A unifying orchestration operating platform for 5G

5G will revolutionize the way ICT and Telecommunications infrastructures work. Indeed, businesses can greatly benefit from innovation introduced by 5G and exploit the new deep integration between ICT and networking capabilities to generate new value-added services. Although a plethora of solutions for virtual resources and infrastructures management and orchestration already exists (e.g., OpenDaylight, ONOS, OpenStack, Apache Mesos, Open Source MANO, Docker Swarm, LXD/LXC, etc.), they are still not properly integrated to match the 5G requirements. In this paper, we present the 5G Operating Platform (5G-OP) which has been conceived to fill in this gap and integrate management, control and orchestration of computing, storage and networking resources down to the end-user devices and terminals (e.g., smart phone, machines, robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, etc.). The 5G-OP is an overarching framework capable to provide agnostic interfaces and a universal set of abstractions in order to implement seamless 5G infrastructure control and orchestration. The functional structure of the 5G-OP, including the horizontal and vertical interworking of functions in it, has been designed to allow Network Operators and Service Providers to exploit diverse roles and business strategies. Moreover, the functional decoupling of the 5G-OP from the underneath management, control and orchestration solutions allows pursuing faster innovation cycles, being ready for the emergence of new service models

A unifying operating platform for 5G end-to-end and multi-layer orchestration

Heterogeneity of current software solutions for 5G is heading for complex and costly situations, with high fragmentation, which in turn creates uncertainty and the risk of delaying 5G innovations. This context motivated the definition of a novel Operating Platform for 5G (5G-OP), a unifying reference functional framework supporting end-to-end and multi-layer orchestration. 5G-OP aims at integrated management, control and orchestration of computing, storage, memory, networking core and edge resources up to the end-user devices and terminals (e.g., robots and smart vehicles). 5G-OP is an overarching architecture, with agnostic interfaces and well-defined abstractions, offering the seamless integration of current and future infrastructure control and orchestration solutions (e.g., OpenDaylight, ONOS, OpenStack, Apache Mesos, OpenSource MANO, Docker, LXC, etc.) The paper provides also the description of a prototype that can be seen as a simplified version of a 5G-OP, whose feasibility has been demonstrated in Focus Group IMT2020 of ITU-T

Software Defined Storage: availability modeling and sensitivity analysis

Software Defined Storage (SDS) systems are crucial elements in cloud environments, where huge amount of data managed by content and network providers (multimedia content, social data, gaming data etc.) are typically strongly unstructured. Such data, referred to as objects, are handled along with their metadata allowing a web-based addressing as in the REST paradigm. According to the Software Defined concepts, SDS systems rely on decoupling the software plane (namely the set of management services), from the hardware plane (typically common, inexpensive and vendor unlocked hardware). SWIFT (a part of the OpenStack cloud project) represents a valuable example of an SDS system which, in the present work, we intend to characterize in terms of availability. Through such a characterization the minimum cost configuration can be selected, guaranteeing the so-called “five nines” availability requirement. The availability analysis is here performed by modeling the highlevel architecture of SWIFT as a Stochastic Reward Net (SRN) model. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis is performed to assess the system robustness with respect to variations of some model parameters

Service Function Chaining deployed in an NFV environment: an availability modeling

Nowadays, network and telecommunication operators require flexible and dynamic models to deploy new services in a fast, reliable and cost saving way. The Service Function Chaining (SFC) design is particularly suited to meet such needs, especially in conjunction with the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm that adds a noteworthy elasticity during the SFC deployment phase. Accordingly, SFC is realized by means of a composition of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) aimed at providing some specific services. We consider, from an availability point of view, an SFC-based architecture with an aim to find out the optimal configuration guaranteeing the so-called “five nines” availability requirement, as demanded in the telecommunication systems. The availability analysis is carried out by exploiting a hierarchical model where a Reliability Block Diagram describes high level dependencies in the SFC implementation, while Stochastic Reward Nets are adopted to model the probabilistic behavior of single blocks. In particular, the SFC availability has been evaluated by performing a steady-state analysis, while a sensitivity analysis of some critical parameters allowed us to analyze in depth the whole system robustness

Object Storage in Cloud Computing Environments: An Availability Analysis

Object Storage Systems (OSSs) have been conceived to manage a bulk of highly unstructured data (videos, images, social resources etc.) by storing them in the form of objects accessible via REST APIs. An interesting implementation of OSS is based on Swift, a component of OpenStack, the most important platform exploited to deploy the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) paradigm. The present work is aimed at characterizing a Swift-based OSS from the availability point of view, namely at finding out the best configuration able to guarantee the socalled “five nines” availability requirement allowing a maximum system downtime of a little more than five minutes per year. The availability analysis is faced by exploiting the Stochastic Reward Nets (SRNs) formalism, accounting for the probabilistic behavior of the underlying structure of the Object Storage System. More specifically, the OSS availability has been assessed by performing a steady-state analysis whereas a sensitivity analysis has been carried out to evaluate the robustness of the overall system with respect to variations of some key parameters

FeelTrust: Providing Trustworthy Communications in Ubiquitous Mobile Environment

The growing intelligence and popularity of smartphones and the advances in Mobile Ubiquitous Computing have resulted in rapid proliferation of data-sharing applications. Instances of these applications include pervasive social networking, games, file sharing and so on. In such scenarios, users are usually involved in selecting the peers with whom communication should take place, continuously facing trust issues. Unfortunately, providing trust support in a pervasive world is challenging due to peer mobility and lack in central control. We propose a novel approach that establishes trust leveraging users' profiles: humans today produce rich strings of unique data twenty-four hours a day. These information enables a task-Aware trust model, namely a finer-grained model in which users are classified as trusted or not depending on the intended business activity. However, simply collecting user's interests may be insufficient to provide a reasonable trust management system. In order to enable the system to recognize malicious users, we include a recommendation subsystem based on the Wilson score confidence interval. It has been designed to be lightweight, minimizing battery depletion. It also protects user privacy. To make our approach fully deployable, it supports two modalities: A TPM-based one and a TPM-less one. The former gives more security guarantees and ensures a fully distributed approach. The latter, requires a Trusted Authority to avoid feedbacks to get tampered and is no more fully distributed. © 2013 IEEE