The advent of fifth generation (5G) mobile communication system brings a new vision of the future for a diverse range of vertical industries. Both the number of connected devices and the amount of mobile data traffic will increase significantly. However, the deployment and operation of 5G networks also cost higher than previous generations of mobile networks. Especially, approximately 70% of total network costs are spent in building the radio access network (RAN). Open RAN is potential solution to deploy RANs in a lower cost. An Open RAN can be constructed via components of different vendors. This brings challenges for effective management of an Open RAN. In this paper, we will propose an architectural design of a network management system (NMS) for 5G Open RAN. The proposed NMS is compliant with the O-RAN architecture defined by the O-RAN Alliance. A set of management functions are provided in the NMS to facilitate the operations, administration, and maintenance (OAM) of an Open RAN. The interactions of the Open RAN NMS with current Telecom OSSs are also addressed.

The delivery of digital services, offered by telecom operators, relies on secure and reliable underlying networks. The networks should be protected via the enforcement of a strict access control scheme for use of IP resources. It is recommended that all IP addresses for use in a telecommunication management network be statically assigned and must be registered before use. Therefore, there is a need for an effective IP address management (IPAM) scheme which can be widely applicable across the telecommunication management network. In a telecom operator, the operations and management of networks are usually accomplished through a set of OSSs with different functions or management scopes. In this paper, we will propose an IPAM framework which can be integrated with these OSSs. The proposed IPAM framework is constructed by the processes of IP address discovery and network access control schemes. This paper will discuss how to seamlessly integrate IP address discovery and network access control with the current OSSs of Chunghwa Telecom.

In recent years, many telecom operators suffered a profits recession because of the rise of over-the-top (OTT) services, especially text messaging and voice calls. To avoid becoming dumb pipes, telecom operators have to launch diverse digital services to transform their networks from dumb pipes to smart ones. Introducing Software-Defined Networking (SDN) into telecom networks may boost the network transformation more easily. SDN could also foster the innovation of novel telecom services, such as Software-Defined Wide-Area Network (SD-WAN) and Datacenter Interconnection (DCl). However, SDN also brings challenges to current network provisioning systems. It is needed to design a new network provisioning system to fulfill the demands of customers from their SD-WAN applications which need network controls. To provide dynamic network control, we design and implement a new service-oriented network provisioning system to support on-demand self-service network services. The system has been successfully deployed with the managed SD-WAN services in Chunghwa Telecom.

The increased popularity of over-the-top (OTT) services such as voice calls and text messaging popular has a great impact on the business of traditional telecom operations. It is important for a telecommunications company to maximize resource utilization so as to decrease OPEX/CAPEX (Operating Expense/Capital Expenditure). On the other hand, the deployment of a variety of digital services for broadband Internet access may complicate telecom operations. When more digital appliances, such as set-top boxes and IP cameras, are deployed at home, more configurations are required in both CPEs and POPs. CWMP is a management protocol between CPEs and auto configuration servers (ACSs) for remote management of those home network devices. It simplifies the service activation and configuration, and provides functionalities of diagnostics and monitoring. The scalability of ACS is an important issue as more CPEs and more configurations are needed, especially when a lot of Internet of Things (IoT) are widely adopted. This paper focuses on ACS containerization to deliver services quickly and to scale well. To dynamically control and manage the containerize ACS, we propose a middleware approach to support container management and to improve scalability horizontally based on designated policies.

Along with the widespread development of Internet and mobile applications, the demand for more flexible and dynamic networking services increases. It becomes a new challenge for many carriers to deploy a variety of new services by effective provisioning of network resources. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a novel approach to make networks reconfigurable and extensible such that new services can be deployed with existing network devices. By decoupling the controller plane from the data plane in network devices, SDN brings networks programmability of the data plane and centralization of the controller plane. Conventional Operations Support Systems (OSSs) were developed to manage networks in a standard fashion with Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) or proprietary protocols. SDN provides a new framework in managing SDN-enabled devices. A new issue for carriers is how SDN-enabled networks and devices can be monitored and controlled by current OSSs. This paper focuses on performance management and aims to develop an efficient scheme to collect traffic statistics data via the SDN controller plane. Similar to Bulkstat, an SNMP-based mechanism for periodic collection and transfer of MIB objects, the proposed scheme for bulk traffic statistics collection is developed in the controller plane and provides a northbound interface for upper network management applications. Instead of using SNMP and MIBs, the scheme is implemented by periodically gathering statistics information of flow tables from SDN-enabled switches via the OpenFlow protocol.

We propose a semi-blind channel estimation for two-way relay networks (TWRNs) where multiple relays employ amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol and the channel is frequency-selectively faded. The challenges of the channel estimation are resulted from inter-symbol interference (ISI), self-interference in two-way systems and difficulty to estimate each relay link separately. To deal with ISI and to obtain the effective channel impulse response (CIR) of each relay link individually, cyclic prefix is inserted in source messages and we propose a low-complexity and scalable design of precoding matrices at relays. Under the framework, effective CIR of each relay link is estimated through the second-order statistics of the received signals, while ambiguity resulted from the channel matrices of direct links between users are resolved by a small number of training blocks. It shows through simulations that NMSE of the proposed scheme exists error floor at high SNR, which can be mitigated by averaging over more blocks of received signals especially when the channel varies slowly.

With the rapid growth of cloud computing, a great number of servers are deployed in a data center to provide virtual machines to a variety of users. Several virtualization techniques have been developed in the recent years. Platforms for virtual machines, e.g. VMware, Xen, KVM, and VirtualBox, may adopt different virtualization techniques for particular purposes. This leads to a heterogeneous virtual infrastructure in clouds. For effective management of a heterogeneous virtual infrastructure, there is a demand for a standardized interface for the monitoring of a lot of virtual machines in the data center. This paper will propose the use of SNMP in VM monitoring. The proposed monitoring scheme makes use of two standard MIBs, MIB-II and Host Resources MIB, to provide essential information for VM configuration and performance monitoring. In addition, an enterprise MIB is developed on AgentX to provide detailed VM instance information. A web-based management system is also implemented to demonstrate the superiority of SNMP in monitoring heterogeneous virtual machines.

In this paper, we propose an Attribute-Based Access Control System (ABACS) for emergency services with security assurance over Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). ABACS aims to improve the efficiency of rescues mobilized via emergency communications over VANETs. By adopting fuzzy identity-based encryption, ABACS can select the emergency vehicles that can most appropriately deal with an emergency and securely delegate the authority to control traffic facilities to the assigned emergency vehicles. Using novel cryptographic preliminaries, ABACS realizes confidentiality of messages, prevention of collusion attacks, and fine-grained access control. As compared to the current PKI scheme, the computational delay and transmission overhead can be reduced by exploiting the advantages afforded by message broadcasting, which is heavily used in ABACS. The performance evaluation demonstrates that ABACS is a suitable candidate for realizing emergency services via VANETs.

Abstract The use of anonymous channel tickets was proposed for authentication in wireless environments to provide user anonymity and to probably reduce the overhead of re‐authentications. Recently, Yanget al.proposed a secure and efficient authentication protocol for anonymous channel in wireless systems without employing asymmetric cryptosystems. In this paper, we will show that Yanget al.'s scheme is vulnerable to guessing attacks performed by malicious visited networks, which can easily obtain the secret keys of the users. We propose a new practical authentication scheme not only reserving the merits of Yanget al.'s scheme, but also extending some additional merits including: no verification table in the home network, free of time synchronization between mobile stations and visited networks, and without obsolete anonymous tickets left in visited networks. The proposed scheme is developed based on a secure one‐way hash function and simple operations, a feature which is extremely fit for mobile devices. We provide the soundness of the authentication protocol by using VO logic. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We present a constant time sorting algorithm by adopting a 3D reconfigurable mesh with only O(n/sup 3/2/) processors. Our algorithm is developed on an n/sup 1/2//spl times/n/sup 1/2//spl times/n/sup 1/2/ 3-D reconfigurable mesh. Moreover, we further extend the result to k-dimensional reconfigurable meshes for k/spl ges/3. Consequently, an O(4/sup k+1/) time sorting algorithm is obtained by adopting an n/sup 1/(k-1)//spl times/n/sup 1/(k-1)//spl times/.../spl times/n/sup 1/(k-1)/k-D reconfigurable mesh of size O(n/sup 1+1/(k-1)/). Hence, constant time sorting using O(n/sup 1+/spl epsiv//) processors, where O>

Semigroup and prefix computations on two-dimensional mesh-connected computers with multiple broadcasting (2-MCCMBs) are studied. Previously, only square 2-MCCMBs with N processing elements were considered for semigroup computations of N data items, and O(N/sup 1/6/) time was required. It is found that square machines are not the best form for semigroup computations, and an O(N/sup 1/8/)-time algorithm is derived on an N/sup 5/8/*N/sup 3/8/ rectangular 2-MCCMB. This time complexity can be further reduced to O(N/sup 1/9/) if fewer processing elements are used. Parallel algorithms for prefix computations with the same time complexities are derived.>