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The integration of both fronthaul and backhaul into a single transport network (namely, 5G-Crosshaul) is envisioned for the future 5G transport networks. This requires a fully integrated and unified management of the fronthaul and backhaul resources in a cost-efficient, scalable and flexible way through the deployment of an SDN/NFV control framework. This paper presents the designed 5G-Crosshaul architecture, two selected SDN/NFV applications targeting for cost-efficient resource and energy usage: the Resource Management Application (RMA) and the Energy Management and Monitoring Application (EMMA). The former manages 5G-Crosshaul resources (network, computing and storage resources). The latter is a special version of RMA with the focus on the objectives of optimizing the energy consumption and minimizing the energy footprint of the 5G-Crosshaul infrastructure. Besides, EMMA is applied to the mmWave mesh network and the high speed train scenarios. In particular, we present the key application design with their main components and the interactions with each other and with the control plane, and then we present the proposed application optimization algorithms along with initial results. The first results demonstrate that the proposed RMA is able to cost-efficiently utilize the Crosshaul resources of heterogeneous technologies, while EMMA can achieve significant energy savings through energy-efficient routing of traffic flows. For experiments in real system, we also set up Proof of Concepts (PoCs) for both applications in order to perform real trials in the field.

Network slicing is one of the fundamental tenets of Fifth Generation (5G)/Sixth Generation (6G) networks. Deploying slices requires end-to-end (E2E) control of services and the underlying resources in a network substrate featuring an increasing number of stakeholders. Beyond the technical difficulties this entails, there is a long list of administrative negotiations among parties that do not necessarily trust each other, which often requires costly manual processes, including the legal construction of neutral entities. In this context, Blockchain comes to the rescue by bringing its decentralized yet immutable and auditable lemdger, which has a high potential in the telco arena. In this sense, it may help to automate some of the above costly processes. There have been some proposals in this direction that are applied to various problems among different stakeholders. This paper aims at structuring this field of knowledge by, first, providing introductions to network slicing and blockchain technologies. Then, state-of-the-art is presented through a global architecture that aggregates the various proposals into a coherent whole while showing the motivation behind applying Blockchain and smart contracts to network slicing. And finally, some limitations of current work, future challenges and research directions are also presented.

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Abstract-Cloud-based radio access networks (C-RAN) are expected to face important challenges in the forthcoming fifth generation (5G) communication systems. For this reason, more flexible C-RAN architectures have recently been proposed in the literature, where the radio communication stack is partitioned and placed across different RAN nodes to tackle the 5G capacity and latency requirements. In this paper, we show that this functional split also supports energy efficiency, especially when it is combined with bandwidth adaptation. To this aim, we have built a dynamic hotspot prototype, where the hardware-accelerated physical-layer is placed in the remote radio head, and higher software-based layers are placed in a server (either directly connected or remotely accessible). This setup allowed us to experimentally evaluate the energy consumption of key hardware modules when adapting the bandwidth and the modulation and coding scheme. The real-time operation of the testbed allows further experimentation with different 5G use cases and the evaluation of other key performance indicators.

Abstract-5G networks will impose network operators to accommodate services demanding heterogeneous and stringent requirements in terms of increased bandwidth, reduced latency, higher availability, etc. as well as enabling emerging capabilities such as slicing. Operators will be then forced to make notable investments in their infrastructure but the revenue is not envisaged to be proportional. Thereby, operators are seeking for more cost-effective solutions to keep their competitiveness. An appealing solution is to integrate all (broadband) services including both fixed and mobile in a convergent way. This is referred to as Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). FMC allows seamlessly serving any kind of access service over the same network infrastructure (access, aggregation and core) and relying on common set of control and operation functions. To this end, FMC leverages the benefits provided by Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). First, we discuss some of the explored FMC solutions and technologies, from both structural and functional perspectives Next, focusing on a Multi-Layer (Packet and Optical) Aggregation Network, we report two implemented and experimentally validated SDN/NFV orchestration architectures providing feasible FMC to address upcoming 5G challenges.

The virtualization of mobile network functions constitutes one of the main blocks for addressing the high flexibility requirements of fifth generation (5G) communication systems. Reconfigurable hotspots are expected to be massively deployed to enable on-demand services and dynamically adapt the network capacity according to traffic requirements. In this paper, we present the extensions and modifications of the long term evolution (LTE) module of the ns-3 simulator (LENA) to include a software defined radio (SDR) physical layer implementation. These extensions combine the native flexibility of the simulator with the SDR features of a real-time prototype. Moreover, the framework was designed to distribute the communication functions across different elements of the network with the possibility of adjusting several transmission parameters as in a network function virtualization (NFV) paradigm. Thanks to an emulated full network protocol stack, the prototype allows the experimentation of novel 5G solutions and the evaluation of relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) from the lower layer protocols up to application level. To this aim, we present the experimental evaluation of the KPIs of energy, latency, throughput and reconfiguration time in relevant scenarios.

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