A First Look at 5G Core Deployments on Public Cloud: Performance Evaluation of Control and User Planes

The Fifth Generation (5G) mobile core network is designed as a set of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) hosted on Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) hardware. This creates a growing demand for general-purpose compute resources as 5G deployments continue to expand. Given their elastic infrastructure, cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) are attractive platforms to address this need. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the control and user plane Quality of Service (QoS) performance associated with deploying the 5G core on top of a public cloud. To account for both software and communication costs, we build a 5G testbed using open-source components spanning multiple locations within AWS. We present an operational breakdown of the performance overhead for various 5G use cases using different core deployment strategies. Our results indicate that moving specific VNFs into edge regions reduces the latency overhead for key 5G operations. Furthermore, we instantiated multiple user plane connections between availability zones and edge regions with different traffic loads. We observed that the deterioration of connection quality varies depending on traffic loads and is use case specific. Ultimately, our findings provide new insights for Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) for optimal placements of their 5G core functions

SCATTER PHY : an open source physical layer for the DARPA spectrum collaboration challenge

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency from the United States, has started the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge with the aim to encourage research and development of coexistence and collaboration techniques of heterogeneous networks in the same wireless spectrum bands. Team SCATTER has been participating in the challenge since its beginning, back in 2016. SCATTER's open-source software defined physical layer (SCATTER PHY) has been developed as a standalone application, with the ability to communicate with higher layers through a set of well defined messages (created with Google's Protocol buffers) and that exchanged over a ZeroMQ bus. This approach allows upper layers to access it remotely or locally and change all parameters in real time through the control messages. SCATTER PHY runs on top of USRP based software defined radio devices (i.e., devices from Ettus or National Instruments) to send and receive wireless signals. It is a highly optimized and real-time configurable SDR based PHY layer that can be used for the research and development of novel intelligent spectrum sharing schemes and algorithms. The main objective of making SCATTER PHY available to the research and development community is to provide a solution that can be used out of the box to devise disruptive algorithms and techniques to optimize the sub-optimal use of the radio spectrum that exists today. This way, researchers and developers can mainly focus their attention on the development of smarter (i.e., intelligent algorithms and techniques) spectrum sharing approaches. Therefore, in this paper, we describe the design and main features of SCATTER PHY and showcase several experiments performed to assess the effectiveness and performance of the proposed PHY layer

SC2 CIL : evaluating the spectrum voxel announcement benefits

The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) was started by DARPA in 2016 to further expand the research on spectrum usage efficiency, and mitigate the ever-growing problem of spectrum scarcity. Teams that participated in SC2 designed and developed wireless networks, called Collaborative Intelligent Radio networks (CIRNs), to compete with other teams' CIRNs. The scoring system was created to motivate maximizing both their own and other networks' data throughput. To improve the spectrum usage efficiency, teams were encouraged to use Artificial Intelligence, as well as to collaborate with other teams and agree on spectrum usage schedules that work best for all parties. To facilitate this collaboration, DARPA has established the CIRN Interaction Language (CIL) - a language CIRNs can use to communicate with other networks and establish common spectrum goals and ways to achieve them. One of CIL's main functionalities was to enable teams to announce their intended spectrum usage and provide information other teams can use to adapt their own channel selection. While potentially a beneficial concept, CIL's effect on ensemble throughput of all networks was never evaluated, as a proper evaluation framework was never provided by DARPA, since it was not possible to disable it. This paper describes a simplified simulation of the spectrum usage announcement functionality of the CIL, explains the experiments run to evaluate CILs gains, and showcases the obtained results

SCATTER PHY : a physical layer for the DARPA spectrum collaboration challenge

DARPA has started the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge with the aim to encourage research and development of coexistence and collaboration techniques of heterogeneous networks in the same wireless spectrum bands. Team SCATTER has participated in the challenge from its beginning and is currently preparing for the final phase of the competition. SCATTER's physical layer (SCATTER PHY) has been developed as a standalone application, with the ability to communicate with higher layers of SCATTER's system via ZeroMQ, and uses USRP X310 software-defined radio devices to send and receive wireless signals. SCATTER PHY relies on USRP's ability to schedule timed commands, uses both physical interfaces of the radio devices, utilizes the radio's internal FPGA board to implement custom high-performance filtering blocks in order to increase its spectral efficiency as well as enable reliable usage of neighboring spectrum bands. This paper describes the design and main features of SCATTER PHY and showcases the experiments performed to verify the achieved benefits

An improved design of optical sensor for long-term measurement of arterial blood flow waveform

We present here the improved design and development of optical sensor for non-invasive measurements of arterial blood flow waveform. The sensor is based on a physical principle of reflective photoplethysmography (PPG). As the light source we used serially connected infrared diodes whereas NPN silicon phototransistors were used as light detectors. The electronic components were molded into square package and poured with silicone. Such preparation produced an elastic superficies that allowed excellent attachment of the sensor on the skins surface. Moreover, a serial connection of infrared diodes and phototransistors completely eliminated signal artifacts caused by minor muscle contractions. The sensor recording performances were examined at the photoplethysmographic sites on three different arteries; the commune carotid, femoral and radial and, on each site the sensor demonstrated remarkable capability to make a consistent, reproducible measurements. Because of the advantageous physical and electrical properties, the new sensor is suitable for various cardiovascular diagnostics procedures, especially when long-term measurements of arterial blood flow waveform are required, for monitoring of different parameters in cardiovascular units and for research

Dynamic and collaborative spectrum sharing : the SCATTER approach

This paper presents the architecture and the basic principles behind the design and implementation of the SCATTER system, a wireless end-to-end communication system that participated in the DARPA Second Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2). The focus is mainly on presenting the architecture and the supported interactions between the different components of the system in order to deliver a true dynamic collaborative spectrum allocation and usage, while coexisting with numerous unknown heterogeneous wireless technologies