Simone Ruffino

Mobile Cloud Networking: Virtualisation of cellular networks

Virtualisation of cellular networks can be seen as a way to significantly reduce the complexity of processes, required nowadays to provide reliable cellular networks. The Future Communication Architecture for Mobile Cloud Services: Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) is a EU FP7 Large-scale Integrating Project (IP) funded by the European Commission that is focusing on how cloud computing and network function virtualisation concepts are applied to achieve virtualisation of cellular networks. It aims at the development of a fully cloud-based mobile communication and application platform, or more specifically, it aims to investigate, implement and evaluate the technological foundations for the mobile communication system of Long Term Evolution (LTE), based on Mobile Network plus Decentralized Computing plus Smart Storage offered as one atomic service: On-Demand, Elastic and Pay-As-You-Go. This paper provides a brief overview of the MCN project and discusses the challenges that need to be solved.

VoIP Communications in Wireless Ad-hoc Network with Gateways

In this paper, we investigate some of the issues that arise when mobile nodes engage voice connections with remote peers by using a wireless ad hoc network (MANET-cell) to access the distribution core network. We focus on a specific network scenario where all communications are directed to a special node, called gateway, which in turn bridges traffic to and from the core network. We first derive a mathematical expression to estimate the maximum number of sustainable voice sessions in a single-hop cell, with multi-rate terminals. Then, we assess the accuracy of the formula through ns2 simulations, which allow us to determine the voice capacity of the system also in presence of hidden terminals. Hence, we analyze the impact of multi-hop paths on the voice capacity of the system. From this analysis, we propose a new cost metric that we apply to a modified version of the OLSR routing algorithm, named HOLSR. This algorithm has proved to be able to preserve stability in some scenarios that were unstable under other routing algorithms.