Quantum communication networks (QCNs) utilize quantum mechanics for secure information transmission, but the reliance on fragile and expensive photonic quantum resources renders QCN resource optimization challenging. Unlike prior QCN works that relied on blindly compressing direct quantum embeddings of classical data, this letter proposes a novel quantum semantic communications (QSC) framework exploiting advancements in quantum machine learning and quantum semantic representations to extracts and embed only the relevant information from classical data into minimal high-dimensional quantum states that are accurately communicated over quantum channels with quantum communication and semantic fidelity measures. Simulation results indicate that, compared to semantic-agnostic QCN schemes, the proposed framework achieves approximately 50-75% reduction in quantum communication resources needed, while achieving a higher quantum semantic fidelity.
Smart grid, regarded as the next generation power grid, uses two-way flows of electricity and information to create a widely distributed automated energy delivery network. In this work we present our vision on smart grid from the perspective of wireless communications and networking technologies. We present wireless communication and networking paradigms for four typical scenarios in the future smart grid and also point out the research challenges of the wireless communication and networking technologies used in smart grid
Autonomous truck and trailer configurations face challenges when operating in reverse due to the lack of sensing on the trailer. It is anticipated that sensor packages will be installed on existing trailers to extend autonomous operations while operating in reverse in uncontrolled environments, like a customer's loading dock. Power Line Communication (PLC) between the trailer and the tractor cannot support high bandwidth and low latency communication. This paper explores the impact of using Ethernet or a wireless medium for commercial trailer-tractor communication on the lifecycle and operatio…
Future practical implementation of secure quantum communication technology in a multiuser network environment would require automatic monitoring of the optical link condition and quantum system parameters, along with adjusting them in real time according to protocol restrictions. We demonstrate how software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm can be used for addressing this problem on the example of a subcarrier wave quantum communication system, which is promising for network applications. We propose a novel approach to dynamic quantum network routing and communication security based on SDN Ope…
We present the University at Buffalo's Airborne Networking and Communications Testbed (UB-ANC Drone). UB-ANC Drone is an open software/hardware platform that aims to facilitate rapid testing and repeatable comparative evaluation of airborne networking and communications protocols at different layers of the protocol stack. It combines quadcopters capable of autonomous flight with sophisticated command and control capabilities and embedded software-defined radios (SDRs), which enable flexible deployment of novel communications and networking protocols. This is in contrast to existing airborne ne…
This paper discusses the design, implementation and field trials of WiMesh - a resilient Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) based disaster communication system purpose-built for underdeveloped and rural parts of the world. Mesh networking is a mature area, and the focus of this paper is not on proposing novel models, protocols or other mesh solutions. Instead, the paper focuses on the identification of important design considerations and justifications for several design trade offs in the context of mesh networking for disaster communication in developing countries with very limited resources. These …
Ambient backscatter communication technology has been introduced recently, and is then quickly becoming a promising choice for self-sustainable communication systems as an external power supply or a dedicated carrier emitter is not required. By leveraging existing RF signal resources, ambient backscatter technology can support sustainable and independent communications and consequently open up a whole new set of applications that facilitate Internet-of-Things (IoT). In this article, we study an integration of ambient backscatter with wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs). We first pr…
In this paper, we investigate how to network smartphones for providing communications in disaster recovery. By bridging the gaps among different kinds of wireless networks, we have designed and implemented a system called TeamPhone, which provides smartphones the capabilities of communications in disaster recovery. Specifically, TeamPhone consists of two components: a messaging system and a self-rescue system. The messaging system integrates cellular networking, ad-hoc networking and opportunistic networking seamlessly, and enables communications among rescue workers. The self-rescue system gr…
Underwater wireless communications can be carried out through acoustic, radio frequency (RF), and optical waves. Compared to its bandwidth limited acoustic and RF counterparts, underwater optical wireless communications (UOWCs) can support higher data rates at low latency levels. However, severe aquatic channel conditions (e.g., absorption, scattering, turbulence, etc.) pose great challenges for UOWCs and significantly reduce the attainable communication ranges, which necessitates efficient networking and localization solutions. Therefore, we provide a comprehensive survey on the challenges, a…
Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a concept being considered as a potential future alternative to, or replacement for, today's Internet IP-style packet-switched host-centric networking. One factor making CCN attractive is its focus on content distribution, which dominates current Internet traffic and which is arguably not well-served by IP. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a prominent example of CCN. It is also one of several on-going research efforts aiming to design and develop a full-blown candidate future Internet architecture. Although NDN's primary motivation is content distribution, it …
Goal-Oriented Multi-Agent Semantic Networking: Unifying Intents, Semantics, and Intelligence
Department of Engineering, King’s College London（伦敦国王学院工程系）；Network Automation Department, NSSR Lab, Nokia Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室网络自动化部门）；Bristol Research and Innovation Laboratory, Toshiba Europe Ltd.（东芝欧洲有限公司布里斯托尔研究与创新实验室）
- The Internet of Things (IoT) is the result of many different enabling technologies such as embedded systems, wireless sensor networks, cloud computing, big-data, etc. used to gather, process, infer, and transmit data. Integrating all these technologies requires a comprehensive and holistic research effort to address all the challenges imposed by these technologies, especially for sensing and delivering information from physical world to cloud-hosted services. In this paper, we outline the most important issues related to standardization efforts, mobility of objects, networking and gateway ac…
Wireless communication is a basis of the vision of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). Given the heterogeneity of both wireless communication technologies and CAV applications, one question that is critical to technology road-mapping and policy making is which communication technology is more suitable for a specific CAV application. Focusing on the technical aspect of this question, we present a multi-scale spatiotemporal perspective of wireless communication technologies as well as canonical CAV applications in active safety, fuel economy and emission control, vehicle automation, and veh…
Beyond 5G networks are expected to support massive traffic through decentralized solutions and advanced networking mechanisms. This paper aims at contributing towards this vision through the integration of device-centric wireless networks, including Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, and the Next Generation of Opportunistic networking (NGO). This integration offers multiple communication modes such as opportunistic cellular and opportunistic D2D-aided communications. Previous studies have demonstrated the potential and benefits of this integration in terms of energy efficiency, spectral ef…
Ethernet has become the next standard for automotive and industrial automation networks. Standard extensions such as IEEE 802.1Q Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) have been proven to meet the real-time and robustness requirements of these environments. Augmenting the TSN switching by Software-Defined Networking functions promises additional benefits: A programming option for TSN devices can add much value to the resilience, security, and adaptivity of the environment. Network simulation allows to model highly complex networks before assembly and is an essential process for the design and validat…
Despite significant research in backscatter communication over the past decade, key technical open problems remain under-explored. Here, we first systematically lay out the design space for backscatter networking and identify applications that make backscatter an attractive communication primitive. We then identify 10 research problems that remain to be solved in backscatter networking. These open problems span across the network stack to include circuits, embedded systems, physical layer, MAC and network protocols as well as applications. We believe that addressing these problems can help del…
In the last decade, there has been a growing realization that the current Internet Protocol is reaching the limits of its senescence. This has prompted several research efforts that aim to design potential next-generation Internet architectures. Named Data Networking (NDN), an instantiation of the content-centric approach to networking, is one such effort. In contrast with IP, NDN routers maintain a significant amount of user-driven state. In this paper we investigate how to use this state for covert ephemeral communication (CEC). CEC allows two or more parties to covertly exchange ephemeral m…
Future in-vehicular networks will be based on Ethernet. The IEEE Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a promising candidate to satisfy real-time requirements in future car communication. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) extends the Ethernet control plane with a programming option that can add much value to the resilience, security, and adaptivity of the automotive environment. In this work, we derive a first concept for combining Software-Defined Networking with Time-Sensitive Networking along with an initial evaluation. Our measurements are performed via a simulation that investigates whether …
The wireless industry is driven by key stakeholders that follow a holistic approach of "one-system-fits-all" that leads to moving network functionality of meeting stringent E2E communication requirements towards the core and cloud infrastructures. This trend is limiting smaller and new players for bringing in new and novel solutions. For meeting these E2E requirements, tenants and end-users need to be active players for bringing their needs and innovations. Driving E2E communication not only in terms of QoS but also overall carbon footprint and spectrum efficiency from one specific community m…
Existing communication systems are mainly built based on Shannon's information theory which deliberately ignores the semantic aspects of communication. The recent iteration of wireless technology, the so-called 5G and beyond, promises to support a plethora of services enabled by carefully tailored network capabilities based on the contents, requirements, as well as semantics. This sparkled significant interest in the semantic communication, a novel paradigm that involves the meaning of message into the communication. In this article, we first review the classic semantic communication framework…
Toward Agentic AI: Generative Information Retrieval Inspired Intelligent Communications and Networking
College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）；University of Technology and Design, Singapore（新加坡科技设计大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局信息通信研究院）；Auburn University（奥本大学）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）；Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学）
We argue that Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) will become the de facto standard for real-time communications in robotics. We present a review and classification of the different communication standards which are relevant for the field and introduce the typical problems with traditional switched Ethernet networks. We discuss some of the TSN features relevant for deterministic communications and evaluate experimentally one of the shaping mechanisms in an exemplary robotic scenario. In particular, and based on our results, we claim that many of the existing real-time industrial solutions will slo…
Nowadays, computation is playing an increasingly more important role in the future generation of computer and communication networks, as exemplified by the recent progress in software defined networking (SDN) for wired networks as well as cloud radio access networks (C-RAN) and mobile cloud computing (MCC) for wireless networks. This paper proposes a unified concept, i.e., computation diversity, to describe the impact and diverse forms of the computation resources on both wired and wireless communications. By linking the computation resources to the communication networks based on quality of s…
Information-centric networking (ICN) is one of the promising solutions that cater to the challenges of IP-based networking. ICN shifts the IP-based access model to a data-centric model. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a flexible ICN architecture, which is based on content distribution considering data as the core entity rather than IP-based hosts. User-generated mobile contents for real-time multimedia communication such as Internet telephony are very common these days and are increasing both in quality and quantity. In NDN, producer mobility is one of the challenging problems to support uninte…
As one of the most promising applications in future Internet of Things, Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been acknowledged as a fundamental technology for developing the Intelligent Transportation Systems in smart cities. With the emergence of the sixth generation (6G) communications technologies, massive network infrastructures will be densely deployed and the number of network nodes will increase exponentially, leading to extremely high energy consumption. There has been an upsurge of interest to develop the green IoV towards sustainable vehicular communication and networking in the 6G era. In…
On the Internet of Things (IoT), devices continuously communicate with each other, with a gateway, or other Internet nodes. Often devices are constrained and use insecure channels for their communication, which exposes them to a selection of attacks that may extract sensitive pieces of information or manipulate dialogues for the purpose of sabotaging. This paper presents a new layer in the RIOT networking architecture to seamlessly integrate secure communication between applications using DTLS. The layer acts as a modular abstraction layer of the different DTLS implementations, enabling swappi…
The 2nd workshop on Future Internet Architecture for Developing Regions (FI4D) took place on January 8th, 2017. The workshop was hosted by the 14th Annual IEEE Consumer Communications $\&$ Networking Conference in Las Vegas, USA. This report summarizes the motivation, discussions and perspectives held during the half-day event.
SANEmerg: An Emergent Communication Framework for Semantic-aware Agentic AI Networking
1 School of Elect. Inform. \& Commun., Huazhong Univ. of Science \& Technology, China；2 Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China；3 Pazhou Laboratory (Huangpu), Guangzhou, China；4 Department of Electrical；Computer Engineering, the University of Arizona
K-12 engineering outreach has typically focused on elementary electrical and mechanical engineering or robot experiments integrated in science or math classes. In contrast, we propose a novel outreach program focusing on communication network principles that enable the ubiquitous web and smart-phone applications. We design outreach activities that illustrate the communication network principles through activities and team competitions in physical education (PE) as well as story writing and cartooning in English Language Arts (ELA) classes. The PE activities cover the principles of store-and-fo…
Over the past three decades, since its invention, the Internet has evolved in both its sheer volume and usage. The Internet's core protocol, Internet Protocol (IP), has proven its usability and effectiveness to support a communication network. However, current Internet usage requires more than a communication network due to a shift in the nature of Internet applications from simple email application to large content producers such as NetFlix, Google, Amazon, etc. Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the few initiatives/projects addressing the shortcomings of the current Internet architecture …
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables flexible network resource allocations for traffic engineering, but at the same time the scalability problem becomes more serious since traffic is more difficult to be aggregated. Those crucial issues in SDN have been studied for unicast but have not been explored for multicast traffic, and addressing those issues for multicast is more challenging since the identities and the number of members in a multicast group can be arbitrary. In this paper, therefore, we propose a new multicast tree for SDN, named Branch-aware Steiner Tree (BST). The BST problem i…
the storage infrastructure is the foundation on which information relies and therefore must support a company's business objectives and business model. In this environment, simply deploying more and faster storage devices is not enough; a new kind of infrastructure is needed, one that provides more enhanced network availability, data accessibility, and system manageability than is provided by today's infrastructure. The SAN meets this challenge. The SAN liberates the storage device, so it is not on a particular server bus, and attaches it directly to the network. In other words, storage is ext…
In this paper, we consider an integrated data and energy network and D2D communication coexistence (DED2D) system. The DED2D system allows a base station (BS) to transfer data to information-demanded users (IUs) and energy to energy-demanded users (EUs), i.e., using a time-fraction-based information and energy transfer (TFIET) scheme. Furthermore, the DED2D system enables D2D communications to share spectrum with the BS. Therefore, the DED2D system addresses the growth of energy and spectrum demands of the next generation networks. However, the interference caused by the D2D communications and…
As new networking paradigms emerge for different networking applications, e.g., cyber-physical systems, and different services are handled under a converged data link technology, e.g., Ethernet, certain applications with mission critical traffic cannot coexist on the same physical networking infrastructure using traditional Ethernet packet-switched networking protocols. The IEEE 802.1Q Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) task group is developing protocol standards to provide deterministic properties on Ethernet based packet-switched networks. In particular, the IEEE 802.1Qcc, centralized managemen…
This paper evaluates the feasibility of using light fidelity with multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for indoor collaborative and cooperative networking. A number of works have presentedchallenges for wireless networking with multiple UAVs such as bandwidth efficiency, security and environment amongst others. Due to this fact, there is a need to secure information and data in UAV ad hoc network (FANETs) using a secure transmission medium that guarantees bandwidth efficiency such as the light fidelity (Li-Fi). Li-Fi enables data transmission using visible light through a light emitting di…
In this era of modern devices and high speed communication the issue of spectral overloading is increasing with time and becoming more serious. With the advancement in LED industry, light fidelity (Li-Fi) based indoor network is an attractive substitute for the existing radio frequency (RF) based communication networks. Because of its capability to perform dual function of lighting as well as high speed communication, Li-Fi is attracting both industrial as well as academic researchers. The Li-Fi networking paradigm offers performance enhancements which can make it an attractive backup option t…
Revolutionizing Networking Paradigms: A Comprehensive Exploration of Information-Centric Networking (ICN), Content-Centric Networking(CCNx) and Named Data Networking (NDN)
Recent technological advances have fostered the development of complex industrial cyber-physical systems which demand real-time communication with delay guarantees. The consequences of delay requirement violation in such systems may become increasingly severe. In this paper, we propose a contract-based fault-resilient methodology which aims at managing the communication delays of real-time flows in industries. With this objective, we present a light-weight mechanism to estimate end-to-end delay in the network in which the clocks of the switches are not synchronized. The mechanism aims at provi…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；York University（约克大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Sungkyunkwan University（成均馆大学）
This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on applications of deep reinforcement learning in communications and networking. Modern networks, e.g., Internet of Things (IoT) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks, become more decentralized and autonomous. In such networks, network entities need to make decisions locally to maximize the network performance under uncertainty of network environment. Reinforcement learning has been efficiently used to enable the network entities to obtain the optimal policy including, e.g., decisions or actions, given their states when the state and a…
