This paper presents a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) focused on intent-based service provisioning and closed-loop automation for collaborative robot (cobot) use case. The PoC demonstrates the integration of two key IBN enablers: the Intent-Based Network Intent Management Entity (IBN-IME) and CL Automation and Coordination, both aligned with 3GPP and ETSI Zero-Touch Service and Network Management (ZSM) standards. These enablers support the seamless interpretation of user intents, service deployment, and migration. The testbed, designed to emulate certain functionalities present in a 6G end-to-end system, highlights the potential for automation in future networks. The work addresses the need for an ecosystem that allows for the interaction of multiple stakeholders in a secure platform. The PoC presented can adapt to increasingly complex use cases, laying the groundwork for future improvements and broader deployments.

The entertainment and gaming industries continue to evolve, so they are becoming increasingly reliant on advanced network capabilities to deliver immersive, real-time experiences. In-network computing (INC) is a transformative paradigm in the design of the network architecture in 6G networks. It facilitates the offloading of computational tasks from devices to edge nodes and central servers, enabling faster data processing in network nodes and reducing latency and response times for high-demand applications, enhancing efficiency. This way, it will be possible to provide the final users with advanced applications like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). In this paper we introduce a 6G Network Infrastructure testbed designed for application execution and testing, supporting INC, and we present an Adaptive 360° Video Streaming service using INC facilities. The testbed has been designed to represent a vertical application for SLICES-RI and SUNRISE-6G projects. Some numerical results will assesses the performance of this dynamic video streaming system.

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the Control Plane functionalities, strategies, and procedures in the Next Generation Central Offices, which are crucial traffic aggregation points close to the subscribers. The Next Generation Central Offices are becoming integral part of the next generation networks and for this reason the management and control of its internal resources is essential. Initially, the paper explains the Next Generation Central Offices system architecture and its placement within an end-to-end network. Then, it details the use cases and their quantitative analysis, taking into consideration a dense urban area in Paris city, for estimating the downlink and uplink throughput and latency related requirements. Based on these estimations, the paper defines the Next Generation Central Office Control Plane requirements, along with its functional architecture and its internal functional blocks, detailing their specific roles and interactions to meet the bandwidth and latency demands. Finally, the paper describes an early software prototype implementation based on ETSI TeraFlow SDN, highlighting the software extensions implemented for the support of the Next Generation Central Office Control Plane functionalities, strategies, and procedures. The paper concludes with the next steps for the future work, consisting of the integration with an actual Next Generation Central Office and a field trial experiment in an end-to-end network.

One of the main tasks of new-generation cellular networks is the support of the wide range of virtual services that may be requested by vertical industries, while fulfilling their diverse performance requirements. Such task is made even more challenging by the time-varying service and traffic demands, and the need for a fully-automated network orchestration and management to reduce the service operational costs incurred by the network provider. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing a softwarized 5G network architecture that realizes the concept of ML-as-a-Service (MLaaS) in a flexible and efficient manner. The designed MLaaS platform can provide the different entities of a MANO architecture with already-trained ML models, ready to be used for decision making. In particular, we show how our MLaaS platform enables the development of two ML-driven algorithms for, respectively, network slice subnet sharing and run-time service scaling. The proposed approach and solutions are implemented and validated through an experimental testbed in the case of three different services in the automotive domain, while their performance is assessed through simulation in a large-scale, real-world scenario. In-testbed validation shows that the use of the MLaaS platform within the designed architecture and the ML-driven decision-making processes entail a very limited time overhead, while simulation results highlight remarkable savings in operational costs, e.g., up to 40% reduction in CPU consumption and up to 30% reduction in the OPEX.

Satellite communications (SatCom) have a role of advanced service enablers in the new virtual networks, following 3GPP specifications. Specifically, the satellite peculiar characteristics are of paramount importance to dynamically activate capabilities, such as multicast and broadcast channels, sudden traffic offloading, capacity bonding, and cost-efficient coverage of uncovered areas. A key aspect to achieve a seamless and efficient integration between satellite and terrestrial infrastructures is to make satellite resource management dynamic and with a centralised control of a single orchestrator that has visibility of the end-to-end network. Considering the adoption of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigms and the upcoming 5thgeneration of mobile communications (5G), this paper presents the ongoing work within the European Space Agency (ESA) ANChOR project, whose main output will be a data-driven Network Controller and Orchestrator for SatCom networks. This tool will be based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML)-based techniques to properly allocate resources exploiting some feedback knowledge of the network and it aims to support different services over 5G integrated satellite-terrestrial networks.

Empowered bynetwork softwarization, 5G systems have become the key enabler to foster the digital transformation of the vertical industries by expanding the scope of traditional mobile networks and enriching the network service offerings. To make this a reality, we propose anautomationsolution for vertical services provisioning and hierarchical Service Level Agreement (SLA) management.Service scalingis one of the most essential operations to adapt the service deployments and resource allocations to ensure SLA fulfilment. Three different scaling levels are addressed in this work: application-, service- and resource-level. We have implemented our solution in a proof-of-concept of a virtualized mobile network platform, spanning over three geographically-distributed sites. To evaluate our solution, we leverage field tests, focusing onautomotive vertical servicescomprising a mission-critical application (collision-avoidance) and an entertainment one (video streaming). The results demonstrate the excellent performance of our solution, and its ability to automatically deploy vertical services and ensure their SLAs through different levels of service scaling.

5G mobile networks need flexilibity, dynamicity and programmability to satisfy the needs of vertical industries. In such context, network services can be designed as integral units to be dynamically grouped among them to create tailored complex composite services or to allow the combination of services in a context of network slicing. In this demonstration, we present the service composition capabilities of the 5G-TRANSFORMER platform. In particular, we will show the instantiation of a composite network service using a previously instantiated service. When terminating the composite network service, the initial instantiated network service resumes its operation without disruption.

The concept of network slicing in 5G infrastructures allows to deliver multiple virtual services over shared environments and fully customized based on vertical-driven requirements and target performance indicators. A key feature of 5G networks is the capability to dynamically re-optimize the allocation of computing and network resources, from the core up to the edge, to instantiate and manage different types of concurrent services over a shared infrastructure. In this demonstration, we present a network slicing and orchestration solution for vertical services in the media sector, where enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) network slices are instantiated interconnecting physical and virtual functions, provisioned and configured on-demand using the concept of NFV Network Services. The eMBB slices are automatically dimensioned to match the requirements of the virtual Content Delivery Network (vCDN) service, e.g. in terms of number of target users, video quality and geographical coverage area. Arbitration and resource allocation schemas optimize the sharing of mobile communication services and virtual resources among concurrent media service instances, in compliance with the Service Level Agreement between network operators and vertical service providers.

5G is the next step in the evolution of operational networks, happening after the successful introduction of past generations like 3G or 4G. However, different with previous evolutions, in the case of 5G there is a confluence of novel technologies at different levels, ranging from the radio access to the virtualization technologies. Building, running and operating all of these new innovations is extremely challenging because of the novelty and the lack of previous experience on integrating them altogether. The base that sustains these new capabilities is the emergence of softwarized networks enabling automation, programmability and virtualization. The paper addresses the case of deploying 5G service slices by describing an architecture design for enabling orchestration in a multi-site environment, formed by 5G end-to-end facilities offered to vertical industries for experimentation, providing realistic situations for all the stakeholders on such multi-site environments (i.e., customers, providers, manufacturers, integrators, etc).

5G network nodes, fronthaul and backhaul alike, will have both forwarding and computational capabilities. This makes energy-efficient network management more challenging, as decisions, such as activating or deactivating a node, impact on both the ability of the network to route traffic and the amount of processing it can perform. To this end, we formulate an optimization problem accounting for the main features of 5G nodes and the traffic they serve, allowing joint decisions about: 1) the nodes to activate; 2) the network functions they run; and 3) the traffic routing. Our optimization module is integrated within the management and orchestration framework of 5G, thus enabling swift and high-quality decisions. We test our scheme with both a real-world testbed based on OpenStack and OpenDaylight, and a large-scale emulated network whose topology and traffic come from a real-world mobile operator, finding it to consistently outperform state-of-the art alternatives and closely match the optimum.

A 5G network provides several service types, tailored to specific needs such as high bandwidth or low latency. On top of these communication services, verticals are enabled to deploy their own vertical services. These vertical service instances compete for the resources of the underlying common infrastructure. We present a resource arbitration approach that allows to handle such resource conflicts on a high level and to provide guidance to lower-level orchestration components.

We consider the problem of energy-efficient network management in 5G systems, where backhaul and fronthaul nodes have both networking and computational capabilities. We devise an optimization model accounting for the main features of 5G backhaul and fronthaul, and jointly solve the problems of (i) node switch on/off, (ii) VNF placement, and (iii) traffic routing. We implement an optimization module within an application on top of an SDN controller and NFV orchestrator, thus enabling swift, high-quality decisions based on current network conditions. Finally, we validate and test our scheme with real-world power consumption, network topology and traffic demand, assessing its performance as well as the relative importance of the main contributions to the total power consumption of the system.

5G networks are expected to be highly energy efficient, with a 10 times lower consumption than today's systems. An effective way to achieve such a goal is to act on the backhaul network by controlling the nodes operational state and the allocation of traffic flows. To this end, in this paper we formulate energy-efficient flow routing on the backhaul network as an optimization problem. In light of its complexity, which impairs the solution in large-scale scenarios, we then propose a heuristic approach. Our scheme, named EMMA, aims to both turn off idle nodes and concentrate traffic on the smallest possible set of links, which in its turn increases the number of idle nodes. We implement EMMA on top of ONOS and derive experimental results by emulating the network through Mininet. Our results show that EMMA provides excellent energy saving performance, which closely approaches the optimum. In larger network scenarios, the gain in energy consumption that EMMA provides with respect to the simple benchmark where all nodes are active, is extremely high under medium-low traffic load.

Cloud computing is a promising solution for the flexible, on-demand delivery of communication services and infrastructures. The European Union funded project Mobile Cloud Networking is developing a cloud-based mobile communication service platform where service providers deliver virtualized wireless infrastructures integrated with high-level applications running on top of them. Mobile networks are redesigned, placed upon and operated on cloud computing platforms. These then are available with the on-demand, elastic and pay-as-you-go characteristics derived from the cloud principles. In this platform, a variety of services including heterogeneous radio networking, federated computing resources, virtualized network functions, support services and high-level applications are automatically and seamlessly orchestrated in composite end-to-end services delivered to enterprise end-users. The management of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for these cloud-based composite services requires a dedicated framework to combine and jointly manage the multiple SLAs associated to the different service components. This paper presents an architecture for the enforcement and validation of SLAs for mobile cloud services, discussing its positioning in the overall mobile cloud networking platform and its role across the different phases of the service lifecycle.

BonFIRE is a multi-site test bed that supports testing of Cloud-based and distributed applications. BonFIRE breaks the mould of commercial Cloud offerings by providing unique functionality in terms of observability, control, advanced Cloud features and ease of use for experimentation. A number of successful use cases have been executed on BonFIRE, involving industrial and academic users and delivering impact in diverse areas, such as media, e-health, environment and manufacturing. The BonFIRE user-base is expanding through its free, Open Access scheme, daily carrying out important research, while the consortium is working to sustain the facility beyond 2014.

The anticipated deployment of IEEE 802.16-based wireless metropolitan area networks (WMANs) will usher a new era in broadband wireless communications. The adoption of the WiMAX technology for remote areas, for example, can address challenging scenarios in a cost-effective manner. While WiMAX Forum documents describe an architecture that inherently supports quality of service and mobility, several areas are left uncovered. We present an architecture which integrates WiMAX, quality of service and mobility management frameworks over heterogeneous networks, developing mechanisms for seamless handovers. Our approach takes into consideration the expected deployment of, on the one hand, the IEEE 802.21 (Media Independent Handover) proposed standard and, on the other, the IETFstandardized Next Steps in Signalling framework. The first contributions of this paper comprise a specification of the mechanisms for make-before-break vertical handovers taking quality of service signalling into account and the integration in a heterogeneous environment. The latter contribution is an empirical evaluation of the proposed architecture using a testbed demonstrator. We quantify the processing delays of the main components in our prototype implementation when a terminal hands over between different access technologies, demonstrating the potential of the proposed architecture.

IEEE 802.16 networks provide mechanisms for QoS support at MAC level, but end-to-end QoS issues are not addressed in detail in the standards. This paper presents an analysis and an experimental validation of a comprehensive solution that describes and implements end-to-end QoS in networks with IEEE802.16e segments. A complete QoS model has been specified, defining the traffic descriptors, the QoS parameters and the resource management functions for networks with WiMAX access. This QoS model has been applied to the next step in signalling (NSIS) protocol suite and its impact has been evaluated on end-to-end QoS when heterogeneous network domains are involved. This work is based on the of results of activities focussed on the study of signalling protocols, carried out within the EU Integrated Project WEIRD (WiMAX extension to isolated research data networks).