TNSM Searchable Index

Author(s)	Title	Year	Publication	Keywords
Qiru Chen, Xinping Guan, Lei Xu, Yanzhou Zhang, Qimin Xu, Cailian Chen	Knowledge-Aware Schedulability Analysis for Time-Sensitive Networking: A GNN-Based Method	2026	Early Access	Modeling Fluid flow Schedules	Industrial automation is rapidly evolving toward flexible production. This transition requires networks to ensure the deterministic transmission of varying traffic sets across different production stages. Consequently, the system must be capable of rapidly analyzing whether fixed network resources can accommodate all service requirements prior to actual scheduling. While Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) provides the deterministic transmission for such environments, existing schedulability assessments rely on exhaustive scheduling tests. However, the scheduling process is inherently an NP-hard constraint satisfaction problem, whose heavy computational overhead severely limits deployment agility. Therefore, it is critical to develop a method that can rapidly predict the constraint satisfiability of diverse traffic sets without repetitive and time-consuming scheduling. In this work, given the inherent graph-structured nature of network infrastructure and traffic patterns, we design a graph neural network model to explicitly capture complex spatial dependencies. As node attributes, sparse basic traffic features are distilled as expert knowledge and integrated, thereby enhancing prediction accuracy. When a traffic set is deemed unschedulable, we explore the traffic features and links with the greatest impact. Based on this, a feature-driven rerouting strategy is proposed to find a more schedulable traffic behavior. The evaluation results show that the model demonstrates the capability to process thousands of datasets within hundreds of microseconds, while guaranteeing a prediction accuracy of over 90% and an increase in the count in schedulable flows by about 25% compared to the standard Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm baseline.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3724835
Nguyen Quang Hieu, Dinh Thai Hoang, Diep N. Nguyen, Mohammad Abu Alsheikh, Carlos C. N. Kuhn, Yibeltal F. Alem, Ibrahim Radwan	End-to-End Human Pose Reconstruction from Wearable Sensors for 6G Extended Reality Systems	2026	Early Access	Receivers OFDM Quantization (signal)	Full 3D human pose reconstruction is a critical enabler for extended reality (XR) applications in future sixth generation (6G) networks, supporting immersive interactions in gaming, virtual meetings, and remote collaboration. However, achieving accurate pose reconstruction over wireless networks remains challenging due to channel impairments, bit errors, and quantization effects. Existing approaches often assume error-free transmission in indoor settings, limiting their applicability to real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a novel deep learning-based framework for human pose reconstruction over orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The framework introduces a two-stage deep learning receiver: the first stage jointly estimates the wireless channel and decodes OFDM symbols, and the second stage maps the received sensor signals to full 3D body poses. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed neural receiver reduces bit error rate (BER), thus gaining a 5 dB gap at 10−4 BER, compared to the baseline method that employs separate signal detection steps, i.e., least squares channel estimation and linear minimum mean square error equalization. Additionally, our empirical findings show that 8-bit quantization is sufficient for accurate pose reconstruction, achieving a mean squared error of 5×10−4 for reconstructed sensor signals, and reducing joint angular error by 40% for the reconstructed human poses compared to the baseline. The practical feasibility of our framework is demonstrated through validation in an open-source ray tracing simulator incorporating realistic 3D scenes and human models.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3722545
Yuyu Zhao, Siyuan Zhou, Guang Cheng, Yuyang Zhou, Zihan Chen, Wei Zhang	CPRANT: Towards a Computing Power Network Telemetry Architecture Based on Collaborative SRv6 and FPGA Optimization	2026	Early Access	Telemetry Planing Field programmable gate arrays	The emergence of Computing Power Networks (CPN) as critical AI infrastructure poses a key networking challenge: how to obtain visibility across the network into computing and transport resources in real time while minimizing the telemetry overhead on user traffic and control/forwarding devices. This paper introduces CPRANT (Computing Power Networks Telemetry based on SRv6 and FPGA), an FPGA-based plug and play In-Band Network Telemetry (INT) framework that addresses this challenge through a joint hardware and software design. The core innovation lies in using FPGA spatial parallelism to establish physically isolated processing paths for telemetry tasks and forwarding tasks, achieving line rate packet processing with a verified CPN’s forwarding latency of only 15 ns. We propose a novel INT mechanism based on SRv6 that eliminates linear metadata accumulation at each hop in traditional INT via SID reconstruction and time division multiplexing, reusing native SRv6 header space and preserving forwarding compatibility. CPRANT further incorporates adaptive sampling and redundant path elimination algorithms to dynamically optimize telemetry processes, demonstrating a 52.4% reduction in bandwidth and a 45.9% reduction in the load of the control plane. Experimental validation confirms the operational efficiency of CPRANT, maintaining high information fidelity (effective telemetry information yield > 0.85) and comprehensive coverage (path overlap < 4%) with a lightweight resource footprint (< 60 MB). This solution provides a scalable telemetry paradigm for mission critical CPN applications, particularly in large scale AI deployment scenarios requiring monitoring that does not disrupt services.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3722680
Xili Wan, Fuliang Yang, Xinjie Guan, Zuwei Zhang, Yihan Ji	Joint Dataflow and In-Network Computing Resource Optimization for Dynamic LEO Satellite Systems	2026	Early Access	Satellites Information rates Throughput	Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations are emerging as an important platform for distributed dataflow execution in space-terrestrial integrated networks. Existing studies largely treat routing and processing separately, while next-generation LEO systems are expected to process and transform data in transit by leveraging on-board computing and software-defined infrastructures. However, jointly optimizing routing and in-network processing in dynamic LEO satellite networks remains challenging because of time-varying connectivity, limited on-board resources, and bandwidth constraints. In this paper, we formulate the Dynamic LEO In-network Processing Dataflow Optimization (DLIDO) problem, which aims to maximize the throughput of processed dataflows by jointly optimizing routing paths and processing-resource allocation over a dynamic flow network. We present an approximation algorithm with a proven (1−ϵ) approximation guarantee for 0 < ϵ ≤ 0.5, providing near-optimal throughput under dynamic processing and communication constraints. To further improve efficiency and practicality, we develop a 2-walk based iterative heuristic algorithm that substantially reduces runtime while maintaining strong empirical performance, and in some regimes provably optimal behavior. Extensive evaluations on realistic LEO network topologies show that both algorithms significantly outperform existing approaches in throughput and adaptability, highlighting a promising direction for dataflow-aware scheduling and optimization in dynamic satellite systems.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3722902
Shuang Zheng, Xing Zhang, Michael Sheng, Haixu Wang, Wenbo Wang	Beam Hopping Low Earth Orbit Satellite Resource Allocation for Differentiated Services and Robustness Analysis under Model Attacks	2026	Early Access	Beams Satellites Resource management	Beam hopping (BH)-enabled Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites play a pivotal role in next-generation communication networks, providing global coverage, improving spectrum efficiency, and supporting flexible adaptation to heterogeneous service demands. To fully exploit these capabilities, artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are increasingly employed for dynamic resource allocation and power management. However, limited onboard resources and potential adversarial perturbations pose challenges to both efficiency and robustness. To address these issues, we leverage digital twin technology to accurately capture the spatio-temporal dynamics of user–satellite visibility, providing precise state information for decision-making. Building on this, we formulate a joint optimization framework for BH scheduling and power allocation as a Markov Decision Process and propose the BRIDGE—BH with Reinforcement learning incorporating Integrated Dirichlet and Gumbel-TopK Exploration—which integrates a quality of service (QoS)-driven subchannel scheduling mechanism to ensure efficient and differentiated resource allocation. The model’s robustness is systematically evaluated under three classical adversarial attacks. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior energy efficiency, service throughput, and fairness, while the robustness analysis shows stable performance under the considered bounded adversarial perturbations.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3710750
Didik Sudyana, Wong Yu Xuan, Laurens D’hooge, Ren-Hung Hwang, Narn-Yih Lee, Pei-Yin Chen, Tim Wauters, Bruno Volckaert, Filip De Turck	Bridging Training–Deployment Gap in Intrusion Detection with Source-Free Domain Adaptation	2026	Early Access	Modeling Internet of Things Fluid flow	Machine learning (ML)–based intrusion detection systems (IDS) frequently degrade when deployed across heterogeneous networks due to domain shifts in traffic composition and monitoring configurations. Conventional domain adaptation (DA) methods mitigate this issue by aligning source and target distributions, but they often rely on retaining source-domain data at deployment—an impractical requirement that undermines operational scalability and reusability. To address this gap, we propose TRANSFA-IDS (Transformer Source-Free Adaptation for IDS), a lightweight source-free adaptation framework that recalibrates a source-trained IDS using only target traffic data. TRANSFA-IDS converts tabular flow records into structured RGB image embeddings and employs a compact Vision Transformer with a Deep Support Vector Data Description (Deep-SVDD) head to learn transferable normal representations. At deployment, adaptation is performed by fine-tuning only the last transformer block on a small target buffer, realigning target representations without retraining or access to source data. Experiments on cross-dataset transfer between CIC-IDS-2018 and UNSW-NB15 show that TRANSFA-IDS achieves AUROC of 0.9177 and 0.9071 in the two transfer directions, reduces target-domain benign false positives by over 60% relative to the same source-pretrained model deployed without source-free adaptation, and adapts substantially faster than supervised and unsupervised DA baselines while using at most 20% of the target-domain data. These results indicate that source-free adaptation can achieve both strong detection performance and a practical deployment-oriented design, with cross-benchmark evidence of scalable adaptation across heterogeneous network environments.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3723866
Lin Cong, Junru Cai, Ying Wang, Peng Yu, Xuesong Qiu, Shaoyong Guo, Ao Xiong	Dynamic E2E Channel Orchestration in Metro Transport Network	2026	Early Access	Algorithms Optimization Timing	In the era of 5G and beyond, the hard-isolated channels enabled by time slot cross-connects in metro transport network (MTN) effectively meet the demands of emerging network services for low latency, low jitter, flexible bandwidth, and secure isolation. However, the dynamic arrival and departure of tenant virtual network request (VNRs) lead to resource fragmentation within the MTN transport network, resulting in inefficient resource utilization. To mitigate network resource fragmentation, we formulate the MTN dynamic channel orchestration problem and propose a fragmentation-aware MTN dynamic channel orchestration method. This method comprises two key components: a greedy graph-reconstruction-based channel mapping algorithm and a fragmentation-aware channel reconfiguration algorithm. The former optimizes MTN channel resource allocation to achieve static channel orchestration, while the latter, leveraging a simulated annealing-based channel reconfiguration strategy, dynamically adjusts channel allocations based on the static orchestration results, thereby reducing fragmentation levels. Compared to existing approaches, under varying network load conditions, the proposed channel mapping algorithm reduces the consumption of network time slot resources by 16.3% -20.6%, while the channel reconfiguration algorithm significantly lowers the levels of network fragmentation by 48.7% -79.5%, and reduces the running time by 91.3%–94.2% compared with the baseline.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3723823
Amin Bashiri, Majid Khabbazian	Resilient Onion Messaging in the Lightning Network	2026	Early Access	Probability Joining processes Algorithms	Onion messages (OMs) in the Lightning Network (LN) enable private communication between nodes through onion routing. While they support important functionalities such as static invoices and asynchronous payments, they can also be exploited for spam. To counter this, the Basis of Lightning Technology Specifications (BOLTs) recommend implementing rate limiting on OM forwarding. Limiting the rate, however, opens the door for an adversary to degrade the OM service by flooding the network—anonymously, thanks to onion routing. In this paper, we analyze and quantify the impact of DoS attacks on the OM service. Following the approach suggested in the literature, we study a policy in which per-peer forwarding limits and forwarding-node selection probabilities are proportional to publicly observable channel-capacity weights. Our analysis shows that OMs are most resilient against DoS attacks when the honest nodes’ public-capacity weights are uniformly distributed. However, the distribution of these weights in LN is highly non-uniform, as demonstrated in prior empirical studies and confirmed by our analysis of three network snapshots spanning 2022–2026. To improve resilience under such skewed conditions, we propose restricting forwarding-node selection to a carefully selected subset of nodes. For the evaluated setting l = L = 3, at a common adversarial public-capacity weight of approximately 14.30 BTC—equivalent to about USD 1 million at the reference BTC/USD rate used in our evaluation—the top-target per-connection adversary matches the strong optimal aggregate-budget adversary in each snapshot. Their OM failure probabilities range from 40.9% to 56.7% when the full network is available for forwarding-node selection. Restricting selection to the optimized subsets reduces these probabilities to 3.6%–3.9%, with corresponding analytical upper bounds of 6.2%–6.9%.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3724114
Yidi Zhang, Lanlan Rui, Sining Wang, Jie Zhang, Zhipeng Gao, Xuesong Qiu, Shaoyong Guo	NEKC: Few-shot Anomaly Knowledge Completion for Intelligent Network Management	2026	Early Access	Modeling Knowledge graphs Anomaly detection	Intelligent network operations increasingly rely on structured anomaly knowledge to support anomaly analysis, alert correlation, and root-cause investigation. However, under emerging and few-shot anomaly scenarios, anomaly-related knowledge graphs are often incomplete, which limits their operational value. To address this issue, this paper studies the problem of few-shot anomaly knowledge completion and proposes a Neighbor-Enhanced Knowledge Graph Completion model (NEKC). NEKC employs a similarity-aware neighbor selection mechanism to retain semantically relevant neighbors while introducing diversity constraints to avoid representation bias caused by overly homogeneous neighborhoods. An attention mechanism is further used to dynamically weight neighbor entities, and a Transformer-based encoder is adopted to capture contextual dependencies for task-specific relation representation. To evaluate the proposed method, experiments are conducted on the generic few-shot knowledge graph completion benchmark NELL and on a constructed Network Anomaly Knowledge Graph (NAKG) derived from public anomaly-related knowledge sources. The results show that NEKC achieves moderate overall improvements on NELL, whereas its advantages are more evident on NAKG compared with representative baseline methods in few-shot link prediction and knowledge completion tasks. These results indicate that NEKC can effectively improve the completeness of anomaly knowledge graphs and provide semantic support for downstream anomaly analysis in intelligent network operations.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3724317
Elham Amini, Jelena Mišić, Vojislav B. Mišić	Deadline-Aware SRPT Scheduling for Paxos Consensus	2026	Early Access	Schedules Scheduling Timing	Paxos consensus protocol is widely used in distributed systems, yet their performance can degrade under heterogeneous workloads and deadline-constrained requests. Traditional priority-based Paxos extensions rely on static scheduling policies that are unable to adapt to dynamically changing urgency. This paper proposes a deadline-aware scheduling framework for Paxos based on the Shortest Remaining Processing Time (SRPT) discipline. The proposed approach dynamically prioritizes requests according to their expected completion behavior and their likelihood of meeting assigned deadlines, enabling preemptive scheduling decisions at the consensus leader. An analytical queueing model is developed to characterize the mean waiting time, mean residence time, and mean response time under SRPT scheduling. Using these results, a probabilistic measure of deadline satisfaction is derived and employed to guide scheduling decisions. Analytical and numerical evaluations demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves deadline satisfaction while preserving the delay-optimal properties of SRPT, making it well suited for latency-sensitive Paxos deployments.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3724325
Nan Wei, Sizhe Huang, Lihua Yin, Ziying Zhu, Wenting Wang	Correction Forest: A Misclassification Correction model for Reducing the Total Error Rate of IIoT Network Intrusion Detection	2026	Early Access	Modeling Industrial Internet of Things Internet of Things	Deep learning-based network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) in the Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) are inevitably prone to producing misclassified samples. Correction models can identify and correct these samples to reduce the total error rate (TER) of NIDSs. Existing correction models fail to account for the uneven distribution of misclassified samples in the prediction intervals of NIDSs due to IIoT data imbalance, re-sulting in over-correction and increased TERs. Given this, we propose a novel correction model called Correction Forest for correcting the misclassified samples of NIDSs targeting imbalanced IIoT network traffic dataset. Correction Forest adopts a generation-correction strategy. The generation process divides the output values of NIDSs with imbalanced dataset into fine-grained bins, and then generates novel misclassification features for each bin using a balanced hybrid Random Forest. The correction process calculates feature importance score for misclassification features and corrects misclassification samples by a K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) -based algorithm. Evaluated on 15 imbalanced IIoT datasets with varying malicious sample ratios, Correction Forest significantly outperforms 4 state-of-the-art models. Under the 1.25% setting of NSL-KDD, Correction Forest improves F1-Score from 0.3144 to 0.7345, an absolute gain of 0.4201. On the TON_IoT at 12.5%, it achieves a maximum R.TER of 0.3750 among the state-of-the-art models.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3724323
Francisco Muro, Eduardo Baena, Tomaso De Cola, Sergio Fortes, Raquel Barco	AI-Driven Optimization of Virtual Network Function Allocation in 6G Non-Terrestrial Networks	2026	Early Access	Resource management Optimization Satellites	The integration of 6G technologies into Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) raises a fundamental orchestration problem: how to allocate Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) across satellite and terrestrial domains under tight onboard resource constraints and a continuously changing topology. The virtualized 6G Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) paradigm makes it possible to run 5G software stacks on Software-Defined Radios (SDRs) based on General Purpose Processors (GPPs), but it also turns VNF placement into a high-dimensional, multi-objective decision that static heuristics and model-based formulations struggle to capture. This paper addresses that gap by introducing an AI-driven VNF allocation framework for 6G-NTN environments built on an O-RAN-based distributed architecture and orchestrated on top of Kubernetes. The VNF allocation problem is formalized for a multi-domain 6G-NTN scenario with constrained satellite resources, and a measurement-based test campaign is designed to characterize the emulated platform in terms of virtual resource utilization and end-to-end performance. The framework couples tree-based machine learning predictors with a gradient-free optimizer to reach the optimal feasible allocation, outperforming two heuristic baselines drawn from the VNF placement literature by reducing the service RTT by up to 39% and delivering up to 3× higher YouTube DL throughput with respect to the best feasible heuristic. Beyond these gains, the proposed framework establishes a measurement-driven, reproducible methodology for VNF allocation in 6GNTN scenarios, demonstrating that AI-driven orchestration can systematically uncover non-obvious resource configurations that purely analytical or static approaches consistently miss.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3724474
Depeng Xu, Guozhen Cheng, Hongchao Hu, Quan Ren, Xiaohan Yang, Kangxu Wang	STNet: Multi-Scale Spatiotemporal Learning and Adaptive Fusion for Few-Shot Tor Traffic Classification	2026	Early Access	Modules (abstract algebra) Modeling Accuracy	The Tor network’s anonymity is increasingly exploited for cybercrime, creating a demand for accurate traffic classification under strict few-shot constraints. While recent efforts like WF-Transformer demonstrate strong temporal modeling capabilities, they still require abundant labeled data and struggle to generalize under defense-induced distortions and open-world unknown traffic. To address these gaps, we propose STNet (SpatioTemporal Multi-scale Augmentation and fusion Network), an episode-based few-shot learning architecture for Tor traffic classification. Unlike simple module stacking, STNet adopts a modular decoupling design: (1) a Multi-Scale Spatiotemporal Feature Fusion (MSMF) module captures packet-level and flow-level patterns to resist obfuscation; (2) scenario-adaptive modules tackle domain shifts in closed-world settings and feature scarcity in open-world settings; and (3) a Hierarchical Layer Attention (HLA) mechanism dynamically fuses heterogeneous features from different deployment positions. Extensive experiments on real-world Tor traffic show that STNet consistently outperforms representative baselines including WF-Transformer. In closed-world settings, it limits the accuracy drop under WalkieTalkie obfuscation to 13.6 percentage points. In open-world 10-shot evaluation, it achieves 92.1% AU-COVR and 79.1% unknown-class F1-score, surpassing the best baseline by 4.9 and 6.0 percentage points, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of decoupling universal feature extraction from scenario-specific adaptation in few-shot Tor traffic analysis.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3722541
Martin Trullenque Ortiz, Daniel Camps Mur, Oriol Sallent, Jad Nasreddine	FOM-5G: A Learning-Based Framework for Overload Mitigation in V2X-Enabled 5G Networks	2026	Early Access	5G mobile communication Cells (biology) Vehicle-to-everything	Public networks deploying 5G-Advanced technology are expected to support large-scale connected and cooperative vehicular services. To this end, 3GPP has enabled the deployment of Day 1 V2X safety services over public cellular networks, which provide the global coverage and low latencies these services require. However, high vehicular mobility may result in traffic jams that strain radio resources, leading to cell overload situations that jeopardize the delivery of V2X services. Previous studies have shown that the best action to mitigate cell overloads strongly depends on road topology and the location of the traffic jam with respect to the cell geometry. Moreover, a fundamental insight to address V2X related cell overloads is to realize that the majority of traffic jams are repeatable, hence historical information should be used to take radio resource management (RRM) decisions. In this paper, we present a novel framework for cell overload mitigation in 5G networks (FOM-5G), an RRM solution for ORAN-based public 5G networks that leverages historical information to prevent recurring cell overloads, particularly those affecting V2X services. We validated FOM-5G through comprehensive simulations incorporating three real vehicular mobility patterns from a European city experiencing traffic congestion. The results show that FOM-5G can adapt its congestion control actions to varying traffic conditions, effectively exploit historical data, and achieve superior performance compared to static congestion mitigation approaches.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3725207
Akhilesh Patel, Yatindra Nath Singh	Scalability and Delay Analysis of XR Traffic in Optical Access Networks	2026	Early Access	Extended reality Modeling Delays	The rapid evolution of 5G and emerging 6G networks requires optical access systems to support immersive extended reality (XR) services with stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, like ultra-low latency and high bandwidth. However, conventional dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) schemes in passive optical networks (PONs) allocate upstream bandwidth solely based on reported queue occupancy, without considering the unique characteristics of XR traffic. To address these limitations, we propose an XR-aware Predictive (XP)-DBA scheme that integrates XR traffic prediction, deadline-aware scheduling, adaptive grant control, and a cycle-controller to proactively allocate bandwidth, prioritize latency-critical packets, and limit polling-cycle growth. We also derive closed-form analytical expressions to characterize XR-specific stability and delay feasibility in PON systems. We evaluate XP-DBA under standardized and burst-enhanced XR traffic models across varying XR user densities and transmission distances of up to 100 km. The results show that XP-DBA will reduce latency, jitter, and polling-cycle time while increasing throughput and supporting higher XR user densities under heavy network loads without violating XR delay bounds. These findings establish XP-DBA as an efficient and scalable scheduling solution for next-generation immersive XR services over long-reach optical access networks.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3725139
Gianluca Reali, Mauro Femminella	Serverless Function Latency Model in Edge Computing	2026	Early Access	Modeling Timing Service level agreements	This paper illustrates a statistical model of the service latency of serverless functions, with particular reference to edge computing. Given a set of functions deployed in an edge computing system, this model can be very useful for several reasons. First of all, evaluating the quality of the user experience is essential to promptly assess whether the system configuration state requires corrective interventions. In case of malfunctions, the model may highlight performance problems. The model can also identify possible Service Level Agreement violations in real time, before they can cause operational problems. In addition, it allows balancing cost-performance trade-offs. The proposed model is based on the observation of experimental latency values and is adapted to produce a statistical distribution that closely approximates the real one. Furthermore, it can be exploited synergistically with Machine Learning algorithms, to dynamically optimize serverless systems in edge computing. We have evaluated the performance of the model by using latency samples generated ad hoc through a mixture of distributions, including long tailed ones, and by using the well-known Azure Functions and Globus datasets. The experimental results show a significant closeness of the statistical distribution of the generated data with the experimental ones, up to high percentiles.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3725364
Xixuan Zhou, Wei Gao, Jian Zhang, Li Sun, Yonglin Huang, Yufan Zhu, Zijiang Yang, Xiaoliang Chen, Zuqing Zhu	Highly-Scalable and Adaptive Virtual Network Embedding in Large-Scale LEO Satellite Networks	2026	Early Access	Satellites Timing Low earth orbit satellites	Large-scale low earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks have recently presented a transformative opportunity for enhancing Internet accessibility globally, yet introduce significant challenges on network control and management (NC&M) due to their mega-scales and dynamic nature. Network slicing can effectively alleviate the pressure on NC&M, provided that the problem of virtual network embedding (VNE) can be efficiently solved. In this work, we propose a highly-scalable algorithm to effectively solve VNE in large-scale LEO satellite networks in a hierarchical way. Specifically, we first design an adaptive clustering scheme to divide a large-scale LEO satellite network into domains, and then based on the requirements of each virtual network (VNT), a suitable domain is selected, transforming its embedding task to a domain-specific VNE with significantly-reduced complexity. Next, we formulate an integer linear programming (ILP) model to solve the domain-specific VNE exactly, and also propose a sophisticated heuristic for time-efficient problem-solving. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness of our proposals, demonstrating both superiority over representative benchmarks in VNT acceptance ratio and more than 24× problem-solving speedup in an LEO satellite network with 4, 409 satellites.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3725482
Chenhao Wang, Yang Ming, Hang Liu, Yutong Deng	Blockchain-Aided Authenticated Key Agreement With Message-Dependent Traceability for WBANs	2026	Early Access	Application programming interfaces Protocols Security	As a significant building block in the intelligent healthcare system, wireless body area networks (WBANs) collect users’ real-time biomedical data, enabling application providers to provide wide medical services. Due to the open environment and wireless transmission of WBANs, the sensitive biomedical data suffers from various security threats. Although authenticated key agreement (AKA) is a promising technology to deal with these threats, the existing AKA protocols encounter deficiencies in security, privacy, and practicality. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-aided authenticated key agreement protocol with message-dependent traceability (BAKA-MT) for WBANs. In the proposed BAKA-MT, the user device can establish one or more different session keys with application providers to guarantee security of the transmitted biomedical data. Meanwhile, the manager is able to monitor network status by revealing the real identity of malicious entities that release illegal messages. Conversely, the identity privacy of honest entities transmitting legitimate data is still protected. In addition, blockchain with smart contract is adopted in BAKA-MT to ensure mutual authentication between communication entities and revoke malicious entities. Finally, the rigorous security proof and performance evaluation demonstrate that BAKA-MT is secure and practical.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3725642
Jiawei Wu, YiBo Wang, ZeLin Zhu	PPO-MS: Confidence-Aware and Collaborative Traffic Management for Multimedia Streaming in SDN	2026	Early Access	Software defined networking Long short term memory Algorithms	The rapid growth of multimedia streaming poses critical challenges, including bursty traffic and congestion, leading to playback delays. The existing separate prediction and control mechanisms for multimedia traffic scheduling, which are based on software-defined networks (SDN), are unable to proactively manage bursty traffic under uncertain conditions. This limitation is particularly evident in SDN-enabled backbone and multimedia-aware access networks, which typically assume centralized control and stable topologies. They lack integration of traffic prediction, traffic shaping, and real-time perception scheduling through reinforcement learning, resulting in low efficiency when exploring multiple paths in dynamic networks. To address this challenge, we propose PPO-MS (Proximal Policy Optimization-based Multimedia Scheduler), an SDN-based multimedia traffic scheduling algorithm integrating three key innovations: (1) A novel LSTM+HTB synergy where LSTM’s confidence intervals dynamically adjust HTB (Hierarchical Token Bucket) shaping parameters, enabling adaptive rate control under prediction uncertainty and overcoming the limitations of static LSTM+HTB hybrids; (2) A Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-optimized path pruning method that reduces state and action spaces by generating a constrained set of k disjoint candidate paths via an improved redundant tree algorithm. Unlike traditional multi-path schemes, this method tightly couples path preselection with the RL decision loop for adaptive, context-aware routing; (3) Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE)–accelerated PPO for stable convergence in dynamic environments. In contrast to prior works (e.g., LSTM+RL for QoE or standalone tree algorithms), PPO-MS uniquely unifies these modules through confidence-aware traffic shaping and hierarchical decision-making, validated via comparative experiments. Results demonstrate that PPO-MS, through the synergistic integration of confidence-aware traffic shaping and DRL-optimized path pruning, significantly outperforms decoupled baselines. In particular, via isolation studies against simpler alternatives (e.g., mean-prediction and fixed-margin shaping), the confidence-aware shaping mechanism is validated to be superior under bursty traffic conditions. Overall, PPO-MS reduces end-to-end latency by 17:3% and packet loss by 32:4% while achieving 24:4% better load balancing during traffic bursts.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3725643
Yuanming Huang, Xiaojuan Wang, Mingshu He	HyTMTC: A Pre-Training Method for Multi-Scenario Network Traffic Classification with Hybrid Transformer-Mamba	2026	Early Access	Modeling Training Telecommunication traffic	Network traffic classification is central to security monitoring and network management in heterogeneous environments. Existing deep learning approaches are often trained for a single scenario and require large amounts of labeled data, making them difficult to reuse when applications, traffic types, or encryption settings change. We present HyTMTC, a pre-training and fine-tuning framework for multi-scenario network traffic classification. HyTMTC encodes each flow as a unified multimodal token sequence that combines raw bytes, packet length, and direction, allowing protocol traces and communication behavior to be modeled together. To match the one-dimensional nature of traffic data, HyTMTC adopts a hybrid Transformer-Mamba backbone. Mamba captures contiguous byte- and packet-level patterns, while Transformer attention strengthens interactions across non-adjacent fields and packets. A self-attention fusion module further integrates the multimodal representations during fine-tuning. This design improves traffic representation without relying on scenario-specific feature engineering. Experiments on seven public datasets show that HyTMTC achieves an average F1-score of 95.03% and outperforms nine representative baselines. It also remains effective in encrypted, VPN, and few-shot settings, and maintains the ability to detect unknown attacks. These results demonstrate its effectiveness and stability for multi-scenario network traffic classification.	10.1109/TNSM.2026.3725912