The recent adaption of virtualization technologies in the next generation mobile network enables 5G base station to be segregated into a Radio Unit (RU), a Distributed Unit (DU), and a Central Unit (CU) to support Cloud based Radio Access Networks (C-RAN). RU and DU are connected through a fronthaul link. In contrast, CU and DU are connected through a midhaul link. Although virtualization of CU gives benefits of centralization to the operators, there are other issues to be solved such as optimization of midhaul bandwidth and computing resources at edge cloud and central cloud where the DUs and CUs are deployed, respectively. In this paper, we propose a dynamic functional split selection for the DUs in 5G C-RAN by adopting to traffic heterogeneity where the midhaul bandwidth is limited. We propose an optimization problem that maximizes the centralization of the C-RAN system by operating more number of DUs on split Option-7 by changing the channel bandwidth of the DUs. The dynamic selection of split options among each CU-DU pair gives 90% centralization over the static functional split for a given midhaul bandwidth.
Detecting the anomalous behavior of traffic is one of the important actions for network operators. In this study, we applied term frequency - inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), which is a popular method used in natural language processing, to detect unusual behavior from network access logs. We mapped the term and document concept to the port number and daily access history, respectively, and calculated the TF-IDF. With this approach, we could obtain ports frequently observed in fewer days compared to other port access activities. Such access behaviors are not always malicious activities; ho…
Filtering packet traffic and rules of permit/denial of data packets into network nodes are granted by facilitating Access Control Lists (ACL). This paper proposes a procedure of adding a link load threshold value to the access control list rules option, which acts on the basis of threshold value. The ultimate goal of this enhanced ACL is to avoid congestion in targeted subnetworks. The link load threshold value allows to decide that packet traffic is rerouted by the router to avoid congestion, or packet drop happens on the basis of packet priorities. The packet rerouting in case of high traffi…
Current practice of shaping subscriber traffic based on token bucket by Internet service provider (ISP) allows short-term fluctuations in its shaped rate and thereby enables a subscriber to transmit traffic at a higher rate than a negotiated long-term average. The traffic shaping, however, results in significant waste of network resources, especially when there are only a few active subscribers, because it cannot allocate excess bandwidth to active subscribers in the long term. In this letter we investigate the long-term aspect of resource sharing in ISP traffic control for shared access netwo…
Traffic shaping is a mechanism used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to limit subscribers' traffic based on their service contracts. This paper investigates the current implementation of traffic shaping based on the token bucket filter (TBF), discusses its advantages and disadvantages, and proposes a cooperative TBF that can improve subscribers' quality of service (QoS)/quality of experience (QoE) without compromising business aspects of the service contract model by proportionally allocating excess bandwidth from inactive subscribers to active ones based on the long-term bandwidths per th…
Traffic demand in the access has grown in the last years, and service providers need to upgrade their infrastructure to the latest access standards. While fiber has become the preferred technology of choice in access networks, there are many fibre access technologies available in the market. This poses a challenging question to operators not always easy to answer: how to upgrade? what technology and for how long it will cope with the demands? In this paper we model the traffic forecast in the access for the next decade and analyze possible upgrade scenarios of fibre access networks, concluding…
The problem of wireless M2M communication is twofold: the reliability aspect and the scalability aspect. The solution of this problem demands a delay constrained random access protocol. To this end we propose Admission Control based Traffic Agnostic Delay Constrained Random Access (AC/DC-RA) protocol. Our main contribution is enabling the stochastic delay constraints agnostic to the traffic, such that the stochastic delay constraint is valid with respect to varying number of arrivals. We achieve this with an admission control decision that uses a novel collision estimation algorithm for active…
Open-access domestic broadband connection sharing constitutes a voluntary practice that is associated with societal, economic and public-safety benefits. Despite this fact, broadband subscribers are usually hesitant to freely share their broadband connection with guests for a multitude of reasons; one of them being sharing their network might hinder their own broadband quality of experience. In this paper, we investigate experimentally the impact of uplink guest traffic on the sharer's broadband quality of experience under both generic and broadband-sharing-specific packet scheduling policies.…
In shared access shaping subscriber traffic based on token bucket by ISPs wastes network resources when there are few active subscribers, because it cannot allocate excess bandwidth in the long term. To address it, traffic control schemes based on core-stateless fair queueing (CSFQ) and token bucket meters (TBMs) have been proposed, which can allocate excess bandwidth among active subscribers proportional to their token generation rates. Using FIFO queue for all packets, however, degrades the short-term performance of conformant traffic due to the presence of non-conformant packets already in …
We consider a cognitive shared access scheme consisting of a high priority primary node and a low priority network with $N$ secondary nodes accessing the spectrum. Assuming bursty traffic at the primary node, saturated queues at the secondary nodes, and multipacket reception capabilities at the receivers, we derive analytical expressions of the time average age of information of the primary node and the throughput of the secondary nodes. We formulate two optimization problems, the first aiming to minimize the time average age of information of the primary node subject to an aggregate secondary…
Dramatic mobile data traffic growth has spurred a dense deployment of small cell base stations (SCBSs). Small cells enhance the spectrum efficiency and thus enlarge the capacity of mobile networks. Although SCBSs consume much less power than macro BSs (MBSs) do, the overall power consumption of a large number of SCBSs is phenomenal. As the energy harvesting technology advances, base stations (BSs) can be powered by green energy to alleviate the on-grid power consumption. For mobile networks with high BS density, traffic load balancing is critical in order to exploit the capacity of SCBSs. To f…
We propose a configuration scheme for a load-balancing Clos-network packet switch that has split central modules and buffers in between the split modules. Our split-central-buffered Load-Balancing Clos-network (LBC) switch is cell based. The switch has four stages, namely input, central-input, central-output, and output stages. The proposed configuration scheme uses a pre-determined and periodic interconnection pattern in the input and split central modules to load-balance and route traffic. The LBC switch has low configuration complexity. The operation of the switch includes a mechanism appli…
To optimize the flow of traffic in IP networks, operators do traffic engineering (TE), i.e., tune routing-protocol parameters in response to traffic demands. TE in IP networks typically involves configuring static link weights and splitting traffic between the resulting shortest-paths via the Equal-Cost-MultiPath (ECMP) mechanism. Unfortunately, ECMP is a notoriously cumbersome and indirect means for optimizing traffic flow, often leading to poor network performance. Also, obtaining accurate knowledge of traffic demands as the input to TE is elusive, and traffic conditions can be highly variab…
Accurate estimation of licensed channel Primary User's (PU) temporal statistics is important for Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) systems. With accurate estimation of the mean duty cycle, u, and the mean off- and on-times of PUs, DSA systems can more efficiently assign PU resources to its subscribers, thus, increasing channel utilization. This paper presents a mathematical analysis of the accuracy of estimating u, as well as the PU mean off- and on-times, where the estimation accuracy is expressed as the mean squared estimation error. The analysis applies for the traffic model assuming exponentia…
State-of-the-art Internet traffic engineering uses source-based explicit routing via MPLS or Segment Routing. Though widely adopted in practice, source routing can face certain inefficiencies and operational issues, caused by its use of bandwidth reservations. In this work, we make the case for Hop-by-Hop (HBH) Traffic Engineering: splitting traffic among nexthops at every router, rather than splitting traffic among paths only at edge routers. We show that HBH traffic engineering can achieve the original goals of MPLS (i.e., efficient use of network resources), with a much simpler design that …
Many current and future multimedia and industrial applications, like video streaming, eXtended Reality or remote robot control, are characterized by periodic data transmissions with strict latency and reliability constraints. In an effort to meet the stringent demand of such traffic sources, the WiGig standards support a contention-free channel access mechanism, named Service Period, that makes it possible to allocate dedicated time intervals to certain wireless stations. However, the standard only covers the fundamental aspects that ensure interoperability, while the actual schedule logic is …
Traffic-Adaptive Per-Hop Multipath Routing in Multi-Hop UAV Networks
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；China Mobile Zijin (Jiangsu) Innovation Research Institute（中国移动紫金（江苏）创新研究院）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦大学玛丽女王学院）；China Telecom Beijing Research Institute（中国电信北京研究院）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）
Dual Connectivity (DC) is a technique proposed to address the problem of increased handovers in heterogeneous networks. In DC, a foreground User Equipment (UE) with multiple transceivers has a possibility to connect to a Macro eNodeB (MeNB) and a Small cell eNodeB (SeNB) simultaneously. In downlink split bearer architecture of DC, a data radio bearer at MeNB gets divided into two; one part is forwarded to the SeNB through a non-ideal backhaul link to the UE, and the other part is forwarded by the MeNB. This may lead to an increase in the total delay at the UE since different packets correspond…
Mobile nodes are typically equipped with multiple radios and can connect to multiple radio access networks (e.g. WiFi, LTE and 5G). Consequently, it is important to design mechanisms that efficiently manage multiple network interfaces for aggregating the capacity, steering of traffic flows or switching flows among multiple interfaces. While such multi-access solutions have the potential to increase the overall traffic throughput and communication reliability, the variable latencies on different access links introduce packet delay variation which has negative effect on the application quality o…
The ability to perform traffic differentiation is a promising feature of the current Medium Access Control (MAC) in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). The Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol for WLANs proposes up to four Access Categories (AC) that can be mapped to different traffic priorities. High priority ACs are allowed to transmit more often than low priority ACs, providing a way of prioritising delay sensitive traffic like voice calls or video streaming. Further, EDCA also considers the intricacies related to the management of multiple queues, virtual collisions and tr…
Random access schemes in modern wireless communications are generally based on the framed-ALOHA (f-ALOHA), which can be optimized by flexibly organizing devices' transmission and re-transmission. However, this optimization is generally intractable due to the lack of information about complex traffic generation statistics and the occurrence of the random collision. In this article, we first summarize the general structure of access control optimization for different random access schemes, and then review the existing access control optimization based on Machine Learning (ML) and non-ML techniqu…
Traffic load balancing and resource allocation is set to play a crucial role in leveraging the dense and increasingly heterogeneous deployment of multi-radio wireless networks. Traffic aggregation across different access points (APs)/radio access technologies (RATs) has become an important feature of recently introduced cellular standards on LTE dual connectivity and LTE-WLAN aggregation (LWA). Low complexity traffic splitting solutions for scenarios where the APs are not necessarily collocated are of great interest for operators. In this paper, we consider a scenario, where traffic for each u…
Shaping subscriber traffic based on token bucket filter (TBF) by Internet service providers (ISPs) results in waste of network resources in shared access when there are few active subscribers, because it cannot allocate excess bandwidth in the long term. New traffic control schemes have been recently proposed to allocate excess bandwidth among active subscribers proportional to their token generation rates. In this paper we report the current status of our research on designing flexible yet practical service plans exploiting excess bandwidth allocation enabled by the new traffic control scheme…
Machine-to-machine services are witnessing an unprecedented diffusion, which is expected to result in an ever-increasing data traffic load. In this context, satellite technology is playing a pivotal role, since it enables a widespread provisioning of machine-to-machine services. In particular, oil industry, maritime communications, as well as remote monitoring are sectors where the use of satellite communications is expected to dramatically explode within the next few years. In the light of this sudden increase of machine-to-machine data transported over satellite, a more thorough understandin…
This paper proposes AFMT, a packet scheduling algorithm to achieve adaptive flow-aware multipath tunnelling. AFMT has two unique properties. Firstly, it implements robust adaptive traffic splitting for the subtunnels. Secondly, it detects and schedules bursts of packets cohesively, a scheme that already enabled traffic splitting for load balancing with little to no packet reordering. Several NS-3 experiments over different network topologies show that AFMT successfully deals with changing path characteristics due to background traffic while increasing throughput and reliability.
Network slicing enabled by fifth generation (5G) systems has the potential to satisfy diversified service requirements from different vertical industries. As a typical vertical industry, smart distribution grid poses new challenges to communication networks. This paper investigates the behavior of network slicing for smart grid applications in 5G radio access networks with heterogeneous traffic. To facilitate network slicing in such a network, we employ different 5G radio access numerologies for two traffic classes which have distinct radio resource and quality of service requirements. Three m…
An All-Optical Metro Network Architecture and QoS-Aware Wavelength Allocation Study for Converged Fixed, Mobile, and Edge Computing Multi-Granular Traffic
The current practice of shaping subscriber traffic using a token bucket filter by Internet service providers may result in a severe waste of network resources in shared access networks; except for a short period of time proportional to the size of a token bucket, it cannot allocate excess bandwidth among active subscribers even when there are only a few active subscribers. To better utilize the network resources in shared access networks, therefore, we recently proposed and analyzed the performance of access traffic control schemes, which can allocate excess bandwidth among active subscribers …
We study the problem of medium access control in domain of event-driven wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this kind of WSN, sensor nodes send data to sink node only when an event occurs in the monitoring area. The nodes in this kind of WSNs encounter correlated traffic as a subset of nodes start sending data by sensing a common event simultaneously. We wish to rethink of medium access control (MAC) for this type of traffic characteristics. For WSNs, many existing MAC protocols utilize the basic CSMA/CA strategy such as IEEE 802.11 Binary Exponential Backoff (BEB) algorithm to handle the coll…
With onboard operating systems becoming increasingly common in vehicles, the real-time broadband infotainment and Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) service applications in fast-motion vehicles become ever demanding, which are highly expected to significantly improve the efficiency and safety of our daily on-road lives. The emerging ITS and vehicular applications, e.g., trip planning, however, require substantial efforts on the real-time pervasive information collection and big data processing so as to provide quick decision making and feedbacks to the fast moving vehicles, which thus imp…
This paper describes a content centric network architecture which uses software defined networking principles to implement efficient metadata driven services by extracting content metadata at the network layer. The ability to access content metadata transparently enables a number of new services in the network. Specific examples discussed here include: a metadata driven traffic engineering scheme which uses prior knowledge of content length to optimize content delivery, a metadata driven content firewall which is more resilient than traditional firewalls and differentiated treatment of content…
Recent studies on the practice of shaping subscribers' traffic by ISPs give a new insight into the actual performance of broadband access networks at a packet level. Unlike metro and backbone networks, however, access networks directly interface with end-users, so it is important to base the study and design of access networks on the behaviors of and the actual performance perceived by end-users. In this paper we study the effect of ISP traffic shaping using traffic models based on user behaviors and application/session-layer metrics providing quantifiable measures of user-perceived performanc…
Nowadays, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) traffic rate is increasing at a fast pace. The use of satellites is expected to play a large role in delivering such a traffic. In this work, we investigate the use of two of the most common M2M/IoT protocols stacks on a satellite Random Access (RA) channel, based on DVB-RCS2 standard. The metric under consideration is the completion time, in order to identify the protocol stack that can provide the best performance level.
Wireless interconnection has emerged as an energy efficient solution to the challenges of multi-hop communication over the wireline paths in conventional Networks-on-Chips (NoCs). However, to ensure the full benefits of this novel interconnect technology, design of simple, fair and efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism to grant access to the on-chip wireless communication channel is needed. Moreover, to adapt to the varying traffic demands from the applications running on a multicore environment, MAC mechanisms should dynamically adjust the transmission slots of the wireless interfac…
As passive optical networks (PON) are increasingly deployed to provide high speed Internet access, it is important to understand their fundamental traffic capacity limits. The paper discusses performance models applicable to wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) EPONs and GPONs under the assumption that users access the fibre via optical network units equipped with tunable transmitters. The considered stochastic models are based on multiserver polling systems for which explicit analytical results are not known. A large system asymptotic, mean-field approximation, is used to derive closed form…
The availability of different paths to communicate to a user or device introduces several benefits, from boosting enduser performance to improving network utilization. Hybrid access is a first step in enabling convergence of mobile and fixed networks, however, despite traffic optimization, this approach is limited as fixed and mobile are still two separate core networks inter-connected through an aggregation point. On the road to 5G networks, the design trend is moving towards an aggregated network, where different access technologies share a common anchor point in the core. This enables furth…
Passive optical networks are increasingly used for access to the Internet and it is important to understand the performance of future long-reach, multi-channel variants. In this paper we discuss requirements on the dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) algorithm used to manage the upstream resource in a WDM EPON and propose a simple novel DBA algorithm that is considerably more efficient than classical approaches. We demonstrate that the algorithm emulates a multi-server polling system and derive capacity formulas that are valid for general traffic processes. We evaluate delay performance by simu…
Software Defined Networking (SDN) can effectively improve the performance of traffic engineering and has promising application foreground in backbone networks. Therefore, new energy saving schemes must take SDN into account, which is extremely important considering the rapidly increasing energy consumption from Telecom and ISP networks. At the same time, the introduction of SDN in a current network must be incremental in most cases, for both technical and economic reasons. During this period, operators have to manage hybrid networks, where SDN and traditional protocols coexist. In this paper, …
To meet the surging demand of increasing mobile Internet traffic from diverse applications while maintaining moderate energy cost, the radio access network (RAN) of cellular systems needs to take a green path into the future, and the key lies in providing elastic service to dynamic traffic demands. To achieve this, it is time to rethink RAN architectures and expect breakthroughs. In this article, we review the state-of-art literature which aims to renovate RANs from the perspectives of control-traffic decoupled air interface, cloud-based RANs, and software-defined RANs. We then propose a softw…
We experimentally demonstrate real-time, end-to-end transmission of 3GPP's option 2 functional split RAN interface with virtualized central units through up to 20km using a 20Gbit/s PAM4 link and 10GHz bandwidth optics.
Coexistence of 3GPP access networks, namely 4G and 5G, and non-3GPP access networks, namely Wi-Fi, has enabled data offloading from one access network to another to reduce burden on the congested network. Within the evolution of 5G system, the coexistence has been evolved to a multi-access framework where simultaneous transmission on both 3GPP and non-3GPP access networks has been enabled. This framework is named as access traffic steering, splitting and switching (ATSSS) in 3GPP and is considered as one of the key enablers to provide stringent requirements on data rate and service continuity.…
We study a problem of scheduling real-time traffic with hard delay constraints in an unreliable wireless channel. Packets arrive at a constant rate to the network and have to be delivered within a fixed number of slots in a fading wireless channel. For an infrastructure mode of traffic with a centralized scheduler, we are interested in the long time average throughput achievable for the real time traffic. In [1], the authors have stud- ied the feasible throughput vectors by identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions using work load characterization. In our work, we provide a character…
Encrypted traffic poses new and unique challenges for network operators because information that is useful or necessary for management purposes is not accessible anymore. This paper examines proposed approaches to provide end-to-end encryption as well as ways to provide the access to the needed information for network management. The two main approaches we consider are 1.- extending and adapting a widely deployed protocol such as TLS, so that information necessary for network management can be obtained; and 2.- introducing a new protocol layer, such as PLUS, that contains the necessary informa…
In this work, we experimentally assess the transmission of a PDCP-RLC virtualised RAN split interface through a commercial XGS-PON system. We investigate the impacts of DBA on the uplink and packet jitter on the downlink.
In order to closely simulate the real network scenario thereby verify the effectiveness of protocol designs, it is necessary to model the traffic flows carried over realistic networks. Extensive studies [1] showed that the actual traffic in access and local area networks (e.g., those generated by ftp and video streams) exhibits the property of self-similarity and long-range dependency (LRD) [2]. In this appendix we briefly introduce the property of self-similarity and suggest a practical approach for modeling self-similar traces with specified traffic intensity.
We propose a coordinated random access scheme for industrial internet-of-things (IIoT) scenarios, with machine-type devices (MTDs) generating sporadic correlated traffic. This occurs, e.g., when external events trigger data generation at multiple MTDs simultaneously. Time is divided into frames, each split into slots and each MTD randomly selects one slot for (re)transmission, with probability density functions (PDFs) specific of both the MTD and the number of the current retransmission. PDFs are locally optimized to minimize the probability of packet collision. The optimization problem is mod…
Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications is one of the key enablers of the Internet of Things (IoT). Billions of devices are expected to be deployed in the next future for novel M2M applications demanding ubiquitous access and global connectivity. In order to cope with the massive number of machines, there is a need for new techniques to coordinate the access and allocate the resources. Although the majority of the proposed solutions are focused on the adaptation of the traditional cellular networks to the M2M traffic patterns, novel approaches based on the direct communication among nearby dev…
Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is currently one of the hottest technologies in wireless, it is a standard-based on the IEEE 802.16 wireless technology that provides high throughput broadband connections over long distance, which supports Point to MultiPoint (PMP) broadband wireless access. In parallel, Voice over Internet Protocol is a promising new technology which provides access to voice communication over internet protocol based network, it becomes an alternative to public switched telephone networks due to its capability of transmission of voice as packets over IP…
Due to the rapid growth of data transmissions in internet of vehicles (IoV), finding schemes that can effectively alleviate access congestion has become an important issue. Recently, many traffic control schemes have been studied. Nevertheless, the dynamics of traffic and the heterogeneous requirements of different IoV applications are not considered in most existing studies, which is significant for the random access resource allocation. In this paper, we consider a hybrid traffic control scheme and use proximal policy optimization (PPO) method to tackle it. Firstly, IoV devices are divided i…
