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Softwarization at the Network Edge for the Tactile Internet
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Softwarization at the Network Edge for the Tactile Internet

A special issue of Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks (ISSN 2224-2708). This special issue belongs to the section "Network Services and Applications".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 December 2018) | Viewed by 26388

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Giovanni Schembra

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Electric, Electronic and Computer Engineering (DIEEI), University of Catania, Catania, Italy
Interests: telecommunication networks; future internet; traffic modeling; performance evaluation; mobile networks

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The introduction of the paradigms of Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is deeply modifying the Internet moving towards the new concept of softwarized network, where network nodes are realized with general-purpose standard servers, and network functions are implemented as software pieces running on them according to the data center and cloud computing paradigms. These technologies, combined with the emerging standard of Multi Access Edge Computing (MEC), will be the enablers of the forthcoming 5G mobile network for the Tactile Internet, a framework that most likely will revolutionize every segment of the society in the immediate future. Tactile Internet is considered as the next step of the Internet of Things (IoT) thanks to its property of delivering a low latency enough to build real-time interactive systems and physical tactile experiences remotely. Example areas of application are real-time gaming, industrial automation, transportation systems, health and education.

We invite authors to submit papers reporting original, previously unpublished research, which address this new area in all its aspects. We are open to papers dealing with a broad spread of topics, ranging from architectural and protocol perspectives to modeling and simulative approaches for design and performance evaluation; from the definition of use cases to the implementation of prototypes; from the description of standardization activities to the analysis of its economic impact on the market and the common daily lifetime. Review articles are also welcome.

Prof. Dr. Giovanni Schembra
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • resource management and orchestration for the Tactile Internet
  • SDN, NFV and MEC as enabling technologies
  • protocols and system architecture design
  • performance evaluation and reliability
  • security and privacy
  • use cases and application domains
  • proof of Concept (PoC) and demonstrators
  • standardization activities
  • economic impact

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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12 pages, 2787 KiB  
Article
A Fleet of MEC UAVs to Extend a 5G Network Slice for Video Monitoring with Low-Latency Constraints
by Christian Grasso and Giovanni Schembra
J. Sens. Actuator Netw. 2019, 8(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan8010003 - 1 Jan 2019
Cited by 37 | Viewed by 8951
Abstract
In the last decade, video surveillance systems have become more and more popular. Thanks to a decrease in price of video camera devices and the diffusion of cheap small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), video monitoring is today adopted in a wide range of [...] Read more.
In the last decade, video surveillance systems have become more and more popular. Thanks to a decrease in price of video camera devices and the diffusion of cheap small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), video monitoring is today adopted in a wide range of application cases, from road traffic control to precision agriculture. This leads to capture a great amount of visual material to be monitored and screened for event detection. However, information that is gathered from a platform of video monitoring UAVs may produce high-volume data, whose processing is unfeasible to be done locally by the same UAVs that perform monitoring. Moreover, because of the limited bandwidth of wireless links connecting UAVs to computing infrastructures that are installed on ground, offloading these data to edge clouds renders these platforms infeasible for video analysis applications with low-latency requirements. The target of this paper is to extend a 5G network slice for video monitoring with a Flying Ad-hoc NETwork (FANET) constituted by UAVs with multi-access edge computing (MEC) facilities (MEC UAVs), flying very close to the layer of UAVs monitoring the area of interest. A policy for mutual help among MEC UAVS is defined in order to increase the performance of the whole aerial MEC platform, so further reducing end-to-end latency between sources and actuators, and increasing system reliability. A use case is considered for a numerical analysis of the proposed platform. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Softwarization at the Network Edge for the Tactile Internet)
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19 pages, 708 KiB  
Article
Enif-Lang: A Specialized Language for Programming Network Functions on Commodity Hardware
by Nicola Bonelli, Stefano Giordano and Gregorio Procissi
J. Sens. Actuator Netw. 2018, 7(3), 34; https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan7030034 - 7 Aug 2018
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 6281
Abstract
The maturity level reached by today’s commodity platforms makes even low-cost PCs viable alternatives to dedicated hardware to implement real network functions without sacrificing performance. Indeed, the availability of multi-core processing packages and multi-queue network interfaces that can be managed by accelerated I/O [...] Read more.
The maturity level reached by today’s commodity platforms makes even low-cost PCs viable alternatives to dedicated hardware to implement real network functions without sacrificing performance. Indeed, the availability of multi-core processing packages and multi-queue network interfaces that can be managed by accelerated I/O frameworks, provides off-the-shelf servers with the necessary power capability for running a broad variety of network applications with near hardware-class performance. At the same time, the introduction of the Software Defined Networks (SDN) and the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) paradigms call for new programming abstractions and tools to allow this new class of network devices to be flexibly configured and functionally repurposed from the network control plane. The paper presents the ongoing work towards Enif-Lang (Enhanced Network processIng Functional Language), a functional language for programming network functions over generic middleboxes running the Linux operating system. The language addresses concurrent programming by design and is targeted at developing simple stand-alone applications as well as pre-processing stages of packet elaborations. Enif-Lang is implemented as a Domain Specific Language embedded in the Haskell language and inherits the main principles of its ancestor, including the strong typedness and the concept of function compositions. Complex network functions are implemented by composing a set of elementary operations (primitives) by means of a compact yet expressive language grammar. Throughout the paper, the description of the design principles and features of Enif-Lang are accompanied by examples and use cases. In addition, a preliminary performance assessment is carried out to prove the effectiveness of the language for developing practical applications with the performance level required by 5G systems and the Tactile Internet. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Softwarization at the Network Edge for the Tactile Internet)
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21 pages, 4918 KiB  
Article
Software Defined Networks in Industrial Automation
by Khandakar Ahmed, Jan O. Blech, Mark A. Gregory and Heinz W. Schmidt
J. Sens. Actuator Netw. 2018, 7(3), 33; https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan7030033 - 6 Aug 2018
Cited by 28 | Viewed by 10465
Abstract
Trends such as the Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 have increased the need to use new and innovative network technologies in industrial automation. The growth of industrial automation communications is an outcome of the shift to harness the productivity and efficiency [...] Read more.
Trends such as the Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 have increased the need to use new and innovative network technologies in industrial automation. The growth of industrial automation communications is an outcome of the shift to harness the productivity and efficiency of manufacturing and process automation with a minimum of human intervention. Due to the ongoing evolution of industrial networks from Fieldbus technologies to Ethernet, a new opportunity has emerged to harness the benefits of Software Defined Networking (SDN). In this paper, we provide a brief overview of SDN in the industrial automation domain and propose a network architecture called the Software Defined Industrial Automation Network (SDIAN), with the objective of improving network scalability and efficiency. To match the specific considerations and requirements of having a deterministic system in an industrial network, we propose two solutions for flow creation: the Pro-active Flow Installation Scheme and the Hybrid Flow Installation Scheme. We analytically quantify the proposed solutions that alleviate the overhead incurred from the flow setup. The analytical model is verified using Monte Carlo simulations. We also evaluate the SDIAN architecture and analyze the network performance of the modified topology using the Mininet emulator. We further list and motivate SDIAN features and report on an experimental food processing plant demonstration featuring Raspberry Pi as a software-defined controller instead of traditional proprietary Programmable Logic Controllers. Our demonstration exemplifies the characteristics of SDIAN. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Softwarization at the Network Edge for the Tactile Internet)
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