Telemedicine, or the ability granted to doctors to remotely assist patients has been greatly benefited by advances in IoT, network communications, Machine Learning and Edge/Cloud computing. With the impeding arrival of 5G, virtualized infrastructures and cloud-native approaches enable the execution of unprecedented procedures during such patient/doctor interactions, allowing medical professionals to e.g. request higher granularity metrics from patients' telemetry equipment, or perform on-demand data mining/processing of patient's stored data in order to provide a more educated diagnostic or prediction. In this work we coalesce the virtues of virtualized infrastructures and IoT into a solution able to satisfy increasing data processing demands for eHealth, e.g. for telemedicine applications, remote assistance or patient pre-screening procedures. The proposed platform, CURATE, leverages Network Functions Virtualisation Management and Orchestration (NFV MANO) for the on-demand instantiation of the required virtual resources on the operator's infrastructure, as well as the concept of 5G Network Slices to guarantee efficient resource allocation and tenant isolation. Results show the proposed platform is able to efficiently make use of the available hardware resources via Network Slices, as well as provide cost-effective service guarantees employing dynamic scaling operations.

As industries are under pressure for shorter business and product life cycles, there is an extensive effort from the research community for novel and profitable automation processes. This effort has given rise to the fifth-generation (5G) Tactile Internet, which is characterized by extremely low latency communication in combination with high availability, reliability, and security. In this paper, we discuss the key technologies to support the Tactile Internet characteristics in industrial environments and then showcase the implementation of a novel 5G network function virtualization enabled experimental platform. Given that ultra-reliable low-latency communication is crucial for the manufacturing process, we demonstrate that, in our setup, submillisecond end-to-end communication is attainable, proving the suitability of our platform for Tactile Internet industrial applications.

Advances in virtualisation technology have reached the mobile networking domain. Network Functions Virtualisation Management and Orchestration (NFV MANO) as proposed by ETSI and realised via Opensource MANO (OSM) allows sharing or partitioning a fairly generic pool of hardware into virtual compute, network and storage resources among differentiated services. A direct consequence of this is a dramatic reduction in CAPEX/OPEX, but also the possibility of instantaneously deploy network services across one or several Mobile Network Operators' (MNO) infrastructure. This work demonstrates how the upcoming fifth generation (5G) of mobile communications envisions NFV MANO for instantiating network services, including Core Network components, and wireless SDN controllers for enforcing end-to-end QoS policies via network slices that span from the radio access segment to the backend packet network.

Future Internet of Things (IoT) will connect to the Internet billions of heterogeneous smart devices with the capacity of interacting with the environment. Therefore, the proposed solutions from an IoT networking perspective must take into account the scalability of IoT nodes as well as the operational cost of deploying the networking infrastructure. This will generate a huge volume of data, which poses a tremendous challenge both from the transport, and processing of information point of view. Moreover, security issues appear, due to the fact that untrusted IoT devices are interconnected towards the aggregation networks. In this paper, we propose the usage of a Software- Defined Networking (SDN) framework for introducing security in IoT gateways. An experimental validation of the framework is proposed, resulting in the enforcement of network security at the network edge.

The paper explores the technical limits and possibilities to transmit live audiovisual contents in the uplink mode by means of IP networks based on WiMAX broadband system using a professional camera. A previous evaluation of the WiMAX link performances in real urban environments is tackled, and then, obtained results used to implement an Automatic Video Coding Rate Adjustment (AVCRA) algorithm that adaptively adjusts the video codec parameters to the experienced wireless channel capacity. The experimental network also contains a designed antenna small enough to be incorporated in the camera. Special considerations regarding the radiation diagram have been taken into account for not affecting the head of the proper cameraman. Obtained experimental WiMAX throughput in function of the signal to noise ratio, and the Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) levels demonstrated the feasibility of live video links over WiMAX networks in urban environment.