Tutorials
Sunday, Nov 24 - Morning Tutorials
T2: The evolution of Public Safety mobile communications through LTE technology
Sunday, Nov 24 - Afternoon Tutorials
T3: On Security Issues in Content Centric Networks- Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Countermeasures
T4: Future of Optical Communication Systems and Networks
T1. Data Center Networking
Data center networks are increasing in size, often connecting tens to hundreds of thousands of servers. Hundreds to thousands of switches are used to interconnect these servers. Since neither flat Ethernet-switched networks nor hierarchical IP-routed networks are ideal for large data center networks (the former have lower administrative costs but are less scalable), researchers have proposed several architectures and routing algorithms, such as fat trees, SEATTLE, PortLand, VL2, Hedera, and SPAIN. Additionally, new alternatives to Ethernet/IP networks, have been proposed. These include DCell, BCube, FiConn, and MDCube. Also, the use of optical interconnects have been proposed in architectures such as c-Through, Helios and OSA. Additionally, industry standards such as IETF TRILL and IETF 802.1Q solutions are being defined to enable large-scale, robust data center networks. Both TRILL and IEEE 802.1Q have solutions to overcome the limitations of spanning tree algorithm while preserving the low-configuration requirements of Ethernet-switched networks. Vendors such as Cisco, Brocade, HP, and Huawei are deploying IETF TRILL and IEEE standards. This tutorial will cover both research contributions and standards activities in data center networking, and identify pending research problems.
Instructor: Prof. Malathi Veeraraghavan
Charles L. Brown Dept. of Elec. & Comp. Engr.
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA
Malathi Veeraraghavan received her PhD degree from Duke University, Durham, NC, in 1988, with support from a three-year James B. Duke Fellowship, and upon graduation joined Bell Laboratories. Here, she was awarded the Distinguished Member of Technical Staff honor for her research. In 1999, she joined the faculty at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, New York (now part of NYU). She won the Polytechnic University Jacobs award for excellence in education in 2002. She moved to the University of Virginia in 2003 as Director of Computer Engineering, and is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Her current research on integrated studies of intra-data center and inter-data center high-speed networking is supported by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and NSF Office of Cyber Infrastructure. These projects are collaborations with Climate science researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which runs a 100-Gbps core (backbone) network to interconnect DOE national laboratories. She holds twenty-nine patents, has over 100 publications, and has received six Bestpaper awards. She served as a Symposium Co-Chair for the Next-Generation Networking Symposium of the IEEE ICC 2013, Budapest, Hungary, as the Technical Program Committee Chair for IEEE ICC 2002, and as an Associate Editor for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. She also served as Editor of IEEE ComSoc e-News.
T2. The evolution of Public Safety mobile communications through LTE technology
Today, PPDR practitioners and other professional users (e.g., utilities, transportation, etc.) are looking to the future and asking how they can access mission critical mobile broadband and applications alongside their existing secure and reliable narrowband voice and data services. Mobile broadband applications are believed to be able to greatly improve the effectiveness of their operations. Governments and industry are increasingly sensitive to these needs and a large number of efforts are being devoted to pave the way for the delivery of mission‐critical mobile broadband.
Nowadays, PPDR agencies mainly rely on the use of Private/Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) technologies (e.g., TETRA, TETRAPOL, APCO 25) that were conceived in the 1990s in parallel with the second generation (2G) of mobile communication systems. While PMR systems offer a rich set of voice‐centric services, with a number of features matched to the special requirements of PPDR, including, e.g., push‐to‐talk (PTT) and call priority, the data transmission capabilities of these PMR technologies are rather limited and lag far behind the technological advances made in the commercial wireless domain. In this context, Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology for mobile broadband PPDR is increasingly backed as the technology of choice for future PPDR communications and technical work is currently being undertaken within the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the organisation in charge of LTE standardisation, to add a number of improved capabilities and features to the LTE standard that will further increase its suitability for PPDR and other professional users, by meeting their high demands for reliability and resilience. While the convergence to common technical standards for the PPDR and commercial domains offers significant opportunities for synergies and economies of scale that were not possible under dedicated PMR technologies, the delivery of PPDR broadband services demands new approaches in the way that network capacity is deployed and managed. The current paradigm for PPDR communications, based on "dedicated technologies, dedicated networks and dedicated spectrum", is no longer believed to constitute the main approach for the provision of PPDR communications.
The adoption of the LTE standard by the PPDR specialised industry is certainly a major step forward, even though some key enhancements are yet to be added to the standard. However, the delivery of mission‐critical mobile broadband is not only about LTE technology but also entails central issues related to the use of dedicated and/or public networks, the sharing of infrastructure among PPDR and commercial players, the allocation of sufficient spectrum that may be dynamically shared with other users, viable migration paths from current systems, etc.
On this basis, this tutorial will provide a comprehensive view of the introduction of LTE technology for PPDR communications. The following topics will be covered in the tutorial:
- Operational scenarios and emerging multimedia, data‐centric applications in demand by PPDR practitioners. These applications have a great potential to improve the efficiency of disaster recovery operation.
- Discussion on the main techno‐economic drivers that are believed to be pivotal for an efficient and cost‐efficient delivery of mobile broadband PPDR communications (e.g., use of common technical standards with the commercial domain; infrastructure sharing and multi‐network based solutions; dynamic spectrum sharing). Actors, partnerships, business arrangements and revenue models.
- Overarching concepts and system view for the delivery of mobile broadband communications to PPDR (e.g. dedicated LTE‐based wide area networks, roaming and priority access to commercial networks' capacity, fast deployable equipment, satellite access, etc.).
- Capabilities and features of the LTE standard for improved support of mission‐critical communications (e.g. group communications, enhanced coverage and resilience, direct mode capabilities, etc.).
- Technologies complementing LTE for localised capacity surges, improved coverage in underserved areas and increased redundancy (e.g., hot‐spots, cells on wheels, satellite systems for PPDR).
- Applicability of Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) models for the delivery of PPDR services through commercial networks.
- Spectrum needs for future broadband PPDR systems and methodologies for spectrum needs' estimation. Allocated and candidate PPDR spectrum bands. Dynamic use of spectrum resources to provide additional capacity to better cope with a surge of PPDR traffic demand during an emergency situation and to improve the cost efficiency of certain PPDR applications.
Instructors: Prof. Oriol Sallent and Dr. Ramon Ferrús
Signal Communication and Theory Department
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain.
Oriol Sallent ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) is Full Professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. His research interests are in the field of mobile communication systems, especially radio resource and spectrum management for cognitive heterogeneous wireless networks. He has published more than 200 papers in international journals and conferences. He has participated in more than 20 research projects of the 5th, 6th and 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission and served as a consultant for a number of private companies. He has contributed to standardisation bodies such as 3GPP, IEEE and ETSI. He holds 3 national and 1 international patents. He is co‐author of 5 complete books and chapter‐contributor to another 5 books. He has lectured Tutorial Sessions in international conferences, Specialised Courses to national and international companies and Master Courses to post‐graduates since 1998.
Ramon Ferrús (
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
) received the Telecommunications Engineering and Ph.D. degrees from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in 1996 and 2000, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Signal Theory and Communications at UPC. His research interests include network architectures, protocols, radio resource and spectrum management for wireless communications. He has participated in several research projects within the European Commission 6th and 7th Framework Programmes as well as in research and technology transfer projects for private companies. He is co‐author of two books on mobile communications and over 70 papers published in peer reviewed international journals, magazines and conference proceedings.
Both authors are with the Mobile Communications Research Group, within the Signal Theory and Communications department, which has been developing research and consultancy activities in the area of Mobile and Wireless Communications for both private and public sectors for the last 20 years. The GRCM’s core competences are on 2G/3G/4G wireless network architectures and protocols, interworking, radio network planning and deployment, radio interface design (layers 1, 2 and 3), radio resource management, dynamic spectrum assignment, cognitive radio, autonomic and self‐organising wireless networks. The group has been involved in eighteen European Research projects mainly in the ICT and Security themes.
Recently, Prof. Oriol Sallent has led the European Research project HELP (http://cordis.europa.eu/projects/rcn/97890_en.html) in the Security domain that established
a solution framework for the provision of Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) communications over Long Term Evolution (LTE)‐based and Private/Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) networks, based on network sharing and spectrum sharing principles. Project HELP system solution was laid out on three pillars: adoption of commercial LTE standards for mobile broadband PPDR; coexistence of dedicated LTE‐based networks and public mobile networks in future PPDR network scenarios; and interworking with legacy PMR systems currently used for mission‐critical voice.
At national level, both authors were involved in the TELMAX project, led by Spanish PMR manufacturer Teltronic, which conducted research in the field of broadband communications oriented to professional users with the aim to lay the groundwork for the next generation of professional mobile radio systems.
At present both authors participate in the ISITEP project, a European Large‐scale integrating project (IP) in the Security theme, which is targeted to develop procedures, technology and legal agreements to achieve a cost effective solution for PPDR interoperability, with a focus on the interworking of European national PMR networks.
T3. On Security Issues in Content Centric Networks: Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Countermeasures
Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a proposal for the future Internet, where the data is identifi ed and requested based on its name. The usage of this architecture is fundamentally focused on the content itself and not on its physical address or locality. Any node in the network may store and forward content in response to user requests. Comparing to the current Internet architecture, the CCN definition proposes to cope with a number of security issues. However, many studies have shown fragilities in the proposed architecture. Recent works present not only the possibility of the emergence of new fragilities, but they also suggest the necessary changes on the current Internet attack to succeed. In this tutorial, we will focus exactly on those works. We will present a perspective of possible attacks and countermeasures proposed in the literature, in addition to their practical challenges and future perspectives.
Instructors: Dr. Antonio Rocha and Dr. Célio Albuquerque
Institute of Computing
Fluminense Federal University
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Antonio Augusto received his D.Sc degree in system engineering from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 2010. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the Fluminense Federal University, Brazil. Previously he was pos-doc supported by INCT WebScience. His areas of interest include performance evaluation, trac engineering, network measurement, next generation Internet, complex networks and security systems. Dr. Antonio Rocha has published many papers in important journals and conferences. He has received a few best paper awards, including ACM/CoNEXT'09, SBC/SBRC2006, SBC/WPerformance 2004 and 2012.
Célio Albuquerque got his PhD from the University of California, Irvine in 2000. His main research interests are: multimedia internet broadcasting, computer network architectures and protocols, next generation Internet, wireless networks, multicast and multimedia services, and trac ow and congestion control mechanisms. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Fluminense Federal University working at the Computer Science Department. Previously he worked at Magis, where he was the designer of Wireless LAN Air5 synchronous TDMA/TDD Medium Access Control, Host Interface, Layer-2 Protocols, QoS Link Scheduler, Admission Control, Hardware memory management, Per- ow ow control, Forward error correction, and Security framework. He was also the main developer of Air5 synchronous MAC rmware and Air5 System simulator. Managed Air5 pre-tapeout and post-tapeout ASIC veri cation, and ASIC-Firmware integration. Patented Air5 MAC scheduling and admission control. Dr. Celio Albuquerque has won the SBRC'98 Best paper award, the CAPES scholarship to support Ph.D. Studies between September 1995 to August 1999, the CNPq/Brasil scholarship to support Undergraduate research studies between March 1988 to December 1992 and CNPq research grants since March 2005. He has published over 100 journal and conference papers.
T4: Future of Optical Communication Systems and Networks
Optical communication based on fibre-optic has revolutionised telecommunications enabling high-speed (>100 Gb/s per channel) and high-capacity (>10 Tbit/s per fiber) transmissions over long distances (>1000 km). However, the proliferation of bandwidth-hungry services, such as high-definition TV, cloud computing and business applications has led to an ever increasing demand of Internet traffic. Therefore, significant research efforts in optical transport networks as well as dramatic changes in the optical networking paradigms are required.
The tutorial presents the main challenges and trends for the next-generation optical communication technology and optical networking. Topics such as channel modelling, advanced transceivers design, network planning and software defined networking are covered.
Instructors: Fabio Pittalà and Jorge López Vizcaíno
European Research Center
Huawei Technologies
Munich, Germany
Fabio Pittalà (M’12) received his M.Sc. in Telecommunication Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 2011. Since mid-2011 he is working as Researcher at the European Research Center of Huawei Technologies in Munich (Germany).
His research interests are on the field digital signal processing for high-speed optical communication systems.
Jorge López Vizcaíno (M’12) received the M.Sc. degree in Telecommunications from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 2011. Since 2012, he is a Researcher at the European Research Center of Huawei Technologies in Munich (Germany).
His research interests are in network planning, optical networking technologies, network protocols, energy-efficiency and elastic optical networks.