An introduction of a modular framework for securing 5G networks and beyond

Fifth Generation Mobile Network (5G) is a heterogeneous network in nature, made up of multiple systems and supported by different technologies. It will be supported by network services such as device-to-device (D2D) communications. This will enable the new use cases to provide access to other services within the network and from third-party service providers (SPs). End-users with their user equipment (UE) will be able to access services ubiquitously from multiple SPs that might share infrastructure and security management, whereby implementing security from one domain to another will be a challenge. This highlights a need for a new and effective security approach to address the security of such a complex system. This article proposes a network service security (NSS) modular framework for 5G and beyond that consists of different security levels of the network. It reviews the security issues of D2D communications in 5G, and it is used to address security issues that affect the users and SPs in an integrated and heterogeneous network such as the 5G enabled D2D communications network. The conceptual framework consists of a physical layer, network access, service and D2D security levels. Finally, it recommends security mechanisms to address the security issues at each level of the 5G-enabled D2D communications network

Identifying 5G system enhancements: enabling technologies for multi-service networks

Proceeding of: 2018 IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN)The fifth generation (5G) of mobile and wireless communications networks aims at addressing a diverse set of use cases, services, and applications with a particular focus on enabling new business cases via network slicing. The development of 5G has thus advanced quickly with research projects and standardization efforts resulting in the 5G baseline architecture. Nevertheless, for the realization of native end-to-end (E2E) network slicing, further features and optimizations shall still be introduced. In this paper, we provide a gap analysis of current 5G system (5GS) with respect to some specific enhancements and detail our insights on the enabling innovations that can fill the identified gaps. We will then discuss the essential building blocks and design principles of an evolved 5G baseline architecture capitalizing on the innovations that are being developed.This work has been performed in the framework of the H2020 project 5G-MoNArch co-funded by the EU

A New Load-Balancing Aware Objective Function for RPL’s IoT Networks

The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (RPL) has been recently standardized as the de facto solution for routing in the context of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. RPL, along with other standards, has provided a baseline framework for IoT that has helped advance communications in the world of embedded resource-constrained networks. However, RPL still suffers from issues that may limit its efficiency such as the absence of an efficient load-balancing primitive. In this study, we show how RPL suffers from a load-balancing problem that may harm both the reliability of the protocol and its network lifetime. To address this problem, a novel load-balancing scheme is introduced that significantly enhances the reliability of RPL and fosters the protocol’s efficiency in terms of power consumption

Named Data Networking in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks: State-of-the-Art and Challenges

International audienceInformation-Centric Networking (ICN) has been proposed as one of the future Internet architectures. It is poised to address the challenges faced by today's Internet that include, but not limited to, scalability, addressing, security, and privacy. Furthermore, it also aims at meeting the requirements for new emerging Internet applications. To realize ICN, Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the recent implementations of ICN that provides a suitable communication approach due to its clean slate design and simple communication model. There are a plethora of applications realized through ICN in different domains where data is the focal point of communication. One such domain is Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) realized through Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) where vehicles exchange information and content with each other and with the infrastructure. To date, excellent research results have been yielded in the VANET domain aiming at safe, reliable, and infotainment-rich driving experience. However, due to the dynamic topologies, host-centric model, and ephemeral nature of vehicular communication, various challenges are faced by VANET that hinder the realization of successful vehicular networks and adversely affect the data dissemination, content delivery, and user experiences. To fill these gaps, NDN has been extensively used as underlying communication paradigm for VANET. Inspired by the extensive research results in NDN-based VANET, in this paper, we provide a detailed and systematic review of NDN-driven VANET. More precisely, we investigate the role of NDN in VANET and discuss the feasibility of NDN architecture in VANET environment. Subsequently, we cover in detail, NDN-based naming, routing and forwarding, caching, mobility, and security mechanism for VANET. Furthermore, we discuss the existing standards, solutions, and simulation tools used in NDN-based VANET. Finally, we also identify open challenges and issues faced by NDN-driven VANET and highlight future research directions that should be addressed by the research community

Key Performance Indicators of the Reference 6TiSCH Implementation in Internet-of-Things Scenarios

International audienceTens of thousands of wireless industrial monitoring deployments exist today, logging more than 18 billion operating hours. These solutions have been around for over a decade and are based on standards such as WirelessHART and ISA100.11a to provide performance guarantees to the applications. The new trend in industry deployments is the convergence of operational and information technologies happening through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) paradigm. The challenge is to bridge the performance of these well-proven industrial standards with the interoperability of IP-based systems. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the organization behind most of the technical solutions of the Internet, has produced a set of specifications with this requirement in mind. The output of this effort is the 6TiSCH protocol stack based on open standards, such as those that have played a key role in the Internet's ubiquitous adoption. The standardization of 6TiSCH is done. The state-of-the-art research work focus is on important, but niche, optimizations and performance evaluations of the 6TiSCH stack. This paper takes a different approach-it evaluates the performance of the standards-compliant 6TiSCH solution from the end user point of view. It does so on two experimental testbeds, in typical IoT test scenarios based on a well-defined experimentation methodology. We provide a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) useful for the end user to decide whether the 6TiSCH technology is a good fit performance-wise for a particular use case. We demonstrate reliability of a vanilla open-source implementation of 6TiSCH above 99.99%, upstream latency on the order of a second and radio duty cycle well below 1%

5G-MoNArch use case for ETSI ENI: elastic resource management and orchestration

Proceeding of: 2018 IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN)5G networks will grant spectacular improvements of the most relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) while allowing resource multi-tenancy through network slicing. However, the other side of the coin is represented by the huge increase of the management complexity and the need for efficient algorithms for resource orchestration. Therefore, the management and orchestration of the network through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms is considered a promising solution, as it allows to reduce the human interaction (usually expensive and error-prone) and scale to large scenario composed by thousands of slices in heterogeneous environments. In this paper, we provide a review of the current standardization efforts in this field, mostly due to the work performed by the Experiential Network Intelligence (ENI) industry specification group (ISG) within the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). Then, we thoroughly describe an exemplary use case on elastic network management and orchestration through learning solutions proposed by the 5GPPP project 5G-MoNArch and recently approved at ETSI ENI

A Survey of Subscription Privacy on the 5G Radio Interface - The Past, Present and Future

End-user privacy in mobile telephony systems is nowadays of great interest because of the envisaged hyper-connectivity and the potential of the unprecedented services (virtual reality, machine-type communication, vehicle-to-everything, IoT, etc.) being offered by the new 5G system. This paper reviews the state of subscription privacy in 5G systems. As the work on 5G Release 15 -- the first full set of 5G standards -- has recently been completed, this seems to be an appropriate occasion for such a review. The scope of the privacy study undertaken is limited to the wireless part of the 5G system which occurs between the service provider\u27s base station and the subscriber\u27s mobile phone. Although 5G offers better privacy guarantees than its predecessors, this work highlights that there still remain significant issues which need rectifying. We undertook an endeavor to (i) compile the privacy vulnerabilities that already existed in the previous mobile telephony generations. Thereafter, (ii) the privacy improvements offered by the recently finalized 5G standard were aggregated. Consequently, (iii) we were able to highlight privacy issues from previous generations that remain unresolved in 5G Release 15. For completeness, (iv) we also explore new privacy attacks which surfaced after the publication of the 5G standard. To address the identified privacy gaps, we also present future research directions in the form of proposed improvements

A Survey on LoRaWAN Technology: Recent Trends, Opportunities, Simulation Tools and Future Directions

Low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technologies play a pivotal role in IoT applications, owing to their capability to meet the key IoT requirements (e.g., long range, low cost, small data volumes, massive device number, and low energy consumption). Between all obtainable LPWAN technologies, long-range wide-area network (LoRaWAN) technology has attracted much interest from both industry and academia due to networking autonomous architecture and an open standard specification. This paper presents a comparative review of five selected driving LPWAN technologies, including NB-IoT, SigFox, Telensa, Ingenu (RPMA), and LoRa/LoRaWAN. The comparison shows that LoRa/LoRaWAN and SigFox surpass other technologies in terms of device lifetime, network capacity, adaptive data rate, and cost. In contrast, NB-IoT technology excels in latency and quality of service. Furthermore, we present a technical overview of LoRa/LoRaWAN technology by considering its main features, opportunities, and open issues. We also compare the most important simulation tools for investigating and analyzing LoRa/LoRaWAN network performance that has been developed recently. Then, we introduce a comparative evaluation of LoRa simulators to highlight their features. Furthermore, we classify the recent efforts to improve LoRa/LoRaWAN performance in terms of energy consumption, pure data extraction rate, network scalability, network coverage, quality of service, and security. Finally, although we focus more on LoRa/LoRaWAN issues and solutions, we introduce guidance and directions for future research on LPWAN technologies

Leveraging a Publish/Subscribe Fog System to Provide Collision Warnings in Vehicular Networks

[EN] Fog computing, an extension of the Cloud Computing paradigm where routers themselves may provide the virtualisation infrastructure, aims at achieving fluidity when distributing in-network functions, in addition to allowing fast and scalable processing, and exchange of information. In this paper we present a fog computing architecture based on a content island which interconnects sets of things to exchange and process data among themselves or with other content islands. We then present a use case that focuses on a smartphone-based forward collision warning application for a connected vehicle scenario. This application makes use of the optical sensor of smartphones to estimate the distance between the device itself and other vehicles in its field of view. The vehicle travelling directly ahead is identified relying on the information from the GPS, camera, and inter-island communication. Warnings are generated at both content islands, if the driver does not maintain a predefined safe distance towards the vehicle ahead. Experiments performed with the application show that with the developed method, we are able to estimate the distance between vehicles, and the inter-island communication has a very low overhead, resulting in improved performance. On comparing our proposed solution based on edge/fog computing with a cloud-based api, it was observed that our solution outperformed the cloud-based api, thus making us optimistic of the utility of the proposed architectureThis work was partially funding by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Programa Estatal de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad, Proyectos I+D+I 2018 , Spain, under Grant RTI2018-096384-B-I00Patra, S.; Manzoni, P.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Zamora-Mero, WJ.; Cano, J. (2019). Leveraging a Publish/Subscribe Fog System to Provide Collision Warnings in Vehicular Networks. Sensors. 19(18):1-22. https://doi.org/10.3390/s19183852S1221918Vaquero, L. M., & Rodero-Merino, L. (2014). Finding your Way in the Fog. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 44(5), 27-32. doi:10.1145/2677046.2677052MQTT Version 3.1.1 http://docs.oasis-open.org/mqtt/mqtt/v3.1.1/os/mqtt-v3.1.1-os.docSultana, T., & Wahid, K. A. (2019). Choice of Application Layer Protocols for Next Generation Video Surveillance Using Internet of Video Things. IEEE Access, 7, 41607-41624. doi:10.1109/access.2019.2907525Mehmood, F., Ullah, I., Ahmad, S., & Kim, D. (2019). Object detection mechanism based on deep learning algorithm using embedded IoT devices for smart home appliances control in CoT. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing. doi:10.1007/s12652-019-01272-8https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7252Volvo Official Website https://www.volvocars.com/Chang, B. R., Tsai, H. F., & Young, C.-P. (2010). Intelligent data fusion system for predicting vehicle collision warning using vision/GPS sensing. Expert Systems with Applications, 37(3), 2439-2450. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2009.07.036Tan, H.-S., & Huang, J. (2006). DGPS-Based Vehicle-to-Vehicle Cooperative Collision Warning: Engineering Feasibility Viewpoints. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 7(4), 415-428. doi:10.1109/tits.2006.883938Gelernter, D. (1985). Generative communication in Linda. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 7(1), 80-112. doi:10.1145/2363.2433Raspberry Pi Official Website https://www.raspberrypi.org/https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc768Wallace, G. K. (1991). The JPEG still picture compression standard. Communications of the ACM, 34(4), 30-44. doi:10.1145/103085.103089Sauvola, J., & Pietikäinen, M. (2000). Adaptive document image binarization. Pattern Recognition, 33(2), 225-236. doi:10.1016/s0031-3203(99)00055-2Road Safety Authority of Ireland Suggest the Use of Two Second Rule http://www.rotr.ie/Rules_of_the_road.pdfOpenALPR Cloud-API Website https://www.openalpr.com/cloud-api.htmlPatra, S., Calafate, C. T., Cano, J.-C., & Manzoni, P. (2015). An ITS solution providing real-time visual overtaking assistance using smartphones. 2015 IEEE 40th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN). doi:10.1109/lcn.2015.736632

On the Rollout of Network Slicing in Carrier Networks: A Technology Radar

Network slicing is a powerful paradigm for network operators to support use cases with widely diverse requirements atop a common infrastructure. As 5G standards are completed, and commercial solutions mature, operators need to start thinking about how to integrate network slicing capabilities in their assets, so that customer-facing solutions can be made available in their portfolio. This integration is, however, not an easy task, due to the heterogeneity of assets that typically exist in carrier networks. In this regard, 5G commercial networks may consist of a number of domains, each with a different technological pace, and built out of products from multiple vendors, including legacy network devices and functions. These multi-technology, multi-vendor and brownfield features constitute a challenge for the operator, which is required to deploy and operate slices across all these domains in order to satisfy the end-to-end nature of the services hosted by these slices. In this context, the only realistic option for operators is to introduce slicing capabilities progressively, following a phased approach in their roll-out. The purpose of this paper is to precisely help designing this kind of plan, by means of a technology radar. The radar identifies a set of solutions enabling network slicing on the individual domains, and classifies these solutions into four rings, each corresponding to a different timeline: (i) as-is ring, covering today’s slicing solutions; (ii) deploy ring, corresponding to solutions available in the short term; (iii) test ring, considering medium-term solutions; and (iv) explore ring, with solutions expected in the long run. This classification is done based on the technical availability of the solutions, together with the foreseen market demands. The value of this radar lies in its ability to provide a complete view of the slicing landscape with one single snapshot, by linking solutions to information that operators may use for decision making in their individual go-to-market strategies.H2020 European Projects 5G-VINNI (grant agreement No. 815279) and 5G-CLARITY (grant agreement No. 871428)Spanish national project TRUE-5G (PID2019-108713RB-C53