Enabling Technologies for hyper-connected, data driven, and service oriented networks of the future

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Advancements in technology and communication in the recent decades have always been on a constant rise, culminating into new models such as the LTE standard for 4G networks for provisioning high data rates responding to the high bandwidth needs of modern mobile applications, and the mobile cloud computing paradigm for leveraging the computing and storage power of data centers to address the computation and energy limitations of mobile devices. However, today, with the cities needing to contain the ever increasing surge in population, and technology needing to keep up with the unparalleled advancement in cutting edge services of the smart city vision, a recent research wave have been pushing for a dramatic evolution of the existing networking infrastructure and communication models, aiming to address the newly imposed smart city service requirements. Future services have heterogeneous stringent requirements, from ultra low latency and reliability, e.g. self-driving, remote surgeries, to very high bandwidth and data rates e.g. advanced gaming, VR, AR, and often require high mobility. 5G (and beyond) technologies promise to achieve this vision, e.g. a) address the high data rates requirement by densifying the cells with MIMO, improving the radio spectrum efficiency and extending it to include higher frequencies. b) address the expansion of IoT devices and huge data consumption by densifying the network and introducing UAV communication. c) address the ultra low latency communication and the tactile internet by pushing the cloud resources close to the end users and enabling various radio access technologies and hence the concepts of fog computing and multi-access edge computing, which is part of a paradigm shift from centralized to distributed services. d) address the dynamic and uncertain nature of traffic flows by softwarizing the network and its functions with the concepts of SDN and NFV, and hence facilitating traffic mobility and migration. e) address the heterogeneity of the services by allocating virtual networks with the concept of network slicing. Nevertheless, realizing the future networks still requires addressing numerous challenges. How to guarantee ultra low latency in dense areas with limited edge resources. How to minimize infrastructure costs when realizing the new communication models. How to address energy limitation for IoT and other communicating devices. How to ensure reliability of UAVs and other serving stations while maintaining low resource costs. How to efficiently manage interference resulting from the communication with the densified stations and UAVs. How to efficiently allocate spectrum and computation resources for maximizing resource utilization. How to efficiently cache data on the edge and UAVs. How to account for security threats in spite of the new architectures and communication models. Those and many other problems still need to be treated for fully realizing the future envisioned networks.