5G infrastructures will heavily rely on novel paradigms such as Network Function Virtualization and Service Function Chaining to build complex business chains involving multiple parties. Although virtualization of security middleboxes looks a common practice today, we argue that this approach is inefficient and does not fit the peculiar characteristics of virtualized environments. In this paper, we outline a new paradigm towards autonomous security assurance in 5G infrastructures, leveraging service orchestration for semi-autonomous management and reaction, yet decoupling security management from service graph design. Our work is expected to improve the design and deployment of complex business chains, as well as the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques over large and intertwined security datasets. We describe the overall concept and architecture, and discuss in details the three architectural layers. We also report preliminary work on implementation of the system, by introducing relevant technologies.

Communications industry will see dramatic changes with the arrival of 5G. 5G is not only about high capacity and ultra-low latency, but also about accommodating Verticals, providing newer flexibility in business development and agility. Network slicing has become an enabler for on-demand accommodation of such Verticals in a mobile network. To support such new features, 3GPP is continuing standardization of a 5G system with all necessary requirements in mind. This paper provides a detailed view of the standards and the technologies that'll make 5G a reality. Specifically, this paper focuses on the new 5G Radio Access Network (RAN), network slicing enabled new 5G Core (5GC) Network, and new management system capable of handling network slicing related management aspect of a mobile network.

The Machine-to-Machine (M2M) service network platform accommodates M2M communications traffic efficiently by using tree-structured networks and the computation resources deployed on network nodes. In the M2M service network platform, program files required for controlling devices are placed on network nodes, which have different amounts of computation resources according to their position in the hierarchy. The program files must be dynamically repositioned in response to service quality requests from each device, such as computation power, link bandwidth, and latency. This paper proposes a Program File Placement (PFP) method for the M2M service network platform. First, the PFP problem is formulated in the Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) approach. We prove that the decision version of the PFP problem is NP-complete. Next, we present heuristic algorithms that attain sub-optimal but attractive solutions. Evaluations show that the heuristic algorithm based on the number of devices that share a program file reduces the total number of placed program files compared to the algorithm that moves program files based on their position.

Softwarized networks are expected to be utilized as a core network for the 5th Generation (5G) mobile services. For the mobile core network architecture, service chaining is expected to be utilized for dynamically steering traffic across multiple network functions. In this paper, for dynamic multipath service chaining, we propose a greedy-based VNF placement algorithm. This method can provide multipath service chaining so as to utilize the node resources such as CPU effectively while decreasing the cost about bandwidth and transmission delay. The proposed algorithm consists of four difference algorithms, and VNFs are placed appropriately with those algorithm. Our proposed algorithm obtains near optimal solution for the formulated optimization problem with a greedy algorithm, and hence multipath service chains can be provided dynamically. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method with simulation and compare its performance with the performances of other methods. In numerical examples, it is shown that our proposed algorithm can provide multipath service chains appropriately so as to utilize the limited amount of node resources effectively. Moreover, it is shown that our proposed algorithm is effective for providing service chaining dynamically in large-scale network.

As IT systems, including network systems using SDN/NFV technologies, become large-scaled and complicated, the cost of system management also increases rapidly. Network operators have to maintain their workflow in constructing and consistently updating such complex systems, and thus these management tasks in generating system update plan are desired to be automated. Declarative system update with state space search is a promising approach to enable this automation, however, the current methods is not enough scalable to practical systems. In this paper, we propose a novel heuristic approach to greatly reduce computation time to solve system update procedure for practical systems. Our heuristics accounts for structural bottleneck of the system update and advance search to resolve bottlenecks of current system states. This paper includes the following contributions: (1) formal definition of a novel heuristic function specialized to system update for A* search algorithm, (2) proofs that our heuristic function is consistent, i.e., A* algorithm with our heuristics returns a correct optimal solution and can omit repeatedly expansion of nodes in search spaces, and (3) results of performance evaluation of our heuristics. We evaluate the proposed algorithm in two cases; upgrading running hypervisor and rolling update of running VMs. The results show that computation time to solve system update plan for a system with 100 VMs does not exceed several minutes, whereas the conventional algorithm is only applicable for a very small system.

Software-defined networking (SDN) technology enables us to flexibly configure switches in a network. Previously, distributed SDN control methods have been discussed to improve their scalability and robustness. Distributed placement of controllers and backing up each other enhance robustness. However, these techniques do not include an emergency measure against large-scale failures such as network separation induced by disasters. In this study, we first propose a network partitioning method to create a robust control plane (C-Plane) against large-scale failures. In our approach, networks are partitioned into multiple sub-networks based on robust topology coefficient (RTC). RTC denotes the probability that nodes in a sub-network isolate from controllers when a large-scale failure occurs. By placing a local controller onto each sub-network, 6%-10% of larger controller-switch connections will be retained after failure as compared to other approaches. Furthermore, we discuss reactive emergency reconstruction of a distributed SDN C-plane. Each node detects a disconnection to its controller. Then, C-plane will be reconstructed by isolated switches and managed by the other substitute controller. Meanwhile, our approach reconstructs C-plane when network connectivity recovers. The main and substitute controllers detect network restoration and merge their C-planes without conflict. Simulation results reveal that our proposed method recovers C-plane logical connectivity with a probability of approximately 90% when failure occurs in 100 node networks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the convergence time of our reconstruction mechanism is proportional to the network size.

This article proposes a method to improve the performance of Message Exchange Network (MeNW) which is modern data distribution network incorporating the search and obtain mechanism. We explore an idea of shortcut creation which can be widely adapted to a topological structure of various network applications. We first define a metric called Efficiency Coefficient (EC) that quantifies the performance enhancement by a shortcut creation. In the design of EC, we consider not only diameter of the topology but also the amount of messages exchanged in the network. Then, we theoretically analyze the creation of a single optimal shortcut in the system based on the performance metric. The simulation results show that the shortcut by the proposed method reduces the network resource to further 30% compared with conventional approaches.

Traffic collision is an extremely serious issue in the world today. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported the number of road traffic deaths globally has plateaued at 1.25 million a year. In an attempt to decrease the occurrence of such traffic collisions, various driving systems for detecting pedestrians and vehicles have been proposed, but they are inadequate as they cannot detect vehicles and pedestrians in blind places such as sharp bends and blind intersections. Therefore, mobile networks such as long term evolution (LTE), LTE-Advanced, and 5G networks are attracting a great deal of attention as platforms for connected car services. Such platforms enable individual devices such as vehicles, drones, and sensors to exchange real-time information (e.g., location information) with each other. To guarantee effective connected car services, it is important to deliver a data block within a certain maximum tolerable delay (called a deadline in this work). The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) stipulates that this deadline be 100 ms and that the arrival ratio within the deadline be 0.95. We investigated an intersection at which vehicle collisions often occur to evaluate a realistic environment and found that schedulers such as proportional fairness (PF) and payload-size and deadline-aware (PayDA) cannot satisfy the deadline and arrival ratio within the deadline, especially as network loads increase. They fail because they do not consider three key elements — radio quality, chunk size, and the deadline — when radio resources are allocated. In this paper, we propose a deadline-aware scheduling scheme that considers chunk size and the deadline in addition to radio quality and uses them to prioritize users in order to meet the deadline. The results of a simulation on ns-3 showed that the proposed method can achieve approximately four times the number of vehicles satisfying network requirements compared to PayDA.

In the context of resource isolation for network slicing, this paper introduces two resource allocation methods especially for the radio access network (RAN) part. Both methods can be implemented by slight modification of the ordinary packet scheduling algorithm such as the proportional fairness algorithm, and guarantee resource isolation by limiting the maximum number of resource blocks (RBs) allocated to each slice. Moreover, since both methods flexibly allocate RBs to the entire system bandwidth, there are cases in which the throughput performance is improved compared to when the system bandwidth is divided in a static manner, especially in a frequency selective channel environment. Numerical results show the superiority of these methods to dividing simply the system bandwidth in a static manner, and show the difference between the features of the methods in terms of the throughput performance of each slice.

Quasi cyclic LDPC (QC-LDPC) codes consisting of circulant permutation matrices (CPM-QC-LDPC) are one of the most attractive types of LDPC codes due to their many advantages. In this paper, we mainly do some research on CPM-QC-LDPC codes. We first propose a two-stage decoding scheme mainly based on parity check matrix transform (MT), which can efficiently improve the bit error rate performance. To optimize the tradeoff between hardware implementation complexity and decoding performance, an improved method that combines our proposed MT scheme with the existing CPM-RID decoding scheme is presented. An experiment shows that both schemes can improve the bit error rate (BER) performance. Finally, we show that the MT decoding mechanism can be applied to other types of LDPC codes. We apply the MT scheme to random LDPC codes and show that it can efficiently lower the error floor.

Link-level and node-level blocking in photonic networks has been intensively investigated for several decades and the C/D/C approach to OXCs/ROADMs is often emphasized. However, this understanding will have to change in the future large traffic environment. We herein elucidate that exploiting node-level blocking can yield cost-effective large-capacity wavelength routing networks in the near future. We analyze the impact of link-level and node-level blocking in terms of traffic demand and assess the fiber utilization and the amount of hardware needed to develop OXCs/ROADMs, where the necessary number of link fibers and that of WSSs are used as metrics. We clarify that the careful introduction of node-level blocking is the more effective direction in creating future cost effective networks; compared to C/D/C OXCs/ROADMs, it offers a more than 70% reduction in the number of WSSs while the fiber increment is less than ~2%.

This paper presents the bit error rate (BER) performance of human body communication (HBC) receivers in interference-rich environments. The BER performance was measured while applying an interference signal to the HBC receiver to consider the effect of receiver performance on BER performance. During the measurement, a signal attenuator was used to mimic the signal loss of the human body channel, which improved the repeatability of the measurement results. The measurement results showed that HBC is robust against the interference when frequency selective digital transmission (FSDT) is used as a modulation scheme. The BER performance in this paper can be effectively used to evaluate a communication performance of HBC.

Since camera networks for surveillance are becoming extremely dense, finding the most informative and desirable views from different cameras are of increasing importance. In this paper, we propose a camera selection method to achieve the goal of providing the clearest visibility possible and selecting the cameras which exactly capture targets for the far-field surveillance. We design a benefit function that takes into account image visibility and the degree of target matching between different cameras. Here, visibility is defined using the entropy of intensity histogram distribution, and the target correspondence is based on activity features rather than photometric features. The proposed solution is tested in both artificial and real environments. A performance evaluation shows that our target correspondence method well suits far-field surveillance, and our proposed selection method is more effective at identifying the cameras that exactly capture the surveillance target than existing methods.

Packet losses significantly degrade TCP performance in high-latency environments. This is because TCP needs at least one round-trip time (RTT) to recover lost packets. The recovery time will grow longer, especially in high-latency environments. TCP keeps transmission rate low while lost packets are recovered, thereby degrading throughput. To prevent this performance degradation, the number of retransmissions must be kept as low as possible. Therefore, we propose a scheme to apply a technology called “forward error correction” (FEC) to the entire TCP operation in order to improve throughput. Since simply applying FEC might not work effectively, three function, namely, controlling redundancy level and transmission rate, suppressing the return of duplicate ACKs, interleaving redundant packets, were devised. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme was demonstrated by simulation evaluations in high-latency environments.

DHT routing algorithms can provide efficient mechanisms for resource placement and lookup for distributed file sharing systems. However, we must still deal with irregular and frequent join/leave of nodes and the problem of load unbalancing between nodes in DHT-based file sharing systems. This paper presents an efficient file backup scheme based on dynamic DHT key space clustering in order to guarantee data availability and support load balancing. The main idea of our method is to dynamically divide the DHT network into a number of clusters, each of which locally stores and maintains data chunks of data files to guarantee the data availability of user data files even when node churn occurs. Further, high-capacity nodes in clusters are selected as backup nodes to achieve adequate load balancing. Simulation results demonstrate the superior effectiveness of the proposed scheme over other file replication schemes.

If a shared IP network is to deliver large-volume streaming media content, such as real-time videos, we need a technique for explicitly setting and dynamically changing the transmission paths used to respond to the congestion situation of the network, including multi-path transmission of a single-flow, to maximize network bandwidth utilization and stabilize transmission quality. However, current technologies cannot realize flexible multi-path transmission because they require complicated algorithms for route searching and the control load for route changing is excessive. This paper proposes a scheme that realizes routing control for multi-path transmission by combining multiple virtual networks on the same physical network. The proposed scheme lowers the control load incurred in creating a detour route because routing control is performed by combining existing routing planes. In addition, our scheme simplifies route searching procedure because congestion avoidance control of multi-path transmission can be realized by the control of a single path. An experiment on the JGN-X network virtualization platform finds that while the time taken to build an inter-slice link must be improved, the time required to inspect whether each slice has virtual nodes that can be connected to the original slice and be used as a detour destination can be as short as 40 microseconds per slice even with large slices having more than 100 virtual nodes.

The low-altitude target detection remains a difficult problem in MIMO radar. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive two-step Bayesian generalized likelihood ratio test (TB-GLRT) detection algorithm for low-altitude target detection. By defining the compound channel scattering coefficient and applying the K distributed clutter model, the signal models for different radars in low-altitude environment are established. Then, aiming at the problem that the integrals are too complex to yield a closed-form Neyman-Pearson detector, we assume prior knowledge of the channel scattering coefficient and clutter to design an adaptive two-step Bayesian GLRT algorithm for low-altitude target detection. Monte Carlo simulation results verify that the proposed detector has better performance than the square law detector, GLRT detector or Bayesian GLRT detector in low-altitude environment. With the TB-GLRT detector, the maximum detection probability can reach 70% when SNR=0dB and ν=1. Simulations also verify that the multipath effect shows positive influence on detection when SNR<5dB, and when SNR>10dB, the multipath effect shows negative influence on detection. When SNR>0dB, the MIMO radar, which keeps a detection probability over 70% with the proposed algorithm, has the best detection performance. Besides, the detection performance gets improved with the decrease of sea clutter fluctuation level.

In this paper, we analyze the impact of channel estimation errors in an amplify-and-forward (AF)-based two-way relaying network (TWRN) where adaptive modulation (AM) is employed in individual relaying path. In particular, the performance degradation caused by channel estimation error is investigated over Nakagami-m fading channels. We first derive an end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), a cumulative distribution function, and a probability density function in the presence of channel estimation error for the AF-based TWRN with adaptive modulation (TWRN-AM). By utilizing the derived SNR statistics, we present accurate expressions of the average spectral efficiency and bit error rates with an outage-constraint in which transmission does not take place during outage events of bidirectional communications. Based on our derived analytical results, an optimal power allocation scheme for TWRN-AM is proposed to improve the average spectral efficiency by minimizing system outages.

Multiuser massive multi-input multi-output (MU massive MIMO) is considered as a promising technology for the fifth generation (5G) of the wireless communication system. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity joint antenna and user selection scheme with block diagonalization (BD) precoding for MU massive MIMO downlink channel in the time division duplex (TDD) system. The base station (BS) is equipped with a large-scale transmit antenna array while each user is using the single receive antenna in the system. To reduce the hardware cost, BS will be implemented by limited number of radio frequency (RF) chains and BS must activate some selected transmit antennas in the BS side for data transmitting and some users' receive antennas in user side for data receiving. To achieve the reduction in the computation complexity in the antenna and user selection while maintaining the same or higher sum-rate in the system, the proposed scheme relies on three complexity reduction key factors. The first key factor is that finding the average channel gains for the transmit antenna in the BS side and the receive antenna in the user side to select the best channel gain antennas and users. The second key factor called the complexity control factor ξ(Xi) for the antenna set and the user set limitation is used to control the complexity of the brute force search. The third one is that using the assumption of the point-to-point deterministic MIMO channel model to avoid the singular value decomposition (SVD) computation in the brute force search. We show that the proposed scheme offers enormous reduction in the computation complexity while ensuring the acceptable performance in terms of total system sum-rate compared with optimal and other conventional schemes.

In this paper, we investigate a cooperative communication system comprised of a source, a destination, and multiple decode-and-forward (DF) relays in the presence of a potential malicious eavesdropper is within or without the coverage area of the source. Based on the more general Nakagami-m fading channels, we analyze the security performance of the single-relay selection and multi-relay selection schemes for protecting the source against eavesdropping. In the single-relay selection scheme, only the best relay is chosen to assist in the source transmission. Differing from the single-relay selection, multi-relay selection scheme allows multiple relays to forward the source to the destination. We also consider the classic direct transmission as a benchmark scheme to compare with the two relay selection schemes. We derive the exact closed-form expressions of outage probability (OP) and intercept probability (IP) for the direct transmission, the single-relay selection as well as the multi-relay selection scheme over Nakagami-m fading channel when the eavesdropper is within and without the coverage area of the source. Moreover, the security-reliability tradeoff (SRT) of these three schemes are also analyzed. It is verified that the SRT of the multi-relay selection consistently outperforms the single-relay selection, which of both the single-relay and multi-relay selection schemes outperform the direct transmission when the number of relays is large, no matter the eavesdropper is within or without the coverage of the source. In addition, as the number of DF relays increases, the SRT of relay selection schemes improve notably. However, the SRT of both two relay selection approaches become worse when the eavesdropper is within the coverage area of the source.

This paper studies power allocation for Chase combining (CC) hybrid ARQ (HARQ) in block-fading channels, with causal channel state information (CSI) available both at the receiver and transmitter. A best-effort power allocation scheme is proposed to improve the average throughput of CC HARQ. The scheme is formulated as an optimization problem that, for each round, allocating the transmit power to maximize the average incremental information according to the HARQ retransmission status and CSI. By convex optimization, the solution is derived in simple analytical form. At the same time, the HARQ performance metrics including throughput and outage probability are computed by recursive numerical integral. With at most 4 transmission rounds, this best-effort method achieves about 75% of ergodic capacity in independent Rayleigh block fading channels.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are a key promising technology for future broadband cellular networks. The propagation paths within massive MIMO radio channels are often sparse, both in the sub-6GHz frequency band and at millimeter wave frequencies. Herein, we propose a two-layer beamforming scheme for downlink transmission over massive multiuser MIMO sparse beam-space channels. The first layer employs a bipartite graph to dynamically group users in the beam-space domain; the aim is to minimize inter-user interference while significantly reducing the effective channel dimensionality. The second layer performs baseband linear MIMO precoding to maximize spatial multiplexing gain and system throughput. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed two-layer beamforming scheme outperforms other, more conventional algorithms.

Blind nonlinear compensation for RF receivers is an important research topic in 5G mobile communication, in which higher level modulation schemes are employed more often to achieve high capacity and ultra-broadband services. Since nonlinear compensation circuits must handle intermodulation bandwidths that are more than three times the signal bandwidth, reducing the sampling frequency is essential for saving power consumption. This paper proposes a novel blind nonlinear compensation technique that employs sub-Nyquist sampling analog-to-digital conversion. Although outband distortion spectrum is folded in the proposed sub-Nyquist sampling technique, determination of compensator coefficients is still possible by using the distortion power. Proposed technique achieves almost same compensation performance in EVM as the conventional compensation scheme, while reducing sampling speed of analog to digital convertor (ADC) to less than half the normal sampling frequency. The proposed technique can be applied in concurrent dual-band communication systems and adapt to flat Rayleigh fading environments.

This paper evaluates the throughput of a distributed antenna network (DAN) with multiple mobile terminal scheduling and the usage of joint maximum-likelihood detection (MLD). Mobile terminals are closer to the desired antennas in the DAN which leads to higher throughput and better frequency utilization efficiency. However, when multiple mobile terminal scheduling is applied to the DAN, interference can occur between transmitted signals from antennas. Therefore, in this research, mobile terminal scheduling along with joint MLD is applied to reduce the effects of interference. A system level simulation shows that the usage of joint MLD in a densely packed DAN provides better system throughput regardless of the numbers of mobile terminals and fading channels.

Pre-weighting based Contention Resolution Diversity Slotted ALOHA-like (PW-CRDSA-like) schemes with joint multi-user multi-slot detection (JMMD) algorithm are proposed to improve the throughput of random access (RA) in geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellite networks. The packet and its replicas are weighted by different pre-weighting factors at each user terminal, and are sent in randomly selected slots within a frame. The correlation of channels between user terminals and satellite node in different slots are removed by using pre-weighting factors. At the gateway station, after the decoding processing of CRDSA, the combinations of remained signals in slots that can construct virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) signal models are found and decoded by the JMMD algorithm. Deadlock problems that can be equivalent to virtual MIMO signal models in the conventional CRDSA-like schemes can be effectively resolved, which improves the throughput of these CRDSA-like schemes. Simulation results show that the PW-CRDSA-like schemes with the JMMD significantly outperform the conventional CRDSA-like schemes in terms of the throughput under equal packet loss ratio (PLR) conditions (e.g. PLR =10^-2), and as the number of the transmitted replicas increases, the throughput of the PW-CRDSA-like schemes also increases, and the normalized maximum throughput of the PW-CRDSA-5 (i.e., PW-CRDSA with 5 replicas) scheme can reach 0.95.