The interest in wireless communication systems for industrial applications has grown significantly over the last years. More flexible, easier to install and maintain, wireless networks present a promising alternative to the currently used wired systems. However, reliability and timeliness requirements at present met by wired networks also need to be fulfilled by wireless solutions. Packet errors introduced when packets travel through wireless channels imply a significant challenge to fulfill these requirements. Relaying has been recognized to improve the reliability in industrial wireless networks without causing additional delay. Furthermore, the recent results have shown that relaying combined with packet aggregation significantly outperforms simple relaying. However, it is not always cost efficient to introduce additional relay nodes into an industrial network and hence, in this paper, we propose using a combination of relaying and packet aggregation at the source nodes. The results show that when relaying and aggregation are used at the source nodes, the transmission schedule plays a crucial role. A schedule adapting to the varying channel conditions improves performance substantially. By carefully choosing which packet to aggregate, even further improvements can be achieved.

The cloud computing paradigm provides remote computing resources to the cloud service consumers and businesses. When combined with Internet of Things (IoT), both technologies open up a wide range of new possibilities for more agile and flexible applications. However, guaranteed quality of service is essential in provisioning of cloud services, which makes Service Level Agreements (SLAs) a focal point in the cloud computing and IoT ecosystem. The SLA definition and modeling phase is crucial in establishing SLAs between service providers and consumers. This paper identifies that the research on definition and modeling of SLAs for cloud services in IoT is widely dispersed and there is a lack of a systematic and comprehensive literature review. Thus, in this paper we build on top of a previously conducted systematic mapping study on management of SLAs for cloud computing and IoT to perform a comprehensive systematic review and discuss sub-categorization of the definition and modeling aspects of SLAs for cloud services in IoT. Furthermore we analyze the extracted relevant literature, present commonalities in the studies, identify gaps and discuss opportunities for further research in the area.

Platooning is highly tractable for enabling fuel savings for autonomous and semi-autonomous cars and trucks. Safety concerns are one of the main impediments that need to be overcome before vehicle platoons can be deployed on ordinary roads despite their readily available technical feasibility. Simulation studies remain vital for evaluating platoon safety applications primarily due to the high cost of field tests. To this end, we present PlatoonSAFE, an open-source simulation tool that promotes the simulation studies of fault tolerance in platooning by enabling the monitoring of transient communication outages during runtime and assigning an appropriate performance level as a function of the instantaneous communication quality. In addition, PlatoonSAFE facilitates the simulation of several emergency braking strategies to evaluate their efficacy in transitioning a platoon to a fail-safe state. Furthermore, two Machine Learning (ML) models are integrated into PlatoonSAFE that can be employed as an onboard prediction tool in the platooning vehicles to facilitate online training of ML models and real-time prediction of communication, network, and traffic parameters. In this paper, we present the PlatoonSAFE structure, its features and implementation details, configuration parameters, and evaluation metrics required to evaluate the fault tolerance of platoon safety applications.

In this paper, we evaluate the overall outage probability (OOP) of pairwise Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) for both uplink and downlink. We also propose a dynamic decoding order (DDO) together with a fixed pairwise power allocation (FPPA) scheme, in which the optimal decoding order is decided based on the instantaneous channel gains, and thereafter, a pair of power levels is assigned in accordance with the selected decoding order. Exact closed-form expressions of the OOPs for both uplink and downlink pairwise NOMA considering all proposed decoding orders over Nakagami-m fading are derived. Further, we find the optimal fixed power levels for different power allocation strategies so that the OOPs are minimized. Moreover, we investigate the influence of the distances between the source nodes and the access point (AP), the target transfer rates and the path-loss exponents on the OOPs for all cases of decoding orders. In addition, we benchmark our proposed DDO against other decoding orders in terms of the OOP. The results show that assigning optimal fixed power levels which takes the instantaneous decoding order into account not only improves the communication reliability, but also reduces the complexity and computational load at the AP.

In this paper, an uplink pairwise Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) scenario using a mobile access point (AP) or an unmanned aerial vehicle in the presence of a jamming attack is considered. To mitigate the influence of the jamming attack, a joint power allocation and AP placement design is proposed. Accordingly, closed-form expressions of the overall outage probability (OOP) and the individual outage probability (IOP) considering imperfect channel state information for each of the source nodes the AP serves, are derived over Nakagami- m fading channels using dynamic decoding order and fixed pairwise power allocation. We conduct an investigation of the effect of different parameters such as power allocation, source node placements, AP placement, target rates, and jammer location on the OOP and the IOP performance. By adapting the power allocation and the AP placement to the jamming attack, the communication reliability can be increased significantly compared to neglecting the presence of the jammer or treating the jammer as noise. Since the malicious jammer and the AP have conflicting interests in terms of communication reliability, we formulate a non-cooperative game for the two players considering their positions and the power allocation of the NOMA nodes as their strategies and the OOP as utility function. We propose using hybrid simulated annealing - greedy algorithms to address the joint power allocation and AP placement problem for the cases of both a fixed and a mobile jammer. Finally, the Nash equilibrium points are obtained and then the UAV goes directly to this position and keeps staying there to save power consumption.

This study focuses on optimizing the performance of an uplink pairwise Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) scenario with and without the support of a relayer, while subject to jamming attacks. We consider two different relaying protocols, one where the sources and the destination are within range of each other and one where they are not. The relay node can be mobile, e.g., a mobile base station, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or a stationary node that is chosen as a result of a relay selection procedure. We also benchmark with a NOMA retransmission protocol and an Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) scheme without a relayer. We analyze, adjust and compare the four protocols for different settings using outage analysis, which is an efficient tool for establishing communication reliability for both individual nodes and the overall wireless network. Closed-form expressions of outage probabilities can be adopted by deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to optimize wireless networks online. Accordingly, we first derive closed-form expressions for the individual outage probability (IOP) of each source node link and the relayer link using both pairwise NOMA and OMA. Next, we analyze the IOP for one packet (IOPP) for each source node considering all possible links between the source node to the destination, taking both phases into account for the considered protocols when operating in Nakagami- $m$ fading channels. The overall outage probability for all packets (OOPP) is defined as the maximum IOPP obtained among the source nodes. This metric is useful to optimize the whole wireless network, e.g., to ensure fairness among the source nodes. Then, we propose a method using deep RL where the OOPP is used as a reward function in order to adapt to the dynamic environment associated with jamming attacks. Finally, we discuss valuable guidelines for enhancing the communication reliability of the legitimate system.