Browsing by Author "Mwangama, Joyce Bertha"

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    Open Access
    A framework to provide charging for third party composite services
    (2010) Mwangama, Joyce Bertha; Ventura, Neco
    Over the past few years the trend in the telecommunications industry has been geared towards offering new and innovative services to end users. A decade ago network operators were content with offering simple services such as voice and text messaging. However, they began to notice that these services were generating lower revenues even while the number of subscribers increased. This was a direct result of the market saturation and network operators were forced to rapidly deploy services with minimum capital investment and while maximising revenue from service usage by end users. Network operators can achieve this by exposing the network to external content and service providers. They would create interfaces that would allow these 3rd party service and content providers to offer their applications and services to users. Composing and bundling of these services will essentially create new services for the user and achieve rapid deployment of enhanced services. The concept of offering a wide range of services that are coordinated in such a way that they deliver a unique experience has sparked interest and numerous research on Service Delivery Platforms (SDP). SDP‟s will enable network operators to be able to develop and offer a wide-variety service set. Given this interest on SDP standardisation bodies such as International Telecommunications Union – Telecommunications (ITU-T), Telecoms and Internet converged Servicers and Protocols for Advanced Networks) (TISPAN), 3rd Generations Partnership Project (3GPP) and Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) are leading efforts into standardising functions and protocols to enhance service delivery by network operators. Obtaining revenue from these services requires effective accounting of service usage and requires mechanisms for billing and charging of these services. The IP Multimedia subsystem(IMS) is a Next Generation Network (NGN) architecture that provides a platform for which multimedia services can be developed and deployed by network operators. The IMS provides network operators, both fixed or mobile, with a control layer that allows them to offer services that will enable them to remain key role players within the industry. Achieving this in an environment where the network operator interacts directly with the 3rd party service providers may become complicated.
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    Open Access
    Infrastructure sharing of 5G mobile core networks on an SDN/NFV platform
    (2017) Mwangama, Joyce Bertha; Ventura, Neco
    When looking towards the deployment of 5G network architectures, mobile network operators will continue to face many challenges. The number of customers is approaching maximum market penetration, the number of devices per customer is increasing, and the number of non-human operated devices estimated to approach towards the tens of billions, network operators have a formidable task ahead of them. The proliferation of cloud computing techniques has created a multitude of applications for network services deployments, and at the forefront is the adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV). Mobile network operators (MNO) have the opportunity to leverage these technologies so that they can enable the delivery of traditional networking functionality in cloud environments. The benefit of this is reductions seen in the capital and operational expenditures of network infrastructure. When going for NFV, how a Virtualised Network Function (VNF) is designed, implemented, and placed over physical infrastructure can play a vital role on the performance metrics achieved by the network function. Not paying careful attention to this aspect could lead to the drastically reduced performance of network functions thus defeating the purpose of going for virtualisation solutions. The success of mobile network operators in the 5G arena will depend heavily on their ability to shift from their old operational models and embrace new technologies, design principles and innovation in both the business and technical aspects of the environment. The primary goal of this thesis is to design, implement and evaluate the viability of data centre and cloud network infrastructure sharing use case. More specifically, the core question addressed by this thesis is how virtualisation of network functions in a shared infrastructure environment can be achieved without adverse performance degradation. 5G should be operational with high penetration beyond the year 2020 with data traffic rates increasing exponentially and the number of connected devices expected to surpass tens of billions. Requirements for 5G mobile networks include higher flexibility, scalability, cost effectiveness and energy efficiency. Towards these goals, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation have been adopted in recent proposals for future mobile networks architectures because they are considered critical technologies for 5G. A Shared Infrastructure Management Framework was designed and implemented for this purpose. This framework was further enhanced for performance optimisation of network functions and underlying physical infrastructure. The objective achieved was the identification of requirements for the design and development of an experimental testbed for future 5G mobile networks. This testbed deploys high performance virtualised network functions (VNFs) while catering for the infrastructure sharing use case of multiple network operators. The management and orchestration of the VNFs allow for automation, scalability, fault recovery, and security to be evaluated. The testbed developed is readily re-creatable and based on open-source software.
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    Open Access
    Medical application of the Internet of Things (IoT): prototyping a telemonitoring system
    (2018) Chisanga, Fredrick; Ventura, Neco; Mwangama, Joyce Bertha
    The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technological paradigm that can be perceived as an evolution of the internet. It is a shift from the traditional way of connecting devices to the internet, both in number and diversity of connected devices. This significant and marked growth in the number and diversity of devices connected to the internet has prompted a rethink of approaches to interconnect devices. The growth in the number of connected devices is driven by emerging applications and business models and supported by falling device costs while the growth in the diversity is driven by the reduction in the cost of manufacturing these devices. This has led to an increase in the number of users (not limited to people) of the internet. According to statistics by the ITU, by the end of 2015, about 3.2 billion people were using the Internet. Significantly, 34% of households in developing countries had Internet access, with more than 80% of households in developed countries. This indicates that it is realistic to leverage the IoT in living spaces. Appreciating this potential, many sectors of society are already positioning themselves to reap the benefits of this great promise. Hence the health sector would do well to adopt this technological paradigm to enhance service delivery. One specific area where the health sector can benefit from the adoption of the IoT is in telemonitoring and the associated early response to medical emergencies. Statistics and research show that there are areas in the medical field, that still need improvement to enhance service delivery. The Nursing Times has summed up these areas into four categories. The first one is a need to have a regular observation of patients and their vital signs. Here, health service providers (SPs) need to adopt creative and non-obtrusive methods that will encourage patients' participation in the monitoring of these vital signs. As much as possible, vital signs readings should be taken at convenient locations and times. Therefore, devices that have consistent internet access and are usually a part of daily life for most patients, such as the mobile phones would prove to be a key enabler of regular observation of vital signs. Furthermore, miniaturization of the vital signs monitoring or sensing devices would be a key step towards realizing this scenario. A lot of work is already being done to miniaturize these devices and make them as much a part of daily life as possible, as evidenced by advancements in the field of fitness and wearables. To map this use to the medical field, a system needs to be created that would allow for the aggregation of these disparate measuring and monitoring devices with medical information management systems. The second potential area of improvement is in the early recognition of deterioration of the patients. With regular observation of patients, it is possible to recognize deterioration at its early stage. Taking cognizance of the different needs of the various stakeholders is important to achieve the intended results. The third potential area of improvement is in the communication among stakeholders. This has to do with identifying the relevant data that must be delivered to the stakeholders during the monitoring and management process. Lastly, effective response to medical concerns is the other potential area of improvement. It is noted that patients do not generally get the right response at the right time because the information does not reach the rightly qualified personnel in good time. The regular and real-time capture of vital signs data coupled with added analytics can enable IoT SPs to design solutions that automate the management and transmission of medical data in a timely manner. This work addresses how the medical sector can adopt IoT-based solutions to improve service delivery, while utilizing existing resources such as smartphones, for the transmission and management of vital signs data, availing it to stakeholders and improve communication among them. It develops a telemonitoring system based on IoT design approaches. The developed system captures readings of vital signs from monitoring devices, processes and manages this data to serve the needs of the various stakeholders. Additionally, intelligence was added to enable the system to interpret the data and make decisions that will help medical practitioners and other stakeholders (patients, caregivers, etc.) to more timely, consistently and reliably provide and receive medical services/assistance. Two end user applications were developed. A cloud-based web application developed using PHP, HTML, and JavaScript and an Android mobile application developed using Java programming language in Android studio. An ETSI standards-compliant M2M middleware is used to aggregate the system using M2M applications developed in Python. This is to leverage the benefits of the standards-compliant middleware while offering flexibility in the design of applications. The developed system was evaluated to assess whether it meets the requirements and expectations of the various stakeholders. Finally, the performance of the proposed telemonitoring system was studied by analyzing the delay on the delivery of messages (local notifications, SMS, and email) to various stakeholders to assess the contribution towards reducing the overall time of the cardiac arrest chain of survival. The results obtained showed a marked improvement (over 28 seconds) on previous work. In addition to improved performance in monitoring and management of vital signs, telemonitoring systems have a potential of decongesting health institutions and saving time for all the stakeholders while bridging most of the gaps discussed above. The captured data can also provide the health researchers and physicians with most of the prerequisite data to effectively execute predictive health thereby improving service delivery in the health sector.
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    Open Access
    SDN based security solutions for multi-tenancy NFV
    (2017) Lejaha, Retselisitsoe; Mwangama, Joyce Bertha
    The Internet continues to expand drastically as a result of explosion of mobile devices, content, server virtualization, and advancement of cloud services. This increase has significantly changed traffic patterns within the enterprise data centres. Therefore, advanced technologies are needed to improve traditional network deployments to enable them to handle the changing network patterns. Software defined networks (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV) are innovative technologies that enable network flexibility, increase network and service agility, and support service-driven virtual networks using concepts of virtualisation and softwarisation. Collaboration of these two concepts enable cloud operator to offer network-as-a-service (NaaS) to multiple tenants in a data-centre deployment. Despite the benefits brought by these technologies, they also bring along security challenges that need to be addressed and managed to ensure successful deployment and encourage faster adoption in industry. This dissertation proposes security solution based on tenant isolation, network access control (NAC) and network reconfiguration that can be implemented in NFV multi-tenant deployment to guarantee privacy and security of tenant functions. The evaluation of the proof-of-concept framework proves that SDN based tenant isolation solution provides a high level of isolation in a multi-tenant NFV cloud. It also shows that the proposed network reconfiguration greatly reduces chances of an attacker correctly identifying location and IP addresses of tenant functions within the cloud environment. Because of resource limitation, the proposed NAC solution was not evaluated. The efficiency of this solution for multitenancy NFV has been added as part of future work.
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    Towards the development of an optimal SDN controller placement framework to expedite SDN deployment in emerging markets
    (2019) Mamushiane, Lusani; Mwangama, Joyce Bertha; Lysko, Albert A.
    The challenge of poor broadband penetration in emerging markets is generally attributed to the high cost of deployment and operations for broadband infrastructure. Operators are more comfortable to rollout infrastructure in urban areas than in rural (i.e. remote, sparsely populated and low income) areas, due to the attractive profit margins they present. The repercussion of this is a wide “digital divide” between urban and rural areas, resulting in social and economic exclusion. The exclusion of rural areas stifles economic growth. In order to bridge this divide, a more cost effective telecommunication infrastructure is indispensable. This means adopting an architecture that minimizes both network deployment costs (CapEx) and operational costs (OpEx), while maintaining a high service quality level and ensuring business agility. There is a general consensus that a large portion of OpEx comes from the costs associated with the configuration and management of the telecommunication infrastructure. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a promising solution to revolutionize network deployment, operations and economic growth. This paradigm aims to address management and configuration complexities in legacy networks so as to reduce the total cost associated with deploying and running telecommunication infrastructures. Conventionally, network control and data planes are tightly coupled and deployed within the same proprietary network device. SDN presents a shift in paradigm by decoupling the control plane from the data plane, abstracting lower level functionality of underlying hardware and enabling network programmability through a centralized controller. As the “brain” of the network, the controller must be able to process and respond to requests from the data plane promptly and proficiently. In order to optimize a controller’s operational efficiency, factors such as the number of controllers deployed, type of controller and controller placement are considered. During the network planning stage of an SDN deployment, the important questions that must be answered are: given a wide area network (WAN) topology, how many controllers are needed and where should they be placed to optimize SDN performance? Henceforth, this is referred to as the controller placement problem. This problem constitutes competing objectives such as load balancing, latency, reliability and CapEx, thus no single best placement solution is available. This study aims to address the controller placement problem by leveraging machine learning algorithms. Moreover, this study carries out a comparative performance evaluation of the most popular SDN controllers namely, Ryu, Floodlight, ONOS and OpenDayLight. The results from the performance evaluation are used to study the controller placement problem on an emulation orchestration platform. In order to contextualize the problem to emerging markets and maintain realism, a local national research and education wide area network called SANReN is used to test the proposed algorithms. This study can potentially be used by network operators as a guideline to start integrating SDN or plan a new SDN deployment, by helping them make quick automatic decisions regarding optimal controller placement.