An NFV-Based Energy Scheduling Algorithm for a 5G Enabled Fleet of Programmable Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The fifth generation of mobile networks (5G) is expected to provide diverse and stringent improvements such as greater connectivity, bandwidth, throughput, availability, improved coverage, and lower latency. Considering this, drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are perfect examples of existing technology that can take advantage of the capabilities provided by 5G technology. In particular, UAVs are expected to be an important component of 5G networks implementations and support different communication requirements and applications. UAVs working together with 5G can potentially facilitate the deployment of standalone or complementary communications infrastructures, and, due to its rapid deployment, these solutions are suitable candidates to provide network services in emergency scenarios, natural disasters, and search and rescue missions. An important consideration in the deployment of a programmable drone fleet is to guarantee the reliability and performance of the services through consistent monitoring, control, and management scheme. In this regard, the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) paradigm, a key technology within the 5G ecosystem, can be used to perform automation, management, and orchestration tasks. In addition, to ensure the coordination and reliability in the communications systems, considering that the UAVs have a finite lifetime and that eventually they must be replaced, a scheduling scheme is needed to guarantee the availability of services and efficient resource utilization. To this end, in this paper is presented an UAV scheduling scheme which leverages the potential offered by NFV. The proposed strategy, based on a brute-force search combinatorial algorithm, allows obtaining the optimal scheduling of UAVs in time, in order to efficiently deploy network services. Simulation results validate the performance of the proposed strategy, by providing the number of drones needed to meet certain levels of servThis work has been supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Government under projects TEC2016-76795-C6-1-R and TEC2016-76795-C6-3-R and also AEI/FEDER, UE. Christian Tipantuña acknowledges the support from Escuela Politécnica Nacional (EPN) and from Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (SENESCYT) for his doctoral studies at Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya (UPC)

Machine Learning Techniques in Optical Networks: A Systematic Mapping Study

During the last decade, optical networks have become “smart networks”. Software-defined networks, software-defined optical networks, and elastic optical networks are some emerging technologies that provide a basis for promising innovations in the functioning and operation of optical networks. Machine learning algorithms are providing the possibility to develop this promising study area. Since machine learning can learn from a large amount of data available from the network elements. They can find a suitable solution for any environment and thus create more dynamic and flexible networks that improve the user experience. This paper performs a systematic mapping that provides an overview of machine learning in optical networks, identifies opportunities, and suggests future research lines. The study analyzed 96 papers from the 841 publications on this topic to find information about the use of machine learning techniques to solve problems related to the functioning and operation of optical networks. It is concluded that supervised machine learning techniques are mainly used for resource management, network monitoring, fault management, and traffic classification and prediction of an optical network. However, specific challenges need to be solved to successfully deploy this type of method in real communication systems since most of the research has been carried out in controlled experimental environments