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Network Architectures and Management group
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Research

5G

 

Our team is heavily involved in 5G networks research. 5G network infrastructures and embodied technologies are considered as a key asset of this emerging common environment and instrumental for the digitalization of the traditional industries as they are destined to “become a stakeholder driven, holistic environment for technical and business innovation integrating networking, computing and storage resources into one programmable and unified infrastructure”.

Our team is currently involved in H2020 projects 5GinFIRE and 5G-VINNI

Security

 

  Our group is active in many areas of cyber security. For more information see our current running H2020 projects CIPSEC and SMESEC
   
   

Blockchain

 

Smartcities - IoT

 

The sense.city platform (http://sense.city) provides the tools that activate citizen's creativity, imagination and communication, engages urban thinking and improves the relationship between citizens, the city municipality and city's public services.. By using the sense.city platform, citizens become the city sensors! With their own communication devices (mobile phones) or via the sense.city application, citizens can post in real time issues and problems for something that happens in their city, inform their fellow citizens and the municipality for problems and incidents that occur every moment.
Citizens actively participate in the processes and solve problems concerning their lives in the city. They help in urban development while improving the relationship between citizens and public services of the city.

Goals

What is happening in the city Citizens are the city sensors! Using own communication devices, through the sense.city mobile application they update their fellow citizens and the municipality of problems and incidents that occur every moment

Urban participation Actively participate in the processes and solve problems concerning your life in the city. Help in urban development and better relationship between citizens and administration services of the city.

Co-creativity The sense.city platform provides the tools to enable citizens, and calls for collective thinking and actions both citizens and administration services.

We are a member of the ThingsNetwork. Our lab started the deployment of LoRa gateways in the wide area of Patras and have started build IoT devices deployed around the city

See more and join our community at https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/community/patras/

or join our facebook group https://www.facebook.com/TheThingsNetworkPatras/
   

 

 

Peer to Peer

We focus in the creation of P2P network architectures and systems that are scalable, stable, with high resource utilization and adaptable to underlying network. Now we focus in the creation of a P2P content distribution system. According to the aforementioned requirements our major tasks are:

  • An overlay which is the graph for the interconnection of peers
  • A scheduler which runs in every peer and ensures the on time and reliable distribution of the content.
  • A scalable, dynamic and accurate bandwidth monitoring system that participating peers have.
  • A bandwidth control system that handles and the supply of extra bandwidth in cases when peers’ aggregated resources are insufficient to sustain the streaming process
  • A peer-to-peer system that is responsible for the storage and query of objects available for streaming.

P2Ner

The UoP P2P client (P2NER) is constructed for transmission of live streaming video and VoD over P2P networks.  It is consisted of several modules, which can be configured and tested separately. This architecture provides flexibility in the experimentation of relevant research agenda such as network resource monitoring and management, distributed scheduling algorithms, overlay management, transport and flow control algorithms and protocols, media libraries etc. It is implemented in python, the data and message exchange is performed over UDP and for media visualization can be used either the Gstreamer or the vlc player. The core component of P2NER is the P2PEngine that can be provided as a separate library using a common interface (API). (more...)

For further information about the implementation and design (click here)

For publications correlated with the relevant research agenda (click here)

 

 

Future Internet: Federation of resources

Today, complex applications have a demand for resources, computing power and storage. Cloud computing with the elastic and pay-as-you-go models changed the landscape. Moreover, organizations have resources and infrastructure (i.e. networking devices, gateways, wireless devices) that would like to combine with other resources. However, users are still locked-in by the resource vendors and face the problem of not easily specifying and operating scenarios involving resources by many resource providers. Either you would like to deploy a complex application over such a rich infrastructure, or you would like to just test you application in such a complex environment, you need to federate resources. Still users need ways to define complex deployments without knowing the underlying details.

FSToolkit

 

The FSToolkit is a development environment for specifying and operating Federation Scenarions. The editor is based on the textual modeling framework (TMF) of Eclipse and specifically the Xtext framework , which helps implementing rich editors by a definition of a specific syntax. The toolkit supports a family of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), used by resource brokers, resource providers and experimenters, that have a defined meta-model, the so called TheOfficeModel, as an abstract syntax. The meta-model is also capable to support a federation of federations. This means that the model and therefore the DSLs are capable to describe federation scenarios involving resources even from a pool of resource brokers. The presented support language tooling is available for the Eclipse workbench. (more...)

 

Federation Computing Interface - FCI

Federation Computing Interface (FCI) is an API for accessing resources of the federation. It is an SDK for developing applications that access requested resources through the resource brokering services during operation of testing. It is quite easy to embed it into your application/ SUT in order to gain control of the requested resources during testing. (more...)

FCI is heavily used withing FSToolkit to access the resource brokering services during provisioning and operation. (more...)

Resource Description Language

RADL is a concrete textual syntax which describes a Resource Adapter and is an attempt (and currently examining the feasibility) for describing an RA in a way that decouples it from the underlying code. RADL’s textual syntax aims to be easier to describe a Resource Adapter than code in Java. So, we anticipate that one can define his RA in RADL without even knowing java . This description could be used also to publish the RA definition to the repository.(more...)

 

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing means that instead of all the computer hardware and software you're using sitting on your desktop, or somewhere inside your organixzation's network, it's provided for you as a service by another organization and accessed over the Internet, usually in a completely seamless way. Exactly where the hardware and software is located and how it all works doesn't matter to you, the user—it's just somewhere up in the nebulous "cloud" that the Internet represents.

CloudVille testbed

We are creating a multi cloud testbed facility, with different Cloud Controlers for multi cloud scenarios but also to serve as an experimental facility and hands-on experience for our students and potential users

(more...)

 

Modeling and control  of distributed web services

 

Web services moved gradually from the “server-client” model to more distributed architecture and nowadays they are mostly deployed on cloud computing platforms, which exploit the benefits of virtualization technology (Virtual Machines VM). Meeting their QoS requirements is a challenging research problem. We mainly focus on the following issues:

· Accurate modeling of the dynamic behavior of distributed web services under highly variant workload conditions.

· Design of efficient controllers that satisfy specific Service Level Objectives (SLOs), such as average response time and energy consumption. Our controller consists of a resource allocation scheme, which shares computational resources (CPU, Memory, Disk I/O and Network) among several VMs, in combination with an admission controller that can reject a small portion of incoming requests in order to guarantee SLO target values.

· Precise prediction of the dynamic incoming workload.

· Development of a monitoring system, which provides all the necessary information for the modeling and control of the web applications.   

Software Defined Networking

Software-Defined Networking or SDN is a relevant new term for an older paradigm of programmable networks. In summary SDN refers to the ability of writing applications to program the behavior of the network and the network devices. (more...)

Ongoing projects under the SDN research activites are the following:

 

Open Distributed Network Element

Our research project aims to create an Open Distributed Network Element, comprising of multiple Forwarding Elements and multiple Control Elements. (more...)

OpenFlow testbed

Under development (more...)

 

IMS: Our IP-Multimedia Subsystem

The IP-Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) defines the functional architecture for a managed IP-based network.Under Vital++ project and our p2p research our IMS testbed was heavily used.

IMS testbed

The testbed supports a wide range of call and connectivity scenarios through different route paths, equipment and service providers.  The testbed is:

-  Connected with the PSTN network.
-  Connected with external IMS Systems.
-  Supports simultaneously multiple communication scenarios e.g. videoconference among 3 or more parties,  under a variety of network setups.

  Connected to the Internet through the Greek University Networks, enjoying speeds up to 1 Gbps

(more...)

 

Social Networks

In the context of exploration of social network APIs and applications, the following projects where created:

 

Social Network Aggregator

http://nam.ece.upatras.gr/aggregator/index.php

(diploma thesis of undergraduate student Konstantina Papanikolopoulou)
 

Facebook Privacy Wall

(diploma thesis of undergraduate student Eleni Papanikolopoulou)

 

Identity Management - Need for a global discovery mechanism

Identity management stands as one of most complex problems towards the unification of diverse network technologies and the creation of the so called "Future Internet". A unified solution capable of supporting the identity management problems for every case, has not yet been proposed. Nearly all existing solutions claim that they are capable of expanding and be operational in a global scale, however, this is valid only if specific requirements are met. Their applicability highly depends on proprietary features like the use of specific global identity formats (e.g. Open-ID, VID, XID) and protocols (e.g. SAML), while their scope is confined in closed trusted groups (Federations) with statically defined procedures and mechanisms.

DIMANDS

DIMANDS (Dynamic Identity Mapping, Association N’ Discovery System) introduces a different approach for addressing the identity management problem in global scale. Its main principle is to avoid the development of a huge system that would embrace everything, capable of supporting all cases and systems, and instead create a system that could support existing networks and contexts, to independently deal with their own identity management problems. (more...)
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