Ricerc@Sapienza

Telecommunication networks play an essential role in the framework of the modern society, that becomes particularly crucial in the case of an emergency and/or of special events.
Ideal Public Safety and Disaster Relief involves the immediate availability of computing and network resources located in the proximity of the Incident Area or directly accessible from there. Unfortunately current emergency networks use technologies that only offer narrow-band capabilities and in major disasters or during big events existing infrastructures are often either disrupted or congested and fail to provide the necessary support. Next-generation emergency networks should provide a real quantum leap in terms of network throughput, users¿ Quality of Service (QoS), resilience and availability guarantees. Moreover they should be integrated with the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure, so that computing resources are provisioned when and where necessary with a large degree of flexibility and dynamicity.
Indeed advances in the wireless technology and in the mobile networking within the 5G framework will bring answers to the aforementioned issues. Nonetheless an architectural shift is also needed to make the whole infrastructure more flexible and autonomic and that new technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) can support such shift.
The project aims at investigating the capability of SDN, NFV, virtualization and cloud computing to support novel, more powerful and more effective Public Safety and Disaster Relief (PSDR) network architectures.
The project is organized in three Workpages (WP). In WP1, we will define the network architecture based on the NFV/SDN technology. We will develop in WP2 some algorithms in order to orchestrate the computing and bandwidth resources. Finally an experimental test-bed will be developed in WP3.