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Projecte llegit

Títol: Modular Architectures assisted by Edge Computing, Network Programmability, and Cross-layer Metrics Monitoring to Optimize Multi-user Holographic Communications Services

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: RINCÓN RIVERA, DAVID

Departament: ENTEL

Títol: Modular Architectures assisted by Edge Computing, Network Programmability, and Cross-layer Metrics Monitoring to Optimize Multi-user Holographic Communications Services

Data inici oferta: 26-06-2025     Data finalització oferta: 26-02-2026


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    MU AI4CI
    MU EM CODAS 1
    MU EM CODAS 2
    MU MASTEAM 2015
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: Fora UPC    
 
        Supervisor/a extern: Mario Montagud
        Institució/Empresa: Fundació i2Cat
        Titulació del Director/a: PhD in Telecommunications Engineering
 
Paraules clau:
Holographic communications, Network-as-a-Service, Kubernetes
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
Optimize the performance, adaptivity and resources usage levels in holographic communication services, by devising:

(i) new modular Edge-assisted Architectures;

(ii) Resources Orchestration Strategies;

(iii) Network-as-a-Service APIs;

(iv) Modular Cross-layer Metrics Monitoring sub-system; and

(v) Level-of-Service (LoS) rules registration and associated alerting modules

Tasks:

- Design the modular architecture, including its components and interfaces, departing from the i2CAT's HoloMIT platform
- Prepare the virtualization and Edge Orchestration platform, by relying on Kubernetes
- Design and implement the cross-layer metrics monitoring subsystem
- Define and implement the Network-as-a-Service APIs for resources' orchestration and LoS rules' registration and inspection
- Define and implement mitigation actions once receiving LoS violation alerts
- Deploy and validate with functional tests the end-to-end platform
- Run objective performance tests to demonstrate the benefits of the devised contributions, and refine the initial designs and implementations
- Provide recommendations on LoS rules and metrics based on observations with tests with end-users
- Submit at least one high-impact publication out of the conducted research activities and obtained results.
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
Multiuser holographic communication services, supporting realistic and volumetric users' representations integrated into shared 3D spaces, are emerging as an impactful medium for remote communication, social interaction and collaboration. However, key remaining challenges still need to be addressed to overcome limitations in terms of performance, scalability, and adaptability. This work is built upon a state-of-the-art end-to-end platform for holographic communications and extends it with three main categories of technological components to enhance its scalability, reliability and optimize the overall resource usage.

As a first contribution, this thesis presents a modular, lightweight cross-layer monitoring and alerting sub-system that is able to register real-time metrics from the network, edge infrastructures, application layer and testing tools to enable autonomous infrastructure and service adaptation. As a second contribution, this thesis has specified and implemented a new versatile edge-assisted architecture for holographic communications, leveraging the aforementioned alerting sub-system and a Kubernetes-based orchestration sub-system to enable autonomous, context-aware resources provisioning and management. As a third contribution, this thesis provides a set of innovative technological components to enhance adaptability, reliability and scalability in holographic communications services, seamlessly integrated within the devised architecture and sub-systems. First, a new mechanism to automatically instantiate new server components, like Selective Forwarding Units (SFUs), has been designed to overcome overload situations on the server side and enhance scalability regarding the number of users per shared session and parallel sessions, by leveraging Kubernetes Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Second, a new server-side module has been designed and integrated to get aware about dynamic positions and viewpoints of each client participating in a holographic communication session, so that the server can decide what streams from the other remote clients to forward or not to each destination client, thus optimizing bandwidth and resources usage, with minimum impact on the user experience. Third, a server-side dynamic transcoding component has been designed and integrated, so it can be strategically instantiated at stream level to downgrade the volumetric video quality for specific target clients, based on relative positions, viewpoints, or available resources, thus contributing to scalability and interoperability. Fourth, a module to apply dynamic encoding or Level of Detail (LoD) adjustments on the client side has been also designed and integrated to reduce the bandwidth from the source, thus overcoming both uplink and downlink congestion problems for the local and remote access network segments, respectively.

All such novel technological enablers are fully compliant with, and can leverage, emerging Cloud Continuum and 6G enablers, like European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) standard and Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) APIs, thus paving the way for a more efficient and sustainable deployment over next-generation networks. Indeed, these technological enablers have been virtualized and provided as Helm Charts to enable their automatic deployment on both local and external Kubernetes infrastructures, and on both local open-source and commercial beyond 5G networks. The technical contributions have been deployed and evaluated across relevant distributed scenarios, under diverse network conditions, to assess their efficacy, performance, reliability and benefits. The obtained results not only prove the potential of the contributions of this work in terms of enhanced performance, sustainability, and interoperability, but also reinforce the relevance and usefulness of the developed technology and testbed to conduct cutting-edge research in this relevant and timely field.

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