20,160 research outputs found
Enabling Disaster Resilient 4G Mobile Communication Networks
The 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the cellular technology expected to
outperform the previous generations and to some extent revolutionize the
experience of the users by taking advantage of the most advanced radio access
techniques (i.e. OFDMA, SC-FDMA, MIMO). However, the strong dependencies
between user equipments (UEs), base stations (eNBs) and the Evolved Packet Core
(EPC) limit the flexibility, manageability and resiliency in such networks. In
case the communication links between UEs-eNB or eNB-EPC are disrupted, UEs are
in fact unable to communicate. In this article, we reshape the 4G mobile
network to move towards more virtual and distributed architectures for
improving disaster resilience, drastically reducing the dependency between UEs,
eNBs and EPC. The contribution of this work is twofold. We firstly present the
Flexible Management Entity (FME), a distributed entity which leverages on
virtualized EPC functionalities in 4G cellular systems. Second, we introduce a
simple and novel device-todevice (D2D) communication scheme allowing the UEs in
physical proximity to communicate directly without resorting to the
coordination with an eNB.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Magazin
Deliverable JRA1.1: Evaluation of current network control and management planes for multi-domain network infrastructure
This deliverable includes a compilation and evaluation of available control and management architectures and protocols applicable to a multilayer infrastructure in a multi-domain Virtual Network environment.The scope of this deliverable is mainly focused on the virtualisation of the resources within a network and at processing nodes. The virtualization of the FEDERICA infrastructure allows the provisioning of its available resources to users by means of FEDERICA slices. A slice is seen by the user as a real physical network under his/her domain, however it maps to a logical partition (a virtual instance) of the physical FEDERICA resources. A slice is built to exhibit to the highest degree all the principles applicable to a physical network (isolation, reproducibility, manageability, ...). Currently, there are no standard definitions available for network virtualization or its associated architectures. Therefore, this deliverable proposes the Virtual Network layer architecture and evaluates a set of Management- and Control Planes that can be used for the partitioning and virtualization of the FEDERICA network resources. This evaluation has been performed taking into account an initial set of FEDERICA requirements; a possible extension of the selected tools will be evaluated in future deliverables. The studies described in this deliverable define the virtual architecture of the FEDERICA infrastructure. During this activity, the need has been recognised to establish a new set of basic definitions (taxonomy) for the building blocks that compose the so-called slice, i.e. the virtual network instantiation (which is virtual with regard to the abstracted view made of the building blocks of the FEDERICA infrastructure) and its architectural plane representation. These definitions will be established as a common nomenclature for the FEDERICA project. Other important aspects when defining a new architecture are the user requirements. It is crucial that the resulting architecture fits the demands that users may have. Since this deliverable has been produced at the same time as the contact process with users, made by the project activities related to the Use Case definitions, JRA1 has proposed a set of basic Use Cases to be considered as starting point for its internal studies. When researchers want to experiment with their developments, they need not only network resources on their slices, but also a slice of the processing resources. These processing slice resources are understood as virtual machine instances that users can use to make them behave as software routers or end nodes, on which to download the software protocols or applications they have produced and want to assess in a realistic environment. Hence, this deliverable also studies the APIs of several virtual machine management software products in order to identify which best suits FEDERICA’s needs.Postprint (published version
A Virtual Network PaaS for 3GPP 4G and Beyond Core Network Services
Cloud computing and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are emerging as key
technologies to overcome the challenges facing 4G and beyond mobile systems.
Over the last few years, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has gained momentum and
has become more widely adopted throughout IT enterprises. It simplifies the
applications provisioning and accelerates time-to-market while lowering costs.
Telco can leverage the same model to provision the 4G and beyond core network
services using NFV technology. However, many challenges have to be addressed,
mainly due to the specificities of network services. This paper proposes an
architecture for a Virtual Network Platform-as-a-Service (VNPaaS) to provision
3GPP 4G and beyond core network services in a distributed environment. As an
illustrative use case, the proposed architecture is employed to provision the
3GPP Home Subscriber Server (HSS) as-a-Service (HSSaaS). The HSSaaS is built
from Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) resulting from a novel decomposition
of HSS. A prototype is implemented and early measurements are made.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, 5th IEEE International Conference on
Cloud Networking (IEEE CloudNet 2016
Component-aware Orchestration of Cloud-based Enterprise Applications, from TOSCA to Docker and Kubernetes
Enterprise IT is currently facing the challenge of coordinating the
management of complex, multi-component applications across heterogeneous cloud
platforms. Containers and container orchestrators provide a valuable solution
to deploy multi-component applications over cloud platforms, by coupling the
lifecycle of each application component to that of its hosting container. We
hereby propose a solution for going beyond such a coupling, based on the OASIS
standard TOSCA and on Docker. We indeed propose a novel approach for deploying
multi-component applications on top of existing container orchestrators, which
allows to manage each component independently from the container used to run
it. We also present prototype tools implementing our approach, and we show how
we effectively exploited them to carry out a concrete case study
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