Economic considerations play only a limited role in explaining support for Catalonian independence, but could be crucial in deciding the final outcome

The Scottish independence referendum saw economic considerations prove decisive, with the Yes campaign never fully convincing the electorate that voting for independence would bring with it greater prosperity. In Catalonia, a similar debate is under way, but this time economic considerations are set to play a smaller role – though they could yet be decisive in deciding whether independence eventually happens, according to Jordi Muñoz and Raül Tormos

Recompte hivernal d'aus aquàtiques i limícoles a les Balears, gener 1993

Winter census of Wildfowl and Waders in the Balearic Islands, Januarv 1993. The census was carried out from the 13th to the 26th of January. The coverage was good, with 52 places visited. The resulting figure is 15.142 birds. belonging to 52 species. Most common species were Fu(rca atea, with 3.227 individuals; Anas platyrrh ynchos, with 2.046; Vanellus vanellus, with 1.919; Gullinula chloropus, with 1.046; Anas crecca, with 912; Podiceps nigricollis, with 685; and Altas clypeata, with 677. Most important arcas were s'Albufera (Mallorca), with 6.396 birds. s'Albufera des Grau (Menorca), with 2.420 birds, and Salobrar de Campos, with 1.935

Anàlisi de la predicció del yield de circuits integrats a nivell d’oblia: Influència de la posició i de les agrupacions

L’obtenció d’una eina que permeti extreure dades sobre la distribució de les agrupacions de daus defectuosos en la fabricació de xips és una de les idees centrals d’aquest projecte. Per poder facilitar l’estudi sobre les lleis físiques que governen la creació d’aquestes agrupacions s’ha desenvolupat una aplicació software creada sobre MATLAB©. Durant la primera part de la memòria s’explicarà, d’una manera general, la fabricació de xips, les possibles causes d’errors, i les dades disponibles sobre aquestes fallades (pertanyents a la fàbrica que PHILIPS© té a Nijmegen, Holanda). Durant aquest informe s’explicarà com fer servir aquest software per visualitzar les dades aconseguides empíricament, i s’exposaran algunes conclusions tretes de d’utilització del comentat software, encara que aquest anàlisi no és l’objectiu d’aquest projecte. Tot el codi font creat per aquest fi es pot consultar a l’annex d’aquest informe, així com diferents taules i gràfiques relacionades amb els estudis duts a terme. Una d’aquestes possibles lleis físiques que contribueixen a la fallada d’un dau és la influència de l’estat correcte o erroni dels daus en les posicions adjacents. Aquesta idea va ser publicada i ratificada per un grup d’enginyers d’Intel Group© al 2001 (veure referència bibliogràfica [5]). En la segona part d’aquest projecte es desenvoluparà l’aplicació software necessària per a dur a terme aquest estudi, i es procedirà a estudiar la existència d’aquestes influències en les dades disponibles. La comprovació de la generalització dels resultats d’Intel, és el segon objectiu d’aquest projecte. Tanmateix, i fent servir la segona part de l’article anterior (Veure referència bibliogràfica [6]) com a guió per les proves a realitzar, s’ha comprovat la no validesa del mètode exposat per les dades disponibles

Anàlisi de la predicció del yield de circuits integrats a nivell d’oblia: Influència de la posició i de les agrupacions

L’obtenció d’una eina que permeti extreure dades sobre la distribució de les agrupacions de daus defectuosos en la fabricació de xips és una de les idees centrals d’aquest projecte. Per poder facilitar l’estudi sobre les lleis físiques que governen la creació d’aquestes agrupacions s’ha desenvolupat una aplicació software creada sobre MATLAB©. Durant la primera part de la memòria s’explicarà, d’una manera general, la fabricació de xips, les possibles causes d’errors, i les dades disponibles sobre aquestes fallades (pertanyents a la fàbrica que PHILIPS© té a Nijmegen, Holanda). Durant aquest informe s’explicarà com fer servir aquest software per visualitzar les dades aconseguides empíricament, i s’exposaran algunes conclusions tretes de d’utilització del comentat software, encara que aquest anàlisi no és l’objectiu d’aquest projecte. Tot el codi font creat per aquest fi es pot consultar a l’annex d’aquest informe, així com diferents taules i gràfiques relacionades amb els estudis duts a terme. Una d’aquestes possibles lleis físiques que contribueixen a la fallada d’un dau és la influència de l’estat correcte o erroni dels daus en les posicions adjacents. Aquesta idea va ser publicada i ratificada per un grup d’enginyers d’Intel Group© al 2001 (veure referència bibliogràfica [5]). En la segona part d’aquest projecte es desenvoluparà l’aplicació software necessària per a dur a terme aquest estudi, i es procedirà a estudiar la existència d’aquestes influències en les dades disponibles. La comprovació de la generalització dels resultats d’Intel, és el segon objectiu d’aquest projecte. Tanmateix, i fent servir la segona part de l’article anterior (Veure referència bibliogràfica [6]) com a guió per les proves a realitzar, s’ha comprovat la no validesa del mètode exposat per les dades disponibles

Service Orchestration on a Heterogeneous Cloud Federation

During the last years, the cloud computing technology has emerged as a new way to obtain computing resources on demand in a very dynamic fashion and only paying for what you consume. Nowadays, there are several hosting providers which follow this approach, offering resources with different capabilities, prices and SLAs. Therefore, depending on the users' preferences and the application requirements, a resource provider can fit better with them than another one. In this paper, we present an architecture for federating clouds, aggregating resources from different providers, deciding which resources and providers are the best for the users' interests, and coordinating the application deployment in the selected resources giving to the user the impression that a single cloud is used

Experimental SDN Control Solutions for Automatic Operations and Management of 5G Services in a Fixed Mobile Converged Packet-Optical Network

5G networks will impose network operators to accommodate services demanding heterogeneous and stringent requirements in terms of increased bandwidth, reduced latency, higher availability, etc. as well as enabling emerging capabilities such as slicing. Operators will be then forced to make notable investments in their infrastructure but the revenue is not envisaged to be proportional. Thereby, operators are seeking for more cost-effective solutions to keep their competitiveness. An appealing solution is to integrate all (broadband) services including both fixed and mobile in a convergent way. This is referred to as Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). FMC allows seamlessly serving any kind of access service over the same network infrastructure (access, aggregation and core) and relying on common set of control and operation functions. To this end, FMC leverages the benefits provided by Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). First, we discuss some of the explored FMC solutions and technologies, from both structural and functional perspectives Next, focusing on a Multi-Layer (Packet and Optical) Aggregation Network, we report two implemented and experimentally validated SDN/NFV orchestration architectures providing feasibleThis work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry MINECO projects DESTELLO (TEC2015-69256-R) and 5G-REFINE (TEC2017-88373-R), and the EU H2020 5G TRANSFORMER project (grant no. 761536)

Quality of transmission estimator retraining for dynamic optimization in optical networks

Optical network optimization involves an algorithm and a physical layer model (PLM) to estimate the quality of transmission of connections while examining candidate optimization operations. In particular, the algorithm typically calculates intermediate solutions until it reaches the optimum, which is then configured to the network. If it uses a PLM that was aligned once to reflect the starting network configuration, then the algorithm within its intermediate calculations can project the network into states where the PLM suffers from low accuracy, resulting in a suboptimal optimization. In this paper, we propose to solve dynamic multivariable optimization problems with an iterative closed control loop process, where after certain algorithm steps we configure the intermediate solution so that we monitor and realign/retrain the PLM to follow the projected network states. The PLM is used as a digital twin, a digital representation of the real system, which is realigned during the dynamic optimization process. Specifically, we study the dynamic launch power optimization problem, where we have a set of established connections, and we optimize their launch powers while the network operates. We observed substantial improvements in the sum and the lowest margin when optimizing the launch powers with the proposed approach over optimization using a one-time trained PLM. The proposed approach achieved near-to-optimum solutions as found by optimizing and continuously probing and monitoring the network, but with a substantial lower optimization time.Funding: Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (765275). This work is a part of the Future Optical Networks for Innovation, Research and Experimentation (ONFIRE) project (https://h2020-onfire.eu/), supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Improving Security in Internet of Things with Software Defined Networking

Future Internet of Things (IoT) will connect to the Internet billions of heterogeneous smart devices with the capacity of interacting with the environment. Therefore, the proposed solutions from an IoT networking perspective must take into account the scalability of IoT nodes as well as the operational cost of deploying the networking infrastructure. This will generate a huge volume of data, which poses a tremendous challenge both from the transport, and processing of information point of view. Moreover, security issues appear, due to the fact that untrusted IoT devices are interconnected towards the aggregation networks. In this paper, we propose the usage of a Software- Defined Networking (SDN) framework for introducing security in IoT gateways. An experimental validation of the framework is proposed, resulting in the enforcement of network security at the network edge

Integrated SDN/NFV management and orchestration architecture for dynamic deployment of virtual SDN control instances for virtual tenant networks

Software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) have emerged as the most promising candidates for improving network function and protocol programmability and dynamic adjustment of network resources. On the one hand, SDN is responsible for providing an abstraction of network resources through well-defined application programming interfaces. This abstraction enables SDN to perform network virtualization, that is, to slice the physical infrastructure and create multiple coexisting application-specific virtual tenant networks (VTNs) with specific quality-of-service and service-level-agreement requirements, independent of the underlying optical transport technology and network protocols. On the other hand, the notion of NFV relates to deploying network functions that are typically deployed in specialized and dedicated hardware, as software instances [called virtual network functions (VNFs)] running on commodity servers (e.g., in data centers) through software virtualization techniques. Despite all the attention that has been given to virtualizing IP functions (e.g., firewall; authentication, authorization, and accounting) or Long-Term Evolution control functions (e.g., mobility management entity, serving gateway, and packet data network gateway), some transport control functions can also be virtualized and moved to the cloud as a VNF. In this work we propose virtualizing the tenant SDN control functions of a VTN and moving them into the cloud. The control of a VTN is a key requirement associated with network virtualization, since it allows the dynamic programming (i.e., direct control and configuration) of the virtual resources allocated to the VTN. We experimentally assess and evaluate the first SDN/NFV orchestration architecture in a multipartner testbed to dynamically deploy independent SDN controller instances for each instantiated VTN and to provide the required connectivity within minutes