An integration of slicing, NFV, and SDN for mobility management in corporate environments

Online access to information while on the move has conferred businesses with the capability to be constantly accessible and in operation, independently of geographical area or time zone. There are situations, however, that demand technical solutions for specific scenarios, such as controlled access to corporate-based content. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) allow controlled remote access to con-tent, supporting scenarios such as teleworking. Nonetheless, such mechanisms are not commonly associated with the highly mobile users of today, which can traverse different types of access networks, while still keeping access to con-tent restricted to corporate network usage. In addition, as VPN mechanisms are disassociated from mobility procedures, service disruption can happen or specific mechanisms and clients can be required in end-user's equipment. This paper proposes a framework that leverages Network Slicing, enabled by Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualisation, to provide seamless and isolated access to corporate-based content while moving through heterogeneous networks. This solution allows Mobile Network Operators to dynamically instantiate isolated network slices for corporate users, and handover them between 3GPP and non-3GPP networks while users move away from the corporate network. In this way, they are able to keep access to corporate-based content in a transparent way, while maintaining access requirements for the servicebeing used. The framework was implemented and validated over an experimental testbed composed by mobile and Wi-Fi accesses, with results presenting improvements in terms of overhead signaling and data redirection without downtime nor stream reconnection.publishe

A Comprehensive Survey of the Tactile Internet: State of the art and Research Directions

The Internet has made several giant leaps over the years, from a fixed to a mobile Internet, then to the Internet of Things, and now to a Tactile Internet. The Tactile Internet goes far beyond data, audio and video delivery over fixed and mobile networks, and even beyond allowing communication and collaboration among things. It is expected to enable haptic communication and allow skill set delivery over networks. Some examples of potential applications are tele-surgery, vehicle fleets, augmented reality and industrial process automation. Several papers already cover many of the Tactile Internet-related concepts and technologies, such as haptic codecs, applications, and supporting technologies. However, none of them offers a comprehensive survey of the Tactile Internet, including its architectures and algorithms. Furthermore, none of them provides a systematic and critical review of the existing solutions. To address these lacunae, we provide a comprehensive survey of the architectures and algorithms proposed to date for the Tactile Internet. In addition, we critically review them using a well-defined set of requirements and discuss some of the lessons learned as well as the most promising research directions

A Survey on the 5th Generation of Mobile Communications: Scope, Technologies and Challenges

The 5th Generation (5G) of mobile communicationswill impact the costumers Quality of Experience (QoE) by ad-dressing the current mobile networks usage trends and providingthe technological foundation for new and emerging services.Additionally, 5G may provide a unified mobile communicationplatform, with multiple purposes, leveraging industries, servicesand economic sectors. In this paper, a 5G tutorial is presented,including the 5G drivers, main use cases, vertical markets anda current status of the standardization process. Furthermore,several 5G key enabling technologies are presented, concerningthe Radio Access Network (RAN) and Core Network (CN)perspectives. Finally, a brief outline over the Internet of Things(IoT) concept and current research topics is presented

A Hybrid SDN-based Architecture for Wireless Networks

With new possibilities brought by the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, the traffic demand of wireless networks increases dramatically. A more sophisticated network management framework is required to handle the flow routing and resource allocation for different users and services. By separating the network control and data planes, Software-defined Networking (SDN) brings flexible and programmable network control, which is considered as an appropriate solution in this scenario.Although SDN has been applied in traditional networks such as data centers with great successes, several unique challenges exist in the wireless environment. Compared with wired networks, wireless links have limited capacity. The high mobility of IoT and edge devices also leads to network topology changes and unstable link qualities. Such factors restrain the scalability and robustness of an SDN control plane. In addition, the coexistence of heterogeneous wireless and IoT protocols with distinct representations of network resources making it difficult to process traffic with state-of-the-art SDN standards such as OpenFlow. In this dissertation, we design a novel architecture for the wireless network management. We propose multiple techniques to better adopt SDN to relevant scenarios. First, while maintaining the centralized control plane logically, we deploy multiple SDN controller instances to ensure their scalability and robustness. We propose algorithms to determine the controllers\u27 locations and synchronization rates that minimize the communication costs. Then, we consider handling heterogeneous protocols in Radio Access Networks (RANs). We design a network slicing orchestrator enabling allocating resources across different RANs controlled by SDN, including LTE and Wi-Fi. Finally, we combine the centralized controller with local intelligence, including deploying another SDN control plane in edge devices locally, and offloading network functions to a programmable data plane. In all these approaches, we evaluate our solutions with both large-scale emulations and prototypes implemented in real devices, demonstrating the improvements in multiple performance metrics compared with state-of-the-art methods

Traffic Management in LTE-WiFi Slicing Networks

Proliferation of the number of smart devices and user applications has generated a tremendous volume of data traffic from/to a cellular network. With a traditional cellular network, a user may experience many drawbacks such as low throughput, large latencies and network outages due to overload of data traffic. The software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) rise as a promising solution to overcome such issues of traditional network architecture. In this paper, we introduce a new network architecture for LTE and WiFi slicing networks taking into account the advantage of SDN and NFV concepts. We propose an IP-Flow management controller in a slicing network to offload and balance the data traffic flow. By utilizing the P-GW and Wireless Access Gateway, we can handle the IP-Flow between LTE and WiFi networks. The P-GW works as an IP-Flow anchor to maintain the flow seamlessly during the offloading and balancing IP-Flow. Within WiFi networks, we leverage the Light Virtual Access Point (LVAP) approach to abstract the WiFi protocol stack for a programming capability of centralized control of WiFi network through the WiFi controller. By creating a client virtual port and assigning a specific Service Set Identifier (SSID), we give a capability to slice an operator’s network to control over his clients within a WiFi coverage area network