Our Agenda for April 12, 2019

The pendulum has always swung between centralized and decentralized infrastructures and Intelligent Edge (IE) represents the swing towards decentralization. IE is at the center of confluence of many emergent technological trends such as hardware-rooted trust and code integrity, 5G, data privacy and sovereignty, block chains and distributed ledgers, ubiquitous sensors and drones, autonomous systems, real time and stream processing , etc..

It has reached the technological maturity tipping point of enabling many smart-* scenarios like smart-homes, smart-factories, smart-buildings, smart-cities, smart-grids, smart-cars, smart-highways, etc. These smart-* deployments run highly-available applications that make decisions based on local data using models trained in the cloud. These smart-* deployments coupled with digital transformation of critical country infrastructure such as dams, bridges, highways, grids, hospitals, defense, etc. will demand an IE runtime that is self-sufficient, highly-available, and capable of disconnected operation.

In this talk we will look behind the scenes of a new intelligent runtime that aims to support autonomous cloud and edge systems that are either air-gapped, can get disconnected or are latency-sensitive. Additionally, we will discuss how developers can accomplish intelligent cloud to intelligent edge continuum through consistent application and programming models.

Our agenda for April 12, 2019 is (Preliminary program that might be subject to change) :

• Short Paper presentations: 10 minutes + 5 min qna
• Full Paper presentations: 20 minutes + 5 min qna

09h00 - Welcome - Chair: Imen Grida Ben Yahia

09h10 - Keynote 1: Boris Scholl - The edge of something or why distributed systems matter more than ever (see above) - Chair: Marc-Oliver Pahl

10h15 - Session: Managing the Internet of Things - Chair: Rishi Sinha

• 10h15 - Marc-Oliver Pahl - Multi-Tenant IoT Service Management towards an IOT App Economy [PDF]
  • Orchestrating the Internet of Things (IoT) is complex. Service modularization can reduce this complexity. There- fore, service-oriented management is a promising paradigm. For reasons such as privacy and performance, managing services site-locally is very suitable for the IoT. The desired service- oriented site-local IoT management requires a suitable service management. However, due to the lack of globally connected IoT deployments, there is little research regarding service management in our envisioned setting. We identify requirements for a service-oriented site-locally deployed IoT with central global App stores. Such a management architecture will become the basis for an IoT App economy. We focus on a multi-tenant setting on all levels: development, distribution, and running.
• 10h30 - Coffee Break
• 11h05 - Holger Kinkelin, Heiko Niedermayer, Georg Carle - Multi-party authorization and conflict mediation for decentralized configuration management processes [PDF]
  • Configuration management in networks with highest security demands must not depend on just one administrator and her device. Otherwise, problems can be caused by mistakes or malicious behavior of this admin, or when her computer got compromised, which allows an attacker to abuse the administrator's far-reaching permissions. Instead, we propose to use a reliable and resilient configuration management process orchestrated by a configuration management system (CMS). This can be achieved by separation of concerns (proposing a configuration vs. authorizing it), employing multi-party authorization (MPA), and enforcing that only authorized configurations can be deployed. This results in a configuration management process that is decentralized on a human, decision-making level, and a technical, device level. However, due to different opinions or adversarial interference, the result of an MPA process can end in a conflict. This raises the question how such conflicts can be mediated in a better way than just employing majority voting, which is insufficient in certain situations. As an alternative, this paper introduces building blocks of customizable conflict mediation strategies which we integrated with to our CMS TANCS 8406324. The conflict mediation functionality as well as the initial TANCS implementation run on top of the distributed ledger and smart contract framework Hyperledger Fabric which makes all processes resilient and tamper-resistant.
• 11h25 - Marc-Oliver Pahl, Stefan Liebald, Lars Wüstrich - Machine-learning based IoT Data Caching [PDF]
  • The Internet of Things (IoT) continuously produces big amounts of data. Data-centric middleware can therefore help reducing the complexity when orchestrating distributed Things. With its heterogeneity and resource limitations, IoT applications can lack performance, scalability, or resilience. Caching can help overcoming the limitations. We are currently working on establishing data caching within IoT middleware. The paper presents fundamentals of caching, major challenges, relevant state of the art, and a description of our current approaches. We show directions of using machine learning for caching in the IoT.

11h45 - Session: 5G and Sliced Networks - Chair: Imen Grida Ben Yahia

• 11h50 - Bogdan Rusti, Horia Stefanescu, Marius Iordache, Jean Ghenta, Cristian Patachia, Panagiotis Gouvas, Anastasios Zafeiropoulos, Eleni Fotopoulou - 5G Smart City Vertical Slice [PDF]
  • 5G is the key enabler for new business and digital transformation initiatives to integrate vertical industries (e.g., automotive, energy, manufacturing, entertainment) into the network slice concept, maximizing the sharing of network resources and creating dedicated logical networks with personalized customer specific functions. In this paper we present a unique concept for the development, deployment and management of a Smart City 5G cloud native application network as a results of synergy between two 5G-PPP EU projects, namely MATILDA and SliceNet. The application development and deployment lifecycle starts with the design and composition of the application graph in MATILDA development kit, followed by on boarding of the developed application into a vertical applications orchestrator and the preparation of a slice intent description for the creation of an application-aware network slice. The latter is provided to the SliceNet One-Stop API to create the application-aware network slice to be deployed further over a programmable network infrastructure. The overall Smart City use case is presented, including plans for further enhancements as a collaborative activity between the two research projects. All functions and integration activities will be tested in a dedicated testbed platform.
• 12h10 - Michail Alexandros Kourtis, George Xilouris, Dimitris Makris, Athanasios Sarlas, Harilaos Koumaras, Anastasios Kourtis - An End-to-End Carrier Ethernet MEF enabled 5G network architecture [PDF]
  • 5G introduces new paradigms that enable communication networks to become more flexible and handle a wide variety of network services from various domains. Small cell virtualization as envisaged by 5G, allows enhanced mobile edge computing capabilities, thus enabling flexible network service deployment and slicing near the end user. This paper presents a cloud-enabled small cell architecture for 5G networks developed within the 5G-ESSENCE project. The paper also presents the implementation and deployment of an Ethernet Virtual Connection service over a 5G-enabled infrastructure.

12h30 - Lunch Break

13h35 - Session: 5G and Sliced Networks - Chair: Amina Boubendir

• 13h40 Barbara Martini, Paolo Mori, Alessio Lunardelli, Andrea Saracino, Antonio La Marra, Francesco Marino, Piero Castoldi, Fabio Martinelli - Enhancing Security in ETSI Open Source MANO with Usage Control Capability [PDF]
  • In this paper, we present and discuss the extension to the Open Source MANO software framework with advanced authorization capabilities able to enhance the security support in terms of preservation of virtual resources and slices integrity in a dynamic context of users, services and resources. The proposed extension consists of a Usage Control system integrated with different OSM subsystems (i.e., lifecycle management, access control and monitoring components) able to enhance the traditional authorization operations with on-going usage control on established slides and virtual resources by continuously reconsidering the granting of resources in light of mutable attribute of users, resources and environment (e.g., presence of viruses, set-up of weak passwords). We provide a description of how the integration is being carried out in a smooth way considering the production-quality of the Open Source MANO software. We also discuss the main issues we addressed in the software integration process and how the Open Source MANO could further evolve to fully encompass a security support with Usage Control.

14h00 - Session: Blockchain mechanisms - Chair: Abdelkader Lahmadi

• 14h05 - Yao Dai, Zhuo Yu, Yong Yan, Shaoyong Guo, Sujie Shao - A Blockchain-Based Decentralized Wi-Fi Sharing Mechanism [PDF]
  • Wi-Fi is widely used as an inexpensive way for terminal service access, which brings a trend of Wi-Fi sharing. However, the current Wi-Fi sharing mode has problems such as low reliability and high cost. In order to cope with these problems, this paper puts forward a decentralized Wi-Fi sharing mechanism based on blockchain, including three sub-mechanisms of Wi-Fi authentication, Wi-Fi sharing, and Wi-Fi usage charging. Specifically, Wi-Fi owners first authenticate their Wi-Fi information on the blockchain and only the authenticated Wi-Fi can be connected. Then, the Wi-Fi users pay for the Wi-Fi usage through the smart contracts. Finally, all transactions are registered on the blockchain to ensure the security and reliability of Wi-Fi sharing process. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism keeps a high Wi-Fi sharing success rate of more than 97 percent at a high Wi-Fi request rate of 200 tps.
• 14h25 - Roman Blum, Thomas Bocek - Superlight A Permissionless, Light-client Only Blockchain with Self-Contained Proofs and BLS Signatures [PDF]
  • Blockchain protocols are based on a distributed, public database where stored data is guaranteed to be immutable. The requirement that all nodes have to maintain their own identical, local copy of the database ensures security while consensus mechanisms help deciding which data gets added to the database and keep powerful adversaries from derailing the system. However, since the database that forms the foundation of a blockchain is a continuously growing list of blocks, scalability is an inherent problem of this technology. Some public blockchains need a few 100 GB to Terabytes of storage. In this work, we present the concept Superlight with self-contained proofs, which is designed to improve scalability of blockchain protocols, while preserving security and decentralization. Instead of all nodes having a local copy of the whole blockchain to verify a transaction, nodes can derive the validity of a transaction by only using block headers of the chain. To keep the block headers compact, BLS signatures are used to combine signatures. We provide a formal definition of SCPs and show the required steps of a client to create a proof that is accepted by other nodes. The advantage of such a light-client-only blockchain protocol is the lower storage requirement, while the drawback is an increased computational complexity due to BLS signatures, limited use-cases due to lack of a global state, and the requirement for an interactive protocol between sender, receiver, and miner to create a transaction.

15h00 - Coffee Break

15h35 - Panel with the speakers - Chair: Amina Boubendir, Abdelkader Lahmadi

16h00 - Closing - Chair: Amina Boubendir, Abdelkader Lahmadi