European Telecommunications Standards Institute Research Articles

Medical Data in Wireless Body Area Networks: Device Authentication Techniques and Threat Mitigation Strategies Based on a Token-Based Communication Approach

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), low power, and short-range wireless communication in a near-body area provide advantages, particularly in the medical and healthcare sector: (i) they enable continuous monitoring of patients and (ii) the recording and correlation of physical and biological information. Along with the utilization and integration of these (sensitive) private and personal data, there are substantial requirements concerning security and privacy, as well as protection during processing and transmission. Contrary to the star topology frequently used in various standards, the overall concept of a novel low-data rate token-based WBAN framework is proposed. This work further comprises the evaluation of strategies for handling medical data with WBANs and emphasizes the importance and necessity of encryption and security strategies in the context of sensitive information. Furthermore, this work considers the recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), which are opening up opportunities for enhancing cyber resilience, but on the other hand, also new attack vectors. Moreover, the implications of targeted regulatory measures, such as the European AI Act, are considered. In contrast to, for instance, the proposed star network topologies of the IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN standard or the Technical Committee (TC) SmartBAN of the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI), the concept of a ring topology is proposed which concatenates information in the form of a ‘data train’ and thus results in faster and more efficient communication. Beyond that, the conductivity of human skin is included in the approach presented to incorporate a supplementary channel. This direct contact requirement not only fortifies the security of the system but also facilitates a reliable means of secure communication, pivotal in maintaining the integrity of sensitive health data. The work identifies different threat models associated with the WBAN system and evaluates potential data vulnerabilities and risks to maximize security. It highlights the crucial balance between security and efficiency in WBANs, using the token-based approach as a case study. Further, it sets a foundation for future healthcare technology advancements, aiming to ensure the secure and efficient integration of patient data.

The participation of civil society in ETSI from the perspective of throughput legitimacy

The use of standards to complement legislation is a prevalent regulatory technique in the EU, including in the telecommunications, information technology and broadcasting sectors, where the ETSI (European Telecommunications Standard Institute) plays a key role. In light of the recent reform of ETSI’s governance model in terms of its inclusiveness, this paper examines the role of societal stakeholders in ETSI’s standard-setting process through the lens of throughput legitimacy. In particular, by relying on desk research and semi-structured interviews conducted in 2020 and 2023, we analyse specific membership and voting rules of ETSI in order to discuss in detail the possibilities of effective participation for the so-called ‘Annex III organisations’. The paper shows that ‘Annex III organisations' have had limited participative possibilities in ETSI’s standard-setting process, entailing both institutional throughput and constructive throughput legitimacy issues. Although not fully, the recent reform of ETSI’s decision-making appears to tackle them to a certain extent.

Service for Deploying Digital Twins of QKD Networks

Quantum technologies promise major advances in different areas. From computation to sensing or telecommunications, quantum implementations could bring significant improvements to these fields, arousing the interest of researchers, companies, and governments. In particular, the deployment of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) networks, which enable the secure dissemination of cryptographic keys to remote application entities following Quantum Mechanics Principles, appears to be one of the most attractive and relevant use cases. Quantum devices and equipment are still in a development phase, making their availability low and their price high, hindering the deployment of physical QKD networks and, therefore, the research and experimentation activities related to this field. In this context, this paper focuses on providing research stakeholders with an open-access testbed where it is feasible to emulate the deployment of QKD networks, thus enabling the execution of experiments and trials, where even potential network attacks can be analyzed, without the quantum physical equipment requirement, nor compromising the integrity of an already built QKD network. The designed solution allows users to automatically deploy, configure, and run a digital twin environment of a QKD network, offering cost-effectiveness and great flexibility in the study of the integration of quantum communications in the current network infrastructures. This solution is aligned with the European Telecommunications Standard Institute (ETSI) standardized application interface for QKD, and is built upon open-source technologies. The feasibility of this solution has been validated throughout several functional trials carried out in the 5G Telefónica Open Network Innovation Centre (5TONIC), verifying the service performance in terms of speed and discarded qubits when generating the quantum keys.

Shortest Path Routing Performance Evaluation over SDN Environment

Static routing has a manual configuration setup system, and the scope of static routing in an SDN network is just for small networks. The solution to this problem rises up with the new technology defined as software-defined networking (SDN) based on shortest path first dynamic routing. SDN has the facility of a centralized controller that smooth the controls and routes computation over a data packet. The performance analysis of SDN networks that have SDN switches connected to the network based on the shortest path first protocol are simulated on Mininet. The POX controller with Mininet programming feature for creating smart topologies was chosen. In this research, the SDN network using Dijkstra’s algorithm, Bellman-Ford algorithm, extended Dijkstra’s algorithm and Floyd Warshall Algorithm were implemented. The quality factors of SDN created by using four algorithms are measured in terms of delay, jitter, latency, packet loss, transmit, received, throughput, and bandwidth based on experimental results and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) data. The performance parameters of SDN network topology created using Dijkstra’s, bellman ford, extended Dijkstra’s, and Floyd Warshall algorithms were compared and the experimental results showed that Bellman-Ford algorithm is better in terms of performance parameters than the other three algorithms.

Deterministic Full-Fiber Service Network for the Fifth-Generation Fixed Network (F5G)

A new communication era characterized by cloud services with high bandwidth and low latency requirements is coming. In this era, fixed networks always provide the highest bandwidth and availability for broadband access users. The concept of the fifth-generation fixed network (F5G), proposed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), is to identify the fixed network generations and facilitate the adoption of wider technical standards. In F5G period, the future fixed network will adapt to the end-to-end optical fiber architecture. F5G connect users with clouds and try its best to provide deterministic service carrying. In the fixed network family, optical transport networks (OTN) have the benefit of high-quality bandwidth provisioning, which will be fundamental infrastructures for F5G. This article focuses on the evolving trend of OTN in the new communication era. Considering the deterministic requirements of cloud services in the F5G era and the key enabling optical service unit (OSU), we propose a concept of deterministic full-fiber service network (D-FSN), which drive OTN to play an important role in F5G. We also outline the D-FSN network architecture and several new key technologies. In addition, as a typical service of F5G, Cloud Virtual Reality (VR) is experimentally demonstrated to verify the performance of D-FSNs. Finally, we look ahead to the possible development trend and challenges of D-FSN.

Performance Evaluation of a Novel Intrusion Detection System in Next Generation Networks

The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) with 5G simply creates additional threat landscape and any network infrastructure is more vulnerable. Severe attacks on networks potentially damage organization reputation, customers or tenants lose confidence, and impacts operational and maintenance cost. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are an effective approach to mitigate threats. We present a novel IDS mechanism in which the unique Radio Frequency (RF) features of IoT devices are used to create a learning model which is later used to identify the illegitimate devices in the network. Leveraging the Deep Autoencoder (DAE), the existing steady-state feature extraction is generalized. The performance evaluation is conducted using a real data set from different aspects including the mobility of the nodes. The proposed IDS is broken down into pluggable virtual network function (VNF) components and its evaluation is presented for its integration into the 5G network slicing ecosystem from the perspective of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) standards. A Proof of Concept (PoC) is presented using ETSI Open Source NFV Management and Orchestration (OSM-MANO) test bed, deployed on AWS cloud systems, to show how the proposed approach would fit in with a real-life MANO.

Confidentiality-preserving machine learning algorithms for soft-failure detection in optical communication networks

Automated fault management is at the forefront of next-generation optical communication networks. The increase in complexity of modern networks has triggered the need for programmable and software-driven architectures to support the operation of agile and self-managed systems. In these scenarios, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute zero-touch network and service management approach is imperative. The need for machine learning algorithms to process the large volume of telemetry data brings safety concerns as distributed cloud-computing solutions become the preferred approach for deploying reliable communication network automation. This paper’s contribution is twofold. First, we propose a simple yet effective method to guarantee the confidentiality of the telemetry data based on feature scrambling. The method allows the operation of third-party computational services without direct access to the full content of the collected data. Additionally, the effectiveness of four unsupervised machine learning algorithms for soft-failure detection is evaluated when applied to the scrambled telemetry data. The methods are based on factor analysis, principal component analysis, nonlinear principal component analysis, and singular value decomposition. Most dimensionality reduction algorithms have the common property that they can maintain similar levels of fault classification performance while hiding the data structure from unauthorized access. Evaluations of the proposed algorithms demonstrate this capability.

Analysis of Co-Channel Coexistence Mitigation Methods Applied to IEEE 802.11p and 5G NR-V2X Sidelink.

Direct communication between vehicles and surrounding objects, called vehicle-to-everything (V2X), is ready for the market and promises to raise the level of safety and comfort while driving. To this aim, specific bands have been reserved in some countries worldwide and different wireless technologies have been developed; however, these are not interoperable. Recently, the issue of co-channel coexistence has been raised, leading the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to propose a number of solutions, called mitigation methods, for the coexistence of the IEEE 802.11p based ITS-G5 and the 3GPP fourth generation (4G) long term evolution (LTE)-V2X sidelink. In this work, several of the envisioned alternatives are investigated when adapted to the coexistence of the IEEE 802.11p with its enhancement IEEE 802.11bd and the latest 3GPP standards, i.e., the fifth generation (5G) new radio (NR)-V2X. The results, obtained through an open-source simulator that is shared with the research community for the evaluation of additional proposals, show that the methods called A and C, which require modifications to the standards, improve the transmission range of one or both systems without affecting the other, at least in low-density scenarios.

A Machine-Learning-Based Cyberattack Detector for a Cloud-Based SDN Controller

The rapid evolution of network infrastructure through the softwarization of network elements has led to an exponential increase in the attack surface, thereby increasing the complexity of threat protection. In light of this pressing concern, European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) TeraFlowSDN (TFS), an open-source microservice-based cloud-native Software-Defined Networking (SDN) controller, integrates robust Machine-Learning components to safeguard its network and infrastructure against potential malicious actors. This work presents a comprehensive study of the integration of these Machine-Learning components in a distributed scenario to provide secure end-to-end protection against cyber threats occurring at the packet level of the telecom operator’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) services configured with that feature. To illustrate the effectiveness of this integration, a real-world emerging attack vector (the cryptomining malware attack) is used as a demonstration. Furthermore, to address the pressing challenge of energy consumption in the telecom industry, we harness the full potential of state-of-the-art Green Artificial Intelligence techniques to optimize the size and complexity of Machine-Learning models in order to reduce their energy usage while maintaining their ability to accurately detect potential cyber threats. Additionally, to enhance the integrity and security of TeraFlowSDN’s cybersecurity components, Machine-Learning models are safeguarded from sophisticated adversarial attacks that attempt to deceive them by subtly perturbing input data. To accomplish this goal, Machine-Learning models are retrained with high-quality adversarial examples generated using a Generative Adversarial Network.

Detection and Reporting of Wireless Channel Congestion and Interference in Connected Vehicle Networks

Connected vehicle (CV) wireless networks based on dedicated short-range communications (DSRC), European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) intelligent transportation systems (ITS-G5), and C-V2X technologies are susceptible to interference from both unintentional emitters and non-CV devices that may be authorized to share the same or adjacent bands. Such interference may lead to unreliable communication and disruption of CV services with a particular impact on safety-related applications. Surprisingly, considering the safety-critical nature of CV applications, there is no simple mechanism for detecting congestion or interference in such networks over wide areas. To address this gap, we propose and demonstrate that both interference and congestion in DSRC and ETSI ITS-G5 networks can be detected simply and inexpensively using capabilities that are already incorporated into the IEEE 802.11p standard, specifically the flags and statistics generated mostly in the physical layer (physical layer convergence procedure and physical medium dependent) state machines. Such a capability could be realized through a relatively minor software upgrade but would resolve a longstanding but underappreciated concern that CV networks are vulnerable to both congestion and a variety of short-range interferers but lack the capability to detect or report this. Although our focus was on DSRC and ITS-G5, similar considerations apply to related schemes such as C-V2X.

Feature-Based Vehicle Identification Framework for Optimization of Collective Perception Messages in Vehicular Networks

The world is moving towards a fully connected digital world, where objects produce and consume data, at a sultry pace. Autonomous vehicles will play a key role in bolstering the digitization of the world. These connected vehicles must communicate timely data with their surrounding objects and road participants to fully and accurately understand their environments and eventually operate smoothly. As a result, the hugely exchanged data would scramble the network traffic that, at a given point, would no longer increase the awareness level of the vehicle. In this paper, we propose a vision-based approach to identify connected vehicles and use it to optimize the exchange of collective perception messages (CPMs), in terms of both the CPM generation frequency and the number of generated CPMs. To validate our proposed approach, we created a <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Cartery</small> framework that integrates SUMO, Carla, and OMNeT++. We also compared our solution with both baselines and European Telecommunications Standards Institute solutions, considering three main KPIs: the channel busy ratio, environmental awareness, and the CPM generation frequency. Simulation results show that our proposed solution exhibits the best trade-off between the network load and situational awareness.

Performance Evaluation of CAM Broadcast Message and Vehicle Safe Distance Under Nakagami-m Radio Channel Conditions

Many potentials exist in the 5G era for effectively managing vehicle safety on the road. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) 5G C-V2X standards for Cooperative Aware Messages for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) provide necessary upper-layer requirements for safety message distribution between vehicles using Cooperative Aware Messages (CAM). In addition, the Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile radio technology in Release-14 has two modes of communication, mode 3 and mode 4, to facilitate vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The focus of this study is on vehicle communications in a mode 3 environment, in which the cellular network chooses and manages the radio services utilised by vehicles for direct vehicle-to-vehicle communication. The performance modelling of Safety Avoidance Time (AT) and safety CAM message broadcast for vehicle-to-vehicle communication in LTE C-V2X under the Nakagami-m radio channel, which has two components, LOS and NLOS, is studied in this thesis. Under the Nakagami-m radio channel, the LOS and NLOS components will affect the CAM message disseminating to other vehicles within safe time gaps. Therefore, the aim of this study is to look into the various radio channel characteristics in a vehicle-to-vehicle communication environment that are related to CAM message dissemination and vehicle safe distance, as well as to evaluate the performance of the relationship between PDR, throughput, and transmit power proportional to safe time gaps under the Nakagami-m radio channel with various setting shape factors.

On the Edge of the Deployment: A Survey on Multi-access Edge Computing

Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) attracts much attention from the scientific community due to its scientific, technical, and commercial implications. In particular, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) standard convergence consolidates the discussions around MEC. Still, the existing MEC practical initiatives are incomplete in their majority, hardening or invalidating their effective deployment. To fill this gap, it is essential to understand a series of experimental prototypes, implementations, and deployments. The early implementations can reveal the potential, the limitations, the related technologies, and the development tools for MEC adoption. In this context, this work first brings a discussion on existing MEC initiatives regarding the use cases they target and their vision (i.e., whether they are more network-related or more distributed systems). Second, we survey MEC practical initiatives according to their strategies, including the ETSI MEC standard. Besides, we compare the strategies according to related limitations, impact, and deployment efforts. We also survey the existing tools making MEC systems a reality. Finally, we give hints to issues yet to be addressed in practice. By bringing a better comprehension of MEC initiatives, we believe this survey will help researchers and developers design their own MEC systems or improve and simplify the usability of existing ones.

Rapid prototyping and performance evaluation of ETSI MEC-based applications

The Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) standard of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) will enable context-aware services for users of mobile 4G/5G networks. ETSI MEC application developers need tools to aid the design and the performance evaluation of their apps. During the early stages of deployment, they should be able to evaluate the performance impact of design choices - e.g., what round-trip delay can be expected due to the interplay of computation, communication and service consumption. When a prototype of the app exists, it needs to be tested live, under controllable conditions, to measure key performance indicators. In this paper, we present an open-source framework that allows developers to do all the above. Our framework is based on Simu5G, the OMNeT++ based simulator of 5G (NewRadio) and 4G (LTE) mobile networks. It includes models of ETSI MEC entities (i.e., MEC orchestrator, MEC host, etc.) and provides a standard-compliant RESTful interface towards application endpoints. Moreover, it can interface with external applications, and can also run in real time. Therefore, one can use it as a cradle to run a MEC app live, having underneath both 4G/5G data packet transport and MEC services based on information generated by the underlying emulated radio access network. We describe our framework and present a use-case of an emulated MEC-enabled 5G scenario.

Fifty Years of Fixed Optical Networks Evolution: A Survey of Architectural and Technological Developments in a Layered Approach

Over the past fifty years, telecommunications has transformed, in an unprecedented manner, the way we live, work and communicate. For telecommunications, fixed networks are the one pillar and wireless networks the other. The wireless networks and their generations have been extensively investigated in the literature; however, the fixed networks lack a consistent exploration of their evolution. For this purpose, our motivation is to present a review of the evolution of fixed networks in a holistic manner, from various different perspectives, which can assist engineers and students to understand, in a better way, how broadband networks developed and the main features of the current networking environment. Specifically, in this review, we aim to shed light on the most important technologies, standards and milestones of the fixed networks from various perspectives, such as the service perspective, the networking perspective (both access and core part) and the physical layer perspective. Our study follows the timeline of the five generations of fixed networks defined by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) F5G group and discusses the key achievements and limitations of each generation for each different infrastructure layer and segment, designating the most important issues for the most widely-adopted technologies and standards. Finally, our analysis helps to reveal the technical challenges that need to be addressed by the fixed telecom network community, such as energy efficiency, capacity scaling, cost-efficiency, etc., while also revealing potential future directions.

Design of Electrically Large UHF RFID Near-Field Bidirectional Antenna With AMC-Based Unidirectional Improvement

Two novel multisegment loops coupled ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification near-field (NF) antenna with a uniform and strong magnetic field distribution over an electrically large interrogation zone are designed. Each proposed antenna is composed of eight loops, and the current distribution along the loop is kept in-phase using a segmented line. To further achieve a more uniform magnetic field, the last four loops of the two proposed antennas (ANT 1 and ANT 2) are loaded with parasitic structures. Here, a 100% detection rate is achieved by ANT 1 within an interrogation area of 370×560×105 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> for the bidirectional operation setup. As for ANT2, it is backed by an artificial magnetic conductor to enhance the magnetic field strength and reduce the profile with respect to a configuration with a PEC reflector plane, and it has yielded a 100% detection rate within the interrogation area of 370×560×185 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> for the unidirectional operation setup. The proposed ANT2 can cover the UHF band of China, the Federal Communications Commission band of North America, and European Telecommunication Standards Institute band of Europe.

An Extended Version of the Proportional Adaptive Algorithm Based on Kernel Methods for Channel Identification with Binary Measurements

In recent years, kernel methods have provided an important alternative solution, as they offer a simple way of expanding linear algorithms to cover the non-linear mode as well. In this paper, we propose a novel recursive kernel approach allowing to identify the finite impulse response (FIR) in non-linear systems, with binary value output observations. This approach employs a kernel function to perform implicit data mapping. The transformation is performed by changing the basis of the data In a high-dimensional feature space in which the relations between the different variables become linearized. To assess the performance of the proposed approach, we have compared it with two other algorithms, such as proportionate normalized least-meansquare (PNLMS) and improved PNLMS (IPNLMS). For this purpose, we used three measurable frequency-selective fading radio channels, known as the broadband radio access Network (BRAN C, BRAN D, and BRAN E), which are standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and one theoretical frequency selective channel, known as the Macchi’s channel. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm offers better results, even in high noise environments, and generates a lower mean square error (MSE) compared with PNLMS and IPNLMS.

Hierarchical Distributed Overarching Architecture of Decoupled Federation and Orchestration Frameworks for Multidomain NFV MANOs

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has developed network function virtualization (NFV) management and orchestration (MANO) for operators to enable quick adaptation of deployment and to reduce the management costs of virtual network functions (VNFs). For scalable and flexible management across transport, cloud, and edge infrastructures, the NFV MANO has been extended into multidomain architectures with network-cloud/edge convergence. In this article, a novel hierarchical distributed overarching architecture of decoupled federation and orchestration frameworks for multidomain ETSI-compliant NFV MANOs is proposed. The proposed architecture can minimize overhead costs for the scalable exchange of abstracted vertical service information through hierarchical brokering and can enable flexible federation through distributed binding among multiple domains. The proposed architecture deploys end-to-end services in single and multiple domains for vertical industries, activates their service processes in a holistic way, and enables operational independence with administrative autonomy. This article serves as an important and necessary step toward the cloud-native design and implementation of federation and orchestration frameworks for multidomain NFV MANOs.

Solar radio emission as a disturbance of radiomobile networks

This paper analyses the effects of solar radio emissions in the radiomobile context, for the first time leveraging massive European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) 3rd Generation Partnership Program (3GPP) Minimization of Drive Test (MDT) radio measures produced by 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) terminals and by 4G LTE Base Station cells. A method to study solar noise effects starting from radiomobile 3GPP standard MDT measures is illustrated and correlated with the excellent 10.7 cm (2800 MHz) indicator of solar activity (National Research Council Canada). The effects of solar disturbance on the LTE radio access network for mobile services are analysed, and possible countermeasures are presented from the perspective of radiomobile network evolution to 5G and 6G.

Analysis of LTE-M Adjacent Channel Interference in Rail Transit.

Long Term Evolution-Metro (LTE-M), as a special communication system for train control, has strict requirements on adjacent channel interference (ACI). According to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) protocol of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) standards, this paper presents the required isolation degree for LTE-M systems to resist ACI. Aiming at the scenario of leaky cable transmission and antenna transmission adopted by the underground LTE-M system of the subway, the isolation degree required for LTE-M system deployment is deduced by combining the channel description with the principle of ACI. For the coexistence of a LTE-M system and an adjacent cellular system in a subway ground scenario, the Monte-Carlo (MC) method is used to simulate several conceivable scenarios of the LTE-M system and the adjacent frequency cellular system. In addition, the throughput loss of the LTE-M system is estimated by considering signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR). Simulation results demonstrate that adjacent frequency user equipment (UE) has negligible small interference with the LTE-M underground system when using the leaky cable radiation pattern, whereas for the LTE-M ground system, the main interference comes from the adjacent frequency UE to the LTE-M base station (BS). Finally, interference avoidance solutions are presented, which can be utilized as a reference in the design and deployment of LTE-M systems in the rail transit environment.