RedZinc (Ireland)

Global warming is one of the greatest challenges currently facing the global population as it results in rapid climate change which is known to cause knock-on effects like rising sea levels, biodiversity loss, and an increased rate of natural disasters. Carbon dioxide is the greenhouse gas most emitted by anthropogenic activity, so strategies to combat global warming often target atmospheric CO2. One strategy recently theorised to mitigate large quantities of CO2 emissions is large-scale seaweed farming. This paper considers the possible direct and indirect impacts of seaweed farming and seaweed-derived compounds on carbon emissions and global warming, with consideration to the environmental risks, ease of adoption, and emergence onto the carbon credit market.

Future networks including the Fifth Generation (5G) and beyond mobile networks shall manage, control and orchestrate the new services for users especially vertical sectors, thereby they shall maximize the potential of 5G infrastructures and their services. Network slicing has emerged as a major new networking paradigm for meeting the diverse requirements of various vertical businesses in virtualized and softwarised 5G networks. SliceNet is a project of the EU 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G PPP) and focuses on network slicing as a cornerstone technology in 5G networks. This article describes how the SliceNet Control Plane shall evolve to meet the end-to-end needs of many different vertical businesses. SliceNet Control Plane shall span across multiple administrative domains, by integrating different technologies in each involved segments (RAN, MEC, CN, inter-connectivity). Moreover, SliceNet Control Plane is able to allow verticals to plug their own control logic on top of provisioned slices and specialize their services characteristics while optimizing the use of shared resources, providing dynamic configuration, dynamic management, resource isolation and scalability.

We propose the TelcoFog architecture as a novel, secure, highly distributed, and ultra-dense fog computing infrastructure, which can be allocated at the extreme edge of a wired/wireless network for a telecom operator to provide multiple unified, cost-effective, and new 5G services, such as NFV, MEC, and services for third parties (e.g., smart cities, vertical industries, and IoT). The distributed and programmable fog technologies that are proposed in TelcoFog are expected to strengthen the position of the mobile network and cloud markets. TelcoFog, by design, is capable of integrating an ecosystem for network operators willing to provide NFV, MEC, and IoT services. TelcoFog's key benefits are the dynamic deployment of new distributed low-latency services. The novel TelcoFog architecture consists of three main building blocks: a scalable TelcoFog node, which is seamlessly integrated in the telecom infrastructure; a TelcoFog controller, focused on service assurance and based on service data modeling using YANG, which is integrated in the management and orchestration architecture of the telecom operator; and TelcoFog services, which are able to run on top of the TelcoFog and telecom infrastructure. The TelcoFog architecture is validated through a proof of concept for IoT services.

Objectives & BackgroundThe LiveCity Project funded by the European Commission included the development of hardware and software and the provision of a telecommunication infrastructure with high-speed internet to allow for an encrypted audio-visual video communication from the site of an emergency to the Emergency Department. Having previously performed a questionnaire based study on telemedicine amongst paramedics we extended our research to examine if Doctors, nurses and patients in the Emergency Department felt it would be beneficial and would want and accept telemedicine in pre-hospital emergency care.MethodsTwo separate seventeen item questionnaires were developed by the research team in consultation with the key stakeholders for patients and staff. Two members of the research team approached doctors, nurses and patients in the Emergency Department to consent them to enrolment in the study. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS software. The comments and statements from the qualitative data were analysed using simple thematic analysis.Results100% (56) of patients said they would like the technology used if they were in an ambulance and possibly suffering a stroke or a major injury, and 96.3% (54) said they would like it used if they were possibly suffering a heart attack. 83.3% (n=10) of doctors and 89% (n=16) of nurses were in favour of using pre-hospital video platform technology in stroke, Myocardial infarction and major trauma. The potential benefits were felt to be in diagnosis of time-dependent illnesses, time management in the ED, increased hospital preparedness for incoming patients and increased triage efficiency. Nurses and Doctors expressed concern that there may be difficulty operating the technology in situations such as adverse weather conditions, low light levels and in remote areas without network coverage. Concerns regarding potential breaches in patient confidentiality were noted.Conclusion99% of patients, 92% of Doctors and 94% of nurses saw the potential of an audio-visual link from the pre-hospital environment to the Emergency Department. Stakeholder enthusiasm for pre-hospital telemedicine must be met with the technological requirements to provide such a service. As noted by one patient a pre-hospital audio-visual link to the Emergency Department could be a “potentially a life saving service”.

Abstract The LiveCity Project effort intends to create a city-based “Living Lab” and associated ecosystem to pilot live interactive high-definition video-to-video (v2v) on ultrafast wireless and wireline Internet infrastructure for the support of appropriate public service use cases among a number of city user communities initially in four major European cities. The essential aim is to empower the citizens of a city to interact with each other in a more productive, efficient and socially useful way by using v2v over the Internet, as the latter can be considered to improve city administration, enhance education and city experiences for tourists/cultural consumers and save patients’ lives. We discuss the role that stakeholders can play in identifying appropriate KPIs to assess the progress of the LiveCity concept, covering the underlying network infrastructure, the intended services-facilities per specific case, as well as users’ satisfaction and requirements.KeywordsKey performance indicators (KPIs)networkpublic servicessmart cityright of wayvideo-to-video (v2v) communication

In this paper, the EuQoS Consortium offers its first architecture release in order to provide an initial view on how end to end QoS is provided over multiple and heterogeneous networks. The EuQoS end to end Architecture has two views; a network deployment view across a number of autonomous systems (AS) domains and a software view within an AS. It was funded on a division of the end to end QoS paradigm along a vertical axis - Service, Control and Transport plane — and an horizontal axis — network division between the various technology especially Core and Access networks. The solution is based on the concept of end to end path build, used and managed by three processes: Provisioning, Invocation and Operating Maintenance (OAM).