Network virtualization in next-generation cellular networks: a spectrum pooling approach

The hardship of expanding the cellular network market results from the tremendous high cost of mobile infrastructure, i.e. the capital expenditures (CAPEX) and the operational expenditures (OPEX). Spectrum Sharing is one of the proposed solution for the high-cost of scalability of cellular networks. However, most of the proposed spectrum pooling frameworks in the literature are mostly approached from a technical view besides there are no good cost models based on real datasets for quantifying the circumstances under which sharing the spectrum and network resources would be beneficial to mobile operators. In this thesis, by studying different sharing scenarios in a fiber-based backhaul mobile network, we assess the incentives for service providers (SPs) to share spectrum/infrastructure in different cellular market areas/economic areas (CMA/BEAs) with different population density, allocated bandwidth (BW), spectrum bid values and considering different network topologies. Moreover, we look at the technical problem of sharing the spectrum between two SPs sharing the same basestation (BS), yet they have different traffic demand as well as different QoS constraints. We design a resource allocation scheme to provision real-time (RT), non-real-time (NRT) as well as Ultra-reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) traffic in a single shared BS scenario such that SPs achieve isolation, fairness and enforce their QoS constraints. Finally, we exploit spectrum pooling to develop an approach for dynamically re-configuring the base stations that survive a disaster and are powered by a microgrid to form a multi-hop mesh network in order to provide local cellular service

Physics-Based Swarm Intelligence for Disaster Relief Communications

This study explores how a swarm of aerial mobile vehicles can provide network connectivity and meet the stringent requirements of public protection and disaster relief operations. In this context, we design a physics-based controlled mobility strategy, which we name the extended Virtual Force Protocol (VFPe), allowing self-propelled nodes, and in particular here unmanned aerial vehicles, to fly autonomously and cooperatively. In this way, ground devices scattered on the operation site may establish communications through the wireless multi-hop communication routes formed by the network of aerial nodes. We further investigate through simulations the behavior of the VFPe protocol, notably focusing on the way node location information is disseminated into the network as well as on the impact of the number of exploration nodes on the overall network performance.Comment: in International Conference on Ad Hoc Networks and Wireless, Jul 2016, Lille, Franc

Power aware routing algorithms (PARA) in wireless mesh networks for emergency management

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) integrate the advantages of WLANs and mobile Ad Hoc networks, which have become the key techniques of next-generation wireless networks in the context of emergency recovery. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are multi-hop wireless networks with instant deployment, self-healing, self-organization and self-configuration features. These capabilities make WMNs a promising technology for incident and emergency communication. An incident area network (IAN) needs a reliable and lively routing path during disaster recovery and emergency response operations when infrastructure-based communications and power resources have been destroyed and no routes are available. Power aware routing plays a significant role in WMNs, in order to provide continuous efficient emergency services. The existing power aware routing algorithms used in wireless networks cannot fully fit the characteristics of WMNs, to be used for emergency recovery. This paper proposes a power aware routing algorithm (PARA) for WMNs, which selects optimal paths to send packets, mainly based on the power level of next node along the path. This algorithm was implemented and tested in a proven simulator. The analytic results show that the proposed power node-type aware routing algorithm metric can clearly improve the network performance by reducing the network overheads and maintaining a high delivery ratio with low latency

Easy Wireless: broadband ad-hoc networking for emergency services

Wireless ad-hoc networks will enable emergency services to continuously overview and act upon the actual status of the situation by retrieving and exchanging detailed up-to-date information between the rescue workers. Deployment of high-bandwidth, robust, self-organising ad-hoc networks will enable quicker response to typical what/where/when questions, than the more vulnerable low-bandwidth communication networks currently in use. This paper addresses a number of results of the Easy Wireless project that enable high bandwidth robust ad-hoc networking. Most of the concepts presented here have been experimentally verified and/or prototyped

From MANET to people-centric networking: Milestones and open research challenges

In this paper, we discuss the state of the art of (mobile) multi-hop ad hoc networking with the aim to present the current status of the research activities and identify the consolidated research areas, with limited research opportunities, and the hot and emerging research areas for which further research is required. We start by briefly discussing the MANET paradigm, and why the research on MANET protocols is now a cold research topic. Then we analyze the active research areas. Specifically, after discussing the wireless-network technologies, we analyze four successful ad hoc networking paradigms, mesh networks, opportunistic networks, vehicular networks, and sensor networks that emerged from the MANET world. We also present an emerging research direction in the multi-hop ad hoc networking field: people centric networking, triggered by the increasing penetration of the smartphones in everyday life, which is generating a people-centric revolution in computing and communications

Survivable and disaster- resilient submarine optical-fiber cable deployment

06.03.2018 tarihli ve 30352 sayılı Resmi Gazetede yayımlanan “Yükseköğretim Kanunu İle Bazı Kanun Ve Kanun Hükmünde Kararnamelerde Değişiklik Yapılması Hakkında Kanun” ile 18.06.2018 tarihli “Lisansüstü Tezlerin Elektronik Ortamda Toplanması, Düzenlenmesi ve Erişime Açılmasına İlişkin Yönerge” gereğince tam metin erişime açılmıştır.Internete olan mevcut sosyal ve ekonomik bağlılık ve servis kesintileri nedeni ile oluşan önemli miktardaki tamir masrafları ile ağ kalımlılığı günümüzde telekomünikasyon ağ dizaynının önemli bir parçası olmuştur. Ayrıca, denizaltı fiber optik kabloların depremler gibi doğal afetlere veya insan-yapımı afetlere karşı zayıf olduğu da herkesçe kabul edilmiş bir gerçektir. Afete dayanıklı bir denizaltı kablo yerleştirilmesi, bir yada daha fazla kablo afet nedeni ile koptuğunda ağ servislerini yeniden eski haline getirmek için ağ operatörünün maliyetlerini (yolculuk maliyeti, kapasite kayıp maliyeti ve hasar gören kablonun tamir maliyeti) azaltabilir. Bu çalışmada afet-farkındalı denizaltı fiber optik kabloları yerleştirme problemini araştırdık. Kablolar için bir yol/rota seçerken yaklaşımımız toplam beklenen kayıp maliyetini, denizaltı fiber kabloların afetler nedeni ile zarar görebileceğini de düşünerek, bütçe ve diğer kısıtlamalar altında minimize etmeyi hedefler. Yaklaşımımızda afetle ilişkisiz arızaların ana kablonun yanında bir de yedek kablo sağlanarak üstesinden gelindiğini varsaydık. Önce basitçe bir su kütlesi (deniz/okyanus) tarafından ayrılmış iki kara parçası üzerine yerleştirilmiş iki düğümün olduğu bir senaryoyu düşündük. Daha sonra problemi formüle edebilmek için afet bölgelerinden sakınacak şekilde eliptik kablo şeklini dikkate aldık. En nihayetinde problem için, bu durumda yaklaşımımızın potansiyel faydalarını gösteren sayısal örneklerle desteklediğimiz bir Tamsayı Lineer Programlama formülasyonu ürettik. Bununla birlikte problemi daha pratik hale getirmek için, farklı kara parçalarına yerleşmiş çoklu düğümlerin örgüsel bir ağ topolojisini, düzenli şekillere sahip olmayan kabloları, deniz altındaki ortamın topografisini de dikkate aldık. Bu problemi de ifade etmek için sayısal örneklere birlikte bir Tamsayı Lineer Programlama sunduk. Sonuç olarak, pratik durumu düşünerek bir örnek durum incelemesi üzerinde yaklaşımımızı mevcut kablolama sistemleri ile kıyaslayarak teyit ettik. İki durumda da, sonuçlar bize %2-%11 oranında bir yerleştirme maliyeti artışı karşılığında beklenen maliyeti %90-%100 arasında azaltabileceğimizi gösterdi.With the existing profoundly social and economic reliance on the Internet and the significant reparation cost associated with service interruption, network survivability is an important element in telecommunication network design nowadays. Moreover, the fact that submarine optical-fiber cables are susceptible to man-made or natural disasters such as earthquakes is well recognized. A disaster-resilient submarine cable deployment can save cost incurred by network operators such as the capacity-loss cost, the cruising cost and the repair cost of the damaged cables, in order to restore network service when cables break due to a disaster. In this study, we investigate disaster-aware submarine fiber-optic cable deployment problem. While selecting a route/path for cables, our approach aims to minimize the total expected cost, considering that submarine optical-fiber cables may break because of natural disasters, subject to deployment budget and other constraints. In our approach, we assume disaster-unrelated failures are handled by providing a backup cable along with primary cable. In the simple case we consider a scenario with two nodes located on two different lands separated by a water body (sea/ocean). We then consider an elliptic cable shape to formulate the problem, which can be extended to other cable shapes, subject to avoiding deploying cable in disaster zones. Eventuaaly, we provide an Integer Linear Programming formulation for the problem supported with illustrative numerical examples that show the potential benefit of our approach. Furthermore, in order to make the problem more practical, we consider a mesh topology network with multiple nodes located on different sea/ocean, submarine optical- fiber cables of irregular shape, and the topography of undersea environment. Eventually, we provide an Integer Linear Programming to address the problem, together with illustrative numerical examples. Finally, we validate our approach by conducting a case study wherein we consider a practical submarine optical-fiber cable system susceptible to natural disasters. In this case, we compare our approach against the existing cable system in terms of deployment cost and reduction in expected cost. In either case results show that our approach can reduce expected cost from 90% to 100% at a slight increase of 2% to 11% in deployment cost of disaster-unaware approach

An Emergent Architecture for Scaling Decentralized Communication Systems (DCS)

With recent technological advancements now accelerating the mobile and wireless Internet solution space, a ubiquitous computing Internet is well within the research and industrial community's design reach - a decentralized system design, which is not solely driven by static physical models and sound engineering principals, but more dynamically, perhaps sub-optimally at initial deployment and socially-influenced in its evolution. To complement today's Internet system, this thesis proposes a Decentralized Communication System (DCS) architecture with the following characteristics: flat physical topologies with numerous compute oriented and communication intensive nodes in the network with many of these nodes operating in multiple functional roles; self-organizing virtual structures formed through alternative mobility scenarios and capable of serving ad hoc networking formations; emergent operations and control with limited dependency on centralized control and management administration. Today, decentralized systems are not commercially scalable or viable for broad adoption in the same way we have to come to rely on the Internet or telephony systems. The premise in this thesis is that DCS can reach high levels of resilience, usefulness, scale that the industry has come to experience with traditional centralized systems by exploiting the following properties: (i.) network density and topological diversity; (ii.) self-organization and emergent attributes; (iii.) cooperative and dynamic infrastructure; and (iv.) node role diversity. This thesis delivers key contributions towards advancing the current state of the art in decentralized systems. First, we present the vision and a conceptual framework for DCS. Second, the thesis demonstrates that such a framework and concept architecture is feasible by prototyping a DCS platform that exhibits the above properties or minimally, demonstrates that these properties are feasible through prototyped network services. Third, this work expands on an alternative approach to network clustering using hierarchical virtual clusters (HVC) to facilitate self-organizing network structures. With increasing network complexity, decentralized systems can generally lead to unreliable and irregular service quality, especially given unpredictable node mobility and traffic dynamics. The HVC framework is an architectural strategy to address organizational disorder associated with traditional decentralized systems. The proposed HVC architecture along with the associated promotional methodology organizes distributed control and management services by leveraging alternative organizational models (e.g., peer-to-peer (P2P), centralized or tiered) in hierarchical and virtual fashion. Through simulation and analytical modeling, we demonstrate HVC efficiencies in DCS structural scalability and resilience by comparing static and dynamic HVC node configurations against traditional physical configurations based on P2P, centralized or tiered structures. Next, an emergent management architecture for DCS exploiting HVC for self-organization, introduces emergence as an operational approach to scaling DCS services for state management and policy control. In this thesis, emergence scales in hierarchical fashion using virtual clustering to create multiple tiers of local and global separation for aggregation, distribution and network control. Emergence is an architectural objective, which HVC introduces into the proposed self-management design for scaling and stability purposes. Since HVC expands the clustering model hierarchically and virtually, a clusterhead (CH) node, positioned as a proxy for a specific cluster or grouped DCS nodes, can also operate in a micro-capacity as a peer member of an organized cluster in a higher tier. As the HVC promotional process continues through the hierarchy, each tier of the hierarchy exhibits emergent behavior. With HVC as the self-organizing structural framework, a multi-tiered, emergent architecture enables the decentralized management strategy to improve scaling objectives that traditionally challenge decentralized systems. The HVC organizational concept and the emergence properties align with and the view of the human brain's neocortex layering structure of sensory storage, prediction and intelligence. It is the position in this thesis, that for DCS to scale and maintain broad stability, network control and management must strive towards an emergent or natural approach. While today's models for network control and management have proven to lack scalability and responsiveness based on pure centralized models, it is unlikely that singular organizational models can withstand the operational complexities associated with DCS. In this work, we integrate emergence and learning-based methods in a cooperative computing manner towards realizing DCS self-management. However, unlike many existing work in these areas which break down with increased network complexity and dynamics, the proposed HVC framework is utilized to offset these issues through effective separation, aggregation and asynchronous processing of both distributed state and policy. Using modeling techniques, we demonstrate that such architecture is feasible and can improve the operational robustness of DCS. The modeling emphasis focuses on demonstrating the operational advantages of an HVC-based organizational strategy for emergent management services (i.e., reachability, availability or performance). By integrating the two approaches, the DCS architecture forms a scalable system to address the challenges associated with traditional decentralized systems. The hypothesis is that the emergent management system architecture will improve the operational scaling properties of DCS-based applications and services. Additionally, we demonstrate structural flexibility of HVC as an underlying service infrastructure to build and deploy DCS applications and layered services. The modeling results demonstrate that an HVC-based emergent management and control system operationally outperforms traditional structural organizational models. In summary, this thesis brings together the above contributions towards delivering a scalable, decentralized system for Internet mobile computing and communications