Internet of Things (IoT) technology is increasingly pervasive in all aspects of our life and its usage is anticipated to significantly increase in future Smart Cities to support their myriad of revolutionary applications. This paper introduces a new architecture that can support several IoT-enabled smart home use cases, with a specified level of security and privacy preservation. The security threats that may target such an architecture are highlighted along with the cryptographic algorithms that can prevent them. An experimental study is performed to provide more insights about the suitability of several lightweight cryptographic algorithms for use in securing the constrained IoT devices used in the proposed architecture. The obtained results showed that many modern lightweight symmetric cryptography algorithms, as CLEFIA and TRIVIUM, are optimized for hardware implementations and can consume up to 10 times more energy than the legacy techniques when they are implemented in software. Moreover, the experiments results highlight that CLEFIA significantly outperforms TRIVIUM under all of the investigated test cases, and the latter performs 100 times worse than the legacy cryptographic algorithms tested.

We propose and demonstrate two configurations for optical millimeter-wave (mm-wave) generation and transmission of 3-Gb/s downstream data based on a gain-switched laser (GSL). The first configuration generates an optical comb spectrum from a GSL that can be appropriately filtered to generate two optical sidebands with 60-GHz separation. These sidebands are modulated with baseband data by using an external intensity modulator and then transmitted via optical fiber to the remote antenna unit (RAU). The second configuration produces a modulated optical frequency comb by driving the laser with both RF local oscillator and data streams coupled together and then followed by the same optical filters to generate two modulated optical sidebands. At the RAU, these two sidebands are heterodyned using a photodetector to generate the electrical modulated mm-wave signal. We investigate the distribution of these two methods over 3-km fiber with 2-m wireless link and demonstrate the system simplicity and cost efficiency for mm-wave over fiber systems. Both configurations are simulated to verify our obtained results and show system performance at higher bit rates.

This paper presents a detailed examination of a novel data center network (DCN) that can satisfy the high capacity and low latency requirements of modern cloud computing applications. This reconfigurable architecture called AgileDCN uses fast-switching optical components with a centralized control function and workload scheduler. By providing a highly flexible optical network fabric between server racks, very high network efficiencies can be achieved even under imbalanced loading patterns. Our simulation results show that, at high (70%) loads, TCP flow completion times in the AgileDCN are significantly lower than in an equivalent electronic leaf-spine network.

Rogue Base Stations (RBS), also known as 5G Subscription Concealed Identifier (SUCI) catchers, were initially developed to maliciously intercept subscribers’ identities. Since then, further advances have been made, not only in RBSs, but also in communication network security. The identification and prevention of RBSs in Fifth Generation (5G) networks are among the main security challenges for users and network infrastructure. The security architecture group in 3GPP clarified that the radio configuration information received from user equipment could contain fingerprints of the RBS. This information is periodically included in the measurement report generated by the user equipment to report location information and Received Signal Strength (RSS) measurements for the strongest base stations. The motivation in this work, then is to generate 5G measurement reports to provide a large and realistic dataset of radio information and RSS measurements for an autonomous vehicle driving along various sections of a road. These simulated measurement reports can then be used to develop and test new methods for identifying an RBS and taking mitigating actions. The proposed approach can generate 20 min of synthetic drive test data in 15 s, which is 80 times faster than real time.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel technique for optical generation of modulated millimeter-wave (mm-wave) by using a gain switched laser (GSL) that is externally injected with a modulated light source. The GSL generates a stream of optical pulses, and these pulses exhibit a small shift in the time domain when the GSL is injected with an on-off keyed (OOK) optical data signal. This time shift can produce a phase modulated mm-wave signal at 60 GHz by suitable optical filtering of the GSL laser output. The system performance was analyzed for data streams at 1.25 Gb/s by using bit-error-rate (BER) measurements for back-to-back (BTB) and 3-km fiber transmission.

The authors present a novel concept of employing optical wavelength packet switching in radio-over-fiber access networks. In such a system, the tunable laser (TL) would be employed as a transmitter in the central station. The optical carrier generated by this device would be externally modulated with the data signal upconverted to an RF frequency before being sent to the appropriate base station (BS). If each of the BSs is assigned a unique wavelength, the addressing and routing of traffic could be performed on a packet-by-packet basis with the TL switching between the wavelength assigned to different BSs