Traditional power grids are currently being transformed into smart grids (SGs). SGs feature multi-way communication among energy generation, transmission, distribution, and usage facilities. The ...reliable, efficient, and intelligent management of complex power systems requires integration of high-speed, reliable, and secure data information and communication technology into the SGs to monitor and regulate power generation and usage. Despite several challenges, such as trade-offs between wireless coverage and capacity as well as limited spectral resources in SGs, wireless communication is a promising SG communications technology. Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) in particular are highly promising for providing timely SG wireless communications by utilizing all available spectrum resources. We provide in this paper a comprehensive survey on the CRN communication paradigm in SGs, including the system architecture, communication network compositions, applications, and CR-based communication technologies. We highlight potential applications of CR-based SG systems. We survey CR-based spectrum sensing approaches with their major classifications. We also provide a survey on CR-based routing and MAC protocols, and describe interference mitigation schemes. We furthermore present open issues and research challenges faced by CR-based SG networks along with future directions.
Software defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a promising paradigm for making the control of communication networks flexible. SDN separates the data packet forwarding plane, i.e., the data plane, ...from the control plane and employs a central controller. Network virtualization allows the flexible sharing of physical networking resources by multiple users (tenants). Each tenant runs its own applications over its virtual network, i.e., its slice of the actual physical network. The virtualization of SDN networks promises to allow networks to leverage the combined benefits of SDN networking and network virtualization and has therefore attracted significant research attention in recent years. A critical component for virtualizing SDN networks is an SDN hypervisor that abstracts the underlying physical SDN network into multiple logically isolated virtual SDN networks (vSDNs), each with its own controller. We comprehensively survey hypervisors for SDN networks in this paper. We categorize the SDN hypervisors according to their architecture into centralized and distributed hypervisors. We furthermore sub-classify the hypervisors according to their execution platform into hypervisors running exclusively on general-purpose compute platforms, or on a combination of general-purpose compute platforms with general- or special-purpose network elements. We exhaustively compare the network attribute abstraction and isolation features of the existing SDN hypervisors. As part of the future research agenda, we outline the development of a performance evaluation framework for SDN hypervisors.
Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) applications have diverse network session requirements. Certain critical applications, such as emergency alert relay, industrial floor evacuation, and surveillance ...systems, require fresh updates that can maintain the most recently delivered packets. This requires high reconfigurability to an extent where the system can measure the impact of an event and adapt the network accordingly. Several approaches have been proposed that provide high precision transmission and bounded latencies. One prominent solution strategy in the literature is based on Software Defined Networking (SDN) control to resolve latency-related issues, such as congestion, for factory floor transmissions. The OpenFlow protocol is a key interface used in SDN to create a low-latency environment. However, the existing approaches provide only offline solutions that are typically compute intensive. Therefore, this article proposes an algorithm based on simple online strategies that utilize an SDN controller with a global view of the network. More specifically, within the context of the IEEE Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) standards this article: (1) designs a control policy framework called TSNu that guarantees transmission time-slot allocations for Scheduled Traffic while mitigating network congestion, (2) develops a utility maximization approach to jointly optimize scheduling, routing, and admission control while ensuring network stability and maximizing the flow admission to the network, and (3) presents extensive theoretical analysis and simulation to evaluate the proposed TSNu design. The conducted evaluations indicate substantially improved performance compared with state-of-the-art policies.
Many network applications, e.g., industrial control, demand ultra-low latency (ULL). However, traditional packet networks can only reduce the end-to-end latencies to the order of tens of ...milliseconds. The IEEE 802.1 time sensitive networking (TSN) standard and related research studies have sought to provide link layer support for ULL networking, while the emerging IETF deterministic networking (DetNet) standards seek to provide the complementary network layer ULL support. This paper provides an up-to-date comprehensive survey of the IEEE TSN and IETF DetNet standards and the related research studies. The survey of these standards and research studies is organized according to the main categories of flow concept, flow synchronization, flow management, flow control, and flow integrity. ULL networking mechanisms play a critical role in the emerging fifth generation (5G) network access chain from wireless devices via access, backhaul, and core networks. We survey the studies that specifically target the support of ULL in 5G networks, with the main categories of fronthaul, backhaul, and network management. Throughout, we identify the pitfalls and limitations of the existing standards and research studies. This survey can thus serve as a basis for the development of standards enhancements and future ULL research studies that address the identified pitfalls and limitations.
A variety of communication networks, such as industrial communication systems, have to provide strict delay guarantees to the carried flows. Fast and close to optimal quality of service (QoS) routing ...algorithms, e.g., delay-constrained leastcost (DCLC) routing algorithms, are required for routing flows in such networks with strict delay requirements. The emerging software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm centralizes the network control in SDN controllers that can centrally execute QoS routing algorithms. A wide range of QoS routing algorithms have been proposed in the literature and examined in individual studies. However, a comprehensive evaluation framework and quantitative comparison of QoS routing algorithms that can serve as a basis for selecting and further advancing QoS routing in SDN networks is missing in the literature. This makes it difficult to select the most appropriate QoS routing algorithm for a particular use case, e.g., for SDN controlled industrial communications. We close this gap in the literature by conducting a comprehensive up-to-date survey of centralized QoS routing algorithms. We introduce a novel four-dimensional (4D) evaluation framework for QoS routing algorithms, whereby the 4D correspond to the type of topology, two forms of scalability of a topology, and the tightness of the delay constraint. We implemented 26 selected DCLC algorithms and compared their runtime and cost inefficiency within the 4D evaluation framework. While the main conclusion of this evaluation is that the best algorithm depends on the specific sub-space of the 4D space that is targeted, we identify two algorithms, namely Lagrange relaxation-based aggregated cost (LARAC) and search space reduction delay-cost-constrained routing (SSR+DCCR), that perform very well in most of the 4D evaluation space.
Current Gigabit-class passive optical networks (PONs) evolve into next-generation PONs, whereby high-speed 10+ Gb/s time division multiplexing (TDM) and long-reach wavelength-broadcasting/routing ...wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) PONs are promising near-term candidates. On the other hand, next-generation wireless local area networks (WLANs) based on frame aggregation techniques will leverage physical-layer enhancements, giving rise to Gigabit-class very high throughput (VHT) WLANs. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework for evaluating the capacity and delay performance of a wide range of routing algorithms in converged fiber-wireless (FiWi) broadband access networks based on different next-generation PONs and a Gigabit-class multiradio multichannel WLAN-mesh front end. Our framework is very flexible and incorporates arbitrary frame size distributions, traffic matrices, optical/wireless propagation delays, data rates, and fiber faults. We verify the accuracy of our probabilistic analysis by means of simulation for the wireless and wireless-optical-wireless operation modes of various FiWi network architectures under peer-to-peer, upstream, uniform, and nonuniform traffic scenarios. The results indicate that our proposed optimized FiWi routing algorithm (OFRA) outperforms minimum (wireless) hop and delay routing in terms of throughput for balanced and unbalanced traffic loads, at the expense of a slightly increased mean delay at small to medium traffic loads.
The emerging software defined networking (SDN) paradigm separates the data plane from the control plane and centralizes network control in an SDN controller. Applications interact with controllers to ...implement network services, such as network transport with quality of service. SDN facilitates the virtualization of network functions so that multiple virtual networks can operate over a given installed physical network infrastructure. Due to the specific characteristics of optical (photonic) communication components and the high optical transmission capacities, SDN-based optical networking poses particular challenges, but holds also great potential. In this article, we comprehensively survey studies that examine the SDN paradigm in optical networks; in brief, we survey the area of software defined optical networks (SDONs). We mainly organize the SDON studies into studies focused on the infrastructure layer, the control layer, and the application layer. Moreover, we cover SDON studies focused on network virtualization, as well as SDON studies focused on the orchestration of multilayer and multidomain networking. Based on the survey, we identify open challenges for SDONs and outline future directions.
Software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) processed in multi-access edge computing (MEC) cloud systems have been proposed as critical paradigms for achieving the low ...latency requirements of the tactile Internet. While virtual network functions (VNFs) allow greater flexibility compared to hardware-based solutions, the VNF abstraction also introduces additional packet processing delays. In this paper, we investigate the practical feasibility of NFV with respect to the tactile Internet latency requirements. We develop, implement, and evaluate Chain-based Low latency VNF ImplemeNtation (CALVIN), a low-latency management framework for distributed Service Function Chains (SFCs). CALVIN classifies VNFs into elementary, basic, and advanced VNFs; moreover, CALVIN implements elementary and basic VNFs in the kernel space, while the advanced VNFs are implemented in the user space. Throughout, CALVIN employs a distributed mapping with one VNF per Virtual Machine (VM) in a MEC system. Furthermore, CALVIN avoids the metadata structure processing and batch processing of packets in the conventional Linux networking stack so as to achieve short per-packet latencies. Our rigorous measurements on off-the-shelf conventional networking and computing hardware demonstrate that CALVIN achieves round-trip times from a MEC ingress point via two elementary forwarding VNFs (one in kernel space and one in user space) and a MEC server to a MEC egress point on the order of 0.32 ms. Our measurements also indicate that MEC network coding and encryption are feasible for small 256 byte packets with an MEC latency budget of 0.35 ms; whereas, large 1400 byte packets can complete the network coding, but not the encryption within the 0.35 ms.
With the increasing demand for video-based applications, the reliable prediction of video quality has increased in importance. Numerous video quality assessment methods and metrics have been proposed ...over the past years with varying computational complexity and accuracy. In this paper, we introduce a classification scheme for full-reference and reduced-reference media-layer objective video quality assessment methods. Our classification scheme first classifies a method according to whether natural visual characteristics or perceptual (human visual system) characteristics are considered. We further subclassify natural visual characteristics methods into methods based on natural visual statistics or natural visual features. We subclassify perceptual characteristics methods into frequency or pixel-domain methods. According to our classification scheme, we comprehensively review and compare the media-layer objective video quality models for both standard resolution and high definition video. We find that the natural visual statistics based MultiScale-Structural SIMilarity index (MS-SSIM), the natural visual feature based Video Quality Metric (VQM), and the perceptual spatio-temporal frequency-domain based MOtion-based Video Integrity Evaluation (MOVIE) index give the best performance for the LIVE Video Quality Database.
Video encoding for multimedia services over communication networks has significantly advanced in recent years with the development of the highly efficient and flexible H.264/AVC video coding standard ...and its SVC extension. The emerging H.265/HEVC video coding standard as well as 3D video coding further advance video coding for multimedia communications. This paper first gives an overview of these new video coding standards and then examines their implications for multimedia communications by studying the traffic characteristics of long videos encoded with the new coding standards. We review video coding advances from MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 2 to H.264/AVC and its SVC and MVC extensions as well as H.265/HEVC. For single-layer (nonscalable) video, we compare H.265/HEVC and H.264/AVC in terms of video traffic and statistical multiplexing characteristics. Our study is the first to examine the H.265/HEVC traffic variability for long videos. We also illustrate the video traffic characteristics and statistical multiplexing of scalable video encoded with the SVC extension of H.264/AVC as well as 3D video encoded with the MVC extension of H.264/AVC.
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