On Mobile Bluetooth Tags

This paper presents a new approach for hyper-local data sharing and delivery on the base of discoverable Bluetooth nodes. Our approach allows customers to associate user-defined data with network nodes and use a special mobile application (context-aware browser) for presenting this information to mobile users in proximity. Alternatively, mobile services can request and share local data in M2M applications rely on network proximity. Bluetooth nodes in cars are among the best candidates for the role of the bearing nodes.Comment: submitted to FRUCT-17 conference (http://fruct.org

Container network functions: bringing NFV to the network edge

In order to cope with the increasing network utilization driven by new mobile clients, and to satisfy demand for new network services and performance guarantees, telecommunication service providers are exploiting virtualization over their network by implementing network services in virtual machines, decoupled from legacy hardware accelerated appliances. This effort, known as NFV, reduces OPEX and provides new business opportunities. At the same time, next generation mobile, enterprise, and IoT networks are introducing the concept of computing capabilities being pushed at the network edge, in close proximity of the users. However, the heavy footprint of today's NFV platforms prevents them from operating at the network edge. In this article, we identify the opportunities of virtualization at the network edge and present Glasgow Network Functions (GNF), a container-based NFV platform that runs and orchestrates lightweight container VNFs, saving core network utilization and providing lower latency. Finally, we demonstrate three useful examples of the platform: IoT DDoS remediation, on-demand troubleshooting for telco networks, and supporting roaming of network functions

Mobile Services Meet Distributed Cloud: Benefits, Applications, and Challenges

As the explosive growth of smart devices and enormous new applications, the variety of corresponding cloud services has been growing quickly. The conventional centralized cloud was faced with an overhead on backhaul links and high latency. Accordingly, a decentralized cloud paradigm including edge computing, mobile edge computing, cloudlet, and so on, was introduced to distribute cloud services to the edge network which located in proximity to mobile devices few years ago. However, this paradigm was not paid attention at that time since cloud technology and mobile network communication were immature to motivate mobile services. Recently, with the overwhelming growth of mobile communication technology and cloud technology, distributed cloud is emerging as a paradigm well equipped with technologies to support a broad range of mobile services. The 5G mobile communication technology provides high-speed data and low latency. Cloud services can be automatically deployed in the edge networks quickly and easily. Distributed cloud can prove itself to bring many benefits for mobile service such as reducing network latency, as well as computational and network overhead at the central cloud. Besides, we present some applications to emphasize the necessity of distributed cloud for mobile service and discuss further technical challenges in distributed cloud

Joint Service Placement and Request Routing in Multi-cell Mobile Edge Computing Networks

The proliferation of innovative mobile services such as augmented reality, networked gaming, and autonomous driving has spurred a growing need for low-latency access to computing resources that cannot be met solely by existing centralized cloud systems. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is expected to be an effective solution to meet the demand for low-latency services by enabling the execution of computing tasks at the network-periphery, in proximity to end-users. While a number of recent studies have addressed the problem of determining the execution of service tasks and the routing of user requests to corresponding edge servers, the focus has primarily been on the efficient utilization of computing resources, neglecting the fact that non-trivial amounts of data need to be stored to enable service execution, and that many emerging services exhibit asymmetric bandwidth requirements. To fill this gap, we study the joint optimization of service placement and request routing in MEC-enabled multi-cell networks with multidimensional (storage-computation-communication) constraints. We show that this problem generalizes several problems in literature and propose an algorithm that achieves close-to-optimal performance using randomized rounding. Evaluation results demonstrate that our approach can effectively utilize the available resources to maximize the number of requests served by low-latency edge cloud servers.Comment: IEEE Infocom 201

Social Data Offloading in D2D-Enhanced Cellular Networks by Network Formation Games

Recently, cellular networks are severely overloaded by social-based services, such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, in which thousands of clients subscribe a common content provider (e.g., a popular singer) and download his/her content updates all the time. Offloading such traffic through complementary networks, such as a delay tolerant network formed by device-to-device (D2D) communications between mobile subscribers, is a promising solution to reduce the cellular burdens. In the existing solutions, mobile users are assumed to be volunteers who selfishlessly deliver the content to every other user in proximity while moving. However, practical users are selfish and they will evaluate their individual payoffs in the D2D sharing process, which may highly influence the network performance compared to the case of selfishless users. In this paper, we take user selfishness into consideration and propose a network formation game to capture the dynamic characteristics of selfish behaviors. In the proposed game, we provide the utility function of each user and specify the conditions under which the subscribers are guaranteed to converge to a stable network. Then, we propose a practical network formation algorithm in which the users can decide their D2D sharing strategies based on their historical records. Simulation results show that user selfishness can highly degrade the efficiency of data offloading, compared with ideal volunteer users. Also, the decrease caused by user selfishness can be highly affected by the cost ratio between the cellular transmission and D2D transmission, the access delays, and mobility patterns