Nikos Koutsouris

SON Coordination in a Unified Management Framework

The adoption of autonomic features in network management becomes a necessity to cope with the increasing complexity of the telecommunications ecosystem. The purpose of this paper is to present the concept of Unified Management Framework (UMF) developed in the FP7 UniverSelf project. The core of UMF comprises three functional blocks, namely Governance, Coordination and Knowledge which allow to efficiently operate autonomic mechanisms such as SON functionalities in the radio access network. These are denoted as Network Empowerment Mechanisms (NEMs) that, by means of policies, enforce operator business and operation objectives. The paper focuses on the Coordination core block of UMF, and its instantiation to the problem of SON coordination for managing LTE-Advanced a Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) with relays. Prototype description and results are described so as to illustrate the value and applicability of the proposed framework.

A framework to facilitate management of services in cloud based 5G environments

The main target of 5G network technologies is to offer radically increased user capacity and quality of service, while saving energy and reducing investment and operating costs. A key technology in this pursue is the cloudification of the virtualized network functions, which can eventually create an environment where services for network operators and application / content providers are chained, configured, deployed and orchestrated as in a common plane. The ARCADIA framework provides the necessary functionalities for facilitating the development and management of component services that can fully exploit the underlying programmable 5G infrastructure. ARCADIA supports policy definition even at the developer level, as well as unified monitoring and dynamic reconfiguration of service parameters.

A Framework to Support Interoperability in IoT and Facilitate the Development and Deployment of Highly Distributed Cloud Applications

The constantly increased variety of available hardware and software solutions for the IoT sector is facilitating the development of novel applications, but at the same time the lack of standardized or widely accepted means of interaction, deployment and configuration is seriously hindering the IoT’s potential. The ARCADIA framework is an application development paradigm that enables the cooperation between software components designed and implemented independently and using various technologies and platforms, so that they can form sophisticated, distributed, cloud applications.