Service Competition and Data-Centric Protocols for Internet Access

The Internet evolved in many aspects, from the application to the physical layers. However, the evolution of the Internet access technologies, most visible in dense urban scenarios, is not easily noticeable in sparsely populated and rural areas. In the United States, for example, the FCC identified that 50% of the census blocks have access to up to two broadband providers; however, these providers do not necessarily compete. Additionally, due to the methodology of the study, there is evidence that the number of actual customers without broadband access is higher since the FCC considers the entire block to have broadband if any customer in a block has broadband. Moreover, the average downstream connection bandwidth in the United States is 18.7 Mbps, according to the Akamai State of the Internet report, which places the US in the 10th position in the global rank. It’s worth noting that modern applications such as Ultra High Definition (UHD) video streaming requires a bandwidth of at least 25 Mbps. Newer applications such as virtual reality streaming require at least a 50 Mbps bandwidth. Additionally, urban scenarios are dominated by monopolistic and duopolistic markets, whereby network providers have little incentives to offer innovative services. In this work, we propose an open access network infrastructure along with a novel Internet architecture that allows dynamic economic relationships between users and providers through a marketplace of network services. These economic relationships have a finer granularity than today’s coarse and lengthy contracts, allowing higher competition and promoting innovation in the access market. We develop an agent-based simulator to evaluate our proposed network model and its various competition scenarios. Our simulations show that competition greatly benefits users and applications, creating the necessary incentives for providers to innovate while also benefiting consumers. The trend that resulted in sparsely populated areas lagging of the latest innovations in the access networks is also observed in wireless access networks, where the investments are focused on densely populated areas. Moreover, the rapidly increasing number of mobile devices coupled with the increasingly bandwidth demanding applications are posing a significant challenge to cellular network operators that have to increase OPEX/CAPEX and deal with higher complexity in their networks. The advances in the access technologies that brought higher speeds and lower latency also reduced the area of coverage of cellular base stations. To cope with the increase in traffic, cellular network operators have been deploying more base stations. In addition, cellular providers have adopted “all-you-can-use” price models, which led users to ramp-up their usage, further worsening congestion in the network. To address this issue, we propose a scheme that uses Device-to-Device (D2D) communication along with Information-Centric Networking (ICN) to offload traffic from cellular base stations. Then, we build on this scheme and propose a cross-layer assisted forwarding strategy to enhance communication in the MANET. In D2D communication, users can retrieve content directly from their nearby peers. However, this type of communication poses challenges to the current connection-oriented communication model, as devices can move in and out of the communication range at any time, constantly changing routing state, and nodes are subject to hidden and exposed terminal problems. ICN addresses some of these issues with inherent support for transparent caching and named content retrieval, making the network more resilient to disconnections. Our proposed scheme can offload up to 51.7% of the contents from the backhaul cellular infrastructure when requesting the content from nearby peers first. Finally, we combine the concepts of the marketplace, D2D communication, and ICN to propose a platform for decentralized and opportunistic communication that uses COTS radios to relay packets, extending the reach of the Internet to sparsely populated areas with low cost and without the lengthy contracts from commercial network providers. Our platform can potentially link the remaining part of the population that is not currently connected to the Internet

Service Provisioning in Edge-Cloud Continuum Emerging Applications for Mobile Devices

Disruptive applications for mobile devices can be enhanced by Edge computing facilities. In this context, Edge Computing (EC) is a proposed architecture to meet the mobility requirements imposed by these applications in a wide range of domains, such as the Internet of Things, Immersive Media, and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles. EC architecture aims to introduce computing capabilities in the path between the user and the Cloud to execute tasks closer to where they are consumed, thus mitigating issues related to latency, context awareness, and mobility support. In this survey, we describe which are the leading technologies to support the deployment of EC infrastructure. Thereafter, we discuss the applications that can take advantage of EC and how they were proposed in the literature. Finally, after examining enabling technologies and related applications, we identify some open challenges to fully achieve the potential of EC, and also research opportunities on upcoming paradigms for service provisioning. This survey is a guide to comprehend the recent advances on the provisioning of mobile applications, as well as foresee the expected next stages of evolution for these applications

A comprehensive survey of V2X cybersecurity mechanisms and future research paths

Recent advancements in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication have notably improved existing transport systems by enabling increased connectivity and driving autonomy levels. The remarkable benefits of V2X connectivity come inadvertently with challenges which involve security vulnerabilities and breaches. Addressing security concerns is essential for seamless and safe operation of mission-critical V2X use cases. This paper surveys current literature on V2X security and provides a systematic and comprehensive review of the most relevant security enhancements to date. An in-depth classification of V2X attacks is first performed according to key security and privacy requirements. Our methodology resumes with a taxonomy of security mechanisms based on their proactive/reactive defensive approach, which helps identify strengths and limitations of state-of-the-art countermeasures for V2X attacks. In addition, this paper delves into the potential of emerging security approaches leveraging artificial intelligence tools to meet security objectives. Promising data-driven solutions tailored to tackle security, privacy and trust issues are thoroughly discussed along with new threat vectors introduced inevitably by these enablers. The lessons learned from the detailed review of existing works are also compiled and highlighted. We conclude this survey with a structured synthesis of open challenges and future research directions to foster contributions in this prominent field.This work is supported by the H2020-INSPIRE-5Gplus project (under Grant agreement No. 871808), the ”Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformacion Digital” and the European Union-NextGenerationEU in the frameworks of the ”Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia” and of the ”Mecanismo de Recuperación y Resiliencia” under references TSI-063000-2021-39/40/41, and the CHIST-ERA-17-BDSI-003 FIREMAN project funded by the Spanish National Foundation (Grant PCI2019-103780).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Social, Private, and Trusted Wearable Technology under Cloud-Aided Intermittent Wireless Connectivity

There has been an unprecedented increase in the use of smart devices globally, together with novel forms of communication, computing, and control technologies that have paved the way for a new category of devices, known as high-end wearables. While massive deployments of these objects may improve the lives of people, unauthorized access to the said private equipment and its connectivity is potentially dangerous. Hence, communication enablers together with highly-secure human authentication mechanisms have to be designed.In addition, it is important to understand how human beings, as the primary users, interact with wearable devices on a day-to-day basis; usage should be comfortable, seamless, user-friendly, and mindful of urban dynamics. Usually the connectivity between wearables and the cloud is executed through the user’s more power independent gateway: this will usually be a smartphone, which may have potentially unreliable infrastructure connectivity. In response to these unique challenges, this thesis advocates for the adoption of direct, secure, proximity-based communication enablers enhanced with multi-factor authentication (hereafter refereed to MFA) that can integrate/interact with wearable technology. Their intelligent combination together with the connection establishment automation relying on the device/user social relations would allow to reliably grant or deny access in cases of both stable and intermittent connectivity to the trusted authority running in the cloud.The introduction will list the main communication paradigms, applications, conventional network architectures, and any relevant wearable-specific challenges. Next, the work examines the improved architecture and security enablers for clusterization between wearable gateways with a proximity-based communication as a baseline. Relying on this architecture, the author then elaborates on the social ties potentially overlaying the direct connectivity management in cases of both reliable and unreliable connection to the trusted cloud. The author discusses that social-aware cooperation and trust relations between users and/or the devices themselves are beneficial for the architecture under proposal. Next, the author introduces a protocol suite that enables temporary delegation of personal device use dependent on different connectivity conditions to the cloud.After these discussions, the wearable technology is analyzed as a biometric and behavior data provider for enabling MFA. The conventional approaches of the authentication factor combination strategies are compared with the ‘intelligent’ method proposed further. The assessment finds significant advantages to the developed solution over existing ones.On the practical side, the performance evaluation of existing cryptographic primitives, as part of the experimental work, shows the possibility of developing the experimental methods further on modern wearable devices.In summary, the set of enablers developed here for wearable technology connectivity is aimed at enriching people’s everyday lives in a secure and usable way, in cases when communication to the cloud is not consistently available

A patient agent controlled customized blockchain based framework for internet of things

Although Blockchain implementations have emerged as revolutionary technologies for various industrial applications including cryptocurrencies, they have not been widely deployed to store data streaming from sensors to remote servers in architectures known as Internet of Things. New Blockchain for the Internet of Things models promise secure solutions for eHealth, smart cities, and other applications. These models pave the way for continuous monitoring of patient’s physiological signs with wearable sensors to augment traditional medical practice without recourse to storing data with a trusted authority. However, existing Blockchain algorithms cannot accommodate the huge volumes, security, and privacy requirements of health data. In this thesis, our first contribution is an End-to-End secure eHealth architecture that introduces an intelligent Patient Centric Agent. The Patient Centric Agent executing on dedicated hardware manages the storage and access of streams of sensors generated health data, into a customized Blockchain and other less secure repositories. As IoT devices cannot host Blockchain technology due to their limited memory, power, and computational resources, the Patient Centric Agent coordinates and communicates with a private customized Blockchain on behalf of the wearable devices. While the adoption of a Patient Centric Agent offers solutions for addressing continuous monitoring of patients’ health, dealing with storage, data privacy and network security issues, the architecture is vulnerable to Denial of Services(DoS) and single point of failure attacks. To address this issue, we advance a second contribution; a decentralised eHealth system in which the Patient Centric Agent is replicated at three levels: Sensing Layer, NEAR Processing Layer and FAR Processing Layer. The functionalities of the Patient Centric Agent are customized to manage the tasks of the three levels. Simulations confirm protection of the architecture against DoS attacks. Few patients require all their health data to be stored in Blockchain repositories but instead need to select an appropriate storage medium for each chunk of data by matching their personal needs and preferences with features of candidate storage mediums. Motivated by this context, we advance third contribution; a recommendation model for health data storage that can accommodate patient preferences and make storage decisions rapidly, in real-time, even with streamed data. The mapping between health data features and characteristics of each repository is learned using machine learning. The Blockchain’s capacity to make transactions and store records without central oversight enables its application for IoT networks outside health such as underwater IoT networks where the unattended nature of the nodes threatens their security and privacy. However, underwater IoT differs from ground IoT as acoustics signals are the communication media leading to high propagation delays, high error rates exacerbated by turbulent water currents. Our fourth contribution is a customized Blockchain leveraged framework with the model of Patient-Centric Agent renamed as Smart Agent for securely monitoring underwater IoT. Finally, the smart Agent has been investigated in developing an IoT smart home or cities monitoring framework. The key algorithms underpinning to each contribution have been implemented and analysed using simulators.Doctor of Philosoph