Project Final Report – FREEDOM ICT-248891

This document is the final publishable summary report of the objective and work carried out within the European Project FREEDOM, ICT-248891.This document is the final publishable summary report of the objective and work carried out within the European Project FREEDOM, ICT-248891.Preprin

Next Generation Connectivity: A Review of Broadband Internet Transitions and Policy from Around the World

Fostering the development of a ubiquitously networked society, connected over high-capacity networks, is a widely shared goal among both developed and developing countries. High capacity networks are seen as strategic infrastructure, intended to contribute to high and sustainable economic growth and to core aspects of human development.

Towards scalable Community Networks topologies

Community Networks (CNs) are grassroots bottom-up initiatives that build local infrastructures, normally using Wi-Fi technology, to bring broadband networking in areas with inadequate offer of traditional infrastructures such as ADSL, FTTx or wide-band cellular (LTE, 5G). Albeit they normally operate as access networks to the Internet, CNs are ad-hoc networks that evolve based on local requirements and constraints, often including additional local services on top of Internet access. These networks grow in highly decentralized manner that radically deviates from the top-down network planning practiced in commercial mobile networks, depending, on the one hand, on the willingness of people to participate, and, on the other hand, on the feasibility of wireless links connecting the houses of potential participants with each other. In this paper, we present a novel methodology and its implementation into an automated tool, which enables the exercise of (light) centralized control to the dynamic and otherwise spontaneous CN growth process. The goal of the methodology is influencing the choices to connect a new node to the CN so that it can grow with more balance and to a larger size. Input to our methodology are open source resources about the physical terrain of the CN deployment area, such as Open Street Map and very detailed (less than 1 m resolution) LIDAR-based data about buildings layout and height, as well as technical descriptions and pricing data about off-the-shelf networking devices that are made available by manufacturers. Data related to demographics can be easily added to refine the environment description. With these data at hand, the tool can estimate the technical and economic feasibility of adding new nodes to the CN and actively assist new CN users in selecting proper equipment and CN node(s) to connect with to improve the CN scalability. We test our methodology in four different areas representing standard territorial characterization categories: urban, suburban, intermediate, and rural. In all four cases our tool shows that CNs scale to much larger size using the assisted, network-aware methodology when compared with de facto practices. Results also show that the CNs deployed with the assisted methodology are more balanced and have a lower per-node cost for the same per-node guaranteed bandwidth. Moreover, this is achieved with fewer devices per node, which means that the network is cheaper to build and easier to maintain.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Antenna allocation and pricing in virtualized massive MIMO networks via Stackelberg game

We study a resource allocation problem for the uplink of a virtualized massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, where the antennas at the base station are priced and virtualized among the service providers (SPs). The mobile network operator (MNO) who owns the infrastructure decides the price per antenna, and a Stackelberg game is formulated for the net profit maximization of the MNO, while minimum rate requirements of SPs are satisfied. To solve the bi-level optimization problem of the MNO, we first derive the closed-form best responses of the SPs with respect to the pricing strategies of the MNO, such that the problem of the MNO can be reduced to a single-level optimization. Then, via transformations and approximations, we cast the MNO’s problem with integer constraints into a signomial geometric program (SGP), and we propose an iterative algorithm based on the successive convex approximation (SCA) to solve the SGP. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has performance close to the global optimum. Moreover, the interactions between the MNO and SPs in different scenarios are explored via simulations