The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is rapidly growing in popularity. Initially introduced for military purposes, over the past few years, UAVs and related technologies have successfully transitioned to a whole new range of civilian applications such as delivery, logistics, surveillance, entertainment, and so forth. They have opened new possibilities such as allowing operation in otherwise difficult or hazardous areas, for instance. For all applications, one foremost concern is the selection of the paths and trajectories of UAVs, and at the same time, UAVs control comes with many challenges, as they have limited energy, limited load capacity and are vulnerable to difficult weather conditions. Generally, efficiently operating a drone can be mathematically formalized as a path optimization problem under some constraints. This shares some commonalities with similar problems that have been extensively studied in the context of urban vehicles and it is only natural that the recent literature has extended the latter to fit aerial vehicle constraints. The knowledge of such problems, their formulation, the resolution methods proposed—through the variants induced specifically by UAVs features—are of interest for practitioners for any UAV application. Hence, in this study, we propose a review of existing literature devoted to such UAV path optimization problems, focusing specifically on the sub-class of problems that consider the mobility on a macroscopic scale. These are related to the two existing general classic ones—the Traveling Salesman Problem and the Vehicle Routing Problem. We analyze the recent literature that adapted the problems to the UAV context, provide an extensive classification and taxonomy of their problems and their formulation and also give a synthetic overview of the resolution techniques, performance metrics and obtained numerical results.

Terahertz (THz) communication is a cutting-edge technology poised to address the increasing demand for ultra-high data rates in next-generation wireless networks. THz frequencies offer a vast spectrum supporting ultra-massive connectivity for applications like high-definition video streaming, virtual reality, and advanced internet-of-things (IoT) devices. Additionally, THz communication can enable new technologies such as high-resolution imaging and sensing. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on THz communication’s advancements, challenges, and potential applications. We provide an overview of the fundamental concepts, including THz band characteristics, transmission mechanisms, and channel models. Additionally, we discuss the current state-of-the-art in THz communication technology, covering aspects such as modulation techniques, radio frequency (RF) front-end design, and signal processing algorithms. Furthermore, we analyze the challenges and limitations associated with THz communication, such as propagation losses, atmospheric absorption, beam split, and hardware constraints. This paper aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of THz communication design and analysis and inspire further advancements in this rapidly evolving field.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, are a class of aircraft without the presence of pilots on board. UAVs have the ability to reduce the time and cost of deliveries and to respond to emergency situations. Currently, UAVs are extensively used for data delivery and/or collection to/from dangerous or inaccessible sites. However, trajectory planning is one of the major UAV issues that needs to be solved. To address this question, we focus in this paper on determining the optimized routes to be followed by the drones for data pickup and delivery with a time window with an intermittent connectivity network, while also having the possibility to recharge the drones’ batteries on the way to their destinations. To do so, we formulated the problem as a multi-objective optimization problem, and we showed how to use the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) to solve this problem. Several experiments were conducted to validate the proposed algorithm by considering different scenarios.

The emergence of 5G Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) has made it the predominant technology for enabling Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications. As a result, this has created an opportunity for telecommunications service providers to leverage their pre-existing 5G network infrastructure, enabling them to provide Vehicle-to-Network (V2N) services. In this paper, we propose a new approach that enhances the security of 5G V2N services through the implementation of a Federated Learning V2X misbehavior detection system within the 5G core network. The proposed system aims to protect V2X application servers (V2X ASs) that are located in 5G edge networks against potential V2X attacks while leveraging the privacy and scalability advantages of Federated Learning. Our proposed model is compared, using extensive emulations, to other centralized and distributed approaches, achieving excellent results, which makes it feasible for deployment. Our proposal achieved a notable accuracy of 98.4%, while scoring an impressive 99.3% precision and 96.9% detection rate.

More and more, edge devices embark Artificial Neuron Networks. In this context, a trend is to simultaneously decentralize their training as much as possible while shrinking their resource requirements, both for inference and training—tasks that are typically intensive in terms of data, memory, and computation. At the edge’s extremity, a specific challenge arises concerning the inclusion of microcontroller-based devices typically deployed in the IoT. So far, no general framework has been provided for that. Such devices not only have extremely challenging resource constraints (weak CPUs, slow network connections, memory budgets measured in kilobytes) but also exhibit high polymorphism, leading to large variability in computational performance among these devices. In this paper, we design and implement TDMiL, a versatile framework for distributed training, and transfer learning. TDMiL interconnects and combines logical components including CoAPerator (a central aggregator) and various tiny embedded software runtimes that are specifically tailored for networks comprising heterogeneous, resource-constrained devices built on diverse types of microcontrollers. We report on experiments conducted with the TDMiL framework, which we use to comparatively evaluate several schemes devised to address computational variability among distributed learning microcontroller-based devices, i.e., stragglers. Additionally, we release the code of our implementation of TDMiL as an open-source project, which is compatible with common commercial off-the-shelf IoT hardware and a well-known open-access IoT testbed.

This document summarizes recommended terminology for Network Coding concepts and constructs. It provides a comprehensive set of terms in order to avoid ambiguities in future IRTF and IETF documents on Network Coding. This document is the product of the Coding for Efficient Network Communications Research Group (NWCRG), and it is in line with the terminology used by the RFCs produced by the Reliable Multicast Transport (RMT) and FEC Framework (FECFRAME) IETF working groups.