Papers by Francisco Valera
It is sometimes believed that a "broadband access" network, providing ample transmission capacity... more It is sometimes believed that a "broadband access" network, providing ample transmission capacity to residential environments, is enough so as to allow a flawless delivery of advanced services. However, the provisioning of a combination of multiple services with guaranteed quality up to the end-user terminal requires a carefully designed architecture incorporating the appropriated Quality of Service (QoS) concepts throughout the data path. And this path includes the Residential Gateway (RGW) as the last hop towards the home network. This paper describes the different experiences performed with the RGW prototype developed within the framework of the European IST research project MUSE. Special emphasis will be made on the QoS capabilities of the RGW as well as on authentication and auto-configuration features.
Sensors
Presently, a significant part of the world population does not have Internet access. The fifth-ge... more Presently, a significant part of the world population does not have Internet access. The fifth-generation cellular network technology evolution (5G) is focused on reducing latency, increasing the available bandwidth, and enhancing network performance. However, researchers and companies have not invested enough effort into the deployment of the Internet in remote/rural/undeveloped areas for different techno-economic reasons. This article presents the result of a collaboration between Brazil and the European Union, introducing the steps designed to create a fully operational experimentation scenario with the main purpose of integrating the different achievements of the H2020 5G-RANGE project so that they can be trialed together into a 5G networking use case. The scenario encompasses (i) a novel radio access network that targets a bandwidth of 100 Mb/s in a cell radius of 50 km, and (ii) a network of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAV). This set of SUAVs is NFV-enabled, on top of whi...
Sensors
We claim the strong potential of data-centric communications in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), ... more We claim the strong potential of data-centric communications in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), as a suitable paradigm to enhance collaborative operations via efficient information sharing, as well as to build systems supporting flexible mission objectives. In particular, this paper analyzes the primary contributions to data dissemination in UAS that can be given by the Data Distribution Service (DDS) open standard, as a solid and industry-mature data-centric technology. Our study is not restricted to traditional UAS where a set of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) transmit data to the ground station that controls them. Instead, we contemplate flexible UAS deployments with multiple UAV units of different sizes and capacities, which are interconnected to form an aerial communication network, enabling the provision of value-added services over a delimited geographical area. In addition, the paper outlines an approach to address the issues inherent to the utilization of network-level mu...
IEEE Access
The next generation of mobile communication system will allow a plethora of new services and use ... more The next generation of mobile communication system will allow a plethora of new services and use cases. By offering support for high throughput connections, low latency response and massive number of connections, the fifth generation of the mobile network will trigger applications unseen in any other network. However, one important application scenario is not being properly addressed by the players responsible for the mobile networks' standardization, that is the remote and rural areas network. This scenario requires large cells with high throughput, flexibility to opportunistically exploit free bands below 1 GHz and spectrum agility to change the operational frequency when an incumbent is detected. Incipient actions are being considered for the Release 17 but based on the new radio specification as starting point. The limitations imposed by orthogonal waveforms in the physical layers hinder the exploitation of vacant TV channels in rural and remote areas. 5G-RANGE, a Brazil-Europe bilateral cooperation project, aims at conceiving, implementing and deploying an innovative mobile network, designed to provide reliable and cost-effective connection in these regions. This network can be seamlessly integrated with the other 5G scenarios, closing the connectivity gap between the urban, rural and remote areas. Hence, 5G-RANGE network is an interesting complementary solution for beyond 5G standards. This paper presents the major achievements of the 5G-RANGE project, from the design of the physical, medium access control and network layers, to the field demonstrations. The paper also covers the business models that can be used to make the deployment of this technology a reality. INDEX TERMS B5G, business model, proof-of-concept, remote areas network. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Christoph Studer .
Journal of Visualized Experiments
Sensors
Nowadays, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are frequently present in the civilian environment. Howe... more Nowadays, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are frequently present in the civilian environment. However, proper implementations of different solutions based on these aircraft still face important challenges. This article deals with multi-UAV systems, forming aerial networks, mainly employed to provide Internet connectivity and different network services to ground users. However, the mission duration (hours) is longer than the limited UAVs’ battery life-time (minutes). This paper introduces the UAV replacement procedure as a way to guarantee ground users’ connectivity over time. This article also formulates the practical UAV replacements problem in moderately large multi-UAV swarms and proves it to be an NP-hard problem in which an optimal solution has exponential complexity. In this regard, the main objective of this article is to evaluate the suitability of heuristic approaches for different scenarios. This paper proposes betweenness centrality heuristic algorithm (BETA), a graph theo...
Sensors
In this paper, we identify the main challenges and problems related with the management and orche... more In this paper, we identify the main challenges and problems related with the management and orchestration of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) over aerial networks built with Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs). Our analysis starts from a reference scenario, where several SUAVs are deployed over a delimited geographic area, and provide a mobile cloud environment that supports the deployment of functions and services using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies. After analyzing the main challenges to NFV orchestration in this reference scenario from a theoretical perspective, we undertake the study of one specific but relevant aspect following a practical perspective, i.e., the limitations of existing transport-layer solutions to support the dissemination of NFV management and orchestration information in the considered scenario. While in traditional cloud computing environments this traffic is delivered using TCP, our simulation results suggest that using this pro...
IEEE Access
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have progressively been integrated into people lives during the l... more Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have progressively been integrated into people lives during the last years. It is quite common now to see UAVs flying in the countryside doing field inspection, in highways for traffic control operations, or above stadiums in sport and music events. It is also common to see spectacular UAV swarm showcases (in most cases they are just performing a choreography) showing the potential of upcoming technologies. This article is focused on multi-UAV scenarios, on the establishment of Flying Ad hoc Networks (FANETs), and on the integration of 5G technologies like Network Function Virtualization (NFV) or Software Defined Networking (SDN). In particular, this article presents a proposal for one of the most common problems that the research and development community has to face at some stage: the validation of the different solutions and deployments. In this area, there is currently a notorious gap between the design phase and the deployment phase, since traditional network simulators are not designed with the constraints imposed by UAVs in mind. Besides, services implementations (that are usually distributed into single-board computers carried as payloads by UAVs) cannot be easily combined with the simulators. VENUE (Virtualized Environment for multi-UAV network emulation) is presented as an experimentation platform that allows testing the integration of multi-UAV FANETs together with network services deployments. VENUE covers from the simulation/emulation phase up to the real equipment integration phase. The validation of the platform is also presented in this article through several UAV use cases that make use of NFV technologies.
ABSTRACT This paper describes a brokering platform for the provision of complex services over the... more ABSTRACT This paper describes a brokering platform for the provision of complex services over the Internet. The platform is able to analyse a request for a complex service, divide it into simple components, and combine several services and products, offered by different providers, ...
2010 Future Network Mobile Summit, Jun 16, 2010
Fourth Generation mobile devices incorporate multiple interfaces with diverse access technologies... more Fourth Generation mobile devices incorporate multiple interfaces with diverse access technologies. The current Mobile IP protocol fails to support the enhanced fault tolerance capabilities that are enabled by the availability of multiple interfaces. In particular, established Mobile IP communications cannot be preserved through outages affecting the Home Address. In this paper we describe an architecture for mobile host multihoming that enables transport layer survivability through multiple failure modes. The proposed approach relies on the cooperation between Mobile IP and Multi-Path TCP and aims to fully support multihoming and extend roaming capabilities of mobile devices.
It is sometimes believed that a "broadband access" network, providing ample transmission capacity... more It is sometimes believed that a "broadband access" network, providing ample transmission capacity to residential environments, is enough so as to allow a flawless delivery of advanced services. However, the provisioning of a combination of multiple services with guaranteed quality up to the end-user terminal requires a carefully designed architecture incorporating the appropriated Quality of Service (QoS) concepts throughout the data path. And this path includes the Residential Gateway (RGW) as the last hop towards the home network. This paper describes the architecture of a RGW prototype designed and implemented within the framework of the European IST research project MUSE. The paper also addresses the different experiences performed with the prototype. Special emphasis will be made on the QoS capabilities of the RGW as well as on authentication and auto-configuration features.
To date, broadcasting traffic data represents a low percentage of the total traffic in the Intern... more To date, broadcasting traffic data represents a low percentage of the total traffic in the Internet when compared to other kinds of information. This may be caused by difficulties with multicast transmissions (i.e filtering by ISPs), low bandwidth rates in the last mile access, quality of service (QoS) and the use of Network Address Translation (NAT) boxes in SME's and home offices (SOHOs). Research efforts in Next Generation Networks (NGN) are under way to create networks with true triple-play capabilities to overcome these problems. Several standardisation bodies like ITU-T and ETSI have working groups aimed at developing a general NGN architecture able to transport any type of traffic with an associated QoS. There are several results available (for example, ETSI TISPAN has published its Release 1) but there is still ongoing work on different subjects, such as broadcasting transport in NGNs, where ETSI TISPAN has approved the study of IPTV in NGN as a high priority issue. This article focuses on the problems and solutions of a flexible, easily upgradeable broadcast enabled RGW (Residential Gateway) designed to work in an NGN scenario where multicast traffic, NAT boxes and QoS must be taken into consideration.
This paper presents several experiences and conclusions about the usage of the new middleware J2E... more This paper presents several experiences and conclusions about the usage of the new middleware J2EE platform in an e-commerce framework introducing mobile agent possibilities within the same environment. Main conclusions are taken from Smart-EC project, where J2EE and mobility are considered as a value added in its architecture. Other advanced technologies such as XML based multi-device publishing, the utilization of e-commerce ontologies to handle static and dynamic aspects of complex services or to control their transactional properties, are also considered in the project.
This paper describes a brokering platform for the provision of complex services over the Internet... more This paper describes a brokering platform for the provision of complex services over the Internet. The platform is able to analyse a request for a complex service, divide it into simple components, and combine several services and products, offered by different providers, into a solution that satisfies the complex request. The platform helps the user to refine or change the request until an suitable solution is found. After the user agreement, it confirms the transaction to the selected providers. Overall, the client can buy a complex service, involving several suppliers, in the same way as a simple one. The main innovations of the platform are the use of an e-commerce ontology to handle the static and dynamic aspects of complex services in different business areas, and the control of the transactional properties of complex services. The system exploits other advanced technologies, such as multi-device publishing based on XML, mobile agents, the Enterprise JavaBeans architecture, and the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE).
(1.4, aún en fase beta) pueden impactar en el desarrollo de una plataforma de intermediación elec... more (1.4, aún en fase beta) pueden impactar en el desarrollo de una plataforma de intermediación electrónica como Smart-EC.
This article presents different experiences carried out in the connectivity layer of several e-co... more This article presents different experiences carried out in the connectivity layer of several e-commerce mediation and brokering projects: ABS and ABROSE (supported by the European Programme on Advanced Communications, Technologies, and Services, ACTS) and Smart-EC project (supported by the European Programme on Information Society Technologies, IST). Project prototypes were implemented using Java, but in order to allow distributed communications, different techniques were used. While in the first two projects CORBA was considered the best choice for the communication infrastructure, the arrival of J2EE at the same time as the beginning of Smart-EC, led this project to move from CORBA to this new technology. This article will begin by summarising the first two approaches in order to finally concentrate on J2EE communication issues: parallelism, synchronous and asynchronous communications, blocking calls, deadlocks, control flow, multi-threading, etc. The last part of the article presents Smart-EC project as a use case, showing some different communication problems that were found and the different solutions that were taken.
The notorious enhancement in the access speed that residential environments are nowadays experien... more The notorious enhancement in the access speed that residential environments are nowadays experiencing has created a new scenario for service delivery that goes far beyond the best effort deployment of Web browsing or email services. This scenario demands the provisioning of real end to end quality of service from the user terminal located in the residential network up to the server premises. This article examines of this problem, providing an overview of the different alternatives for service signalling and resource reservation and including a proposal for local admission control for residential gateways in order to be able to promote the quality of service scenario presented in the first release of TISPAN-NGN towards the residential network.
Internet access has been, until now, the main driver for the generalization of broadband connecti... more Internet access has been, until now, the main driver for the generalization of broadband connections in the residential market. Simple IP based services like email and web browsing were, during many years, the typical services provided to residential customers. Today the telecommunications market is changing and operators are looking for ways to provide, through those same IP broadband connections, value added services. These will, in one hand, increase their revenues and on the other hand, provide to the customer a wider range of services until now inaccessible. Triple Play is already a reality, although, the convergence between mobile and fixed networks is bringing to the home a new range of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) based services, which used to be exclusive of the mobile world. Although, to successfully achieve the delivery of these new services, the interface between residential and operator's networks must be meticulously defined and implemented, by what is usually called the residential gateway (RGW). This paper focuses on emerging residential services and the implications that these impose on the RGW. The coexistence between IMS based services and non-IMS based services are also approached on this paper, with a special emphasis on RGW Quality of Service (QoS) issues.
Residential Gateways are key elements in order to be able to connect future advanced home environ... more Residential Gateways are key elements in order to be able to connect future advanced home environment with next generation networks such as the ones being defined by TISPAN NGN specification. A broadband multi-service and multi-provider enabled Residential Gateway that is capable of supporting an end to end QoS environment (from the end user terminal to the provider domain) in presented in this article. The prototype that is described here shows the different challenges and functionalities considered in MUSE European project mainly focusing on the quality of service and multi-provider multi-service management features. The last part of the article presents the capabilities of the prototype as Residential Service Gateway, and it is possible to implement new valuable services in the gateway itself to enable new functionalities in the home network.
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Papers by Francisco Valera