Harilaos Koumaras

National Center for Scientific Research Demokritos | ncsr · Insititute of Informatics and Telecommunications

The 5th Generation (5G) of mobile networks brings the concept of openness to vertical industries, by enabling new levels of programmability in the network core and edge domains. Openness is enabled through APIs and it creates the field for developing 5G-enabled vertical applications, i.e., applications that can interact with the underlay network. I...

A scalable, flexible and reliable Analytics service has become a requirement toward building efficient Fifth Generation (5G) experimental platforms that can support a suite of end-user experiments and verticals. Our paper presents the challenges that come with designing such a service-based Analytics component, and shows how we have used it in the...

The definition of multiple slicing types in 5G has created a wide field for service innovation in communications. However, the advantages that network slicing has to offer remain to be fully exploited by today’s applications and users. An important area that can potentially benefit from 5G slicing is emergency communications for First Responders. T...

In the last few years UAVs have progressed considerably in terms of applications, moving beyond entertaining activities and use. Taking into account that the use of the UAVs is expected to be increased significantly in the forthcoming years, it is deemed necessary to adopt innovative communication technologies and features, towards the support...

—5G system aims to enable vertical industries utilizing network programmability to its full extension. 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has already established the foundations to provide 5G Core’s capabilities to third parties with Common API Framework (CAPIF) and Service Enabler Layer Architecture (SEAL). Vertical application develop...

The White Paper covers key areas related to 6G research from a technical, societal, policy and business perspective providing a vision for the future networks and services. In the coming decade, 6G will bring a new era in which billions of things, humans, connected vehicles, robots and drones will generate zettabytes of digital information. 6G will...

In the past few years, UAVs have evolved considerably towards real-world applications, going beyond entertaining activities. The unique features that UAVs can provide, such as flexible and easy deployment, high mobility, and mostly autonomous operation, tend to be appealing solutions in a wide variety of applications. With the number of UAVs expect...

Recently Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have evolved considerably towards real world applications, going beyond entertaining activities and use. With the advent of Fifth Generation (5G) cellular networks and the number of UAVs to be increased significantly, it is created the opportunity for UAVs to participate in the realisation of 5G opportunisti...

In the current 5G technology domain network slicing already plays an important role as a critical enabler. An industry that 5G aims to disrupt is the vehicular one. In this paper the brief scope of the 5G‐DRIVE research project is presented, regarding 5G vehicular research between the EU and China. In the frame of 5G‐DRIVE a set of slicing mechanis...

The high heterogeneity of 5G use cases requires the extension of the traditional per-component testing procedures provided by certification organizations, in order to devise and incorporate methodologies that cover the testing requirements from vertical applications and services. In this paper, we introduce an experimentation methodology that is de...

This article focuses on IoT interoperability challenges that limit the applicability of IoT-related services due to the variety of IoT data protocols utilized by different sensors and data nodes. Through the agility brought by virtualization, which allows gateway functions to be deployed on demand in an agile manner, this chapter discusses the conc...

Developing products, services and vertical applications for the future digitized society in the 6G era requires a multidisciplinary approach and a re-definition of how we create, deliver and consume network resources, data and services for both communications and sensing purposes. This development will change and disrupt the traditional business mo...

Executive Summary This white paper discusses the different business verticals that are expected to gain productivity enhancements with the introduction of B5G/6G wireless services. It is evident that wireless offers benefits when the use case exhibits mobility, requires nomadic behavior or flexibility and in some situation, cost may be favoring wir...

The emerging technologies in the field of telecommunications have evolved into the paradigm of 5G. 5G technology is aimed to become sufficiently flexible to handle a wide variety of network services from various domains. One of the aspects envisaged by 5G is the virtualization of small cells, which allows enhanced mobile edge computing capabilities...

The evolution of 5G suggests that communication networks become sufficiently flexible to handle a wide variety of network services from various domains. The virtualization of small cells as envisaged by 5G, allows enhanced mobile edge computing capabilities, thus enabling network service deployment and management near the end user. This paper prese...

Integrating joint network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networks (SDNs) with digital televisions (TVs) into home environments, has the potential to provide smart TV services to users, and improve their quality of experience (QoE). In this regard, this paper focuses on one of the next generation services so-called follow me serv...

The focus of research into 5G networks to date has been largely on the required advances in network architectures, technologies and infrastructures. Less effort has been put on the applications and services that will make use of and exploit the flexibility of 5G networks built upon the concept of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functi...

The ubiquity of the internet led to a diverse number of devices referred to as the “things” to have online access. The internet of things (IoT) framework's infrastructure is formed by sensors, actuators, computer servers, and the communication network. Within this framework, the chapter focuses on IoT interoperability challenges through virtualizat...

This chapter discusses the evolution of the cloud computing paradigm and its applicability in various sections of the computing and networking/telecommunications industry, such as the cloud networking, the cloud offloading, and the network function virtualization. The new heterogeneous virtualized ecosystem that is formulated creates new needs and...

A Chatbot is an application that is designed to provide automated contextual communication. Today most chatbots are implemented on top of or as a gateway to popular messaging services, such as Facebook Messenger, Skype and Viber. Chatbots can be classified into many categories regarding their usage, such as conversational commerce, customer support...

The telecom community is during the last years witnessing a paradigm shift towards the virtualisation/ " softwarisation " of the network infrastructure, mostly driven by the concepts of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV). At the same time, satellite telecommunication technologies, although rapidly advancing...

5G envisages a "hyper-connected society" where an enormous number of diverse entities could communicate with each other anywhere and at any time, some of which will demand extremely challenging performance requirements such as sub-millisecond latency, and higher data rates. Cloud-enabled radio access networks where intelligence is placed at the edg...

One of the primary challenges associated with Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is the automated management of the service lifecycle. In this paper, we present a full software-based MANO (Management and Orchestration) stack which operates with OpenStack and OpenDaylight controllers and has the in-built functionality to automate the key phases...

This paper proposes a novel video quality assessment method aimed for the next generation (5G) mobile networks, following the small cell deployment architecture. The proposed method is based on a novel usage of the structural similarity (SSIM) index, as a Reduced Reference metric and is suitable for implementation as a Virtual Network Function (VNF...

Emerging technologies for infrastructure and service virtualisation promise radical changes in the way IT and telecommunications systems are designed, operated and managed. The satellite industry, and satcom networking could also benefit from this trend, introducing new methods for network operations and management, with key advantages in terms of...

The fast growing development of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) trends and the remarkable progress of Software Defined Networking (SDN), have yield a synergy between both, towards the provision of convergent networking solutions. Since the traditional networking principles were not designed according to NVF specification, a work has surged de...

This special issue is dedicated to the exploration of how systems based on software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) can enhance multimedia distribution. Bringing together researchers from both the networking and multimedia research communities, this issue showcases emerging research and creates a discussion from d...

To understand how the design and engineering of multimedia distribution systems will be influenced by the combination of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), the guest editors of this special issue on advancing multimedia distribution interviewed three active researchers in this cross-disciplinary field: Baoc...

Key features of satellite communications such as wide-scale coverage, broadcast/multicast support and high availability, together with significant amounts of new satellite capacity coming online, anticipate new opportunities for satellite communications services as an integral part within upcoming 5G systems. To materialize these opportunities, sat...

A reduced-reference video quality assessment (VQA) method was proposed by using structural similarity (SSIM) index as a tool to extract features from both the original and the target video sequences, using a reference video pattern. The method is suitable for monitoring the video quality in real time and across the service provision chain. The perf...

As the rollout of NFV in the Telecommunications domain gains momentum, methods that enable the automated and performant deployment of VNFs are required to support large scale deployments. This paper presents a framework that enables the automated characterization of VNFs and modelling of the relationships between resource types, quantities and achi...

The primary goal of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is the migration of physical network functions to software versions running on virtual machines (VM) in cloud computing environments. Rapid developments in virtualization technologies have made high-speed network connections and line rate packet processing viable in virtualized infrastructur...

This chapter discusses the evolution of the cloud computing paradigm and its applicability in various sections of the computing and networking/telecommunications industry, such as the cloud networking, the cloud offloading, and the network function virtualization. The new heterogeneous virtualized ecosystem that is formulated creates new needs and...

In the context of next generation 5G networks, the satellite industry is clearly committed to revisit and revamp the role of satellite communications. As major drivers in the evolution of (terrestrial) fixed and mobile networks, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) technologies are also being positioned as cen...

A video quality assessment mechanism for next-generation (5G) mobile networks uses the small cell deployment architecture to implement a virtual network function to enable in-service monitoring of delivered video quality.

This chapter discusses the evolution of the cloud computing paradigm and its applicability in various sections of the computing and networking/telecommunications industry, such as the cloud networking,the cloud offloading, and the network function virtualization. The new heterogeneous virtualized ecosystem that is formulated creates new needs and c...

Currently, the critical communications sector is aware of the need for evolving the portfolio of service capabilities to support advanced multimedia communications in their daily emergency operations. However, there is a discussion about the evolving the private communication networks or adopting commercial network technologies, which have evolved...

This paper presents a novel open-source implementation of a call center, which is compatible with the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) platform, supporting call forwarding and dispatching services, along with video call and chat with file transfer. The proposed solution is called Call Center for IMS (CC4IMS) and following a requirement analysis, the p...