Current and future network services and applications are expected to revolutionize our society and lifestyle. At the same time, the abundant possibilities that new network technologies offer to end users, network operators and administrators have created a cumbersome network configuration process to accommodate all different stakeholders and applications. Thus, lately, there is a need to simplify the management and configuration of the network, through possibly an autonomic and automatic way. Intent Based Networking (IBN) is such a paradigm that envisions flexible, agile, and simplified network configuration with minimal external intervention. This paper provides a detailed survey of how the IBN concept works and what are the main components to guarantee a fully autonomous IBN system (IBNS). Particular emphasis is given on the intent expression, intent translation, intent resolution, intent activation and intent assurance components, which form the closed loop automation system of an IBNS. The survey concludes with identifying open challenges and future directions of the problem at hand.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has revolutionized the way network services are offered to end users. Individual network functions are decoupled from expensive and dedicated middleboxes and are now provided as software-based virtualized entities called Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). NFV is often complemented with the Cloud Computing paradigm to provide networking functions to enterprise customers and end-users remote from their premises. NFV along with Cloud Computing has also started to be seen in Internet of Things (IoT) platforms as a means to provide networking functions to the IoT traffic. The intermix of IoT, NFV, and Cloud technologies, however, is still in its infancy creating a rich and open future research area. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to facilitate the placement and deployment of service chained VNFs in a network cloud infrastructure that can be extended using the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) infrastructure for accommodating mission critical and delay sensitive traffic. Our aim is to minimize the end-to-end communication delay while keeping the overall deployment cost to minimum. Results reveal that the proposed approach can significantly reduce the delay experienced, while satisfying the Service Providers’ goal of low deployment costs.

As the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and applications increases, the capacity of the IoT access networks is considerably stressed. This can create significant performance bottlenecks in various layers of an end-to-end communication path, including the scheduling of the spectrum, the resource requirements for processing the IoT data at the Edge and/or Cloud, and the attainable delay for critical emergency scenarios. Thus, a proper classification or prediction of the time varying traffic characteristics of the IoT devices is required. However, this classification remains at large an open challenge. Most of the existing solutions are based on machine learning techniques, which nonetheless present high computational cost, whereas they are not considering the fine-grained flow characteristics of the traffic. To this end, this paper introduces the following four contributions. Firstly, we provide an extended feature set including, flow, packet and device level features to characterize the IoT devices in the context of a smart environment. Secondly, we propose a custom weighting based preprocessing algorithm to determine the importance of the data values. Thirdly, we present insights into traffic characteristics using feature selection and correlation mechanisms. Finally, we develop a two-stage learning algorithm and we demonstrate its ability to accurately categorize the IoT devices in two different datasets. The evaluation results show that the proposed learning framework achieves 99.9% accuracy for the first dataset and 99.8% accuracy for the second. Additionally, for the first dataset we achieve a precision and recall performance of 99.6% and 99.5%, while for the second dataset the precission and recall attained is of 99.6% and 99.7% respectively. These results show that our approach clearly outperforms other well-known machine learning methods. Hence, this work provides a useful model deployed in a realistic IoT scenario, where IoT traffic and devices’ profiles are predicted and classified, while facilitating the data processing in the upper layers of an end-to-end communication model.

The potential offered by the abundance of sensors, actuators, and communications in the Internet of Things (IoT) era is hindered by the limited computational capacity of local nodes. Several key challenges should be addressed to optimally and jointly exploit the network, computing, and storage resources, guaranteeing at the same time feasibility for time-critical and mission-critical tasks. We propose the DRUID-NET framework to take upon these challenges by dynamically distributing resources when the demand is rapidly varying. It includes analytic dynamical modeling of the resources, offered workload, and networking environment, incorporating phenomena typically met in wireless communications and mobile edge computing, together with new estimators of time-varying profiles. Building on this framework, we aim to develop novel resource allocation mechanisms that explicitly include service differentiation and context-awareness, being capable of guaranteeing well-defined Quality of Service (QoS) metrics. DRUID-NET goes beyond the state of the art in the design of control algorithms by incorporating resource allocation mechanisms to the decision strategy itself. To achieve these breakthroughs, we combine tools from Automata and Graph theory, Machine Learning, Modern Control Theory, and Network Theory. DRUID-NET constitutes the first truly holistic, multidisciplinary approach that extends recent, albeit fragmented results from all aforementioned fields, thus bridging the gap between efforts of different communities.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices generate a tremendous amount of time series data that is extremely dynamic, heterogeneous and time dependent. Such types of data introduce significant challenges for the real-time prediction of QoS metrics of IoT applications with different traffic characteristics. To this end, in this paper, we propose a temporal transformer model and a unified system to predict several QoS metrics of heterogeneous IoT applications when they communicate with the Edge of the network. The transformer model also leverages an attention module to provide a solution for both short-term and long-term sequence prediction of QoS metrics that allows to better extract any time dependencies. In particular, in our framework, we firstly generate a set of datasets containing real-time traffic information of five different IoT applications such as Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC), lighting, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), surveillance and emergency response using the 802.15.4 access technology and the RPL routing protocol. Following, we perform the data cleaning, downsampling and pre-processing of the datasets and we construct the QoS datasets, which include four QoS metrics, namely throughput, packet delivery ratio, packet loss ratio and latency. Finally, we evaluate the transformer model through extensive experimentation using both short-term and long-term dependencies and we show that our model can guarantee a robust performance and accurate QoS prediction.