The 5th workshop on Network Infrastructure Services as part of Cloud Computing (NetCloud 2015)
Webpage: http://www.cyclone-project.eu/netcloud2015/

In conjunction with the 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC2015), December 07-10, 2015 – St. Raphael Resort, Limassol, Cyprus

Introduction
The workshop is a follow-up of the successful workshop in 2011-2014 (held in conjunction with the CloudCom conference), where a number of enthusiasts of cloud computing and future networking exchanged ideas and presented results of research projects dealing with clouds and network integration.

The Cloud computing emerges as a new computing paradigm which aims to provide secure and reliable, on demand QoS guaranteed computing environments for the end-users. Cloud computing services usage in both academia and industry, changed the way of thinking on how users’ needs can be satisfied by computational infrastructures. However, with the increase of data transferred among different places, it became critical how to support distributed computing resources with advanced network infrastructure services. It is envisioned that network infrastructure services provisioned on-demand could be managed and reconfigured dynamically by Cloud operators and user applications to achieve optimal usage criteria. Such dynamic infrastructures reveal new aspects in network virtualization, service delivery automation and general infrastructure resources management that should be supported by well-defined information models and related middleware. New components of the required network infrastructure for Cloud services and applications should create an integrated self-management environment that can react to changes in workloads and other events with minimal human interference. Security issues should addressed as a part of the general service delivery framework/workflow and support both infrastructure provisioning process and secure virtualized services/infrastructures operation.

The workshop will address issues of network virtualization to create an ecosystem for cloud computing applications. In particular, the workshop will discuss the progress of development of advanced tools and mechanisms for seamless and efficient integration of network and IT worlds, not well interconnected so far. The workshop will consist of a number of sessions, where recent results of on-going and just-finished research projects will be demonstrated. The workshop will present also some future research considerations on the future of cloud computing and networking and expose views from different perspectives: research projects and industry. The workshop will be followed by a panel discussion, to allow free exchange of thoughts and ideas between the workshop speakers and audience.

Objective
NetCloud2015, collocated with IEEE/ACM UCC2015, attempts to address the problem of how the underlying network infrastructure is capable of supporting advanced cloud computing cases. The workshop is intended to bring together network research community, commercial network operators and industry with the major cloud computing players, including IT specialists, researchers and commercial providers.

Topics of Interest
• Definition and architectures for the Network as a Service (NaaS) cloud service model and Cloud Carrier operational model

• Zero Touch Network services provisioning

• Intercloud and inter-datacenters Software Defined Networks (SDN)

• Heterogeneous network architectures and frameworks for distributed and high performance computing

• Cloud and Intercloud architecture frameworks and required on-demand network infrastructure provisioning

• Cloud and Intercloud Federation Infrastructure and components

• “Last mile” in cloud services delivery

• Unified and converged IT and optical resources description languages and frameworks for cloud oriented infrastructures

• General Infrastructure services provisioning in clouds, new architecture developments, service delivery and on-demand provisioning frameworks

• Isolation and flexibility of the cloud oriented virtualized optical networks

• Network infrastructure optimization for intra- and inter-datacenter communication and resources virtualisation

• Standardization of optical network service provisioning interfaces for cloud based platforms and services

• Co-advertisement, co-planning, composition and co-provisioning of any type of optical network resource and IT services (i.e. connectivity + IT resources at the end-points coordinated in a single, optimal procedure)

• Performance and reliability issues, Service Level Agreement and QoS guarantees in the network layer

• Dynamically provisioned security infrastructure and its integration with provider and customer legacy services and service provisioning workflow, security policy definition, security context management

• End-to-end techniques for autonomic management of cloud resources

• Policy based infrastructure services management

• Experimental platforms that support network management in cloud computing

• Experimentation test-beds and measurement studies

Call for papers:
Papers describing original research on both theoretical and practical aspects of dynamic network services for cloud computing are solicited.

Important Dates:
Paper Submissions: August 31, 2015 - EXTENDED

Notification: September 11, 2015

Camera-ready: September 25, 2015

NetCloud2015 workshop (during UCC2015 Conference): 7-10 December2015

Paper submission instructions
This workshop will only accept for review original papers that have not been previously published. Papers should be formatted based on the IEEE Transactions journals and conferences style; maximum allowed camera-ready paper length is six (6) pages. Submissions must be in Adobe PDF format, including text, figures and references.

Accepted papers will be published in the UCC2015 proceedings. For further information see IEEE/ACM UCC2015 website http://cyprusconferences.org/ucc2015/#&panel1-3.

Paper submission website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=netcloud2015

Review procedure
All submitted paper will be reviewed by international program committee.

Workshop Organizers
The workshop is organized by the partners of the CYCLONE, GEANT4, the EC-funded H2020 projects.

• Anna Tzanakaki, AIT, Greece, atzanakaki (at) phys.uoa.gr

• Eduard Escalona, I2CAT, Spain, eduard.escalona (at) i2cat.net

• Yuri Demchenko, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, y.demchenko (at) uva.nl

Technical Program Committee
To be announced…

Invited Speakers
To be announced…