The Networking Research Group (NRG) is working on technologies for future cellular network architectures, covering topics ranging from lower system layer research all the way to service delivery platform design. In particular, the goal of our research is to design a Next Mobile Network (NMN) architecture and enabling technologies to support high-quality mobile multimedia services in a most efficient way and everywhere the user is requesting them. Our research covers core network aspects such as high speed optical transport, technologies for network virtualization, quality of experience based traffic management as well as network support for radio access and service delivery platform design.
Mobile Service Delivery Platform
Today's mobile service delivery platforms are centralized, monolithic systems, which usually do not support inter-domain service provisioning and heterogeneous and third party service access. Our research on next-generation service platforms targets designing a cost efficient, highly scalable and flexible service delivery platform for mobile networks. We achieve cost efficiency through employing the two following principles: efficient caching of the content consumed within the network and optimal placement of service components across network nodes. Caching content, especially if services based on user generated content are provided, can bring important benefits to both users and the network. At the other extreme, the platform needs to enable composability of services as well as the ability to dynamically change the place of execution of entire services or their constituent components as response to changing conditions such as user mobility.
Service Program Mobility
Imagine cellular network services that are offered globally and seamlessly without the traditional limitation of having to access the home network no matter where the service requests originate. Then the same user experience can be provided to users roaming as to the home users. Or, imagine a scenario in which services are spread within the home network as to follow the users and then provided from points in the network which are closest to the requesting users as opposed to central servers. This should lead not only to better user experience but also to more efficient usage of network resources. We refer to a set of technologies to realize this paradigm as Service Program Mobility. The vision of SPM is to develop an in-network capability for NMN supporting the dynamic placement of service components across domains to improve service performance (QoE) and reduce infrastructure cost.
QoE-based Mobile Traffic Management
Today, the allocation of resources in a mobile network is performed based on traditional QoS metrics, such as data rate and delay, striving for the most efficient resource utilization. For the emerging resource demanding multimedia applications, such as high fidelity video streaming or real-time games, a simple QoS mapping does not match any more to the quality the user actually perceives. NMN has the objective of optimizing the network for the best user satisfaction. We refer to the user perceived quality of service as Quality of Experience (QoE). The goal for NMN is to maximize the QoE for each application given the network resource constraints. Therefore more sophisticated applications models are needed to express the QoE and must be considered for a novel QoE aware mobile network traffic optimization.
Reconfigurable Mobile Network
In order to (re-)allocate and manage resources in a mobile network more efficiently and to support a higher level of flexibility in the network, the goal is to design a network configuration mechanism and a unified control plane. This mechanism allows for control and management of all network resources including transport links, radio resources and service capabilities (server storage and processing power). We refer to virtualization and, in particular, to network virtualization technologies in order to slice all network resources and provide virtual networks as isolated views on parts of the virtualized network resources. In this way infrastructure sharing between operators as well as flexible allocation of networked resources inside a network domain or outside (see Service Program Mobility) can be realized.
Optical Mobile Network
The foreseen substantial increase in mobile traffic and the resulting requirement to increase capacity in the radio access networks also has implications on the backhaul and core network of a mobile operator. It is therefore necessary to design a mobile network architecture that is able to scale with future traffic demands. Given that ARPU is likely to increase at a much lower rate than the traffic demand, or may even remain constant, having a cost efficient infrastructure is imperative. This implies to strive for ease of operation and ease of network management, as well as energy efficiency and “green networking” to reduce OPEX. Continuing to scale to high network capacity at a reasonable energy consumption and network cost is very difficult with the current routing/switching technology and network architectures, e.g., mobility management. We therefore focus on optical transport technologies and their integration for a cost efficient, mobility-aware backhaul and core network infrastructure.
Network-support for Radio Access
The mobile wireless network architecture has to be designed to scale with the expected growth of mobile data rates. Similarly, the reduction of OPEX by lowering the cost per bit as well as the improvement of energy efficiency are important design goals. On the wireless side, a key element for improved wireless coverage and data rates achieved by smaller and denser antenna deployments is interference management. Promising candidate technologies are base station coordination mechanisms such as cooperative MIMO, for high rate coverage. Further, we expect that dumb antenna modules and centralized scheduling/packet processing in the RAN (in so called signal processing nodes - SPN) has a high potential to provide OPEX savings. A suitable network architecture has to be designed in order to support those emerging radio signal processing concepts.
EU Projects and national funded Projects
COMCON – Control and Management of Coexisting Networks
(BMBF G-Lab) www.german-lab.de
The objective of this project is to design novel control and management mechanisms that support the coexistence of networks in a future networking scenario and illustrate the economic advantages. Coexisting networks allow specialization and isolation of functionalities in order to provide dependable and predictable networks, to allow different network technologies to run in parallel but isolated from each other (e.g., network sharing between operators), and to support network resource scalability to reduce the time and overhead required to introduce new services. Network virtualization is considered to be a key technology to realize coexisting networks.
SAIL – Scalable and Adaptive Internet Solutions
(EU project) www.sail-project.eu
SAIL’s objective is the research and development of novel networking technologies using proof-of-concept prototypes to lead the way from current networks to the Network of the Future. SAIL improves application support via an information-centric paradigm, replacing the old host-centric one, and develops concrete mechanisms and protocols to realise the benefits of a Network of Information (NetInf). SAIL enables the co-existence of legacy and new networks via virtualisation of resources and self-management, fully integrating networking with cloud computing to produce Cloud Networking (CloNe). SAIL embraces heterogeneous media from fibre backbones to wireless access networks, developing new signalling and control interfaces, able to control multiple technologies across multiple aggregation stages, implementing Open Connectivity Services (OConS).
MEDIEVAL – Mutilmedia Transport for Mobile Video Applications
(EU project) www.ict-medieval.eu
The objective of this project is to evolve the mobile network architecture for efficient video traffic support. The proposed architecture will follow a cross-layer design that, by exploiting the interaction between layers, can raise performance to values unattainable with individual developments. In particular, the architecture will address enhanced wireless access support to optimize video performance, novel IP mobility architecture adapted to the requirements of video traffic, transport optimizations for video distribution and network-aware video services that interact with the underlying layers. The technology developed by the project will be designed taking into account the requirements of network operators for commercial deployment, and will aim at improving the Quality of Experience by users as well as reducing the associated costs for operators.
EARTH – Energy Aware Radio and Network Technologies
(EU project) www.ict-earth.eu
The goal of the EARTH project is to address the global environmental challenge by investigating and proposing effective mechanisms to drastically reduce energy wastage and improve energy efficiency of mobile broadband communication systems, without compromising users’ perceived quality of service and system capacity.
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