Program your city: Designing an urban integrated open data API

Cities accumulate and distribute vast sets of digital information. Many decision-making and planning processes in councils, local governments and organisations are based on both real-time and historical data. Until recently, only a small, carefully selected subset of this information has been released to the public – usually for specific purposes (e.g. train timetables, release of planning application through websites to name just a few). This situation is however changing rapidly. Regulatory frameworks, such as the Freedom of Information Legislation in the US, the UK, the European Union and many other countries guarantee public access to data held by the state. One of the results of this legislation and changing attitudes towards open data has been the widespread release of public information as part of recent Government 2.0 initiatives. This includes the creation of public data catalogues such as data.gov.au (U.S.), data.gov.uk (U.K.), data.gov.au (Australia) at federal government levels, and datasf.org (San Francisco) and data.london.gov.uk (London) at municipal levels. The release of this data has opened up the possibility of a wide range of future applications and services which are now the subject of intensified research efforts. Previous research endeavours have explored the creation of specialised tools to aid decision-making by urban citizens, councils and other stakeholders (Calabrese, Kloeckl & Ratti, 2008; Paulos, Honicky & Hooker, 2009). While these initiatives represent an important step towards open data, they too often result in mere collections of data repositories. Proprietary database formats and the lack of an open application programming interface (API) limit the full potential achievable by allowing these data sets to be cross-queried. Our research, presented in this paper, looks beyond the pure release of data. It is concerned with three essential questions: First, how can data from different sources be integrated into a consistent framework and made accessible? Second, how can ordinary citizens be supported in easily composing data from different sources in order to address their specific problems? Third, what are interfaces that make it easy for citizens to interact with data in an urban environment? How can data be accessed and collected

Building Programmable Wireless Networks: An Architectural Survey

In recent times, there have been a lot of efforts for improving the ossified Internet architecture in a bid to sustain unstinted growth and innovation. A major reason for the perceived architectural ossification is the lack of ability to program the network as a system. This situation has resulted partly from historical decisions in the original Internet design which emphasized decentralized network operations through co-located data and control planes on each network device. The situation for wireless networks is no different resulting in a lot of complexity and a plethora of largely incompatible wireless technologies. The emergence of "programmable wireless networks", that allow greater flexibility, ease of management and configurability, is a step in the right direction to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings of the wireless networks. In this paper, we provide a broad overview of the architectures proposed in literature for building programmable wireless networks focusing primarily on three popular techniques, i.e., software defined networks, cognitive radio networks, and virtualized networks. This survey is a self-contained tutorial on these techniques and its applications. We also discuss the opportunities and challenges in building next-generation programmable wireless networks and identify open research issues and future research directions.Comment: 19 page

Hybrid SDN Evolution: A Comprehensive Survey of the State-of-the-Art

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an evolutionary networking paradigm which has been adopted by large network and cloud providers, among which are Tech Giants. However, embracing a new and futuristic paradigm as an alternative to well-established and mature legacy networking paradigm requires a lot of time along with considerable financial resources and technical expertise. Consequently, many enterprises can not afford it. A compromise solution then is a hybrid networking environment (a.k.a. Hybrid SDN (hSDN)) in which SDN functionalities are leveraged while existing traditional network infrastructures are acknowledged. Recently, hSDN has been seen as a viable networking solution for a diverse range of businesses and organizations. Accordingly, the body of literature on hSDN research has improved remarkably. On this account, we present this paper as a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey which expands upon hSDN from many different perspectives

Architectures for the Future Networks and the Next Generation Internet: A Survey

Networking research funding agencies in the USA, Europe, Japan, and other countries are encouraging research on revolutionary networking architectures that may or may not be bound by the restrictions of the current TCP/IP based Internet. We present a comprehensive survey of such research projects and activities. The topics covered include various testbeds for experimentations for new architectures, new security mechanisms, content delivery mechanisms, management and control frameworks, service architectures, and routing mechanisms. Delay/Disruption tolerant networks, which allow communications even when complete end-to-end path is not available, are also discussed

Department of Computer Science Activity 1998-2004

This report summarizes much of the research and teaching activity of the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College between late 1998 and late 2004. The material for this report was collected as part of the final report for NSF Institutional Infrastructure award EIA-9802068, which funded equipment and technical staff during that six-year period. This equipment and staff supported essentially all of the department\u27s research activity during that period

Energy-Efficient Softwarized Networks: A Survey

With the dynamic demands and stringent requirements of various applications, networks need to be high-performance, scalable, and adaptive to changes. Researchers and industries view network softwarization as the best enabler for the evolution of networking to tackle current and prospective challenges. Network softwarization must provide programmability and flexibility to network infrastructures and allow agile management, along with higher control for operators. While satisfying the demands and requirements of network services, energy cannot be overlooked, considering the effects on the sustainability of the environment and business. This paper discusses energy efficiency in modern and future networks with three network softwarization technologies: SDN, NFV, and NS, introduced in an energy-oriented context. With that framework in mind, we review the literature based on network scenarios, control/MANO layers, and energy-efficiency strategies. Following that, we compare the references regarding approach, evaluation method, criterion, and metric attributes to demonstrate the state-of-the-art. Last, we analyze the classified literature, summarize lessons learned, and present ten essential concerns to open discussions about future research opportunities on energy-efficient softwarized networks.Comment: Accepted draft for publication in TNSM with minor updates and editin

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