Reducing service creation time leveraging on network function virtualization

Fifth-generation (5G) networks are envisioned to simultaneously support several services with different connectivity requirements. In this respect, service creation time is a key performance indicator (KPI) for service providers when planning the migration to 5G. For example, the European 5G infrastructure public private partnership (5G-PPP) suggests to reduce this time from 90 hours to 90 minutes, in the different phases of the service creation time KPI identified by this organization. This reduction can be achieved by leveraging on 5G state-of-the-art technologies: network function virtualization, network slicing, software-defined networking, and cloud computing, among others. Although some authors and projects have already studied the service creation time KPI in 5G, there is no literature that comprehensively analyzes and presents results related to each phase of this KPI. In this article, we explore the potential of network function virtualization technologies to reduce service creation time. To this end, we investigate the various phases of the service creation time KPI by designing and implementing, a realistic as well as complex network service that leverages on network function virtualization and related technologies. For our use case, we chose a content delivery network service specifically designed to distribute video. This decision was based on an analysis where we considered several parameters, like the complexity in the phases of design, fulfillment, and service assurance. We dissected all phases of the service creation time KPI required to turn our service blueprint into a deployment by utilizing network function virtualization tools. Henceforth, we defined and conducted several experiments, which were oriented to analyzing the different phases of the service creation time KPI. After analyzing the obtained results, we can conclude that using these new tools permits a substantial reduction in the time taken by each phase of the service creation time KPI.publishe

Deployment and evaluation of an Industry 4.0 use case over 5G

The arrival of 5G paves the way for the deployment of the so-called Industry 4.0, which is a new paradigm devoted to the digital transformation of manufacturing and factory production. Because of the resources required to perform this transformation, the importance of field trials and experimentation cannot be overstated, both to support the design of novel methodologies and to validate these designs. In this article, we leverage the 5G EVE end-to-end open platform to design and validate a novel operation approach for automated guided vehicles (AGVs). This use case consists of the placement of the intelligence that controls the AGV in a remote entity. This movement could improve and simplify the operation of industrial processes. The customizability of the 5G validation platform proves fundamental to evaluate the solution under different deployment architectures and to assess its performance under hazardous radio conditions. Our results demonstrate the ability of 5G to handle latency-constrained use cases with superior performance compared to the current state-of-the-art mobile technology.This work was partly funded by the European Commission under the European Union's Horizon 2020 program, grant agreement number 815074 (5G EVE project). The article solely reflects the views of the authors. The Commission is not responsible for the contents of this article or any use made thereof. The authors would like to thank Ignacio Berberana and Neftali Gonzalez from the 5TONIC Laboratory for their support in setting up the Spanish site

Anemia in Ugandan pregnant women: a cross-sectional, systematic review and meta-analysis study.

Background Anemia in pregnancy represents a global public health concern due to wide ranging maternal and neonatal adverse outcomes in all peripartum periods. We estimated the prevalence and factors associated with anemia in pregnancy at a national obstetrics and gynecology referral hospital in Uganda and in addition performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of the overall burden of anemia in pregnancy in Uganda. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional study among 263 pregnant women attending the antenatal care clinic of Kawempe National Referral Hospital, Kampala, Uganda, in September 2020. Anemia in pregnancy was defined as a hemoglobin level of < 11.0 g/dl and microcytosis as a mean corpuscular volume (MCV) of < 76 fL. We also performed a systematic review (PROSPERO Registration ID: CRD42020213001) and meta-analysis of studies indexed on MEDLINE, Embase, African Journal Online, ClinicalTrials.gov , ICTRP, and the Cochrane Library of systematic review between 1 January 2000 and 31 September 2020 reporting on the prevalence of anemia in pregnancy in Uganda. Results The prevalence of anemia was 14.1% (n= 37) (95%CI 10.4-18.8), of whom 21 (56.8%) had microcytic anemia. All cases of anemia occurred in the second or third trimester of pregnancy and none were severe. However, women with anemia had significantly lower MCV (75.1 vs. 80.2 fL, p<0.0001) and anthropometric measurements, such as weight (63.3 vs. 68.9kg; p=0.008), body mass index (25.2 vs. 27.3, p=0.013), hip (98.5 vs. 103.8 cm, p=0.002), and waist (91.1 vs. 95.1 cm, p=0.027) circumferences and mean systolic blood pressure (BP) (118 vs 125 mmHg, p=0.014). Additionally, most had BP within the normal range (59.5% vs. 34.1%, p=0.023). The comparison meta-analysis of pooled data from 17 published studies of anemia in pregnancy in Uganda, which had a total of 14,410 pregnant mothers, revealed a prevalence of 30% (95% CI 23-37). Conclusions Despite our study having a lower prevalence compared to other studies in Uganda, these findings further confirm that anemia in pregnancy is still of public health significance and is likely to have nutritional causes, requiring targeted interventions. A larger study would be necessary to demonstrate potential use of basic clinical parameters such as weight or blood pressure as screening predictors for anemia in pregnancy

Latent Tuberculosis Infection Status of Pregnant Women in Uganda Determined Using QuantiFERON TB Gold-Plus.

BACKGROUND: The risk of progression of latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) to active disease increases with pregnancy. This study determined the prevalence and risk factors associated with LTBI among pregnant women in Uganda. METHODS: We enrolled 261 pregnant women, irrespective of gestational age. Participants who had known or suspected active tuberculosis (TB) on the basis of clinical evaluation or who had recently received treatment for TB were excluded. LTBI was defined as an interferon-γ concentration ≥0.35 IU/mL (calculated as either TB1 [eliciting CD4+ T-cell responses] or TB2 [eliciting CD8+ T-cell responses] antigen minus nil) using QuantiFERON TB Gold-Plus (QFT-plus) assay. RESULTS: LTBI prevalence was 37.9% (n = 99) (95% confidence interval [CI], 32.3-44.0). However, 24 (9.2%) subjects had indeterminate QFT-plus results. Among participants with LTBI, TB1 and TB2 alone were positive in 11 (11.1%) and 18 (18.2%) participants, respectively. In multivariable analysis, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 4.4 [95% confidence interval {CI}, 1.1-18.0]; P = .04) and age 30-39 years (aOR, 4.0 [95% CI, 1.2-12.7]; P = .02) were independently associated with LTBI. Meanwhile, smoking status, alcohol use, nature of residence, crowding index, and TB contact were not associated with LTBI. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings are in keeping with the evidence that HIV infection and advancing age are important risk factors for LTBI in pregnancy. In our setting, we recommend routine screening for LTBI and TB preventive therapy among eligible pregnant women

Enhancement of Vertical Services Leveraging 5G and Enabling Technologies

The fifth generation of mobile networks, i.e., 5G, has been envisioned to revolutionize mobile communications by providing the flexibility to create dynamic end-to-end logical networks on top of a shared physical network. These complete logical networks are geared to meet the heterogeneous network requirements of the envisioned 5G use cases. Furthermore, compared to the previous 4G network, 3GPP has designed the 5G network with the following key performance indicators (KPIs): (i) reduce the end-to-end latency by less than 1ms, (ii) provide ultra-high reliability, (iii) increase the user-experienced data rates by 100 times, (iv) support massive wireless connectivity to billions of devices, (v) minimize the battery consumption by a factor of 10 while (vi) simultaneously increasing the spectrum efficiency by 3. Besides, the European 5G infrastructure public-private partnership (5G-PPP) project has proposed an additional 5G network KPI, i.e., service creation time. Accordingly, the research work done in this thesis has identified and focused on a set of these 5G critical KPIs, i.e., service creation time, end-to-end latency, reliability, and the user-experienced data rate. The service creation time KPI is the time taken to create, instantiate and monitor a network service on the 5G network and is a critical KPI for service providers when planning the migration to 5G. The European 5G infrastructure public-private partnership (5G-PPP) suggests reducing this time from 90 hours to 90 minutes in the different phases of this KPI identified by this organization. Accordingly, the first section of our research in this thesis focused on the comprehensive evaluation and analysis of this 5G service creation time KPI. In particular, we explore the potential of some of the 5G enabling technologies, i.e., network function virtualization and network slicing technologies, to reduce the 5G service creation time KPI. Subsequently, we investigated the various phases of the service creation time KPI by designing and implementing a realistic yet complex network service. We dissected all phases of this KPI required to turn our service blueprint into deployment by utilizing network function virtualization and network slicing technologies. Henceforth, we conducted several experiments to analyze the different phases of the service creation time KPI and the impact of the aforementioned 5G enabling technologies in reducing this KPI. Besides, the arrival of 5G paves the way for the deployment of the so-called Industry 4.0, which is a new paradigm devoted to the digital transformation of manufacturing and factory production. This industry 4.0 evolution fosters network-based use cases with stringent network latency requirements. Accordingly, the second phase of our thesis research focused on evaluating the 5G end-to-end latency and reliability KPIs in the context of industry 4.0 use cases. Moreover, because of the resources required to perform the industry 4.0 transformation, the importance of field trials and experimentation to support the design of novel methodologies and validate these designs cannot be overstated. Accordingly, in this research, we leverage the 5G EVE end-to-end open platform to design and validate a latency-constrained industry 4.0 use case leveraging the 5G network for communication purposes. In addition, the customizability of the 5G-EVE platform proves fundamental to evaluating the solution under different deployment architectures and assessing its performance under hazardous radio conditions, i.e., network latency and packet losses, the latter of which is directly related to the reliability KPI. Our research results demonstrate the ability of the 5G network to handle latency-constrained industry 4.0 use cases with superior performance compared to the current state-of-the-art mobile technology. Furthermore, from these research results, we noticed that such latency-constrained industry 4.0 use cases are greatly affected by time-varying random delays, which impact the use-case’s reliability, stability, and performance. Thus, there is an urgent need to design mechanisms to compensate for these time-varying delays. The delay estimation can be achieved by leveraging the Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) framework with 5G. Accordingly, this section of the thesis research focused on exploiting the radio network information provided by the MEC framework to improve the performance of latency-constrained industry 4.0 use cases that leverage 5G for communication purposes. Subsequently, we designed and implemented a latency-constrained industry 4.0 use case that leverages the MEC platform functionalities to estimate the current network delays. These estimated delays are availed to the remote end of the industry 4.0 use case and compensated. Extensive simulations prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Moreover, our approach is compared with the optimal baseline network delay estimation approach. Lastly, we focused our research efforts on analyzing the 5G user-experienced data rate KPI by employing a gaming streaming service that is also latency-constrained. 5G and some of its enabling technologies, i.e., Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) unlock multi-media industries’ potential by offering high-quality media services through dynamic and efficient resource allocation with low latency. Subsequently, the work done in this stage of the research implemented a multi-site gaming streaming use case over an end-to-end 5G-enabled platform, i.e., the 5G EVE project. Furthermore, we present the executed use case experiment scenarios to validate the use case performance following a defined quality of experience (QoE)-related Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) by the vertical. In particular, this research discusses the design workflow and orchestration of the multi-site gaming streaming use case across two 5G EVE sites (i.e., Spain and Greece), providing a detailed description of the network function applications and resources utilized for the use case. Finally, leveraging the 5G EVE monitoring platform, this paper elaborates on the executed experiment scenarios that provide the defined KPI metrics data and consequently presents the obtained KPI results.Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Telemática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Javier Vales Alonso.- Secretario: Marco Gramaglia.- Vocal: Elisa Rojas Sánche

Microbial Translocation Does Not Drive Immune Activation in Ugandan Children Infected With HIV

International audienc