Navid Nikaein (Eurecom, France)
Slicing and Orchestration in Service-Oriented 5G Networks
Abstract: The softwarization of network processing components coupled with the virtualization of network infrastructure constitute the foundation for a multi-service and multi-tenant architecture. In this context, network slicing and orchestration become two key enablers to transform the legacy physical infrastructures into multiple logical networks, one per service instance. They also enable the flexible customization, composition and management of virtualized network functions, while sharing the resources of different types/domains among multiple network slice instances according to service QoS.
This poses an important shift from the communication-oriented 4G to the service-orient 5G, where the network shall be dynamically controlled and managed to meet service requirements, ranging from people watching videos to surgeons performing critical operations anywhere on the planet. For this to work, however, we require some fundamental network designs to be “reconsidered” and “rearchitected”. This keynote is all about the disruptive technology enablers in 5G, which will allow us to break through this next tech frontier.
Biography: Navid Nikaein is an Associate Professor in Communication System Department at Eurecom. He received his Ph.D. degree in communication systems from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL in 2003. He is currently leading a group on experimental 4G-5G system research related to radio access and core networks with a blend of communication, computing, and data analysis with concrete use-cases. He is very active in collaborative research projects related to 5G and beyond in the context of industry-driven projects as well European FP6, FP7, H2020 framework programmes. He is also leading the development of the radio access layer of OpenAirInterface and its evolution towards 5G as well as coordinating the Mosaic-5G initiative whose goal is to provide software-based 4G/5G service delivery platforms.
Reuven Cohen (Technion-Israel Institute of Technology)
The New QUIC Protocol and Its Impact on the Future of Cellular Networks
Abstract: QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connection) is a new IETF Transport protocol, initially proposed by Google, which implements TCP-like properties on top of UDP transport. QUIC improves many important aspects of TCP, offering stronger security, faster connection establishment, stream-based multiplexing, and more. As opposed to kernel space TCP, QUIC is implemented at the user space, enabling a rapid evolution of the protocol and adding new features. QUIC has been designed with mobility in mind. In particular, it supports smooth connection migration from WiFi to cellular and back. Still, it poses a problem for mobile network operators for two main reasons. First, all QUIC data and almost all of its control information is encrypted, and therefore hidden from operators’ middleboxes. Second, QUIC can carry multiple sub-streams over the same 5-tuple, all at the same time. These sub-streams might differ with regard to their required QoS treatment, but it is impossible to differentiate between the different streams as the header that indicates the stream identifier is also encrypted. Most of this talk will be devoted to QUIC and its interesting properties. I will also explain how modern cellular schedulers work, and why the interaction with QUIC might negatively impact their ability to provide quality of experience to the end user.
Biography: Reuven Cohen received the Ph.D. degree from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1991. From 1991 to 1993, he was with the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center. Since 1993, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the Technion, where he is a full professor. Reuven’s research areas include optical and wireless networks, sensor networks, mobile networks, protocol design and analysis, traffic engineering, and many other aspects of modern communication networks. Reuven has served as an editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking journal and the ACM Journal on Wireless Networks (WINET). He was the TPC co-chair of Infocom 2010 and MedHocNet 2009. He also served as a TCP member of many conferences, including Infocom, Sigcomm and ICNP. Since February 2013, Prof. Cohen has also been serving as the Technion’s deputy vice president for information and computing systems.