The TNT Laboratory of DITEN-University of Genoa has excellent research experience, developed over a time span of more than 20 years in networking research topics covering Internet technologies and infrastructures.
The main research topics include technologies for the Future Internet, with specific focus on 5G and beyond, edge computing, green networking, programmable networks, software defined networks, network virtualization, IoT and cybersecurity. The Lab staff has been involved in many European projects in FP7 (among others, SatNEx II, NEWCOM, INTERMEDIA, ECONET, TREND and the 3 e-Infrastructure projects GRIDCC, RINGrid, and DORII) and H2020 (ARCADIA, INPUT, TRIANGLE, MATILDA and 5GINDUCE, regarding cloud-native applications and their deployment over virtualized networking infrastructure; ASTRID, GUARD and SPIDER regarding cybersecurity). The Lab has also been collaborating with the largest telecommunication industries in Genoa (Ericsson, Finmeccanica/Leonardo, Hitachi, Esaote). The Lab has been involved in the development of standardization activities within ETSI (European Telecommunication Standard Institute) and ITU (International Telecommunication Union), participating in several Working Items, as well as in specialized task forces of selected ETSI experts (Specialist Task Force -STF) and ITU study groups. In particular, work performed in the ECONET project led to the definition of ETSI Standard (ES) 203 237 - 'Green Abstraction Layer' (GAL), a reference standard for optimizing network equipment consumption, which has more recently been extended to the virtualized environment in both ETSI and ITU.
Over the years, the TNT Lab, in cooperation with the CNIT S2N National Lab, has dedicated continuous attention to the design and development of networking infrastructure in support of the research activity. Currently, it operates a testbed composed by a multi-layered hardware and software facility for the advanced experimentation and demonstration of 5G and beyond, edge and cloud computing technologies. The infrastructure is specifically conceived to host multiple isolated tenant spaces (e.g., as project environments) that can emulate complete 5G network instances, as well as to manage and configure their respective physical/virtual resources. It possesses hardware capabilities to set up 5G network environments, complete with User Equipment (UE), radio/wired access, programmable connectivity, security system and (geo-distributed) computing domains, as well as equipment useful for performance evaluation, such as traffic generators and power monitors. Currently on-boarded Virtual Network Functions (VNFs)
enable 5G mobile radio access networks (RANs), network slices, and a wide range of other services.
The equipment includes 17 servers (700 cores, 2.5TB RAM, local & central SSDs/SAS storage >100TB); 8 highspeed switches (918 ports from 1GbE to 40GbE); 2x 5G NR gNBs, 3x LTE+ eNBs; an Amarisoft 5G gNB; Power monitors, hardware traffic generators, hardware firewalls, various pieces of user equipment (drones, tablets, modems, etc.). Software capababilities include Open-Stack and Kubernetes instances as-a-Service, site-to-site and client-server VPNs.
Università di Genova - Department of Electrical, Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering, and Naval Architect
UNIGE | Genova