Tag: MCN

MCN and ICCLab Demo at EUCNC

As part of our on-going work in MobileCloud Networking the project demonstrated at this year’s EUCNC, held in a very warm (> 35*C !!!) Paris, France.

The MCN demonstration was built on top of a standard cloud infrastructure, leveraging key technologies of OpenStack and OpenShift and used (open source outputs of MCN, namely hurtle – the cloud orchestration framework of the ICCLab which is used throughout MCN to enable service delivery. Also demonstrated was the use of the ICCLab’s billing solution, Cyclops that is orchestrated using Hurtle. All of this delivers a NFV-compatible, on-demand, composed service instance.

The MobileCloud Networking (MCN) approach and architecture was demonstrated aiming to show new innovative revenue streams based on new service offerings and the optimisation of CAPEX/OPEX. Of particular note and focus, the work highlighted results of cloudifying the Radio Access Network (RAN) and delivering this capability as an on-demand service.

Supporting this focus was the composition of an end-to-end service (RAN, EPC, IMS, DNS, Monitoring & Billing) instance via the MCN dashboard. This demo service is standards compliant and features interoperable implementations of ETSI NFV, OCCI and 3GPP software.

 

MCN and ICCLab @ ACROSS COST action meeting in Würzburg

Three ICCLab members were in sunny Würzburg for the ACROSS COST action meeting last week. ACROSS stands for “Autonomous Control for a Reliable Internet of Services” and our own TMB is a member of the management committee (MC) for Switzerland.
For those of you unfamiliar with COST actions, they are an instrument for research funding from the EU that provides networking opportunities for researchers.

The meeting was spread over three days with:

  • The 1st ACROSS Open Workshop on Autonomous Control for the Internet of Services on Tuesday;
  • Task forces and Management Committee on Wednesday;
  • Plenary and work group meetings on Thursday.

The keynote speakers for the workshop gave motivating talks that spawned interesting discussions on autonomous control spanning multiple domains including mobile, compute, and application-level quality of experience (QoE). The keynote speakers were: Marco Hoffmann from Nokia Networks, Thomas Zinner from Würzburg University, and Maris van Sprang from IBM.

ICClab’s Giovanni Toffetti (that’s me!) gave a talk on the Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) project motivation and architecture. Here are the slides I used for the talk: MCN-Vision-Scope-Architecture.

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MobileCloud Networking Live @ Globecomm

As part of the on-going work in MobileCloud Networking the project will demonstrate outputs of the project at this year’s Globecomm industry-track demonstrations. Globecomm is being held this year in Austin, Texas.

MobileCloud Networking (MCN) approach and architecture will be demonstrated aiming to show new innovative revenue streams based on new service offerings and the optimisation of CAPEX/OPEX. MCN is based on a service-oriented architecture that delivering end-to-end, composed services using cloud computing and SDN technologies. This architecture is NFV compatible but goes beyond NFV to bring new improvements. The demonstration includes real implementations of telco equipment as software and cloud infrastructure, providing a relevant view on how the new virtualised environment will be implemented.

For taking the advantage of the technologies offered by cloud computing today’s communication networks has to be re-designed and adapted to the new paradigm both as developing a comprehensive service enablement platform as well as through the appropriate softwarization of network components. Within the Mobile Cloud Networking project this new paradigm has been developed, and early results are already available to be exploited to the community. In particular this demonstration aims at deploying a Mobile Core Network on a cloud infrastructure and show the automated, elastic and flexible mechanism that are offered by such technologies for typical networking services. This demonstration aims at showing how a mobile core network can be instantiated on demand on top of a standard cloud infrastructure, leveraging key technologies of OpenStack and OpenShift.

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The scenario will be as following:

  1. A tenant (Enterprise End User (EEU), in MCN terminology) – may be an MVNO or an enterprise network – requests the instantiation of a mobile core network service instance via the dashboard of the MCN Service Manager – the the service front-end where tenants can come and request the automated creation of a service instance via API or user interface. In particular the deployment of such core network will be on top of a cloud hosted in Europe. At the end of the provisioning procedures, the mobile core network endpoints will be communicated to the EEU.
  2. The EEU will have the possibility to access the Web frontend of the Home Subscriber Server (HSS) and provision new subscribers. Those subscribers information will be used also for configuring the client device (in our case a laptop).
  3. The client device will send the attachment requests to the mobile core network and establish a connectivity service. Since at the moment of the demonstration the clients will be located in the USA, there will be a VPN connection to the eNodeB emulator through which the attachment request will be sent. At the end of the attachment procedure all the data traffic will be redirected to Europe. It will be possible to show that the public IPs assigned to the subscriber are part of the IP range of the European cloud testbed.
  4. The clients attached to the network will establish a call making use of the IP Multimedia Subsystem provided by the MVNO. During the call the MVNO administrator can open the Monitoring as a Service tool provided by the MCN platform and check the current situation of the services. For this two IMS clients will be installed on the demonstration device.
  5. At the end of the demonstration it will be possible to show that the MVNO can dispose the instantiated core network and release the resources which are not anymore necessary. After this operation the MVNO will receive a bill indicating the costs for running such virtualized core network.

It specifically includes:

  • An end-to-end Service Orchestrator, managing dynamically the deployment of a set of virtual networks and of a virtual telecom platform. The service is delivered from the radiohead all the way through the core network to service delivery of IMS services. The orchestration framework is developed on an open source framework available under the Apache 2.0 license and is where the ICCLab actively develops and contributes.
  • Interoperability is guaranteed throughout the stack through the adoption of telecommunication standards (3GPPP, TMForum) and cloud computing standards (OCCI).
  • A basic monitoring system for providing momentary capacity and triggers for virtual network infrastructure adaptations. This will be part of the orchestrated composition.
  • An accounting-billing system for providing cost and billing functions back to the tenant or the provisioned service instance. This will be part of the orchestrated composition.
  • A set of virtualised network functions:
  • A realistic implementation of a 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) based on the open source OpenIMSCore
  • A realistic implementation of a virtual 3GPP EPC based on the Fraunhofer FOKUS OpenEPC toolkit,
  • An LTE emulation bases on the Fraunhofer FOKUS OpenEPC eNB implementation
  • Demonstration of IMS call establishment across the provisioned on-demand virtualised network functions.

ICCLab Presents OCCI @ Future Internet Assembly

The ICCLab presented on the latest developments (PDF) in the Open Cloud Computing Interface at the Future Internet Assembly in Dublin. The session was organised by Cloud4SOA and the main theme was MultiCloud. In this regard, OCCI figures in many projects striving from this including EGI FedCloud, CompatibleOne and BonFire. In the presentation some future points of work that will be carried out in Mobile Cloud Networking, which took the audience’s interest.

MobileCloud Networking GA Meeting in Palermo

What happens when a group of experts from the Cloud Computing space and the Mobile/Telco industry get together in a meeting room? Last week the first General Assembly Meeting for the MobileCloud Networking (MCN) project was held in Palermo, with over thirty experts joining forces for four days to deliver an excellent result. The ICCLab was present as one of the contributing partners and technical leader of the project.

After a rocky start (or better, a rocky landing) on Monday evening, the GA meeting started on Tuesday morning with an overview of the project and an open discussion about issues related to dissemination and publications. After lunch the group split into two to discuss the  use case scenarios for the MCN project and to start working on the requirements.

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On Wednesday the day started with an overview of the status of the different Work Packages, to continue then with a series of ‘deep dive’ sessions, exploring some of the technologies that will be used in the MCN project. The first session MobileCloud Infrastructural Foundations technologies, such as OpenStack, cloud monitoring and RAN virtualisation. The day ended with a pleasant tour of the city of Palermo and with a great sicilian dinner.

On Thursday morning the ‘deep dive’ sessions were resumed, with interesting talks about the Mobile Core Network components and different options to ‘cloudify’ them. In the afternoon the Mobile Platform session took place, with topics varying from IMS-as-a-Service and digital signage to SLA and Charging&Billing. Then, after a long session on Thursday night, the overall architecture was presented on Friday morning, including a deep overview of the OpenStack components. The GA meeting ended over lunch, before all the participants made their way home.

Overall it has been a great meeting with extremely competent partners and very well organised by the MCN partner Italtel. The next MCN GA Meeting will be held in Paris in June/July.

More information about the MobileCloud Networking project can be found here.

 

CFP – 1st international Workshop on Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN 2013)

1st international Workshop on Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN 2013)

http://mcn2013.unibe.ch

Organized in conjunction with IEEE International Communications Conference (ICC 2013) 9-13 June 2013, Budapest, Hungary.

The workshop will address the integration of two technologies that are  expected to have significant impact in the ICT area for the next 
decade(s): next generation mobile communication networks (mainly 4G)  and cloud computing. While mobile communication networks have been 
established decades ago and are still continuously evolving, cloud  computing became a hot topic in recent years and is expected to have 
significantly impact on novel applications as well as on ICT  infrastructures.

Cloud computing and mobile communication networks have been considered separate from each other in the past. However, there are various 
possible synergies between them. First, access to cloud storage and computing service via wireless/mobile networks should be optimized in 
terms of delay, bandwidth and energy consumption from an end user perspective. Second, there is an increasing trend to implement more 
and more functions of a mobile communication network in software, e.g., for signal and protocol processing. This enables the use of 
cloud computing infrastructures as processing platforms for signal and protocol processing of mobile communication networks, in particular 
for current (4G) and future (5G) generation networks. In particular, the integration of protocol and application/service processing enables 
several opportunities to optimize performance of cloud applications and services observed by the mobile user, whose device is connected to 
the cloud via wireless access networks. The workshop will discuss emerging technologies in cloud computing and mobile communication 
networks. Moreover, it will focus on possible integration scenarios and synergies between them.

The workshop solicits original contributions in the topics of interest for the workshop. Those topics include but are not limited to the following:
- Protocols and wireless network technologies for mobile cloud applications
- Network virtualization for mobile cloud networks
- Energy-saving at mobile end systems in network elements supporting 
mobile cloud applications
- Distributed mobility management, including mobility prediction
- Future Internet architectures and protocols for mobile cloud 
computing, including content-centric / context-based networking
- Network and protocol support for delay-tolerant applications
- Cloud computing in opportunistic networks
- Management and allocation of mobile cloud resources, including SLA 
management
- Cloud service management and migration
- Seamless handover support for mobile cloud applications
- Resource and service monitoring in mobile cloud networks
- Physical radio resource sharing
- End-to-end performance of mobile cloud applications
- Novel cloud-based implementation architectures for mobile 
communication networks
- Quality-of-Experience in mobile cloud applications
- Cloud-based applications and services for mobile users, including 
social networks
- (Participatory) sensing and mobile cloud applications, including 
data aggregation
- Security and privacy issues of mobile cloud computing, including 
authentication and authorization
- Accounting and charging of mobile cloud services
- Testbeds and performance evaluation for mobile cloud networking and 
applications

Workshop Chairs:
- Torsten Braun
- Luis M. Correia
- Georgios Karagiannis
- Edmundo Monteiro
- Almerima Jamakovic

Important Dates:
- Registration of abstract: January 4, 2013
- Manuscript submission: January 11, 2013
- Acceptance Notification: February 22, 2013
- Camera-ready: March 8, 2013

Submission Procedure:
Paper length should not exceed five-pages standard IEEE conference 
two-column format (including all text, figures, and references). You 
may use the standard IEEE Transactions templates for Microsoft Word or 
LaTeX. Alternatively you can follow the IEEE Communications Society's 
guidelines for attendees and authors. Only PDF files are accepted for 
review.

To submit the paper, use the EDAS online submission system. All 
submitted papers will go through a peer review process. All accepted 
and presented papers will be included in the IEEE ICC 2013 
proceedings. IEEE reserves the right to exclude an accepted and 
registered but not presented paper from the IEEE digital library. 
Extended versions of selected best papers will be recommended for 
publication in Special Issues of prestigious International Journal.