Service Restoration in Multi-Entity Network-Cloud Ecosystems: How to Cooperate?

In network-cloud ecosystems, cooperation among different entities, for example, network carriers and datacenter providers (DCPs), is crucial to enhance resiliency, especially during large-scale failures or congestion. However, such cooperation is constrained by limited visibility of confidential information, for example, network topology, resource availability, and so on, of different entities owing to proprietary and regulatory policies. To facilitate cooperation, we present and discuss the role of a third-party entity, called provider neutral exchange (PNE), which acts as a broker/mediator and enables cooperation among multiple entities by sharing abstracted (instead of detailed) information of individual entities. We design novel cooperation strategies for post-disaster service restoration and categorize them as: multi-carrier cooperation and DCP-carrier cooperation. Results under different failure scenarios show benefits of cooperation in terms of service-restoration efficiency, restoration time, and restoration cost.