Rajat Chaudhary

Data Offloading in 5G-Enabled Software-Defined Vehicular Networks: A Stackelberg-Game-Based Approach

Data offloading using vehicles is one of the most challenging tasks to perform due to the high mobility of vehicles. There are many solutions available for this purpose, but due to the inefficient management of data along with the control decisions, these solutions are not adequate to provide data offloading by making use of the available networks. Moreover, with the advent of 5G and related technologies, there is a need to cope with high speed and traffic congestion in the existing infrastructure used for data offloading. Hence, to make intelligent decisions for data offloading, an SDN-based scheme is presented in this article. In the proposed scheme, an SDNbased controller is designed that makes decisions for data offloading by using the priority manager and load balancer. Using these two managers in SDN-based controllers, traffic routing is managed efficiently even with an increase in the size of the network. Moreover, a single-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game for network selection is also used for data offloading. The proposed scheme is evaluated with respect to several parameters where its performance was found to be superior in comparison to the existing schemes.

Network Service Chaining in Fog and Cloud Computing for the 5G Environment: Data Management and Security Challenges

In the last few years, we have seen an exponential increase in the number of Internet-enabled devices, which has resulted in popularity of fog and cloud computing among end users. End users expect high data rates coupled with secure data access for various applications executed either at the edge (fog computing) or in the core network (cloud computing). However, the bidirectional data flow between the end users and the devices located at either the edge or core may cause congestion at the cloud data centers, which are used mainly for data storage and data analytics. The high mobility of devices (e.g., vehicles) may also pose additional challenges with respect to data availability and processing at the core data centers. Hence, there is a need to have most of the resources available at the edge of the network to ensure the smooth execution of end-user applications. Considering the challenges of future user demands, we present an architecture that integrates cloud and fog computing in the 5G environment that works in collaboration with the advanced technologies such as SDN and NFV with the NSC model. The NSC service model helps to automate the virtual resources by chaining in a series for fast computing in both computing technologies. The proposed architecture also supports data analytics and management with respect to device mobility. Moreover, we also compare the core and edge computing with respect to the type of hypervisors, virtualization, security, and node heterogeneity. By focusing on nodes heterogeneity at the edge or core in the 5G environment, we also present security challenges and possible types of attacks on the data shared between different devices in the 5G environment.

EnergyChain: Enabling Energy Trading for Smart Homes using Blockchains in Smart Grid Ecosystem

The amalgamation of information and communication technologies in power industry has led to a revolution known as smart grid (SG). The energy consumers interact with the power utility using a bidirectional communication channel for energy trading in SG ecosystem. However, the traditional energy trading mechanisms strongly rely on trusted third parties which act as a single point of failure. Therefore, it is important to equip SG with a decentralized and secure energy trading system which can execute contracts and handle negotiations among various trading parties. Hence, in this paper, EnergyChain, a blockchain model for storing and accessing the data generated by smart homes in a secure manner is proposed. EnergyChain works in following phases: 1) a miner node is selected on the basis of power capacity of various smart homes, 2) a block creation and validation scheme is presented, and 3) a transaction handling mechanism is designed for secure energy trading. After evaluation, the superiority of EnergyChain is validated. The results obtained show that EnergyChain outperforms the traditional scheme in terms of communication costs and computation time.