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The evolution of cellular networks from its first generation (1G) to its fourth generation (4G) was driven by the demand of user-centric downlink capacity also technically called Mobile Broad-Band (MBB). With its fifth generation (5G), Machine Type Communication (MTC) has been added into the target use cases and the upcoming generation of cellular networks is expected to support them. However, such support requires improvements in the existing technologies in terms of latency, reliability, energy efficiency, data rate, scalability, and capacity.
Originally, MTC was designed for low-bandwidth high-latency applications such as, environmental sensing, smart dustbin, etc. Nowadays there is an additional demand around applications with low-latency requirements. Among other well-known challenges for recent cellular networks such as data rate energy efficiency, reliability etc., latency is also not suitable for mission-critical applications such as real-time control of machines, autonomous driving, tactile Internet etc. Therefore, in the currently deployed cellular networks, there is a necessity to reduce the latency and increase the reliability offered by the networks to support use cases such as, cooperative autonomous driving or factory automation, that are grouped under the denomination Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC).
This thesis is primarily concerned with the latency into the Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN) of cellular networks. The overall work is divided into five parts. The first part presents the state of the art for cellular networks. The second part contains a detailed overview of URLLC use cases and the requirements that must be fulfilled by the cellular networks to support them. The work in this thesis is done as part of a collaboration project between IRIMAS lab in Université de Haute-Alsace, France and Institute for Reliable Embedded Systems and Communication Electronics (ivESK) in Offenburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany. The selected use cases of URLLC are part of the research interests of both partner institutes. The third part presents a detailed study and evaluation of user- and control-plane latency mechanisms in current generation of cellular networks. The evaluation and analysis of these latencies, performed with the open-source ns-3 simulator, were conducted by exploring a broad range of parameters that include among others, traffic models, channel access parameters, realistic propagation models, and a broad set of cellular network protocol stack parameters. These simulations were performed with low-power, low-cost, and wide-range devices, commonly called IoT devices, and standardized for cellular networks. These devices use either LTE-M or Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) technologies that are designed for connected things. They differ mainly by the provided bandwidth and other additional characteristics such as coding scheme, device complexity, and so on.
The fourth part of this thesis shows a study, an implementation, and an evaluation of latency reduction techniques that target the different layers of the currently used Long Term Evolution (LTE) network protocol stack. These techniques based on Transmission Time Interval (TTI) reduction and Semi-Persistent Scheduling (SPS) methods are implemented into the ns-3 simulator and are evaluated through realistic simulations performed for a variety of low-latency use cases focused on industry automation and vehicular networking. For testing the proposed latency reduction techniques in cellular networks, since ns-3 does not support NB-IoT in its current release, an NB-IoT extension for LTE module was developed. This makes it possible to explore deployment limitations and issues.
In the last part of this thesis, a flexible deployment framework called Hybrid Scheduling and Flexible TTI for the proposed latency reduction techniques is presented, implemented and evaluated through realistic simulations. With help of the simulation evaluation, it is shown that the improved LTE network proposed and implemented in the simulator can support low-latency applications with low cost, higher range, and narrow bandwidth devices. The work in this thesis points out the potential improvement techniques, their deployment issues and paves the way towards the support for URLLC applications with upcoming cellular networks.
In the work at hand, we state that privacy and malleability of data are two aspects highly desired but not easy to associate. On the one hand, we are trying to shape data to make them usable and editable in an intelligible way, namely without losing their initial information. On the other hand, we are looking for effective privacy on data such that no external or non-authorized party could learn about their content. In such a way, we get overlapping requirements by pursuing different goals; it is trivial to be malleable without being secure, and vice versa. We propose four “real-world” use cases identified as scenarios where these two contradictory features are required and taking place in distinct environments. These considered backgrounds consist of firstly, cloud security auditing, then privacy of mobile network users and industry 4.0 and finally, privacy of COVID-19 tracing app users. After presenting useful background material, we propose to employ multiple approaches to design solutions to solve the use cases. We combine homomorphic encryption with searchable encryption and private information retrieval protocol to build an effective construction for the could auditing use case. As a second step, we develop an algorithm to generate the appropriate parameters to use the somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme by considering correctness, performance and security of the respective application. Finally, we propose an alternative use of Bloom filter data structure by adding an HMAC function to allow an outsourced third party to perform set relations in a private manner. By analyzing the overlapping bits occurring on Bloom filters while testing the inclusiveness or disjointness of the sets, we show how these functions maintain privacy and allow operations directly computed on the data structure. Then, we show how these constructions could be applied to the four selected use cases. Our obtained solutions have been implemented and we provide promising results that validate their efficiency and thus relevancy.