Context-Aware Self-Healing for Small Cell Networks

These can be an invaluable source of information for the management of the network, in a way that we have denominated as context-aware SON, which is the approach proposed in this thesis. To develop this concept, the thesis follows a top-down approach. Firstly, the characteristics of the cellular deployments are assessed, especially for indoor small cell networks. In those scenarios, the need for context-aware SON is evaluated and considered indispensable. Secondly, a new cellular architecture is defined to integrate both context information and SON mechanisms in the management plane of the mobile network. Thus, the specifics of making context an integral part of cellular OAM/SON are defined. Also, the real-world implementation of the architecture is proposed. Thirdly, from the established general SON architecture, a logical self-healing framework is defined to support the context-aware healing mechanisms to be developed. Fourthly, different self-healing algorithms are defined depending on the failures to be managed and the conditions of the considered scenario. The mechanisms are based on probabilistic analysis, making use of both context and network data for detection and diagnosis of cellular issues. The conditions for the implementation of these methods are assessed. Their applicability is evaluated by means of simulators and testbed trials. The results show important improvements in performance and capabilities in comparison to previous methods, demonstrating the relevance of the proposed approach.The last years have seen a continuous increase in the use of mobile communications. To cope with the growing traffic, recently deployed technologies have deepened the adoption of small cells (low powered base stations) to serve areas with high demand or coverage issues, where macrocells can be both unsuccessful or inefficient. Also, new cellular and non-cellular technologies (e.g. WiFi) coexist with legacy ones, including also multiple deployment schemes (macrocell, small cells), in what is known as heterogeneous networks (HetNets). Due to the huge complexity of HetNets, their operation, administration and management (OAM) became increasingly difficult. To overcome this, the NGMN Alliance and the 3GPP defined the Self-Organizing Network (SON) paradigm, aiming to automate the OAM procedures to reduce their costs and increase the resulting performance. One key focus of SON is the self-healing of the network, covering the automatic detection of problems, the diagnosis of their causes, their compensation and their recovery. Until recently, SON mechanisms have been solely based on the analysis of alarms and performance indicators. However, on the one hand, this approach has become very limited given the complexity of the scenarios, and particularly in indoor cellular environments. Here, the deployment of small cells, their coexistence with multiple telecommunications systems and the nature of those environments (in terms of propagation, coverage overlapping, fast demand changes and users' mobility) introduce many challenges for classic SON. On the other hand, modern user equipment (e.g. smartphones), equipped with powerful processors, sensors and applications, generate a huge amount of context information. Context refers to those variables not directly associated with the telecommunication service, but with the terminals and their environment. This includes the user's position, applications, social data, etc

A Semi-Supervised Location-Aware Anomaly Detection Method for Ultra-Dense Indoor Scenarios.

Over the past few years, indoor cellular deployments have been on the rise. These scenarios are characterized by their user density and fast-changing conditions, thus, being prone to failures. Moreover, the steady development of indoor and outdoor positioning techniques is expected to provide a reliable source of information. Thus, the availability of user location is being considered to be a key enabler to improve the resilience and performance of automatic failure management and optimization techniques. Taking this into consideration, the present work proposes a semi-supervised location-aware anomaly detection method for the management of failures such as cell outages and interference problems.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Failure management insights in 5G using ns-3 network simulator

Failure management has been one of the most researched fields in cellular networks paradigm. Networks operators has experienced many problems on their deployments with each of the past generations. 5G networks aim high to encompass a wide variety of services, which means a large amount of resources on network management and failure resolution. The objective of the present work is to use the previous generation as base and provide, together with the updates on 3GPP specification, insights about what would be the problems that networks will handle. For this, they were identified and categorized some of these failures at the same time their effect on system performance was evaluated.This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant no. 871249, project LOCUS. This work has been also funded by: Junta de Andalucía and ERDF: projects IDADE-5G (UMA18-FEDERJA-201) and OptiRAN5G (UMA18-FEDERJA-174), and postdoctoral grant (Ref., DOC 01154, “selección de personal investigador doctor convocado mediante Resolución de 21 de mayo de 2020”, PAIDI 2020); University of Malaga, through the I Plan Propio de Investigación, Transferencia y Divulgación Científica de la Universidad de Málaga. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Análisis del efecto del número de beams sobre un escenario 5G

5G has been presented as the most revolutionary generation in the mobile network paradigm. With regard to the RAN part, the main achieved improvements in comparison with its predecessor are based on the use of mmWaves. To overcome the high propagation losses that are inherent to mmWaves, beamforming scheme usage becomes essential. In this scope, the aim of this paper is to provide a first approach regarding the effect of the beamforming configuration in these radio networks. To do so, a complete scenario has been simulated in ns-3, enabling the evaluation of the signal-to-interference-plus- noise ratio (SINR) received by a UE under different number of configured beams.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

A Framework to boost the potential of networkin- a-box solutions

The expected heterogeneous connectivity provided by the fifth generation mobile network (5G) implies a huge revolution in the telecommunication field. Here, virtualisation and software implementation of network elements have been positioned as a key elements for this revolution. At the same time and as a consequence of the evolution of these two paradigms, network-in-a-box solutions have also emerged as a potential way in the deployment of networks, offering a portable infrastructure. Here, this work presents a framework for easing the management tasks of the network-in-a-box devices, allowing abstracting the hardware and software implementation of these kind of solutions. We provide an experimental validation of the framework through the deployment of a portable cellular network. Besides, a Cloud Gaming service is launched on this scenario, showing the versatility and strengths that the framework provides to these novel solutions.This work has been partially funded by “Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y transformación digital” (red.es, “Piloto 5G Andalucía, Caso 31 OpenRAN”), by “Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación” (grant FPU19/04468), and by Junta de Andalucía and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through AECMA-5G (UMA-CEIATECH-14) and post-doctoral grant (DOC01154, PAIDI 2020

5G in airports: challenges and use cases.

5G is the new generation of cellular communications that aims to provide high-throughput high-reliability connectivity to greatly diversified scenarios. With this objective, it shall act as a viable solution for environments as complex as an airport terminal, whose daily work cycle includes a wide range of diversified activities. As such, in this paper, 5G capacities are assessed, identifying those airport processes that can benefit from its application. From the proposed use cases, the monitoring of luggage trolleys is identified as a key use case that poses a problematic that is usually approached in a very inefficient way, due to the lack of information about the position and state of the trolleys. In this sense, a management system for the luggage trolleys using NarrowBand Internet of Things (NB-IoT) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is proposed.This work has been partially funded by: Junta de Andalucía and EDRF in the framework of 5G-SCARF: 5G Smart Communications for the AiRport of the Future (Ref. UMACEIATECH- 17) project, Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital and European Union – NextGenerationEU within the framework “Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia y el Mecanismo de Recuperación y Resiliencia” under the project MAORI and Universidad de Málaga through the “II Plan Propio de Investigación, Transferencia y Divulgación Científica”. The authors are grateful to Aertec Solutions’ Airport Area for their support and collaboration in this work

ML-based network management framework for XR services.

This work presents a novel framework designed for the management of XR (Extended Reality) services for B5G/6G network paradigms. These networks will enable its near-future deployment to change the concept of the XR experiences known at this moment. Our proposed framework powered by ML (Machine Learning) consists of the measurement and estimation of metrics based on network-accessible information, and a proof of concept of network optimization. The latter is based on the use of KQI (Key Quality Indicators) to tune the performance of XR services. This in conjunction with ML approaches, can offer additional levels of intelligence to networks. To validate this, a 360-video service has been selected as a use case to provide a proof of concept of the performance, utility, and novelty of this work.This work has been partially funded by: Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital and European Union - NextGenerationEU within the framework “Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia y el Mecanismo de Recuperación y Resiliencia” under the project MAORI, and Universidad de Málaga through the “II Plan Propio de Investigación, Transferencia y Divulgación Científica”. This work has been also supported by Junta de Andalucía through Secretaría General de Universidades, Investigación y Tecnología with predoctoral grant (Ref. PREDOC_01712) as well as by Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología through grant FPU19/04468. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

AFDX networks simulation-based evaluation system

Aircraft on-board systems, including navigation equipment, sensors and actuator, among others, present an increasingly demanding requirements on the avionics data communication networks. Moreover, the safety-critical needs of avionics make network requirement even more stringent. Also, prototyping and testing different network architectures and configurations pose a challenge due to the cost of the equipment. Furthermore, classical performance assessment relies solely on worst-case assessment, which do not provide detailed feedback. For these reasons, an evaluation system is proposed focusing on the simulation of Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX) in order to help decrease the costs of the development of such networks.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

KQI evaluation for 360-Video services over mobile networks

New generation services have become the pillars and basis for the development of cutting-edge mobile networks as 5G and 6G. These technologies are intended to provide high-quality services which currently are not available, for instance, VR (Virtual reality). This paper presents a framework for LTE and 5G that aims to assess the performance of the 360-video service through Key Quality Indicators (KQI). This proposal integrates the immersive experience of omnidirectional video using an HMD (Head Mounted Device) while the performance measurement is done along the user session. The video content uses DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) from a video server located in the cloud. Finally, a performance comparison is provided making use of the data collected through an iterative experiment. The results obtained show the potential of the mobile networks and encourage their use for a high-quality VR service deployment.This work has been partially funded by: Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital; “Piloto 5G Andalucía” initiative, promoted by the Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital, through Red.es; Junta de Andalucía and ERDF (Consejería de Transformación Económica, Industria, Conocimiento y Universidades, Proyecto de Excelencia PENTA, P18-FR-4647), AECMA-5G: Advanced E2E Cellular Management for 5G Applications (Ref. UMA-CEIATECH-14), postdoctoral grant (Ref., DOC 01154, PAIDI 2020), Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología through grant FPU19/04468, and Junta de Andalucía (Secretaría General de Universidades, Investigación y Tecnología) through predoctoral grant call 2021 (granted to Oswaldo Penaherrera). This work was also supported by the University of Málaga through the I Plan Propio de Investigación, Transferencia y Divulgación Científica de la Universidad de Málaga. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Infraestructura 5G Standalone para Investigación y Desarrollo

The deployment of 5G infrastructures has been notably addressed during the last years. In contrast, most of the cellular operators are opting for deploying 5G Non- Standalone (NSA), which relies on LTE as anchor technology (signaling, guaranteed coverage...). Nevertheless, 5G NSA is not able to provide all the enhancements that 5G envisions to introduce, including a wide variety of services and use cases. At the University of Ma ́laga, a complete 5G Standanlone (SA) private network has been deployed for research and development purposes. This infrastructure is composed by both indoor and outdoor cells with different equipment, respectively. It enables the use novel technologies such as beamforming to achieve better capacity and coverage, which means higher bandwidths and lower latencies. The aim of this work is to analyze the benefits in terms of transmission bandwidth and latency with reference to a LTE private network. To accomplish this, some tests have been performed over the 5G SA network, providing also some insights about the use of MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) in 5G.Este trabajo está parcialmente financiado por el programa de “Ayudas para la formación de profesorado universitario” (Ref. FPU20/02863) del Ministerio de Universidades, la beca postdoctoral (Ref. DOC 01154, “Selección de personal investigador doctor convocado mediante Resolución de 21 de mayo de 2020”, PAIDI 2020), y el Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital y la Unión Europea - NextGenerationEU, en el marco del Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia y el Mecanismo de Recuperación y Resiliencia bajo el proyecto MAORI. La infraestructura descrita fue concedida mediante la convocatoria de “Ayudas para la adquisición de equipamiento científico-técnico (Plan Estatal I+D+I 2017-2020)”, Ref. EQC2018-005173-P. El trabajo también ha sido parcialmente financiado por la Universidad de Málaga, a través del II Plan Propio de Investigación y Transferencia. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec