CREATING A COMMON SECURED TUNNEL FOR NETWORK FUNCTIONS

Techniques are described herein for efficient tunnel management for secured communication between Network Functions (NFs) across different Public Land Mobile Networks (PLMNs) through Security Edge Protection Proxies (SEPPs). A common secured tunnel is created for all the NFs to interact between visited SEPPs (vSEPP) and home SEPPs (hSEPPs). There is a choice to select different authentication methods between different vSEPP-hSEPP pairs

Effects of lengthscales and attractions on the collapse of hydrophobic polymers in water

We present results from extensive molecular dynamics simulations of collapse transitions of hydrophobic polymers in explicit water focused on understanding effects of lengthscale of the hydrophobic surface and of attractive interactions on folding. Hydrophobic polymers display parabolic, protein-like, temperature-dependent free energy of unfolding. Folded states of small attractive polymers are marginally stable at 300 K, and can be unfolded by heating or cooling. Increasing the lengthscale or decreasing the polymer-water attractions stabilizes folded states significantly, the former dominated by the hydration contribution. That hydration contribution can be described by the surface tension model, $\Delta G=\gamma (T)\Delta A$, where the surface tension, $\gamma$, is lengthscale dependent and decreases monotonically with temperature. The resulting variation of the hydration entropy with polymer lengthscale is consistent with theoretical predictions of Huang and Chandler (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.,97, 8324-8327, 2000) that explain the blurring of entropy convergence observed in protein folding thermodynamics. Analysis of water structure shows that the polymer-water hydrophobic interface is soft and weakly dewetted, and is characterized by enhanced interfacial density fluctuations. Formation of this interface, which induces polymer folding, is strongly opposed by enthalpy and favored by entropy, similar to the vapor-liquid interface.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure

SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETECTING INFINITE SIGNALING LOOP IN HIERARCHICAL NRF DEPLOYMENTS

For larger deployments, where multiple level of Network Function (NF) Repository Functions (NRFs) are deployed, the slightest misconfiguration could lead to an indefinite query loop between NRFs. The indefinite loop in the NRF query would mean repeated timeouts and/or failure of a service discovery request that a consumer had initiated to find a suitable producer. This could lead to signaling failure between a set of consumers and producers, which in turn can lead to Quality of Service (QoS) and Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations. A new Hypertext Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2) header, Network Function (NF)-route-record, is proposed, which should be added by an intermediate NRF (relay or proxy) before forwarding any request. The NF-route-record should contain the identity of the peer from which the request was received. The receiving NRF checks the NF-route-record before further forwarding or serving the request. If the NF-route-record matches its own identity, then the receiving NRF would detect the loop. The same can be used in the reverse direction when sending the response from a server (producer) to a client (consumer)

TECHNIQUES TO FACILITATE SELECTION OF NEXT HOP NRF IN A HIERARCHICAL NETWORK REPOSITORY FUNCTION (NRF) DEPLOYMENT IN 5G NETWORKS

When a Fifth Generation (5G) Network Repository Function (NRF) deployed in a Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) hierarchical model architecture receives a Network Function (NF) Discovery or Subscription or Access Token request, the NRF may not have the required information to serve the request on account of the information being divided among multiple NRF instances in the network. In such cases, the NRF instance that receives the request from a consumer NF may choose to forward or redirect the request to another NRF instance in the hierarchy. The conditions and policies to decide when to redirect or forward the request to another NRF are not defined by 3GPP. Further, the procedures and policies for selecting the next hop NRF are left to implementation. This is a major gap in 3GPP standards as an NRF at each hierarchical level needs rules to determine whether it can serve a request locally or needs to forward/redirect the request to another NRF instance in the hierarchy. This proposal involves defining a granular, flexible and policy-driven system for NRF selection and message routing between hierarchical NRFs to minimize latency and signaling overhead

Influence of corrosion on failure modes and lifetime seismic vulnerability assessment of low‐ductility RC frames

Corrosion of reinforced concrete (RC) structures constitutes a critical form of environmental deterioration and may significantly increase the vulnerability of old non‐seismically designed buildings during earthquake events. This study proposes a probabilistic framework to evaluate the influence of corrosion deterioration on the lifetime seismic fragility of low‐ductility RC frame buildings. In contrast to limited past literature on this topic, the proposed framework offers novel contributions. This is one of the first study to consider potential alteration in failure modes of building components (from flexure to flexure‐shear) due to the time‐dependent aging process. Numerical models validated with past experimental test results are utilized to capture these failure modes, which are particularly relevant for low ductility RC frames designed prior to the introduction of modern seismic codes. Secondly, given the gamut of uncertainties associated with the corrosion process, this study develops condition‐dependent seismic fragility functions independent from an assumed exposure scenario, as often done in literature. These functions can be easily adopted by design engineers and stakeholders for prompt fragility assessment, and subsequent decision‐making without the need for computationally expensive finite element (FE) model runs. The proposed framework is demonstrated on a benchmark three‐story RC frame that considers time‐varying seismic demand models and damage state thresholds while accounting for the uncertain corrosion deterioration process and ground motion record‐to‐record variability

Peer-to-Peer Communication Trade-Offs for Smart Grid Applications

Virtual topologies in peer-to-peer networks can reduce the traffic consumed by altering the logical connectivity of peers without altering the underlying network. However, such sparsely connected virtual topologies do not focus on the needs for smart grid applications, which is information dissemination throughout the network, and in turn degrade the performance of distributed control algorithms running on peer-to-peer networks. This paper provides a flexible solution for application developers to prototype and deploy different virtual topologies that balances these trade-offs. First, it introduces a configurable virtual communication topology framework, TopLinkMgr, which enables users to specify any chosen connectivity configuration and deploy peer-to-peer applications using it. Second, it proposes a novel fault-tolerant self-adaptive virtual topology management algorithm, Bounded Path Dissemination, that can ensure the dissemination of information to all peers within a specified threshold. Experiments show that the algorithm improves on convergence speed and accuracy over state-of-the-art methods and is also robust against node failures while consuming significantly less communication bandwidth.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure