Luca Chiaraviglio

Bringing 5G into Rural and Low-Income Areas: Is It Feasible?

Nowadays, at least two billion people are experiencing a complete lack of wireless cellular network coverage. These users live in rural areas and low-income regions, where network operators are not keen to invest, mainly due to high capital expenditure and operational expenditure costs, as well as the scarcity of electricity from the grid. We tackle this challenge by proposing a 5G network explicitly designed to serve rural and low-income areas. Our solution investigates the possibility of mounting remote radio heads on top of unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as large cells (LCs) to increase the coverage range. In addition, 5G nodes are powered by solar panels and batteries. Preliminary results, obtained over three representative case studies located in Italy, Cook Islands, and Zimbabwe, show that providing connectivity in rural and low-income areas by means of the proposed 5G architecture is feasible. At the same time, we also show that the monthly subscription fee paid by the users can be kept sufficiently low, that is, less than €1/month in low-income areas, and around €11/month in rural regions.

A Sustainable Marriage of Telcos and Transp in the Era of Big Data: Are We Ready?

The emerging smart city paradigm e.g., intelligent transport, smart grid and participatory sensing etc. is to advance the quality, performance and experience of urban citizten services through greater connectivity. This paradigm needs to collect data from citizens, various devices and assets that could be monitored, processed and analysed for the city governers to make better decision and also more efficiently manage those assests and resources. While the telecommunication and Internet are progressively being over-burdened and congested by the growing data transmission demands. To keep expanding the telecommunications and Internet infrastructures to accomodate these intensive data demands is costly and also the associated energy consumptions and carbon emissions could at long last wind up genuinely hurting the environment. To face this issue in the coming era of big data, we envision it will be best to utilize the established urban transport and road infrastructure and existing daily massive vehicular trips, to complement traditional option for data transmission. After detailing the current state-of-the-art, we consider the main challenges that need to be faced. Moreover, we define the main pillars to integrate the telecommunications and transport infrastructures, and also a proposal for the future urban network architecture.

A Sustainable Connectivity Model of the Internet Access Technologies in Rural and Low-Income Areas

The Internet has evolved as a critical booster for the economic, social and technical development of human society. Almost half of the world’s population is unfortunately missing out due to the lack of access to the Internet. Such users are mainly those living in rural and low-income areas. Various strategies and approaches for improving the Internet’s accessibility are available, each with a different set of benefits, costs, and risks. It is important to choose solutions from these feasible options that promise to promote the efficiency as well as the sustainability of the ‘Internet Ecosystem’. In this paper, we propose a new model of sustainable connectivity that integrates three factors (affordability, social shareability, and geographical network coverage) that must be considered in the selection and design of Internet access solutions. In addition, we develop a hypergraph-based network graph solution that illustrates the relationship among the three factors. Then, we use Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) to model and simulate the possible Internet access solutions and also interplay those three factors to study how they impact the overall network connectivity performance. Our initial results have revealed how sustainable Internet connectivity behaves as a function of the affordability, social interaction, and geographical network coverage and investigates how these factors could be leveraged to provide different network connectivity and Internet access solutions.

Energy- and fatigue-aware RWA in optical backbone networks

Abstract Connection provisioning in Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks needs to account for a number of crucial parameters. On the one hand, operators need to ensure the connection availability requirements defined in Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This is addressed by selecting an appropriate amount of backup resources and recovery strategies for the connections over which services are provisioned. Services requiring less strict availability requirements can be routed over unprotected lightpaths. Services with more strict availability requirements are provisioned over protected lightpaths in order to cope with possible failures in the network. Another important aspect to consider during the provisioning process is energy efficiency. Green strategies leverage on setting network devices in Sleep Mode (SM) or Active Mode (AM) depending on whether or not they are needed to accommodate traffic. However, frequent power state changes introduce thermal fatigue which in turn has a negative effect on the device lifetime. Finally, in multi-period traffic scenarios, it is also important to minimize the number of reconfigurations of lightpaths already established in the network in order to avoid possible traffic disruptions at higher layers. The work presented in this paper tackles the connection provisioning paradigm in an optical backbone network with a multi-period traffic scenario. More specifically the paper looks into the interplay among (i) energy efficiency, (ii) thermal fatigue, and (iii) lightpath reconfiguration aspects. To this end, the Energy and Fatigue Aware Heuristic with Unnecessary Reconfiguration Avoidance (EFAH-URA) is introduced, showing that it is possible to balance the three aspects mentioned above in an efficient way. When compared to the pure energy-aware strategies, EFAH-URA significantly improves the average connection availability for both unprotected and protected connections. On the other hand, it is done at the expense of reduced energy saving.

SDN-based resource allocation in MPLS networks: A hybrid approach: SDN-based resource allocation in MPLS networks: A hybrid approach

The highly dynamic nature of the current network traffics makes the network managers to exploit the flexibility of the state‐of‐the‐art paradigm called SDN. In this way, there has been an increasing interest in hybrid networks of SDN‐MPLS. In this paper, a new traffic engineering architecture for SDN‐MPLS network is proposed. To this end, OpenFlow‐enabled switches are applied over the edge of the network to improve flow‐level management flexibility while MPLS routers are considered as the core of the network to make the scheme applicable for existing MPLS networks. The proposed scheme re‐assigns flows to the Label‐Switched Paths (LSPs) to highly utilize the network resources. In the cases that the flow‐level re‐routing is insufficient, the proposed scheme re‐computes and re‐creates the undergoing LSPs. To this end, we mathematically formulate two optimization problems, ie, i) flow re‐routing and ii) LSP re‐creation, and propose a heuristic algorithm to improve the performance of the scheme. Our experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed hybrid SDN‐MPLS architecture in traffic engineering superiors traditionally deployed MPLS networks.

EFAH: An energy and fatigue aware heuristic for provisioning highly available connections in optical backbone networks

Optical backbone operators need to meet the availability requirements specified in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs). While less stringent availability constraints, i.e., less than three 9s might be met by provisioning connections without any protection, more stringent requirements, i.e., five 9s, force operator to use proactive protection strategies. The connection provisioning process becomes more cost-efficient when green aspects are considered. On the other hand, energy awareness introduces thermal fatigue effects, which may in turn lower the lifetime of devices that undergo frequent power state transitions, i.e., between Active Mode (AM) and Sleep Mode (SM). As a result the availability level experienced by the unprotected connections may decrease. At the same time, with devices failing more frequently the protection level chosen for a given connection might not be enough to guarantee the required average connection availability performance. This work tackles the problem of managing an optical back-bone network when green and thermal fatigue aspects are introduced. We propose an Energy and Fatigue Aware Heuristic (EFAH) that is able to balance between thermal fatigue effects and energy saving performance. When compared to the pure Energy-Aware (EA) strategies, EFAH manages to significantly improve the value of the average connection availability of both unprotected and protected connections. On the other hand, there is a price to pay in terms of lower energy saving performance.