The paper provides an overview of the current status of the 5G evolution as well as a research outlook on the future wireless-access evolution towards 6G.

Forecasting commodity futures price is a challenging task. We present an algorithm to predict the trend of commodity futures price based on a type of structuring data and back propagation neural network. The random volatility of futures can be filtered out in the structuring data. Moreover, it is not restricted by the type of futures contract. Experiments show the algorithm can achieve 80% accuracy in predicting price trends.

This paper argues that a layered approach is more suitable for Information Centric Networking (ICN) than a narrow-waist approach and proposes an ICN mechanism called ZINK. In ZINK, a location-independent content name is resolved to a list of node IDs of content servers in the application layer and a node ID is mapped to a node locator in the network layer, which results in scalable locator-based routing. An ID/Locator split approach in the network layer can efficiently support client/serever mobility. Efficient content transfer is achieved by using sophisticated functions in the transport layer such as multipath transfer for bandwidth aggregation or fault tolerance. Existing well-tuned congestion control in the transport layer achieves fairness not only among ICN flows but also among ICN flows and other flows. A proof-of concept prototype of ZINK is implemented on an IPv6 stack. Evaluation results show that the time for content finding is practical, efficient content transfer is possible by using multipath transfer, and the mobility support mechanism is scalable as shown in a nationwide experiment environment in Japan.

Wireless engineers and business planners commonly raise the question on where, when, and how millimeter-wave (mmWave) will be used in 5G and beyond. Since the next generation network is not just a new radio access standard, but also an integration of networks for vertical markets with diverse applications, answers to the question depend on scenarios and use cases to be deployed. This paper gives four 5G mmWave deployment examples and describes in chronological order the scenarios and use cases of their probable deployment, including expected system architectures and hardware prototypes. The first example is a 28 GHz outdoor backhauling for fixed wireless access and moving hotspots, which will be demonstrated at the PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games in 2018. The second deployment example is a 60 GHz unlicensed indoor access system at the Tokyo-Narita airport, which is combined with Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) to enable ultra-high speed content download with low latency. The third example is mmWave mesh network to be used as a micro Radio Access Network (µ-RAN), for cost-effective backhauling of small-cell Base Stations (BSs) in dense urban scenarios. The last example is mmWave based Vehicular-to-Vehicular (V2V) and Vehicular-to-Everything (V2X) communications system, which enables automated driving by exchanging High Definition (HD) dynamic map information between cars and Roadside Units (RSUs). For 5G and beyond, mmWave and MEC will play important roles for a diverse set of applications that require both ultra-high data rate and low latency communications.

Telecommunication networks have evolved from telephony networks to the Internet, and they sustainably support the development of a secured, safe, and comfortable society. The so-called “switching technology” including the evolved “network system technology” is one of the main infrastructure technologies used for realizing information communication services. On the occasion of completion of 100 years since the establishment of the IEICE, we summarize the history of network system technologies and present their future direction for the next generation. We mainly focus on a series of technologies that evolved through the discussions of the IEICE technical committees on switching engineering, launched 50 years ago, switching systems engineering, and network systems in action.

In everyday life, people use past events and their own knowledge in predicting probable unfolding of events. To obtain the necessary knowledge for such predictions, newspapers and the Internet provide a general source of information. Newspapers contain various expressions describing past events, but also current and future events, and opinions. In our research we focused on automatically obtaining sentences that make reference to the future. Such sentences can contain expressions that not only explicitly refer to future events, but could also refer to past or current events. For example, if people read a news article that states “In the near future, there will be an upward trend in the price of gasoline,” they may be likely to buy gasoline now. However, if the article says “The cost of gasoline has just risen 10 yen per liter,” people will not rush to buy gasoline, because they accept this as reality and may expect the cost to decrease in the future. In the following study we firstly investigate future reference sentences in newspapers and Web news. Next, we propose a method for automatic extraction of such sentences by using semantic role labels, without typical approaches (temporal expressions, etc.). In a series of experiments, we extract semantic role patterns from future reference sentences and examine the validity of the extracted patterns in classification of future reference sentences.

5G is the next step in the evolution of mobile communication and a key component of the future networked society. It will include the evolution of LTE as well as new non-backwards-compatible technology. With capabilities such as massive system capacity, higher data rates, very low latency and ultra-high reliability, 5G will provide significantly enhanced mobile-broadband experience but also support a wide range of new wireless applications and use cases. Key technology components include operation at higher frequency bands and flexible spectrum usage, advanced multi-antenna/multi-site transmission, lean transmission, access/backhaul integration, and possibility for direct device-to-device communication.

Content-centric networking (CCN) is an innovative network architecture that is being considered as a successor to the Internet. In recent years, CCN has received increasing attention from all over the world because its novel technologies (e.g., caching, multicast, aggregating requests) and communication based on names that act as addresses for content have the potential to resolve various problems facing the Internet. To implement these technologies, however, requires routers with performance far superior to that offered by today's Internet routers. Although many researchers have proposed various router components, such as caching and name lookup mechanisms, there are few router-level designs incorporating all the necessary components. The design and evaluation of a complete router is the primary contribution of this paper. We provide a concrete hardware design for a router model that uses three basic tables — forwarding information base (FIB), pending interest table (PIT), and content store (CS) — and incorporates two entities that we propose. One of these entities is the name lookup entity, which looks up a name address within a few cycles from content-addressable memory by use of a Bloom filter; the other is the interest count entity, which counts interest packets that require certain content and selects content worth caching. Our contributions are (1) presenting a proper algorithm for looking up and matching name addresses in CCN communication, (2) proposing a method to process CCN packets in a way that achieves high throughput and very low latency, and (3) demonstrating feasible performance and cost on the basis of a concrete hardware design using distributed content-addressable memory.

Cognitive radio ad hoc networks can be used to solve the problems of limited available spectrum and inefficient spectrum usage by adaptively changing their transmission parameters. Routing protocol design has a significant impact on the network performance. However, an efficient protocol that takes account of primary user flows and the long-term channel assignment issue in route selection is still missing. In this paper, we propose AODV-cog, a cognitive routing protocol for CSMA/CA ad hoc networks based on AODV. AODV-cog chooses a route by considering the effect on the primary users, available channel bandwidth and link reliability. AODV-cog also takes account of future channel utilization which is an important but underexplored issue. AODV-cog switches channels for secondary user flows when network congestion occurs. We use theoretical analysis and computer simulations to show the advantage of AODV-cog over existing alternatives.

Current network technologies, mainly represented by the Internet, have demonstrated little capacity to evolve because of the strict binding of communications to identifiers and locators. While locator namespaces represent the position of communication participants in the graph of a specific protocol, unstructured/plain identifiers represent the position of communications participants in the global network graph. Although they are valid for forwarding packets along communication paths, both views fail to fully represent the actual entities behind communications beyond a simple vertex. In this paper we introduce and evaluate an identity-based control plane that resolves these problems by abstracting communications from identifiers and locators and by using identities to achieve enhanced security, and mobility management operations. This identity-based control plane can then be integrated into different network architectures in order to incorporate the features it provides. This facilitates the evolution capacity of those architectures that separate the information transmission concerns (networking, routing), from end-to-end aspects like security and mobility management.

Due to the recent network service market trends, network infrastructure providers must make their network infrastructures tolerant of network service complexity and swift at providing new network services. To achieve this, we first make a design decision for the single domain network infrastructure in which we use network virtualization and separate the network service control and management from the network infrastructure and leave the resource connectivity control and management in the network infrastructure so that the infrastructure can maintain simplicity and the network service can become complex and be quickly provided. Along with the decision, we construct an architecture of the network infrastructure and a network management model. The management model defines a slice as being determined by abstracted resource requirements and restructures the roles and planes from the viewpoint of network infrastructure usability so that network service requesters can manage network resources freely and swiftly in an abstract manner within the authorities the network infrastructure operator provides. We give the details of our design and implementation for a network virtualization management system along with the model. We deployed and evaluated our designed and implemented management system on the Japan national R&E testbed (JGN-X) to confirm the feasibility of our management system design and discuss room for improvement in terms of response time and scalability towards practical use. We also investigated certain cases of sophisticated network functions to confirm that the infrastructure can accept these functions without having to be modified.

Software-Defined Networking currently appears to be a major evolution towards network programmability. In this paper, we first analyze the network management capabilities of OpenFlow in order to identify the main challenges that are raised for SDN management. We address current deficiencies of SDN management and suggest solutions that incur research directions to be carried out for the management of enhanced SDN.

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is expected to grow in networks of the future, where massive numbers of low cost, low function M2M terminals communicate in many-to-many manner in an extremely mobile and dynamic environment. We propose a network architecture called Data-centric Network (DCN) where communication is done using a data identifier (ID) and the dynamic data registered by mobile terminals can be retrieved by specifying the data ID. DCN mitigates the problems of prior arts, which are large size of routing table and transaction load of name resolution service. DCN introduces concept of route attraction and aggregation in which the related routes are attracted to an aggregation point and aggregated to reduce routing table size, and route optimization in which optimized routes are established routes to reduce access transaction load to the aggregation points. These allow the proposed architecture to deal with ever increasing number of data and terminals with frequent mobility and changes in data.

Information-centric networking has been touted as an alternative to the current Internet architecture. Our work addresses a crucial part of such a proposal, namely the design of a network node within an information-centric networking architecture. Special attention is given in providing a platform for development and experimentation in an emerging network research area; an area that questions many starting points of the current Internet. In this paper, we describe the service model exposed to applications and provide background on the operation of the platform. For illustration, we present current efforts in deployment and experimentation with demo applications presented, too.

Overlay networking makes it easy for users add new network functionalities while keeping existing Internet connectivity intact. This paper introduces SCONE (Service-COmposable InterNEt) as a networking service to facilitate the management of service overlay networking. By looking into the structure of programmable overlay nodes, SCONE provides programmable IP service gateways (PSGs) that ensure high-speed per-flow packet processing for overlay networking. In order to meet the data-rate requirements of various host applications, each PSG is accelerated by hardware packet processing for its data plane. It also leverages the space-efficient pattern matching of entity cloning and provides localized (i.e., de-centralized) services to assist the scalable support for software-defined networking (SDN). An experiment result shows that the proposed PSGs can support high-fidelity overlay networking from both performance and scalability perspectives.

The Internet was designed for academic use more than 40 years ago. After having been used commercially, many unpredictable requirements have emerged, including mobility, security and content distribution. In addition, the Internet has become so ossified that fulfilling new requirements is difficult. Instead of developing ad-hoc solutions, re-designing clean-slate Internet architectures has become a key research challenge in networking communities. This survey paper addresses key research issues and then introduces ongoing research projects from Japan, the United States and the European Union.

To support mobility, multihoming, routing scalability, and security, there are a lot of proposals based on ID/Locator split approach not only for the current Internet but also for the future Internet. However, none of them meet the requirements for practical operation such as (1) support heterogeneous network layer protocols, (2) scalability of ID/Locator mapping system, (3) independence of mapping information management, and (4) avoidance of locator leakage beyond the administrative boundary. This paper proposes a network layer protocol called Z Network Protocol (ZNP) for the future Internet based on the clean slate approach. ZNP supports heterogeneity of network layer protocols by “Internetworking with a Common ID Space”. Its mapping systems meet the requirements (1)–(4) described above. For manipulating the mapping systems, Z Control Message Protocol (ZCMP) is designed. For resolving the link layer (L2) address from the ZNP Locator, Z Neighbor Discovery Protocol (ZNDP) is designed. We implement ZNP and ZNDP in the Linux kernel, ZCMP in the user space and measure the times needed for transmission, reception, forwarding, and locator conversion. The results show the practicability of ZNP as a network layer protocol for the future Internet.

In recent years, technologies and markets related to data centers have been rapidly changing and growing. Data centers are playing an important role in ICT infrastructure deployment and promise to become common platforms for almost all social infrastructures. Even though research has focused on networking technologies, various technologies are needed to develop high-performance, cost-efficient, and flexible large-scale data centers. To understand those technologies better, this paper surveys recent research and development efforts and results in accordance with a data center network taxonomy that the authors defined.

For flexibility in supporting mobility and multihoming in edge networks and scalability of the backbone routing system, future Internet is expected to be based on the concept of ID/locator split. Heterogeneity Inclusion and Mobility Adaptation through Locator ID Separation (HIMALIS) has been designed as a generic future network architecture based on ID/locator split concept. It can natively support mobility, multihoming, scalable backbone routing and heterogeneous protocols in the network layer of the new generation network or future Internet. However, HIMALIS still lacks security functions to protect itself from various attacks during the procedures of storing, updating, and retrieving of ID/locator mappings, such as impersonation attacks. Therefore, in this paper, we address the issues of security functions design and implementation for the HIMALIS architecture. We present an integrated security scheme consisting of mapping registration and retrieval security, network access security, communication session security, and mobility security. Through the proposed scheme, the hostname to ID and locator mapping records can be securely stored and updated in two types of name registries, domain name registry and host name registry. Meanwhile, the mapping records retrieved securely from these registries are utilized for securing the network access process, communication sessions, and mobility management functions. The proposed scheme provides comprehensive protection of both control and data packets as well as the network infrastructure through an effective combination of asymmetric and symmetric cryptographic functions.

Content-centric networking (CCN) is one of candidates being spotlighted as the technologies of the future Internet to solve the problems of the current Internet. Since DoS/DDoS attack is the most serious threat to the current Internet, this letter introduces the possibility of DoS/DDoS attack on CCN for the first time. And we introduce an attack method using fake-request packets and propose countermeasures in order to detect and/or react to CCN DoS/DDoS attack, and then analyze the result of our proposal.