Biblio

Metaverse opens up a new social networking paradigm where people can experience a real interactive feeling without physical space constraints. Social interactions are gradually evolving from text combined with pictures and videos to 3-dimensional virtual reality, making the social experience increasingly physical, implying that more metaverse applications with immersive experiences will be developed in the future. However, the increasing data dimensionality and volume for new metaverse applications present a significant challenge in data acquisition, security, and sharing. Furthermore, metaverse applications require high capacity and ultrareliability for the wireless system to guarantee the quality of user experience, which cannot be addressed in the current fifth-generation system. Therefore, reaching the metaverse is dependent on the revolution in the sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication, which is expected to provide low-latency, high-throughput, and secure services. This article provides a comprehensive view of metaverse applications and investigates the fundamental technologies for the 6G toward metaverse.

In this work, we propose a novel framework to identify and mitigate a recently disclosed covert channel scheme exploiting unprotected broadcast messages in cellular MAC layer protocols. Examples of covert channel are used in data exfiltration, remote command-and-control (CnC) and espionage. Responsibly disclosed to GSMA (CVD-2021-0045), the SPAR-ROW covert channel scheme exploits the downlink power of LTE/5G base-stations that broadcast contention resolution identity (CRI) from any anonymous device according to the 3GPP standards. Thus, the SPARROW devices can covertly relay short messages across long-distance which can be potentially harmful to critical infrastructure. The SPARROW schemes can also complement the solutions for long-range M2M applications. This work investigates the security vs. performance trade-off in CRI-based contention resolution mechanisms. Then it offers a rig-orously designed method to randomly obfuscate CRI broadcast in future 5G/6G standards. Compared to CRI length reduction, the proposed method achieves considerable protection against SPARROW exploitation with less impact on the random-access performance as shown in the numerical results.

In this short position paper, we discuss several potential security concerns that can be found at the physical layer of 6th-generation (6G) cellular networks. Discussion on 6G cellular networks is still at its early stage and thus several candidate radio technologies have been proposed but no single technology has yet been finally selected for 6G systems. Among several radio technologies, we focus on three promising ones for 6G physical-layer technologies: reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), Open-RAN (O-RAN), and full-duplex radios. We hope this position paper will spark more active discussion on the security concerns in these new radio technologies.

Network slicing qualitatively transforms network infrastructures such that they have maximum flexibility in the context of ever-changing service requirements. While the agility of cloud native network functions (CNFs) demonstrates significant promise, virtualization and softwarization severely degrade the performance of such network functions. Considerable efforts were expended to improve the performance of virtualized systems, and at this stage 10 Gbps throughput is a real target even for container/VM-based applications. Nonetheless, the current performance of CNFs with state-of-the-art enhancements does not meet the performance requirements of next-generation 6G networks that aim for terabit-class throughput. The present pace of performance enhancements in hardware indicates that straightforward optimization of existing system components has limited possibility of filling the performance gap. As it would be reasonable to expect a single silver-bullet technology to dramatically enhance the ability of CNFs, an organic integration of various data-plane technologies with a comprehensive vision is a potential approach. In this paper, we show a future vision of system architecture for terabit-class CNFs based on effective harmonization of the technologies within the wide-range of network systems consisting of commodity hardware devices. We focus not only on the performance aspect of CNFs but also other pragmatic aspects such as interoperability with the current environment (not clean slate). We also highlight the remaining missing-link technologies revealed by the goal-oriented approach.

The ecosystem of the Internet of Things (IoT) continues growing now and covers more and more fields. One of these areas is the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) which integrates sensors and actuators, business applications, open web applications, multimedia security systems, positioning, and tracking systems. Each of these components creates its own data stream and has its own parameters of the probability distribution when transmitting information packets. One such distribution, specific to the TrumpfTruPrint 1000 IIoT system, is the beta distribution. We described issues of the processing of such a data flow by an agent model of the \$5\textbackslashtextbackslashtimes5\$ NoC switch fabric. The concepts of modern telecommunication networks 5G/6G imply the processing of “small” data in the place of their origin, not excluding the centralized processing of big data. This process, which involves the transmission, distribution, and processing of data, involves a large number of devices: routers, multiprocessor systems, multi-core systems, etc. We assumed that the data stream is processed by a device with the network structure, such as NoC, and goes to its built-in router. We carried out a study how the average queues of the \$5\textbackslashtextbackslashtimes5\$ router change with changes in the parameters of a data stream that has a beta distribution.

The performance prediction of user equipment (UE) metrics has many applications in the 5G era and beyond. For instance, throughput prediction can improve carrier selection, adaptive video streaming's quality of experience (QoE), and traffic latency. Many studies suggest distributed learning algorithms (e.g., federated learning (FL)) for this purpose. However, in a multi-tier design, features are measured in different tiers, e.g., UE tier, and gNodeB (gNB) tier. On one hand, neglecting the measurements in one tier results in inaccurate predictions. On the other hand, transmitting the data from one tier to another improves the prediction performance at the expense of increasing network overhead and privacy risks. In this paper, we propose cascaded FL to enhance UE throughput prediction with minimum network footprint and privacy ramifications (if any). The idea is to introduce feedback to conventional FL, in multi-tier architectures. Although we use cascaded FL for UE prediction tasks, the idea is rather general and can be used for many prediction problems in multi-tier architectures, such as cellular networks. We evaluate the performance of cascaded FL by detailed and 3GPP compliant simulations of London's city center. Our simulations show that the proposed cascaded FL can achieve up to 54% improvement over conventional FL in the normalized gain, at the cost of 1.8 MB (without quantization) and no cost with quantization.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is expected to play a key role in the design phase of next generation cellular networks. As 5G is being implemented and 6G is just in the conceptualization stage, it is increasingly clear that AI will be essential to manage the ever-growing complexity of the network. However, AI models will not only be required to deliver high levels of performance, but also high levels of explainability. In this paper we show how fuzzy models may be well suited to address this challenge. We compare fuzzy and classical decision tree models with a Random Forest (RF) classifier on a Quality of Experience classification dataset. The comparison suggests that, in our setting, fuzzy decision trees are easier to interpret and perform comparably or even better than classical ones in identifying stall events in a video streaming application. The accuracy drop with respect to RF classifier, which is considered to be a black-box ensemble model, is counterbalanced by a significant gain in terms of explainability.

The use of wireless connectivity has increased exponentially in recent years. Fifth generation (5G) communications will soon be deployed worldwide. Six-generation (6G) communications vision and planning have begun, and the use of 6G communications is expected to begin in the 2030s. The 6G system has higher capacity, higher data rates, lower latency, higher security and better quality of service (QoS) compared to the 5G system. This paper presents a brief overview on the vision and requirements of 6G wireless communications and networks. Finally, some of the challenges in launching the 6G are also explained.

This paper considers improving the confidentiality of the next generation of wireless communications by using the watermark-based blind physical layer security (WBPLSec) in Visible Light Communications (VLCs). Since the growth of wireless applications and service, the demand for a secure and fast data transfer connection requires new technology solutions capable to ensure the best countermeasure against security attacks. VLC is one of the most promising new wireless communication technology, due to the possibility of using environmental artificial lights as data transfer channel in free-space. On the other hand, VLCs are even inherently susceptible to eavesdropping attacks. This work proposes an innovative scheme in which red, green, blue (RGB) light-emitting-diodes (LEDs) and three color-tuned photo-diodes (PDs) are used to secure a VLC by using a jamming receiver in conjunction with the spread spectrum watermarking technique. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first work that deals with physical layer security on VLC by using RGB LEDs.