FITCE 2016 – Notes of presentations
These notes give a summary of the proceedings of the 2016 FITCE conference in Athens. They should
be read in conjunction with the programme.
Welcome Speeches:
Constantinos Sidiropoulos, President of FITCE Hellas, opened the conference by exploring some of
the challenges across Europe, exacerbated by the prolonged recession and difficult financial
environment. ICT is seen as a major catalyst for improving this situation. Andy Valder, President of
FITCE Europe, built on this by drawing attention to the industry’s ability to manage a very rapid rate
of change. The Greek regulation authority discussed the broadband roll out across Greece, where a
target of giving 100% of the population access at more than 30M and 50% access at greater than
100M by 2020. The regulator is trying to facilitate the roll out, however the Greek
telecommunications market is seen as underperforming in its delivery of competitive networks. It is
the take-up of services rather than the degree of investment, which is the major problem.
Telecommunications has a major part to play in the stimulation of the economy. George Stasinos,
expressed a desire to strengthen the ideas coming out of universities.
Congress Opening
Udo Helmbrech talked about Secure IT procurement, its impact on infrastructure and the mobile
internet. He saw six major focusses: the need to reduce expenditure whilst improving risk
management, secure the development lifecycle by incorporating security from the ground up,
empower the business, standardisation, certification to improve consumer trust and drawing on the
power of academia. The concern is that whilst the EU is good at research, too much talent is lost to
American enterprise. Christos Fouskoudis, is the Executive Director of Technical Service and
Technology Transformation Fixed and Mobile, with OTE Group. He sees the generation of the best
customer experience been through technical excellence. They have three target areas for
development: Network Infrastructure, bandwidth everywhere (including rural areas) and technical
service. This includes the integration with new fields such as pay TV, ICT and Business to Business.
Anastasios Dimopoulos, the Vice President of the BoD with Intracom Telecom talked about
innovation across a broad range of his company’s offerings. Georgios Aggelis, a sales director with
ZTE, looked at his company’s contribution to the local telecommunications infrastructure,
particularly to research and development and noted that smart could be defined as making the best
of your technical prowess and business acumen. Dimitris Kyriakou, a Lead Economist with the
European Commission, he considered the importance of “consulting the ways of the helix” when
looking at the bottom-up process of building partnerships, commenting on “internal devaluation
through efficiency drivers”. He was very clear on outlining the limits of cost reduction. Vassilios
Makios, looked at collaboration and innovation and giving the young people a vision. He noted that
all Apple design is done in California and contributes 93% of the value. It is important to engage
youth and the universities, with the US being the leader in innovation and the UK being second.
Next Generation Technologies
Sotiros Bithas considered transforming Smart into Genius, noting that IoT is here but there are
challenges in technology, business and the market. He talked about the challenges of modernising
and then talked about the IoT information loop. The need for standardisation and integration was
emphasised and the possibility of segmenting a common WiFi infrastructure between users. Energy
usage patterns can be used by energy providers. He outlined a six stage innovation model and
suggested that the release of a minimum function product to judge the market reaction, followed by
a process of incremental refinement. He advocated “The Lean Start-up”. He asked where the value
comes from in an IoT proposition. He suggested that there was a lot of room for collaboration.
Andreas Caracostas from Accenture looked at driving growth through the Internet of Things,
asserting that customer’s want tailored services. He went through the basic building blocks involved
and highlighted the disruptive nature of the business model, noting that there were 16 billion
devices that were attached to the Internet today. He outlined a range of solutions although it was
not clear if these were live implementations or demonstrators and pilots.
George Heliotis of the OTE group looked at the evolution of the copper access network, noting that
there is an argument that Fibre to the Home FTTH, is widely considered to be the future, despite
many years of discussion this has not happened and copper has got better in that time. Copper at
Gigabit rates is now a possibility. VDSL/2 is the main standard, however far end cross talk (FEXT) has
been an inhibitor and its effect increases as the number of connections coming into a DSLAM
increases. Vectoring reduces cross talk and functions by sending known patterns back towards the
customer modem, which counteract the impact of cross talk, through destructive interference. This
needs an intelligent end device and can give good performance gains. VDSL Annex Q has a new
profile 36b, which will be standardised this year and added to ITU standard G.992. This permits a
bandwidth extension to 34M Hz and permits super vectoring. G.Fast uses spectrum up to 108 M.Hz
in conjunction with TDD (Time Division Duplex) rather than frequency separation to provide capacity
for the up and down links. Here the DSLAM is replaced by a unit called the DPU, which handles the
copper to fibre conversion and is powered by the user. This will get us closer to 1 G.Hz over copper.
Once the distance from the DSLAM to the modem increases beyond 300m, it is better to use super
vectoring.
Bogdan Hebean covered automatic configuration of Optical Distribution frames (ODM), using
remote intelligence and robotics, to handle physical aspects of connection manipulation. This can be
used to build PON networks.
Gregory Papaconstantinou considered the demands that 5G imposes on antenna demand, with the
need to support 5 frequency bands across 3 technologies. Antenna size and location were prime
considerations.
Regulation, Standardisation and Security Issues Part 1.
Marianna Goldhammer from 4GCelleX in Israel spoke about 3GPP standardisation and its relevance
to the Radio Access Network. 5G opens up the possibility of a 20G downlink and 10G uplink, using a
bandwidth of 1G.Hz. A recent RAN (radio access network) study showed that this could be
ultrareliable and meet the low latency objectives for 5G, which requires new RAN PHY components.
The largest component is a carrier bandwidth not smaller than 80 M.Hz., with a wave form based on
OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing). The study looked at flexible/dynamic TDD,
including both the downlink and the uplink. Significant consideration was given to physical
infrastructures.
Ionis Psallidas gave a regulator’s perspective of communications security. The goal is to protect
content and data within an operational framework consisting of constitutions, laws and regulations.
The most frequent issues are: unpatched software, non-adherence to security procedures, the
introduction of systems that had not been considered as part of the original design, non-adoption of
access controls and command and event knowledge. This is the service provider’s sphere of
influence. There is a need to audit the major CSPs; business impact assessments and risk
assessments must have been performed. Other areas of concern are the interception of mobile
communications and SS7 traffic and other factors that could impact the availability of the network
and services. SS7 was designed before security was a prime concern; threats include: location
tracking and intercepting calls. The options for tackling this include a forklift upgrade and SS7
hardening. It is a case of making the most of what you have.
Peter Thermos of Palindome Technologies in the UK looked at threats and security issues in
emerging technologies. IoT is built on its own ecosystem, connected with a household. %G also has
its security challenges, including platform verification. Security certification and validation methods
are needed. Security needs to be at the core of the network and not just at the edge. He asked has
thought been given to time to hack as well as time to market. This can be exacerbated due to the
wide spread use of Open Source software without adequate attention being given to hardening. He
then moved on to consider the management interface for Femtocells and how these could be used
to enter operating system commands directly into the infrastructure. There is always a risk that a
hacker could exploit newer devices. The tendency of devices to fail to an open condition can force
the device into a zombie condition. This provides an attacker with a wide scope for exploitation.
CDMA, GSM devices and even wearables make use of SIMs, which make use of partial keys derived
from a master key. It is possible for a hacker to extract interactions between the SIM card and
network, thus allowing the master key to be identified, making it easy to take over the device.
Thermos recommended testing from multiple perspectives and identified the need for test plan
analytics.
Michael Sharpe of ETSI considered using harmonised standards to address the single European
market for radio equipment. He took the audience through ETSI’s role and activities.
Workshop on 5G Technologies and Smart Educational Platforms.
This section covered the results, challenges and architectures arising from research projects that are
part of the Horizon 2020 initiative.
Nancy Alonistiorti noted that by 2021 there are expected to be 9 billion mobile subscriptions and
that traffic grew by 60% last year largely over smartphones. 4G+ and 5G are seen as business
enablers. Europe is seen to have lost its leadership in mobile sometime during the migration from 3G
to 4G and the question was could it regain it during the migration to 5G, which is the evolution of
existing technology with a new approach to the Radio Access Network. IoT will provide a further
impulse for network expansion, driving 17% network growth.
Athabasios Lioumpas looked at SDN for resource management in indoor multi-RAT deployments, as
investigated by the WiVi project. SDN provides a means of coping with connected events and critical
eventsultradense networks and issues related to high levels of traffic. New networks will handle
billions of devices and new means and methods of managing the response of the network to events
is required. SDN and NFV have become important components in the reduction of operating costs.
Siloed approaches need to be challenged. SDN is an enabler for dynamic spectrum allocation for
example throughan SDN enabled RAN. Concepts such as everything as a service, radio access
virtualisation and Smart Device co-operation were discussed. The strap line was that SDN and NFV
are seen as the critical success factors in 5G delivery.
Nelly Leligou looked at smart mobile apps for educational needs in primary, secondary and tertiary
education, plus vocational training; considering the intricacies of the knowledge based economy.
Mobility is seen as a big factor. Global e-learning is growing at a rate of 5.08% and Learning
Management Systems are growing at a rate of 22.8%. Global learning and corporate learning are
growing fast, with the growth being driven by the SMEs. Users of these services want easy access at
anytime from anywhere. There is a need for attractive learning material and a high degree of
personalisation.Tutors need to develop learning materials very quickly and also need to monitor the
student’s behaviour, potentially through automated assessment of performance with a feedback
system for real time tailoring. There could be a sensorial component which is learner based.
Emmanouil Kafetzakis considered virtualisation tools for privacy awareness in User Centric Open
Environments. The concern is with privacy and personal data and the VISION platform aims to
enhance transparency and develop use cases. A key question is does the public authority comply
with privacy law and manage the security of data. The pilot allows the citizen to access information
with privacy guarantees. The citizen should be able to tell the authority what data they are prepared
to share and its commercial value. There should be a Privacy Level Agreement (PLA).
SDN for management looks at a 5G solutions, to manage the control of bandwidth, QoS and QoE.
There are multiple RAN technologies which have to be managed, this includes network slicing, where
the network partitioning is based on user requirements and service type. This is a form of
virtualisation of the network and looks at offloading based on the trade-off between operator cost
and QoS, with network slicing being driven by SDN, with a particular emphasis on MNVOs.
Panagiotis Matzoros talked about load balancing in heterogeneous networks with emphasis in 5G.
5G is expected to require a thousand times the capacity of the existing networks and needs to
provide for a 90% reduction in energy consumption. There has been a huge increase in mobile data
traffic; by 2020 this is expected to rise to 30.6 Exabytes per month. Heterogeneous networks will be
chosen to achieve the strongest signal and will need to support offloading and load balancing.
Dynamic traffic management and an SDN network controller are important tools, using a
combination of monitoring and dynamic traffic modelling to manage resource allocation. This can be
used to control congestion, latency, throughput with minimised drop rate and to reduce the energy
consumption of the base station.
Alexandros Kostopoulos talked about architecture views in 5G networks, with emphasis on results
coming from the Horizon 2020 programme. There are a number of advanced network abstraction
projects to improve the available capacity. This requires better use of spectrum and experience of
end users. There has been innovation at the physical and MAC layers, programmable control, flexible
and co-ordinated spectrum management. A coherent concept is required. An SDN architecture is
incorporated in the architecture, a useful analogy is the data plane and control plane in network
design. Different slices of the network can be allocated to different services,; network partitioning
and slicing are key techniques.
Towards 5G realisation: advances at the physical/MAC/RRM layers and directions for hardware and
software splitting continued the theme of delivering the promise of 5G. Key topics were the
development of the MAC/RRM (Radio Resource Management) layers, QoS provision and capacity
expansion. The project involves the development of both hardware and software, providing
cognitive partitioning based on information from sensors.
Evangelos Sfakianakis looked at architectural models for enabling network virtualisation techniques
in a cloud environment. This enables the sharing and scaling of networks, including the provision of
small cell as a service. Here small cells can be clustered and form part of the cloud infrastructure.
Network slicing through virtualisation is an important concept.
Konstantinos Filis looked at Charisma, a hierarchical intelligent SDN/NFV based 5G architecture
supporting low latency, intrinsic security and open access. This again described network slicing as a
technique to partition the network infrastructure between different providers. The project takes a
hierarchical approach. Data routing is engineered to give a low latency of less than a millisecond and
high data rates of 10G for SMEs. One aspect is high speed access for railway based applications,
involving significant Doppler effects. Another key use case is big events such as stadiums and
concerts. Techniques include open access and small cells.
Infrastructure Provider Federations in 5G ecosystems considered the 5G value chain as a guide to
save operational expenses. The network will need composite services and new business models are
needed for operators. There are multiple variants of federation and the cloud can provide
federation. Resource slicing is considered a key technique and covers the grouping of physical or
virtual resources such as the network, compute and storage. There is also the concept of a service
slice.
Regulatory, standardisation, security issues (part II)
Panos Karaminas considered the role of BERC in the harmonisation of the European market for
electronic communications. Here the emphasis was on harmonisation. BERC covers the competition
rules and there are effectively two organisations are working on pre-implementation and post
implementation issues respectively. The process starts with the market analysis by the watchdog,
who will define the market and as a priority look for evidence of significant market power. There is
also a process of public consultation with consumer organisations. The regulator has to notify the
Commission of its findings and the Commission can raise objections to their findings, but this is a
rarity. The European telecommunications market is well harmonised.
Spectrum prioritisation for 5G mobile networks in the frequency ranges 24-86 G.Hz in Greece was
covered by Vasilis Milas. This project looked at frequencies greater than 24 G.Hz and compatibility
with existing and planned services was a primary concern. The analysis was performed band by band
considering the efficiency of each. The conclusion was that the most advantageous frequencies were
30 G.Hz. and 66 to76 G.Hz. Up to 2020, 36 G.Hz is likely to see the greatest 5G take-up.
Evaggelos Ouzounis looked at the internet as a critical infrastructure. This considered the key
problems of physical issues, quality concerns, configuration, backhaul and software. The
telecommunications sector should be aligned. The Internet can be thought of as a critical
infrastructure. The telecommunications sector is about to change in terms of the services it provides
and this will bring new security issues. This is due to scale and as a result collaboration is required,
you can’t use security for competitive advantage. Service availability dominates cyber-attacks as a
means of disrupting service.
Advanced Applications, Cloud, Virtualisation and SDN
Nikolaos Toulatos of (ZTE) considered “Big Broadband”, the development trends of fixed-line
broadband (FBB), noting that a significant driver of growth was the number of devices and users.
This has led to growth for both mobile and terrestrial connectivity. The transfer of large amounts of
data drives the requirement for increased bandwidth. However it should be noted that service as
well as technology will drive growth. The evolution from PON1 to PON2 is likely to be a major
influence, but flexible deployment is required. Unified management reduces operational costs and it
is important to eliminate man made errors.
Monitoring QoS and QoE System of Mobile and Fixed Networks in Greece, was examined by
Strvroula Bouzouki of the Greek National Regulatory Authority (NRA), who need to manage a
balance between active and passive monitoring. These can be respectively defined as the real-time
processing of information and post processing of operational data and needs to consider both ISP
and mobile providers. Currently only mobile broadband is measured, using infrastructure comprising
three subsystems for mobile, fixed line and presentation. The low level functionality was developed
by Anite in Finland and the higher level aggregation was developed in Greece. One of the key
questions is: how does the use of antennas impact the end user experience? The platform will be
launched in October and will accommodate partial reporting. The use of crowd sourcing to gather
data has been considered but this may have reproducibility issues.
In looking at, transforming mobile backhaul with the use of SDN, Michalis Sidiropoulos; considered
the use of small cells for high intermediate mobile demand. As they proliferate how does this impact
the network core and the backhaul choices? In the examples shown radio technology was favoured
and scaling and optimisation were considered key issues, as was the complexity of configuration.
The backhaul concentrator used is highly programmable and can accommodate SDN software. The
SDN software makes use of an OPENFLOW/NETCONF interface and an OPEN DAYLIGHT SDN
controller, the system is orchestrated using uniMS. This is used to maintain the network topology
and is used to configure services and can make re-routing decisions on trunk failure. The system also
impacts planning, roll-out, optimisation and maintenance. This also allows the parenting of small
cells to be switched from hub to hub.
Marios. A.Moyssidis noted that radio had a large part to play in the roll out of Smart Cities, when he
discussed Smart Wireless Connections. He majored on multipoint wireless and low latency LTE.
IT applications, social media and techno-economic analysis.
Andy Valdar looked at the economics of packet versus circuit voice switching, focussing on many of
the misconceptions surrounding the economic assessment of these technologies. Looking specifically
at the circuit switching case it appears that the line card connecting the client to the switch accounts
for 70% of the costs. The same is true for a DSL connection. Many of the benefits of switching from a
circuit switched to packet switched platform is the ability to rationalise platforms with a single
platform supporting multiple services, thus reducing provisioning, operational, maintenance and
management costs.
The topic Business models for smart infrastructures using smart metering as a case study, was
explored by Ed Smith. This considered the application of new business analysis techniques in
building the business case for rolling out smart infrastructures, by focussing on the roll out of smart
metering across Austria, Italy and the UK. It was noted that the evaluation of business cases was
determined along traditional lines, but through a long value chain. Whilst the academic literature
gave several examples of how newer evaluation techniques might be applied to this problem space,
there was little evidence of their use in live deployments. This was considered a missed opportunity.
A Business game for offering IT solution for early care homes by Jonathan Spruytte, looked at testing
the business acumen of students, who were asked to design an IT solution for an elderly care home
and understand the commercial impact of their designs. There was a delicate balance between the
offering achieving a price that was acceptable to the market and ensuring that the network was
profitable. The students were allowed two attempts, one of which was effectively a dress rehearsal
for the second. A sense of competition was encouraged amongst the students and three rounds of
inputs and results were seen against as adoption pattern following the traditional S curve.
In examining surge protection practices for telecommunications infrastructure, Fani Asimakopoulou
considered the requirements for protecting sensitive electronic equipment against power surges
provoked primarily by lightning strikes. The principal resource to defend was radio masts and their
associated equipment.
Workshop on advanced backhauling technologies, impact of SDN and NFV
This focussed on the output from the SANSA and VITAL projects and consisted of two overview
papers followed by an examination of the results, challenges, architectures from these research
projects.
Maria Guta looked at combining the strength of satellite and terrestrial networks to deploy 5G. It
was noted that 5G has to incorporate satellite technologies and a review of satellite technologies
was given. Satellite costs are dropping, with the balance of the cost moving from the space segment
to the ground segment. The European Space Agency starts their analysis by considering the satellite
system MAC layer and also considers the benefits of the application of SDN and NFV, which
compliment this approach. This permits service coverage to become global and allows multicast and
broadcast services to be more easily provided. Key issues such as funding, the security aspects of
caching techniques, global high speed networks enterprise networks, signalling, big data and IOT
were discussed.
Impact of SDN and NFV implementation in the telecommunications industry was the subject of a
presentation by Anastasios Kourtis. He considered the challenges posed to network operators by
Over the Top (OTT) providers such as Netflix. It is believed that operators need more flexibility and
to introduce new technology. He considered that NFV facilitates the deployment of new services,
through the Virtual Network Function VNF, which is the executable code that permits this. VNFs are
interconnected within the cloud using an OVS or Open Virtual Switch. This creates a flexible platform
for operators, with instantiation of the services being handled by an orchestrator. A number of use
cases were described.
George Petropoulos considered the application of SDN and NFV applied to the management of an
operational wind farm, when he presented “VirtuWind virtual and programmable industrial
prototype deployed in operational wind park.” These were complex to configure and manage, since
physical access to the resources was restricted, making remote management important. The
objectives of the project were to provide industrial QoS, Inter-domain QoS and reduced
maintenance times. This aids the installation and upgrade of services and provide multisite
deployment.
The role of converged satellite and terrestrial backhauling for 5G networks was examined by George
Agapoiu and Panagiotis Matzoros. The key question was how can satellite help provide commercially
viable back hauling? K band spectrum was deployed in a manged hybrid network, which would
permit congestion management, load balancing and traffic modelling. The same equations are
applicable to both satellite and mobile. This was followed by an examination of the impact of SDN
and NFV in satellite technology, noting that satellite is SDN capable and provides an important
means of reducing capex expenses. Here the satellite cloud Radio Access Network can automatically
re-allocate bandwidth to satellite in the event of congestion. The project makes use of open
interfaces, using vendor implementations; some applications are well suited to satellite especially
where QoS is available and a latency of 600mS is acceptable.
SDN as an enabler of application awareness and multilayer network optimisation was explored by
Ionnis Tomkos, who noted that applications want more bandwidth and asked how the network
could handle this. The core of the network is often application unaware and offers no flow
differentiation. Elastic networks offer the opportunity to groom applications and we need this to be
accommodated by the optical network, enables by an SDN orchestrator. Applications need to expose
their “intent” to the orchestrator allowing the desired topology to be mapped to the optical layer.
The planning, management and optimisation of optical networks was considered by Manos
Varvarigos. With over 6.4 billion devices already connected to the Internet in 2016 and IP traffic
growing at a rate of 23% per annum better management through SDN is imperative. The network
needs to be more programmable and in many cases needs to be sliced to create new business
models. A unified resource management interface such as deployed in the Manti tool, which can be
used for planning optical and IP networks, is required. This allows multilayer optimisation to be
performed. Mantis will be the logic (algorithms and software) for the future SDN. The optimisation
logic drives the SDN tool.
Nikos Taramas considered two strategies, when he described beam selection strategies for multiuser
cellular networks with limited feedback. This affects the wireless access network and exploits
multiuser diversity. The trick is to work out how the beam should be shaped, this is done by checking
who it suits and this requires user feedback. Previous attempts at doing this required multiple
parameters to be used but the current treatment only focuses on the signal to noise ratio. The fair
allocation of service is managed through a proportional fair algorithm. Improvements can be made
using several beams.
Ionnis Stefanakis considered the role of SDN as IT and TV converge, when he considered SDN and
NFV architectures for multimedia delivery and video broadcast - a micro-services approach in the
context IPTV and OTT Deployments (HbbTV vs IMS-MBMS). Key technologies are considered use
NFV, the virtual evolved packet core (vEPC), Service Orientated Architectures and microsystems.
These are considered for implementation using a three layer stack on a set top box. These are
underpinned by a hybrid broadcast protocol which is considered more mature than IMS.
Conclusions from the Congress
The key conclusions of the congress were:
1. There is ample evidence that the Internet of Things will have a significant impact on
infrastructure and financially.
2. Copper will remain a very important access technology.
3. Antenna development will be an important enabler in the management of migration from
4G radio to 5G.
4. 3GPPP continues to evolve.
5. Network security is crucial to the development of network services.
6. The implementation of fixed line broadband remains an area where new techniques are
evolving to meet national aspirations.
7. As networks and services evolve Quality of Service and Quality of Experience remain
important.
8. SDN promises to bring down the cost of running networks.
9. The economic aspects of network deployment and service evolution need to be considered
carefully.
10. Protection of infrastructure through the deployment of surge protectors is needed to
protect hardware investment in mobile infrastructures.
11. Satellite and terrestrial means can be mixed to optimise radio backhaul, with selection being
dependent of the functionality and performance characteristics required.
12. The design and deployment of antennas can be instrumental in delivering better QoS.