FORGE enabling FIRE facilities for the eLearning community

International audienceMany engineering students at third-level institutions across the world will not have the advantage of using real-world experimentation equipment, as the infrastructure and resources required for this activity are too expensive. This paper explains how the FORGE (Forging Online Education through FIRE) FP7 project transforms Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) testbed facilities into educational resources for the eLearning community. This is achieved by providing a framework for remote experimentation that supports easy access and control to testbed infrastructure for students and educators. Moreover, we identify a list of recommendations to support development of eLearning courses that access these facilities and highlight some of the challenges encountered by FORGE

Whisper: Programmable and Flexible Control on Industrial IoT Networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) centralizes network control to improve network programmability and flexibility. Contrary to wired settings, it is unclear how to support SDN in low power and lossy networks like typical Internet of Things (IoT) ones. Challenges encompass providing reliable in-band connectivity between the centralized controller and out-of-range nodes, and coping with physical limitations of the highly resource-constrained IoT devices. In this work, we present Whisper, an enabler for SDN in low power and lossy networks. The centralized Whisper controller of a network remotely controls nodes' forwarding and cell allocation. To do so, the controller sends carefully computed routing and scheduling messages that are fully compatible with the protocols run in the network. This mechanism ensures the best possible in-band connectivity between the controller and all network nodes, capitalizing on an interface which is already supported by network devices. Whisper's internal algorithms further reduce the number of messages sent by the controller, to make the exerted control as lightweight as possible for the devices. Beyond detailing Whisper's design, we discuss compelling use cases that Whisper unlocks, including rerouting around low-battery devices and providing runtime defense to jamming attacks. We also describe how to implement Whisper in current IoT open standards (RPL and 6TiSCH) without modifying IoT devices' firmware. This shows that Whisper can implement an SDN-like control for distributed low power networks with no specific support for SDN, from legacy to next generation IoT devices. Our testbed experiments show that Whisper successfully controls the network in both the scheduling and routing plane, with significantly less overhead than other SDN-IoT solutions, no additional latency and no packet loss

Redes Heterogéneas en el entorno vehicular

En la actualidad, los elementos de la infraestructura existentes para el despligue de redes vehiculares han sido desplegados en su totalidad por las operadoras de telefonía. Sin embargo, los fuertes requisitos de comunicaciones necesarios por parte de los vehículos y especialmente los vehículos autónomos, va a hacer necesario el uso combinado de las redes de telefonía (basadas en Macrocells) con otro tipo de paradigmas de red. En este artículo, presentamos un esquema para mejorar las comunicaciones vehiculares denominado DSM (\textit{Dynamic Small Cell Management}, o gestión dinámica de celdas pequeñas). La propuesta se centra en la activación dinámica de Small Cells cuando las Macrocells no son capaces de gestionar toda la información enviada por los vehículos. Para la validación de la propuesta se ha simulado un despligue real de Estaciones Base en Dublín. Los resultados de la simulación muestran mejoras en cuanto a la capacidad de comunicación y la reducción en la sobrecarga de las Estaciones Base

Intelligent Technique for Seamless Vertical Handover in Vehicular Networks

Seamless mobility is a challenging issue in the area of research of vehicular networks that are supportive of various applications dealing with the intelligent transportation system (ITS). The conventional mobility management plans for the Internet and the mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is unable to address the needs of the vehicular network and there is severe performance degradation because of the vehicular networks’ unique characters such as high mobility. Thus, vehicular networks require seamless mobility designs that especially developed for them. This research provides an intelligent algorithm in providing seamless mobility using the media independent handover, MIH (IEEE 802.21), over heterogeneous networks with different access technologies such as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), as well as the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) for improving the quality of service (QoS) of the mobile services in the vehicular networks. The proposed algorithm is a hybrid model which merges the biogeography-based optimization or BBO with the Markov chain. The findings of this research show that our method within the given scenario can meet the requirements of the application as well as the preferences of the users

Software-Defined Vehicular Networking: Opportunities and Challenges

Over the last ten years, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have received significant attention from the academic and industrial communities alike. VANETs are a particular type of mobile ad hoc network originally designed for the purpose of facilitating the creation of spontaneous wireless networks between different vehicles, but since their inception the scope of VANETs has been extended to other types of road users such as cyclists and pedestrians. Due to the volatility of the wireless medium, VANETs face several challenges, especially when applications with a diverse set of requirements must be supported. Among the various techniques used to address such challenges, one of the most recent is Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which, by clearly separating the data plane from the control plane, allows the implementation of traditional network control and management tasks on top of a logically centralized controller. In this work, we perform a systematic review of SDN techniques tailored to the VANET domain. More specifically, we first review the literature on VANETs and SDN from an architectural and communications requirement perspective, then we report on the most recent standardization efforts, and finally, we highlight the open research areas and the most important challenges in this domain