PRIVED: a Privacy Model for Heterogeneous Mobile Networks

We propose a network-oriented privacy model (PRIVED) composed by a well defined information model, using events, information sets and relationships to define the conceptual privacy relationships that can occur in the network. We propose formal rules and a network instantiation, using linkability and correlation as the main tools for network applicability. We also use the model to determine the best approaches towards privacy protection in the network, resulting in a vertical/horizontal network privacy dichotomy

Flying mobile edge computing towards 5G and beyond: an overview on current use cases and challenges

The increasing computational capacity of multiple devices, the advent of complex applications, and data generation create new challenges of scalability, ubiquity, and seamless services to meet the most diverse network demands and requirements, such as reliability, latency, battery lifetime. For this reason, the 5th Generation (5G) network comes to mitigate the most diverse challenges inherent to the current dynamic mobile networks and their increasing data rates. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have also been considered as communication relays or mobile base stations to assist mobile users with limited or no available wireless infrastructure. They can provide connections for mobile users in hard-to-reach areas, replacing damaged or overloaded ground infrastructure and working as mobile clouds, providing low but increasing computational power. However, the feasibility of a Flying Edge Computing requires special attention in terms of resource allocation techniques, cooperation with existing ground units and among multiple UAVs, coordination with user mobility, computation efficiency, collision avoidance, and recharging approaches. Thus, the cooperation among UAVs and the current terrestrial Mobile Edge Computing can be relevant in some cases once the computation power of a single UAV might be insufficient. It is important to understand the feasibility of current proposals and establish new approaches that consider the usage of multiple UAVs and recharging approaches. In this paper we discuss the challenges of a 5G extended network through the help of UAVs. The proposed multi-tier architecture employs UAVs with different mobility models, providing support to ground nodes. Moreover, the support of the UAVs as edge nodes will also be evaluated.publishe

Improving VANET Protocols via Network Science

Developing routing protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is a significant challenge in these large, self- organized and distributed networks. We address this challenge by studying VANETs from a network science perspective to develop solutions that act locally but influence the network performance globally. More specifically, we look at snapshots from highway and urban VANETs of different sizes and vehicle densities, and study parameters such as the node degree distribution, the clustering coefficient and the average shortest path length, in order to better understand the networks' structure and compare it to structures commonly found in large real world networks such as small-world and scale-free networks. We then show how to use this information to improve existing VANET protocols. As an illustrative example, it is shown that, by adding new mechanisms that make use of this information, the overhead of the urban vehicular broadcasting (UV-CAST) protocol can be reduced substantially with no significant performance degradation.Comment: Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC), Korea, November 201

FastM: Design and Evaluation of a Fast Mobility Mechanism for Wireless Mesh Networks

Although there is a large volume of work in the literature in terms of mobility approaches for Wireless Mesh Networks, usually these approaches introduce high latency in the handover process and do not support realtime services and applications. Moreover, mobility is decoupled from routing, which leads to inefficiency to both mobility and routing approaches with respect to mobility. In this paper we present a new extension to proactive routing protocols using a fast mobility extension, FastM, with the purpose of increasing handover performance in Wireless Mesh Networks. With this new extension, a new concept is created to integrate information between neighbor wireless mesh routers, managing locations of clients associated to wireless mesh routers in a certain neighborhood, and avoiding packet loss during handover. The proposed mobility approach is able to optimize the handover process without imposing any modifications to the current IEE 802.11 MAC protocol and use unmodified clients. Results show the improved efficiency of the proposed scheme: metrics such as disconnection time, throughput, packet loss and control overhead are largely improved when compared to previous approaches. Moreover, these conclusions apply to mobility scenarios, although mobility decreases the performance of the handover approach, as expected