Alan Carlton, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Alan Carlton

Author Archives: Alan Carlton

IDG Contributor Network: HTTP and DNS in a 5G World

The internet has of course been wildly successful over the last thirty years as more and more functionality has moved online. A large part of this success has been due to two key protocols that have allowed the internet to scale relatively gracefully: HTTP which stands for Hypertext Transmission Protocol, and DNS which stands for Domain Name System. HTTP is the protocol used to send data between a web browser running on a laptop or mobile phone and the web page or application that it is communicating with, which is running on a server in the network. No matter where the web page is located or who develops the web browser, it is guaranteed that they will be able to interoperate because they all use the standardized HTTP protocol to communicate. DNS is equally fundamental as it is the protocol which allows end user devices to translate a given human readable URL such as “www.google.com” to a machine usable IP address that the network can make sense of.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The future is not the cloud or the fog: it is actually the SEA!

A casual reflection on the last few years in the evolution of the wireless network provides us all the insights necessary to reason that there is at least one final frontier coming down the road. Who can deny that the last few years have been owned by the cloud, virtualization and softwarization (if that is even a word!). Edge Computing too, which is really nothing more than the pushing of all of these concepts deep into places in the network where they have never been before. Fog computing is another term (created by Cisco) for something similar but driven in its genesis more bottom up from the many Internet of Things use cases. The bigger trend is obvious; network intelligence is distributing but where will it, can it go, beyond this?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Real world challenges between us and the Internet of Things

Many a blog line has been penned on the rich topic of the Internet of Things (IoT) but not much has been written about the real world challenges between our today and the many promises of the IoT tomorrow. Technology considerations can easily blind us “techies” to more mundane realities but, when you work as deeply in the Smart City space as I do, it is difficult to avoid them. In my opinion, the technology challenges surrounding the IoT are relatively small compared to the real world challenges that are perhaps not so obvious.Some say the IoT is now, but I don’t believe that! I believe we are on a journey, and the trajectory of every vertical industry to this destination will be carved somewhat uniquely and at its own necessary pace. Healthcare is often touted as a darling of the IoT, but the privacy, security and regulatory issues here might never be adequately solved in a way that will allow this sensitive data to be leveraged up significantly into any wider value creating ecosystem. The automotive and intelligent transportation verticals, on the other hand, look more promising to me in terms of fast tracking their way to the Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Big Data will enable better network and application intelligence in 5G

We are fortunate to live in an exciting time where multiple technological leaps are occurring. Specifically, I am thinking of the mobile industry transition from 4G to 5G, and the cross-industry IT paradigm shift to the Big Data approach. The 5G standards community is already planning to support the collection and transmission of massive amounts of data. This is one of its key requirements pillars in the area of supporting the IoT. What is left, however, is for the 5G community to ensure that the other component of Big Data, namely support for network and application intelligence, is also baked into the 5G architecture. Otherwise, 5G may become simply a pipe for Big Data passing between devices and the cloud infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 5G reality check: Where is 3GPP on standardization?

If your travel plans over the next week or so include Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, then one thing I am sure you will know is that 5G will be a hot topic. The 5G requirements are now well-aired and the triumvirate of use cases (enhanced mobile broadband (emBB), ultra-low latency reliable communications (URLLC) and massive machine type communications (mMTC) are commonly understood.+ Also on Network World: 4 things we expect from Mobile World Congress 2017 + But as we prepare, let’s take a breath and ask one simple question, where are we right now in terms of standardization for 5G?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 5G reality check: Where is 3GPP on standardization?

IDG Contributor Network: Surprise! Polar codes are coming in from the cold

As the festive season approaches, there is nothing better than a good surprise. If you follow my blog regularly, you’ll have read my position on Polar codes—great technology, but perhaps not quite ready for prime time.Well, I guess I was wrong, or maybe not? Recently, 3GPP selected Polar codes as the official coding method for the control channel functions in the 5G enhanced mobile broadband use case (one of the three main use cases being developed), and the LDPC method was crowned as the channel code for the data channels in the same use case. Turbo codes are not in the game yet, at least in this round. So, what happened?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Real edge computing will enable new business models

Edge computing today may be most simplistically defined as putting an extra layer of computing in the network between your smartphone and a centralized data center in the cloud for some optimizing purpose.From this original, slightly narrow vision, there is still some ways to go before realizing full stack relocations (e.g., relocation of an entire web server) that will allow true service enablement just one hop away from the end user device. Obvious benefits of realizing this vision include reduced latency and backhaul capacity reduction, but I believe there will be more profound benefits to operators and service providers in terms of new business model enablement, too.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Will the real edge computing please stand up!

In its simplest form, edge computing is basically about putting an extra layer of computing in the network between the end device and a centralized data center, which is commonly referred to as being located in the cloud. The “edge” moniker implies that this extra layer of computing is as close as possible to the end device.The primary reasons for deploying edge computing is to significantly reduce the network processing delay for time-critical applications, and to greatly reduce the amount of data that needs to be carried further upstream into the network.How it all started The idea of having computing at the edge of the network, such as a gateway in a remote enterprise office, has been around for a long time. However, typically these have been for very specific use cases and in comparatively low volumes. It has only been more recently, driven by newer uses cases and enabling technologies, that edge computing has taken on more significance and added value in the networking world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Why the IETF will be key for standardizing 5G

Most people in the mobile industry are aware that the Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)—and Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) before it—has traditionally been the lead standards organization in specifying mobile network functionality. 3GPP logically partitions the mobile network architecture into Radio Access Network (RAN), and Core Network (CN) components.+ Also on Network World: What we talk about when we talk about 5G wireless + 3GPP will continue to be important in 5G, especially for the RAN-related functionality such as the OFDM and massive MIMO specifications for the radio interfaces. However, knowledgeable observers will also be aware of the fact that a significant number of key 5G protocols will be specified in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Actually, this is just a continuation and acceleration of trends started way back in 3G.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: IoT is not about radios; it’s all about data

The initial challenge for the Internet of Things (IoT) was how to provide physical connectivity of small and often remote devices to the Internet. This issue has basically been solved with the plethora of wireless connectivity solutions. The real challenge for IoT is data organization, sharing and search on an unprecedented scale.Most discussions about IoT usually point out in passing that today’s machine data is concentrated in vertical, or isolated, data silos. However, they rarely explain why this is a problem. More important, they do not give a roadmap of how to solve this problem going forward. I will try to provide some insight on both points.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Web Search Engines for IoT: The new frontier

We are all intimately familiar with the experience of “googling” a keyword(s) on a Web browser search engine to find related websites. For example, searching for “best French restaurant” in Google or Yahoo will return a list of many websites that are related to this topic. However, this key feature of the current Web will have to be fundamentally reworked for the new types of devices that are expected to join the Web as part of the Internet of Things (IoT). I mean, just how is it going to work when your fridge needs to do a search for something - and it will before too long?Traditional Web Search EnginesWhen thinking about any technology evolution, it is useful to first understand how the current generation of technology works before we try to predict what will happen in the future. So let’s briefly review how search engines work today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Fronthaul and backhaul: Look out, a fusion is coming!

Backhaul and fronthaul have come a long way through the generations. When I started out, fronthaul was literally the length of industrial coax cable that you could easily observe running from the bottom of a cell phone tower to the top. Backhaul was always where the excitement was—in all the signal processing smarts surrounding transcoding. This technology existed to condense almighty 64k bit/sec. pipes down to a 16k bit/sec. ones and vice versa. Today, the story has moved on and converged quite a bit, but the uncoordinated shaping of these spaces in those early days has resulted in two worlds or two heterogeneous technology silos, one each for fronthaul and backhaul. This is not going to fly in 5G, and a fusion is coming that will bring these two worlds together.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Channel coding: Is there anywhere left to go?

Channel coding, aka, error control codes, is a foundational building block in almost all modern communication systems. Over the decades there has been a long list of champions and pretenders for the crown of supreme code du jour or perhaps more accurately, code de la génération. As we approach our fifth generation of wireless, is there anything left for the information theory gang to do? Have we pushed this frontier to its limits? I would suggest not. Innovation in this space suggests a little renaissance period in channel coding is coming because of requirements for 5G. But first a look at how we got here.Channel coding history Channel coding is one of the main reasons our wireless networks work the way we like them to do—fast and error free. The general idea is simple. First pad the information/packet/bits at the source node with some redundant bits to be transmitted over the communication medium. Then, at the receiving end, exploit the redundancy of the extra padded information to overcome the side effects of the channel, e.g. randomness, noise, interference, etc.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Information-centric networking could fix these internet problems

Information-centric networking (ICN) ticks many of the requirements boxes for 5G, driven by the proliferation of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). But what are those issues that ICN improves over the current internet? And how does it do it?Today’s internet has seen significant changes. With forecasts for 2020 predicting 50 billion IoT devices, the scale of connectivity is ever increasing with nearly every computing device today providing some form of connectivity option.This will have a tremendous impact on the size of IP routing tables. This is not a problem in your typical home router on the edge of the internet. But as you move up to the core (into the so called Default Free Zone), the nodes in this part of the network literally need to store the whole internet in their routing tables. This is driving up memory costs in each IP router, as well as increasing processing complexity and power consumption. Even in SDN-enabled environments, this trend can be observed through increasing flow matching tables (growing similarly as the IP routing tables in the traditional internet), leading to an arms’ race between vendors for ever larger and costly table memory.To read this Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Demystifying the Information Centric Network

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is receiving increasing interest in the context of future wireless networks. So, what is ICN? Why is it important and will it have a role in next generation 5G networks? I think it will and for some very good reasons.ICN is a research area that dates back to about 2006 and has been cooking for over a decade. It defines a new way of inter-networking or, as I see it, a very natural next step now for the internet—if it is done right.The principles and essential architecture of today’s internet are rooted in the system that was created for simple file transfers some 40-plus years ago. The internet has, of course, evolved within this restrictive construct, and the media consumption experience you most likely enjoy today is as much a function of carefully choreographed Content Delivery Networks (CDN) as the old internet client-server model. CDNs and the careful management of content (aka information) are essential to the smooth functioning that we perceive today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here