An efficient algorithm for fast service edge selection in cloud-based telco networks

© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Telecommunication operators are increasingly integrating computational infrastructure into their networks at different location levels, including the network edge. This makes a highly distributed processing environment a reality, which is expected to enable next-generation services. This article proposes a novel and efficient algorithm to determine the best service execution locations through the “service edge”, a concept that groups services in categories according to their requirements and benefits from the flexibility of distributed cloud resources. The paper is focused on describing the algorithm so that it can be integrated into the telco operators’ management and orchestration systems. Simulation results underpin the practical feasibility of the proposed algorithm.The European Commission has partly funded this work through the projects NECOS (Grant Agreement No 777067) and 5G-DIVE (Grant Agreement No 859881).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Resource slicing in virtual wireless networks: a survey

New architectural and design approaches for radio access networks have appeared with the introduction of network virtualization in the wireless domain. One of these approaches splits the wireless network infrastructure into isolated virtual slices under their own management, requirements, and characteristics. Despite the advances in wireless virtualization, there are still many open issues regarding the resource allocation and isolation of wireless slices. Because of the dynamics and shared nature of the wireless medium, guaranteeing that the traffic on one slice will not affect the traffic on the others has proven to be difficult. In this paper, we focus on the detailed definition of the problem, discussing its challenges. We also provide a review of existing works that deal with the problem, analyzing how new trends such as software defined networking and network function virtualization can assist in the slicing. We will finally describe some research challenges on this topic.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Guaranteed bit rate slicing in WiFi networks

In forthcoming 5G networks, slicing has been proposed as a means to partition a shared physical network infrastructure into different self-contained logical parts (slices), which are set up to satisfy certain requirements. Although the topic has been thoroughly investigated by the scientific community and the industry, there are not many works addressing the challenges that appear when trying to exploit slicing techniques over WiFi networks. In this paper, we propose a novel method of allocating resources for WiFi networks to satisfy minimum bit rate requirements. We formulate an optimization problem, and we propose a solution based on the theory of Lyapunov drift optimization. The validity of the proposed solution is assessed by means of a simulation-based evaluation in Matlab.This work has been supported in part by the European Commission and the Spanish Government (Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, FEDER) by means of the EU H2020 NECOS (777067) and ADVICE (TEC2015-71329) projects, respectively

Computing at the edge: but, what edge?

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The traditional telecommunications business is evolving towards offering a richer set of services beyond basic connectivity, leveraging on network programmability and virtualization. A versatile execution environment is required, capable of running different workloads in different locations in the network. Cloud computing is the key paradigm that allows fostering this trending change. One interesting question to solve is to what extent those computing environments have to move towards the network edge. Some services can be enabled by environments with increased capillarity, while others can be implemented in environments with more relaxed constraints (e.g., in terms of latency). This paper explores this topic by differentiating service edge from physical network edge and proposing an architecture based on the ALTO server for assisting orchestration systems in discriminating the suitable environments for each service. We present a network-flow strategy for assigning services to infrastructure elements following those precepts, together with an initial scalability evaluation of the proposed assignment solution to show its feasibility.This work has been partly funded by the European Com-mission through the projects NECOS (Grant Agreement No 777067) and 5G-DIVE (Grant Agreement No 859881).Peer Reviewe

Resource slicing in virtual wireless networks: a survey

New architectural and design approaches for radio access networks have appeared with the introduction of network virtualization in the wireless domain. One of these approaches splits the wireless network infrastructure into isolated virtual slices under their own management, requirements, and characteristics. Despite the advances in wireless virtualization, there are still many open issues regarding the resource allocation and isolation of wireless slices. Because of the dynamics and shared nature of the wireless medium, guaranteeing that the traffic on one slice will not affect the traffic on the others has proven to be difficult. In this paper, we focus on the detailed definition of the problem, discussing its challenges. We also provide a review of existing works that deal with the problem, analyzing how new trends such as software defined networking and network function virtualization can assist in the slicing. We will finally describe some research challenges on this topic.Peer Reviewe

Guaranteed bit rate slicing in WiFi networks

In forthcoming 5G networks, slicing has been proposed as a means to partition a shared physical network infrastructure into different self-contained logical parts (slices), which are set up to satisfy certain requirements. Although the topic has been thoroughly investigated by the scientific community and the industry, there are not many works addressing the challenges that appear when trying to exploit slicing techniques over WiFi networks. In this paper, we propose a novel method of allocating resources for WiFi networks to satisfy minimum bit rate requirements. We formulate an optimization problem, and we propose a solution based on the theory of Lyapunov drift optimization. The validity of the proposed solution is assessed by means of a simulation-based evaluation in Matlab.Peer Reviewe