Publications

Federation of Internet of Things Testbeds for the Realization of a Semantically-Enabled Multi-Domain Data Marketplace

Authors:  Sánchez L, Lanza J, Santana JR, Agarwal R, Raverdy PG, Elsaleh T, Fathy Y, Jeong S, Dadoukis A, Korakis T, Keranidis S, O’Brien P, Horgan J, Sacchetti A, Mastandrea G, Fragkiadakis A, Charalampidis P, Seydoux N, Ecrepont C, Zhao M.

Journal:  Sensors, vol. 18, no. 10, pp -, October 2018.

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) concept has attracted a lot of attention from the research and innovation community for a number of years already. One of the key drivers for this hype towards the IoT is its applicability to a plethora of different application domains. However, infrastructures enabling experimental assessment of IoT solutions are scarce. Being able to test and assess the behavior and the performance of any piece of technology (i.e., protocol, algorithm, application, service, etc.) under real-world circumstances is of utmost importance to increase the acceptance and reduce the time to market of these innovative developments. This paper describes the federation of eleven IoT deployments from heterogeneous application domains (e.g., smart cities, maritime, smart building, crowd-sensing, smart grid, etc.) with over 10,000 IoT devices overall which produce hundreds of thousands of observations per day. The paper summarizes the resources that are made available through a cloud-based platform. The main contributions from this paper are twofold. In the one hand, the insightful summary of the federated data resources are relevant to the experimenters that might be seeking for an experimental infrastructure to assess their innovations. On the other hand, the identification of the challenges met during the testbed integration process, as well as the mitigation strategies that have been implemented to face them, are of interest for testbed providers that can be considering to join the federation.

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On the Development of Energy-Efficient Communications for Marine Monitoring Deployments

Authors: Giannis Kazdaridis, Polychronis Symeonidis, Ioannis Zographopoulos, Thanasis Korakis, Katja Klun and Nives Kovac

Conference:  13th IEEE TELSIKS 2017, Nis, Serbia, 18-20 Ocomber 2017.

Abstract: In this paper we present a novel architecture for enabling on-line communication with marine environment monitoring deployments. We rely on a set of communication technologies that range from IoT related low data rate communication standards to the widely adopted Wi-Fi and LTE protocols that are able to support bandwidth demanding applications. To achieve energy-efficient results we turn off all the power-hungry interfaces and peripherals, while maintaining a low-power interface active, dedicated to control the rest of the components. Finally, we present the installation of the developed system in the Vida oceanographic buoy, in Slovenia and evaluate our device in terms of power consumption.

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Flexible Cross-Technology Offloading Using SDN

Authors: Christos Zarafetas, Nikos Makris, Apostolos Apostolaras, Thanasis Korakis and Leandros Tassiulas

Conference:  13th IEEE TELSIKS 2017, Nis, Serbia, 18-20 October 2017.

Abstract: Ultra dense networks are expected to be the vehicle for better network coverage featuring higher speeds, augmented network capacity and more per cell end-users served.  Towards meeting these stiff requirements, cells of varying coverage (pico-/femto-/macro- cells) are being deployed, especially in densely populated urban areas. Considering the high availability of such equipment, as well as the low deployment and maintenance costs of WLAN networks, an ecosystem rich in heterogeneity may assist in extending the overall network capacity, thus enabling throughput-hungry services to be offered over contemporary networks. The solution that is considered in this paper is offloading macro-cell users to the available wireless networks in a geographical area, while meeting their demands for the downlink channel. We model our problem and present an applied framework that facilitates cross-technology offloading. Our solution is making use of Software Defined Networking, thus enabling the very rapid and low latency network switching. We experimentally evaluate and benchmark our framework in a real testbed setup, and present our findings.

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Cloud-based convergence of heterogeneous RANs in 5G disaggregated architectures

Authors: Nikos Makris, Christos Zarafetas, Pavlos Basaras, Thanasis Korakis, Navid Nikaein and Leandros Tassiulas

Conference:  IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Kansas City, MO, USA, 20-24 May 2018

Abstract: Cloud-RAN based architectures are widely considered a fundamental part of 5G networks. As a consequence, in the upcoming standards for 5G RAN, disaggregating the RAN functionality between a Central Unit (CU) and multiple Distributed Units (DUs) is considered, addressing the splitting of the 5G protocol stack at the PDCP/RLC point. This split is expected to bring numerous advantages to mobile network operators, as through the isolation of the stack from the PDCP layer and upwards, the CU will be able to act as the Cloud-based convergence point among multiple heterogeneous technologies in the provisioned networks and hence able to serve multiple heterogeneous DUs. Moreover, data rate requirements for this type of split are not very demanding, thus allowing the IPbased transferring of data from the DU to CU and vice-versa. In this work, we propose, implement and evaluate a protocol for a Cloud-RAN based architecture allowing the selection and dynamic switching of different heterogeneous networks in the RAN. We rely on the open source OpenAirInterface platform and extend it to support data plane splitting of the LTE functionality, and the subsequent data injection to WiFi networks. We evaluate the platform using a real network setup, under several scenarios of network selection and different delay settings.

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