AI-driven, Context-Aware Profiling for 5G and Beyond Networks

In the era of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0, an immense volume of heterogeneous network devices will coexist and contend for shared network resources, in order to satisfy the very challenging IIoT applications, requiring ultra-reliable and ultra-low latency communications. Although novel key enablers, such as Network Slicing, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) have already offered significant advantages towards more efficient and flexible network and resource management approaches, the particular characteristics of IIoT applications pose additional burdens, mainly due to the complex wireless environments, high number of heterogeneous network devices, sensors, user equipments (UEs), etc., which may stochastically demand and contend for the -often scarce -computing and communication resources of industrial environments. To this end, this paper introduces PRIMATE, a novel, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven framework for the profiling of the networking behavior of such UEs, devices, users and things, which is able to operate in conjunction with already standardized or forthcoming, AI-based network resource management processes towards further gains. The novelty and potential of the proposed work lies on the fact that instead of attempting to either predict raw network metrics in a reactive manner, or predict the behavior of specific network entities/devices in an isolated manner, a big data-driven classification approach is introduced, which models the behavior of any network device/user from both a macroscopic, as well as service-specific perspective. The extended evaluation at the last part of this work shows the validity and viability of the proposed framework.This work has been partially supported by EC H2020 5GPPP 5Growth project (Grant 856709)

A Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Energy Efficient Federated Learning in Wireless Communication Networks

Progressing towards a new era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) - enabled wireless networks, concerns regarding the environmental impact of AI have been raised both in industry and academia. Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a key privacy preserving decentralized AI technique. Despite efforts currently being made in FL, its environmental impact is still an open problem. Targeting the minimization of the overall energy consumption of an FL process, we propose the orchestration of computational and communication resources of the involved devices to minimize the total energy required, while guaranteeing a certain performance of the model. To this end, we propose a Soft Actor Critic Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) solution, where a penalty function is introduced during training, penalizing the strategies that violate the constraints of the environment, and ensuring a safe RL process. A device level synchronization method, along with a computationally cost effective FL environment are proposed, with the goal of further reducing the energy consumption and communication overhead. Evaluation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme compared to four state-of-the-art baseline solutions in both static and dynamic environments, achieving a decrease of up to 94% in the total energy consumption.Comment: 27 Pages Single Column, 6 Figures, Submitted for possible publication in the IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking (TGCN). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2306.1423

A Deep Learning-Based Intrusion Detection System for MQTT Enabled IoT

A large number of smart devices in Internet of Things (IoT) environments communicate via different messaging protocols. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a widely used publish–subscribe-based protocol for the communication of sensor or event data. The publish–subscribe strategy makes it more attractive for intruders and thus increases the number of possible attacks over MQTT. In this paper, we proposed a Deep Neural Network (DNN) for intrusion detection in the MQTT-based protocol and also compared its performance with other traditional machine learning (ML) algorithms, such as a Naive Bayes (NB), Random Forest (RF), k-Nearest Neighbour (kNN), Decision Tree (DT), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs). The performance is proved using two different publicly available datasets, including (1) MQTT-IoT-IDS2020 and (2) a dataset with three different types of attacks, such as Man in the Middle (MitM), Intrusion in the network, and Denial of Services (DoS). The MQTT-IoT-IDS2020 contains three abstract-level features, including Uni-Flow, Bi-Flow, and Packet-Flow. The results for the first dataset and binary classification show that the DNN-based model achieved 99.92%, 99.75%, and 94.94% accuracies for Uni-flow, Bi-flow, and Packet-flow, respectively. However, in the case of multi-label classification, these accuracies reduced to 97.08%, 98.12%, and 90.79%, respectively. On the other hand, the proposed DNN model attains the highest accuracy of 97.13% against LSTM and GRUs for the second dataset

A framework for the deployment of self-managing and self-configuring components in autonomic environments

Over the last two decades, the advent of the Internet coupled with the diverse philosophy of networks, formed the basis for a pervasive computing environment. In the latter, the current trend is defined by the concept of autonomic computing and communications, which lies in the introduction of automated functions that enhance the intelligence of existing computing and communication systems. This concept forms a new paradigm of systems with selfware capabilities that will automatically adapt their behavior in relation to the configuration of the drastically changing environment and user preferences. In this context, this paper presents a generic architecture for the design and deployment of self-managing and self-configuring capabilities. In addition, it exploits the dynamic binding and replacement of components with autonomic capabilities. The feasibility aspects of the proposed framework are validated by means of a prototype that demonstrates the operation of plug and play solutions for an adaptable component-based protocol. Performance issues are also discussed. 1

A genetic algorithm approach for service function chain placement in 5G and beyond, virtualized edge networks

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is already considered as a structural enabler of today’s networking technology and particularly the 5th Generation of Broadband and Cellular Networks (5G). NFV provides the means to flexibly and dynamically manage and allocate resources, without being restricted to the hardware limitations of the network/cloud infrastructure. Resource orchestration for specific 5G vertical industries and use case families, such as Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), often introduce very strict requirements in terms of network performance. In such a dynamic environment, the challenge is to efficiently place directed graphs of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), named as SFCs (Service Function Chains), to the underlying network topology and to dynamically allocate the required resources. To this end, this work presents a novel framework, which makes use of a delay and location aware Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based approach, in order to perform optimized sequential SFC placement. Evaluation results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of producing solutions that approximate well the global optimal, as well as achieving low execution time due to the employed GA-based approach and the incorporation of an early stopping criterion. The performance benefits of the proposed framework are evaluated in the context of an extensive set of simulation-based scenarios, under diverse network configurations and scales.This research has been partially funded by EC H2020 5GPPP 5Growth project (Grant number: 856709)

Integrated Management Plane for Policy based End-to-End Reconfiguration Services

In order to address end-to-end reconfigurability, it is important to enable the management of such a complex functionality. Several efforts have been undertaken towards addressing aspects of reconfigurability in various areas and levels ([1], [2], [3]). In this paper we introduce a generic management framework to cope with reconfigurability aspects at all layers (Reconfiguration Management Plane). We also present an enhanced architecture (RCSPM-MOBIVAS) for the support of flexible service provision and reconfiguration control taking into consideration the mapping of Reconfiguration Management Plane functionality into the respective entities of the architecture