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The article discusses deadlines for submission of manuscript of periodical on various topics related to architectures, algorithms and applications of software defined vehicular networks (SDVN). Topics discussed include security and privacy in SDVN; data offloading in SDVN and flexible architecture in SDVN.

The twelve articles in this special section focus on energy efficiency as it relates to fog or edge computing. The Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as one of the most advanced and complex technological trends, where more than 50 billion things will be connected (e.g., mobile devices, sensors, wearable devices, and other computing nodes) to the Internet by 2020. Edge/fog computing will play an increasingly important role in handling the information flow of such large and complex networks. An unintended consequence is the impact of their operations on carbon emissions and the resulting electricity costs. Thus, there has been focus on designing energy-efficient solutions for the edge-fog environment. In this Feature Topic, state-of-the-art research advances in energy efficiency and sustainability for edge/fog deployment are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to deal with the challenges and opportunities presented by the mobile Internet, this paper proposes a new Internet-oriented mobile network architecture, dubbed i-Net, for fifth generation (5G) mobile communication systems. Based on direct communications established between the base stations (BSs), i-Net can implement local data routing for mobile data traffic, which adapts to increased service localization for the mobile Internet. We first present the network architecture and main technical features, i.e., inter-connection, integration, and intelligence. Then the key techniques are discussed to show their potential in improving the network efficiency of i-Net. Field trials for inter-BS direct communications to implement cooperative multipoint oPeration (CoMP) in i-Net are carried out to demonstrate the feasibility of i-Net. It is expected that i-Net can provide a good quality of experience for end users through the efficient integration of the multi-BS, multi-band, and multi-radio-access-technology (RAT) radio resources in 5G. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although software-defined networking (SDN) brings numerous benefits by decoupling the control plane from the data plane, there is a contradictory relationship between SDN and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. On one hand, the capabilities of SDN make it easy to detect and to react to DDoS attacks. On the other hand, the separation of the control plane from the data plane of SDN introduces new attacks. Consequently, SDN itself may be a target of DDoS attacks. In this paper, we first discuss the new trends and characteristics of DDoS attacks in cloud computing environments. We show that SDN brings us a new chance to defeat DDoS attacks in cloud computing environments, and we summarize good features of SDN in defeating DDoS attacks. Then we review the studies about launching DDoS attacks on SDN and the methods against DDoS attacks in SDN. In addition, we discuss a number of challenges that need to be addressed to mitigate DDoS attached in SDN with cloud computing. This work can help understand how to make full use of SDN's advantages to defeat DDoS attacks in cloud computing environments and how to prevent SDN itself from becoming a victim of DDoS attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we examine upcoming 5G networks where the support of D2D communication is expected to be a key asset for operators and users alike. First, we argue the need to functionally integrate D2D and infrastructure-to-device (I2D) modes. Next, we address practical issues such as integrated resource scheduling of D2D communication within heterogeneous networks, proposing an extension of the proportional fairness algorithm that we call multi-modal proportional fairness (MMPF). We evaluate the impact of D2D in a two-tier scenario combining macroand micro-coverage, finding that although I2D retains a clear edge for general-purpose downloading, D2D is an appealing solution for localized transfers as well as for viral content. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The articles in this special section focus on network softwarization and management. This renewed series focuses on softwarization, management, and their integration in communication networks and their services. "Network Softwarization" advocates for network architectures that separate the software implementing network functions, protocols and services from the hardware running them. Propelled by the maturity of technologies like network function virtualization and software-defined networking, softwarization is radically changing the way communication infrastructures are designed, programmed, integrated and operated, enabling rapid and innovative service creation with easy deployment and opening the door to a faster pace of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces various manuscripts presented in part 2 of the series "Cross-Layer Engineering for Wireless Mobile Networks," given in the January 2006 issue of the journal "IEEE Communications Magazine." The papers discuss several issues related to the cross-layer architecture and designing. They also discuss the need of high speed multimedia services that are one of the primary prerequisites for the protocol. The paper by V.T. Raisinghani and S. Iyer presents the cross-layer design architecture for enhancing the performance of existing protocol stacks in the wireless environment. The paper by R. Winter, J. Schiller, N. Nikaein and C. Bonnet provides an insight into cross-talk and methods of improvement of the cross layer working. Then there is an article by X. Zhang, J. Tang, H-H. Chen, S. Ci, and M. Guizani that presents information on a cross-layer model to investigate the impact of various advanced physical layer techniques on radio link layer performance. Then there are articles that focus on IEEE 802.11 standard on cross-layer signaling.

Network planning is undergoing major changes in terms of the technologies considered and the methodologies. The papers we received for this special issue actually testify to these changes and show the manifold advances made in the area. As the networking industry becomes increasingly cost competitive, planning becomes ever more important, and the articles in the feature topic are particularly timely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose the TelcoFog architecture as a novel, secure, highly distributed, and ultra-dense fog computing infrastructure, which can be allocated at the extreme edge of a wired/wireless network for a telecom operator to provide multiple unified, cost-effective, and new 5G services, such as NFV, MEC, and services for third parties (e.g., smart cities, vertical industries, and IoT). The distributed and programmable fog technologies that are proposed in TelcoFog are expected to strengthen the position of the mobile network and cloud markets. TelcoFog, by design, is capable of integrating an ecosystem for network operators willing to provide NFV, MEC, and IoT services. TelcoFog's key benefits are the dynamic deployment of new distributed low-latency services. The novel TelcoFog architecture consists of three main building blocks: a scalable TelcoFog node, which is seamlessly integrated in the telecom infrastructure; a TelcoFog controller, focused on service assurance and based on service data modeling using YANG, which is integrated in the management and orchestration architecture of the telecom operator; and TelcoFog services, which are able to run on top of the TelcoFog and telecom infrastructure. The TelcoFog architecture is validated through a proof of concept for IoT services. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Toward ITS, academia and industry aim to utilize all possible radio access technologies in order to support reliable services and applications in VANETs. Thus, the inclusion of already deployed Wi-Fi networks in VANET topology is a crucial step for the next generation vehicular networks. However, the VANET topology also requires preservation of the features already offered by DSRC and the core cellular network. As a result, the coexistence of multiple different access technologies results in high complexity in terms of the control and management of the network infrastructure. To this end, software defined networking provides a promising opportunity to simplify the management and control of clumsy network infrastructures by decoupling the data and control planes in order to provide elasticity for current networks. In this article, we propose an architectural model that exploits this opportunity in order to enhance VANET with Wi-Fi access capability. Moreover, we offer a novel software defined VANET architecture that consists of soft OpenFlow switches with Wi-Fi capabilities as both roadside units and vehicles. In particular, we first investigate existing test tools and environments for software defined wireless networks and also supply a novel testbed architecture in order to provide a feasible test environment for evaluating the proposed architecture. Additionally, we propose a Wireless Access Management (WAM) protocol that provides wireless host management and basic flow admission with respect to the available bandwidth to validate the capability of the offered architecture. The observation results of the deployed testbed prove the conformity of the offered 802.11 architecture to the VANET. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following the Part 1 that appeared in the September 2015 issue of IEEE Communications Magazine, this Part 2 of the Radio Communications Series features several papers illustrating key trends in Software Defined Radio. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to cope with the relentless data tsunami in 5G wireless networks, current approaches such as acquiring new spectrum, deploying more BSs, and increasing nodes in mobile packet core networks are becoming ineffective in terms of scalability, cost, and flexibility. In this regard, context- aware 5G networks with edge/cloud computing and exploitation of big data analytics can yield significant gains for mobile operators. In this article, proactive content caching in 5G wireless networks is investigated in which a big-data-enabled architecture is proposed. In this practical architecture, a vast amount of data is harnessed for content popularity estimation, and strategic contents are cached at BSs to achieve higher user satisfaction and backhaul offloading. To validate the proposed solution, we consider a real-world case study where several hours worth of mobile data traffic is collected from a major telecom operator in Turkey, and big-data-enabled analysis is carried out, leveraging tools from machine learning. Based on the available information and storage capacity, numerical studies show that several gains are achieved in terms of both user satisfaction and backhaul offloading. For example, in the case of 16 BSs with 30 percent of content ratings and 13 GB storage size (78 percent of total library size), proactive caching yields 100 percent user satisfaction and offloads 98 percent of the backhaul. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Next generation (5G&B) networks will require the design of new architectures and technologies capable of supporting time-sensitive applications. To this aim, the implementation of service chaining as a tool to simplify and lighten the execution of complex tasks by splitting these into simpler functions that can be provided at the network edge can represent a critical improvement. Recently, it has been proposed to implement the network edge by way of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) organized as a flying ad hoc network. In this article, we shed light on the new paradigm of service chaining at the network edge and present an approach that aims at solving an optimal virtual network function placement problem, taking into account UAV computing and battery limitations, as well as latency constraints, tightly associated with the specific application to be supported. Some numerical results assess the effectiveness of this methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a widely held belief that future radio access network architectures will be characterized by increased levels of virtualization, whereby base station functionalities, traditionally residing at a single location, will be scattered across different logical entities while being interfaced via high-speed fronthaul (FH) links. For the deployment of such FH links, operators are faced with the challenge of maintaining acceptable radio access performance while at the same time keeping deployment costs low. A common practice is to exploit statistical multiplexing by allowing several cells to utilize the same FH link. As a result, in order to cope with the resulting aggregated traffic, different techniques can be used to reduce the required FH data rates. Herein, we focus on FH compression control strategies for multiple-ceilimuitiple-user scenarios sharing a common FH link. We propose various methods for sounding reference signal (SRS) handling, and analyze different FH-aware modulation data compression and scheduling strategies. Considering a full system setup, including the radio and FH access networks, numerical evaluation is conducted using a 5G NR system-level simulator implemented in ns-3. Simulation results show that under stringent FH capacity constraints, optimized modulation compression strategies provide significant user-perceived throughput gains over baseline strategies (between 5.2 × and 6.9 ×). On top of them, SRS handling methods achieve additional 2 to 41 percent gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The massive growth of connected devices, including sensors and machines, is revolutionizing every aspect of human life. The socioeconomic impacts are significant and have already transformed many industries. In this article, we discuss some of the challenges of the explosion of devices and exponential growth in personal digital content and machine generated data. The centralized cloud architecture adopted in the early days of mobile Internet was designed primarily to allow access to data stored on the worldwide web. Today, use cases have evolved significantly. Humans and devices are now producing most of the data consumed on the Internet. As a result, the existing centralized cloud infrastructure is no longer efficient or sustainable. There is significant waste of network bandwidth to send terabytes of data to server farms that may be hundreds of kilometers away from the source and/or destination of data. The prevalent centralized cloud architecture does not adequately leverage massive amounts of computing resources on smart devices, which are idle most of the time. Moreover, despite all the efforts to reduce network latencies, communication to server farms is a major bottleneck for latency in many applications. We introduce a novel architectural approach to cloud decentralization called hybrid edge cloud (HEC) that minimizes network bandwidth usage, reduces communication latencies, and leverages resources on smart devices to reduce the burden on server farms and other centralized computing resources. HEC combines the benefits of new network technologies such as 5G and WiFi 6 in private and public clouds to leverage computing resources on smart devices to build a sustainable decentralized infrastructure for the hyper-connected world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has developed network function virtualization (NFV) management and orchestration (MANO) for operators to enable quick adaptation of deployment and to reduce the management costs of virtual network functions (VNFs). For scalable and flexible management across transport, cloud, and edge infrastructures, the NFV MANO has been extended into multidomain architectures with network-cloud/edge convergence. In this article, a novel hierarchical distributed overarching architecture of decoupled federation and orchestration frameworks for multidomain ETSI-compliant NFV MANOs is proposed. The proposed architecture can minimize overhead costs for the scalable exchange of abstracted vertical service information through hierarchical brokering and can enable flexible federation through distributed binding among multiple domains. The proposed architecture deploys end-to-end services in single and multiple domains for vertical industries, activates their service processes in a holistic way, and enables operational independence with administrative autonomy. This article serves as an important and necessary step toward the cloud-native design and implementation of federation and orchestration frameworks for multidomain NFV MANOs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective communication among first responders during and in the aftermath of a disaster can dramatically affect outcomes - saving lives by providing appropriate, timely assistance. In this article, we discuss the design of a resilient architecture that enables effective first responder communications in the challenging situations caused by a disaster. Our ReDiCom (Resilient Disaster Communications) architecture builds resilience into its framework across all the layers. The information layer allows communication by roles and identities instead of addresses to support communication among dynamically formed first responder teams. The network layer provides robust and resilient communication even when facilities are error- and disruption-prone. Our coded computation further improves resilience and enables efficient distributed data processing potentially with first responder and civilian mobile devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network infrastructure sharing and base station switching off mechanisms have been recently introduced as promising solutions toward energy and cost reduction in cellular networks. Although these techniques are usually studied independently, their combination offers new alternatives to MNOs for serving their users and could potentially provide them with additional benefits. In this article we introduce the concept of intra-cell roaming-based infrastructure sharing, where the MNOs may switch off their BSs and roam their traffic to active BSs operated by other MNOs in the same cell. Motivated by the coexistence of multiple operators in the same area, we present possible network deployments and architectures in current and future cellular scenarios, discussing their particular characteristics. In addition, we propose an innovative distributed game theoretic BS switching off scheme, employing an integrated cost function that takes into account all the different cases for a given operator to serve its own traffic (i.e. through active BSs of neighboring cells or exploiting intra-cell roaming-based infrastructure sharing). Finally, we demonstrate some indicative simulation results in realistic scenarios to quantify the potential energy and financial benefits that our proposed scheme offers to the MNOs in multioperator environments, providing them with the necessary incentives to participate in the infrastructure sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Both the military R&D and operational communities have recognized the growing complexity of the operational environment. Envisioned as a highly interconnected and networked space, technology faces unique challenges in order for militaries to effectively operate in these conditions. Understanding how these interconnected systems and networks will operate in complex information environments is a significant challenge. In order to address these challenges, we must further our understanding of advanced systems such as unmanned systems and the internet- of-things. We also recognize the necessity to maintain security of these systems and the information these systems are gathering, storing and transmitting. With the development of these systems, these approaches must be tested and verified in emulation and simulation environments. This issue addresses four very different but important topics related to these challenges for military communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been two decades since the publication of the seminal tutorial "The Software Radio Architecture" in IEEE Communications Magazine. The evolution of Software Defined Radio (SDR) systems had profound impact both in military and multi-standard commercial space. The intent of the feature topic is to capture key elements of the evolution of the enabling technologies as well as SDR solutions for flexible and reconfigurable wireless platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nowadays taking care of elderly people and the disabled has become a very important but challenging task. Although the elderly have wisdom and wealth gathered from their life experiences, they require special assistance, higher health insurance costs, and even constant monitoring. By utilizing information process and communications technology, ambient assisted living (AAL) communications open up a new way to address such needs for the aged and the sick. Specifically, AAL uses ambient technologies, including data sensing, processing, transmission, and artificial intelligence, to enable new products, services, and processes that help to provide safe, healthy lives for the aged and disabled. It also supports improved social connections and accessibility to the external world. With the growth of AAL environment, the accessibility gets more challenging for the complex data structure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Beyond-3G (B3G) systems have been envisaged as an evolution and convdergence of mobile/wireless communication systems and IP technologies to offer a multitude of services over a variety of access technologies. To fulfill the vision, it is necessary to understand the requirements with respect to the support of heterogeneity in network accesses, communication services, mobility, user devices, and so on. Besides, it is equally important to promote the necessary research in networking technology by providing a guiding framework of research areas and technical issues with priority. The new architectures and technologies will have to address the fundamental assumptions and requirements that govern the design. All these issues are being tackled by the Cooperative Network working group (CoNet) of WWRF; the group is working on a series of white papers outlining B3G visions and roadmap, architectural principles, research challenges, and candidate approaches. This article outlines the CoNet concept, architectural principles, and guidelines for research into cooperative networks assuming that the B3G systems will be built over generic IP networking technologies. The article also presents the key research challenges, research framework, and major network components and technologies. The key points are that the system should be layered on demand, encourage reuse of independent modularized functional blocks, support multiple services and service creation, ensure consistent end-to-end connectivity across different access technologies, and cooperate in terms of net- work control, operations, and maintenance. The architecture shall include the endpoints of communications as part of the communications system, and should provide a secure and trusted environment in which network functions are performed; the network should self-organize dynamically. Additionally, the article presents the IST WSI architecture proposed to CoNet as a reference model along with some approaches to the outlined research challenges. Finally, this study selects three important network components and technologies (i.e., mobility management, multiple access, and moving networks) in order to provide with answers and possible solutions the research challenges presented in earlier sections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The articles in this special section focus on the deployment of fog computing in communication networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The general definition of context-aware communications and networking (CACN) was provided in the June 2014 Guest Editorial of Part 1 of this Feature Topic. Briefly speaking, there are two classes of context awareness: person context awareness and object context awareness. Context awareness may be implemented using quite different aspects under different environments and conditions, and at different layers. The relevant research topics in this area include context-aware network architectures, protocols, services and applications, context-aware green communications and computing networking, context-aware modeling and analysis methods, context-aware security approaches, context-aware distributed systems, context awareness in the Internet of Things, context-aware semantic networking, context-aware data storage and cloud computing, context-aware recommender systems, context awareness in smart spaces, context awareness in multimedia content distribution, adaptive and context-based multimodal interaction, location-aware services and context-aware location tracking, context-aware messaging, addressing, and routing, mobile phone sensing, personal awareness in smart environments, social context understanding and social interaction among peers, context-aware social networks, urban awareness for communications and networking, social agents and avatars, virtual humans for communications and networking, and standardization and regulation of context-aware information networking and communications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tubiquitous ultra-broadband network enabling the future Internet (FI), is not only about new releases of current network generations and services, but, more significantly, will be associated with a true revolution in the information and communications technologies (ICT) field: the network will efficiently and effectively take forward new-fangled services to everyone and everything, such as cognitive objects and cyber physical systems (CPSs). A "full immersive (3D) experience" enriched by "context information" and, in particular, "anything or everything as a service (XaaS)" are the main business drivers for massive adoption and market uptake of the new fundamental enabling technologies, beyond today's "client-server" model, where the network has been reduced to a ubiquitous "pipe of bits." XaaS refers to those services ? beyond the current models of software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and platfore as a service (PaaS), SPI models, of cloud computing ? such as data as a service (DaaS), security as a service (again, SaaS), network as a service (NaaS), knowledge as a service (KaaS), machine as a service (MaaS), and robot as a service (RaaS), which could be delivered over the advanced 5G infrastructure, without the need to own hardware, software, or even the cognitive objects themselves. Communication services, such as voice and video telephony, will be enriched and bundled with other services. The network infrastructure is expected to become the "nervous system" of the actual digital society and digital economy. This challenge calls for a complete redesign of services and service capabilities, architectures, interfaces, functions, access and non-access stratum protocols and related procedures, as well as advanced algorithms (e.g., for unified connection, security, mobility and routing management, and reconfiguration of ICT services; and any type of resource of cyber physical systems). The expected transformation will be especially true at the edge, that is, around the end user (or prosumer), where the "intelligence" already started migrating a few years ago, and where massive processing, memory, and storage capacity are gradually accumulating. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The five articles in this special section focus on telecommunications software, network virtualization, and software defined networks. The increasingly relevant and transformational role that software and virtualization are gaining in the telecommunications field today enables unprecedented levels of abstraction, disaggregation, distribution, extensibility, slicing, and programmability in network infrastructures and services. Software-based networking is radically changing the way communication infrastructures are designed, programmed, integrated, and operated, enabling rapid and innovative network functions and network services creation and deployment, and opening the door to a faster pace of innovation in the networking and ICT industry. Such transformation, referred to as "network softwarization," is propelled by the emergence of several network technologies and paradigms, like network programmability (NP), intent-based networking (IBN), multi-access edge computing (MEC), network slicing (NS), software defined networking (SDN), and network function virtualization (NFV), which are gaining traction in production environments, and are bound to be core technologies of the maturing 5G and beyond networks. However, there are still several daunting challenges that need to be addressed before "telecom software" solutions fully leverage these technologies and become mature enough to be widespread and adopted by the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, a large portion of mobile data traffic is consumed behind the shielding walls of buildings or in the Faraday cage of trains. This renders cellular network coverage from outdoor cell sites difficult. Indoor small cells and distributed antennas along train tracks are often considered as a solution, but the cost and the need for optical fiber backhaul are often prohibitive. To alleviate this issue, we describe an out-of-band repeater that converts a sub-6 GHz cell signal from a small cell installed at a cell tower to an mmWave frequency for the fronthaul to buildings or distributed antenna sites, where the signal is downconverted to the original frequency and emitted, for example, inside a building. This concept does not require fiber deployment, provides backward compatibility to equipment already in use, and additional indoor capacity is gained while outdoor networks are offloaded. The architecture and hardware prototype implementation is described, and measurements are reported to demonstrate the functionality and compatibility with commercial infrastructure and mobile terminals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses DeepMDR, which is a deep learning (DL)-assisted control plane (CP) system to realize scalable and protocol-independent path computation in multi-domain packet networks. We develop DeepMDR based on ONOS, make it support protocol-oblivious forwarding (POF) in the data plane, facilitate a hierarchical CP architecture for multi-domain operations, and propose a DL model to achieve fast and high-quality path computation in each domain. Simulation results verify that our DL-assisted routing module achieves better trade-off between path computation time and routing performance than existing approaches. The effectiveness of our proposed DeepMDR is also demonstrated with experiments, which show that it serves inter-domain flow requests quickly with a processing capacity of ∼166,000 messages/s or higher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argued boldly in the first part of the feature topic on information-centric networking (ICN) [1] that ICN marks a fundamental shift in communications and networking. Indeed, we claim that the paradigm change ICN fosters is poised to have a large impact on the way we think about telecommunications in general, the way we design network architectures in particular, the trade-offs we consider in the specification of (future) protocols, and the possibilities for new services, especially in mobile and wireless environments. For example, in the first part of this feature topic we saw how content-centric networking (CCN) can be used to build social networking applications [2, 3] at a fraction of the complexity of today's systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The papers in this special section provide articles on the latest developments in this area, highlighting recent research achievements and providing insight into both theoretical and practical issues related to the evolution of network and service management. The series provides a forum for the publication of both academic and industrial research, addressing the state of the art, theory and practice in this discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fifth generation (5G) mobile network is standardized and developed to explore the mobile market beyond 2020. In response to the diverse strategies of 5G deployment, five alternative network architectures have been proposed to 3GPP by different mobile operators. To fulfill the urgent deployment requirement from some operators, an early drop of 5G, termed as non-standalone (NSA) new radio (NR), was completed at the end of 2017. After that, the standardization of a new 5G system, including th standalone (SA) new radio access network, was finished in June 2018. This article analyzes and compares the SA NR and NSA NR deployment modes in terms of coverage, network capability, interworking between 4G and 5G, complexity and cost of network deployment, and the latest industry progress. NSA NR performs better in interworking performance in the initial phase, while SA NR performs better in network capabilities, device performance, simple network deployment, and cost efficiency. 5G SA NR is recommended for operators who have the ambition to explore new opportunities in the vertical and enterprise markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network slicing is set out to address crucial needs of 5G, including support for multi-service provisioning. Focusing on resource and performance isolation, as well as security concerns associated with multi-tenancy, existing management and orchestration (MANO) frameworks typically offer network slices in the form of isolated bundles of computing, storage, and network resources across the network infrastructure, including the edge. However, network slice instantiation in its prevailing form raises significant concerns related to performance and resource utilization, hindering potential business-to-business (B2B) synergies. In this article, we discuss a new aspect of network slicing, optimized cross-slice communication (CSC). We argue that multi-tenancy and service co-location open up unique opportunities for B2B interactions, inter-service communications, and service composition, especially in the domain of edge computing and location-based services. In this context, we present optimized edge slice orchestration (MESON), a MANO-based architecture for optimized CSC in edge clouds. We discuss the main architecture components and descriptors, as well as the steps required for the discovery of CSC-enabled services and the establishment of optimized CSC among co-located slices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with supporting new business opportunities, data analytics -- understood as the pursuit of extracting meaning from raw data -- will be key to getting 5G radio access networks (RANs) efficiently rolled out and operated. The exploitation of data analytics services within the RAN itself, that is, to empower the operation of the RRM algorithms executed within the RAN nodes, is an incipient area of interest that broadens the more well-established applicability of using data analytics for on-top-of-the-RAN operations. In this respect, this article is an attempt to put a spotlight on this topic by motivating a plausible data analytics architectural framework for data-driven, smarter RRM algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The MEC paradigm calls for a distribution of computational capacity at the network's edges. While MEC will play a key role in future 5G deployments, it will take some time until the existing 4G networks evolve into a full 5G system. A challenge exists to devise a transition mechanism that allows MEC features to be seamlessly integrated in the current 4G networks. This article introduces a lightweight, ETSI-compliant MEC solution for 4G and 5G networks. The proposed solution, which we name LightEdge, has the main goal of immediately making available the features and capabilities of edge clouds to mobile users. This article reports on the design and implementation of LightEdge and on its evaluation in a practical latency-sensitive use case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IAB is being considered as a means to reduce the deployment costs of ultra-dense 5G mmWave networks, using wireless backhaul links to relay the access traffic. In this work we describe the most recent standardization activities on IAB, and compare architectures with and without IAB in mmWave deployments. While it is well understood that IAB networks reduce deployment costs by obviating the need to provide wired backhaul to each cellular base station, it is still necessary to validate the IAB performance in realistic scenarios. In this article we demonstrate the cell edge throughput advantage offered by IAB using endto- end system-level simulations. We also highlight some research challenges for IAB that will require further investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computation offloading through stateless applications is gaining momentum thanks to the emergence of serverless frameworks with inherent scalability properties. However, adoption of a serverless framework in an edge computing system requires careful consideration to keep its advantages unscathed. In the cloud, micro-services are scaled automatically according to demands, but in edge computing this would incur a significantly higher cost than in a data center and cannot be as fluid. This is especially relevant in scenarios where edge nodes are spread across large areas and have relatively small computation capabilities. In this article we propose to overcome this issue by adapting the allocation of demands to the currently allocated micro-services at short timescales, with two alternative mechanisms designed for different target scenarios, both aimed at enabling distributed computing environments. The proposed solution can be integrated within the ETSI MEC standard, which specifies a reference architecture and open service interfaces. Our contribution is validated in a proof-of-concept scenario with a prototype implementation released as open source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MCS is an emerging paradigm that leverages the pervasiveness of mobile, wearable, and vehicle-mounted devices to collect data from urban environments for ubiquitous service provisioning. In order to manage MCS application data streams efficiently, a scalable computing infrastructure hosting heterogeneous and distributed resources is critical. FC, as a geo-distributed computing paradigm, is a key enabler for this requirement as it bridges cloud servers and smart mobile devices. Research on the integration of MCS with FC has recently started to be explored, recognizing the requirements of MCS and their coexistence with cyber-physical systems. In this article, we analyze the state of the art of FC solutions in MCS systems. After a brief overview of MCS, we emphasize the link between MCS and FC. We then investigate the existing fog-based MCS architectures in detail by focusing on their building blocks, as well as the challenges that remain unaddressed. Our detailed review on the subject results in a taxonomy of FC solutions in MCS systems. In particular, we highlight the node structures, the information exchanged, the resource and service management, and the type of solutions adopted concerning privacy and security. Moreover, we provide a thorough discussion on the open issues and challenges by reporting useful insights for researchers in MCS and FC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major theme in the consumer communications area has been networked homes. In the past this has often focused on networking consumer devices within a single home to offer added value or better control. Initially, these solutions were often closed and only worked with devices of a single manufacturer. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses several reports published within the issue including "GRS: The Green, Reliability, and Security of Emerging Machine to Machine Communications," by Lu et al, "M2M: From Mobile to Embedded Internet," by Rose Qingyang Hu et al and "Home M2M Networks: Architectures, Standardsm and QoS Improvements," by Zhang et al.

Current mobile network infrastructure has a hard time keeping up with the constant content demand by an increasing number of smart devices, in terms of both bandwidth and cost. At the same time, the advent of devices with relatively high resources (computing, communications, caching) allows offloading computation, control, cache, and communication near users, as in edge or fog networking. If we consider the caching resource, the basic challenges are: (i) How and who can form fogs for local content caching? (ii) How is interacting with the fog done for efficient content caching and retrieval? To address these, we leverage information-centric networking to propose IS-Fog, a social-aware fog network where the content is the first class citizen. We first classify a device's eligibility to provide content using novel content-based centrality. At the same time, we incentivize users to self-organize and share their devices' resources and cache in the fog. We then propose social-aware content caching and a distribution scheme to model fog interactions allowing nodes to collaboratively cache content locally. We evaluate IS-Fog using realistic mobility traces of 2986 nodes. Results show that IS-Fog is a more scalable and efficient content caching and distribution approach compared to existing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the explosive growth of network traffic, content delivery in the Internet is an increasing concern. To fundamentally deal with this problem, in this article, we propose a data-driven intelligent future network from the perspectives of design philosophy, architecture, and use cases, respectively. The novel proposal fully absorbs the advantages of future network architectures and technologies, and efficiently improves the utilization of system resources and realizes intelligent content distribution while meeting the demands of network services. Moreover, we also outline some challenges and future research directions in this field [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased carrier bandwidth and the number of antenna elements expected in 5G networks require a redesign of the traditional IP-based backhaul and CPRI-based fronthaul interfaces used in 4G networks. We envision future mobile networks to encompass these legacy interfaces together with novel 5G RAN functional splits. In this scenario, a consistent transport network architecture able to jointly support backhaul and 4G/5G fronthaul interfaces is of paramount importance. In this article we present 5G-XHaul, a novel transport network architecture featuring wireless and optical technologies and a multi-technology software defined control plane, which is able to jointly support backhaul and fronthaul services. We have deployed and validated the 5G-XHaul architecture in a city-wide testbed in Bristol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The convergence of communication and computing (COM2P) has been taken as a promising solution for the sustainable development of mobile communication systems. The introduction of fog computing in future mobile networks makes COM2P possible. This article provides an overview on fog computing enabled mobile communication networks (FogMNW), including network architecture, system capacity and resource management. First, this article analyzes the heterogeneity of FogMNW with both advanced communication techniques and fog computing. Then a heterogeneous communication and hierarchical fog computing network architecture is proposed. With both communication and computing resources, FogMNW is enabled to achieve much higher capacity than conventional communication networks. This has been well demonstrated by the coded multicast scheme. Furthermore, a systematic management of communication and computing resources is necessary for FogMNW. By exploiting the communication load diversity in N cells, a communication load aware CLA scheme can achieve much higher computing resource efficiency than comparing schemes. The performance gap increases with N, and CLA can improve efficiency by more than 100 percent when there are 14 cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of smart city has been flourishing based on the prosperous development of various advanced technologies: mobile edge computing (MEC), ultra-dense networking, and software defined networking. However, it becomes increasingly complicated to design routing strategies to meet the stringent and ever changing network requirements due to the dynamic distribution of the crowd in different sectors of smart cities. To alleviate the network congestion and balance the network load for supporting smart city services with dramatic disparities, we design a deep-reinforcement- learning-based smart routing algorithm to make the distributed computing and communication infrastructure thoroughly viable while simultaneously satisfying the latency constraints of service requests from the crowd. Besides the proposed algorithm, extensive numerical results are also presented to validate its efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multi-access edge computing (MEC) architectural model has fostered the development of new human-driven edge computing (HEC) frameworks that extend the coverage of traditional MEC solutions leveraging people roaming around with their devices. HEC is a well-suited architecture for human-centered technologies such as mobile crowdsensing (MCS) as it allows conveying and distributing sensing tasks at the edges of the network, also enabling (local) sensing data collection from devices. This article, through the joint use of HEC and MCS paradigms, introduces a new social-driven edge computing architecture based on incentives and centrality measures. The core idea is to add social MEC (SMEC) nodes to complement the traditional edge nodes (i.e., the main actors of the middle layer of the standard MEC architecture), acting as bridges between other devices and the cloud. The principle that underlies the SMEC selection is based on the attitude of the users in performing tasks and on their measures of centrality. In addition, we report extensive experimental results based on co-location traces and cooperativeness scores extracted from the ParticipAct living lab, a well-known MCS dataset based on data collected between 2013 and 2015 from 170 students of the University of Bologna, that show how the selection based on centrality measurements returns greater benefits than simple selection based on cooperativeness scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

mmWave radio, although instrumental for achieving the required 5G capacity KPIs, necessitates the need for a very large number of access points, which places an immense strain on the current network infrastructure. In this article, we try to identify the major challenges that inhibit the design of the Next Generation Fronthaul Interface in two upcoming distinctively highly dense environments: in Urban 5G deployments in metropolitan areas, and in ultra-dense Hotspot scenarios. Second, we propose a novel centralized and converged analog Fiber-Wireless Fronthaul architecture, specifically designed to facilitate mmWave access in the above scenarios. The proposed architecture leverages optical transceivers, optical add/drop multiplexers and optical beamforming integrated photonics towards a Digital Signal Processing analog fronthaul. The functional administration of the fronthaul infrastructure is achieved by means of a packetized Medium Transparent Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation protocol. Preliminary results show that the protocol can facilitate Gb/s-enabled data transport while abiding to the 5G low-latency KPIs in various network traffic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) has been recently proposed to provide diverse vehicle control and on-board infotainment services while improving road safety and transportation intelligence. However, with the increased number of on-road vehicles and their mobility, conventional C/U-plane coupled architecture, which incurs high latency and low reliability, brings many challenges to the future deployment and operation of vehicular networks. Meanwhile, the tightly coupled network functions with operating hardware in network equipment also hinders new service provisioning in IoV. In order to address these issues, we propose a novel IoV framework by exploiting the potential of C/U-plane decoupled network architecture and Software Defined Networking technology. To satisfy the requirements of Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications in IoV, a virtualized radio access network, an integrated caching-computing- analyzing module, a scalable hierarchical C/U-plane scheme, and the corresponding programmable protocol configuration are developed to support the proposed framework. Mobility management, especially C-plane handoff management, is then analyzed through a typical case study. The analysis and simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed framework can dramatically reduce latency and enhance reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management and orchestration of virtual resources and functions, commonly referred to as MANO, are key functionalities of NFV environments. This article describes the design and deployment of the NFV MANO platform of 5TONIC, the open research and innovation laboratory on 5G technologies founded by Telefonica and IMDEA Networks. This NFV MANO platform provides 5TONIC trials and experiments with access to a functional production-like NFV environment, enabling experimentation with novel NFV products and services. As a relevant feature, the platform is capable of incorporating external sites to complement the portfolio of software and hardware resources that can be made available for experimentation activities. The 5TONIC MANO platform has been designed and built using open source technologies. The research carried out during its design and deployment has resulted in a contribution already made to its upstream projects regarding the automated configuration of virtualized network functions. Finally, we explore the scalability properties of the 5TONIC MANO platform, and we experimentally validate its functional capacity to orchestrate multi-site experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The volume of data traffic has increased exponentially due to the explosive growth of IoT devices and the arrival of many new IoT applications. Due to the large volume of data generated from IoT devices, limited bandwidth, high latency, and realtime analysis requirements, the conventional centralized network architecture cannot meet users requirements. Intensive real-time data analysis is one of the major challenges in current state-ofthe- art centralized architectures due to the ubiquitous deployment of different types of sensors. To address the current challenges and adhere to the principles of architectural design, we are proposing a SoftEdgeNet model, which is a novel SDN-based distributed layered network architecture with a blockchain technique for a sustainable edge computing network. At the fog layer, we introduce an SDN-based secure fog node architecture to mitigate security attacks and provide real-time analytics services. We are also proposing a flow rule partition, and allocation algorithm at the edge of the network. The evaluation result shows our proposed model allows for a significant improvement of the interactions in real time data transmission. In terms of the ability to mitigate flooding attacks, the bandwidth is maintained above 9 Mb/s until the attack rates exceed 2000 PPS in the hardware environment and the bandwidth remained almost unchanged in the software environment. In the case of scalability of the proposed model, our proposed algorithm has performed better and proceeded linearly with the increase in traffic volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]