A Survey on Handover Management in Mobility Architectures

This work presents a comprehensive and structured taxonomy of available techniques for managing the handover process in mobility architectures. Representative works from the existing literature have been divided into appropriate categories, based on their ability to support horizontal handovers, vertical handovers and multihoming. We describe approaches designed to work on the current Internet (i.e. IPv4-based networks), as well as those that have been devised for the "future" Internet (e.g. IPv6-based networks and extensions). Quantitative measures and qualitative indicators are also presented and used to evaluate and compare the examined approaches. This critical review provides some valuable guidelines and suggestions for designing and developing mobility architectures, including some practical expedients (e.g. those required in the current Internet environment), aimed to cope with the presence of NAT/firewalls and to provide support to legacy systems and several communication protocols working at the application layer

SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks

The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework, communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services, providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner. According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologie

Future Trends and Challenges for Mobile and Convergent Networks

Some traffic characteristics like real-time, location-based, and community-inspired, as well as the exponential increase on the data traffic in mobile networks, are challenging the academia and standardization communities to manage these networks in completely novel and intelligent ways, otherwise, current network infrastructures can not offer a connection service with an acceptable quality for both emergent traffic demand and application requisites. In this way, a very relevant research problem that needs to be addressed is how a heterogeneous wireless access infrastructure should be controlled to offer a network access with a proper level of quality for diverse flows ending at multi-mode devices in mobile scenarios. The current chapter reviews recent research and standardization work developed under the most used wireless access technologies and mobile access proposals. It comprehensively outlines the impact on the deployment of those technologies in future networking environments, not only on the network performance but also in how the most important requirements of several relevant players, such as, content providers, network operators, and users/terminals can be addressed. Finally, the chapter concludes referring the most notable aspects in how the environment of future networks are expected to evolve like technology convergence, service convergence, terminal convergence, market convergence, environmental awareness, energy-efficiency, self-organized and intelligent infrastructure, as well as the most important functional requisites to be addressed through that infrastructure such as flow mobility, data offloading, load balancing and vertical multihoming.Comment: In book 4G & Beyond: The Convergence of Networks, Devices and Services, Nova Science Publishers, 201

Mecanismos de autenticação e controle de acesso para uma arquitetura de Internet do Futuro

Even with evolutions, the current Internet can not properly handle requirements such as multihoming, Quality of Service, mobility, multicasting and security. Several research groups around the world are involved in experimentally and incrementally creating the next generation of Internet architecture. Currently, knowledge and information are the factors of extreme importance for any person, company or nation. Therefore, the information security is a prerequisite for any information system. However, when the Internet was designed and security was not a necessity at the moment, this became a chronic problem in the last decades. Whenever new vulnerabilities emerge on the network, a new mechanism is created to combat this threat, so the mechanism is added to the design of the Internet as an overlay, rather than the architecture providing security intrinsically. In this way, including security aspects is a fundamental requirement for the Future Internet architecture. With regard to these architectures, Brazil has some initiatives and one of them in an ETArch. It has a conceptual view very close to the definition of Software Defined Networks and therefore since its first prototype uses the OpenFlow protocol to materialize this vision. From its creation, researchers from several universities are working to incorporate in the ETArch, in an incremental way, solutions that meet the requirements of the Future Internet. The mechanisms implementation proved viable with a reasonable average increase in time, considering the resources acquired by the mechanisms of authentication and access control incorporated into ETArch.CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível SuperiorDissertação (Mestrado)Mesmo com evoluções, a Internet atual não consegue tratar adequadamente requisitos como multihoming, Quality of Service (QoS), mobilidade, multicast e segurança. Vários grupos de pesquisa ao redor mundo estão envolvidos em criar, de forma experimental e incremental, a próxima geração da arquitetura da Internet. Atualmente, o conhecimento e a informação são fatores importantes para qualquer pessoa, organização ou nação. Pensando nisso, a segurança é um pré-requisito para todo e qualquer sistema de computação, mas quando a Internet foi projetada, a segurança não era uma necessidade da época, provocando um problema crônico nas últimas décadas. Sempre que surgem novas vulnerabilidades em um sistema computacional, um novo mecanismo é criado para combater essa ameaça, sendo assim, o mecanismo é adicionado ao projeto da Internet como uma sobreposição, em vez da arquitetura fornecer a segurança de forma intrínseca. No que tange à essas arquiteturas, o Brasil possui algumas iniciativas e uma delas é a Entity Title Architecture (ETArch). Ela possui uma visão conceitual muito próxima da abstração proposta pelas Redes Definidas por Software e portanto, desde o seu primeiro protótipo utiliza o protocolo OpenFlow para materializar essa visão. Desde a sua criação, pesquisadores de várias universidades vêm trabalhando para incorporar à ETArch, de forma incremental, soluções que visam atender os requisitos de Internet do Futuro. Apesar da segurança ser um requisito fundamental para implementações em arquiteturas de Internet do Futuro, na ETArch tal requisito ainda não foi projetado. Deste modo, as principais contribuições deste trabalho são elaborar e implementar dois mecanismos de segurança: um para autenticação e outro para o controle de acesso. A implementação dos mecanismos demonstraram-se viáveis com um acréscimo médio relativamente pequeno em termos de tempo, se considerar os benefícios adquiridos pelos mecanismos de autenticação e controle de acesso incorporados à ETArch

Intelligence in 5G networks

Over the past decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an important part of our daily lives; however, its application to communication networks has been partial and unsystematic, with uncoordinated efforts that often conflict with each other. Providing a framework to integrate the existing studies and to actually build an intelligent network is a top research priority. In fact, one of the objectives of 5G is to manage all communications under a single overarching paradigm, and the staggering complexity of this task is beyond the scope of human-designed algorithms and control systems. This thesis presents an overview of all the necessary components to integrate intelligence in this complex environment, with a user-centric perspective: network optimization should always have the end goal of improving the experience of the user. Each step is described with the aid of one or more case studies, involving various network functions and elements. Starting from perception and prediction of the surrounding environment, the first core requirements of an intelligent system, this work gradually builds its way up to showing examples of fully autonomous network agents which learn from experience without any human intervention or pre-defined behavior, discussing the possible application of each aspect of intelligence in future networks