APMEC: An Automated Provisioning Framework for Multi-access Edge Computing

Novel use cases and verticals such as connected cars and human-robot cooperation in the areas of 5G and Tactile Internet can significantly benefit from the flexibility and reduced latency provided by Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC). Existing frameworks managing and orchestrating MEC and NFV are either tightly coupled or completely separated. The former design is inflexible and increases the complexity of one framework. Whereas, the latter leads to inefficient use of computation resources because information are not shared. We introduce APMEC, a dedicated framework for MEC while enabling the collaboration with the management and orchestration (MANO) frameworks for NFV. The new design allows to reuse allocated network services, thus maximizing resource utilization. Measurement results have shown that APMEC can allocate up to 60% more number of network services. Being developed on top of OpenStack, APMEC is an open source project, available for collaboration and facilitating further research activities

S-PRAC: Fast Partial Packet Recovery with Network Coding in Very Noisy Wireless Channels

Well-known error detection and correction solutions in wireless communications are slow or incur high transmission overhead. Recently, notable solutions like PRAC and DAPRAC, implementing partial packet recovery with network coding, could address these problems. However, they perform slowly when there are many errors. We propose S-PRAC, a fast scheme for partial packet recovery, particularly designed for very noisy wireless channels. S-PRAC improves on DAPRAC. It divides each packet into segments consisting of a fixed number of small RLNC encoded symbols and then attaches a CRC code to each segment and one to each coded packet. Extensive simulations show that S-PRAC can detect and correct errors quickly. It also outperforms DAPRAC significantly when the number of errors is high

Neuromorphic Twins for Networked Control and Decision-Making

We consider the problem of remotely tracking the state of and unstable linear time-invariant plant by means of data transmitted through a noisy communication channel from an algorithmic point of view. Assuming the dynamics of the plant are known, does there exist an algorithm that accepts a description of the channel's characteristics as input, and returns 'Yes' if the transmission capabilities permit the remote tracking of the plant's state, 'No' otherwise? Does there exist an algorithm that, in case of a positive answer, computes a suitable encoder/decoder-pair for the channel? Questions of this kind are becoming increasingly important with regards to future communication technologies that aim to solve control engineering tasks in a distributed manner. In particular, they play an essential role in digital twinning, an emerging information processing approach originally considered in the context of Industry 4.0. Yet, the abovementioned questions have been answered in the negative with respect to algorithms that can be implemented on idealized digital hardware, i.e., Turing machines. In this article, we investigate the remote state estimation problem in view of the Blum-Shub-Smale computability framework. In the broadest sense, the latter can be interpreted as a model for idealized analog computation. Especially in the context of neuromorphic computing, analog hardware has experienced a revival in the past view years. Hence, the contribution of this work may serve as a motivation for a theory of neuromorphic twins as a counterpart to digital twins for analog hardware

On the Need of Analog Signals and Systems for Digital-Twin Representations

We consider the task of converting different digital descriptions of analog bandlimited signals and systems into each other, with a rigorous application of mathematical computability theory. Albeit very fundamental, the problem appears in the scope of digital twinning, an emerging concept in the field of digital processing of analog information that is regularly mentioned as one of the key enablers for next-generation cyber-physical systems and their areas of application. In this context, we prove that essential quantities such as the peak-to-average power ratio and the bounded-input/bounded-output norm, which determine the behavior of the real-world analog system, cannot generally be determined from the system's digital twin, depending on which of the above-mentioned descriptions is chosen. As a main result, we characterize the algorithmic strength of Shannon's sampling type representation as digital twin implementation and also introduce a new digital twin implementation of analog signals and systems. We show there exist two digital descriptions, both of which uniquely characterize a certain analog system, such that one description can be algorithmically converted into the other, but not vice versa