Alireza Esfahani

Wireless communication plays a crucial role in evolving next-generation networks. Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN), Self-Organizing Networks (SON), and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven automation are set to revolutionize network operations by enhancing flexibility, scalability, intelligence, and efficiency. Integrating AI and Machine Learning (ML) into O-RAN and SON enables autonomous network management, dynamically optimizing performance, resource allocation, and fault recovery. SON enhances network self-configuration, self-optimization, and self-healing capabilities, reducing operational costs and improving service reliability. This paper examines the potential of AI-driven autonomy in O-RAN and SON, with a focus on their combined impact on next-generation wireless networks. With its open and intelligent architecture, O-RAN can provide flexibility and adaptability for SON functionalities. O-RAN’s open interfaces and modular components can help achieve greater control and customization of network resources. Both O-RAN and SON can significantly enhance network efficiency, scalability, and reliability, shaping the future of wireless networks. Network efficiency can be achieved through dynamic resource allocation, while improved scalability allows the network to accommodate the growing number of connected devices. Increased reliability is ensured through automated fault detection and recovery mechanisms. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the synergies of AI-driven autonomy of O-RAN and SON, highlighting their technical and operational benefits. It also addresses potential challenges such as interoperability issues, security concerns, and the need for standardized protocols. The paper concludes with a discussion of the future directions and research opportunities in this domain, emphasizing the critical role of O-RAN and SON in shaping the evolution of autonomous next-generation wireless networks.

Vehicular social networking (VSN), as a novel communication paradigm, exploits opportunistic encounters among vehicles for mobile social networking, collaborative content dissemination, and to provide a variety of services for users and their vehicles. VSNs promise to solve problems such as the ever‐increasing number of road accidents, or traffic congestion, by forming networks of vehicles whose users share common interests. However, in particular in urban regions, VSNs benefit from extending far beyond vehicular networks with their road side units, by integrating all kinds of sensors to provide higher accuracy and additional information in increasingly crowded areas. Integrating such sensors turns VSNs into networks of cellular‐connected IoT devices with mobile cells and raises the question how to authenticate all these units in a scalable, efficient, and anonymous manner. In this article, we present SI‐AKAV, an efficient group‐local authentication scheme for cellular‐connected IoT devices, which is specifically tailored to overcome the high computational costs of existing schemes, while improving in all of the above dimensions. For example, compared with the state‐of‐the‐art authentication and key agreement protocol (AKA), SI‐AKAV reduces communication volume by 29% and computation overhead by 41%.

Contact tracing is an important instrument for national health services to fight epidemics. As part of the COVID-19 situation, many proposals have been made for scaling up contract tracing capacities with the help of smartphone applications, an important but highly critical endeavor due to the privacy risks involved in such solutions. Extending our previously expressed concern, we clearly articulate in this article, the functional and non-functional requirements that any solution has to meet, when striving to serve, not mere collections of individuals, but the whole of a nation, as required in face of such potentially dangerous epidemics. We present a critical information infrastructure, PriLock, a fully-open preliminary architecture proposal and design draft for privacy preserving contact tracing, which we believe can be constructed in a way to fulfill the former requirements. Our architecture leverages the existing regulated mobile communication infrastructure and builds upon the concept of "checks and balances", requiring a majority of independent players to agree to effect any operation on it, thus preventing abuse of the highly sensitive information that must be collected and processed for efficient contact tracing. This is enforced with a largely decentralised layout and highly resilient state-of-the-art technology, which we explain in the paper, finishing by giving a security, dependability and resilience analysis, showing how it meets the defined requirements, even while the infrastructure is under attack.

Network coding (NC)-enabled mobile small cells are observed as a promising technology for fifth-generation (5G) networks that can cover the urban landscape by being set up on-demand at any place and at any time on any device. Nevertheless, despite the significant benefits that this technology brings to the 5G of mobile networks, major security issues arise due to the fact that NC-enabled mobile small cells are susceptible to pollution attacks; a severe security threat exploiting the inherent vulnerabilities of NC. Therefore, intrusion detection and prevention mechanisms to detect and mitigate pollution attacks are of utmost importance so that NC-enabled mobile small cells can reach their full potential. Thus, in this article, we propose for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, a novel intrusion detection and prevention scheme (IDPS) for NC-enabled mobile small cells. The proposed scheme is based on a null space-based homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) scheme that allows detection of pollution attacks and takes proper risk mitigation actions when an intrusive incident is detected. The proposed scheme has been implemented in Kodo and its performance has been evaluated in terms of computational overhead.

The fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) is transforming the next generation of the Supply Chain by making it more agile and efficient compared to the traditional Supply Chain. However, data communication across the partners in the Industry 4.0 Supply Chain can be the target of a wide spectrum of attackers exploiting security breaches in the internal/external environment of the partners due to its heterogeneous and dynamic nature as well as the fact that non-professional users in security issues usually operate their information systems. Attackers can compromise the data communication between legitimate parties in the Industry 4.0 Supply Chain and thus jeopardizing the delivery of services across the partners as well as the continuity of the service provision. Consequently, secure data communications across the partners in the Industry 4.0 Supply Chain are of utmost importance. Towards this direction, TLS protocol, which is the de facto standard for secure Internet communications, is employed to ensure secure communication between a user’s web browser and a remote web server located in the premises of the same or another partner. However, over the last few years, there have been several serious attacks on TLS, including Man-In-The Middle attacks in web applications using TLS to secure HTTP communication. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient TLS-based authentication mechanism which is resistant against MITM in web applications.

In the emerging industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) era, machine-to-machine (M2M) communication technology is considered as a key underlying technology for building IIoT environments, where devices (e.g., sensors, actuators, and gateways) are enabled to exchange information with each other in an autonomous way without human intervention. However, most of the existing M2M protocols that can be also used in the IIoT domain provide security mechanisms based on asymmetric cryptography resulting in high computational cost. As a consequence, the resource-constrained IoT devices are not able to support them appropriately and thus, many security issues arise for the IIoT environment. Therefore, lightweight security mechanisms are required for M2M communications in IIoT in order to reach its full potential. As a step toward this direction, in this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication mechanism, based only on hash and XOR operations, for M2M communications in IIoT environment. The proposed mechanism is characterized by low computational cost, communication, and storage overhead, while achieving mutual authentication, session key agreement, device's identity confidentiality, and resistance against the following attacks: replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack, impersonation attack, and modification attack.