Heterogeneous Access Technologies Research Articles

GvdsSQL: Heterogeneous Database Unified Access Technology for Wide-Area Environments

GvdsSQL: Heterogeneous Database Unified Access Technology for Wide-Area Environments

Joint Traffic Offloading and Aging Control in 5G IoT Networks

The widespread adoption of 5G cellular technology will evolve as one of the major drivers for the growth of IoT-based applications. In this paper, we consider a Service Provider (SP) that launches a smart city service based on IoT data readings: in order to serve IoT data collected across different locations, the SP dynamically negotiates and rescales bandwidth and service functions. 5G network slicing functions are key to lease appropriate amount of resources over heterogeneous access technologies and different site types. Also, different infrastructure providers will charge slicing service depending on specific access technology supported across sites and IoT data collection patterns. We introduce a pricing mechanism based on Age of Information (AoI) to reduce the cost of SPs. It provides incentives for devices to smooth traffic by shifting part of the traffic load from highly congested and more expensive locations to lesser charged ones, while meeting QoS requirements of the IoT service. The proposed optimal pricing scheme comprises a two-stage decision process, where the SP determines the pricing of each location and devices schedule uploads of collected data based on the optimal uploading policy. Simulations show that the SP attains consistent cost reductions tuning the trade-off between slicing costs and the AoI of uploaded IoT data.

A Probabilistic Copula-Based Fault Detection Method With TrAdaBoost Strategy for Industrial IoT

With the development of information and technology, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are widely-spread. In the face of heterogeneous network access technologies, IIoT data presents characteristics such as massiveness, heterogeneity and dynamics. In this work, an inductive transfer modeling fault detection method based on the vine copula-based dependence description (VCDD), named TrAdaBoost Vine Copula-Based Dependence Description (TAVCDD), is proposed for fusing the target and source data. Especially, there is too little data in target domain operation condition to establish a good monitoring model. In the modeling process, a generalized local probability (GLP) index is used to set the selection probabilities of samples in the target and source domains. In addition, two adaptive indexes are used to determine the number of training samples in one iteration and the number of iterations. To avoid unbalanced samples between the target and source datasets, an adaptive sample selection strategy called active VCDD (AVCDD) is introduced to explore the underlying distribution of the target sample space and to select the most “informative” samples from the source dataset. The proposed TAVCDD method is compared with six state-of-the-art methods via a numerical example, the Tennessee Eastman process, and the ethylene cracking furnace process.

BSDCE-IoV: Blockchain-Based Secure Data Collection and Exchange Scheme for IoV in 5G Environment

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a network that connects vehicles and their environment: in-built devices, pedestrians, and infrastructure through the Internet using heterogeneous access technologies. During communication between vehicles, roadside units, and control rooms, data confidentiality and privacy are critical issues that require effective measures. Several works have been proposed for securing IoV environments based on vehicles-to-infrastructure authentication; However, some schemes have security vulnerabilities, while others have shown efficiency issues. Due to its decentralization, stability, and transaction tracking capabilities, Blockchain as an emerging technology presents a potential solution for IoV security. This article provides an in-depth examination of the benefits of blockchain for a 5G-based IoV environment. In particular, we propose and evaluate a novel blockchain-based secure data exchange (BSDCE-IoV) scheme based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography algorithm. Our solution is designed to eliminate several potential attacks that pose a threat to the IoV environment. Deep examination using the Real-or-Random oracle model and Scyther tool, in addition to the informal security analysis, validates the scheme regarding security and privacy. The Multi-precision Integer and Rational Arithmetic Cryptographic Library (MIRACL) assesses the computational and communication overhead. Computational and communicative overheads were also evaluated using the Multi-precision Integer and Rational Arithmetic Cryptographic Library (MIRACL). BSDCE-IoV shows higher performance in terms of security, functionality, and time delay than a number of recent selective work in IoV security.

BCSM: Blockchain‐based cooperative spectrum management system for 5G NR‐U and WiFi coexistence in the unlicensed band

The licensed band is crowded and suffers from immense mobile data traffic growth, which exceeded 58 exabytes per month in 5 years. Meanwhile, a significant portion of the unlicensed band is underutilized and not coordinated efficiently. Experiments in some urban areas of the world have shown that only 5% of the unlicensed 5 GHz band is being used. 5G NR-U technology supports 5G networks in the unlicensed band to alleviate the traffic congestion and boosts 5G networks capacity. Different heterogeneous network access technologies already use the unlicensed band. Consequently, 5G NR-U networks will operate in the proximity of the other coexisting networks, such as WiFi networks in the 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands. In such environments, assessing the shared spectrum becomes challenging and necessitates adequate protocols to identify idle slots for successful transmissions. Cooperative Spectrum Sensing (CSS) improves the spectrum assessment process, as the decision about the spectrum state is rendered based on the local decisions of multiple sensing nodes. CSS is exploited by integrating it with Blockchain technology to design a decentralized cooperative spectrum management system called: Blockchain-Based Cooperative Spectrum Management (BCSM). The system is attributed to ameliorating 5G NR-U awareness about the neighboring WiFi networks traffic in the unlicensed band. An algorithm is designed for performing distributed cooperative spectrum assessment between the 5G NR-U base stations to profile the WiFi networks traffic in their proximity. To ensure fairness based on the effort expended in assessing the spectrum, a priority-based algorithm is designed for spectrum access scheduling. A proof-of-concept is implemented using private Ethereum Blockchain and NS3 simulator. Finally, the system's accuracy is evaluated empirically along with theoretical security analysis.

User-Centric Resource Scheduling for Dual-Connectivity Communications

In this letter, we study adaptive user-centric resource scheduling management for dual-connectivity (DC) heterogeneous networks with different numbers of user terminals (UTs) and different quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. We present a general framework for adaptively selecting the connection mode between UTs and base stations (BSs) to maximize energy efficiency. Based on this framework, we propose a user-centric resource scheduling algorithm to further increase network capacity, including traffic offloading among heterogeneous access technologies and available resource allocation, which results in less traffic congestion and better QoS of UTs. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can significantly improve energy efficiency and throughput over state-of-the-art schemes.

A novel proactive controller deployment protocol for 5G-enabled software-defined Vehicular Networks

With the vast expansion of data loads across numerous safety and infotainment applications, the software-defined paradigm has become a critical component for 5G-enabled and intelligent vehicular networks. By transforming the network’s rigid hardware devices into programmable units, SDVN offers a broad view of the entire network status and a standard interface between heterogeneous wireless access technologies. However, deploying a centralized control unit carries several problems, such as bottleneck issues and densification issues. A distributed control plane is a potential alternative to a centralized control plane. Still, it poses many questions about the optimal location of local control units and the number of control units required for a given network structure. In this article, we propose an efficient proactive controller deployment and assignment strategy for distributed 5G-enabled software-defined Vehicular Networks based on predictive vehicles’ traffic flow information and communication delays between switch-enabled roadside units. A thorough performance evaluation is conducted under different vehicular network’s mobility scenarios. We assess the performance of the proposed method in terms of communication latency and load on the subsequent control units and their assigned set of switches. The proposed proactive clustering method is compared to different forms of controller placement methods. The results showed that the proposed approach reduced the network’s communication delays while maintaining a balanced distributed load among controllers over the simulation time.

A Secure and Scalable Framework for Blockchain Based Edge Computation Offloading in Social Internet of Vehicles

The integration of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) with social networks has introduced Social IoV (SIoV) that will offer new applications in vehicular networks, e.g., personalized recommendations and route planning. This will be facilitated by heterogeneous access technologies and edge computing to offload tasks from vehicles via secure resource assignment. Thus, each vehicle in SIoV acts as a social subject that manages its own network. SIoV will lead to an explosive growth in network size, and induce issues like scalability and resource discovery. Blockchain is a potential candidate to address these, however, it is not suitable for SIoV with traditional proof-of-work (PoW) consensus. In this paper, we propose a framework that uses a dynamic PoW (dPoW) consensus with a checkpoint mechanism and a resource assignment policy. The dPoW consensus has different mining difficulty levels that change according to the communication traffic, whereas the checkpoint defines an alternative mechanism to generate the next block hash. The assignment policy manages an access control list to mandate the edge modules to securely distribute resources among vehicles. To study the feasibility of our framework, we present a formal security analysis using the Access Control Logic model. For the performance analysis, we use three metrics, i.e., scalability, latency, and security. With these analyses, we demonstrate that our framework offers enhanced security and can scale with a minimal increase in computation overhead. A case study with a comparative analysis is also discussed that evaluates the network dynamics and attests the superior performance of the framework under a real-life vehicular network scenario.

Unsupervised Learning Based Capacity Augmentation in SDN Assisted Wireless Networks

Future tactile internet is likely to have a combination of underlying wired and wireless networks with heterogeneous (legacy and new) access technologies to support diverse applications, e.g., Internet of Things (IoT). In this context, Opportunistic Network (ON) can be an important paradigm in wireless networks to help augment capacity of network for varying internet traffic requirements. Software Defined Networking (SDN), with its logically centralized control plane, is expected to ease implementation of functions, such as radio resource management, across wireless networks with multiple Radio Access Technologies (multi-RAT). Hence, tactile internet is likely to work over an intelligent SDN controlled cloud-based implementation of wired and wireless technologies, and necessitating opportunistic network capacity augmentation with appropriate RAT. This paper presents a novel SDN assisted architecture for futuristic wireless networks which augments network capacity on need basis using unsupervised Machine Learning (ML) to create ON cells with appropriate RAT. Subsequently, we define utilities for the Wireless Network Infrastructure (WNI) and the User Equipment (UE) to evaluate the benefit of creation of ON cells. A game theoretic model is developed to understand the strategies of the two players, i.e., WNI and UE, while using the ON cell resources. The Nash Equilibria (NE) of the game reveal that both UE and WNI gain by co-operating with each other and lose otherwise in utilizing the augmented network capacity. Simulation results also confirm this observation.

ADVICE-LOC: An adaptive vehicle-centric location management scheme for intelligent connected cars

With the recent advances and wide availability of heterogeneous wireless access technologies, inter-vehicle communication systems are expected to culminate in the integration of different wireless networks based on such standards as 5G/6G, coupling with multimedia and sensor networks for the next generation of connected and autonomous vehicles. However, the high mobility nature of vehicles poses intrinsic research challenges on the mobility management and the integration of different wireless technologies. Towards this end, in this paper, we propose an ADaptive VehIcle-CEntric LOCation management protocol (ADVICE-LOC) that utilizes the individual mobility projection of each vehicle and estimates the vehicles’ residual time within each access point. Its ultimate objective is to eliminate the network communication’s overhead, while guaranteeing a high packet delivery ratio and low latency rates. The proposed protocol preemptively adjusts the vehicles’ access registration and location updates based on its movement projections. We present our protocol, and we report on its performance evaluation using an extensive set of experiments using SUMO generated vehicles’ mobility. Our results indicate that the proposed DEVICE-LOC protocol succeed significantly in reducing the communication overhead while sustaining high packet delivery ratio when compared to previous studies.

Survey on blockchain-based applications in internet of vehicles

Vehicular networks are evolving towards a new paradigm, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). With IoV, vehicles should be able to communicate with their environment using heterogeneous access technologies. To make it reality, security, privacy, cooperation and trust establishment in vehicular networks should be considered. Blockchain, a popular distributed ledger technology, could be a way to overcome these challenges. That is why the integration of this technology within vehicular networks is currently under study. The aim of this survey is to provide directions for future work in the area of Blockchain-based vehicular networks. To do so, existing research works aiming to overcome vehicular challenges using the Blockchain technology are presented and compared. Moreover, different requirements related to the deployment of Blockchain-based applications in vehicular networks are identified and analysed. Finally, challenges related to the integration of the Blockchain technology within vehicular networks are discussed.

A Game Theoretic Scheme for Optimal Access Control in Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks

The heterogeneous vehicular networks (HetVNETs), which apply the heterogeneous access technologies ( e.g. , cellular networks and WiFi) complementarily to provide seamless and ubiquitous connections to vehicles, have emerged as a promising and practical paradigm to enable vehicular service applications on the road. However, with different costs in terms of latency time and price, how to optimize the connection along the vehicle’s trip toward the lowest cost represents fundamental challenges. This paper investigates the issue by proposing an optimal access control scheme for vehicles in HetVNETs. In specific, with different access networks, we first model the cost of each vehicle to download the requested content by jointly considering the vehicle’s requirements of the requested content and the features of the available access networks, including conventional vehicle to vehicle communication and the heterogeneous access technologies. A coalition formation game is then introduced to formulate the cooperation among vehicles based on their different interests (contents cached in vehicles) and requests (contents to be downloaded). After forming the coalitions, vehicles in the same coalition can download their requested contents cooperatively by selecting the optimal access network to achieve the minimum costs. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed game approach can lead to the optimal strategy for the vehicle.

Network slicing - enabled RAN management for 5G: Cross layer control based on SDN and SDR

Having already entered the initial phase of the 5th generation networks (5G) era, the network ecosystems have already begun comprising a plethora of coexisting 3GPP and non-3GGP Radio Access Technologies (RATs). Deployment scenarios envision a multi-layer use of macro, micro and femto-cells, where multi-mode end devices, supporting different applications, are served by heterogeneous access technologies. At the same time, this heterogeneous environment results in an abstract pool of resources, moving away from the traditional cell concept and exposing the network administrator with the collective resources in time, frequency, and space. An imperative need is thus created, to obtain an overview of the network and radio conditions in order to respond in an optimal way. The concepts of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Radio (SDR), when applied in a coordinated and sophisticated manner, may prove of utmost importance towards addressing the aforementioned challenges. The concept of network slicing -that enables the creation of several virtual networks with diverse characteristics, on top of common infrastructure- further reinforces the flexibility and dynamicity of the network. To this end, we present and evaluate a Cross Layer Controller (CLC), which acts on top of well-established SDN and SDR technologies, and monitors in real-time the conditions in the radio environment, as well as the transport network traffic, in a unified way; based on this dynamic input, CLC enforces sophisticated, end-to-end resource allocation policies and pairing mechanisms between network slices from different network segments, highlighting thus, the feature of cross layer resource management and dynamic adaptation. The experimentation results demonstrate the considerable gains acquired from the proposed solution.

An IMS-Based Advanced Handoff Scheme for Wi-Fi/LTE Integrated Framework

Integrating heterogeneous access technologies to provide users with always best connected services is one of the primary objectives of fourth-generation wireless technologies. The major research issue in an integrated framework is to enable mobile users with fast and smooth connectivity while switching between heterogeneous access technologies. In this paper, an integration framework for Wireless Fidelity/Long-Term Evolution access technologies is presented with IP Multimedia Subsystem for service provisioning. An inter-domain handoff scheme called SIP advanced handoff is proposed which utilizes improved Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Mobile IPv6 with a multilayer approach which enables fast and smooth connectivity with minimized handoff latency and improved throughput. A simulation is carried out using NS2, and the performance characteristics are studied. The measured handoff performance metrics reveal that successful video session handoffs are achieved with acceptable quality of services levels and further that the proposed scheme shows better performance than the conventional scheme.

Mobility management on 5G Vehicular Cloud Computing systems

Fifth generation (5G) Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) systems use heterogeneous network access technologies to fulfill the requirements of modern services. Multiple services with different Quality of Service (QoS) constraints could be available in each vehicle, while at the same time, user requirements and provider policies must be addressed. Therefore, the design of efficient Vertical Handover (VHO) management schemes for 5G-VCC infrastructures is needed. In this paper, a novel VHO management scheme for 5G-VCC systems is proposed. Whenever the user satisfaction grade becomes less than a predefined threshold, VHO is initiated and network selection is performed, considering the velocity of the vehicle, network characteristic criteria such as throughput, delay, jitter and packet loss, as well as provider policy criteria such as service reliability, security and price. The proposed scheme uses linguistic values for VHO criteria attributes represented by Interval Valued Pentagonal Fuzzy Numbers (IVPFNs) to express the information using membership intervals. The VHO scheme is applied to a 5G-VCC system which includes 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) and IEEE 802.16 Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) Macrocells and Femtocells, as well as IEEE 802.11p Wireless Access for Vehicular Environment (WAVE) Road Side Units (RSUs). Performance evaluation shows that the suggested method ensures the Always Best Connection (ABC) principle, while at the same time outperforms existing VHO management schemes.

QoE-Based Resource Allocation for Heterogeneous Multi-Radio Communication in Software-Defined Vehicle Networks

Recently, vehicle to everything (V2X) communications have drawn a significant amount of attention. Emerging V2X applications demand the efficient utilization of heterogeneous access technologies, such as long-term evolution (LTE), Wi-Fi, and dedicated short-range communications. This work first develops a software-defined networking-based application-layer scheme to exploit the available bandwidth from the LTE and Wi-Fi networks in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. The newly proposed scheme utilizes the vehicles’ states information to obtain an optimal association of the vehicles with different access points for maximizing the system’s quality of experience (QoE) of all cars. We then incorporate the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications to further improve performance when some users’ V2I QoEs are not satisfactory. A heuristic solution that jointly determines the resource allocation as well as V2I and V2V connections are derived. The proposed schemes are evaluated in NS-3 to illustrate their good performance and low computational complexity.

Software-Defined Vehicular Networks: Architecture, Algorithms, and Applications: Part 2

The articles in this special section focus on software-defined radio in vehicular networks. Due to the random vehicle mobility and varying communication environment, an integrated vehicular network comprising heterogeneous access technologies (DSRC, WiFi, 4G/LTE, 5G, etc.) will be indispensable to provide ubiquitous mobile coverage. Although heterogeneous networking has been extensively studied in different contexts, the salient features of vehicular communications, fast mobility) have brought new challenges and led to fundamental and interesting research issues, such as how to flexibly configure and efficiently conduct resource allocation, how to enable interoperation among multiple coexisting networks, and how to effectively accommodate a large number of traveling users with various kinds of smart devices.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Inventive Network Structures for Next Generation Wireless Personal Systems

Welcome to the Special Issue of the Wireless Personal Communication Journal on Inventive Network Structures for Next Generation Wireless Personal Systems. We have received a large number of wireless personal communication-related submissions to the journal. Wireless personal communication needs are extending beyond its limitations by gradually incorporating a wide range of challenging services and applications. The tremendous growth of wireless personal communication devices and heterogeneous access technologies provides uninterrupted services to both mobile and static users. The integration of localized interoperability network structure with seamless access between various vendors still poses significant technical challenges. Most of existing network architectures follow the neighbor aware architecture information exchange, but current wireless technology need new dynamic architecture/routing techniques to scalable in small geographical areas and rely on different metrics. This special issue addresses the applicability of various technologies with emphasis on wireless applications. These integrated network environments require innovative computing strategies to exploit the communication opportunity. The contributions of this special issue covered the high-quality theoretical as well as practical works on a wide range of wireless issues. The contributed papers mainly focus on performance improvements of wireless networks. The contributed papers have been divided into three categories. The first category contains papers that deal with the performance improvements of wireless networks. The second group of papers in this issue deals with mobility in wireless systems.

Quality of service provision and capacity expansion through extended‐DSA for 5G

Abstract5G systems are expected to advance on a number of aspects compared with current systems, for example, providing a 1000 times higher capacity, a much lower latency and improved quality of user experience. This paper presents the vision and approach followed by the H2020 project SPEED‐5G. The approach is based on densification of small cells, exploitation of Multi‐RAT, development of new resource management techniques and a more efficient use of spectrum. A novel 5G system architecture is proposed based on the Network Slicing paradigm, which enables a highly flexible, scalable and backwards compatible architecture. A core aspect is the definition of a new MAC layer that facilitates Multi‐RAT access and allows prioritising and allocating traffic across heterogeneous access technologies. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Towards user-centric operation in 5G networks

There are three pillars that characterize the new 5G revolution, namely, the use of heterogeneous wireless access technologies conforming an ultra-dense network, the software-driven flexibility of this network, and the simplified and user-centric operation and management of the system. This next-generation network operation and management shall be based on the usage of Big Data Analytics techniques to monitor the end-user quality of experience through direct measures of the network. This paper describes the Astellia approach towards this network revolution and presents some results on the performance of quality estimation techniques in current cellular networks. Thanks to the use of this approach, operators may fill the gap of knowledge between network key performance indicators and user experience. This way, they can operate in a proactive manner and have actual measurements of the users’ experience, which leads to a fairer judgement of the users’ complaints.