Collecting data generated by widespread digital transactions is an increasingly common practice. The likes of telecommunication network operators, mobile service providers, app developers and financial companies have the possibility to track the movements, preferences, activities and habits of large populations of individuals.

We investigate how individual mobile services are consumed at a national scale, by studying data collected in a 3G/4G mobile network deployed over a major European country. Through correlation and clustering analyses, our study unveils a strong heterogeneity in the demand for different mobile services, both in time and space. In particular, we show that: (i) somehow surprisingly, almost all considered services exhibit quite different temporal usage patterns; (ii) in contrast to such temporal behavior, spatial patterns are fairly uniform across all services; (iii) when looking at usage patterns at different locations, the average traffic volume per user is dependent on the urbanization level, yet its temporal dynamics are not. Our findings do not only have sociological implications, but are also relevant to the orchestration of network resources.

The second wave of cloud computing, named network cloudification, in the forms of SDN (Software Defined Networking), NFV (Network Function Virtualization), and 5G-MEC (Mobile Edge Computing), is to centralize and virtualize networking into data centers.

Queueing theory, the set of probabilistic techniques that study waiting lines or queues, is a fundamental tool to analyze the performance of modern telecommunication networks. In this talk, we present the results of the performance analysis of two queueing systems.

A multitude of wireless technologies are used within air traffic communication. From a conceptual perspective, all of them are insecure as security was never part of their design and the evolution of wireless security in aviation did not keep up with the state of the art.

Future networks based on virtualization will enable on-the-fly instantiation of services in the form of "network slices". In this talk we will focus on a fundamental resource allocation problem in this context, that of finding a minimum cost embedding of a network slice onto a graph representing the available resources of our architecture.

Crowdsourced signal monitoring systems are gaining attention for capturing the wireless spectrum at large geographical scale. Yet, most of the current systems are still limited to simple power spectrum measurements reported by each sensor.

The use of deceptive techniques in user-generated video portals is ubiquitous. Unscrupulous uploaders deliberately mislabel video descriptors, such as headline, thumbnail etc., in order to increase their views and subsequently their ad revenue. However, such deceptive practices come at the expense of the end-user’s experience as the content does not meet the viewer’s expectations, which are formed by the misleading headline and thumbnail.

In this talk we present OpenBox — a software-defined framework for network-wide development, deployment, and management of network functions (NFs). OpenBox effectively decouples the control plane of NFs from their data plane, similarly to SDN solutions that only address the network’s forwarding plane.

Cisco estimates that by 2019 traffic will be 64x than in 2005. Network caching can help cope with this traffic deluge as, by replicating content closer to the users, it reduces bandwidth consumption.