VAP (Session 2) : Applications and services based on 5G&6G and Edge technologies
Wednesday, 8 June 2022, 16:00-17:30, Room A306
Session Chair: Konstantin Mikhaylov (University of Oulu, FI)
Nina Slamnik-Krijestorac (University of Antwerp, IDLab-imec, Belgium); Giada Landi and Juan Brenes (Nextworks, Italy); Alexandru Vulpe (University Politehnica of Bucharest & Beam Innovation SRL, Romania); George Suciu (BEIA, Romania); Valentin Carlan (DigiTrans – University of Antwerp, Belgium); Konstantinos Trichias and Ilias Kotinas (WINGS ICT Solutions, Greece); Esteban Municio (i2CAT Foundation, Spain); Athina Ropodi (Incelligent PC, Greece); Johann M. Marquez-Barja (University of Antwerpen & imec, Belgium)
By delivering end-to-end latencies down to 5ms, data rates of up to 20Gbps, and ultra-high reliability of 99.999%, 5G is extending the capabilities of numerous industry verticals, including the Transport & Logistics (T&L).
As the T&L industry has a pivotal role in modern production and distribution systems, it is expected to leverage 5G technology to significantly increase efficiency and safety in the T&L operations, through automating and optimizing processes and resource usage. However, to be able to truly benefit from 5G, the design, the development, as well as the management, of T&L services need to specify and include 5G connectivity requirements, and the features that are tailored to the specific T&L use cases. To this end, in this paper we introduce the concept of Network Applications (NetApps), as the fundamental building blocks of T&L services in 5G, which simplify the composition of complex services, abstracting the underlying complexity and bridging the knowledge gap between the vertical stakeholders, the network experts, and the application/service providers, while specifying service-level information (vertical specific) and 5G requirements (5G slices and 5G Core services). In this paper, we exemplify the concept of NetApps leveraging one of the VITAL-5G use cases, which provides faster and safer operations of vessels in the port of Galati, the largest port on the Danube River.
Management, Orchestration and Workflow Automation of Edge Computing Services: The TANDEM Approach
Konstantinos Vasilopoulos, Vasileios Theodorou, Theodoros Bozios and Maria-Evgenia Xezonaki (Intracom S.A. Telecom Solutions, Greece); Dimitrios Laskaratos (Intracom SA Telecom Solutions, Greece)
The distributed computing paradigm that brings information processing closer to end users and data sources, i.e., Edge Computing, is growing in popularity and adoption inmany domains, such as Cloud Computing, Telecommunications, Internet of Things (IoT) and (distributed) Artificial Intelligence (AI). Despite several efforts towards standardizing Edge Computing services and their ecosystem-driven interactions, especially from the telecom world and open-source communities, automation in deployment, operation and interoperability of Edge Computing services is still in an immature state, making practical Edge/IoT scenarios with multiple application services and technologies, complex and cumbersome. This paper presents our approach of an integrated platform aimed to simplify the establishment, management, control and monitoring of edge computing services with a particular focus on the IoT domain. Central in this effort are the ability to (I) make use of existing functions, modules in new edge computing services and (II) to seamlessly integrate service function chain components with remote backend services and with locally available Edge/IoT devices for on-device processing. Characteristic examples of desired functions and local processing tasks, include data stream analytics, event-driven workflows and Machine Learning tasks with an emphasis on video stream analysis for Object Detection and/or tracking, for which we provide a deployment architecture of our approach.
Reducing Storage and Communication Latencies in Vehicular Edge Cloud
Mostafa Kishani (CTU in Prague, FEE, Czech Republic); Zdenek Becvar and Mohammadsaleh Nikooroo (Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic); Hossein Asadi (Sharif University of Technology, Iran)
Low-latency data access is crucial in edge clouds serving autonomous vehicles. Storage I/O caching is a promising solution to deliver the desired storage performance at a reasonable cost in vehicular edge platforms. Current storage I/O caching methods, however, are not specialized for workload characteristics and demands of autonomous vehicles and/or do not consider the communication latency between the vehicle and the base station hosting the edge cloud node. In this work, we propose a storage mechanism for vehicular edge cloud platforms taking communication, I/O cache, and storage latencies into account. We evaluate our proposed framework using realistic storage traces of vehicular services. Our framework reduces the average latency and the average latency of high-priority services by up to 1.56x and 2.43x, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art works.
Direct Discovery-Based Cooperative Device-To-Device Communication for Emergency Scenarios in 6G
Ali Masood (Tallinna University of Technology, Estonia); Muhammad Mahtab Alam (Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia); Yannick Le Moullec (Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), Estonia)
Device-to-device (D2D) enables direct communication between two-user equipment (UEs) with or without the involvement of a base station (BS). D2D communication is a vital paradigm to design a reliable public safety network (PSN) and support several services in the sixth generation (6G) systems such as target monitoring, emergency search and rescue, etc. In this experimental study, we demonstrate a cooperative D2D communication system in an emergency scenario to disseminate important information (e.g., the number of people, their IDs and current location) from an affected zone to a deployed command centre in the absence of a BS. We suggest context-aware proximity services-based direct discovery along with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as a possible solution to implement the future PSN in 6G. Furthermore, we characterize the performance of direct discovery in terms of connectivity reliability and latency in emergency scenarios. Our results show that the discovery ratio is always higher than 90\% for SNR values above 20 dB and reaches 100\% for SNR values of 23 dB. The end-to-end delay is a low as 18 ms when there is no relay node between two UEs, and increases linearly with the number of hops. Under specific emergency scenarios, the impact of this work is that it is possible to deploy the equipment, establish connectivity, and pass information from the affected zone to deployed command centre in approximately one minute and forty seconds in a real-time lab environment, and four minutes and thirteen seconds in a real-life outdoor scenario.
NEFSim: An Open Experimentation Framework Utilizing 3GPP’s Exposure Services
Dimitrios Fragkos (National Centre for Scientific Research Demokritos (NCSRD) & University of Peloponnese, Greece); Georgios Makropoulos, Anastasios Gogos and Harilaos Koumaras (NCSR Demokritos, Greece); Alexandros Kaloxylos (University of Peloponnese, Greece & The 5GIA, Belgium)
Network Exposure Function (NEF) enables third-party application providers utilize the network capabilities and services that the 5G System offers. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) provides open standardized Application programming Interfaces (API) through NEF; however, a big gap appears in the market between mobile operators and service providers since no commercial solutions are available. In this context, the NEF’s standardized APIs offered by 3GPP are examined. As a result of this analysis an open-source simulator “NEFSim” is presented. NEFSim realizes the aspects of the NEF and enables application developers to experiment with the northbound APIs under a simulated, configurable environment.