The increasing demand of mobile Internet and the Internet of Things poses challenging requirements for 5G wireless communications, such as high spectral efficiency and massive connectivity. In this article, a promising technology, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), is discussed, which can address some of these challenges for 5G. Different from conventional orthogonal multiple access technologies, NOMA can accommodate much more users via nonorthogonal resource allocation. We divide existing dominant NOMA schemes into two categories: power-domain multiplexing and code-domain multiplexing, and the corresponding schemes include power-domain NOMA, multiple access with low-density spreading, sparse code multiple access, multi-user shared access, pattern division multiple access, and so on. We discuss their principles, key features, and pros/cons, and then provide a comprehensive comparison of these solutions from the perspective of spectral efficiency, system performance, receiver complexity, and so on. In addition, challenges, opportunities, and future research trends for NOMA design are highlighted to provide some insight on the potential future work for researchers in this field. Finally, to leverage different multiple access schemes including both conventional OMA and new NOMA, we propose the concept of software defined multiple access (SoDeMA), which enables adaptive configuration of available multiple access schemes to support diverse services and applications in future 5G networks.

Non-orthogonal multiple access for 5G: solutions, challenges, opportunities, and future research trends

Network functions virtualization (NFV) is a new network architecture framework where network function that traditionally used dedicated hardware (middleboxes or network appliances) are now implemented in software that runs on top of general purpose hardware such as high volume server. NFV emerges as an initiative from the industry (network operators, carriers, and manufacturers) in order to increase the deployment flexibility and integration of new network services with increased agility within operator’s networks and to obtain significant reductions in operating expenditures and capital expenditures. NFV promotes virtualizing network functions such as transcoders, firewalls, and load balancers, among others, which were carried out by specialized hardware devices and migrating them to software-based appliances. One of the main challenges for the deployment of NFV is the resource allocation of demanded network services in NFV-based network infrastructures. This challenge has been called the NFV resource allocation (NFV-RA) problem. This paper presents a comprehensive state of the art of NFV-RA by introducing a novel classification of the main approaches that pose solutions to solve it. This paper also presents the research challenges that are still subject of future investigation in the NFV-RA realm.

Resource Allocation in NFV: A Comprehensive Survey

https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/files/134629726/paper_v2.pdf

Next generation cloud computing

The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space, but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers. These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems. Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.

Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions

We study the virtual machine live migration (LM) and disaster recovery (DR) from a networking perspective, considering long-distance networks, for example, between data centers. These networks are usually constrained by limited available bandwidth, increased latency and congestion, or high cost of use when dedicated network resources are used, while their exact characteristics cannot be controlled. LM and DR present several challenges due to the large amounts of data that need to be transferred over long-distance networks, which increase with the number of migrated or protected resources. In this context, our work presents the way LM and DR are currently being performed and their operation in long-distance networking environments, discussing related issues and bottlenecks and surveying other works. We also present the way networks are evolving today and the new technologies and protocols (e.g., software-defined networking, or SDN, and flexible optical networks) that can be used to boost the efficiency of LM and DR over long distances. Traffic redirection in a long-distance environment is also an important part of the whole equation, since it directly affects the transparency of LM and DR. Related works and solutions both from academia and the industry are presented.

Survey: Live Migration and Disaster Recovery over Long-Distance Networks

Disaster survivability in optical communication networks

Recent targeted attacks and natural disasters have made disaster-resilient cloud network design an important issue. Network operators are investigating proactive and reactive measures to prevent huge data loss and service disruptions in case of a disaster. We present novel techniques for disaster-aware datacenter placement and content management in cloud networks that can mitigate such loss by avoiding placement in given disaster-vulnerable locations. We first solve a static disaster-aware datacenter and content placement problem by adopting an integer linear program with the objective to minimize risk, defined as expected loss of content. It is a measure of how much, in terms of cost or penalty, a network operator may lose probabilistically due to possible disasters in a cloud network. We also show how a service provider's budget constraint can affect disaster-aware placement design. Since disaster scenarios, content popularity, and/or importance are always changing in time, content placement should rapidly adapt to these changes. We propose a disaster-aware dynamic content-management algorithm that can adjust the existing placement based on dynamic settings. Besides reducing the overall risk and making the network disaster-aware, reducing network resource usage and satisfying quality-of-service requirements can also be achieved in this approach. We also provide a cost analysis of employing a dynamic disaster-aware placement design in the network based on real-world cloud pricing.

Disaster-aware datacenter placement and dynamic content management in cloud networks

We define Content Connectivity as the reachability of every content from any point of an optical network. We propose a scheme for virtual network mapping and content placement to ensure content connectivity after failures.

Fault-tolerant virtual network mapping to provide Content Connectivity in optical networks

The rapid increase in network traffic with new bandwidth-hungry applications such as cloud computing and telemedicine makes disaster survivability a crucial concern as the data (and revenue) loss caused by large-scale correlated cascading failures can be very high To alleviate their impact, new measures should be taken since the nature of the network changes dramatically as available resources decrease during disasters We develop a metric, called degraded-service tolerance, which can reduce protection cost and network disruption, and support maximal carried traffic in case of disasters Degraded-service-tolerant connections can be admitted and recovered with reduced bandwidth under resource crunch Our scheme re-assigns resources among connections by leveraging their degraded-service tolerance A case study shows how our proposal can be applied to boost network performance during the resource crunch following a disaster

M. Farhan Habib

Papers

Disaster survivability in optical communication networks

Disaster-aware datacenter placement and dynamic content management in cloud networks

Fault-tolerant virtual network mapping to provide Content Connectivity in optical networks

Network adaptability to disaster disruptions by exploiting degraded-service tolerance

On Service-Chaining Strategies using Virtual Network Functions in Operator Networks