Publication: An NFV system to support adaptable multi-UAV service deployments
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2022-05
Defense date
2022-07-07
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Abstract
A main aspect that has characterized the evolution towards the 5th Generation of Mobile Networks (5G) has been the involvement of industrial sectors, or as they are generally known, verticals, in the definition of the requirements that these networks must address with respect to the service provisioning.
Thus, this paradigmshift not only considers services that facilitate human communications, but also promotes the creation of a global digital ecosystem in which verticals such as the automotive sector, smart-cities, health-care, or public-safety are key adopters. In addition, this change in the service provisioning model also facilitates the appearance of innovative services (e.g., virtual reality, augmented reality, healthcare, autonomous driving, etc.), which are not only expected to cause an enormous growth in the amount of traffic, but also to demand a high performance from the network.
One of the technological advances that has driven this evolution toward 5G has been the adoption of technologies for function virtualization and softwarization supporting the transition from traditional specialized hardware equipment (e.g., IP routers, firewalls or load balancing devices) to versatile software components, which can be deployed in different locations. In particular, 5G embraces NFV, a technology standardized by the ETSI, that enables the automated and agile provision of telecommunication and vertical services in 5G networks, as a composition of virtualized components, commonly referred to as Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). However, under the temporal context in which
the beginning of this thesis is situated (i.e., in 2017), NFV was starting to receive a great interest from the industry and research community, and there were just a few open source initiatives aiming to implement the standard. Due to this, an additional effort was needed to understand, by means of existent implementations at that time, the implications and challenges of applying the NFV standards in practical situations. In this context, the first part of this thesis is devoted to creating a platform capable of enabling complex, close to reality, experimentation scenarios across a distributed set of
NFV and vertical infrastructures, which can be made available by different stakeholders at different geographic locations. Thus, consolidating important aspects of the standard, as well as identifying new necessary specifications.
In accordance to these specifications, the next part of this thesis is intended to address the lack of flexibility on the 5G networks to support reliable service operations in environments and situations where there are obvious resource constraints. For instance, in (i) remote areas where 5G radio access network coverage is insufficient or non-existent; (ii) emergency situations (e.g., natural disasters), where the network infrastructure may fail or provide deficient service; or (iii) situations where there are occasional high, unexpected or predictable, service demands such as in the case of mass events. To this purpose, this thesis explores the potential benefits of creating an NFV system based on
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to exploit the inherent capabilities of this aerial devices, and extend the programmable substrate of 5G networks beyond the network access segments of telecommunications operators.
Then, the thesis analyzes the potential benefits of using the UAV-based system in the deployment of services included within the context of different vertical sectors. Firstly, this part analyzes possible synergies between NFV, UAVs, and vertical services from a practical perspective, presenting the creation of a multi-site testbed at national scale to support prototyping, and experimentation activities.
This testbed builds on the NFV system based on UAVs, and on themechanisms related to the orchestration of telecommunications and vertical services within a multi-site NFV ecosystem, previously discussed in the context of this thesis. Moreover, this testbed allows to realize the practical validation related to the capability of the UAVs-based system to support vertical services. This validation is performed then with the definition of a use case involving smart-farming vertical, instantiating a precision agriculture service over the UAVs on a remote site. Subsequently, following this line, this thesis explores the interoperation of the UAV-based system with other NFV infrastructures, with the aim of supporting the deployment of telecommunications and/or vertical services in resource-constrained situations. In particular, this part considers a situation related to the public-safety vertical, where the system collaborates with an NFV infrastructure composed of a fleet of vehicles to assist a response teamin the management of an emergency.
To conclude, this thesis addresses an additional key challenge to support the provision of telecommunications
and vertical services in 5G: the provision of adequate mechanisms to enable the exchange of data traffic between VNFs, which may be located in different 5G domains. This is not only interesting from the general point of view of the NFV ecosystems, but this type of communications particularized for the UAVs-based system, could allow this system to collaborate with other NFV infrastructures e.g., cloud/edge platforms) to support the proper operations of more elaborated services. In this context, this last part of the thesis presents a novel solution to support secure link-layer
connectivity for virtualized functions in multi-site NFV ecosystems. Thus, providing an appropriate mechanism to enable the exchange of data traffic among VNFs that are located in different NFV domains.
As part of this work, the thesis explores the use of a SDN framework to evolve such a solution, offering an inter-domain connectivity orchestration service, which intends to support the automated and on-demand provisioning and configuration of virtual networks between different NFV domains.
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Keywords
Network functions virtualization (NFV), Software defined networking (SDN), Unmmaned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 5G, 5TONIC, OSM, Flying ad-hoc networks, Multi-site network/Vertical services