Mobile Service Continuity for Edge Train Networks

This paper has been presented at : IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (IEEE PIMRC 2019). 8-11 September 2019 Istanbul, TurkeyIn press / En prensaIn moving train networks, two-hop architecture is adopted to improve users experience by reducing the interaction between on-board users and base stations on the train route. In addition, edge networking have emerged as a solution for bringing services to the proximity of the users. However, deploying two-hop and edge networks do not guarantee a continuous service delivery for train users. When a large number of users transit from the train to the land, they experience service interruption due to control signalling storm and backhaul latency. In this paper, we propose a holistic edge service management system to provide mobile service continuity. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we develop an enhanced handover scheme that reduces control signals by handling user mobility at the edge. Second, we develop a pre-copy migration scheme that eliminates backhaul latency by relocating containerized applications to the user proximity across edge train networks. Our experimental results show that the two proposed solution can reduce the control signals and migration downtime by 50% and 36%, respectively.This work has been partially funded by the H2020 col-laborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL (grant no. 761586). This research is also partially supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, under the Grant Number MOST 108-2634-F-009-006 - through Pervasive Artificial Intelligence Research (PAIR) Labs, Taiwan

Enabling Mobile Service Continuity across Orchestrated Edge Networks

Edge networking has become an important technology for providing low-latency services to end users. However, deploying an edge network does not guarantee continuous service for mobile users. Mobility can cause frequent interruptions and network delays as users leave the initial serving edge. In this paper, we propose a solution to provide transparent service continuity for mobile users in large-scale WiFi networks. The contribution of this work has three parts. First, we propose ARNAB architecture to achieve mobile service continuity. The term ARNAB means rabbit in Arabic, which represents an Architecture for Transparent Service Continuity via Double-tier Migration. The first tier migrates user connectivity, while the second tier migrates user containerized applications. ARNAB provides mobile services just like rabbits hop through the WiFi infrastructure. Second, we identify the root-causes for prolonged container migration downtime. Finally, we enhance the container migration scheme by improving system response time. Our experimental results show that the downtime of ARNAB container migration solution is 50% shorter than that of the state-of-the-art migration.This work has been partially funded by the H2020 Europe/Taiwan joint action 5G-DIVE (Grant #859881) and also partially funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, under the Grant Number MOST 108-2634-F-009-006 - through Pervasive Artificial Intelligence Research (PAIR) Labs, Taiwan

ARNAB: Transparent Service Continuity across Orchestrated Edge Networks

Paper presented at: IEEE GLOBECOM 2018 Workshops: Intelligent Network orchestration and interaction in 5G and beyond. Abu Dabhi. 9-13 December 2018In this paper, we present an architecture for transparent service continuity for cloud-enabled WiFi networks called ARNAB: ARchitecture for traNsparent service continuity viA douBle-tier migration. The term arnab means rabbit in Arabic. It is dubbed for the proposed service architecture because a mobileuser service with ARNAB behaves like a rabbit hopping through the WiFi infrastructure. To deliver continuous services, deploying edge clouds is not sufficient. Users may travel far from the initial serving edge and also perform multiple WiFi handoffs during mobility. To solve this, ARNAB employs a double-tier migration scheme. One migration tier is for user connectivity, and the other one is for edge applications. Our experimental results show that ARNAB can not only enable continuous service delivery but also outperform the existing work in the area of container live migration across edge clouds.This work has been partially supported by the H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL (grant num. 761586)

Opportunities and Challenges of Joint Edge and Fog Orchestration

Pushing contents, applications, and network functions closer to end users is necessary to cope with the huge data volume and low latency required in future 5G networks. Edge and fog frameworks have emerged recently to address this challenge. Whilst the edge framework was more infrastructure focused and more mobile operator-oriented, the fog was more pervasive and included any node (stationary or mobile), including terminal devices. This article analyzes the opportunities and challenges to integrate, federate, and jointly orchestrate the edge and fog resources into a unified framework.This work has been partially funded by the H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL (grant num. 761586

Information hiding in internet protocol networks

In this thesis, we develop network information hiding methods which can be utilized to transmit external information between two network end-systems as stealthy as possible. Here, we propose three network information hiding methods namely, Packet Payload Byte Parity Based Steganography, Alternative Packet Payload Bit Parity Based Steganography and finally, the IP Identification Based Steganographic method. In the first and second methods, we exploit the parity of the payload to encode external information. We examine and analyze the packet lengths of normal traffic to show that the methods can cope with traffic anomaly detection methods and do not introduce noticeable overhead. Results suggest that the proposed methods achieve high undetectability at 1 bit per packet of channel capacity. On the other hand, we propose to utilize the IP identification field to establish steganographic communication in operating systems which manifest randomness in their IP identification generation

A survey of network protocol based steganographic techniques

Steganography is a sub-discipline of information hiding, which hides external information into an innocuous carrier to establish stealthy communication. Steganography in network protocols however, is an emerging research area, which exploits network protocols specifications, protocol mechanisms, network applications, and network services to realize covert channels between network end-systems. In this paper, we aim to clarify topics related to information hiding and its applications especially steganography. We also provide a brief comparison between steganography and cryptography. Eventually, we categorize and present some of the current work related steganography in networks

Network packet payload parity based steganography

Network steganography is an emerging research field, which exploits packet protocol headers, protocol mechanism, packet payload, etc. to establish secret communication between two parties over a computer network. The detection of such hidden communication has not been part of intrusion detection systems that are primarily used to detect malicious activities such as viruses and malwares. In this paper, we propose two packet-length based steganographic techniques to implement a covert channel. We examine and analyze the packet lengths of normal traffic to show that our techniques can cope with traffic anomaly detection methods and does not introduce noticeable traffic overhead

AIPISteg: An active IP identification based steganographic method

IP identification (IPID) is an IP header field which is designed to identify a packet in a communication session. The main purpose of IPID is to recover from IP fragmentation. To the best of our knowledge, most existing IPID based information hiding methods assume that the IPID number is a pseudo random number, which is found to be false. In this paper, we propose a steganographic method by exploiting the IPID field while considering the information from the user data field. First, we analyze the IPID distribution of various operating systems. Subsequently, we put forward a simple data embedding method, which is then refined to mimic the ordinary IPID traffic. Experiments are carried out and the results empirically prove that the proposed method is of high undetectability as compared to the existing IPID based steganographic methods

EagleEYE: Aerial Edge-enabled Disaster Relief Response System

This paper has been presented at 2020 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC).The fifth generation (5G) mobile network has paved the way for innovations across vertical industries. The integration of distributed intelligent edge into the 5G orchestrated architecture brings the benefits of low-latency and automation. A successful example of this integration is exhibited by the 5G-DIVE project, which aims at proving the technical merits and business value proposition of vertical industries such as autonomous drone surveillance and navigation. In this paper, and as part of 5G-DIVE, we present an aerial disaster relief system, called EagleEYE, which utilizes edge computing and machine learning to detect emergency situations in real-time. EagleEYE reduces training time by devising an object fusion mechanism which enables reusing existing datasets. Furthermore, EagleEYE parallelizes the detection tasks to enable real-time response. Finally, EagleEYE is evaluated in a real-world testbed and the results show that EagleEYE can reduce the inference latency by 90% with a high detection accuracy of 87%.This work has been partially funded by the H2020 EU/TW joint action 5G-DIVE (Grant #859881)