OSOMI 2016 - On-the-fly services in on-the-fly mobile infrastructures (OSOMI)

Mobile networks and mobile ad hoc networks in particular have a long history of research on spontaneously, on-the-fly creating an infrastructure that is suitable for the execution of particular communication tasks. A typical example is clustering with different objectives or different types of routing protocols that superimpose an overlay graph on top of the physical infrastructure of the network. In some research direction, the creation of such an overlay infrastructure has been mirrored back to the actual infrastructure and influenced it as well, for example, in the form of transmission power control.
In the past, however, the service to be supported by the network has been considered as something fairly static and simple: unicasting, broadcasting, perhaps geocasting or - already very complex - servie discovery in an ad hoc network. This is not adequate to the state of the art in services in a general sense. This is witnessed, first and foremost, by the current rapid development of Network Function Virtualization in fixed networks, but also in a more general sense by dynamic service configuration and service reconfiguration in the context of software engineering in general and distributed cloud computing in particular.
For such dynamically, on-the-fly created services, support in fixed networks by dynamically creating infrastructures has received some attention in the recent past. Ideas have ranged from creating suitable overlay graphs to support the search for service components as well as for executing components; in some work, also the reconfiguration of an optical infrastructure to meet service demands by adapting lightpath routing has been considered. These issues are particular relevant in a new trend for the designing of infrastructure networks: multi-tenancy. Enabling multi-tenancy in networks require of the dynamic partition of resources and allocation of NFVs providing services to the tenants of the network, while book-keeping resources for billing and maintaining QoS for each separated virtual network.
The idea of executing such dynamically configured, dynamically distributed services on a wireless, mobile infrastructure has, however, not been considered in the literature so far. The challenges here become even harder: can be reconfigure a wireless network to support a given service layout, e.g., by on-the-fly creation of distributed antenna arrays to span large distances? Can we assign roles of multiple services to different nodes, taking both service and application needs explicitly into account? In order to answer all these questions research on how to apply SDN principles to Wireless networks, which nature highly differs from wired ones is a hot topic of research and standardisation activities.
A crown witness for such applications in wireless networks could be all kinds of distributed signal processing applications, specifically, if multiple applications have to share a single substrate and conflict over resources.
Topics
Reconfigurable services in reconfigurable wireless and mobile networks
Wireless SDN
Distributed applications in mobile networks, e.g., signal processing
Reuse of application building blocks
Role assignment, component placement and scaling, substrate reconfiguration
Multi-tenancy of wireless domains
Network Function Virtualisation applied to wireless processing