In an MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) environment, it is suitable to compose an application as a set of containers for flexibility in resource allocation. This paper proposes stateless shared containers (SS-Containers) that can be shared by multiple applications simultaneously in an MEC environment, similar to a shared library in an operating system. It is expected that SS-Containers reduce resource consumption, shorten application startup time, and efficiently manage special hardware such as GPU. When 16 applications share an SS-Container with an encryption function, and each application contains the container with the same encryption function, the memory consumption is reduced by approximately 190 MiB. Comparing the case in which nine applications share an SS-Container that accesses a GPU to solve large-scale simultaneous linear equations with the case in which nine applications randomly access a GPU via a container inside them, the response time is reduced approximately by 57 % (39 seconds).

Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI) enables the operation of Network Function Chaining (NFC) in a low-cost and flexible manner by realizing network functions as software on general-purpose servers. One of NFVI's security requirements is access control to packet buffers, which can be achieved using Intra-process Isolation techniques. This paper proposes a secure NFVI using Software Fault Isolation (SFI) for access control to packet buffers by inserting bounds check instructions before indirect memory access instructions. The measurement results show that the proposed method is faster than ERIM, another Intra-process isolation method based on domain switching.

In a Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) environment, an application will be composed of multiple containers running on edge servers, and a container orchestration method determines which containers should be deployed on which edge servers. This paper proposes a container orchestration method considering shared containers. These containers will be introduced in an MEC environment to reduce application resource usage, similar to a shared library in an operating system. The proposed method adopts a multi-stage grouping of edge servers to aggregate computation resource information and network information of the edge servers for efficient orchestration calculation. The formulation of the proposed orchestration method has been successfully completed, marking a significant milestone in this research. Evaluation will be conducted assuming an environment that contains 2,048 edge servers and 200 user terminals.

As of 2022, 66% of Internet traffic is generated by video services, among which Netflix and YouTube are the dominant players. By monitoring the traffic volume of individual video services, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) can make appropriate capital investments and determine appropriate peering policies with CDN (Content Delivery Network) providers. Although DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) is widely used to identify network services, packet-level analysis does not scale to the traffic passing through backbone ISPs and is inapplicable to encrypted packets. This paper proposes OLIViS (OSINT-based Lightweight method for Identifying Video Services), a flow-level, label-free method designed for backbone ISPs. OLIViS employs a CNN-VAE (Convolutional Neural Network - Variational AutoEncoder) model to initially identify elephant flows which likely include video service flows and then utilizes OSINT (Open Source INTelligence) data for further services identification. Two datasets are used for evaluation: UTMobileNet2021 and WIDE backbone real trace. The evaluation results show that OLIViS identifies the Netflix and YouTube flows with an accuracy of over 96% in terms of traffic volume. Moreover, OLIViS infers the flow statistics (e.g., mean and peak throughput) of Netflix and YouTube, which closely resemble those inferred with DPI on non-encrypted traffic in a campus network.

With the proliferation of digital transactions, trust is becoming increasingly important, as exemplified by the World Economic Forum’s Data Free Flow with Trust. Digital signatures are utilized to establish trust to prevent spoofing and unauthorized modification of transmitted digital data. However, the extent of trust is limited by jurisdictions, trusted lists and bridge certificate authorities, and does not have international coverage. For this reason, mutual recognition is needed, i.e. trust relationships established across countries. Establishing mutual recognition is complex and time-demanding due to the legislations, systems, and technologies involved. In parallel, electronic signatures consist of complex systems and structures and, thus, focusing on the technical requirements and solutions can enhance mutual recognition processes. The purpose of our approach is to develop a testbed that can verify technical aspects of mutual recognition. This paper describes the concept of the testbed “Hakoniwa” which includes analyzing the requirements, simulating and testing mutual recognition trust services across US, UK, EU and JP.

This paper proposes an architecture called Cont-MEC for enabling UEs (User Equipments) to offload a part of applications to MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) servers. It is expected that a MEC infrastructure is composed of a small number of centralized data centers and geographically distributed edge stations, in each of which multiple edge servers are installed. It is also expected that applications on UEs are implemented as container clusters similar to cloud-native applications and they are deployed on computing clusters. ContMEC has the following three features: (i) constructing a computing cluster per edge station for scalability to the number of UEs, (ii) hierarchical resource management for scalability and efficient resource sharing among computing clusters, and (iii) overlapped computing clusters for efficient resource sharing. A PoC (Proof-of Concept) implementation of ContMEC employs Kubernetes as a container orchestration system without modifications although Kubernetes does not take account of the MEC infrastructure. The PoC implementation shows that advantage of offloading is larger than disadvantage of implementing applications as container clusters, control traffic is moderate against the number of UEs, and efficient resource sharing among computing clusters is achieved.

A service in cloud computing is executed in a data center, which may result in large communication delay. To host applications requiring low latency, edge/fog computing has attracted great attention. This paper proposes a mechanism called AFC (Application Function Chaining) for realizing distributed edge/fog computing. In AFC, an application is defined as a Chained-AF, which is composed of one or more AFs (Application Functions) with control structures such as conditional branches. An AF basically fulfills a single task similar to a UNIX command. Thus, a Chained-AF looks like a distributed shell script and the networks look like a single computer from users' viewpoint. A MANO (Management and Network Orchestration) mechanism in AFC places AFs on optimal edge/fog servers which satisfy Chained-AF's requirements when it is launched. Evaluation results of a prototype implementation show that it takes 0.5 seconds and 3 seconds to launch a Chained-AF composed of two and six AFs, respectively, and that the throughput of a Chained-AF is more than 90 % of the line speed, which is independent of the number of AFs. The throughput of an AFC depends on processing performance of AFs, not on the AFC mechanism.

An experimental network environment plays an important role to examine new systems and protocols. We have developed an experimental network construction tool called LiONv1 (Lightweight On-Demand Networking, ver.1). LiONv1 satisfies the following four requirements: programmer-friendly configuration file based on Infrastructure as Code, multiple virtualization technologies for virtual nodes, physical topology conscious virtual node placement, and L3 protocol agnostic virtual networks. None of existing experimental network environments satisfy all the four requirements. In this paper, we develop LiONv2 which satisfies three more requirements: diversity of available network devices, Internet-scale deployment, and disaggregation of network configuration and device configuration. LiONv2 employs NETCONF and YANG to achieve diversity of available network devices and Internet-scale deployment. LiONv2 also defines two YANG models which disaggregate network configuration and device configuration. LiONv2 is implemented in Go and C languages with public libraries for Go. Measurement results show that construction time of a virtual network is irrelevant to the number of virtual nodes if a single virtual node is created per physical node.

In the LTE/LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) system, user-plane for a user equipment (UE) is provided by tunneling which causes header overhead, processing overhead, and management overhead. In addition, the LTE-A system does not support moving cells which are composed of a mobile Relay Node (RN) and UEs attached to the mobile RN. There are several proposals for moving cells in the LTE-A system and the 5G system, however, all of them rely on tunneling for the user-plane, which means that none of them avoid the tunneling overheads. This paper proposes MocLis, a moving cell support protocol based on a Locator/ID split approach. MocLis does not use tunneling. Nested moving cells are supported. Signaling cost for handover of a moving cell is independent of the number of UEs and nested RNs in the moving cell. MocLis is implemented in Linux; user space daemons and modified kernel. The measurement results show that the attachment time and handover time are short enough for practical use. TCP throughput in MocLis is faster than that in the tunneling based approaches.

Recently, applications' demands for the network become more multifaceted. Highly functional application-to- application communication services such as bandwidth aggregation, fault tolerant communication, and delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) were developed independently in the network layer, the transport layer, and the application layer. As a result, protocol layering has become complicated. This paper proposes Layer-5 (L5) inserted between the application layer and the trans- port layer to separate communication policies and communication mechanisms to make protocol layering clearer. The transport layer (L4) provides end-to-end communication mechanisms such as reliable byte stream while L5 realizes communication policies such as bandwidth aggregation by combining the communication mechanisms in L4. This paper proposes five types of L5-paths as communication policies: (1) the L5 bundled path for bandwidth aggregation or fault tolerant communication, (2) the L5 spatially- spliced path for communication with middleboxes, (3) the L5 temporally-spliced path for DTN, (4) the L5 spliced- bundled path, and (5) the L5 bundled over spatially-spliced path. An application can select and use an appropriate L5- path depending on the network circumstances through a common API. A prototype of L5 is implemented in the Linux user space as a library to make deployment and maintenance easier. The evaluation shows that establishment time of L5- paths is short enough and performance of L5-paths is comparable or superior to existing technologies.

In this paper, we try to establish new technique that the components of the biological clock are reconstituted into the liposome. In other words, we try to produce a nano size clock, capsulated into the liposome, made by protein molecules. The circadian clock is a basic cellular system found in almost all organisms. This clock generates self-sustained oscillations under constant conditions with a ≈ 24-hour (circadian) period. In cyanobacteria, circadian clock could be reconstituted in vitro only by mixing the three clock proteins, KaiA, KaiB, KaiC, with adenosine triphosphate (ATP). So we reconstitute these proteins and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) into phospholipid-coated microdroplet and confirmed the clock function. The clocks in phospholipids-coated microdroplet indicate long period more than 24 hours. In this case, period length became 35 hour, self-sustaining oscillation was reaming with little dumping. To reveal why the time cycle became long period, we observed localization of Kai proteins in phospholipid-coated microdroplets by using fluorescents labeled Kai proteins under fluorescent (confocal) microscopy. From the observation of localization of Kai proteins, we found KaiB protein was distributed equivalently, on the other hand, KaiC protein was located near membrane of phospholipid-coated microdroplet. These results indicate that different localization between Kai proteins cause long period oscillation and we could control period length depend on calculation data from localization.

In this paper, we try to establish newly technique that the components of the biological clock are reconstituted into the liposome. In other words, we try to produce a nano size clock, capsulated into the liposome, made by protein molecules. The circadian clock is a basic cellular system found in almost all organisms. This clock generates self-sustained oscillations under constant conditions with a ≈ 24-hour (circadian) period. In cyanobacteria, circadian clock could be reconstituted in vitro only by mixing the three clock proteins, KaiA, KaiB, KaiC, with adenosine triphosphate (ATP). So we reconstitute these proteins and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) into phospholipid-coated microdroplet and confirmed the clock function. The clocks in phospholipids-coated microdroplet indicate long period more than 24 hour. In this case, period length became 35 hour, self-sustaining oscillation was reaming with little dumping. To reveal why the time cycle became long period, we observed localization of Kai proteins in phospholipid-coated microdroplets by using fluorescents labeled Kai proteins under fluorescent (conforcal) microscopy. From the observation of localization of Kai proteins, we found KaiB protein was distributed equivalently, on the other hand, KaiC protein was located near membrane of phospholipid-coated microdroplet. These results indicate that deferent localization between Kai proteins cause long period oscillation.