Controlling Drones from 5G Networks (original) (raw)
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Utilizing Network Function Virtualization for Drone-based Networks
GLOBECOM 2020 - 2020 IEEE Global Communications Conference, 2020
The emerging use of drones to support communication infrastructure and to deploy temporary networks in emergency scenarios is under active research. In this paper, we consider virtualizing drones’ computing resources when deploying drone networks by utilizing Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) to process and deliver mission-related data traffic. This is aimed at cases where off loading and processing traffic to the cloud is not an option due to the unavailability of terrestrial and satellite communications. After discussing possible applications, we propose and evaluate a scheme for the deployment and placement of a drone network as well as the VNFs needed to deliver a set of traffics flowing from different locations in the task area.
NFV Orchestration Platform for 5G over On-the-fly Provisioned Infrastructure
IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)
Multiple services with heterogeneous characteristics are anticipated with fifth generation of mobile communications (5G). Each requires an infrastructure tuned to serve requirements. To maintain affordability, operators will provide these services over a common infrastructure. We talk about provisioning Network Slices that are tailored to demands. A slice is a logical network built using Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) that are enabled by leveraging Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Orchestration is key for saving costs when tailoring infrastructures due to scarcity of resources. It enables operators to supply infrastructure with resources, meeting exactly with demands. In this demo, we present an on-the-fly provisioned cluster used to provision 5G Core Network (CN) as a Service (CNaaS). Our platform is designed for high-availability with self-healing feature. It uses Docker Swarm as orchestrator and Open Air Interface (OAI) for virtualizing the CN. We demonstrate resiliency, and the effortless on-demand scaling or orchestrated auto-scaling using bin-packing or spreading strategies for achieving elasticity.
Cellular network technologies have evolved to support the ever-increasing wireless data traffic, which results from the rapidly-evolving Internet and widely-adopted cloud applications over wireless networks. However, hardware-based designs, which rely on closed and inflexible architectures of current cellular systems, make a typical 10-year cycle for a new generation of wireless networks to be standardized and deployed. To overcome this limitation, the concept of software-defined networking (SDN) has been proposed to efficiently create centralized network abstraction with the provisioning of programmability over the entire network. Moreover, the complementary concept of network function virtualization (NFV) has been further proposed to effectively separate the abstraction of functionalities from the hardware by decoupling the data forwarding plane from the control plane. These two concepts provide cellular networks with the needed flexibility to evolve and adapt according to the ever-changing network context and introduce wireless software-defined networks (W-SDNs) for 5G cellular systems. Thus, there is an urgent need to study the fundamental architectural principles underlying a new generation of software-defined cellular network as well as the enabling technologies that supports and manages such emerging architecture. In this paper, first, the state-of-the-art W-SDNs solutions along with their associated NFV techniques are surveyed. Then, the key differences among these W-SDN solutions as well as their limitations are highlighted. To counter those limitations, SoftAir, a new SDN architecture for 5G cellular systems, is introduced. tural designs. Such inflexible hardware-based architectures typically lead to a 10-year cycle for a new generation of wireless networks to be standardized and deployed, impose significant challenges into adopting new wireless networking technologies to maximize the network capacity and coverage, and prevent the provision of truly-differentiated services able to adapt to increasingly growing, uneven, and highly variable traffic patterns. In particular, for 5G cellular system requirements, the ultra high capacity should have 1000-fold capacity/km 2 compared to LTE, the user-plane latency should be less than 1ms over the radio access network (RAN), and http://dx.
Softwarization of UAV Networks: A Survey of Applications and Future Trends
IEEE Access
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become increasingly important in assisting 5G and beyond 5G (B5G) mobile networks. Indeed, UAVs have all the potentials to both satisfy the ever-increasing mobile data demands of such mobile networks and provide ubiquitous connectivity to different kinds of wireless devices. However, the UAV assistance paradigm faces a set of crucial issues and challenges. For example, the network management of current UAV-assisted systems is time consuming, complicated, and carried out manually, thus causing a multitude of interoperability issues. To efficiently address all these issues, Software-Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are two promising technologies to efficiently manage and improve the UAV assistance for the next generation of mobile networks. In the literature, no clear guidelines are describing the different use cases of SDN and NFV in the context of UAV assistance to terrestrial networks, including mobile networks. Motivated by this fact, in this survey, we guide the reader through a comprehensive discussion of the main characteristics of SDN and NFV technologies. Moreover, we provide a thorough analysis of the different classifications, use cases, and challenges related to UAV-assisted systems. We then discuss SDN/NFV-enabled UAV-assisted systems, along with several case studies and issues, such as the involvement of UAVs in cellular communications, monitoring, and routing, to name a few. We furthermore present a set of open research challenges, high-level insights, and future research directions related to UAV-assisted systems.
5G Applications From Vision to Reality: Multi-Operator Orchestration
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Envisioned 5G applications and services, such as Tactile Internet, Industry 4.0 use-cases, remote control of drone swarms, pose serious challenges to the underlying networks and cloud platforms. On the one hand, evolved cloud infrastructures provide the IT basis for future applications. On the other hand, networking is in the middle of a momentous revolution and important changes are mainly driven by Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN). A diverse set of cloud and network resources, controlled by different technologies and owned by cooperating or competing providers, should be coordinated and orchestrated in a novel way in order to enable future applications and fulfill application level requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel cross domain orchestration system which provides wholesale XaaS (Anything as a Service) services over multiple administrative and technology domains. Our goal is threefold. First, we design a novel orchestration system exploiting a powerful information model and propose a versatile embedding algorithm with advanced capabilities as a key enabler. The main features of the architecture include i) efficient and multipurpose service embedding algorithms which can be implemented based on graph models, ii) inherent multidomain support, iii) programmable aggregation of different resources, iv) information hiding together with flexible delegation of certain requirements enabling multi-operator use-cases, and v) support for legacy technologies. Second, we present our proof-of-concept prototype implementing the proposed system. Third, we establish a dedicated test environment spanning across multiple European sites encompassing sandbox environments from both operators and the academia in order to evaluate the operation of the system. Dedicated experiments confirm the feasibility and good scalability of the whole framework.
A service-oriented Cloud-based management system for the Internet-of-Drones
2017 IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC)
Deploying drones over the Cloud is an emerging research area motivated by the emergence of Cloud Robotics and the Internet-of-Drones (IoD) paradigms. This paper contributes to IoD and to the deployment of drones over the cloud. It presents, Dronemap Planner, an innovative service-oriented cloud based drone management system that provides access to drones through web services (SOAP and REST), schedule missions and promotes collaboration between drones. A modular cloud proxy server was developed; it acts as a moderator between drones and users. Communication between drones, users and the Dronemap Planner cloud is provided through the MAVLink protocol, which is supported by commodity drones. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Dronemap Planner, we implemented and validated it using simulated and real MAVLink-enabled drones, and deployed it on a public cloud server. Experimental results show that Dronemap Planner is efficient in virtualizing the access to drones over the Internet, and provides developers with appropriate APIs to easily program drones 19 applications.
NFV and SDN—Key Technology Enablers for 5G Networks
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2017
Communication networks are undergoing their next evolutionary step towards 5G. The 5G networks are envisioned to provide a flexible, scalable, agile and programmable network platform over which different services with varying requirements can be deployed and managed within strict performance bounds. In order to address these challenges a paradigm shift is taking place in the technologies that drive the networks, and thus their architecture. Innovative concepts and techniques are being developed to power the next generation mobile networks. At the heart of this development lie Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networking technologies, which are now recognized as being two of the key technology enablers for realizing 5G networks, and which have introduced a major change in the way network services are deployed and operated. For interested readers that are new to the field of SDN and NFV this paper provides an overview of both these technologies with reference to the 5G networks. Most importantly it describes how the two technologies complement each other and how they are expected to drive the networks of near future.
Exploring Network Softwarization and Virtualization by Applying SDN/NFV to 5G and IoT
Transactions on Networks and Communications, 2018
The development trends of networking and wireless communications technologies have evolved toward Open Networking (ON), Software Defined Networks (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and Disaggregation. ON and SDN/NFV are playing the key roles for softwarization and virtualization (S&V) of next generation networks such as 5 th Generation Communications and Networks (5G) and Internet of Things (IoT). This article explores the S&V of 5G & IoT and addresses the challenging issues related to applying SDN/NFV to 5G and IoT. These issues include system performance, end-to-end interoperability, software compatibility, global deployment, integration of SDN and NFV , and shortage of talents. In addition, we describe the research and development status of adapting ON architecture and applying SDN/NFV to 5G and IoT in Taiwan. Finally we report the collaboration between National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) and networking industry in the areas of programmable switches built on top of silicon with Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processor (P4) high-level script language and prototyping an OpenAirIntrface (OAI)-based M-CORD.
Dronemap Planner: A service-oriented cloud-based management system for the Internet-of-Drones
Ad Hoc Networks
Low-cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, are increasingly gaining interest for enabling novel commercial and civil Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. However, there are still open challenges that restrain their real-world deployment. First, drones typically have limited wireless communication ranges with the ground stations preventing their control over large distances. Second, these low-cost aerial platforms have limited computation and energy resources preventing them from running heavy applications onboard. In this paper, we address this gap and we present Dronemap Planner (DP), a service-oriented cloud-based drone management system that controls, monitors and communicates with drones over the Internet. DP allows seamless communication with the drones over the Internet, which enables their control anywhere and anytime without restriction on distance. In addition, DP provides access to cloud computing resources for drones to offload heavy computations. It virtualizes the access to drones through Web services (SOAP and REST), schedules their missions, and promotes collaboration between drones. DP supports two communication protocols: (i.) the MAVLink protocol, which is a lightweight message marshaling protocol supported by commodities Ardupilot-based drones. (ii.) the ROSLink protocol, which is a communication protocol that we developed to integrate Robot Operating System (ROS)-enabled robots into the IoT. We present several applications and proof-of-concepts that were developed using DP. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DP through a performance evaluation study using a real drone for a real-time tracking application.
Orchestration of IT/Cloud and Networks: From Inter-DC Interconnection to SDN/NFV 5G Services
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2016
The so-called 5G networks promise to be the foundations for the deployment of advanced services, conceived around the joint allocation and use of heterogeneous resources, including network, computing and storage. Resources are placed on remote locations constrained by the different service requirements, resulting in cloud infrastructures (as pool of resources) that need to be interconnected. The automation of the provisioning of such services relies on a generalized orchestration, defined as to the coherent coordination of heterogeneous systems, applied to common cases such as involving heterogeneous network domains in terms of control or data plane technologies, or cloud and network resources. Although cloud-computing platforms do take into account the need to interconnect remote virtual machine instances, mostly rely on managing L2 overlays over L3 (IP). The integration with transport networks is still not fully achieved, including leveraging the advances in software defined networks and transmission. We start with an overview of network orchestration, considering different models; we extend them to take into account cloud management while mentioning relevant existing initiatives and conclude with the NFV architecture.