Experiment case study

HOPBOP Home platform over BonFire Project

The use of on BonFIRE has permitted to obtain in a shorter time results to improve the product and also identify how deploy a new set of services.

The challenge
Televes S.A. is a company founded in 1958, headquarters in Santiago de Compostela (Spain), whose is provider of telecommunications solutions, systems and services for the Digital Home and Building. In addition to these activities, Televes Group has also activities in television transmission, wireless technologies, data integration over coaxial and home networks and test and measurement equipment. On the first of April 2011, the new Regulation for Common Infrastructures of Telecommunications was published in Spain. This Regulation includes fiber optic and coaxial cable infrastructure to facilitate the access of the users to the new so called Next Generation Access Networks, allowing the introduction of the functionalities of the Digital Home. It is out of the scope of the present proposal to quote all the literature available about this hot topic of the Digital Home, yet it is important to highlight that it is the first time that a legal framework which encompass Digital Home has been published. This Framework has to be exploited to develop projects and product matching the following requirements: Save money to the users and the Public Administration alike for the provision of services. Improve the levels of comfort, security, sustainability and productivity. Be appealing for the end user, so he or she can demand them. Be viable and realizable.

Building Reliable Computing Services on Clouds

Byron Ortiz Project Manager Televes

Televes has accepted the challenge to deve lop a Home Platform, but that platform has features that make its testing in a real environment extremely difficult if not impossible, the main difficulties come from the architecture of the platform and the test resources available, we need to know how the server answers to a high number of connected homes and how the efficiency of the different services can be improved. The challenge needs of a facility that will allow respond the different questions of the Televes Home Platform that requires a large and heterogeneous infrastructure to help in the creation of models for testing and performance, as a simple to use and with a large set of capabilities to measure, configure, manage and simulate experiments. .

The use of a multicloud testbed facility has permitted to obtain prominent conclusions. These have direct impact in the present and futures services of our commercial product (Televes Home Platform).

The solution The HOPBOP experiment

Televes has designed a HOPBOP experiment over BonFIRE with the objective of accumulate enough information which allows improvement of the platform and obtaining the knowing of how the platform will work in a real scenario, avoiding serious problems in the market and also allowing the creation of new services. The main objectives of the HOPBOP experiment are: Study how we can tailor the server in the cloud infrastructure to improve the provision of services of the Platform. Get the number of homes that can connect to the server at the same time using the service of video surveillance in different scenarios: public Internet and network with QoS. This will allow us to resize the needs of our server hardware based on the results. Know the answer from the server when there are network disconnections and the video surveillance service is active in many homes. Is the state successfully recovered? How much time it takes to recover the service? Know the answer from the server when there are network disconnections and sensors/actuators are sending/receiving information persistently in many homes. Is the state home successfully recovered? How much time it takes to recover the state? Study if we can create an automatic system which permits automatic adjustment of the QoS depending on the quality of the network and the specifications of the server used.

Justo Rodal R&D Director Televes

For the architecture of the real platform, its functionalities and for the characteristics of the experiment, the architecture of the HOPBOP experiment makes use of the standard tools and infrastructure of BonFIRE creating a virtual machine on the server and several virtual machines for each home to simulate. The virtual home contains the virtual Home Manager and the modules software that allow simulation of the actuators, sensors and cameras.

Results
The resilience of a Home Platform is its main strength to be able to efficiently deliver services which like for instance, elderly surveillance or health assistance, must have a near zero failure rate no matter the access time, the people connected at a time and the network conditions in terms of load and connectivity. One of the main conclusions reached during our experiments is the good performance of the platform regarding network disconnections, with fast recovering of the state independently of the number of homes connected. Thanks to BonFIRE, we can be sure about of the resilience of the platform. BonFIRE has allowed know how the server responds to a high number of homes. Today we have the knowledge about of the appropriate configuration of the server depending of the number of homes. That offers the capability to configure the resources of the server efficiently Finally, we discovered a behavior of our platform that otherwise would have been impossible to notice in our laboratory: the increased latency negatively affects the quality of service of video surveillance to our platform. The use of a multi-cloud testbed facility has permitted to obtain prominent conclusions in a shorter testing time. These have direct impact in the present and futures services of a commercial product (Televes Home Platform). The multi-cloud testbed facility allows carrying out our large scale experiment HOPBOP, that otherwise it would be impossible.

Added value of using BonFIRE

The multi-site cloud architecture provided by BonFIRE allows the creating of models for testing and performance that allow respond the different questions of the Televes Home

The results allow create a new version of Televes Home Platform with capability of support future services like health assistance

Platform.

BonFIRE represents an ideal platform of virtualization for testing a nd

optimization the actual and future Internet services. The use of on BonFIRE has permitted to obtain in a shorter time results to improve the product and also identify how deploy a new set of services. That shows that BonFIRE helps to the provision of new added-value services in shorter time and with less input investment. BonFIRE has allowed execute the tests of HOPBOP experiment as close as possible to real environment and a simple way. The use of BonFIRE provides an opportunity to test products and services that in real word is impossible, with capabilities that are difficult to implement locally by small research centers or SME (Small and Medium Enterprise), where our product can be tested and new concepts can be experimented. In addition, this experiment needs some of the BonFIRE unique capabilities as a testbed where the experimenter can control network parameters such as bandwidth, latency or errors.

Next steps
The goal of the HOPBOP experiment is to obtain knowledge of Televes Home Platform to take appropriate actions in order to guarantee the fulfilling of the actual and future demands of users. In addition, it intends to foresee the feasibility to upgrade the platform to future services. In line with the HOPBOP experiment, we have obtained positive conclusions like the resilience of the platform to network disconnections with fast state recovering but also, we have obtained characteristics to improve the platform like the influence of the latency to the video surveillance service. All these findings are leading us to the creation of the newest version of Televes Home Platform. In this new version Televes will redefine the video surveillance service to remove its dependence with the latency. That redefinition most probably requires breaking the compatibility with the first version of Automation Home (where the user can control his home only locally) and therefore the creation on new versions of home devices. Further work will involve the creation of a new set of services, like health assistance, over that new version. For our product (the Televes Home Platform) the use of results is directly linked with the exploitation and will be used for Televes to: Evolution of the Home devices Creation of the new devices. Create a new version of the platform with the new services Create new platform over digital building

Your free and open Cloud testbed

BonFIRE Facility: open for experimentation

Following two successful Open Calls that have given academic researchers, developers and SMEs access to the Cloud infrastructures in BonFIRE, it is possible to apply for running experiments as part of the Open Access initiative. This is your chance to get involved and test your innovative ideas for free!

In Open Access, you will have access to a multi-site Cloud facility for applications, services and systems experimentation:

Large-scale, heterogeneous and virtualised compute, storage and networking resources Full control of your resource deployment In-depth monitoring and logging of both physical and virtual resources Advanced Cloud and network features Ease of use of experimentation

BonFIRE allows users to evaluate the effects of converged service and network infrastructures; assess the socio-economic impact of new Cloud services; and to combine Cloud computing and data storage with novel networking scenarios. Essentially, BonFIRE enables developers to research new, faster, cheaper or more flexible ways of running applications. Open Access will continue through 2014.

BonFIRE Project
The BonFIRE Project has funded experiments selected trough two open calls. This series of public case studies highlights the challenges and results of each experiment and the added value of the BonFIRE multi-cloud facility.

The BonFIRE consortium brings together world leading industrial and academic organisations in cloud computing to deliver a robust, reliable and sustainable facility for large scale experimentally-driven cloud research.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n 257386

Contact information
Experiment contact information: Byron Ortiz (byrort@televes.com). Phone:+34981522200

Provided by the Foundation

BonFIRE contact information More information: www.bonfire-project.eu Contact: bonfire @ bonfire-project.eu