Mobility management in 5G heterogeneous networks

In recent years, mobile data traffic has increased exponentially as a result of widespread popularity and uptake of portable devices, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops. This growth has placed enormous stress on network service providers who are committed to offering the best quality of service to consumer groups. Consequently, telecommunication engineers are investigating innovative solutions to accommodate the additional load offered by growing numbers of mobile users. The fifth generation (5G) of wireless communication standard is expected to provide numerous innovative solutions to meet the growing demand of consumer groups. Accordingly the ultimate goal is to achieve several key technological milestones including up to 1000 times higher wireless area capacity and a significant cut in power consumption. Massive deployment of small cells is likely to be a key innovation in 5G, which enables frequent frequency reuse and higher data rates. Small cells, however, present a major challenge for nodes moving at vehicular speeds. This is because the smaller coverage areas of small cells result in frequent handover, which leads to lower throughput and longer delay. In this thesis, a new mobility management technique is introduced that reduces the number of handovers in a 5G heterogeneous network. This research also investigates techniques to accommodate low latency applications in nodes moving at vehicular speeds

Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review

Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today. Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain, and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint. Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication management as well as policy for animal welfare

Identification of misbehavior detection solutions and risk scenarios in advanced connected and automated driving scenarios

The inclusion of 5G cellular communication system into vehicles, combined with other connected-vehicle technology, such as sensors and cameras, makes connected and advanced vehicles a promising application in the Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems. One of the most challenging task is to provide resilience against misbehavior i.e., against vehicles that intentionally disseminate false information to deceive receivers and induce them to manoeuvre incorrectly or even dangerously. This calls for misbehaviour detection mechanisms, whose purpose is to analyze information semantics to detect and filter attacks. As a result, data correctness and integrity are ensured. Misbehaviour and its detection are rather new concepts in the literature; there is a lack of methods that leverage the available information to prove its trustworthiness. This is mainly because misbehaviour techniques come with several flavours and have different unpredictable purposes, therefore providing precise guidelines is rather ambitious. Moreover, dataset to test detection schemes are rare to find and inconvenient to customize and adapt according to needs. This work presents a misbehaviour detection scheme that exploits information shared between vehicles and received signal properties to investigate the behaviour of transmitters. Differently from most available solutions, this is based on the data of the on-board own resources of the vehicle. Computational effort and resources required are minor concerns, and concurrently time efficiency is gained. Also, the project addresses three different types of attack to show that detecting misbehaviour methods are more vulnerable to some profile of attacker than others. Moreover, a rich dataset was set up to test the scheme. The dataset was created according to the latest standardised evaluation methodologies and provides a valuable starting point for any further development and research

5G: 2020 and Beyond

The future society would be ushered in a new communication era with the emergence of 5G. 5G would be significantly different, especially, in terms of architecture and operation in comparison with the previous communication generations (4G, 3G...). This book discusses the various aspects of the architecture, operation, possible challenges, and mechanisms to overcome them. Further, it supports users? interac- tion through communication devices relying on Human Bond Communication and COmmunication-NAvigation- SENsing- SErvices (CONASENSE).Topics broadly covered in this book are; • Wireless Innovative System for Dynamically Operating Mega Communications (WISDOM)• Millimeter Waves and Spectrum Management• Cyber Security• Device to Device Communicatio

A Comprehensive Overview on 5G-and-Beyond Networks with UAVs: From Communications to Sensing and Intelligence

Due to the advancements in cellular technologies and the dense deployment of cellular infrastructure, integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond cellular networks is a promising solution to achieve safe UAV operation as well as enabling diversified applications with mission-specific payload data delivery. In particular, 5G networks need to support three typical usage scenarios, namely, enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine-type communications (mMTC). On the one hand, UAVs can be leveraged as cost-effective aerial platforms to provide ground users with enhanced communication services by exploiting their high cruising altitude and controllable maneuverability in three-dimensional (3D) space. On the other hand, providing such communication services simultaneously for both UAV and ground users poses new challenges due to the need for ubiquitous 3D signal coverage as well as the strong air-ground network interference. Besides the requirement of high-performance wireless communications, the ability to support effective and efficient sensing as well as network intelligence is also essential for 5G-and-beyond 3D heterogeneous wireless networks with coexisting aerial and ground users. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the latest research efforts on integrating UAVs into cellular networks, with an emphasis on how to exploit advanced techniques (e.g., intelligent reflecting surface, short packet transmission, energy harvesting, joint communication and radar sensing, and edge intelligence) to meet the diversified service requirements of next-generation wireless systems. Moreover, we highlight important directions for further investigation in future work.Comment: Accepted by IEEE JSA