Abstract: This talk will present an overview of our work on laying the basic design principles for new approaches to programmable, AI-driven, and virtualized next-generation wireless networks. We will cover architectures, programmability, slicing, and experimental testbeds. First, we will introduce the building principles of end-to-end fully virtualized cellular wireless networks, and discuss architectural alternatives and options. Then, we will talk about programmability, or how to develop abstractions and algorithms to automatically control resources in an end-to-end environment. The third part of the talk will focus on the role of network slicing, and on recently developed algorithmic and architectural frameworks to provide optimally sized, isolated slices on virtualized infrastructures with differentiated SLAs in terms of performance and security. Last, we will discuss the state of the art of the experimental testing ecosystem for 5G and beyond, focusing on advances in the NSF Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research Program, and discuss the role of open testing platforms in advancing the wireless ecosystem.

Abstract: Over the years, supply chains have evolved from a few regional traders to globally complex chains of trade. Consequently, supply chain management systems have become heavily dependent on digitisation for the purpose of data storage and traceability of goods. However, current approaches suffer from issues such as scattering of information across multiple silos, susceptibility of erroneous or untrustworthy data, inability to accurately capture physical events associated with the movement of goods and protection of trade secrets. Our work aims to address above mentioned challenges related to traceability, scalability, trustworthiness and privacy.

To support traceability and provenance, a consortium blockchain based framework, ProductChain, is proposed which provides an immutable audit trail of product's supply chain events and its origin. The framework also presents a sharded network model to meet the scalability needs of complex supply chains. Next, we address the issue of trust associated with the qualities of the commodities and the entities logging data on the blockchain through an extensible framework, TrustChain. TrustChain tracks interactions among supply chain entities and dynamically assigns trust and reputation scores to commodities and traders using smart contracts. For protecting trade secrets, we propose a privacy-preservation framework PrivChain, which allows traders to keep trade related information private and rather return computations or proofs on data to support provenance and traceability claims. The traders are in turn incentivised for providing such proofs. A different privacy-preservation approach for decoupling the identities of traders is explored in TradeChain by managing two ledgers: one for managing decentralised identities and another for recording supply chain events. The information from two ledgers is then collated using access tokens provided by the data owners, i.e. traders themselves