Increasingly, the networking world today includes more connected physical objects. Home appliances, machinery, infrastructure, and shipment are being equipped with network capable sensors and actuators that enable them to monitor their environment, report their status, receive instructions command and for configuration or taking actions. We are carrying mobile devices equipped with different sensors tracking our situation, location or health. This is the world of the Internet of Things (IoT), where the number of connected devices is estimated to increase dramatically within the next decade.

Machine-2-Machine (M2M) communication is a new paradigm in telecommunications, gaining momentum in the recent years. It enables to remotely sense, monitor, and control devices, where real and virtual objects communicate with each other without human intervention. M2M communication platforms will control the communication between all connected objects and systems.

As we evolve from the static web to social networking (Web 2.0) to a ubiquitous computing web (Web 3.0) the Internet is stepping toward as a fully integrated Future Internet, which significantly increases the need for sophisticated smart applications. The M2M communication aims to enable connecting everyday existing objects, and allows “non-human” content providers to feed the Internet with data in various formats frequently. Smart City services should have the capability to analyses data collected from various vertical domains and provide instant real time solutions for many applications in order to promote positive outcomes.

The M2M tutorial will cover the following topics:

With the evolution towards 5G, the mobile communication ecosystem becomes even more complex, by the foreseen adoption of high levels of heterogeneity and automation mechanisms while aiming at a better subscriber service where the human is immersed into a communicating and actuating environment, as well as aiming at other markets such as industry and manufacturing, grid and energy, transportation, safety and security. With novel paradigms such as Network Functions Virtualization and Software Defined Networks, a very high level of elasticity can be achieved, while common understanding and robustness of the overall system is still a major issue.

Before going towards the silo-ed research of the different domains: radio, core network, management and virtualisation, there is a stringent need for a common understanding from all stakeholders on which are the directions followed also in the other areas of the 5G ecosystem in order to be able to provide at the end meaningful results which can be directly mapped and integrated within the 5G software and equipment.

This half day workshop will provide a comprehensive overview of the network architecture evolution towards 5G, including support of the new 5G radio access, LTE and WiFi, convergent core network support (integration of fixed, backhaul and satellite) and cognitive, self-adaptable management systems as well as the leveraging into operator networks of Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Software Defined Networks (SDN) concepts and the support for highly heterogeneous devices and applications. The main focus will be on the evolution of the core network platform beyond the current 3GPP Evolved Packet Core (EPC) as a network and service control including security, mobility support, QoS and connectivity management, monitoring and network management. A best practice architecture model, following the best-practice of 3G and LTE/EPC evolution will be analyzed and adapted to 5G requirements. Then, this tutorial will outline how the major concepts will affect the core network architecture and each other beyond EPC. Additionally, the scope of the SDOs (3GPP, ETSI NFV, IETF, ONF, etc.), their initial results and their future directions will be introduced. The tutorial terminates with outlining how the new technology can be brought in a relevant manner to the 5G R&D and later exploited in the 5G ecosystem. Furthermore, the software toolkits and experimentation platforms of Fraunhofer FOKUS/TU Berlin will be introduced, namely Open5GCore as evolution from the OpenEPC, OpenSDNCore and the 5G Berlin Testbed enabling demonstrations and hands-on know how accumulation and comprehensive prototyping in the context of academic and industry research.

Agenda:

Due to the ongoing convergence of telecommunications, Internet and entertainment, and the increasing adoption of Internet technologies in our daily lives, we are moving rapidly into a world of total interconnection of humans and machines. This means that after Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) and voice/data integration which has coined the evolution of telecommunication infrastructures in the last decade, we are now witnessing the start of a much broader convergence of quite different application domains with different value chains and technologies. This convergence is driven by the adoption and extension of Internet technologies in various application domains, which today is getting a lot of attention by the increasing notion of Smart Cities. Different transport and control platforms need to be integrated into a Smart City service platform enabling an open set of application domains by so-called common or generic enablers on top of different fixed and mobile network infrastructures.

This half-day tutorial will provide an overview of relevant control platforms and the related standards in the context of fixed and mobile Next Generation Network (NGN) evolution towards a common, cloud based transport and control layer. We will look at the 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), the 3GPP Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and the emerging 3GPP and ETSI/OneM2M Machine Type Communications (MTC) platforms. In addition, we look at relevant Service Delivery Platform (SDP) concepts and related service enablers and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for enabling seamlessly various applications on top of fixed and mobile networks. We also address the current state of the art in Smart City environments in Europe, US, and Asia.

Addressing the Over-The-Top (OTT) and IT evolution, this tutorial will provide an overview of current advances in cloud-based technologies and their integration with networks based on OpenFlow and current networking approaches. From a service layer perspective, an introduction into HTML5 and especially WebRTC will provide an overview of latest developments as currently under way by companies as Google for Android and hangouts and Mozilla for FirefoxOS.

We will illustrate that operators have the potential to play a dominant role in the Smart City context when providing the right infrastructures and appropriate interfaces to the right partners in the future. Finally, the tutorial terminates with an introduction to relevant toolkits and laboratories from Fraunhofer FOKUS and Technical University Berlin, enabling rapid prototyping for academic and industry research in the context of this tutorial. We will briefly introduce the Open5GCore and OpenSDNCore and OpenMTC/OpenXSP toolkits, as well as the FUSECO-Playground and the Smart Communications Playground enabling comprehensive prototyping in the context of academic and industry research.