Publications

Toward Moving Public Safety Networks

Authors: Romain Favraud, Apostolos Apostolaras, Navid Nikaein and Thanasis Korakis

Journal: IEEE Communications Magazine, Critical Communications and Public Safety Networks Series, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 14-20, March 2016

Abstract: Fourth Generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) has been selected by US federal and EU authorities to be the technology for public-safety (PS) networks that would allow first responders to seamlessly communicate between agencies and across geographies in tactical and emergency scenarios. From Release 11, the Third-Generation-Partnership-Project (3GPP) has been underway to develop and specify dedicated, nationwide public safety broadband networks that will be scalable, robust and resilient and can address the specific communication needs of emergency services. In this realm, the requirements and scenarios for isolated Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E- TRAN) with no or limited backhaul access to the core network are still in progress. In this article, we survey possible public safety use-cases with the induced network topologies, current status of the 3GPP standards and highlight future challenges. We further elaborate on the need to support mobile backhauling in movingcell scenarios and describe two LTE-based solutions to enable dynamic meshing among the base stations.

Download paper: toward_moving_public_safety_networks.pdf

Mobile edge-Networking Architectures and Control Policies for 5G Communication Systems

Authors: Dimitris Giatsios, Giorgos Iosifidis and Leandros Tassiulas

Conference: IEEE WiOpt 2016, Tempe, Arizona, USA, 9-13 May 2016

Abstract: Motivated by the recent proliferation of advanced handheld devices and the unprecedented growth of mobile data traffic, this paper proposes the concept of Mobile edge-Networks (MeNs), a solution that leverages the end-user devices to enhance the performance of emerging 5G systems. MeNs enable mobile users to collaborate with each other and address in a bottomup fashion key problems in wireless systems, such as poor channel conditions. We design a dynamic cooperation policy that determines transmission parameters of the network in a utility-optimal fashion, ensuring that no user performs worse than she would without cooperation and that the benefits from the collaboration are shared among the users.

Download paper: Mobile edge-Networking Architectures and Control Policies for 5G

Enabling Wireless LAN Troubleshooting

Particular WLAN pathologies experienced in realistic scenarios are hard to detect, due to the complex nature of the wireless medium. Prior work has employed sophisticated equipment, driver modifications,or even application-layer techniques, towards diagnosing such pathologies. The key novelty of our approach lies in the identification of metrics able to characterize the root causes of individual pathologies, while also being directly extractable from MAC-layer statistics available in today’s wireless equipment. Through the development of the proposed framework as application-layer software on top of commercial hardware and its experimental evaluation, we validate the efficiency and applicability of our approach.

Enabling experimentation in mobile sensing scenarios through 4G networks: the NITOS approach

Authors: Donatos Stavropoulos, Giannis Kazdaridis, Nikos Makris, Harris Niavis, Ioannis Igoumenos, Thanasis Korakis and Leandros Tassiulas

Conference: EuCNC 2015, Paris, France, June 2015

Abstract: Wireless technologies have evolved rapidly over the past years, directly affecting our everyday living with the wide penetration of smart mobile devices. As such, the research community has placed major efforts in shaping and forming the future wireless technologies for enhanced end-user experience. Nevertheless, protocols and algorithms over wireless networks are better evaluated in real world scenarios, where simulations and complex theoretical models fail to characterize and emulate their behavior. Networking experimental facilities (testbeds) fill this gap by allowing experimental network measurements to serve as a basis for extracting valuable findings. In this paper, we present the extensions to the NITOS testbed for supporting experimentation in mobile sensing scenarios, by employing smartphones in vehicular environments, communicating using WiFi and 4G networks. We emphasize on the ease of configuration, execution and reproducibility of these experiments, leveraging the hardware and software tools provided by the NITOS testbed.

Download paper: dostavro_eucnc_2015.pdf