Ning Wang

University of Surrey · Department of Electronic Engineering

This letter proposes an innovative energy-efficient Radio Access Network (RAN) disaggregation and virtualization method for Open RAN (O-RAN) that effectively addresses the challenges posed by dynamic traffic conditions. In this case, the energy consumption is primarily formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem and then solved by integrat...

Service Function Chaining (SFC) is an emerging network technology based on network function virtualisation (NFV), which facilitates in-network data processing during traffic steering. SFC optimisations can be broadly categorised into centralised and distributed solutions, each with advantages and disadvantages. In this paper, we propose a flexible...

Open Radio Access Networks (O-RANs) have revolutionized the telecom ecosystem by bringing intelligence into disaggregated RAN and implementing functionalities as Virtual Network Functions (VNF) through open interfaces. However, dynamic traffic conditions in real-life O-RAN environments may require necessary VNF reconfigurations during run-time, whi...

This letter highlights the combined advantages of Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) and distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI) in network slicing. O-RAN’s virtualization and disaggregation techniques enable efficient resource allocation, while AI-driven networks optimize performance and decision-making. We propose a federated Deep Reinforcement L...

Open radio access network (Open-RAN) is becoming a key component of cellular networks, and therefore optimizing its architecture is vital. The Open-RAN is a distributed architecture that lets the virtualized networking functions be split between Distributed Units (DU) and Centralized Units (CUs); as a result, there is a wide range of design options...

Software-defined networking (SDN) is the key technology to enable network softwarization by offering a programable and flexible network control capabilities. In order to dynamically manage and reconfigure the underlying network through SDN, network-based monitoring functionality needs to be in place. However, existing network monitoring schemes are...

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a promising paradigm of computer networks, offering a programmable and centralised network architecture. However, although such a technology supports the ability to dynamically handle network traffic based on real-time and flexible traffic control, SDN-based networks can be vulnerable to dynamic change of flow c...

A techno-economic analysis of the 5G enhanced mobile broadband scenario in dense urban areas has been accomplished by radio capacity modelling of probable 5G technologies within a 1 km² grid representing central London. Different density networks were modelled at 700 MHz (macro network), 3.5 GHz (micro network) and 24-27.5 GHz (hot spots) - togethe...

The Internet, the de facto platform for large-scale content distribution, suffers from two issues that limit its manageability, efficiency, and evolution. First, the IP-based Internet is host-centric and agnostic to the content being delivered and, second, the tight coupling of the control and data planes restrict its manageability, and subsequentl...

Network function virtualization (NFV) is one of key features envisioned for the upcoming 5G core networks in order to support high flexibility in network deployment and management. However, potential performance degradations that could be caused by virtualization of network functions is still a controversial issue, especially in regards to virtuali...

HTTP-based live streaming has become increasingly popular in recent years, and more users have started generating 4K live streams from their devices (e.g., mobile phones) through social-media service providers like Facebook or YouTube. If the audience is located far from a live stream source across the global Internet, TCP throughput becomes substa...

In order to minimize the downloading time of short-lived applications like web browsing, web application and short video clips, the recently standardized HTTP/2 adopts stream multiplexing on one single TCP connection. However, aggregating all content objects within one single connection suffers from the Head-of-Line blocking issue. QUIC, by elimina...

The random access (RA) mechanism of Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks is prone to congestion when a large number of devices attempt RA simultaneously, due to the limited set of preambles. If each RA attempt is made by means of transmission of multiple consecutive preambles (codewords) picked from a subset of preambles, as proposed in [1], collisio...

It has been envisaged that in future 5G networks user devices will become an integral part by participating in the transmission of mobile content traffic typically through Deviceto- device (D2D) technologies. In this context, we promote the concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS), where content-aware mobile network edge is equipped with necessary k...

Motivated by alleviating CO2 pollution, Electric Vehicle (EV) based applications have recently received wide interests from both commercial and research communities by using electric energy instead of traditional fuel energy. Although EVs are inherently with limited travelling distance, such limitation could be overcome by deploying public Charging...

With increased complexity of webpages nowadays, computation latency incurred by webpage processing during downloading operations has become a newly identified factor that may substantially affect user experiences in a mobile network. In order to tackle this issue, we propose a simple but effective transport-layer optimization technique which requir...

Internet video streaming applications have been demanding more bandwidth and higher video quality, especially with the advent of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications. While adaptive streaming protocols like MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) allows video quality to be flexibly adapted, e.g., degraded when mobil...

Cooperation between peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays and underlying networks has been proposed as an effective approach to improve the efficiency of both the applications and the underlying networks. However, fundamental characteristics with respect to Internet service providers (ISP) business relationships and inter-ISP routing information are not suff...

In this letter, we analyse the trade-off between collision probability and code-ambiguity, when devices transmit a sequence of preambles as a codeword, instead of a single preamble, to reduce collision probability during random access to a mobile network. We point out that the network may not have sufficient resources to allocate to every possible...

The design of an efficient charging management system for on-the-move electric vehicles (EVs) has become an emerging research problem in future connected vehicle applications, given their mobility uncertainties. Major technical challenges here involve decision-making intelligence for the selection of charging stations (CSs) and the corresponding co...

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm envisions billions of devices all connected to the Internet, generating low-rate monitoring and measurement data to be delivered to application servers or end-users. Recently, the possibility of applying in-network data caching techniques to IoT traffic flows has been discussed in research forums. The main chal...

The high volume of energy consumption has become a great concern to the Internet community because of high energy waste on redundant network devices. One promising scheme for energy savings is to reconfigure network elements to sleep mode when traffic demand is low. However, due to the nature of today's traditional IP routing protocols, network rec...

In this paper, we present a Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) scheme for enabling network edge-assisted video adaptation based on MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP). In contrast to the traditional over-the-top (OTT) adaptation performed by DASH clients, the MEC server at the mobile network edge can capture radio access network (RAN) conditi...

Data collection is a fundamental yet challenging task of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) to support a variety of applications, due to the inherent distinguish characteristics for sensor networks, such as limited energy supply, self-organizing deployment and QoS requirements for different applications. Mobile sink and virtual MIMO (vMIMO) techniques...

The separation between the control plane and the user plane is a key property of the newly proposed heterogeneous networks that will be widely deployed in 5G. In contrast to the failure of a small cell base station in the user plane which can be directly handled by the associated macrocell base station, the solution to handling a macrocell base sta...

The vehicular cloud is a promising new paradigm where vehicular networking and mobile cloud computing are elaborately integrated to enhance the quality of vehicular information services. Pseudonym is a resource for vehicles to protect their location privacy, which should be efficiently utilized to secure vehicular clouds. However, only a few existi...

With the continually increased attention on Electric Vehicles (EVs) due to environment impact, public Charging Stations (CSs) for EVs will become common. However, due to the limited electricity of battery, the driver may experience discomfort for long charging waiting time, if travelling towards a CS which is heavily loaded for charging. With this...

Data collection is a fundamental task of wireless sensor networks to support a variety of applications, such as remote monitoring, and emergency response, where collected information is relayed to an infrastructure network via packet gateways for processing and decision making. In large-scale monitoring scenarios, data packets need to be relayed ov...

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-configuring infrastructure-less network. Taking advantage of spontaneous and infrastructure-less behavior, MANET can be integrated with satellite network to provide world-wide communication for emergency and disaster relieve services and can also be integrated with cellular network for mobile data offloadin...

We have harnessed the salient features of information-centric networking (ICN) and implemented a communication infrastructure, called C-DAX, for supporting smart grid applications. We will demonstrate the operations of C-DAX both in a laboratory setup and a real field trial that involves the deployment of C-DAX in a live electricity grid in the Net...

In-network content caching has recently emerged in the context of information-centric networking (ICN), which allows content objects to be cached at the intermediate router side. In this paper, we specifically focus on in-network caching of peer-to-peer (P2P)-like content objects for improving both service and operation efficiencies. We propose a f...

Energy-aware traffic engineering (ETE) has been gaining increasing research attentions due to the cost reduction benefits that it can offer to network operators and for environmental reasons. While numerous approaches exist which attempt to provide energy reduction benefits by intelligently manipulating network devices and their configurations, mos...

Information-centric networking (ICN) is an emerging networking paradigm that places content identifiers rather than host identifiers at the core of the mechanisms and protocols used to deliver content to end users. Such a paradigm allows routers enhanced with content-awareness to play a direct role in the routing and resolution of content requests...

The evolution toward emerging active distribution networks (ADNs) can be realized via a real-time state estimation (RTSE) application facilitated by the use of phasor measurement units (PMUs). A critical challenge in deploying PMU-based RTSE applications at large scale is the lack of a scalable and flexible communication infrastructure for the time...

This article addresses Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) routing under a highly dynamic scenario, envisioned for communication in Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs) suffering from intermittent connection. Here, we focus on the design of a high level routing framework, rather than the dedicated encounter prediction. Based on an analyzed utili...

Wireless sensor networks usually have a massive number of randomly deployed sensor nodes that perform sensing and transmitting data to a base station. This can be a cause of sensor redundancy and data duplication. Sensor scheduling is a solution to reducing the enormous amount of the data load by selecting certain potential sensors to perform the t...

Energy efficiency has become a major research topic in the Internet community as a result of unprecedented rise in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. One typical approach towards energy efficiency is to select a subset of IP routers or interfaces that will go to sleep mode during the off-peak period. However, on-the-fly netw...

In this article, we design and evaluate the proposed Geographic-based Spray-and-Relay (GSaR) routing scheme in Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs). To the best of our knowledge, GSaR is the first spray based geographic routing scheme using the historical geographic information for making routing decision. Here, the term spray means only a lim...

In recent years, Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) have been great interest all over the world for its advantage of high mobility and flexibility. It is also among the greatest challenges in wireless communications. As a special type of MANET, Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) are considerably important in Next-Generation Networking (NGN). Unlike ty...

In-network content caching has recently emerged in the context of Information-Centric Networking (ICN), which allows content objects to be cached at the content router side. In this paper, we specifically focus on in-network caching of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content objects for improving both service and operation efficiencies. We propose an intelligen...

Electric Vehicle (EV) based applications have recently received wide interests from both commercial and research communities, thanks to the avoidance of CO2 pollution by using electric energy instead of traditional fuel energy. With the deployment of public Charging Stations (CSs), the travelling distance of EVs could be substantially increased by...

There is a general consensus about the success of Internet architecture in academia and industry. However, with the development of diversified application, the existing Internet architecture is facing more and more challenges in scalability, security, mobility and performance. A novel evolvable Internet architecture framework is proposed in this pa...

Reducing energy consumption in the Telecom industry has become a major research challenge to the Internet community. Towards this end, numerous research works have been carried out to mitigate the growth of energy consumption through intelligent network control mechanisms. This paper proposes a novel approach to achieving energy efficiency in ISP b...

The energy consumption of backbone networks has risen exponentially during the past decade with the advent of various bandwidth-hungry applications. To address this serious issue, network operators are keen to identify new energy-saving techniques to green their networks. Up to this point, the optimization of IGP link weights has only been used for...

In a content delivery network (CDN), the energy cost is dominated by its geographically distributed data centers (DCs). Generally within a DC, the energy consumption is dominated by its server infrastructure and cooling system, with each contributing approximately half. However, existing research work has been addressing energy efficiency on these...

Node clustering has been widely studied in recent years for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) as a technique to form a hierarchical structure and prolong network lifetime by reducing the number of packet transmissions. Cluster Heads (CH) are elected in a distributed way among sensors, but are often highly overloaded, and therefore re-clustering operat...

Backup paths are usually pre-installed by network operators to protect against single link failures in backbone networks that use multi-protocol label switching. This paper introduces a new scheme called Green Backup Paths (GBP) that intelligently exploits these existing backup paths to perform energy-aware traffic engineering without adversely imp...

Node provisioning in wireless sensor networks is very high density and is a cause of data duplication. Therefore, sensors' duty-cycling is a significant process in order to reduce data load and prolong network lifetime, where certain sensors are selected to be active, while some others are pushed into sleep mode. However, quality of service in term...

The research in this letter focuses on geographic routing in Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs), by considering sparse network density. We explore the Delegation Forwarding (DF) approach to overcome the limitation of the geometric metric which requires mobile node moving towards destination, with the Delegation Geographic Routing (DGR) propo...

A content delivery network (CDN) typically consists of geographically-distributed data centers, each containing servers that cache and deliver Web contents close to end-users for localized content access purpose. In recent years, optimization of CDN data center energy consumption has attracted increasing research efforts. The key technical challeng...

In this paper we propose an efficient scheme for supporting multi-path based in-network content caching by leveraging Loop-Free Alternate (LFA) in IP routing. The purpose is to enable clustered distribution of cached content chunks at en-route routers between the content source and the requester. In order to achieve caching localization, we also in...

With the popularity of information and content items that can be cached within ISP networks, developing high-quality and efficient content distribution approaches has become an important task in future internet architecture design. As one of the main techniques of content distribution, in-network caching mechanism has attracted attention from both...

The integrated MANET and satellite network is a natural evolution in providing local and remote connectivity. The features of this integrated network, such as requiring no fixed infrastructure, ease of deployment and providing global ubiquitous communication, give advantages of its being popular. However, its unpredictable mobility of nodes, lack o...

Energy consumption in ISP backbone networks has been rapidly increasing with the advent of increasingly bandwidth-hungry applications. Network resource optimization through sleeping reconfiguration and rate adaptation has been proposed for reducing energy consumption when the traffic demands are at their low levels. It has been observed that many o...

Routing in delay/disruption-tolerant networks (DTNs) is without the assumption of contemporaneous end-to-end connectivity to relay messages. Geographic routing is an alternative approach using real-time geographic information instead of network topology information. However, if considering the mobility of destination, its real-time geographic infor...

This paper presents a holistic peer selection scheme in multi-domain environments, aiming to mitigate Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic volumes over expensive inter-domain links as well as the maintenance of desirable P2P users' perceived service quality. The mechanism combines the traditional locality-aware peer selection with the consideration of ISP bu...

How to reduce power consumption within individual data centers has attracted major research efforts in the past decade, as their energy bills have contributed significantly to the overall operating costs. In recent years, increasing research efforts have also been devoted to the design of practical power-saving techniques in content delivery networ...

Energy constraint is a crucial factor in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). One of the best solutions for networking in the WSNs is a clustering-based technique to deal with the energy constraint. However, cluster heads (CHs) in such technique tend to consume much more energy than ordinary nodes and, eventually, deplete quickly. In this paper, we pro...

The energy consumption of backbone networks has become a primary concern for network operators and regulators due to the pervasive deployment of wired backbone networks to meet the requirements of bandwidth-hungry applications. While traditional optimization of IGP link weights has been used in IP based load-balancing operations, in this paper we i...

Power consumption in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is 10% of total energy consumed in industrial countries. According to the latest measurements, this amount is increasing rapidly in recent years. In the literature, a variety of new schemes have been proposed to save energy in operational communication networks. In this paper, we p...

Three-Network Convergence” refers to the way the telecommunications network, the TV broadcasting network, and the Internet converge and develop together, connecting the three networks and sharing their resources in the provisioning of Internet access, TV, and telephone services. A related term “triple play service” refers to the provisioning of the...

Receiving great interest from the research community, Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are a type of Next Generation Networks (NGNs) proposed to bridge communication in challenged environments. In this paper, the message replication probability is proportionally sprayed for efficient routing mainly under sparse scenario. This methodology is different...

The continuous growth in volume of Internet traffic, including VoIP, IPTV and user-generated content, requires improved routing mechanisms that satisfy the requirements of both the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that manage the network and the end-users that are the sources and sinks of data. The objectives of these two players are different, si...

Optimizing server's power consumption in content distribution infrastructure has attracted increasing research efforts. The technical challenge is the tradeoff between server power consumption and the content service capability on both the server and the network side. This paper proposes and evaluates a novel approach that optimizes content servers...

Energy consumption has already become a major challenge to the current Internet. Most researches aim at lowering energy consumption under certain fixed performance constraints. Since trade-offs exist between network performance and energy saving, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may desire to achieve different Traffic Engineering (TE) goals corres...

Backbone network energy efficiency has recently become a primary concern for Internet Service Providers and regulators. The common solutions for energy conservation in such an environment include sleep mode reconfigurations and rate adaptation at network devices when the traffic volume is low. It has been observed that many ISP networks exhibit reg...

In order to meet the requirements of emerging demanding services, network resource management functionality that is decentralized, flexible and adaptive to traffic and network dynamics is of paramount importance. In this paper we describe the main mechanisms of DACoRM, a new intra-domain adaptive resource management approach for IP networks. Based...

Without the assumption of contemporaneous end to end connectivity in challenged wireless networks, Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) routing is an important research area. The contribution in this paper is to take advantage of the proposed DTN geographic replication to overcome the limitation of topology based utility replication, since message repli...

Given that the vast majority of Internet interactions relate to content access and delivery, recent research has pointed to a potential paradigm shift from the current host-centric Internet model to an information-centric one. In information-centric networks, named content is accessed directly, with the best content copy delivered to the requesting...

Handling traffic dynamics in order to avoid network congestion and subsequent service disruptions is one of the key tasks performed by contemporary network management systems. Given the simple but rigid routing and forwarding functionalities in IP base environments, efficient resource management and control solutions against dynamic traffic conditi...

The current Internet has been founded on the architectural premise of a simple network service used to interconnect relatively intelligent end systems. While this simplicity allowed it to reach an impressive scale, the predictive manner in which ISP networks are currently planned and configured through external management systems and the uniform tr...

Conserving energy consumption in the Internet has attracted much attention in recent years. During the non-peak time in daily network operations, it is possible to put a subset of routers to sleep mode for energy conservation purposes without network performance deterioration. This paper proposes a practical green traffic engineering scheme called...

The recently proposed Application Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) framework has opened up a new dimension for Internet traffic management that is complementary to the traditional application-agnostic traffic engineering (AATE) solutions currently employed by ISPs. In this paper, we investigate how ALTO-assisted Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic manageme...

We introduce a practical green traffic engineering technique in fast reroute (FRR) enabled IP networks which is able to avoid transient routing disruption caused by sleeping- mode reconfigurations during runtime. Following the description on the time-driven "delegate before sleep" operations based on the NotVia FRR platform, we also propose a simpl...

This paper presents the vision of the EU FP7 project COMET (COntent Mediator architecture for content-aware nETworks), which aims at defining a novel content-oriented Internet architecture for simplifying content access and supporting content distribution in the network in a content-aware fashion. The COMET architecture will deal with content as a...