Vangelis Gazis

Cross-layer design proposals for wireless mobile networks: a survey and taxonomy

Third-generation (3G) and beyond 3G mobile communication systems must provide interoperability with the Internet, increase throughput for mobile devices, and optimize their operation for multimedia applications. The limited ability of traditional layered architectures to exploit the unique nature of wireless communication has fostered the introduction of cross-layer design solutions that allow optimized operation for mobile devices in the modern heterogeneous wireless environment. In this article we present the major cross-layer design solutions that handle such problems, and discuss cross-layer implementations with a focus on functional entities that support cross-layer processes and the respective signaling. In addition, we consider the associated architectural complexity and communication overhead they introduce. Furthermore, we point out the major open technical challenges in the cross-layer design research area. Finally, we conclude our article with a summary of cross-layer approaches developed thus far and provide directions for future work.

A Survey of Standards for Machine-to-Machine and the Internet of Things

Over the last decade, there has been a growing research interest in machine-to-machine communications and the Internet of Things (IoT) as a milestone embodiment of the continuous convergence between the physical facet of human activities and its reflection on the information world. IoT is understood as the (r)evolutionary transition into an era where physical assets and virtual assets will be treated uniformly and, for all intents and purposes, be largely indistinguishable to the processes involving them. The sheer scale of IoT suggests that harmonized global standards will be paramount in realizing a seamless treatment across the physical facet and the virtual facet of things. In this paper, we survey the—;admittedly babelian—standardization landscape of IoT and present its major efforts. Our survey concludes with a comparative discussion that highlights the key challenges of future standardization in IoT.

Towards a Big Data Analytics Framework for IoT and Smart City Applications

An increasing amount of valuable data sources, advances in Internet of Things and Big Data technologies as well as the availability of a wide range of machine learning algorithms offers new potential to deliver analytical services to citizens and urban decision makers. However, there is still a gap in combining the current state of the art in an integrated framework that would help reducing development costs and enable new kind of services. In this chapter, we show how such an integrated Big Data analytical framework for Internet of Things and Smart City application could look like. The contributions of this chapter are threefold: (1) we provide an overview of Big Data and Internet of Things technologies including a summary of their relationships, (2) we present a case study in the smart grid domain that illustrates the high-level requirements towards such an analytical Big Data framework, and (3) we present an initial version of such a framework mainly addressing the volume and velocity challenge. The findings presented in this chapter are extended results from the EU funded project BIG and the German funded project PEC.

Evolving perspectives of 4th generation mobile communication systems

The last decade of the 20/sup th/ century has been witness to remarkable technological developments in the area of wireless communication technologies. Following the commercial deployment-and subsequent worldwide success-of 2/sup nd/ generation mobile telecommunication systems, such as GSM, standardization bodies, industry partners and regulatory fora from around the globe joined forces in producing the standards for 3/sup rd/ generation mobile telecommunication systems. In parallel, the academic research community has been gradually shifting its focus in defining the scope of 4/sup th/ generation systems. The present paper highlights fundamental concepts and presents key market developments in 4/sup th/ generation mobile communication environments. It outlines their major high level requirements and identifies the fundamental building blocks of 4/sup th/ generation system architectures in terms of technological solution sets. Finally, it proposes a set of priorities for the 4/sup th/ generation research agenda.

A survey of technologies for the internet of things

The number of smart things is growing exponentially. By 2020, tens of billions of things will be deployed worldwide, collecting a wealth of diverse data. Traditional computing models collect in-field data and then transmit it to a central data center where analytics are applied to it, but this is no longer a sustainable model. New approaches and new technologies are required to transform enormous amounts of collected data into meaningful information. Technology also will enable the interconnection around things in the IoT ecosystem but further research is required in the development, convergence and interoperability of the different IoT elements. In this paper, we provide a picture of the main technological components needed to enable the interconnection among things in order to realize IoT concepts and applications.

On the Security and Privacy of Internet of Things Architectures and Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings together a multitude of technologies, with a vision of creating an interconnected world. This will benefit both corporations as well as the end-users. However, a plethora of security and privacy challenges need to be addressed for the IoT to be fully realized. In this paper, we identify and discuss the properties that constitute the uniqueness of the IoT in terms of the upcoming security and privacy challenges. Furthermore, we construct requirements induced by the aforementioned properties. We survey the four most dominant IoT architectures and analyze their security and privacy components with respect to the requirements. Our analysis shows a mediocre coverage of security and privacy requirements. Finally, through our survey we identify a number of research gaps that constitute the steps ahead for future research.

A survey of dynamically adaptable protocol stacks

The continuous development of new networking standards over the last decade has resulted in an unprecedented proliferation of interfacing technologies and their associated protocol stacks. Never before was such a wide gamut of network architectures, protocol configurations and deployment options available to network designers. Alas, this significant increase in flexibility has come at the cost of an increased complexity in network management tasks, particularly with regard to the accommodation of performance requirements. Especially in mobile settings, this is due to the greater probability of unforeseen communication contexts that renders the efficient provisioning of multiple dissimilar protocol stacks a challenging task. To address this unpredictability, several approaches based on the dynamic adaptation of protocol stacks during runtime have been proposed and investigated over the years. This article surveys major research efforts dealing with the introduction of a dynamic adaptation capacity into protocol stack subsystems. To this end, we present the respective architectures with a focus on their functional entities and their particular mode of operation. Most importantly, we elaborate on the various design approaches to adaptability and the entailed degree of coupling between protocol stack-and layer-entities and their impact on resource allocation models. Furthermore, we classify these research efforts according to a taxonomy for non-monolithic protocol stacks and discuss design trade-offs inherent in each class. We conclude the article with a summary of the key design principles for adaptable protocol stack architectures.

Enabling Delivery of Mobile Services Over Heterogeneous Converged Infrastructures

Traditionally, end customers have been offered different categories of communication, data and media services (e.g., fixed/mobile voice, fixed/mobile data, broadcasting) through vertically separated, rigidly integrated infrastructures. Major advances in a variety of technological fields, mainly in the area of mobile computing and networking, have created prospects for a fully converged environment, where ubiquitous access to an abundance of value-added services will be offered over a single, as perceived by the users, highly reconfigurable system. This vision can be enabled by the seamless “plugging” of diverse access networks to a high-speed IP backbone; however the path to its realization poses a variety of additional challenges. The required support of complicated business models and service delivery over highly diverse contexts introduces significant complexity to service management and provision. The present contribution presents object-oriented mediating service management platforms as a catalyst for making these demanding tasks feasible, identifies their desired functionality and provides an overview of such a distributed framework that we have designed and prototyped. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the latter is able to be a critical enabler of flexible, adaptable service provision over future heterogeneous networks, while supporting advanced business paradigms.

Generic architecture and mechanisms for protocol reconfiguration

The next generation of wireless mobile communications termed beyond 3G (or 4G), will be based on a heterogeneous infrastructure that comprises different wireless networks in a complementary manner. Beyond 3G will introduce reconfiguration capabilities to flexibly and dynamically (i.e., during operation) adapt the wireless protocol stacks to better meet the ever-changing service requirements. For the dynamic reconfiguration of protocol stacks during runtime operation to become a practical capability of mobile communication systems, it is necessary to establish a software architecture that functionally supports reconfiguration. In the present paper, a generic architecture and respective mechanisms to achieve protocol stack and component based protocol layer reconfiguration are proposed.

An advanced service provision framework for reconfigurable mobile networks

The success of next generation mobile networks is highly dependent on the availability of a plethora of functionality-rich applications, accessible via a variety of network infrastructures and terminals. This can be achieved through the cooperation of various business players in addition to network operators and infrastructure providers. The specification by major standardisation organisations of open APIs for network access by third parties is a significant step in this direction. A critical issue in such architectures is reconfiguration management, which is regarded as the mean to enable new approaches to service provision, customisation and personalisation. In this paper, we present our proposal for a generic, open, flexible, service provision framework that supports context-aware service provision and reconfiguration management.