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It is widely expected that future networks of 6G and beyond will deliver on the unachieved goals set by 5G. Technologies such as Internet of Skills and Industry 4.0 will become stable and viable, as a direct consequence of networks that offer sustained and reliable mobile performance levels. The primary challenges for future technologies are not just low-latency and high-bandwidth. The more critical problem Mobile Service Providers (MSPs) will face will be in balancing the inflated demands of network connections and customers' trust in the network service, that is, being able to interconnect billions of unique devices while adhering to the agreed terms of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). To meet these targets, it is self-evident that MSPs cannot operate in a solitary environment. They must enable cooperation among themselves in a manner that ensures trust, both between themselves as well as with customers. In this study, we present the BEAT (Blockchain-Enabled Accountable and Transparent) Infrastructure Sharing architecture. BEAT exploits the inherent properties of permissioned type of distributed ledger technology (i.e., permissioned distributed ledgers) to deliver on accountability and transparency metrics whenever infrastructure needs to be shared between providers. We also propose a lightweight method that enables device-level accountability. BEAT has been designed to be deployable directly as only minor software upgrades to network devices such as routers. Our simulations on a resource-limited device show that BEAT adds only a few seconds of overhead processing time -- with the latest state-of-the-art network devices, we can reasonably anticipate much lower overheads., arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2107.04328

Infrastructure sharing is a widely discussed and implemented approach and is successfully adopted in telecommunications networks today. In practice, it is implemented through prior negotiated Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between the parties involved. However, it is recognised that these agreements are difficult to negotiate, monitor and enforce. For future 6G networks, resource and infrastructure sharing is expected to play an even greater role. It will be a crucial technique for reducing overall infrastructure costs and increasing operational efficiencies for operators. More efficient SLA mechanisms are thus crucial to the success of future networks. In this work, we present "BEAT", an automated, transparent and accountable end-to-end architecture for network sharing based on blockchain and smart contracts. This work focuses on a particular type of blockchain, Permissioned Distributed Ledger (PDL), due to its permissioned nature allowing for industry-compliant SLAs with stringent governance. Our architecture can be implemented with minimal hardware changes and with minimal overheads.

openaire: EC/H2020/871808/EU//INSPIRE-5Gplus The promise of disparate features envisioned by the 3GPP for 5G, such as offering enhanced Mobile Broadband connectivity while providing massive Machine Type Communications likely with very low data rates and maintaining Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications requirements, create a very challenging environment for protecting the 5G networks themselves and associated assets. To overcome such complexity, future 5G networks must employ a very high degree of network and service management automation, which is a security challenge by itself as well as an opportunity for smarter and more efficient security functions. In this paper, we present the smart, trustworthy and liable 5G security platform being designed and developed in the INSPIRE-5Gplus1 project. This platform takes advantage of new techniques such as Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), network softwarization and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) for closed-loop and end-to-end security management following a zero-touch model in 5G and Beyond 5G networks. To this end, we specifically elaborate on two key aspects of our platform, namely security management with Security Service Level Agreements (SSLAs) and liability management, in addition to the description of the overall architecture.

The fifth generation (5G) of cellular networks shall host a number of tenants and provide services tailored to meet a wide range of requirements in terms of performance, dependability and security. Network slicing will be a key enabler, by assigning dedicated resources and functionalities to meet such requirements, where the isolation between slices, i.e., that a slice may operate without interference from other slices, becomes a core issue. The objective of this paper is to give a thorough insight into the isolation concept, discuss the challenges involved in providing it, and outline the means available to provide various levels of isolation. Fundamental concepts that can be used in further work to build an isolation solution tailored to specific needs. This paper defines important concepts such as the Provider Management, the Tenant Management, and the Means of Isolation in the context of the Isolation Dimensions. The conclusion of the study is that dealing with isolation between slices needs extensions in state of the art on the mentioned concepts, and in how to tailor the isolation to meet the needs in a cost-efficiency manner. © 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

Proceeding of: IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS MiSARN 2019: Mission-Oriented Wireless Sensor, UAV and Robot Networking), 29 April-2 May 2019 Paris, France In this paper, we analyze the main challenges and issues related with the orchestration of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) on Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs). Our analysis considers a reference scenario where a number of SUAVs are deployed over a delimited geographic area and provide a mobile cloud environment that supports the deployment of functionalities using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies. The orchestration of services in this reference scenario presents different challenges, due to the constrained capacity and limited lifetime of battery-powered SUAVs, the intermittent availability of network communications, and the need to consider enhanced policies for the allocation of virtual functions to SUAVs. Finally, we perform a first exploratory evaluation of the identified challenges and issues, using a well-known and widely adopted virtualized infrastructure manager, i.e., OpenStack. This article has been partially supported by the European H2020 5GRANGE project (grant agreement 777137), and by the 5GCity project (TEC2016-76795- C6-3-R) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.

To allow 5G-VINNI Facility Sites to implement their networks with some degree of consistency, and with the potential for inter-operability and interconnection between Facility Sites, a common architecture for 5G-VINNI is defined. This draws heavily on pre-existing work from Standards, as well as from previous 5G-PPP projects. This document is produced ahead of implementation, and so is to some extent a description of the expectations for implementing a standards compliant facility. Future versions will reflect this as a starting point, but also include lessons learned during implementation.

This work is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the European Regional Development Fund (Project TEC2016-76795-C6-4-R), the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (FPU Grant 16/03354), and the University of Granada, Andalusian Regional Government and European Social Fund under Youth Employment Program., Next-generation systems are anticipated to be digital platforms supporting innovative services with rapidly changing traffic patterns. To cope with this dynamicity in a cost-efficient manner, operators need advanced service management capabilities such as those provided by NFV. NFV enables operators to scale network services with higher granularity and agility than today. For this end, automation is key. In search of this automation, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has defined a reference NFV framework that make use of model-driven templates called Network Service Descriptors (NSDs) to operate network services through their lifecycle. For the scaling operation, an NSD defines a discrete set of instantiation levels among which a network service instance can be resized throughout its lifecycle. Thus, the design of these levels is key for ensuring an effective scaling. In this article, we provide an overview of the automation of the network service scaling operation in NFV, addressing the options and boundaries introduced by ETSI normative specifications. We start by providing a description of the NSD structure, focusing on how instantiation levels are constructed. For illustrative purposes, we propose an NSD for a representative NS. This NSD includes different instantiation levels that enable different ways to automatically scale this NS. Then, we show the different scaling procedures the NFV framework has available, and how it may automate their triggering. Finally, we propose an ETSI-compliant workflow to describe in detail a representative scaling procedure. This workflow clarifies the interactions and information exchanges between the functional blocks in the NFV framework when performing the scaling operation., This work is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the European Regional Development Fund (Project TEC2016-76795-C6-4-R), Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (FPU Grant 16/03354), University of Granada, Andalusian Regional Government and European Social Fund under Youth Employment Program.

The evolution of the Internet has resulted in the deployment of new application-level solutions to enhance the scalability and efficiency of content dissemination (e.g., content delivery networks and peer-to-peer systems). However, despite of this improvement on performance, the utilization of this type of solutions introduces new security concerns, as a content provider must necessarily delegate the role of distributing the content to third parties, and current security solutions, such as TLS and IPsec, do not allow authenticating the original content provider or the content itself in these scenarios. In this paper, we present SCoT, a transport-layer protocol that allows a content provider to bind protection to content, enabling content authentication at receivers regardless of any third party infrastructures that have been used to disseminate the content. Content authentication procedures are executed transparently to end-user applications. We implemented a fully operational prototype of the protocol in Java, including an API to support the development of SCoT applications. We utilized it to configure an experimentation scenario that served to validate a theoretical analysis of the SCoT throughput and to illustrate the performance that can be achieved in a practical deployment. The paper concludes describing a set of use cases of the protocol. This article has been partially supported by the European H2020 5Gin-FIRE project (grant agreement 732497), and by the DRONEXT project (TEC2014-54335-C4-2-R) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. The work of Ignacio Soto has partially been supported by the Spanish Texeo project (TEC2016-80339-R) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.

In pursuit of a flexible, resource efficient and high- performant 5G infrastructure, many operators, vendors and research consortia are currently developing, testing and inte­grating their NFV platform with associated management and orchestration (MANO) functionality. The SONATA NFV platform follows a micro-service design, which involves a tight coupling between an SDK, monitoring and MANO functionality, targeting a secure and stable software foundation. This experience paper gives a thorough overview on the encountered challenges, insights and resulting learnings when implementing and integrating the SONATA Service Platform using a continuous integration and delivery DevOps methodology. This is the result of a strong cooperation between prominent equipment vendors, network operators, software companies and universities, providing a set of constructive recommendations in hope of catalysing the development and deployment of NFV platforms.

This work is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund (Project TEC2016-76795-C6-4-R), the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (FPU Grant 16/03354), and the University of Granada, Andalusian Regional Government and European Social Fund under Youth Employment Program.       , —Network slicing is considered a key mechanism to serve the multitude of tenants (e.g. vertical industries) targeted by forthcoming 5G systems in a flexible and cost-efficient manner. In this paper, we present a SDN/NFV architecture with multitenancy support. This architecture enables a network slice provider to deploy network slice instances for multiple tenants on-the-fly, and simultaneously provision them with isolation guarantees. Following the Network Slice as-a-Service delivery model, a tenant may access a Service Catalog, selecting the slice that best fits its needs and ordering its deployment. This work provides a detailed view on the stages that a network slice provider must follow to deploy the ordered network slice instance, accommodating it into a multi-domain infrastructure, and putting it operative for tenant’s consumption. These stages address critical issues identified in the literature, including (i) the mapping from high-level service requirements to network functions and infrastructure requirements, (ii) the admission control, and (iii) the specific information a network slice descriptor should have. With the proposed architecture and the recommended set of stages, network slice providers can deploy (and later operate) slice instances with great agility, flexibility, and full automation., This work is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund (Project TEC2016-76795-C6-4-R), Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (FPU Grant 16/03354), University of Granada, Andalusian regional Government and European Social Fund under Youth Employment Program.

MEC or Multi-Access Edge Computing is a network service delivery architecture that enables cloud computing capabilities at the edge of the access network. Realisation of the MEC vision is challenging with current network technologies: service discovery and routing, secure network slicing and distributed mobility management require complex capabilities in the network. This demo features an OMEC use case realised via RINA, the Recursive Network Architecture. RINA provides interesting properties for OMEC, due to its support for multi-homing, mobility and slicing without special protocols, and security as a first class element of the architecture.

The fifth generation of mobile communications is anticipated to open up innovation opportunities for new industries such as vertical markets. However, these verticals originate myriad use cases with diverging requirements that future 5G networks have to efficiently support. Network slicing may be a natural solution to simultaneously accommodate over a common network infrastructure the wide range of services that vertical-specific use cases will demand. In this article, we present the network slicing concept, with a particular focus on its application to 5G systems. We start by summarizing the key aspects that enable the realization of so-called network slices. Then, we give a brief overview on the SDN architecture proposed by the ONF and show that it provides tools to support slicing. We argue that although such architecture paves the way for network slicing implementation, it lacks some essential capabilities that can be supplied by NFV. Hence, we analyze a proposal from the ETSI to incorporate the capabilities of SDN into the NFV architecture. Additionally, we present an example scenario that combines SDN and NFV technologies to address the realization of network slices. Finally, we summarize the open research issues with the purpose of motivating new advances in this field.

Heterogeneity of current software solutions for 5G is heading for complex and costly situations, with high fragmentation, which in turn creates uncertainty and the risk of delaying 5G innovations. This context motivated the definition of a novel Operating Platform for 5G (5G-OP), a unifying reference functional framework supporting end-to-end and multi-layer orchestration. 5G-OP aims at integrated management, control and orchestration of computing, storage, memory, networking core and edge resources up to the end-user devices and terminals (e.g., robots and smart vehicles). 5G-OP is an overarching architecture, with agnostic interfaces and well-defined abstractions, offering the seamless integration of current and future infrastructure control and orchestration solutions (e.g., OpenDaylight, ONOS, OpenStack, Apache Mesos, OpenSource MANO, Docker, LXC, etc.) The paper provides also the description of a prototype that can be seen as a simplified version of a 5G-OP, whose feasibility has been demonstrated in Focus Group IMT2020 of ITU-T.

A Network Operating System (NetOS) is a novel paradigm for developing a next-generation network management and operation platform. As we shall describe, NetOS not only goes far beyond the SDN concepts but also constitutes a fundamental enabler for NFV. © 2014 OSA.

International audience; This article explores the possibility of using traffic optimization techniques within the context of the LISP (Locator/ Identifier Separation Protocol) framework. These techniques use Tunneling, Multiplexing and header Compression of Traffic Flows (TCMTF) in order to save bandwidth and to reduce the amount of packets per time unit. Taking into account that encapsulation is necessary in LISP, bandwidth can be drastically reduced in flows using small packets, which are typical of many real-time services. The ability of the LISP framework to manage the signaling of TCMTF options is also studied. An analytical expression of the savings, as a function of the different header sizes, is devised and used to calculate the maximum expected savings. Different services and scenarios of interest are identified, and this allows the consideration of tests with real traffic traces, showing the savings as a function of the multiplexing period, and demonstrating that the additional delays can be acceptable for real-time services.

In this chapter, we focus on long-term modeling and prediction of univariate nonlinear time series. First, a method for long-term time series prediction by means of fuzzy inference systems combined with residual variance estimation techniques is developed and validated through a number of time series prediction benchmarks. This method provides an automatic means of modeling and predicting network traffic load, and can thus be classified as a method for predictive data mining. Although the primary focus in this section is to develop a methodology for building simple and thus interpretable fuzzy inference systems, it will be shown that they also outperform some of the most accurate and commonly used techniques in the field of time series prediction. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

This article introduces the key innovations of the 5Growth service platform to empower verticals industries with an AI-driven automated 5G End-to-End (E2E) slicing solution which allows industries to achieve their service requirements. Specifically, we present multiple vertical pilots (Industry 4.0, Transportation and Energy), identify the key 5G requirements to enable them and analyze existing technical and functional gaps as compared to current solutions. Based on the identified gaps, we propose a set of innovations to address them with: (i) support of 3GPP-based RAN slices by introducing a RAN slicing model and providing automated RAN orchestration and control, (ii) an AI-driven closed-loop for automated service management with Service Level Agreement (SLA) assurance, and, (iii) Multi-domain solutions to expand service offerings by aggregating services and resources from different provider domains and also enable the integration of private 5G networks with public networks., Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/MCOM.2009.5273797

Quantum computers will change the cryptographic panorama. A technology once believed to lay far away into the future is increasingly closer to real world applications. Quantum computers will break the algorithms used in our public key infrastructure and in our key exchange protocols, forcing a complete retooling of the cryptography as we know it. Quantum Key distribution is a physical layer technology immune to quantum or classical computational threats. However, it requires a physical substrate, and optical fiber has been the usual choice. Most of the time used just as a point to point link for the exclusive transport of the delicate quantum signals. Its integration in a real-world shared network has not been attempted so far. Here we show how the new programmable software network architectures, together with specially designed quantum systems can be used to produce a network that integrates classical and quantum communications, including management, in a single, production-level infrastructure. The network can also incorporate new quantum-safe algorithms and use the existing security protocols, thus bridging the gap between today's network security and the quantum-safe network of the future. This can be done in an evolutionary way, without zero-day migrations and the corresponding upfront costs. We also present how the technologies have been deployed in practice using a production network., 7 pages, 4 figures, Accepted for publication in the IEEE Communications Magazine, Future Internet: Architectures and Protocols issue

There is a great attention to quantum technologies in the ICT environment. In particular, when dealing with security matters, the most prominent quantum technology is Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). QKD allows the sharing of symmetric keys with information theoretic security (ITS, i.e. independently of the computational power of the attacker) between two remote network nodes. QKD is the only known method to share a key able to reach ITS. During the last two decades, there has been a tremendous technological progress in QKD research, that has led to the availability of QKD network demonstrators.Software Defined Networks (SDN) enables the automation of service provisioning within network operator infrastructures. With the advent of web-scale services and dynamic network requirements, operators can not anymore deploy their services based on manual intervention or using proprietary vendor solutions. Programmability is key in the next-generation network infrastructure and any new technology must be integrated with this paradigm. Let us highlight that this requirement is even more important with virtual environments, where a Virtual Network Function (VNF) can be deployed in any point-of-presence of the operator. The new 5G deployments will enable operators to have edge computing services supporting different capabilities, thus increasing even more the complexity to deliver services without any automation.In spite of the high potential of QKD, this technology has not yet found its path to wide adoption, commercialization and deployment. QKD is a physical technology that requires the existence of a quantum channel, a physical connection able to transmit quantum bits without perturbation, making hard its integration in networks. The aim of this document is to present how QKD can be deployed in next generation infrastructures, based on realistic scenarios. To do so, this paper describes the technological components of the solutions, as well as the use cases that motivate such effort. These use cases are described from a telecommunication provider's point of view, as they are the actors in charge of deploying QKD systems in their networks.

The evolution of next-generation mobile networks (5G, 6G ...) is highlyrelated to the latest virtualisation technology, which exposes it to newcyber-attack vectors. Therefore, there is an increasing need to train cy-bersecurity experts in the use of appropriate tools to prevent network at-tacks, especially those applied in mission-critical industrial environments.To meet this need, there are systems called cyber ranges that can be seenas an exemplification of a digital network twin. SPIDER is a cyber rangespecially oriented to train experts in next-generation network cybersecu-rity. In this paper we present how SPIDER is augmenting cyber rangeenvironments with ML tools, how it works and the way in which it canbe used to train new experts.

Machine Learning (ML) technologies applied to Cybersecurity, especiallyin the area of network cyber threat detection, are a promisingchoice, but they require additional research in the applicabilityof a wide range of available algorithms. Such algorithms usuallyrequire training using good-quality and quantitatively significantdatasets, which are rarely publicly available. To this end, in thispaper we describe a novel experimental framework, that we call theMouseworld, that combines NFV and SDN to create an environmentable to (1) blend and transmit real and synthetic traffic and (2)collect and label this traffic in order to be utilised for training andvalidating ML algorithms that will be applied to the detection ofcybersecurity threats. The Mouseworld framework includes a setof traffic generation, collection and labelling modules, jointly withanalytics and algorithm training and visualization components. TheOSM open-source network orchestrator is utilized to control andmanage the framework and to deploy the training and validationscenarios. We present a preliminary result on the area of Securitythreat detection as a demonstration of the framework viability.

The ETSI network function virtualisation (NFV) management and orchestration (MANO) architectural framework defines an NFV service platform composed of an NFV orchestrator and virtualised network function (VNFs) managers that are responsible to provide NFV network services. Network services can be defined as the joint instantiation of VNFs and the provisioning of required network connections between the different VNFs to jointly realise a more complex function (e.g. service function chaining). In general, it is assumed that a single service platform is governing the whole NFV infrastructure (NFVI) domain from the edge to the core of the network, composed of multiple edge computing and core DCs interconnected by heterogeneous optical access, metro and core transport networks. However, network operators will fragment their transport networks and DCs into multiple NFVI domains for scalability, administrative, or security issues. Each NFVI domain can be provided by different vendors relying on their own NFV service platforms or leveraging open source solutions such as SONATA, OSM, or ONAP. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical and recursive network service orchestration architecture to compose end-to-end network services by aggregating network services provided by per-domain NFV service platforms together with VNFs.