617 research outputs found
Optimal Cross Slice Orchestration for 5G Mobile Services
5G mobile networks encompass the capabilities of hosting a variety of
services such as mobile social networks, multimedia delivery, healthcare,
transportation, and public safety. Therefore, the major challenge in designing
the 5G networks is how to support different types of users and applications
with different quality-of-service requirements under a single physical network
infrastructure. Recently, network slicing has been introduced as a promising
solution to address this challenge. Network slicing allows programmable network
instances which match the service requirements by using network virtualization
technologies. However, how to efficiently allocate resources across network
slices has not been well studied in the literature. Therefore, in this paper,
we first introduce a model for orchestrating network slices based on the
service requirements and available resources. Then, we propose a Markov
decision process framework to formulate and determine the optimal policy that
manages cross-slice admission control and resource allocation for the 5G
networks. Through simulation results, we show that the proposed framework and
solution are efficient not only in providing slice-as-a-service based on the
service requirements, but also in maximizing the provider's revenue.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, WCNC 2018 conferenc
Network automation: challenges, enablers, and benefits
Communication infrastructures are evolving towards an ad-hoc service provisioning scenario where programmability and flexibility are fundamental concepts. Network automation is expected to play a vital role in streamlining all aspects of the service provisioning process (i.e., deployment, maintenance, and tear down). However, to fully realize this autonomous operation vision, closed-loop automation procedures need to be developed.This tutorial will present the main motivations and challenges behind designing and operating closed-loop autonomous decision-making processes, including a brief overview of current standardization initiatives. The tutorial will then address several use cases showcasing how network automation can alleviate the complexity of the service provisioning processes and the benefits brought in by the introduction of network automation
A novel multipath-transmission supported software defined wireless network architecture
The inflexible management and operation of today\u27s wireless access networks cannot meet the increasingly growing specific requirements, such as high mobility and throughput, service differentiation, and high-level programmability. In this paper, we put forward a novel multipath-transmission supported software-defined wireless network architecture (MP-SDWN), with the aim of achieving seamless handover, throughput enhancement, and flow-level wireless transmission control as well as programmable interfaces. In particular, this research addresses the following issues: 1) for high mobility and throughput, multi-connection virtual access point is proposed to enable multiple transmission paths simultaneously over a set of access points for users and 2) wireless flow transmission rules and programmable interfaces are implemented into mac80211 subsystem to enable service differentiation and flow-level wireless transmission control. Moreover, the efficiency and flexibility of MP-SDWN are demonstrated in the performance evaluations conducted on a 802.11 based-testbed, and the experimental results show that compared to regular WiFi, our proposed MP-SDWN architecture achieves seamless handover and multifold throughput improvement, and supports flow-level wireless transmission control for different applications
An adaptive 5G multiservice and multitenant radio access network architecture
This article provides an overview on objectives and first results of the Horizon 2020 project 5G NOvel Radio Multiservice adaptive network Architecture (5GNORMA). With 5G NORMA, leading players in the mobile ecosystem aim to underpin Europe's leadership position in 5G. The key objective of 5G NORMA is to develop a conceptually novel, adaptive and future-proof 5G mobile network architecture. This architecture will allow for adapting the network to a wide range of service specific requirements, resulting in novel service-aware and context-aware end-to-end function chaining. The technical approach is based on an innovative concept of adaptive (de)composition and allocation of mobile network functions based on end-user requirements and infrastructure capabilities. At the same time, cost savings and faster time to market are to be expected by joint deployment of logically separated multiservice and multitenant networks on common hardware and other physical resources making use of traffic multiplexing gains. In this context architectural enablers such as network function virtualization and software-defined mobile networking will play a key role for introducing the needed flexible resource assignment to logical networks and specific virtual network functions.This work has been performed in the framework of the H2020-ICT-2014-2 project 5G NORMA
QoE-Centric Control and Management of Multimedia Services in Software Defined and Virtualized Networks
Multimedia services consumption has increased tremendously since the deployment of 4G/LTE networks. Mobile video services (e.g., YouTube and Mobile TV) on smart devices are expected to continue to grow with the emergence and evolution of future networks such as 5G. The end user’s demand for services with better quality from service providers has triggered a trend towards Quality of Experience (QoE) - centric network management through efficient utilization of network resources. However, existing network technologies are either unable to adapt to diverse changing network conditions or limited in available resources.
This has posed challenges to service providers for provisioning of QoE-centric multimedia services. New networking solutions such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) can provide better solutions in terms of
QoE control and management of multimedia services in emerging and future networks. The features of SDN, such as adaptability, programmability and cost-effectiveness make it suitable for bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications such as live video streaming, 3D/HD video and video gaming. However, the delivery of multimedia services over SDN/NFV networks to achieve optimized QoE, and the overall QoE-centric network resource management remain an open question especially in the advent development of future softwarized networks.
The work in this thesis intends to investigate, design and develop novel approaches for QoE-centric control and management of multimedia services (with a focus on video streaming services) over software defined and virtualized networks.
First, a video quality management scheme based on the traffic intensity under Dynamic Adaptive Video Streaming over HTTP (DASH) using SDN is developed. The proposed scheme can mitigate virtual port queue congestion which may cause
buffering or stalling events during video streaming, thus, reducing the video quality.
A QoE-driven resource allocation mechanism is designed and developed for improving the end user’s QoE for video streaming services. The aim of this approach is to find the best combination of network node functions that can provide an optimized QoE level to end-users through network node cooperation. Furthermore, a novel QoE-centric management scheme is proposed and developed, which utilizes Multipath TCP (MPTCP) and Segment Routing (SR) to enhance QoE for video streaming services over SDN/NFV-based networks. The goal of this strategy is to enable service providers to route network traffic through multiple
disjointed bandwidth-satisfying paths and meet specific service QoE guarantees to the end-users. Extensive experiments demonstrated that the proposed schemes in this work improve the video quality significantly compared with the state-of-the-
art approaches. The thesis further proposes the path protections and link failure-free MPTCP/SR-based architecture that increases survivability, resilience, availability and robustness of future networks. The proposed path protection and dynamic link recovery scheme achieves a minimum time to recover from a failed link and avoids link congestion in softwarized networks
NFV orchestration in edge and fog scenarios
Mención Internacional en el título de doctorLas infraestructuras de red actuales soportan una
variedad diversa de servicios como video bajo demanda,
video conferencias, redes sociales, sistemas
de educación, o servicios de almacenamiento de
fotografías. Gran parte de la población mundial ha
comenzado a utilizar estos servicios, y los utilizan
diariamente. Proveedores de Cloud y operadores
de infraestructuras de red albergan el tráfico de
red generado por estos servicios, y sus tareas de
gestión no solo implican realizar el enrutamiento
del tráfico, sino también el procesado del tráfico de
servicios de red. Tradicionalmente, el procesado
del tráfico ha sido realizado mediante aplicaciones/
programas desplegados en servidores que estaban
dedicados en exclusiva a tareas concretas
como la inspección de paquetes. Sin embargo, en
los últimos anos los servicios de red se han virtualizado
y esto ha dado lugar al paradigma de
virtualización de funciones de red (Network Function
Virtualization (NFV) siguiendo las siglas en
ingles), en el que las funciones de red de un servicio
se ejecutan en contenedores o máquinas virtuales
desacopladas de la infraestructura hardware. Como
resultado, el procesado de tráfico se ha ido
haciendo más flexible gracias al laxo acople del
software y hardware, y a la posibilidad de compartir
funciones de red típicas, como firewalls, entre
los distintos servicios de red.
NFV facilita la automatización de operaciones
de red, ya que tareas como el escalado, o la migración
son típicamente llevadas a cabo mediante
un conjunto de comandos previamente definidos
por la tecnología de virtualización pertinente, bien
mediante contenedores o máquinas virtuales. De
todos modos, sigue siendo necesario decidir el en rutamiento y procesado del tráfico de cada servicio
de red. En otras palabras, que servidores tienen
que encargarse del procesado del tráfico, y que
enlaces de la red tienen que utilizarse para que las
peticiones de los usuarios lleguen a los servidores
finales, es decir, el conocido como embedding problem.
Bajo el paraguas del paradigma NFV, a este
problema se le conoce en inglés como Virtual Network
Embedding (VNE), y esta tesis utiliza el termino
“NFV orchestration algorithm” para referirse
a los algoritmos que resuelven este problema. El
problema del VNE es NP-hard, lo cual significa
que que es imposible encontrar una solución optima
en un tiempo polinómico, independientemente
del tamaño de la red. Como consecuencia, la comunidad
investigadora y de telecomunicaciones
utilizan heurísticos que encuentran soluciones de
manera más rápida que productos para la resolución
de problemas de optimización.
Tradicionalmente, los “NFV orchestration algorithms”
han intentado minimizar los costes de
despliegue derivados de las soluciones asociadas.
Por ejemplo, estos algoritmos intentan no consumir
el ancho de banda de la red, y usar rutas cortas
para no utilizar tantos recursos. Además, una tendencia
reciente ha llevado a la comunidad investigadora
a utilizar algoritmos que minimizan el
consumo energético de los servicios desplegados,
bien mediante la elección de dispositivos con un
consumo energético más eficiente, o mediante el
apagado de dispositivos de red en desuso. Típicamente,
las restricciones de los problemas de VNE se
han resumido en un conjunto de restricciones asociadas
al uso de recursos y consumo energético, y las
soluciones se diferenciaban por la función objetivo
utilizada. Pero eso era antes de la 5a generación de
redes móviles (5G) se considerase en el problema
de VNE. Con la aparición del 5G, nuevos servicios
de red y casos de uso entraron en escena. Los estándares
hablaban de comunicaciones ultra rápidas
y fiables (Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications
(URLLC) usando las siglas en inglés) con
latencias por debajo de unos pocos milisegundos y
fiabilidades del 99.999%, una banda ancha mejorada
(enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) usando
las siglas en inglés) con notorios incrementos en
el flujo de datos, e incluso la consideración de comunicaciones
masivas entre maquinas (Massive
Machine-Type Communications (mMTC) usando
las siglas en inglés) entre dispositivos IoT. Es más,
paradigmas como edge y fog computing se incorporaron a la tecnología 5G, e introducían la idea
de tener dispositivos de computo más cercanos al
usuario final. Como resultado, el problema del VNE
tenía que incorporar los nuevos requisitos como
restricciones a tener en cuenta, y toda solución
debía satisfacer bajas latencias, alta fiabilidad, y
mayores tasas de transmisión.
Esta tesis estudia el problema des VNE, y propone
algunos heurísticos que lidian con las restricciones
asociadas a servicios 5G en escenarios
edge y fog, es decir, las soluciones propuestas se
encargan de asignar funciones virtuales de red a
servidores, y deciden el enrutamiento del trafico
en las infraestructuras 5G con dispositivos edge y
fog. Para evaluar el rendimiento de las soluciones
propuestas, esta tesis estudia en primer lugar la
generación de grafos que representan redes 5G.
Los mecanismos propuestos para la generación de
grafos sirven para representar distintos escenarios
5G. En particular, escenarios de federación en
los que varios dominios comparten recursos entre
ellos. Los grafos generados también representan
servidores en el edge, así como dispositivos fog con
una batería limitada. Además, estos grafos tienen
en cuenta los requisitos de estándares, y la demanda
que se espera en las redes 5G. La generación de
grafos propuesta sirve para representar escenarios
federación en los que varios dominios comparten
recursos entre ellos, y redes 5G con servidores edge,
así como dispositivos fog estáticos o móviles con
una batería limitada. Los grafos generados para
infraestructuras 5G tienen en cuenta los requisitos
de estándares, y la demanda de red que se espera
en las redes 5G. Además, los grafos son diferentes
en función de la densidad de población, y el área
de estudio, es decir, si es una zona industrial, una
autopista, o una zona urbana.
Tras detallar la generación de grafos que representan
redes 5G, esta tesis propone algoritmos de
orquestación NFV para resolver con el problema
del VNE. Primero, se centra en escenarios federados
en los que los servicios de red se tienen que
asignar no solo a la infraestructura de un dominio,
sino a los recursos compartidos en la federación
de dominios. Dos problemas diferentes han sido estudiados,
uno es el problema del VNE propiamente
dicho sobre una infraestructura federada, y el otro
es la delegación de servicios de red. Es decir, si
un servicio de red se debe desplegar localmente
en un dominio, o en los recursos compartidos por
la federación de dominios; a sabiendas de que el último caso supone el pago de cuotas por parte del
dominio local a cambio del despliegue del servicio
de red. En segundo lugar, esta tesis propone
OKpi, un algoritmo de orquestación NFV para conseguir
la calidad de servicio de las distintas slices
de las redes 5G. Conceptualmente, el slicing consiste
en partir la red de modo que cada servicio
de red sea tratado de modo diferente dependiendo
del trozo al que pertenezca. Por ejemplo, una
slice de eHealth reservara los recursos de red necesarios
para conseguir bajas latencias en servicios
como operaciones quirúrgicas realizadas de manera
remota. Cada trozo (slice) está destinado a
unos servicios específicos con unos requisitos muy
concretos, como alta fiabilidad, restricciones de
localización, o latencias de un milisegundo. OKpi
es un algoritmo de orquestación NFV que consigue
satisfacer los requisitos de servicios de red en los
distintos trozos, o slices de la red. Tras presentar
OKpi, la tesis resuelve el problema del VNE en redes
5G con dispositivos fog estáticos y móviles. El
algoritmo de orquestación NFV presentado tiene
en cuenta las limitaciones de recursos de computo
de los dispositivos fog, además de los problemas
de falta de cobertura derivados de la movilidad de
los dispositivos.
Para concluir, esta tesis estudia el escalado
de servicios vehiculares Vehicle-to-Network (V2N),
que requieren de bajas latencias para servicios como
la prevención de choques, avisos de posibles
riesgos, y conducción remota. Para estos servicios,
los atascos y congestiones en la carretera pueden
causar el incumplimiento de los requisitos de latencia.
Por tanto, es necesario anticiparse a esas
circunstancias usando técnicas de series temporales
que permiten saber el tráfico inminente en los
siguientes minutos u horas, para así poder escalar
el servicio V2N adecuadamente.Current network infrastructures handle a diverse
range of network services such as video
on demand services, video-conferences, social
networks, educational systems, or photo
storage services. These services have been
embraced by a significant amount of the
world population, and are used on a daily basis.
Cloud providers and Network operators’
infrastructures accommodate the traffic rates
that the aforementioned services generate, and
their management tasks do not only involve
the traffic steering, but also the processing of
the network services’ traffic. Traditionally,
the traffic processing has been assessed via
applications/programs deployed on servers
that were exclusively dedicated to a specific
task as packet inspection. However, in recent
years network services have stated to be
virtualized and this has led to the Network
Function Virtualization (Network Function
Virtualization (NFV)) paradigm, in which the
network functions of a service run on containers
or virtual machines that are decoupled
from the hardware infrastructure. As a result,
the traffic processing has become more flexible
because of the loose coupling between
software and hardware, and the possibility
of sharing common network functions, as
firewalls, across multiple network services.
NFV eases the automation of network operations,
since scaling and migrations tasks
are typically performed by a set of commands
predefined by the virtualization technology,
either containers or virtual machines. However,
it is still necessary to decide the traffic steering and processing of every network
service. In other words, which servers will
hold the traffic processing, and which are the
network links to be traversed so the users’ requests
reach the final servers, i.e., the network
embedding problem. Under the umbrella of
NFV, this problem is known as Virtual Network
Embedding (VNE), and this thesis refers
as “NFV orchestration algorithms” to those
algorithms solving such a problem. The VNE
problem is a NP-hard, meaning that it is impossible
to find optimal solutions in polynomial
time, no matter the network size. As a
consequence, the research and telecommunications
community rely on heuristics that find
solutions quicker than a commodity optimization
solver.
Traditionally, NFV orchestration algorithms
have tried to minimize the deployment
costs derived from their solutions. For example,
they try to not exhaust the network
bandwidth, and use short paths to use less
network resources. Additionally, a recent
tendency led the research community towards
algorithms that minimize the energy consumption
of the deployed services, either
by selecting more energy efficient devices
or by turning off those network devices that
remained unused. VNE problem constraints
were typically summarized in a set of resources/energy constraints, and the solutions
differed on which objectives functions were
aimed for. But that was before 5th generation
of mobile networks (5G) were considered
in the VNE problem. With the appearance
of 5G, new network services and use cases
started to emerge. The standards talked about
Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication
(Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications
(URLLC)) with latencies below few
milliseconds and 99.999% reliability, an enhanced
mobile broadband (enhanced Mobile
Broadband (eMBB)) with significant data
rate increases, and even the consideration
of massive machine-type communications
(Massive Machine-Type Communications
(mMTC)) among Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Moreover, paradigms such as edge and
fog computing blended with the 5G technology
to introduce the idea of having computing
devices closer to the end users. As a result, the VNE problem had to incorporate the new
requirements as constraints to be taken into
account, and every solution should either
satisfy low latencies, high reliability, or larger
data rates.
This thesis studies the VNE problem, and
proposes some heuristics tackling the constraints
related to 5G services in Edge and
fog scenarios, that is, the proposed solutions
assess the assignment of Virtual Network
Functions to resources, and the traffic steering
across 5G infrastructures that have Edge and
Fog devices. To evaluate the performance
of the proposed solutions, the thesis studies
first the generation of graphs that represent
5G networks. The proposed mechanisms to
generate graphs serve to represent diverse 5G
scenarios. In particular federation scenarios
in which several domains share resources
among themselves. The generated graphs
also represent edge servers, so as fog devices
with limited battery capacity. Additionally,
these graphs take into account the standard
requirements, and the expected demand for
5G networks. Moreover, the graphs differ depending
on the density of population, and the
area of study, i.e., whether it is an industrial
area, a highway, or an urban area.
After detailing the generation of graphs
representing the 5G networks, this thesis proposes
several NFV orchestration algorithms
to tackle the VNE problem. First, it focuses
on federation scenarios in which network services
should be assigned not only to a single
domain infrastructure, but also to the shared
resources of the federation of domains. Two
different problems are studied, one being the
VNE itself over a federated infrastructure, and
the other the delegation of network services.
That is, whether a network service should be
deployed in a local domain, or in the pool
of resources of the federation domain; knowing
that the latter charges the local domain
for hosting the network service. Second, the
thesis proposes OKpi, a NFV orchestration
algorithm to meet 5G network slices quality
of service. Conceptually, network slicing consists
in splitting the network so network services
are treated differently based on the slice
they belong to. For example, an eHealth network
slice will allocate the network resources necessary to meet low latencies for network
services such as remote surgery. Each network
slice is devoted to specific services with
very concrete requirements, as high reliability,
location constraints, or 1ms latencies. OKpi is
a NFV orchestration algorithm that meets the
network service requirements among different
slices. It is based on a multi-constrained
shortest path heuristic, and its solutions satisfy
latency, reliability, and location constraints.
After presenting OKpi, the thesis tackles the
VNE problem in 5G networks with static/moving
fog devices. The presented NFV orchestration
algorithm takes into account the limited
computing resources of fog devices, as well
as the out-of-coverage problems derived from
the devices’ mobility.
To conclude, this thesis studies the scaling
of Vehicle-to-Network (V2N) services, which
require low latencies for network services as
collision avoidance, hazard warning, and remote
driving. For these services, the presence
of traffic jams, or high vehicular traffic congestion
lead to the violation of latency requirements.
Hence, it is necessary to anticipate to
such circumstances by using time-series techniques
that allow to derive the incoming vehicular
traffic flow in the next minutes or hours,
so as to scale the V2N service accordingly.The 5G Exchange (5GEx) project (2015-2018) was an EU-funded project (H2020-ICT-2014-2 grant agreement 671636).
The 5G-TRANSFORMER project (2017-2019) is an EU-funded project (H2020-ICT-2016-2 grant agreement 761536).
The 5G-CORAL project (2017-2019) is an EU-Taiwan project (H2020-ICT-2016-2 grant agreement 761586).Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Telemática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Ioannis Stavrakakis.- Secretario: Pablo Serrano Yáñez-Mingot.- Vocal: Paul Horatiu Patra
Side Channel Attack-Aware Resource Allocation for URLLC and eMBB Slices in 5G RAN
Network slicing is a key enabling technology to realize the provisioning of customized services in 5G paradigm. Due to logical isolation instead of physical isolation, network slicing is facing a series of security issues. Side Channel Attack (SCA) is a typical attack for slices that share resources in the same hardware. Considering the risk of SCA among slices, this paper investigates how to effectively allocate heterogeneous resources for the slices under their different security requirements. Then, a SCA-aware Resource Allocation (SCA-RA) algorithm is proposed for Ultra-reliable and Low-latency Communications (URLLC) and Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) slices in 5G RAN. The objective is to maximize the number of slices accommodated in 5G RAN. With dynamic slice requests, simulation is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in two different network scenarios. Simulation results indicate that compared with benchmark, SCA-RA algorithm can effectively reduce blocking probability of slice requests. In addition, the usage of IT and transport resources is also optimized
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