Water is a vital resource for life, and for the economy. Nowadays, one of the most serious challenges to solve is to manage the water scarcity. Current water management ICT systems are supported by specific vendor equipment, without considering any interoperability standards. The lack of standardization among producer's water ICT equipment hinders proper monitoring and control systems, resulting in low efficiency in water distribution and consumption, system's maintenance and improvement, and failure identification. In this paper we propose a smart water management model integrating Internet of Things technologies for decoupling decision support systems and monitoring from business processes coordination and subsystem implementation. The proposed smart water management model makes specific vendor equipment interoperable and manageable in a water management domain in a homogeneous way.

Resource consumption in residential areas requires novel contributions in the field of consumer information management and collaborative mechanisms for the exchange of resources, in order to optimize the overall consumption of the community. We propose an authorization system to facilitate access to consumer information and resource trading, based on blockchain technology. Our proposal is oriented to the Smart communities, an evolution of Community Energy Management Systems, in which communities are involved in the monitoring and coordination of resource consumption. The proposed environment allows a more reliable management of monitoring and authorization functions, with secure data access and storage and delegation of controller functions among householders. We provide the definition of virtual assets for energy and water resource sharing as an auction, which encourages the optimization of global consumption and saves resources. The proposed solution is implemented and validated in application scenarios that demonstrate the suitability of the defined consensus mechanism, trustworthiness in the level of provided security for resource monitoring and delegation and reduction on resource consumption by the resource trading contribution.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through SEMOLA project (TEC2015-68284-R) and from the Autonomous Region of Madrid through MOSI-AGIL-CM project (grant P2013/ICE-3019, co-funded by EU Structural Funds FSE and FEDER). Borja Bordel has received funding from the Ministry of Education through the FPU program (grant number FPU15/03977). This research has been partially supported by Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (MINECO), Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI), and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER, UE) under project COPCIS, reference TIN2017-84844-C2-1-R. Future 5G networks must provide communication services to a great and heterogeneous collection of scenarios: from traditional mobile communications, to emerging applications such as Industry 4.0 or the Internet-of-Things (IoT). In this context, the network slicing technique is defined, where network resources are packaged and assigned in an isolated manner to sets of users according to their specific requirements. Two different domains are, thus, defined: the intra-slice domain (where dedicated and specific solutions have to be deployed) and the inter-slice domain (including transversal solutions). One of the key topics which should be redefined following this approach is security. Traditionally, some solutions (such as stream ciphers) were not considered in mobile networks. However, 5G systems will be extensively employed in other new and very distinct scenarios, where requirements are different. For example, the use of resource constrained devices with little mobility and real-time data streaming in certain IoT applications suggests the use of stream ciphers (and other similar techniques) as main security solutions. Therefore, in this paper we investigate and propose a new security solution for emerging 5G networks, to be applied in the intra-slice domain. The proposed solutions employ lightweight pseudo-random number generators in order to provide the keystream used in stream ciphers which protect the private information and hide the communication signals in the frequency spectrum using spread spectrum techniques. We also describe and evaluate a first implementation of the proposed solution, using both, a simulation scenario and a real deployment.

Future Internet-of-Things (IoT) scenarios and applications are envisioned to be supported by emerging 5G networks. In this context, complex routing schemes for pervasive infrastructures are highly simplified, as every hardware element may stablish its own communication link with a 5G base station. However, this situation also introduces new risks, especially in the security field where innovative cyber-physical attacks and distributed denial of service attacks are becoming more popular and dangerous each day. Thus, data authentication, protection and anonymization in those new applications and schemes is a key challenge to be addressed. Besides, most devices in future IoT systems will be resource constrained, so traditional solutions based on private keys stored in devices' memory and computationally heavy cryptographic algorithms will turn unsecure, inefficient or, directly, impossible to run. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new mechanism to protect, authenticate and anonymize data in IoT systems supported by future 5G networks. The proposed solution employs both digital watermarking techniques and lightweight cryptographic technologies. To generate keys in a secure and simple manner, physical unclonable functions are employed. Besides, to reduce as much as possible the computational cost of algorithms, chaotic dynamics will be considered. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution an experimental validation based on simulation techniques is also carried out.