In this letter the development and testing of an open enterprise Wi-Fi solution based on virtual APs, managed by a central WLAN controller is presented. It allows seamless handovers between APs in different channels, maintaining the QoS of real-time services. The potential scalability issues associated to the beacon generation and channel assignment have been addressed. A battery of tests has been run in a real environment, and the results are reported in terms of packet loss and delay.

Upcoming 5G mobile networks are addressing ambitious Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) not just in terms of capacity and latency, but also in terms of network control and management. In this direction, network management schemes need to evolve to provide the required flexibility, and automated and integrated management of 5G networks. This also applies to the 5G-Crosshaul transport network, which provides an integrated fronthaul and backhaul. Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are seen as key enablers for that. This article validates the flexibility, scalability, and recovery capabilities of the 5G-Crosshaul architecture in a testbed distributed geographically. More specifically, the central component of the validation is the hierarchical 5G-Crosshaul control infrastructure (XCI), conceived to handle multi-domain multi-technology transport network resources. Its performance is characterized through two experimental case studies. The first one illustrates the automated provisioning of all network resources required to deploy a complete LTE virtual mobile network featuring fronthaul and backhaul configurations. This takes 10.467s. on average for the network under test. The second one exploits the flexibility of the hierarchical XCI to apply local or centralized service recovery in the event of link failure depending on the desired path optimality vs. recovery time trade-off. On average, recovery takes 0.299s. and 6.652s., respectively. Overall, the proposed solution contributes to attain the target set for 5G networks of reducing service setup from hours to minutes.

We present a cloud-native architecture for Optical SDN Controllers based on ABNO architecture and gRPC interfaces, which is demonstrated and evaluated. Autoscaling mechanisms for high request loads and auto-healing support are evaluated. © 2020 The Author(s) 1. Introduction Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a consolidated network architecture paradigm that provides network programmability by separating the control plane logic from the data plane forwarding infrastructure. This decoupling, provides novel benefits to network operators, such as CAPEX savings by replacing dedicated hardware network equipment by software-driven network elements and OPEX thanks to faster new service introduction. SDN has been accompanied with new open standard interfaces, such as NETCONF, gRPC, OpenFlow or P4, which allow to interact with the network elements from centralized entities generally defined as SDN controllers [1]. SDN controllers currently are developed as single monolithic and resource-hungry applications, which might be replicated in case of need for resiliency or extra resources. This leads to non-efficient use of the resources, does not provide scaling mechanisms for high loads of connectivity service requests, and incur on extra delays in each request, not allowing a cloud-scale number of requests. Some network vendors are experimenting with solutions that export the complexity towards applications, but are not dealing with the need to break the monolithic SDN controllers [2]. The Applications-Based Network Operations (ABNO) framework [3] has been standardized by the IETF and it is based on standard protocols and components to efficiently provide a solution to the transport network orchestration. Microservices are a software development technique that structures an application as a collection of interconnected and related services. In a microservices architecture, services are simple and detailed and the protocols are lightweight. For example, gRPC Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) [4] is a protocol designed for cloud native high-performance RPC. It uses HTTP/2 as a transport protocol and uses protocol buffers encodings for transported messages. gRPC has been proven as useful in telemetry, due to its low latency and small byte overhead. In this paper, we propose the application of microservices architecture to the development of an SDN controller. The internal architecture of SDN controller makes it clearly a good candidate for splitting it into microservices, which provide resiliency and scalability features per design. Using ABNO components, several microservices will be defined, including path computation service, NBI service, connectivity service, connection service, topology service, context service, VNTM service, transceiver service, monitoring service, and plugin services. Each microservice will interact with each other using protocol buffers and gRPC interfaces. A common gRPC interface will be provided for health check of the microservices. This novel cloud-native architecture named uABNO (Fig. 1, left) provides ...

This work aims to describe how EHRs have been used to meet the needs of healthcare providers and researchers in a 1,300-beds tertiary Hospital during COVID-19 pandemic. For this purpose, essential clinical concepts were identified and standardized with LOINC and SNOMED CT. After that, these concepts were implemented in EHR systems and based on them, data tools, such as clinical alerts, dynamic patient lists and a clinical follow-up dashboard, were developed for healthcare support. In addition, these data were incorporated into standardized repositories and COVID-19 databases to improve clinical research on this new disease. In conclusion, standardized EHRs allowed implementation of useful multi- purpose data resources in a major Hospital in the course of the pandemic.

Abstract-In corporate and commercial environments, the deployment of a set of coordinated Wi-Fi APs is becoming a common solution to provide Internet coverage to moving users. In these scenarios, real-time services as online games can also be present. This paper presents a set of experiments developed in a test scenario where an end device moves between different APs while generating game traffic. A WLAN solution based on virtual APs is used, in order to make the handoffs transparent for Layer 3. The results show that it is possible to maintain an acceptable level of subjective quality during the handoff. At the same time, it is set clear that the fact of having a gamer in an AP could be taken into account by radio resource management algorithms, in order to provide a better quality.