Pavel Masek

Exploring synergy between communications, caching, and computing in 5G-grade deployments

Decisive progress in 5G mobile technology, fueled by a rapid proliferation of computation- hungry and delay-sensitive services, puts economic pressure on the research community to rethink the fundamentals of underlying networking architectures. Along these lines, the first half of this article offers a first-hand tutorial on the most recent advances in content-centric networking, emerging user applications, as well as enabling system architectures. We establish that while significant progress has been made along the individual vectors of communications, caching, and computing, together with some promising steps in proposing hybrid functionalities, the ultimate synergy behind a fully integrated solution is not nearly well understood. Against this background, the second half of this work carefully brings into perspective additional important factors, such as user mobility patterns, aggressive application requirements, and associated operator deployment capabilities, to conduct comprehensive system-level analysis. Furthermore, supported by a full-fledged practical trial on a live cellular network, our systematic findings reveal the most dominant factors in converged 5G-grade communications, caching, and computing layouts, as well as indicate the natural optimization points for system operators to leverage the maximum available benefits.

Feasibility characterization of cryptographic primitives for constrained (wearable) IoT devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) employs smart devices as its building blocks for developing a ubiquitous communication framework. It thus supports a wide variety of application domains, including public safety, healthcare, education, and public transportation. While offering a novel communication paradigm, IoT finds its requirements closely connected to the security issues. The role of security following the fact that a new type of devices known as wearables constitute an emerging area. This paper delivers an applicability study of the state-of-the-art cryptographic primitives for wearable IoT devices, including the pairing-based cryptography. Pairing-based schemes are well-recognized as fundamental enablers for many advanced cryptographic applications, such as privacy protection and identity-based encryption. To deliver a comprehensive view on the computational power of modern wearable devices (smart phones, watches, and embedded devices), we perform an evaluation of a variety of them utilizing bilinear pairing for real-time communication. In order to deliver a complete picture, the obtained bilinear pairing results are complemented with performance figures for classical cryptography (such as block ciphers, digital signatures, and hash functions). Our findings show that wearable devices of today have the needed potential to efficiently operate with cryptographic primitives in real time. Therefore, we believe that the data provided during this research would shed light on what devices are more suitable for certain cryptographic operations.

Universal smart energy communication platform

Online data collection is crucial for increasing efficiency of energy consumption and reducing environmental impacts. Moreover, utility market liberalization and parallel EC requirements on smart measurement brought new challenges for utility and telecommunication providers. More Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) networks have been proposed with not clear widely accepted solution. Our study investigates feasibility of cost efficient measurement architecture based on already deployed network and home access technologies. Developed system running on the smart home gateway acts as a multi purpose enabler providing a real time smart meter data collection and visualization, but can be used for any home automation services as well.

Analytical Evaluation of D2D Connectivity Potential in 5G Wireless Systems

Constantly growing number of wireless devices leads to the increasing complexity of maintenance and requirements of mobile access services. Following this, the paper discusses perspectives, challenges and services of 5th generation wireless systems, as well as direct device-to-device communication technology, which can provide energy efficient, high throughput and low latency transmission services between end-users. Due to these expected benefits, the part of network traffic between mobile terminals can be transmitted directly between the terminals via established D2D connection without utilizing an infrastructure link. In order to analyse how frequently can be such direct connectivity implemented, it is important to estimate the probability of D2D communication for arbitrary pair of mobile nodes. In this paper, we present the results of the network modelling when the random graph model is used. The model was implemented as a simulation program in C# which generates random graph with a given number of vertexes and creates the minimal spanning tree (mst) by using the Prime’s algorithm. All our result and practical findings are summarized at the end of this manuscript.

A Harmonized Perspective on Transportation Management in Smart Cities: the Novel IoT-Driven Environment for Road Traffic Modeling

The unprecedented growth of today’s cities together with increased population mobility are fueling the avalanche in the numbers of vehicles on the roads. This development led to the new challenges for the traffic management, including the mitigation of road congestion, accidents, and air pollution. Over the last decade, researchers have been focusing their efforts on leveraging the recent advances in sensing, communications, and dynamic adaptive technologies to prepare the deployed road traffic management systems (TMS) for resolving these important challenges in future smart cities. However, the existing solutions may still be insufficient to construct a reliable and secure TMS that is capable of handling the anticipated influx of the population and vehicles in urban areas. Along these lines, this work systematically outlines a perspective on a novel modular environment for traffic modeling, which allows to recreate the examined road networks in their full resemblance. Our developed solution is targeted to incorporate the progress in the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, where low-power, embedded devices integrate as part of a next-generation TMS. To mimic the real traffic conditions, we recreated and evaluated a practical traffic scenario built after a complex road intersection within a large European city.

Implementation of True IoT Vision

Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to become a driver in an emerging era of interconnected world through the advanced connectivity of smart devices, systems, and services. IoT goes beyond a broad range of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication technologies and covers a wide variety of networking protocols. There exist solutions like MQTT or SIP collecting data from sensors, CoAP for constrained devices and networks, or XMPP for interconnecting devices and people. Also there is a plethora of standards and frameworks (OSGi, AllJoyn) bringing closer the paradigm of IoT vision. However, the main constraint of most existing platforms is their limited mutual interoperability. To this end, we provide a comprehensive description of protocols suitable to support the IoT vision. Further, we advocate an alternative approach to already known principles and employ the SIP protocol as a container for M2M data. We provide description of data structures and practical implementation principles of the proposed structures (JSON and Protocol Buffers are discussed in detail) transmitted by SIP as a promising enabler for efficient M2M communication in the IoT world. Our reported findings are based on extensive hands-on experience collected after the development of advanced M2M smart home gateway in cooperation with the operator Telekom Austria Group.

IP home gateway as universal multi-purpose enabler for smart home services

There are many candidates for a communication infrastructure between the smart home gateway and service providers, distribution centers or end-users accessing smart home applications remotely. Optimally the access technology should be already deployed in order to minimize initial investments and in parallel must provide sufficient reliability and security even for critical applications. Therefore, we focused at already deployed platforms which have a strong potential to become the key communication technologies for smart home domain. Furthermore, we investigated the applicability of residential gateway access technology for emerging home automation services. Finally, we developed and demonstrate a middleware solution enabling the “state of technology” IP-based home gateway to serve as a universal multi-purpose enabler for connected home automation systems like alarm systems, smart metering and grid, photo-voltaic energy production systems, etc.ZusammenfassungEs gibt eine Reihe von Möglichkeiten, eine Kommunikationsinfrastruktur zwischen einem Smart Home Gateway, Dienstleistungsanbietern und Verteilnetzbetreibern einzurichten, die gleichzeitig auch den Endbenutzern den Fernzugriff auf Smart Home-Anwendungen erlaubt. Die bevorzugte Zugangstechnologie sollte jedoch idealerweise schon weit verbreitet und verfügbar sein, um Anfangsinvestitionen zu minimieren, und muss parallel dazu auch noch für kritischen Anwendungen ausreichende Zuverlässigkeit und Sicherheit aufweisen. Daher wurde in diesem Beitrag ausschließlich auf bereits in Betrieb befindliche Plattformen mit hohem Potenzial als Schlüsseltechnologien für Smart Home-Kommunikation fokussiert. Darüber hinaus galt es, die technologische Eignung des so genannten „Residential Internet Gateway“ für neue Home Automation-Dienstleistungen zu untersuchen. Letztendlich kann anhand einer konkret entwickelten Middleware-Lösung aufgezeigt werden, dass handelsübliche IP-basierte Internet-Home-Router durchaus nutzbringend als universelle Mehrzweck-Gateways für die Vernetzung und Steuerung von Hausautomationssystemen wie Alarmanlagen, Smart Metering, Smart Grid-Boxen und Photovoltaikanlagen eingesetzt werden können.

User performance gains by data offloading of LTE mobile traffic onto unlicensed IEEE 802.11 links

Today, one of the most engaging challenges for mobile operators is the question how to manage the data traffic in mobile networks which is increasing exponentially; mainly due to the growing popularity of applications for mobile devices. Mobile data offloading represents the idea of cost-efficient technology to release the overloaded parts of RAN in cellular networks. This emerging solution introduces the concept of offloading the mobile data from primary cellular communication technology to the IEEE 802.11 infrastructure with aim to gain extra capacity (higher throughput) and improve the overall network performance and user experience. The strategy what, when and for how long to offload data from one communication system to another is non-trivial and therefore already active research in this domain should continue to find the answers for open questions. This paper addresses two the most discussed solutions for offloading between the LTE cellular network and WiFi when the performance needs/requirements exceed the threshold for providing the services via LTE network under an agreed-upon QoS (Quality of Services). In detail, the implementation of SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) threshold based handover and network throughput based handover solutions following the 3GPP standard for Access Network Discovery and Selection Function framework for WiFi offloading in simulation environment NS-3 is proposed. Our simulation results confirm that the concept when the SNR and throughput thresholds can be used to control the mobile data offloading process.

M2M gateway: The centerpiece of future home

The online collection of information about the consumption of gas, water, electricity and data from other sensors as temperature and humidity sensors or photo-voltaic systems became highly required. At the same time, the market liberalization on smart metering brought new challenges for utility distributors and telecommunication operators. Likewise, online data collection is crucial for increasing efficiency of energy consumption and reducing environmental impact as well. The communication concept which is able to fulfil mentioned requirements is called Internet of Things or Machine-to-Machine. During these days many industry bodies are trying to take a piece of this M2M cake, especially in a home environment. Since such an intelligent house is equipped by many different sensors and home automation systems, it is important to come up with a solution which will be able orchestrate all elements and provide end-users with one single management interface. The smart home gateway is one of possible solutions which enables the communication with various types of devices /sensors and provides common networking features like residential IP router as well. This paper demonstrates the concept of our smart home gateway which acts as a multipurpose enabler and communicates information from connected sensors to the end user through the developed middleware application. Since it is expected that the number of sensors in smart homes will be enormous it is appropriate to optimize the transmission of generated data between sensors and user applications. Therefore, our gateway implements a data aggregation scheme and respects the requirements defined by Home Gateway Initiative.

Implementing secure network-assisted D2D framework in live 3GPP LTE deployment

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication constitutes an emerging network paradigm that promises to unlock decisive capacity gains without the need for expensive cellular resources. However, while deployment of this promising enabler technology in 5G-grade mobile networks is currently underway, the complete understanding of feasible use cases and their respective limitations has not yet been provided in literature. Today, employing D2D connectivity both in human-to-human and machine-to-machine scenarios, the attention of research community focuses on security, privacy, and trust. Inspired by this increasing demand, we provide in this paper a comprehensive summary on our live trial of secure cellular-assisted D2D communication technology within the full-featured 3GPP LTE network deployment. Correspondingly, we describe a novel D2D framework capable of delivering secure direct connectivity even if the managing cellular link is temporarily not available (unreliable), so that communicating devices could continue to exchange confidential data in their private coalitions. To this end, our prototype implementation characterizes the practical capabilities of secure D2D communication in dynamic, urban environments suffering from intermittent 3GPP LTE connectivity.