Regional energy projects in the Eurasian Area

The Eurasian area has a very rich energy reserves, and is characterized by a complex network of relationships between major suppliers and consumers. The central place in this area has Russia as a country richest in energy resources in Eurasia. Beside her, the European Union is the largest economic and political grouping in the world, and a huge consumer of energy. The dynamic development of Chinese economy requires more energy imports by China. Dependence of the European Union and China on imported energy is high and will grow in the future. Russia is the world's dominant natural gas producer and one of the two largest oil producers in the world. Russia is the largest natural gas supplier of the EU and a significant oil and natural gas supplier of China. Energy projects in Eurasia are the result of the need to strengthen the stability of energy supplies, efforts to diversify sources of supply, and the geographic redistribution of Russian oil and gas exports. Although the interests of the main actors often do not agree, the reasons of energy security affect the development of joint energy projects

Federation in dynamic environments: Can Blockchain be the solution?

Deploying multi-domain network services is be-coming a need for operators. However, achieving that in a real operational environment is not easy and requires the use of federation. Federation is a multi-domain concept that enables the use and orchestration of network services/resources to/from external administrative domains. In this article, we first characterize the federation concept, and involved procedures, to then dive into the challenges that emerge when federation is performed in dynamic environments. To tackle these challenges, we propose the application of Blockchain technology, identifying some associated high-level benefits. Last, we validate our proposed approach by conducting a small experimental scenario using Tendermint, an application-based Blockchain.This work has been partially supported by EC H2020 5GPPP 5Growth project (Grant 856709)

Federation of 5G services using distributed ledger technologies

This paper has been published in the special issue: Mobislice 2019 and Leveraging Advanced Technologies and Tools for Connected Vehicles.Federation of services, as a 5G networks concept, aims to provide orchestration of services across multiple administrative domains. In this paper, we are exploring a solution of applying distributed ledger technologies, precisely the combination of blockchain and smart contracts, to enable highly secure, private, fast and distributed interaction between administrative domains in the federation process. Along with the designed solution, we developed an experimental prototype that requires simple one-time setup and fast simultaneous registration time for multiple administrative domains. Obtained results show single service federation times (without considering the deployment time) of around 5 seconds.This work has been partially funded by the EU H2020 5GROWTH Project (grant no. 856709

Inostrane investicione aktivnosti kineskih kompanija

Kineske investicije u inostranstvu su beležile visoke stope rasta u poslednjoj deceniji, ali njihov obim je još uvek u poređenju sa onima u razvijenim industrijskim zemljama. Država igra ključnu ulogu u njihovom podsticanju i podršci, direktno i indirektno. Velike državne korporacije su najveći investitori u inostranstvu, a negde dominiraju investicije privatnih kineskih kompanija, kao npr. u Africi. Postoji velika geografska disperzija investicionih tokova, dok je najviša koncentracija u zemljama u razvoju. Glavni pokretači investicionog kapitala su: trgovina, energenti, prirodni resursi, infrastrukturni projekti i preuzimanje strateške imovine. Često su ovi pokretači kombinovani od dva ili više koji se uzajamno podržavaju

Demo: Composing Services in 5G-TRANSFORMER

This paper has been presented at: 20th International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (ACM MobiHoc'19)5G mobile networks need flexilibity, dynamicity and programmability to satisfy the needs of vertical industries. In such context, network services can be designed as integral units to be dynamically grouped among them to create tailored complex composite services or to allow the combination of services in a context of network slicing. In this demonstration, we present the service composition capabilities of the 5G-TRANSFORMER platform. In particular, we will show the instantiation of a composite network service using a previously instantiated service. When terminating the composite network service, the initial instantiated network service resumes its operation without disruption.This work has been partially funded by the EC H2020 5G-Transformer Project (grant no. 761536), by MINECO grant TEC2017-88373-R (5G-REFINE) and Generalitat de Catalunya grant 2017 SGR 1195

COTORRA: COntext-aware Testbed fOR Robotic Applications

Edge & Fog computing have received considerable attention as promising candidates for the evolution of robotic systems. In this letter, we propose COTORRA, an Edge & Fog driven robotic testbed that combines context information with robot sensor data to validate innovative concepts for robotic systems prior to being applied in a production environment. In lab/university, we established COTORRA as an easy applicable and modular testbed on top of heterogeneous network infrastructure. COTORRA is open for pluggable robotic applications. To verify its feasibility and assess its performance, we ran set of experiments that show how autonomous navigation applications can achieve target latencies bellow 15ms or perform an inter-domain (DLT) federation within 19 seconds.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to IEEE Communications Letter

Distributed Ledger Technologies for Network Slicing: A Survey

Network slicing is one of the fundamental tenets of Fifth Generation (5G)/Sixth Generation (6G) networks. Deploying slices requires end-to-end (E2E) control of services and the underlying resources in a network substrate featuring an increasing number of stakeholders. Beyond the technical difficulties this entails, there is a long list of administrative negotiations among parties that do not necessarily trust each other, which often requires costly manual processes, including the legal construction of neutral entities. In this context, Blockchain comes to the rescue by bringing its decentralized yet immutable and auditable lemdger, which has a high potential in the telco arena. In this sense, it may help to automate some of the above costly processes. There have been some proposals in this direction that are applied to various problems among different stakeholders. This paper aims at structuring this field of knowledge by, first, providing introductions to network slicing and blockchain technologies. Then, state-of-the-art is presented through a global architecture that aggregates the various proposals into a coherent whole while showing the motivation behind applying Blockchain and smart contracts to network slicing. And finally, some limitations of current work, future challenges and research directions are also presented.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Formación Personal Investigador (FPI) under Grant PRE2018-086061, in part by the TRUE5G under Grant PID2019-108713RB-C52/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, and in part by the European Union (EU) H2020 The 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5GPPP) 5Growth Project 856709.Publicad

DQN dynamic pricing and revenue driven service federation strategy

This paper proposes a dynamic pricing and revenue-driven service federation strategy based on a Deep Q-Network (DQN) to instantly and automatically decide federation across different service provider domains, each introduces dynamic service prices offering to its customers and towards other domains. A dynamic pricing model is considered in this work based on the analysis of real pricing data collected from public cloud provider, and upon this a dynamic arrival process as a result of the price changes is proposed for formulating the service federation problem as a Markov Decision Problem (MDP). In this work, several reinforcement learning algorithms are developed to solve the problem, and the presented results show that the DQN method reached 90% of the optimal revenue and outperformed existing state-of-the-art strategies, and it can learn the federation pricing dynamics to make optimum federation decisions according to price changes

Enhancing Edge robotics through the use of context information

Cloud robotics aims at endowing robot systems with powerful capabilities by leveraging the computing resources available in theCloud. To that end, the Cloud infrastructure consolidates servicesand information among the robots, enabling a degree of centralization which has the potential to improve operations. Despite beingvery promising, Cloud robotics presents two critical issues: (i) it isvery hard to control the network between the robots and the Cloud(e.g., long delays, high jitter), and (ii) local context information (e.g.,on the access network) is not available in the Cloud. This makeshard to achieve deterministic performance for robotics applications.Over the last few years, Edge computing has emerged as a trend toprovide services and computing capabilities directly in the accessnetwork. This is so because of the additional benefits enabled byEdge computing: (i) it is easier to control the network end-to-end,and (ii) local context information (e.g., about the wireless channel) can be made available for use by applications. The goal of this paperis to showcase, by means of real-life experimentation, the benefits ofresiding at the Edge for robotics applications, due to the possibilityof consuming context information locally available. In our experimentation, an application running in the Edge controls over a Wi-Filink the movement of a robot. Information related to the wirelesschannel is made available via a service at the Edge, which is thenconsumed by the application.Results show that a smoother drivingof the robot can be achieved when wireless quality information isconsidered as input of the movement control algorithm.This article has been partially supported by the EU H2020 5G-CORAL Project (grant no. 761586) and by the 5G-City project (grant no. TEC2016-76795-C6-3-R) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness

Realising the Network Service Federation vision

In Press / En PrensaThe 5G-TRANSFORMER project proposes an NFV/SDN-based architecture to manage the end-to-end deployment of composite NFV network services, which may involve multiple administrative domains, hence, requiring network service federation capabilities. At the architectural level, this article presents the service federation functionality of the 5G-TRANSFORMER service orchestrator. It covers the gaps identified in ETSI NFV reports and specifications (e.g., IFA028). Some recommendations are also presented based on this experience, particularly on the relevance of multi-domain resource orchestration. Experimental results show that the federated service under evaluation is deployed in less than 5 minutes. Time profiling of the various processing federation-related operation shows its reduced impact in the experienced deployment time. A comparison of service deployments of increasing complexity also offers valuable insights.This work has been partially funded by the EC H2020 5G-Transformer Project (grant no. 761536), by MINECO grant TEC2017-88373-R (5G-REFINE) and Generalitat de Catalunya grant 2017 SGR 1195