3,527 research outputs found
Pay as You Go: A Generic Crypto Tolling Architecture
The imminent pervasive adoption of vehicular communication, based on
dedicated short-range technology (ETSI ITS G5 or IEEE WAVE), 5G, or both, will
foster a richer service ecosystem for vehicular applications. The appearance of
new cryptography based solutions envisaging digital identity and currency
exchange are set to stem new approaches for existing and future challenges.
This paper presents a novel tolling architecture that harnesses the
availability of 5G C-V2X connectivity for open road tolling using smartphones,
IOTA as the digital currency and Hyperledger Indy for identity validation. An
experimental feasibility analysis is used to validate the proposed architecture
for secure, private and convenient electronic toll payment
NeutRAN: An Open RAN Neutral Host Architecture for Zero-Touch RAN and Spectrum Sharing
Obtaining access to exclusive spectrum, cell sites, Radio Access Network
(RAN) equipment, and edge infrastructure imposes major capital expenses to
mobile network operators. A neutral host infrastructure, by which a third-party
company provides RAN services to mobile operators through network
virtualization and slicing techniques, is seen as a promising solution to
decrease these costs. Currently, however, neutral host providers lack automated
and virtualized pipelines for onboarding new tenants and to provide elastic and
on-demand allocation of resources matching operators' requirements. To address
this gap, this paper presents NeutRAN, a zero-touch framework based on the
O-RAN architecture to support applications on neutral hosts and automatic
operator onboarding. NeutRAN builds upon two key components: (i) an
optimization engine to guarantee coverage and to meet quality of service
requirements while accounting for the limited amount of shared spectrum and RAN
nodes, and (ii) a fully virtualized and automated infrastructure that converts
the output of the optimization engine into deployable micro-services to be
executed at RAN nodes and cell sites. NeutRAN was prototyped on an OpenShift
cluster and on a programmable testbed with 4 base stations and 10 users from 3
different tenants. We evaluate its benefits, comparing it to a traditional
license-based RAN where each tenant has dedicated physical and spectrum
resources. We show that NeutRAN can deploy a fully operational neutral
host-based cellular network in around 10 seconds. Experimental results show
that it increases the cumulative network throughput by 2.18x and the per-user
average throughput by 1.73x in networks with shared spectrum blocks of 30 MHz.
NeutRAN provides a 1.77x cumulative throughput gain even when it can only
operate on a shared spectrum block of 10 MHz (one third of the spectrum used in
license-based RANs).Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, 1 table. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing,
August 202
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