Since January 1st 2022 the MAPS group is participating in the TALENT6G project lead by prof. Josep Vidal. This project is aimed to carry out activities to promote the telecommunication studies.

TALENT6G is funded by the EU Recovery Funds managed by the Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital under the UNICO-5G I+D Call of 2021.

Since January 1st 2022, the group is participating in the Network Digital Twin (NDT) project. This project is meant to build a "digital twin" of the underlaying metwork by means of which the operators will deploy advanced 5G services.

The NDT project is lead by Prof. Oriol Sallent and it is funded by means of the EU Recovery Funds managed by the Ministerio the Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital under the UNICO-5G I+D Call of 2021

Since January 1st, the group is participating in the Optimization as a Service (OaaS) project lead by Prof. Oriol Sallent. This project is about designing a platform to help service providers and network operators to optimally deploy new advanced 5G services.

The project is funded by the EU Recovery Funds managed by the Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital under the UNICO-5G I+D Call of 2021

Since mid-Summer 2020, David Linde, undergraduate student of Telecommunication Engineering at UPC, has been collaborating with the group learning on container-based, open tools. This collaboration is expected to continue until early 2021.

This is an example of how undergraduate students can get involved in the group projects and be initiated in research activities at the same time they complete the course of their career.

The Novel enablers for Cloud Slicing (NECOS) project is already in its fourth month.

The Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad has recently adopted the resolution to fund ADVICE, a collaborative project to be carried out by research groups of University of Cantabria, which will take the coordinator role, and our MAPS group at University Polytechnical of Catalunya. The project is planned to start along the next few months and will last for three years.

The ADVICE project (Dynamic provisioning of connectivity in high density 5G wireless scenarios) aims to tackle some of the challenges that are foreseen to appear in the future wireless communications, which are usually referred to as 5G. Our approach consist of the appropriate combination of SDN/NFV paradigms, together with radio resource management mechanisms for heterogeneous networks, exploiting the advantages of such a holistic approach. Furthermore, we will also analyze the potential deployment strategies of some of the mechanisms that will be proposed during the project over management and resource orchestration platforms that are being currently used by mobile operators. In this sense, the results of the research project will be also linked to the particular needs of the stakeholders pushing such platforms, thus broadening the project impact.

PhD proposal title:

Analysis and study of the traffic demand in social networks. Evaluation and evolution of the traffic demand on several social network scenarios.

PhD supervisors:

Prof. José-Luis Melús and Dr. Marcos Postigo

In the aim to understand and to determine what are the necessary resources that network or service operators need to offer their services it is useful to know the user traffic patterns generated in its access to these services. This traffic not only depends on the type of device that the user utilizes, but how it uses. In fact the used technology is really important but the habits of the users when use these services could be crucial.  More often these habits are close related with the relationships with their friends.  In this sense social networks are fundamental in achieving this goal. Millions of people in the world are connected every day through this massive communication strategy. Personal, familiar or professional relations of people are influenced by the use of social networks.  This work analyzes and evaluates the influence that social networks have in the traffic that circulates by networks and, in this sense, it try to establish the type of this traffic and to quantify its associated demand. It is not quite difficult to admit that the topology of the network and the typology of its use will play an important role in the determination of the present traffic and, of course, it could be an approximation to evaluate its evolution in the future. Thus, to know how the social network is, where users are involved in or, to determine the connectivity degree that users have in each network they utilize, could be important factors in the determination of the type of influence that each user exercises on others and vice versa and, of course, in the demand of traffic that they require.

Objectives:

• To analyze the state of the art in the field of proposed demand models or patterns of traffic for the traffic generated in the present networks (wireless networks and users with smartphones, tablets, etc.).
• To define appropriate models for traffic generation (based on agents that are able to simulate the behavior of individual users) that allows simulating the demand of the offered services.
• To analyze the influence of different typologies of social networks on the generation of distinct types of traffic. The typology of each network could be classified according to some metrics such as its connectivity (homophily, multiplexity, mutuality, etc.), its distribution (bridge, centrality, density, distance, etc.) and its segmentation (clustering coefficient, cohesion, etc.).
• To define a model to generate traffic (volume and characterization) based on the social network which generates this traffic. This model should tackle the evolution of the demand on by means of data clustering techniques, temporal smoothing-driven evolving clustering, milestone-driven-evolving clustering or incremental adaptation-driven-evolving clustering).

Previous Know-How or backgroud required:

It is recommended a basic knowledge in these areas:

• Existent patterns analysis applied to demand in network traffic
• Graph theory and metrics in network topologies with applications to social networks.
• Simulation techniques or special ad- hoc software appropriated to the generation of network topologies.
• Analytical techniques that allow to evaluate and to compare different network topology scenarios in social networks

Methodology

The suggested steps to develop this work are:

• Analysis of the state of the art in the aim to eliminate ways that have been followed by other authors. In parallel the scenarios (in social networks) suggested in this work should be defined.
• Proposal and implementation of the selected scenarios using the available simulation techniques or creating new ones (ad-hoc).
• Evaluation and comparison by simulation or analytical techniques, based on different metrics used in networks and in the selected scenarios, of the type and characteristics of the traffic generated in different social networks.

References:

• Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, “Social Network Analysis: Methods and Analysis”, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1999 reprint (1994 original).
• Easley D., Kleinberg J., “Networks, Crowds and Markets“, Cambridge University Press, 2010
• Jackson M.O. “Social and Economic Networks”, Princeton University Press, 2008.
• Newman M.E. J. “Networks. An Introduction”,  Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Y. Jin, et al. “Characterizing data usage patterns in a large cellular network”. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Cellular networks: operations, challenges, and future design (CellNet '12), ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 7-12, 2012.
• J. Kang J., S. Seo S., H. J.W.-K., "Usage pattern analysis of smartphones", Network Operations and Management Symposium (APNOMS), 2011 13th Asia-Pacific, vol.1, nº 8, pp: 21-23 Sept. 2011.
• Giatsoglou M., Vakali A., "Capturing Social Data Evolution Using Graph Clustering",  IEEE Internet Computing, vol.17, nº.1, pp.74,79, Jan.-Feb. 2013.
• Olfati-Saber R., "Evolutionary dynamics of behavior in social networks", 46th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2007, pp: 4051-4056, Dec. 2007.
• Singh B, Gupte N. (2005), “Congestion and decongestion in a communication network”, Phys. Rev. E 71(5):055103.
• Krebs V., "The Social Life of Routers", Internet Protocol Journal 3, pp. 14-25, 2000.
• Kas, M., et al., "What if wireless routers were social? Approaching wireless mesh networks from a social networks perspective, "IEEE Wireless Communications, vol.19, nº6, pp: 36,43, December 2012

The Fifth International Workshop on Distributed Autonomous Network Management Systems DANMS 2012 , co-located with 13th IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium NOMS 2012 , is co-chaired by Joan Serrat.

The event will take place at the Westin Maui Resort & Spa, Maui, Hawaii, USA
April 16, 2012.

Professor Jonathan Smith from Pennsylvania University, will spend a sabbatical in our group, starting July 2011. Professor Smith, director of the NEBULA cloud computing project, will also collaborate with Telefonica I+D in Barcelona

MAPS group is represented in the international cooperation project entitled Institutional cooperation between Addis Ababa University (AAU) and UPC-BARCELONATECH and academic cooperation in ITC technologies. The project is  funded by the Spanish International Cooperation for the Development Agency (AECID)and is lasting for one year, starting June 2011.

The objective of this project is to prepare and to set up the basis for permanent academic cooperation between these two institutions which will be done in the near future through an Integrated Action. A key goal of the project is institutional building which will strength the future cooperation between AAU and UPC-BARCELONATECH