Damien Lavaux

System design for 5G converged networks

This paper presents high level design concepts for the control plane (C-plane) of the upcoming 5G networks, in the framework of Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC). This control plane is enabled by SDN and NFV technologies in order to offer a very flexible environment able to optimally deploy network infrastructure(s) that will cope with multiple service provisions scenarios. Furthermore, our innovative control plane will be able to support fast deployment of novel services depending on the requirements from different use case and application scenarios and enabling the operators to provide fast answers to the society challenges ahead.

Overview and optimization of flooding techniques in OLSR

During this last decade, mesh networks have experienced strong growth due to their ability to provide an additional and complementary support for existing infrastructure communication systems. In such a network, routers are supposed to be fixed for short (e.g. public safety deployment) or long (e.g. network operator extension) period. This relative stability of infrastructure makes proactive routing protocols appropriate. One of the well known proactive routing protocols is OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing), which routing decisions are based on exchanges of topology information using all-to-all flooding of local information in order for each router to build a global knowledge of the topology. This study first goal is to improve the performance of topology information flooding in OLSR by introducing network coding techniques, which leads to a decrease of signaling overhead.

Business models and multi-domain analysis for acquiring broadband PPDR systems

Availability of modern, reliable and offering a wide range of services wireless communication systems is crucial for the effective operation of Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) agencies during the emergency situations. This paper presents the elements of the financial-economic analysis for acquiring and operating PPDR communication systems by the interested entities. It deals with business model possible scenarios and discusses main financial and economic factors in acquiring PPDR systems. A software tool for multi-domain analysis of business efficiency in procuring PPDR systems, developed within the PPDR-TC EU project, and some example results obtained with it are also presented in the paper.

Tendoc: A Network Coding Video Transmission for Public Safety

This work relies on previous studies that aims at emphasizing the benefit to use Network Coding when one considers a multiple source-destination traffic pattern. This is the case of video transmission between rescue teams on an incident area. The goal of this study is to reduce bandwidth requirements, limited in the case of wireless networks but highly required for the proper functioning of the whole system. In this document, we present the architecture of TenDoc, a software that has been first designed to support any application and that has been adapted especially, here, for the video diffusion case. We also describe a use case scenario to be demonstrated. Keywords-Network coding; Public Safety

Public Safety Situation Aware Services over Cognitive Radio Networks

One of the challenging features of the TVWS for public safety operation is its variation across space and time. More specifically the available channels are not contiguous and vary from one location to another. In addition the white space available in a given location can vary with time if one or more of the TV band primary users start/stop operation. Public Safety Situation Aware services are a main concern when one strives to provide a standard overview of an incident. This standard overview aims at providing intervention information as refreshed as possible to facilitate Incident Commander/Unified Command (e.g. in the case of an European cooperative intervention that involves different Operations Center). Within this study, we propose to investigate how this service can be supported in a Cognitive Radio Network context by considering the unpredictable availability of spectrum resources. We present a Random Network Coding based technique and evaluate the performance assessment of this technique under Cognitive Radio Network assumptions. We show that even for a very restrictive radio resource access, Public Safety Situation Aware services can be fully supported without interfering with a existing primary user activity. Keywords-Common Operational Picture, Public Safety Network, Network Coding

Overview of LTE Isolated E-UTRAN Operation for Public Safety

In response to the growing demand in the public safety community for broadband communication systems, LTE is currently being adopted as the base technology for next generation public safety networks. In parallel, notable efforts are being made by the 3GPP to enhance the LTE standard in order to offer public safety oriented services. In the recent Release 13, the Isolated E-UTRAN Operation for Public Safety (IOPS) concept was introduced. IOPS aims at maintaining a level of communication between public safety users, offering them local mission-critical services even when the backhaul connectivity to the core network is not fully functional. Isolated operation is usually needed in mission-critical situations, when the infrastructure is damaged or completely destroyed, and in out of coverage areas. In this article, we present a detailed technical overview of the IOPS specifications, and then identify several research prospects and development perspectives opened up by IOPS, being a relatively novel concept in the mobile networks field.

Providing Mission-Critical Services over 5G Radio Access Network

5G is called to introduce a major transformation in communication network architectures with its transition to cloud native networks. This transformation will enable new unique service capabilities that will drive the development of innovative applications. But, for 5G being successful in this task, the identification of the vertical sectors’ requirements is of outmost importance in order to map them into the design of the network architecture. This paper proposes a novel Cloud-Enabled Radio Access Network (CE-RAN) architecture to support Public Safety services at the edge of the network. This proposal leverages Network Functions Virtualisation, Software Defined Networking and Mobile Edge Computing principles to provide Mission-Critical services through an isolated network slice. We suggest a CE-RAN architecture with two levels of cloudification to bring the service closer to the end user.

Migration Towards Broadband PPDR Networks

This paper presents a study on development and evolution of Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) com- munication networks in the perspective of the next 15-20 years. A need for modern, reliable mobile communications systems for PPDR offering a wide range of services, yet harmonized, is commonly recognized at both country and European level. There are therefore a number of activities in this area currently being undertaken. In this paper we discuss several technical aspects of migration of PPDR networks towards broadband systems and describe the most likely upgrade scenario based on an evaluation of migration costs.

Transparent IP Proxy for Tactical Ad Hoc Networks

This paper presents an adaptive and controllable framework to optimize the transport of IP packets in military MANETs. The HBH (Hop-By-Hop) protocol that we propose uses a combination of hop-by-hop reliability and congestion mitigation mechanisms. Its major advantage is to run any standard IP application unmodified on top of the network. Moreover it is able to improve flow performance in terms of latency or goodput. HBH is tunable and provides a target level of hop-by-hop reliability. It uses a transmission window and selective acknowledgements to improve bandwidth usage. We present the HBH protocol components, mechanisms and parameters. We carried out an implementation of HBH very close to a Linux implementation and validated it in the NS3 simulator. Finally, we demonstrate how HBH can improve TCP performance on a four-node chain topology by providing the right amount of additional reliability that the end-to-end TCP connection requires to overcome lossy conditions.