Julius Mueller

Design and implementation of a Carrier Grade Software Defined Telecommunication Switch and Controller

Todays Next Generation Mobile Network architecture is challenged by several limitations in regard to the performance and flexibility. Recent investigations and proposals on core network architecture improvements through applying the Software Defined Network (SDN) concepts have been published, but no implementation has been presented yet. The main contribution of this paper is the design, implementation and validation of a Carrier Grade Software Defined Telecommunication system consisting of an OpenFlow Controller (OFC), Switch (OFS) and Protocol (OFP) according to latest OpenFlow (OF) standards and optimized for an 3GPP Evolved Packet Core (EPC). This paper first presents related work, positions contributions of this paper against the State of the Art and identifies important requirements for a new telecommunication network architecture. Secondly as a main contribution, the specifications of Software Defined Telecommunication OFC, OFS and OFP are presented as an architectural extension for the Evolved Packet Core (EPC). A section on the implementation of the presented specifications highlights the most relevant software technical design decisions. An extensive evaluation validates and evaluates the prototype within an existing Evolved Packet Core implementation. A summary concludes all finding of the authors and presents planned Future Work finally.

NNodeTree: A Scalable Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming Overlay Architecture for Next-Generation-Networks

The rapid evolution of the telecommunication domain increases the performance of different access networks continuously. New services, especially in the domain multimedia content distribution, require higher and higher bandwidth at the user’s and service provider’s side. Multimedia services like Video on Demand, IPTV and live streaming were introduced in the past and are still improved in quality and quantity. Multimedia streams and Peer to Peer (P2P) file sharing dominates the worldwide Internet traffic nowadays and will continue further [1]. The user acceptance of enjoying multimedia content over the Internet will grow steadily together with the increasing quality of the available multimedia content. Network operators and service providers have to face the growths, by either increasing their service platform with higher performance and bandwidth or introducing a scalable solution. We present the design and implementation of a scalable Peer-to-Peer live streaming overlay architecture for Next-Generation-Networks (NGN) in this paper that addresses this challenge.

Scalable On-Demand Network Management Module for Software Defined Telecommunication Networks

The design of telecommunication networks and its provisioning is a challenging and complex task, which is constantly influenced by various factors. The disciplines of Traffic Engineering (TE) and Network Management (NM) have addressed these domains with static, semi-automatic and pure self-organizational approaches. Most of the existing approaches usually either relax the problem by taking strong assumptions on the problem instances or by only taking a small portion of the solution space into consideration, thus losing the chance of proving any global optimality gaps. The emerging cloud hosted flexible telecommunication system addressed by the industry nowadays puts new requirements on TE and ND. Current, telecommunication networks are often statically deployed and over-provisioned to cover pre-defined peak data rates, but are inflexible to adapt to dynamic network load situations. This paper presents novel dynamic Traffic Engineering (TE) and adaptive Network Management (NM) approaches for software defined telecommunication networks, which reduce Operational - and Capital Expenditures (OPEX/CAPEX), but also enhance the level of flexibility and elasticity at the same time.

QoE-aware resource provisioning and adaptation in IMS-based IPTV using OpenFlow

This article presents the architecture design and experimental evaluation of a QoE-aware flexible-QoS-control next-generation IPTV network. The architecture extends the IMS service control functionality by providing an efficient application-specific service control approach based on user satisfaction on the connectivity. The validation NGN testbed uses OpenFlow network virtualization between individual components.

UE & network initiated QoS reservation in NGN and beyond

Next Generation Mobile Broadband Networks are designed to solve the large amount of expected mobile data traffic and to reduce the network costs at the same time. 3GPP has standardized the Evolved Packet System (EPS) in order to address such issues and provide connectivity, mobility, security and Quality-of-Service (QoS) on a connection between User Equipments (UE) and services through the access network. The 3GPP Evolved Packet Core (EPC) is the next big step in the evolution of mobile core networks following UMTS and HSPA(+) towards all-IP networks, which will be deployed in parallel to the current Long-Term-Evolution (LTE) roll-out. QoS management in NGN is historically operator controlled based on static rules differentiating voice from other data. This article analyses opportunities and challenges of UE & Network initiated QoS reservation in NGN and beyond. Furthermore, a subsystem for solving these QoS demands is integrated in the concepts of 3GPP EPC and finally prototyped in the Fraunhofer FOKUS and TUB OpenEPC toolkit.

Towards a generic application aware network resource control function for Next-Generation-Networks and beyond

The Internet is the largest global recognized communication system, which evolved in dimensions of technology, capacity, availability and subscriber, transported data, etc. since its beginnings in the 1960s continuously. As the world moves towards a data-only network environment with Long-Term-Evolution (LTE) and its advanced version (LTE-A), it is crucial to ensure Quality-of-Service (QoS) even during overload situations in the access and core network. Information (voice and other data) is transported in All-IP networks in form of packets without taking individual application characteristics into consideration. Different application requirements on the packet data transport within the network exist due to the heterogeneity of applications, which cannot be realized yet adequate, because of missing communication between the application and network layer. This paper presents Generic-Adaptive-Resource-Control (GARC) as a conceptual approach, its prototypical implementation and validation. GARC bridges the gap between application and network-layer in order to optimize the overall end-to-end connectivity by applying individual adequate and application specific service control mechanisms on the connectivity.

Evaluating a Future Internet Cross-Layer Composition Prototype

The World-Wide-Web was initially designed to enable Information exchange between research institutes using the Internet Protocol based transport network. Since then, more and more areas of our daily live are reached by the evolving Internet including business critical areas, causes through its big success, fast acceptance and emerged possibilities. However, today’s best-effort Internet still lacks wide-area support for End-to-End Quality-of-Service and security sensitive services. Future Internet (FI) related research targets at a re-designs of the current Internet while addressing today’s requirements. In this paper we present a clean-slate cross-layer FI architecture approach. In order to optimize the underlying network for services we focus on a framework able to provide service required functionalities at the network layer on demand. We validate the presented architecture based on a prototype implementation. An evaluation section discusses measurements done with the prototype and an outlook on our future work concludes the paper.

SLA management and service composition of virtualized applications in mobile networking environments

Cloud computing is a promising solution for the flexible, on-demand delivery of communication services and infrastructures. The European Union funded project Mobile Cloud Networking is developing a cloud-based mobile communication service platform where service providers deliver virtualized wireless infrastructures integrated with high-level applications running on top of them. Mobile networks are redesigned, placed upon and operated on cloud computing platforms. These then are available with the on-demand, elastic and pay-as-you-go characteristics derived from the cloud principles. In this platform, a variety of services including heterogeneous radio networking, federated computing resources, virtualized network functions, support services and high-level applications are automatically and seamlessly orchestrated in composite end-to-end services delivered to enterprise end-users. The management of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for these cloud-based composite services requires a dedicated framework to combine and jointly manage the multiple SLAs associated to the different service components. This paper presents an architecture for the enforcement and validation of SLAs for mobile cloud services, discussing its positioning in the overall mobile cloud networking platform and its role across the different phases of the service lifecycle.

Toward a full implementation of SCIM functional block in IMS framework

IMS has been widely recognized as the control and brokering framework for delivering of the blended communication and multimedia services to the fix and mobile IP users. However, until recently, most of IMS services have been developed and deployed in a manner that does not carefully consider how these services can be combined and interact with each other in a beneficial way. Services can often overlap in terms of the logic that they execute, causing of redundant code across several application servers. Nowadays researching and industrial communities are approaching an IN-styled strategy of breaking down services into the basic building blocks needed to construct them known as Service Capabilities (SC). This breakdown is only possible if a full-functioning SCIM block is to be implemented. The SCIM will grant and schedule the user application to access those SCs properly, as well as resolve any rising conflict during that Service Capabilities access process. However at the moment there are no detailed specifications of this SCIM block from standardization bodies but only suggestions from research community to either put SCIM functions on Application platform or integrate it into the Service Invocation mechanisms of S-CSCF. But both of these approaches expose many disadvantages, either overloading S-CSCF or preventing the combination of services from different (Application) Platforms. In this paper, we propose a possible design that positioning the SCIM as an independent block between S-CSCF and Application Platforms. Finally a reference implementation at our Test-bed, which extended and re-used the existing IMS protocols and standard interfaces, is presented and early results are discussed.

Prototyping new concepts beyond 4G – The Fraunhofer Open5GCore

Abstract The 5th Generation of mobile networks (5G) is expected to be rolled out by 2020. New and revolutionary applications are already being envisioned, real-time control of machines, the Tactile Internet for wireless, Industry 4.0, the Internet of Things and self-driving cars, among others. To make this possible important enhancements and improvements in todays existing telecommunication technologies form an end-to-end perspective are required. Early testing and fast prototyping of new approaches and solutions will help to shape the evolving technologies. One of the technical enablers for 5G are two concepts based on the softwarisation and virtualisation of the core network, known as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation, NFV. Fraunhofer FOKUS has set up the Open5GCore testing environment to start shaping, together with its partners, the nascent 5G technologies by addressing these topics together with other relevant technological developments. After a short motivation, the architecture of the open5GCore is presented, followed by a functional description of supported features.