With network slicing, 5G is able to best support heterogeneous IoT applications each with a specially tailored virtual network, called IoT slice. NFV (Network Function Virtualization) is the key enabler to virtualize a 5G network into multiple IoT slices for different types of IoT applications. All 5G network slices are required to support scalability for their operations in order to deal with dynamic fluctuation of incoming IoT requests. This research focuses on designing and implementing an NFV-enabled vertical scalability system for IoT slices according to their CPU loading. Our system is tested using a traffic generator with three types of IoT services. Each type of IoT services has a different QoS requirement, and the system will forward it to a specific network slice according to its requirement. We will evaluate the performance of vertical scalability by comparing two systems: one system implements vertical scalability followed by horizontal scalability while the other system implements only horizontal scalability. Our aim is to demonstrate that the former involves lower CPU utilization and power consumption while still achieves compatible response time and throughput when compared to the latter.

Network slicing enables a single physical network be sliced into multiple virtual networks. Each is customized and optimized according to specific 5G services and business goals. It can accommodate QoS heterogeneity of different 5G vertical services with isolation. In this research, we realize 5G mobile core network slicing based on the NFV (Network Functions Virtualisation) MANO (MANagement and Orchestration) architecture. Our prototype leverages open sources from both OpenStack Tacker and NCTU free5GC to creates 5G core network slicing based on its Network Service Descriptor (NSD). We evaluate and compare the performance between the multiple network slicing system and the one-slice-fits-all single slicing system using three eMBB (enhanced Mobile BroadBand) services of different QoS levels. Our test results show that the former can achieve better throughput and response time than the latter with the tradeoff of increasing its CPU consumption.

Service Function Chaining (SFC) is an important mechanism in Software-Defined Network/Network Function Virtualization (SDN/NFV) to allow the network traffic to be forwarded through a pre-defined ordered set of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). Nevertheless, such a chain may be broken with the failure of a VNF. In this research, we propose a novel fault management system that can rapidly and dynamically recover an SFC from a failed VNF. In our proposed system, no backup VNF or backup Service Function Path needs to be established in advance. Our system will monitor all the VNFs used by SFC and when there is a VNF out of service, it will dynamically create a new VNF with the same functionality as that of the failed one and replace it. Unlike existing solutions of fault-recovery using virtual machines, our system employs container technologies to speed up the instantiation and replacement of VNFs. When compared to the existing method, our proposed solution is capable of achieving much faster recovery time with acceptable cost of resource consumption.

The SDN/NFV technologies, where SDN detaches the control plane and the data plane and NFV enables the virtualization of various network appliances, will transform the traditional networking paradigms. Both technologies create enormous opportunities for telecommunications operators by transforming their networks into low-cost, elastically scaling cloud environments. SDN/NFV is challenging the traditional accounting management with its high flexibility. It is thus very important for telecom operators to identify new charging factors introduced by SDN/NFV in the new telecom ecosystem. In this paper, we report our research results in identifying these new charging factors of SDN/NFV. Furthermore, we briefly explain how to utilize them to define new charging models to enable SDN/NFV accounting management that would benefit both operators and customers in the 5G era.

Over-The-Air (OTA) provisioning is an important technology describing the ability to change or update the applications in the devices over the wireless network. To enable the OTA provisioning for wearable devices, the wireless technologies need to take into consideration the limited capabilities of these devices. In recent years, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has emerged as the protocol choice for many wearable devices including mobile handsets. In this research, we develop technologies that enable the OTA provisioning for the wearable devices via BLE and oneM2M. We focus on two BLE communication methods: (1) Interworking Proxy Application Entity (IPE) and (2) 6LoWPAN over BLE, and evaluating and comparing these two BLE communication methods for the OTA provisioning by investigating the performance metrics of each. Our research objective is to determine the best suitable design for the OTA provisioning.

In this research, we have extended our initial effort in cloud-based IoT/M2M system scalability and developed a more robust solution by considering diverse QoS requirements from various IoT/M2M traffic patterns. Though our initial effort created a highly scalable architecture for IoT/M2M platforms based on OpenStack, it treated all IoT/M2M traffic without any discrepancy in the same underlying network (i.e. in the same network slice). Now, by leveraging software-defined networking in OpenStack and by using our traffic-slice optimal matching algorithm, we can direct different types of IoT traffic to feasible network slices in terms of QoS. Our experiments show that when compared with a system without network slicing, our scalability system performs better in terms of response time, power consumption, and computational cost.

Virtualizing the EPC (Evolved Packet Core) in modern carrier-grade networks provides more flexible and reliable network services by decoupling dependence on the hardware. Hy- pervisor and container are two popular virtualization techniques nowadays to enable virtualization of EPC. In this paper, we compared the Open5GCore, a 5G EPC prototype, over KVM and Docker, which are representatives of the hypervisor and container techniques. Moreover, to verify how each supports new services for Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, we also analyze the performance of two systems with the IoT and M2M traffic generated by Open5GMTC, a prototype tool for IoT/M2M platforms.

The IoT/M2M service providers need security mechanisms to avoid illegal usage of the service. Normally, this can be accomplished by using the certificate to authenticate the device before providing the service. In this paper, we consider the situation where a malicious user attempts to pay only for the service of a device but deploy the same certificate for many other devices to access the service illegally. To address this problem of duplicate certificates, we design two prevention mechanisms on top of the security framework defined in the oneM2M standard. Furthermore, we implement these two protection mechanisms on the OM2M platform and evaluate them in terms of their cost and performance in order to find the most suitable one for service providers.

The emerging of M2M communications enables many new applications such as smart grid, connected vehicle, eHealth and smart city. The telecom network is an ideal environment to support the implementation of these applications. However, the property of M2M communications is very different from that of traditional telecomm. Consequently, charging models designed for traditional telecomm such as pricing by amount of data transfer are no longer adequate for M2M communications. More general charging models are needed to accommodate new charging factors identified for M2M communications. With appropriate charging models, the amount of resources consumed by M2M communications can be assessed fairly and charged accordingly. This paper proposes general charging models for M2M communications based on two innovative ingredients: charging factors and pricing parameters.

International standards such as ETSI SmartM2M and oneM2M have defined a client-server model as the common service architecture for IoT/M2M systems. Moreover, the IoT/M2M servers are normally provisioned in a cloud environment. This paper proposes a highly scalable architecture for all such cloud-based IoT/M2M systems. The uniqueness of our architecture is the incorporation of a Master Node in the cloud that is aware of system resources and incoming traffic so that it not only can dynamically decide load balancing policies but also proactively react to scalability needs. When compared with other cloud implementations without such a Master Node, our proposed system achieves faster response time and lower energy consumption.

Many Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have been used in applications for money flow, logistics flow, people flow, interactive art design, and so on. To manage these increasing disparate devices and connectivity options, ETSI has specified end-to-end machine-to-machine (M2M) system architecture for IoT applications. Based on this architecture, we develop an IoT EasyConnect system to manage IoT devices. In our approach, an IoT device is characterized by its “features” (e.g., temperature, vibration, and display) that are manipulated by the network applications. If a network application handles the individual device features independently, then we can write a software module for each device feature, and the network application can be simply constructed by including these brick-like device feature modules. Based on the concept of device feature, brick-like software modules can provide simple and efficient mechanism to develop IoT device applications and interactions.

Long Term Evolution (LTE) has been widely adopted by many 4G network operators. Many countries in America, Europe, and Asia have started LTE services since 2010. In the meantime, some countries (such as Taiwan and China) are in the process of transferring from 3G or Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) to 4G services. In this paper, we investigate the tariff plans of the nine telecommunications operators which own top-three market shares in Singapore, Japan, and Hong Kong, respectively. Several issues, such as market share, tariff strategy, and even customs are discussed. Also, Tier-pricing strategies of LTE, such as Fair Use Policy (FUP), monthly data allowance, and data overage allowance, are discussed and compared. Moreover, we compare different charging plans and examine their price-performance ratios.

Uncertainty is a key factor that prevents a commuter from using public transportation system. More and more transportation agencies are incorporating real-time Trip Planners to empower commuters with opportune information. However, such systems require continuous status updates from the vehicles and involves expensive communication cost. In this paper we propose an architecture that takes advantage of Machine-to-Machine Communication concepts and provides a degree of intelligence to the vehicles, to alleviate unnecessary communication between the vehicles and the Trip Planner.

A common service platform is considered as the key enabler to catalyze the development of IoT/M2M applications for a large variety of vertical markets such as smart energy, smart transportation, home and industry automation, eHealth and connected vehicles. This paper reports an initial effort at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan with such an experimental approach. We first train our graduate students with an ETSI M2M architecture-compliant service platform OpenMTC from FOKUS, and then charter them with the tasks of developing diverse M2M applications. The effort is used as a feasibility study to investigate how useful the notion of a common service platform for IoT/M2M is and how urgent an international standard is required in defining such a platform. We intend to use the result of the study to create a suitable IoT/M2M curriculum for our students.

The combination of cloud computing, ad hoc networking and proliferation of wireless devices and sensors will be the most significant disruptive technology to transform the way next generation services are supplied and consumed in the communications industry since the introduction of Internet. In this next generation service marketplace, service brokering is emerging as a promising low-risk business model for offering new and value-added services through cross provider service delivery and partnership. The paper presents a service brokering architecture possessing the capabilities necessary to support a service delivery infrastructure for integration, delivery and management of composite services in a multi-provider heterogeneous networks environment.

The NGN (Next Generation Network), which can provide advanced multimedia services over an all-IP based network, has been the subject of considerable attention for several years. While there have been tremendous efforts to develop its architecture and protocols, especially for IMS, a key technology of the NGN, its wide deployment is still a long way off. However, efforts to create an advanced signaling infrastructure able to meet many requirements have resulted in a large number of functional components and interactions between these components. Thus, the carriers are trying to explore effective ways to deploy IMS while offering value-added services. As one such approach, we have proposed a self-organizing IMS. A self-organizing IMS enables IMS functional components and corresponding physical nodes to adapt dynamically and automatically based on actual conditions such as network load and available system resources while continuing IMS operation. To realize this, service continuity for users is an important requirement when a reconfiguration occurs during operation. In this paper, we propose a mechanism that will provide service continuity to users without any impact on clients by extending the SBC (Session Border Controller). Furthermore, we implement it, show its behavior and evaluate its processing time.

Web services are rapidly becoming the technology of choice for integrating distributed application components in heterogeneous computing environments. In this paper, we present a novel e-commerce prototype application that itself would not be feasible without the leverage provided by underlying Web services technologies for flexible design and rapid prototyping. The application is a model-driven service brokerage that allows service providers to model, advertise, validate, and create a wide range of services (e.g. Internet access services such as DSL, cable, video-on-demand, etc) in an open marketplace in an automated fashion. The application answers real needs expressed by today's large service providers and goes beyond the current state-of-the-art in online communication marketplaces. It consists of several functional components, i.e. a service dependency modeling tool, brokerage engine, location services, and workflow engine - that have been independently developed on diverse platforms, e.g., J2EE, .NET. To efficiently integrate these components, we have designed a distributed Web services architecture, in which one Web service functions as a "hub" between previously disconnected components, another works as a "wrapper" of legacy data systems, while another "orchestrates" invocations of these services. Use of Web services has enabled parallel and independent development and testing, greatly increasing productivity and reducing time to get the system operational. It has also fostered the development of new brokerage features, which would have been difficult to plan without first experimenting with a "live" system.

Conventional telecommunication software components are mainly developed using message passing as the underlying communication mechanisms. Recent standards on modern distributed systems, exemplified by CORBA and DCE, however, have converged to a new programming paradigm based on the client/server architecture, object-oriented model, and remote procedure calls (RPCs). In the near future, we envision the coexistence of conventional and CORBA or DCE-based telecommunication software components. As a result, protocol converters between the network components using a message-oriented protocol and the ones using RPCs have become an important issue. This paper addresses how to interwork these two different communication paradigms using a signalling adaptor (SA), which is a protocol converter for enabling seamless communications between message-based systems and object-oriented, RPC-based systems.

We propose an integrated methodology for specifying AIN (advanced intelligent networks) and switch based features and analyzing their interactions in the AIN 0.1 framework. The specification of each individual feature is tied to the AIN call model and requires only a minimum amount of information in terms of control and data for interaction analysis. Once a feature is specified, its specification is then validated for consistency with respect to control and data. Interaction analysis is conducted for a set of features based on the sharing of call variables between the SSP and the SCP. With this approach, one can detect the following interactions involving AIN features: (1) side effects, where a call variable modified by one feature is used by another feature and (2) disabling, where one feature disconnects a call, preventing another feature from execution. We also develop a theory that is based on the computation of sequences of messages exchanged between the SSP and the SCP and their call variable usage. This theory is shown to dramatically reduce the number of cases considered during the analysis. A brief overview of a tool that makes use of this methodology to aid in the task of feature interaction detection is also given.

Errors such as deadlock and race conditions are very common yet extremely difficult to debug in the communications design of client/server models based on remote procedure calls and multi-threading. This paper presents an effective approach to detecting these errors. It shows how to apply the specification and validation techniques used in protocol engineering to discover those errors in the early stages of a client/server software development. The work is based on the protocol specification and validation tool PROMELA/SPIN. PROMELA is extended to a new language called PROMELA-C/S for additional expressive power of specifying client/server communications. A PROMELA-C/S translator is built to convert PROMELA-C/S to PROMELA for validation using SPIN. The paper also reports the results of some specification and validation trials using PROMELA-C/S, its translator, and SPIN.>