Fog computing : enabling the management and orchestration of smart city applications in 5G networks

Fog computing extends the cloud computing paradigm by placing resources close to the edges of the network to deal with the upcoming growth of connected devices. Smart city applications, such as health monitoring and predictive maintenance, will introduce a new set of stringent requirements, such as low latency, since resources can be requested on-demand simultaneously by multiple devices at different locations. It is then necessary to adapt existing network technologies to future needs and design new architectural concepts to help meet these strict requirements. This article proposes a fog computing framework enabling autonomous management and orchestration functionalities in 5G-enabled smart cities. Our approach follows the guidelines of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV MANO architecture extending it with additional software components. The contribution of our work is its fully-integrated fog node management system alongside the foreseen application layer Peer-to-Peer (P2P) fog protocol based on the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol for the exchange of application service provisioning information between fog nodes. Evaluations of an anomaly detection use case based on an air monitoring application are presented. Our results show that the proposed framework achieves a substantial reduction in network bandwidth usage and in latency when compared to centralized cloud solutions

Towards delay-aware container-based Service Function Chaining in Fog Computing

Recently, the fifth-generation mobile network (5G) is getting significant attention. Empowered by Network Function Virtualization (NFV), 5G networks aim to support diverse services coming from different business verticals (e.g. Smart Cities, Automotive, etc). To fully leverage on NFV, services must be connected in a specific order forming a Service Function Chain (SFC). SFCs allow mobile operators to benefit from the high flexibility and low operational costs introduced by network softwarization. Additionally, Cloud computing is evolving towards a distributed paradigm called Fog Computing, which aims to provide a distributed cloud infrastructure by placing computational resources close to end-users. However, most SFC research only focuses on Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) use cases where mobile operators aim to deploy services close to end-users. Bi-directional communication between Edges and Cloud are not considered in MEC, which in contrast is highly important in a Fog environment as in distributed anomaly detection services. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an SFC controller to optimize the placement of service chains in Fog environments, specifically tailored for Smart City use cases. Our approach has been validated on the Kubernetes platform, an open-source orchestrator for the automatic deployment of micro-services. Our SFC controller has been implemented as an extension to the scheduling features available in Kubernetes, enabling the efficient provisioning of container-based SFCs while optimizing resource allocation and reducing the end-to-end (E2E) latency. Results show that the proposed approach can lower the network latency up to 18% for the studied use case while conserving bandwidth when compared to the default scheduling mechanism

Thirty Years of Machine Learning: The Road to Pareto-Optimal Wireless Networks

Future wireless networks have a substantial potential in terms of supporting a broad range of complex compelling applications both in military and civilian fields, where the users are able to enjoy high-rate, low-latency, low-cost and reliable information services. Achieving this ambitious goal requires new radio techniques for adaptive learning and intelligent decision making because of the complex heterogeneous nature of the network structures and wireless services. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have great success in supporting big data analytics, efficient parameter estimation and interactive decision making. Hence, in this article, we review the thirty-year history of ML by elaborating on supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning and deep learning. Furthermore, we investigate their employment in the compelling applications of wireless networks, including heterogeneous networks (HetNets), cognitive radios (CR), Internet of things (IoT), machine to machine networks (M2M), and so on. This article aims for assisting the readers in clarifying the motivation and methodology of the various ML algorithms, so as to invoke them for hitherto unexplored services as well as scenarios of future wireless networks.Comment: 46 pages, 22 fig