Multi-Administrative Domain Service Onboarding in a ZSM-Based Orchestration Architecture

The automation and flexibility introduced in the management and orchestration of B5G/6G mobile networks are allowing the creation of innovative vertical use cases considering the coordination of multiple provider domains owned by different operators and/or service providers. The first step to enable this automation is the onboarding of network service artefacts prior to enabling its instantiation in such challenging scenarios. This demonstration focuses on the automatic onboarding operation in a multi-administrative domain scenario. We propose a cloudnative solution deployed at each administrative domain made of an artefact registry management system coupled with an Integration Fabric element following ETSI ZSM guidelines. These elements synchronize between them autonomously and with the associated ETSI NFV management and orchestration stacks ensuring a consistent catalogue of vertical services at the different administrative domains.This work has received funding from EU Horizon 2020 grant agreements No 951867 (5G-ROUTES), from Spanish MINECO grants TSI-063000-2021-56/TSI-063000-2021-57 (6G-BLUR) and Grant PID2021-126431OBI00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by "ERDF A way of making Europe" and Generalitat de Catalunya grant 2021 SGR 00770. © 2023, IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other work

AUTOMATED ONBOARDING AND TIME-SENSITIVE NETWORK (TSN) FLOW CREATION OF DEVICES IN A TSN NETWORK ENVIRONMENT

Techniques described herein provide for automating a time-sensitive network (TSN) configuration using an edge inventory system. In particular, according to techniques described herein, an asset inventory system discovers a TSN-capable device, identifies the requirements of the TSN-capable device, and adds a TSN tag to the asset inventory system that describes the function of the device. The asset inventory system provides instructions to on-board the device to a network as TSN-mandatory and sets the latency bounds for the network based on known or discovered characteristics of the device

Application for managing container-based software development environments

Abstract. Virtualizing the software development process can enhance efficiency through unified, remotely managed environments. Docker containers, a popular technology in software development, are widely used for application testing and deployment. This thesis examines the use of containers as cloud-based development environments. This study explores the history and implementation of container-based virtualization before presenting containers as a novel cloud-based software development environment. Virtual containers, like virtual machines, have been extensively used in software development for code testing but not as development environments. Containers are also prevalent in the final stages of software production, specifically in the distribution and deployment of completed applications. In the practical part of the thesis, an application is implemented to improve the usability of a container-based development environment, addressing challenges in adopting new work environments. The work was conducted for a private company, and multiple experts provided input. The management application enhanced the container-based development environment’s efficiency by improving user rights management, virtual container management, and user interface. Additionally, the new management tools reduced training time for new employees by 50%, facilitating their integration into the organization. Container-based development environments with efficient management tools provide a secure, efficient, and unified platform for large-scale software development. Virtual containers also hold potential for future improvements in energy-saving strategies and organizational work method harmonization and integration.Sovellus konttipohjaisten ohjelmistonkehitysympäristöjen hallintaan. Tiivistelmä. Ohjelmistokehitysprosessin virtualisointi voi parantaa tehokkuutta yhtenäisten, etähallittujen ympäristöjen avulla. Ohjelmistonkehityksessä suosittu ohjelmistonkehitysteknologia, Docker-kontteja käytetään laajalti sovellusten testaamisessa ja käyttöönotossa. Tässä opinnäytetyössä tarkastellaan konttien käyttöä pilvipohjaisina kehitysympäristöinä. Tämä tutkimus tutkii konttipohjaisen virtualisoinnin historiaa ja toteutusta, jonka jälkeen esitellään konttien käyttöä uudenlaisena pilvipohjaisena ohjelmistokehitysympäristönä. Virtuaalisia kontteja, kuten virtuaalikoneita, on käytetty laajasti ohjelmistokehityksessä kooditestauksessa, mutta ei kehitysympäristöinä. Kontit ovat myös yleisiä ohjelmistotuotannon loppuvaiheissa, erityisesti valmiiden sovellusten jakelussa ja käyttöönotossa. Opinnäytetyön käytännön osassa toteutetaan konttipohjaisen kehitysympäristön käytettävyyttä parantava sovellus, joka vastaa uusien työympäristöjen käyttöönoton haasteisiin. Työ suoritettiin yksityiselle yritykselle, ja sen suunnitteluun osallistui useita asiantuntijoita. Hallintasovellus lisäsi konttipohjaisen kehitysympäristön tehokkuutta parantamalla käyttäjäoikeuksien hallintaa, virtuaalisen kontin hallintaa ja käyttöliittymää. Lisäksi uudet hallintatyökalut lyhensivät uusien työntekijöiden koulutusaikaa 50%, mikä helpotti heidän integroitumistaan organisaatioon. Säiliöpohjaiset kehitysympäristöt varustettuina tehokkailla hallintatyökaluilla tarjoavat turvallisen, tehokkaan ja yhtenäisen alustan laajamittaiseen ohjelmistokehitykseen. Virtuaalisissa konteissa on myös potentiaalia tulevaisuuden parannuksiin energiansäästöstrategioissa ja organisaation työmenetelmien harmonisoinnissa ja integroinnissa

Emerging Technology Adoption and Use : Consolidated Assignments from Spring 2020

Digitalization changes the world. Information systems, software applications and other technologies are in a central role in this change. They enable new work practices and processes, new business models and opportunities, initiate changes in how technologies are used, perceived and interpreted, and ultimately force individuals, organizations, and even societies at large to respond to those changes. Individuals, organizations, and societies have to somehow transform and adjust their old ways of doing things. Yet, not only technologies drive digital transformation. Increasing amounts of data that is produced by numerous sensors, applications, and systems account for the transformation as well. Such data is gathered and collected, merged together, and analyzed by different methods and tools; by using artificial intelligence, data analytics, or data science. The sense-making of such versatile data is of importance because not only can it be used to improve decision-making at workplaces but also, it can be utilized for the benefit of individuals and societies, in organizational and non-work settings. These views, transformation and smartness, pose several questions for information system (IS) research. In general, we might ask what actually is the smartness of individuals, organizations, or a society. We can even ask whether stakeholders possess the required abilities, skills and competences to enable and support the change. These, and other related questions arise due to fast evolving landscape of information technology, and information and technology. The nuanced understanding of Smart Transformation in IS has become even more critical due to governmental and organizational programs that foster smartness. This report summarizes research reports of students attending “Emerging Technology Adoption and Use” course in Tampere University. During the course, we focused on three emerging technologies. Extended Reality Blockchain Artificial Intelligence Each group collaborated on finding a common topic of interest. They focused on the adoption and/or use of a particular emerging technology in a setting of their own choosing. As you are about to see, the findings of each group emphasize different perspectives. These range from the negative effects of technology use to the opportunities and delights of information systems

ICSEA 2022: the seventeenth international conference on software engineering advances

The Seventeenth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances (ICSEA 2022), held between October 16th and October 20th, 2022, continued a series of events covering a broad spectrum of software-related topics. The conference covered fundamentals on designing, implementing, testing, validating and maintaining various kinds of software. Several tracks were proposed to treat the topics from theory to practice, in terms of methodologies, design, implementation, testing, use cases, tools, and lessons learned. The conference topics covered classical and advanced methodologies, open source, agile software, as well as software deployment and software economics and education. Other advanced aspects are related to on-time practical aspects, such as run-time vulnerability checking, rejuvenation process, updates partial or temporary feature deprecation, software deployment and configuration, and on-line software updates. These aspects trigger implications related to patenting, licensing, engineering education, new ways for software adoption and improvement, and ultimately, to software knowledge management. There are many advanced applications requiring robust, safe, and secure software: disaster recovery applications, vehicular systems, biomedical-related software, biometrics related software, mission critical software, E-health related software, crisis-situation software. These applications require appropriate software engineering techniques, metrics and formalisms, such as, software reuse, appropriate software quality metrics, composition and integration, consistency checking, model checking, provers and reasoning. The nature of research in software varies slightly with the specific discipline researchers work in, yet there is much common ground and room for a sharing of best practice, frameworks, tools, languages and methodologies. Despite the number of experts we have available, little work is done at the meta level, that is examining how we go about our research, and how this process can be improved. There are questions related to the choice of programming language, IDEs and documentation styles and standard. Reuse can be of great benefit to research projects yet reuse of prior research projects introduces special problems that need to be mitigated. The research environment is a mix of creativity and systematic approach which leads to a creative tension that needs to be managed or at least monitored. Much of the coding in any university is undertaken by research students or young researchers. Issues of skills training, development and quality control can have significant effects on an entire department. In an industrial research setting, the environment is not quite that of industry as a whole, nor does it follow the pattern set by the university. The unique approaches and issues of industrial research may hold lessons for researchers in other domains. We take here the opportunity to warmly thank all the members of the ICSEA 2022 technical program committee, as well as all the reviewers. The creation of such a high-quality conference program would not have been possible without their involvement. We also kindly thank all the authors who dedicated much of their time and effort to contribute to ICSEA 2022. We truly believe that, thanks to all these efforts, the final conference program consisted of top-quality contributions. We also thank the members of the ICSEA 2022 organizing committee for their help in handling the logistics of this event. We hope that ICSEA 2022 was a successful international forum for the exchange of ideas and results between academia and industry and for the promotion of progress in software engineering advances

Integração contínua no 5GASP

The wide adoption of an NFV-oriented paradigm by network operators proves the importance of NFV in the future of communication networks. This paradigm allows network operators to speed up the development process of their services, decoupling hardware from the functionalities provided by these services. However, since NFV has only been recently globally adopted, several questions and difficulties arose. Network operators need to ensure the reliability and the correct behavior of their Virtualized Network Functions, which poses severe challenges. Thus, the need for developing new validation tools, which are capable of validating network functions that live in an NFV ecosystem. 5GASP is a European project which aims to shorten the idea-to-market process by creating a fully automated and selfservice 5G testbed and providing support tools for Continuous Integration in a secure and trusted environment, addressing the DevOps paradigm. Being aligned with 5GASP’s goals, this dissertation mainly addresses the development of tools to validate NetApps. To accomplish this, this document introduces two different mechanisms for validating NetApps. The first tool is responsible for statically validate the NetApps before they are deployed in 5GASP’s testbeds, being denominated by NetApp Package Validator. Regarding this tool, during this document the focus is its Descriptors Validator Module, which validates the NetApp descriptors through syntactic, semantics, and reference validation and supports NetApps developed according to different Information Models. The second tool comprises an automated validation pipeline. This pipeline validates the functionality and the behavior of the NetApps once they are deployed in a 5G-testbed. Besides, it collects several metrics to enable a better understanding of the NetApp’s behavior. Both tools are expected to be integrated with the 5GASP’s ecosystem. This document presents the requirements definition, architecture, and implementation of these tools and presents their results and outputs.The wide adoption of an NFV-oriented paradigm by network operators proves the importance of NFV in the future of communication networks. This paradigm allows network operators to speed up the development process of their services, decoupling hardware from the functionalities provided by these services. However, since NFV has only been recently globally adopted, several questions and difficulties arose. Network operators need to ensure the reliability and the correct behavior of their Virtualized Network Functions, which poses severe challenges. Thus, the need for developing new validation tools, which are capable of validating network functions that live in an NFV ecosystem. 5GASP is a European project which aims to shorten the idea-to-market process by creating a fully automated and selfservice 5G testbed and providing support tools for Continuous Integration in a secure and trusted environment, addressing the DevOps paradigm. Being aligned with 5GASP’s goals, this dissertation mainly addresses the development of tools to validate NetApps. To accomplish this, this document introduces two different mechanisms for validating NetApps. The first tool is responsible for statically validate the NetApps before they are deployed in 5GASP’s testbeds, being denominated by NetApp Package Validator. Regarding this tool, during this document the focus is its Descriptors Validator Module, which validates the NetApp descriptors through syntactic, semantics, and reference validation and supports NetApps developed according to different Information Models. The second tool comprises an automated validation pipeline. This pipeline validates the functionality and the behavior of the NetApps once they are deployed in a 5G-testbed. Besides, it collects several metrics to enable a better understanding of the NetApp’s behavior. Both tools are expected to be integrated with the 5GASP’s ecosystem. This document presents the requirements definition, architecture, and implementation of these tools and presents their results and outputs.Mestrado em Engenharia Informátic

Implementation of a NFV monitoring system for reactive environments

This work aims at researching the existent solutions of monitoring and alerting techniques, as well as defining a suitable architecture, design and implementation of a complete and customizable monitoring and alerting framework used to inspect and notify specific conditions on dynamically instantiated applications operating in the network. Such Network Services (NS) are used in the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) architecture, allowing rapid instantiation and configuration of virtualized environments that handle network configuration. This design and implementation seek to provide more flexibility and dynamicity to the network operator to monitor custom or generic metrics and trigger notifications based on custom thresholds, without depending on the Virtual Network Function (VNF) developer to adapt its descriptor and onboard each version into the NFV Orchestrator (NFVO) prior to each usage. The framework here developed follows a modular architecture that separates the monitoring and alerting policies from the onboarding and instantiation process of the Network Functions. The architecture also facilitates the integration with other systems and adapting the functionality of an operational environment thanks to its decoupled and modular approach. The presented work considers a monitoring and alerting framework that is especially useful for dynamic environments such as those relying in NFV, like those in the EU H2020 PALANTIR project. There, the framework is used to help assessing the correct behavior of the Security NSs that are used to prevent or mitigate security anomalies in the network of each client. If abnormalities are found, remediation measures will take place to replace the potentially compromised NS instances with clean, appropriate ones.Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::9 - Indústria, Innovació i Infraestructur

Network Function Virtualization technologies applied to cellular systems

Future 5G networks will exploit the inherent flexibility associated to the introduction of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies in both the core network and even the Radio Access Network (RAN) through the software implementation of network functions running on general purpose computing/storage resources. The advent of the NFV paradigm provides an inherent capability to add new functionalities, extend, upgrade or evolve existing functionalities and to customize the network on a per-tenant basis. In this context, this work intends to make an analysis of the cuFuture 5G networks open a new spectrum of possibilities, both at the level of services it can offer, and at the level of its deployment. This thesis aims to make a study of some of the technologies that make possible the arrival of 5G, such as virtualization and virtualization applied to networks, NFV. In order to better understand the defined standard for NFV, the analysis of market NFV-MANO available tools is included. In addition, the study and evaluation of the deployment process of a virtualized 5G network scenario has been performed with HPE NFV Director

CONSUMER INITIATED HIGH-VALUE PAYMENTS

The present disclosure relates to a method and a system for facilitating a consumer to initiate a secure, high-value payment transfer. The present disclosure suggests sending, by a payment initiator, an inquiry about a payment receiver account along with the payment receiver’s details to a payment network via an originating financial institution. Thereafter, the payment network validates the payment receiver details and provides a validation code using the payment data to uniquely identify the transaction. Subsequently, the payment network confirms the validity of the payment receiver details to the payment initiator via the originating financial institution and requests confirmation from the payment initiator to continue with a money transfer. Based on the confirmation, the money transfer request, including the validation code and a Transaction ID (Tran ID), is sent from the payment initiator via the originating financial institution to the payment network. The payment network re-validates both the validation code as well as the Tran ID before sending the money transfer request to a receiving financial institution. Upon receiving the money transfer request, the receiving financial institution completes the request and sends the response back to the originating financial institution. Subsequently, the payment recipient receives the fund from the recipient financial institution. As a result, the payment initiator may transfer an adequate amount of money to the payment receiver account without having to physically visit a bank branch