Will SDN be part of 5G?

For many, this is no longer a valid question and the case is considered settled with SDN/NFV (Software Defined Networking/Network Function Virtualization) providing the inevitable innovation enablers solving many outstanding management issues regarding 5G. However, given the monumental task of softwarization of radio access network (RAN) while 5G is just around the corner and some companies have started unveiling their 5G equipment already, the concern is very realistic that we may only see some point solutions involving SDN technology instead of a fully SDN-enabled RAN. This survey paper identifies all important obstacles in the way and looks at the state of the art of the relevant solutions. This survey is different from the previous surveys on SDN-based RAN as it focuses on the salient problems and discusses solutions proposed within and outside SDN literature. Our main focus is on fronthaul, backward compatibility, supposedly disruptive nature of SDN deployment, business cases and monetization of SDN related upgrades, latency of general purpose processors (GPP), and additional security vulnerabilities, softwarization brings along to the RAN. We have also provided a summary of the architectural developments in SDN-based RAN landscape as not all work can be covered under the focused issues. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the state of the art of SDN-based RAN and clearly points out the gaps in the technology.Comment: 33 pages, 10 figure

Constraining application behaviour by generating languages

Writing a platform for reactive applications which enforces operational constraints is difficult, and has been approached in various ways. In this experience report, we detail an approach using an embedded DSL which can be used to specify the structure and permissions of a program in a given application domain. Once the developer has specified which components an application will consist of, and which permissions each one needs, the specification itself evaluates to a new, tailored, language. The final implementation of the application is then written in this specialised environment where precisely the API calls associated with the permissions which have been granted, are made available. Our prototype platform targets the domain of mobile computing, and is implemented using Racket. It demonstrates resource access control (e.g., camera, address book, etc.) and tries to prevent leaking of private data. Racket is shown to be an extremely effective platform for designing new programming languages and their run-time libraries. We demonstrate that this approach allows reuse of an inter-component communication layer, is convenient for the application developer because it provides high-level building blocks to structure the application, and provides increased control to the platform owner, preventing certain classes of errors by the developer.Comment: 8 pages, 8th European Lisp Symposiu

Continuous Performance Benchmarking Framework for ROOT

Foundational software libraries such as ROOT are under intense pressure to avoid software regression, including performance regressions. Continuous performance benchmarking, as a part of continuous integration and other code quality testing, is an industry best-practice to understand how the performance of a software product evolves over time. We present a framework, built from industry best practices and tools, to help to understand ROOT code performance and monitor the efficiency of the code for a several processor architectures. It additionally allows historical performance measurements for ROOT I/O, vectorization and parallelization sub-systems.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, CHEP 2018 - 23rd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physic

Motion estimation and CABAC VLSI co-processors for real-time high-quality H.264/AVC video coding

Real-time and high-quality video coding is gaining a wide interest in the research and industrial community for different applications. H.264/AVC, a recent standard for high performance video coding, can be successfully exploited in several scenarios including digital video broadcasting, high-definition TV and DVD-based systems, which require to sustain up to tens of Mbits/s. To that purpose this paper proposes optimized architectures for H.264/AVC most critical tasks, Motion estimation and context adaptive binary arithmetic coding. Post synthesis results on sub-micron CMOS standard-cells technologies show that the proposed architectures can actually process in real-time 720 × 480 video sequences at 30 frames/s and grant more than 50 Mbits/s. The achieved circuit complexity and power consumption budgets are suitable for their integration in complex VLSI multimedia systems based either on AHB bus centric on-chip communication system or on novel Network-on-Chip (NoC) infrastructures for MPSoC (Multi-Processor System on Chip