Network Slicing: Past, Present and Moving Forward

Raouf Boutaba

Network Slicing (a.k.a. Network Virtualization) allows multiple logical Networks to coexist on a single physical network while isolated from each other, i.e., without performance or security interferences. It was first propounded as a diversifying attribute of the future inter-networking paradigm that can enable seamless integration of new features resulting in a more rapid evolution of the Internet architecture. Later, it was rolled out in data center networks to provide bandwidth guarantees to cloud applications. More recently, it has been incorporated as a pillar of 5G and beyond mobile communication networks to provide differentiated services with stringent bandwidth, latency and reliability requirements. However, despite a significant progress in virtualization research and technologies over the last two decades, the end-to-end deployment of virtual networks in practice remains unrealized. In this talk, I will overview the genesis and evolution of network virtualization, present key underlying challenges and solution ideas, and an outlook to end-to-end 5G & beyond network slicing.

Bio

Raouf Boutaba is a University Professor and the Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Before that he served as the Associate Dean Research (2016-2019) and the Associate Dean Innovation and Partnership (2019-2020) in the Faculty of Mathematics. Between 2017 and 2022, he also held an INRIA International Chair in France and currently holds a University Chair and the Rogers Chair in Network Automation at Waterloo. His research interests are in the areas of network and service management. He has published extensively in these areas and received over 20 journal and conference best paper awards, including the IEEE CNOM test of time award. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (2007-2010), and served as the Editor-in- Chief of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (2018-2021). He received several awards and recognitions, including the Silver Core from IFIP, the Hal Sobol, the Salah Aidarous, the Joe LociCero, the Dan Stokesbury, and the Donald W. McLellan awards from the IEEE Communications Society, and the McNaugthon Gold Medal from IEEE Canada. He is fellow of the IEEE, the Engineering Institute of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Canada.

Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville

Internet centralization occurs when critical services and infrastructure become concentrated in the hands of fewer providers. This trend goes against the original design principles of the Internet, which prioritized distribution and decentralization. Centralization not only increases the risk of single points of failure but also raises concerns about digital sovereignty. For example, it can lead to a situation where a growing number of countries become heavily dependent on Internet services provided by companies based in a small number of other countries. In this talk, we will examine how Internet centralization manifests today by focusing on three critical services: DNS, web hosting, and email. We will analyze these services in terms of the dependencies that arise between countries and how such dependencies can undermine their digital sovereignty.

Bio

Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville is a full professor at the Institute of Informatics (INF) of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil. He served as the president of the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) from 2015 to 2019 and, starting in April 2025, will assume the role of CEO of the Brazilian National Research and Education Network (RNP). Lisandro holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UFRGS (2001) and has held prominent positions such as Chair of IEEE ComSoc’s Committee on Network Operations and Management (CNOM), Director for Latin America of IEEE ComSoc, and Co-Chair of the IETF’s Network Management Research Group (NMRG). His research focuses on network and service management, with an emphasis on Internet centralization, digital sovereignty, network programmability, and intent-based networking.

Connected and Public, or can it be private?

Sandra Julieta Rueda Rodríguez

Current and emerging technologies facilitate the collection, storage, and processing of massive amounts of data and allow for the improvement of existing products, the development of new ideas, and the creation of new products. However, companies have taken this possibility to the limit, collecting and processing large amounts of data, including personal data, and postponing the analysis to meet the privacy needs of users and the associated rules and laws, although understanding and complying with data privacy needs and laws is a responsibility that should not be evaded.

Over the last few years, our vision of privacy has changed, and as a consequence, organizations must also change and adjust. In this conference, the keynote will offer a vision of the evolution of the meaning of privacy, the new challenges and solutions, and how we can use technology to build novel products that handle privacy appropriately.

Bio

Associate Professor and current Director of the Master’s Degree in Information Security in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia.
M.Sc. in Systems and Computer Engineering from the Universidad de los Andes. Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University, United States.

Her research areas include software systems security, analysis and automatic generation of access control policies, security in emerging platforms (IoT, Software-defined Networks, Network Function Virtualization) and mobile.

The Computing Continuum: Beyond Cloud and Edge Intelligence

Luiz Fernando Bittencourt

With the combination of Iternet of things, edge, and cloud computing, computing services can be scattered over a set of computing resources that encompass everything between users’ devices and, including intermediate computing infrastructure deployed in between. The evolving networking technologies promote enhanced bandwidth and data transmission capacity with lower delays, which enables distributed computing resources to be faced as an entangled, distributed heterogeneous platform.  This continuum of computing capacity can be used to process large amounts of data with reduced response times.
However, creating a seamless distributed computing infrastructure and managing its resources to optimize applications with widely heterogeneous requirements is still a challenge, even after decades of research. The rise of distributed machine learning techniques adds more complexity but also brings additional mechanisms to address this problem. In this talk, I will present an overview of the resource allocation problem, focusing on aspects that can help build an Intelligent Computing Continuum.

Bio

Luiz Bittencourt is an Associate Professor at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Luiz was awarded with the IEEE ComSoc Latin America Young Professional Award in 2013. He acts on the organization of several conferences in the cloud and edge computing topics, and in several technical program committees. He served as associate editor for the IEEE Cloud Computing Magazine, and currently serves as AE for the Computers and Electrical Engineering and the Internet of Things journals, for the Journal of Network and Systems Management, and for IEEE Networking Letters. His main interests are in resource management and scheduling in cloud, edge, and fog computing, and their synergy towards an intelligent computing continuum through distributed machine learning techniques.