Adaptable and automated small UAV deployments via virtualization

In this paper, we present a practical solution to support the adaptable and automated deployment of applications of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs). Our solution is based on virtualization technologies, and considers SUAVs as programmable network platforms capable of executing virtual functions and services, which may be dynamically selected according to the requirements specified by the operator of the aerial vehicles. This way, SUAVs can be flexibly and rapidly adapted to different missions with heterogeneous objectives. The design of our solution is based on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies, developed under the umbrella of the fifth generation of mobile networks (5G), as well as on existing Internet protocol standards, including flying ad hoc network routing protocols. We implemented a functional prototype of our solution using well-known open source technologies, and we demonstrated its practical feasibility with the execution of an IP telephony service. This service was implemented as a set of virtualized network functions, which were automatically deployed and interconnected over an infrastructure of SUAVs, being the telephony service tested with real voice-over-IP terminals.This article was partially supported by the European H2020 5GinFIRE project (grant agreement 732497), and by the 5GCity project (TEC2016-76795-C6-3-R) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness

A Multi-Site NFV Testbed for Experimentation With SUAV-Based 5G Vertical Services

[EN] With the advent of 5G technologies, vertical markets have been placed at the forefront, as fundamental drivers and adopters of technical developments and new business models. Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs) are gaining traction in multiple vertical sectors, as key assets to generate, process, and distribute relevant information for the provision of value-added services. However, the enormous potential of SUAVs to support a exible, rapid, and cost-effective deployment of vertical applications is still to be exploited. In this paper, we leverage our prior work on Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and SUAVs to design and build a multi-site experimentation testbed based on open-source technologies. The goal of this testbed is to explore synergies among NFV, SUAVs, and vertical services, following a practical approach primarily governed by experimentation. To verify our testbed design, we realized a reference use case where a number of SUAVs, cloud infrastructures, and communication protocols are used to provide a multi-site vertical service. Our experimentation results suggest the potential of NFV and SUAVs to exibly support vertical services. The lessons learned have served to identify missing elements in our NFV platform, as well as challenging aspects for potential improvement. These include the development of speci c mechanisms to limit processing load and delays of service deployment operations.This work was supported in part by the European Commission under the European Union's Horizon 2020 program (5GRANGE Project, grant agreement number 777137), and in part by the 5GCity Project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Grant TEC2016-76795-C6-1R, Grant TEC2016-76795-C6-3R, and Grant TEC2016-76795-C6-5R

NFV orchestration on intermittently available SUAV platforms: challenges and hurdles

Proceeding of: IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS MiSARN 2019: Mission-Oriented Wireless Sensor, UAV and Robot Networking), 29 April-2 May 2019 Paris, FranceIn this paper, we analyze the main challenges and issues related with the orchestration of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) on Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs). Our analysis considers a reference scenario where a number of SUAVs are deployed over a delimited geographic area and provide a mobile cloud environment that supports the deployment of functionalities using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies. The orchestration of services in this reference scenario presents different challenges, due to the constrained capacity and limited lifetime of battery-powered SUAVs, the intermittent availability of network communications, and the need to consider enhanced policies for the allocation of virtual functions to SUAVs. Finally, we perform a first exploratory evaluation of the identified challenges and issues, using a well-known and widely adopted virtualized infrastructure manager, i.e., OpenStack.This article has been partially supported by the European H2020 5GRANGE project (grant agreement 777137), and by the 5GCity project (TEC2016-76795- C6-3-R) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness

An NFV system to support service provisioning on UAV networks

In this presentation, we will first describe the design and implementation of an NFV system capable of deploying moderately complex network services over a wireless ad-hoc network of resource-constrained compute nodes. The system design targets aerial networks built by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and it relies on container virtualization to support the execution of network functions within constrained environments, as well as on mobile ad-hoc networking to support the underlying end-to-end network communications [1]. The presentation will also cover the implementation experience from developing this NFV system, which is based on relevant and widely-adopted open-source technologies in the NFV arena such as ETSI Open-Source MANO (OSM) and OpenStack. In addition, we will present the details concerning the integration of this system into a distributed NFV testbed spanning three different remote sites in Spain, i.e., Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña (UPC), and Universidad del País Vasco (UPV-EHU). The goal of this testbed is to explore synergies among NFV, UAVs, and 5G vertical services, following a practical approach primarily governed by experimentation. To showcase the potential of this testbed to support vertical services, we will present three different use cases that have been realized as part of our prior research work: i) the automated deployment of an IP telephony service on a delimited geographic area, using a network of interconnected UAVs [2] (noteworthily, this work was awarded by ETSI as the best proof-of-concept demonstration with OSM during the OSM Release Eight cycle [3]); ii) the realization of a smart farming vertical service [4]; and iii) a public-safety vertical use case, which uses aerial and vehicular NFV infrastructures to monitor traffic conditions and handle emergency situations [5]. This latter involves an international collaboration with the Instituto de Telecomunicações of Aveiro, which operates a vehicular NFV infrastructure. Finally, the presentation will tackle the standardization challenges related with the future view of a decentralized and flexible MANO framework, capable of supporting the operation of cost-effective, reliable services beyond the edge of the telecommunication operator infrastructures. In this view, multiple stakeholders would collaboratively provide a wide range of heterogeneous compute-connect devices (e.g., end-user terminals, CPEs, or UAV swarms). These devices might exist and be opportunistically used, or they could otherwise be deployed on-demand by those stakeholders, contributing to the availability of a potentially unlimited pool of network, computing, and storage resources beyond the network edge. This view introduces several standardization challenges to the NFV MANO framework in terms of interoperation, flexibility, robustness, and security. These challenges have been presented at the NFV Evolution1 event organized by ETSI, and will build the basis of our future work in this research line.This work has been partially supported by the European H2020 LABYRINTH project (grant agreement H2020-MG-2019-TwoStages-861696), and by the TRUE5G project (PID2019-108713RB-C52PID2019-108713RBC52/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) funded by the Spanish National Research Agency

A Survey on Cellular-connected UAVs: Design Challenges, Enabling 5G/B5G Innovations, and Experimental Advancements

As an emerging field of aerial robotics, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant research interest within the wireless networking research community. As soon as national legislations allow UAVs to fly autonomously, we will see swarms of UAV populating the sky of our smart cities to accomplish different missions: parcel delivery, infrastructure monitoring, event filming, surveillance, tracking, etc. The UAV ecosystem can benefit from existing 5G/B5G cellular networks, which can be exploited in different ways to enhance UAV communications. Because of the inherent characteristics of UAV pertaining to flexible mobility in 3D space, autonomous operation and intelligent placement, these smart devices cater to wide range of wireless applications and use cases. This work aims at presenting an in-depth exploration of integration synergies between 5G/B5G cellular systems and UAV technology, where the UAV is integrated as a new aerial User Equipment (UE) to existing cellular networks. In this integration, the UAVs perform the role of flying users within cellular coverage, thus they are termed as cellular-connected UAVs (a.k.a. UAV-UE, drone-UE, 5G-connected drone, or aerial user). The main focus of this work is to present an extensive study of integration challenges along with key 5G/B5G technological innovations and ongoing efforts in design prototyping and field trials corroborating cellular-connected UAVs. This study highlights recent progress updates with respect to 3GPP standardization and emphasizes socio-economic concerns that must be accounted before successful adoption of this promising technology. Various open problems paving the path to future research opportunities are also discussed.Comment: 30 pages, 18 figures, 9 tables, 102 references, journal submissio

Using Aerial and Vehicular NFV Infrastructures to Agilely Create Vertical Services

5G communications have become an enabler for the creation of new and more complex networking scenarios, bringing together different vertical ecosystems. Such behavior has been fostered by the network function virtualization (NFV) concept, where the orchestration and virtualization capabilities allow the possibility of dynamically supplying network resources according to its needs. Nevertheless, the integration and performance of heterogeneous network environments, each one supported by a different provider, and with specific characteristics and requirements, in a single NFV framework is not straightforward. In this work we propose an NFV-based framework capable of supporting the flexible, cost-effective deployment of vertical services, through the integration of two distinguished mobile environments and their networks: small sized unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAVs), supporting a flying ad hoc network (FANET) and vehicles, promoting a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). In this context, a use case involving the public safety vertical will be used as an illustrative example to showcase the potential of this framework. This work also includes the technical implementation details of the framework proposed, allowing to analyse and discuss the delays on the network services deployment process. The results show that the deployment times can be significantly reduced through a distributed VNF configuration function based on the publish&-subscribe model.This article has been partially supported by the European H2020 5GinFIRE project (grant agreement 732497). The work of the Universidad Carlos III team members was partially supported by the European H2020 LABYRINTH project (grant agreement H2020-MG-2019-TwoStages-861696), and by the TRUE5G project (PID2019-108713RB-C52PID2019-108713RB-C52/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) funded by the Spanish National Research Agency; and the work of the Instituto de Telecomunicações team members, by the Competitiveness and Internationalization Operational Programme (COMPETE 2020) of the Portugal 2020 framework Mobilizer Project 5G with Nr. 024539 (POCI-01-0247-FEDER-024539)

Usage of Network Simulators in Machine-Learning-Assisted 5G/6G Networks

Without any doubt, Machine Learning (ML) will be an important driver of future communications due to its foreseen performance when applied to complex problems. However, the application of ML to networking systems raises concerns among network operators and other stakeholders, especially regarding trustworthiness and reliability. In this paper, we devise the role of network simulators for bridging the gap between ML and communications systems. In particular, we present an architectural integration of simulators in ML-aware networks for training, testing, and validating ML models before being applied to the operative network. Moreover, we provide insights on the main challenges resulting from this integration, and then give hints discussing how they can be overcome. Finally, we illustrate the integration of network simulators into ML-assisted communications through a proof-of-concept testbed implementation of a residential Wi-Fi network

A Decade of Research in Fog computing: Relevance, Challenges, and Future Directions

Recent developments in the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-time applications, have led to the unprecedented growth in the connected devices and their generated data. Traditionally, this sensor data is transferred and processed at the cloud, and the control signals are sent back to the relevant actuators, as part of the IoT applications. This cloud-centric IoT model, resulted in increased latencies and network load, and compromised privacy. To address these problems, Fog Computing was coined by Cisco in 2012, a decade ago, which utilizes proximal computational resources for processing the sensor data. Ever since its proposal, fog computing has attracted significant attention and the research fraternity focused at addressing different challenges such as fog frameworks, simulators, resource management, placement strategies, quality of service aspects, fog economics etc. However, after a decade of research, we still do not see large-scale deployments of public/private fog networks, which can be utilized in realizing interesting IoT applications. In the literature, we only see pilot case studies and small-scale testbeds, and utilization of simulators for demonstrating scale of the specified models addressing the respective technical challenges. There are several reasons for this, and most importantly, fog computing did not present a clear business case for the companies and participating individuals yet. This paper summarizes the technical, non-functional and economic challenges, which have been posing hurdles in adopting fog computing, by consolidating them across different clusters. The paper also summarizes the relevant academic and industrial contributions in addressing these challenges and provides future research directions in realizing real-time fog computing applications, also considering the emerging trends such as federated learning and quantum computing.Comment: Accepted for publication at Wiley Software: Practice and Experience journa

A Survey on Security and Privacy of 5G Technologies: Potential Solutions, Recent Advancements, and Future Directions

Security has become the primary concern in many telecommunications industries today as risks can have high consequences. Especially, as the core and enable technologies will be associated with 5G network, the confidential information will move at all layers in future wireless systems. Several incidents revealed that the hazard encountered by an infected wireless network, not only affects the security and privacy concerns, but also impedes the complex dynamics of the communications ecosystem. Consequently, the complexity and strength of security attacks have increased in the recent past making the detection or prevention of sabotage a global challenge. From the security and privacy perspectives, this paper presents a comprehensive detail on the core and enabling technologies, which are used to build the 5G security model; network softwarization security, PHY (Physical) layer security and 5G privacy concerns, among others. Additionally, the paper includes discussion on security monitoring and management of 5G networks. This paper also evaluates the related security measures and standards of core 5G technologies by resorting to different standardization bodies and provide a brief overview of 5G standardization security forces. Furthermore, the key projects of international significance, in line with the security concerns of 5G and beyond are also presented. Finally, a future directions and open challenges section has included to encourage future research.European CommissionNational Research Tomsk Polytechnic UniversityUpdate citation details during checkdate report - A

6G Wireless Systems: Vision, Requirements, Challenges, Insights, and Opportunities

Mobile communications have been undergoing a generational change every ten years or so. However, the time difference between the so-called "G's" is also decreasing. While fifth-generation (5G) systems are becoming a commercial reality, there is already significant interest in systems beyond 5G, which we refer to as the sixth-generation (6G) of wireless systems. In contrast to the already published papers on the topic, we take a top-down approach to 6G. We present a holistic discussion of 6G systems beginning with lifestyle and societal changes driving the need for next generation networks. This is followed by a discussion into the technical requirements needed to enable 6G applications, based on which we dissect key challenges, as well as possibilities for practically realizable system solutions across all layers of the Open Systems Interconnection stack. Since many of the 6G applications will need access to an order-of-magnitude more spectrum, utilization of frequencies between 100 GHz and 1 THz becomes of paramount importance. As such, the 6G eco-system will feature a diverse range of frequency bands, ranging from below 6 GHz up to 1 THz. We comprehensively characterize the limitations that must be overcome to realize working systems in these bands; and provide a unique perspective on the physical, as well as higher layer challenges relating to the design of next generation core networks, new modulation and coding methods, novel multiple access techniques, antenna arrays, wave propagation, radio-frequency transceiver design, as well as real-time signal processing. We rigorously discuss the fundamental changes required in the core networks of the future that serves as a major source of latency for time-sensitive applications. While evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of key 6G technologies, we differentiate what may be achievable over the next decade, relative to what is possible.Comment: Accepted for Publication into the Proceedings of the IEEE; 32 pages, 10 figures, 5 table