for their valuable remarks and constructive comments. Thank you to my colleagues at MOSA!C Lab, who created a fruitful science and technology environment for me to work in. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance I received from the ComNet laboratory, and I would like to thank laboratory engineer Mr. Viktor Nässi for his readiness in providing any required laboratory equipment in a short time. Thanks also go to the Aalto IT Service Desk members for their continuous service and support. I am grateful to my dear friends in Finland, both in the Helsinki region and in Vaasa, who have supported me with their wisdom and kindness during my studies. Most of all, I would like to thank my parents and my family, who have always given me strength and freedom to follow my dreams. Lastly, I am deeply grateful to my wife, Somayeh, for her tremendous support, endless patience, and understanding during my doctoral studies.

Cloud offerings represent a promising solution for mobile network operators to cope with the surging mobile traffic. The concept of carrier cloud has therefore emerged as an important topic of inquiry. For a successful carrier cloud, algorithms for optimal placement of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on federated cloud are of crucial importance. In this paper, we introduce different VNF placement algorithms for carrier cloud with two main design goals: i) minimizing path between users and their respective data anchor gateways and ii) optimizing their sessions' mobility. The two design goals effectively represent two conflicting objectives, that we deal with considering the mobility features and service usage behavioral patterns of mobile users, in addition to the mobile operators' cost in terms of the total number of instantiated VNFs to build a Virtual Network Infrastructure (VNI). Different solutions are evaluated based on different metrics and encouraging results are obtained.IEEE ICC 2015 -Mobile and Wireless Networking Symposium 978-1-4673-6432-4/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE

This paper introduces a content delivery network as a service (CDNaaS) platform that allows dynamic deployment and life-cycle management of virtual content delivery network (CDN) slices running across multiple administrative cloud domains. The CDN slice consists of four virtual network function (VNF) types, namely virtual transcoders, virtual streamers, virtual caches, and a CDN-slice-specific Coordinator for the management of the slice resources across the involved cloud domains. To create an efficient CDN slice, the optimal placement of its composing VNFs using adequate amount of virtual resources for each VNF is of vital importance. In this vein, this paper devises mechanisms for allocating an appropriate set of VNFs for each CDN slice to meet its performance requirements and minimize as much as possible the incurred cost in terms of allocated virtual resources. A mathematical model is developed to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanisms. We first formulate the VNF placement problem as two Linear Integer problem models, aiming at minimizing the cost and maximizing the quality of experience (QoE) of the virtual streaming service. By applying the bargaining game theory, we ensure an optimal tradeoff solution between the cost efficiency and QoE. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed models in achieving their design objectives and encouraging results are obtained.

No abstract

Abstract:The research and development (R&D) and the standardization of the 5th Generation (5G) mobile networking technologies are proceeding at a rapid pace all around the world. In this paper, we introduce the emerging concept of network slicing that is considered one of the most significant technology challenges for 5G mobile networking infrastructure, summarize our preliminary research efforts to enable end-to-end network slicing for 5G mobile networking, and finally discuss application use cases that should drive the designs of the infrastructure of network slicing.