Last updated: 2025-04-03 03:01 UTC
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Number of pages: 136
Author(s) | Title | Year | Publication | Keywords | ||
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Xingyu Yang, Jipeng Hou, Lei Xu, Liehuang Zhu | zkFabLedger: Enabling Privacy Preserving and Regulatory Compliance in Hyperledger Fabric | 2025 | Early Access | Blockchains Privacy Regulation Regulators Fabrics Peer-to-peer computing Protocols Distributed ledger Cryptocurrency Receivers Blockchain privacy preserving auditable ledger regulatory compliance non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs | Preserving the privacy of transactions and ensuring the regulatory compliance of transactions are two important requirements for blockchain-based financial applications. However, these two requirements are somewhat contradictory. Techniques for protecting transaction privacy, such as data encryption and zero-knowledge proof, generally make it difficult to regulate and audit the transactions. In this paper, we propose a system named zkFabLedger which enhances both the privacy and the auditability of the classic permissioned blockchain platform Hyperledger Fabric. The proposed system utilizes commitments and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs to hide the detailed information of transactions while enabling the endorsing peer nodes to verify the regulatory compliance of transactions. Transactions are recorded on table-structured ledgers, so that the regulator can perform complex auditing of transactions. Moreover, we utilize the ring signature scheme and the secret handshake protocol to ensure the anonymity of the transaction sender while enabling the regulator to trace the sender’s identity. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system can balance well between privacy, regulation and efficiency. | 10.1109/TNSM.2024.3525045 |
Zhenyu Fu, Juan Liu, Yuyi Mao, Long Qu, Lingfu Xie, Xijun Wang | Energy-Efficient UAV-Assisted Federated Learning: Trajectory Optimization, Device Scheduling, and Resource Management | 2025 | Early Access | Autonomous aerial vehicles Energy consumption Convergence Accuracy Trajectory Resource management Optimization Scheduling Servers Training Federated learning energy efficiency device scheduling unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) trajectory optimization | The emergence of intelligent mobile technologies and the widespread adoption of 5G wireless networks have made Federated Learning (FL) a promising method for protecting privacy during distributed model training. However, traditional FL frameworks rely on static aggregators such as base stations, encountering obstacles such as increased energy demands, frequent disconnections, and poor model performance. To address these issues, this paper investigates an innovative Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted FL framework, aiming to utilize UAVs as mobile model aggregators to collaborate with devices in training models, while minimizing the total energy consumption of devices and ensuring that FL can achieve the target model accuracy. By adopting the Distributed Approximate NEwton (DANE) method for local optimization, we analyze the convergence of FL and derive device scheduling constraints that aid in convergence. Accordingly, we formulate a problem of minimizing the total energy consumption of devices, integrating a constraint on global model accuracy, and jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory, device scheduling, bandwidth allocation, time slot lengths, as well as the uplink transmission power, CPU frequency, and local convergence accuracy. Then, we decompose this non-convex optimization problem into three subproblems and propose an iterative algorithm based on Block Coordinate Descent (BCD) with convergence guarantee. Simulation results indicate that, compared with various benchmark methods, our proposed UAV-assisted FL framework significantly reduces the total energy consumption of devices and achieves an improved trade-off between energy and convergence accuracy. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3531237 |
Abdul Basit, Muddasir Rahim, Tri Nhu Do, Nadir Adam, Georges Kaddoum | DRL-Based Maximization of the Sum Cross-Layer Achievable Rate for Networks Under Jamming | 2025 | Early Access | Jamming Wireless networks Schedules Interference Intercell interference Uplink Vectors Time division multiple access Residual neural networks Reliability Deep reinforcement learning medium access control jamming attacks residual neural network | In quasi-static wireless networks characterized by infrequent changes in the transmission schedules of user equipment (UE), malicious jammers can easily deteriorate network performance. Accordingly, a key challenge in these networks is managing channel access amidst jammers and under dynamic channel conditions. In this context, we propose a robust learning-based mechanism for channel access in multi-cell quasi-static networks under jamming. The network comprises multiple legitimate UEs, including predefined UEs (pUEs) with stochastic predefined schedules and an intelligent UE (iUE) with an undefined transmission schedule, all transmitting over a shared, time-varying uplink channel. Jammers transmit unwanted packets to disturb the pUEs’ and the iUE’s communication. The iUE’s learning process is based on the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, utilizing a residual network (ResNet)-based deep Q-Network (DQN). To coexist in the network and maximize the network’s sum cross-layer achievable rate (SCLAR), the iUE must learn the unknown network dynamics while concurrently adapting to dynamic channel conditions. Our simulation results reveal that, with properly defined state space, action space, and rewards in DRL, the iUE can effectively coexist in the network, maximizing channel utilization and the network’s SCLAR by judiciously selecting transmission time slots and thus avoiding collisions and jamming. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3534028 |
Tianhao Ouyang, Haipeng Yao, Wenji He, Tianle Mai, Fu Wang, F. Richard Yu | Self-Adaptive Dynamic In-Band Network Telemetry Orchestration for Balancing Accuracy and Stability | 2025 | Early Access | Telemetry Switches Stability analysis Accuracy Optimization Bandwidth Real-time systems Data collection Stochastic processes Monitoring In-band network telemetry (INT) INT orchestration Network stability Lyapunov optimization Surrogate Lagrangian relaxation | In-band network telemetry (INT) is an emerging network measurement technique that offers real-time and fine-grained visualization capabilities for networks. However, the utilization of INT for network measurement introduces additional overheads to the network. The process of data collection consumes extra bandwidth resources, and adjustments to the data collection scheme can impact network stability. Additionally, the INT orchestration scheme requires adaptation to dynamics in the network to improve measurement accuracy. Therefore, striking a balance between accuracy and stability becomes a critical problem. In this paper, our focus lies in the trade-off between measurement accuracy and network stability. We consider the long-term orchestration of multiple telemetry tasks, rationally deploying distinct telemetry tasks to different application flows. To address the challenge, we propose a self-adaptive Dynamic INT Orchestration scheme, D-INTO. Specifically, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem for dynamic INT orchestration. Then we employ Lyapunov optimization to decouple the stochastic optimization problem and use surrogate Lagrangian relaxation to construct a polynomial-time approximation algorithm. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that our proposed D-INTO outperforms existing schemes in terms of adaptability to the network dynamics. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3530432 |
XiaoBo Fan | Path Selection via Mutual Coherence Optimization in Network Monitoring | 2025 | Early Access | Monitoring Routing Tomography Probes Inference algorithms Coherence Costs Vectors Topology Network topology Network monitoring path selection matrix design mutual coherence | Periodically monitoring the state of internal links is important for network diagnosis. One of the major problems in tomography-based network monitoring is to select which paths to measure. In this paper, we propose a new path selection scheme by means of optimizing the mutual coherence of the routing matrix. The proposed scheme exploits the sparse characteristic of link status and follows the matrix design methods in sparse signal theory. By picking the paths with the minimum average mutual coherence, we can recover a sparse vector more accurately. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is analyzed theoretically. We conduct simulation experiments of delay estimation on both synthetic and real topologies. The results demonstrate that our scheme can select the most useful paths for network tomography with lowest cost in an acceptable time. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3532343 |
Tien Van Do, Nam H. Do, Csaba Rotter, T.V. Lakshman, Csaba Biro, T. Bérczes | Properties of Horizontal Pod Autoscaling Algorithms and Application for Scaling Cloud-Native Network Functions | 2025 | Early Access | Measurement Cloud computing Clustering algorithms Prediction algorithms Containers Heuristic algorithms Software algorithms Servers Q-learning Surveys Network Functions Virtualisation Resource Management Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaling Algorithm metrics | With the growing adoption of network function virtualization, telco core network elements and network functions will increasingly be designed and deployed as cloud-native application instances. To ensure the efficient use of virtualised resources and meet diverse requirements for quality of services a resource scaling algorithm is used to scale the the number of application instances up or down depending on variations in offered traffic from customers. Most of the observed performance metrics for a service are a function of the current customer traffic and the current number of application instances providing the service. The ubiquitous use of Kubernetes, the popular open-source framework for deployment and management of cloud-native functions, has resulted in variants of the Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) algorithm being widely used to change the number of application instances providing network functions as traffic demands vary. This change is done by determining whether a selected performance metric of interest is outside a range set by two input parameters (the desired metric value and the tolerance parameter). In this paper, we invesitigate the characteristics of the HPA algorithms and prove that there are only a finite number of intervals for its tolerance parametere. Further any choice of the tolerance parameter from each interval leads to similar computational decisions on the recommended number of application instances. As a consequence, the number of parameter setting choices is finite due to the rule that the desired metric value can only be an integer in specific ranges. Additionally, we investigate the use of HPA for scaling application instances that provide session-based services and establish lower and the upper bounds for performance of the HPA scaling algorithms in this scenario. Our contributions can help operators find appropriate parameter settings efficiently -administrators of Kubernetes clusters only need to select parameters from a limited and finite number of choices (instead of infinite) for scaling cloud-native applications. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3532121 |
Gerald Budigiri, Christoph Baumann, Eddy Truyen, Wouter Joosen | Elastic Cross-Layer Orchestration of Network Policies in the Kubernetes Stack | 2025 | Early Access | Security Containers Virtual machines Cloud computing Firewalls (computing) Microservice architectures Dynamic scheduling Protocols Low latency communication Industries container orchestration Kubernetes network isolation network policies security groups | Packaging applications in Containers, dynamically managed using a cluster orchestrator, is the de-facto approach for deployment of cloud-native applications. When Containers run inside Virtual Machines (VMs) to protect infrastructural assets, Network Policies at the Container layer and Security Groups at the VM layer provide complementary firewall mechanisms that strengthen defenses against lateral movement of attackers. However, least-privilege network policies at the Container layer may not always be consistent with statically defined, over-permissive Security Groups at the VM layer. This is especially a problem with low-latency configuration of Container networking solutions that requires every opened Container protocol, port and traffic direction also to be opened at the VM layer. In any post-exploitation scenario where attackers escape from within an already compromised or infected Container, such over-permissive Security Groups do not prevent the attacker from spreading across VMs to find powerful tokens for accessing the cluster orchestrator. In this paper, we introduce GrassHopper, a fast and dynamic cross-layer enforcement approach for Network Policies, which automatically generates Security Group configurations from dynamically verified Network Policies and Container scheduling decisions. Given the low-latency context, the design of GrassHopper must ensure that dynamically generated Security Group rules come in a timely manner to effect before the newly scheduled Containers become ready to serve traffic. We evaluate the performance of GrassHopper on a Kubernetes cluster running on OpenStack at the network and application level. In comparison to a Security Group management approach that is not scheduling-aware, our findings show that for low-latency applications GrassHopper can reduce the network attack surface between VMs at a ratio of 78-to-99%, while causing no network performance overhead at the application level with respect to latency and throughput. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3531040 |
Ruowen Yan, Qiao Li, Huagang Xiong | Optimizing Traffic Management in Airborne Power Line Communication Networks: A Credit-Based Shaping Approach Using Network Calculus | 2025 | Early Access | Real-time systems Protocols Media Access Control Delays Time division multiple access Aircraft Air traffic control Ethernet Communication systems Telecommunication traffic Airborne communication systems Credit-based shaper Network Calculus Network fairness Power Line Communication Traffic shaping | As the aviation industry progresses towards More Electric Aircraft (MEA), the demand for robust and efficient data communication systems intensifies. Traditional fieldbus systems are burdened by high installation costs and substantial weight due to extensive cabling requirements. The Power Line Communication (PLC) technology presents a promising alternative; however, its adaptation to the stringent real-time demands of airborne environments poses significant challenges. To address this, this paper introduces a novel Credit-Based Shaper with Channel Contention (CBSCC) mechanism designed to optimize traffic management in airborne PLC networks. This mechanism operates at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer of the HomePlug AV 2 protocol, employing a dynamic configuration approach informed by Network Calculus (NC). This approach utilizes End-to-End Delay (E2ED) requirements of data flows and network configuration details to calculate the parameters for the CBSCC traffic shaper. Comprehensive simulations conducted with OMNeT++ demonstrate the efficacy of CBSCC, demonstrating marked improvements in E2ED satisfaction for all data frames, reduced average access delays, and enhanced fairness across different priority levels compared to the HomePlug AV2 protocol and previous traffic management strategies. The findings confirm that the CBSCC mechanism substantially alleviates the starvation of lower-priority traffic, boosts network efficiency, and ensures robust real-time guarantees essential for the safety and reliability of airborne communication systems. This research represents a substantial advancement over existing solutions, aligning with the evolving needs of MEA implementations. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3529871 |
Xiaonan Wang, Yajing Song | Personalized Preference and Social Attribute Based Data Sharing for Information-Centric IoT | 2025 | Early Access | Internet of Things Smart devices Performance evaluation Data models Time factors Delays Backhaul networks Spread spectrum communication Relays Proposals Information-centric Internet of Things personalized preference social attribute data sharing in-network caching | With the rapid increase in the number of smart devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), network traffic has imposed serious overload on backhaul networks and led to network congestion. Data sharing among IoT devices through multi-hop communication between smart devices is expected to ease increasing pressure of backhaul traffic. In this paper, we propose a personalized preference and social attribute based data sharing framework for information-centric IoT, aiming to improve success rates of data sharing among IoT devices and reduce data sharing delays. This framework proposes personalized preferences and social attributes to reduce data response time and avoid data delivery failures caused by obsolete FIB and broken reverse paths. The experiment results justify the advantages of the proposed framework in terms of data sharing success rates and delays. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3529291 |
Lo-Yao Yeh, Sheng-Po Tseng, Chia-Hsun Lu, Chih-Ya Shen | Auditable Homomorphic-Based Decentralized Collaborative AI with Attribute-based Differential Privacy | 2025 | Early Access | Servers Blockchains Data models Noise Security Federated learning Privacy Computational modeling Training Differential privacy Federated learning Blockchain Privacy preservation Group key management | In recent years, the notion of federated learning (FL) has led to the new paradigm of distributed artificial intelligence (AI) with privacy preservation. However, most current FL systems suffer from data privacy issues due to the requirement of a trusted third party. Although some previous works introduce differential privacy to protect the data, however, it may also significantly deteriorate the model performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel decentralized collaborative AI framework, named Auditable Homomorphic-based Decentralised Collaborative AI (AerisAI), to improve security with homomorphic encryption and fine-grained differential privacy. Our proposed AerisAI directly aggregates the encrypted parameters with a blockchain-based smart contract to get rid of the need of a trusted third party. We also propose a brand-new concept for eliminating the negative impacts of differential privacy for model performance. Moreover, the proposed AerisAI also provides the broadcast-aware group key management based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) to achieve fine-grained access control based on different service-level agreements. We provide a formal theoretical analysis of the proposed AerisAI as well as the functionality comparison with the other baselines. We also conduct extensive experiments on real datasets to evaluate the proposed approach. The experimental results indicate that our proposed AerisAI significantly outperforms the other state-of-the-art baselines. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3529774 |
Cheng Ren, Jinsong Gao, Yu Wang, Yaxin Li | A Fastformer Assisted DRL Method on Energy Efficient and Interference Aware Service Provisioning | 2025 | Early Access | Interference Throughput Servers Energy consumption Resource management Adaptation models Transformers Logic gates Upper bound Training Network function virtualization deep reinforcement learning Fastformer virtual network function interference | Network function virtualization (NFV) empowered by virtualization technology can achieve flexible virtual network function (VNF) placement. To improve resource utilization and energy efficiency, different VNFs tend to be co-located on common servers, which inevitably intrigues VNF performance degradation induced by hardware resource competition. The problem of energy-efficient and interference-aware service function chain (SFC) provisioning is considered in this paper and envisioned to yield minimum activated servers and maximum average throughput. It is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to achieve optimal solutions. Then, a gale-shapley based offline approximation algorithm is designed through bipartite matching, to yield an SFC allocation decision in one go with proved competitive ratio. In online scenario, Transformer and its efficient model Fastformer, combined with Graph Attention Network (GAT) respectively, are introduced into deep reinforcement learning (DRL) structure for the first time to quickly and accurately abstract features of substrate network and SFC. A DRL-based Fastformer-assisted energy efficient and interference aware SFC provisioning (DRL-EI) algorithm is proposed with an elaborately designed reward function to balance energy consumption and VNF interference. Simulations indicate the gap between DRL-EI and MILP is marginal. DRL-EI outperforms state-of-art work in terms of energy consumption, VNF normalized throughput and acceptance rate. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3538105 |
Abdulsamet Dağaşan, Ezhan Karaşan | Resilient Multi-Hop Autonomous UAV Networks With Extended Lifetime for Multi-Target Surveillance | 2025 | Early Access | Autonomous aerial vehicles Relays Target tracking Trajectory Surveillance Spread spectrum communication Trajectory planning Network topology Sensors Heuristic algorithms UAVs multi-target surveillance resilient multi-hop network topology network lifetime | Cooperative utilization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in public and military surveillance applications has attracted significant attention in recent years. Most UAVs are equipped with sensors and wireless communication equipment with limited ranges. Such limitations pose challenging problems to monitor mobile targets. This paper examines fulfilling surveillance objectives to achieve better coverage while building a resilient network between UAVs with an extended lifetime. The multiple target tracking problem is studied by including a relay UAV within the fleet whose trajectory is autonomously calculated in order to achieve a reliable connected network among all UAVs. Optimization problems are formulated for single-hop and multi-hop communications among UAVs. Three heuristic algorithms are proposed for multi-hop communications and their performances are evaluated. A hybrid algorithm, which dynamically switches between single-hop and multi-hop communications is also proposed. The effect of the time horizon considered in the optimization problem is also studied. Performance evaluation results show that the trajectories generated for the relay UAV by the hybrid algorithm can achieve network lifetimes that are within 95% of the maximum possible network lifetime which can be obtained if the entire trajectories of all targets were known a priori. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3528495 |
Ammar Kamal Abasi, Moayad Aloqaily, Mohsen Guizani | 6G mmWave Security Advancements through Federated Learning and Differential Privacy | 2025 | Early Access | Millimeter wave communication 6G mobile communication Data models Array signal processing Security Predictive models Adaptation models Accuracy Training Privacy 6G Federated Learning (FL) Adversarial machine learning Millimeter-wave (mmWave) Differential Privacy Security | This paper presents a new framework that integrates Federated Learning (FL) with advanced privacy-preserving mechanisms to enhance the security of millimeter-wave (mmWave) beam prediction systems in 6G networks. By decentralizing model training, the framework safeguards sensitive user information while maintaining high model accuracy, effectively addressing privacy concerns inherent in centralized Machine learning (ML) methods. Adaptive noise augmentation and differential privacy principles are incorporated to mitigate vulnerabilities in FL systems, providing a robust defense against adversarial threats such as the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM). Extensive experiments across diverse scenarios, including adversarial attacks, outdoor environments, and indoor settings, demonstrate a significant 17.45% average improvement in defense effectiveness, underscoring the framework’s ability to ensure data integrity, privacy, and performance reliability in dynamic 6G environments. By seamlessly integrating privacy protection with resilience against adversarial attacks, the proposed solution offers a comprehensive and scalable approach to secure mmWave communication systems. This work establishes a critical foundation for advancing secure 6G networks and sets a benchmark for future research in decentralized, privacy-aware machine learning systems. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3528235 |
Chaofeng Lin, Jinchuan Tang, Shuping Dang, Gaojie Chen | Priority-Based Blockchain Packing for Dependent Industrial IoT Transactions | 2025 | Early Access | Time factors Industrial Internet of Things Blockchains Delays Indexes Economics Simulation Protection Heuristic algorithms Directed acyclic graph Blockchain Industrial Internet of Things priority response time transaction packing | Blockchain plays a key role in establishing secure and decentralized Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems. Currently, the dependent transactions generated by IIoT devices require a packing process to select a set of non-conflicted transactions, which results in significant delay and deviation of the transaction response time. In this paper, we propose a novel transaction packing algorithm named Priority-Pack to address the above issue. Firstly, we use directed acyclic graphs to model the dependent transactions in IIoT systems to establish the mathematical relationships between transaction priority and waiting time as well as dependencies. Secondly, we propose an algorithm to specify a higher priority to a transaction with longer waiting time without violating transaction dependencies. It eliminates the time required to traverse the subsets of transactions in other algorithms. Thirdly, to further reduce the response delay for transactions with the same priority level, we choose to first pack transactions with smaller sizes. We prove that this selection can achieve the lowest average response time. Finally, simulations are conducted to benchmark the Priority-Pack against the state-of-the-art algorithms including Fair-Pack and Random-Pack. The results demonstrate that Priority-Pack outperforms the others in terms of average response time and deviations. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3527810 |
Xinyu Yuan, Yan Qiao, Zhenchun Wei, Zeyu Zhang, Minyue Li, Pei Zhao, Rongyao Hu, Wenjing Li | Diffusion Models Meet Network Management: Improving Traffic Matrix Analysis With Diffusion-Based Approach | 2025 | Early Access | Estimation Routing Training Tomography Diffusion models Telecommunication traffic Tensors Mathematical models Sparse matrices Data models diffusion models deep learning network traffic matrix network tomography network management | Due to network operation and maintenance relying heavily on network traffic monitoring, traffic matrix analysis has been one of the most crucial issues for network management related tasks. However, it is challenging to reliably obtain the precise measurement in computer networks because of the high measurement cost, and the unavoidable transmission loss. Although some methods proposed in recent years allowed estimating network traffic from partial flow-level or link-level measurements, they often perform poorly for traffic matrix estimation nowadays. Despite strong assumptions like low-rank structure and the prior distribution, existing techniques are usually task-specific and tend to be significantly worse as modern network communication is extremely complicated and dynamic. To address the dilemma, this paper proposed a diffusion-based traffic matrix analysis framework named Diffusion-TM, which leverages problem-agnostic diffusion to notably elevate the estimation performance in both traffic distribution and accuracy. The novel framework not only takes advantage of the powerful generative ability of diffusion models to produce realistic network traffic, but also leverages the denoising process to unbiasedly estimate all end-to-end traffic in a plug-and-play manner under theoretical guarantee. Moreover, taking into account that compiling an intact traffic dataset is usually infeasible, we also propose a two-stage training scheme to make our framework be insensitive to missing values in the dataset. With extensive experiments with real-world datasets, we illustrate the effectiveness of Diffusion-TM on several tasks. Moreover, the results also demonstrate that our method can obtain promising results even with 5% known values left in the datasets. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3527442 |
Tao Huang, Jingyuan Liu, Zheng Chang, Yao Wei, Xu Zhao, Ying-Chang Liang | Energy Efficient Spectrum Sharing and Resource Allocation for 6G Air-Ground Integrated Networks | 2025 | Early Access | Resource management Autonomous aerial vehicles Interference Vehicle dynamics Internet of Things Wireless networks Quality of service Radio spectrum management Games Game theory Spectrum sharing unmanned aerial vehicle resource allocation game theory | In this paper, we investigate the spectrum sharing and resource allocation scheme for air-ground integrated wireless network which consists of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and a high altitude platform (HAP). We consider the UAVs are required to provide services or execute certain missions in the area that HAP owns the spectrum and other resources. Correspondingly, we propose an energy efficient spectrum sharing and resource allocation scheme so that the UAVs can flexibly utilize the radio resources within the area without degrading the quality of service (QoS) of the HAP. In the proposed scheme, we jointly optimize pricing of spectrum and transmit power to maximize the utility of both the HAP and UAVs in the considered system in an energy efficient manner. A game theoretic approach is then presented to find the spectrum sharing and resource allocation strategies for both HAP and UAVs and the problem has been addressed via convex optimization. Our extensive simulations demonstrate marked improvements in system utility, spectrum and energy efficiency, and also highlight the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3527651 |
Hnin Pann Phyu, Diala Naboulsi, Razvan Stanica | ICE-CREAM: multI-agent fully CooperativE deCentRalizEd frAMework for Energy Efficiency in RAN Slicing | 2025 | Early Access | Quality of service Base stations Energy efficiency Energy consumption Network slicing 5G mobile communication Costs Computer architecture Resource management Switches 5G Network Slicing Energy Efficiency QoS | Network slicing is one of the major catalysts proposed to turn future telecommunication networks into versatile service platforms. Along with its benefits, network slicing is introducing new challenges in the development of sustainable network operations, as it entails a higher energy consumption compared to non-sliced networks.Using a sliced architecture, which includes guaranteeing the communication and computation requirements for each slice, is essential for operators to provide a satisfying user quality of service (QoS) in a multi-service network. At the same time, building sustainable mobile networks, with the least amount of resources used, is crucial today, for both economic and environmental reasons. As a result, mobile operators need to find a middle ground between these two objectives – a tough nut considering they are both antithetical and important. In this light, we investigate a joint slice activation/deactivation and user association problem, with the aim of minimizing energy consumption and maximizing the QoS. The proposed multI-agent fully CooperativE deCentRalizEd frAMework (ICE-CREAM) addresses the formulated joint problem, with agents acting at two different granularity levels. Not only all the agents can access the shared information with their direct neighbors, but also they are trained with one global reward, which is an ideal approach in multi-agent cooperative settings. We evaluate ICE-CREAM using a real-world dataset that captures the spatio-temporal consumption of three different mobile services in France. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution provides more than 30% energy efficiency improvement compared to a configuration where all the slice instances are always active while maintaining the same level of QoS. From a broader perspective, our work explicitly shows the impact of prioritizing the energy over QoS, and vice versa. | 10.1109/TNSM.2024.3524503 |
Xiaojun Zhang, Qing Liu, Bingyun Liu, Yuan Zhang, Jingting Xue | Dynamic Certificateless Outsourced Data Auditing Mechanism Supporting Multi-Ownership Transfer via Blockchain Systems | 2025 | Early Access | Cloud computing Servers Blockchains Privacy Polynomials Games Electronic mail Software engineering Software Smart contracts cloud storage data auditing multi-ownership transfer dynamic update blockchain systems | Data auditing contributes to checking the integrity of outsourced data, promoting the vigorous development of cloud storage services. In actual scenarios, such as migration of electronic medical records or data transfer of enterprise mergers and acquisitions, it always require data auditing to help clients with dynamic data migration and integrity checking. In this paper, we present an efficient dynamic certificateless outsourced data auditing mechanism supporting multi-ownership transfer (CDA-MOT), addressing the issue of key escrow and without needing complex certificate management. By integrating a certificateless multi-signature on the same data file into the construction of a homomorphic authenticator based on the Lagrange inverse Multinomial theorem, CDA-MOT not only achieves integrity verification but also enables clients to transfer ownership rights and responsibilities for multi-ownership data in collaboration with cloud servers. Utilizing blockchain systems to store necessary data conversion and update records, as well as smart contracts to fulfill auditing tasks, CDA-MOT owns the characteristics of openness, transparency, accountability, and decentralized public auditing. Besides, CDA-MOT could be further applied in the extension of dynamic update operations, even if outsourced data have been transferred. The security analysis and performance evaluation have demonstrated the feasibility of CDA-MOT in the secure deployment of cloud storage. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3525462 |
Ahsan Raza Khan, Habib Ullah Manzoor, Rao Naveed Bin Rais, Sajjad Hussain, Lina Mohjazi, Muhammad Ali Imran, Ahmed Zoha | Semantic-Aware Federated Blockage Prediction (SFBP) in Vision-Aided Next-Generation Wireless Network | 2025 | Early Access | Sensors Wireless sensor networks Semantics Accuracy Training Millimeter wave communication Data models Wireless networks Computational modeling Antenna arrays Millimetre Wave Federated Learning Semantic Communication Blockage Prediction Computer Vision | Predicting signal blockages in millimetre-wave and terahertz networks is essential for enabling proactive handover (PHO) and ensuring seamless connectivity. Existing approaches utilising deep learning, multi-modal vision and wireless sensing data primarily depend on centralised model training. Although these techniques are effective, they come with high communication costs, inefficient bandwidth usage, and latency issues, which restrict their real-time applicability. This paper proposes a Semantic-Aware Federated Blockage Prediction (SFBP) framework, leveraging the lightweight computer vision technique MobileNetV3 for edge-based semantic extraction, lowering communication and computation costs. Furthermore, we introduce a Similarity-Driven Federated Averaging (SD-FedAVG) mechanism to enhance the robustness of the model aggregation process, effectively mitigating the impact of noisy updates and adversarial attacks. Our proposed SFBP framework achieves 97.1% blockage prediction accuracy, closely matching centralised learning methods, while reducing communication costs by 88.75% compared to centralised learning and by 57.87% compared to FL without semantic extraction. Moreover, on-device inference reduces the latency by 23% compared to centralised learning and 18% compared to FL without semantic extraction, improving real-time decision-making for PHO. Additionally, the SD-FedAVG mechanism improves prediction accuracy under noisy conditions, directly impacting the PHO by reducing the handover failure rate by 7%. | 10.1109/TNSM.2024.3525338 |
Jiangang Liu, Hanjiang Luo, Hang Tao, Jiahong Liu, Jiehan Zhou | JLOS: a Cooperative UAV-Based Optical Wireless Communication With Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning | 2025 | Early Access | Autonomous aerial vehicles Optical fiber communication Atmospheric modeling Reliability Relays Adaptive optics Training Heuristic algorithms Data communication Optical receivers Internet of Things Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Optical Communication Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Maritime Data Transmission | In maritime Internet of Things (IoT) systems, leveraging a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and optical communication can achieve a variety of potential maritime missions. However, due to the high directionality of the optical beam and interference from the marine environment, the optical link via UAVs as relays is prone to interruption. To address this challenge, we propose a Joint Link Optimization Scheme (JLOS) that includes Wind Disturbance Resistance (WDR) and Adaptive Beamwidth Adjustment (ABA). In WDR, we first model the problem as a Partially Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP), and then design a collaborative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) approach to control a swarm of UAVs in windy conditions, to maintain mechanical stability and prevent link interruption. Furthermore, in ABA, to reduce uncertainties from control activities and environmental factors like sunlight and fog, we design an adaptive algorithm using distributed MARL. It adjusts beamwidth based on historical UAV locations and link Bit Error Ratio (BER) to improve communication reliability. Numerical simulations confirm its effectiveness in enhancing robust data transmission. | 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3543160 |