There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized mobile cloud computing toward mobile edge computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also discuss a set of issues, challenges, and future research directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios.

A Survey on Mobile Edge Computing: The Communication Perspective

Information Theory and Reliable Communication

Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized Mobile Cloud Computing towards Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also present a research outlook consisting of a set of promising directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios.

Increasingly ubiquitous communication networks and connectivity via portable devices have engendered a host of applications in which sources, for example people and environmental sensors, send updates of their status to interested recipients. These applications desire status updates at the recipients to be as timely as possible; however, this is typically constrained by limited network resources. In this paper, we employ a time-average age metric for the performance evaluation of status update systems. We derive general methods for calculating the age metric that can be applied to a broad class of service systems. We apply these methods to queue-theoretic system abstractions consisting of a source, a service facility and monitors, with the model of the service facility (physical constraints) a given. The queue discipline of first-come-first-served (FCFS) is explored. We show the existence of an optimal rate at which a source must generate its information to keep its status as timely as possible at all its monitors. This rate differs from those that maximize utilization (throughput) or minimize status packet delivery delay. While our abstractions are simpler than their real-world counterparts, the insights obtained, we believe, are a useful starting point in understanding and designing systems that support real time status updates.

/pdf/real-time-status-how-often-should-one-update-3yjrq72m61.pdf

Real-time status: How often should one update?

Numerous technologies have been deployed to assist and manage transportation. But recent concerted efforts in academia and industry point to a paradigm shift in intelligent transportation systems. Vehicles will carry computing and communication platforms, and will have enhanced sensing capabilities. They will enable new versatile systems that enhance transportation safety and efficiency and will provide infotainment. This article surveys the state-of-the-art approaches, solutions, and technologies across a broad range of projects for vehicular communication systems.

/pdf/vehicular-communication-systems-enabling-technologies-v53op6z6g9.pdf

Vehicular communication systems: Enabling technologies, applications, and future outlook on intelligent transportation

The road to a successful introduction of vehicular communications has to pass through the analysis of potential security threats and the design of a robust security architecture able to cope with these threats. In this article we undertake this challenge. In addition to providing a survey of related academic and industrial efforts, we also outline several open problems

/pdf/securing-vehicular-communications-502u243wbz.pdf

Securing vehicular communications

Significant developments have taken place over the past few years in the area of vehicular communication systems. Now, it is well understood in the community that security and protection of private user information are a prerequisite for the deployment of the technology. This is so precisely because the benefits of VC systems, with the mission to enhance transportation safety and efficiency, are at stake. Without the integration of strong and practical security and privacy enhancing mechanisms, VC systems can be disrupted or disabled, even by relatively unsophisticated attackers. We address this problem within the SeVeCom project, having developed a security architecture that provides a comprehensive and practical solution. We present our results in a set of two articles in this issue. In this first one, we analyze threats and types of adversaries, identify security and privacy requirements, and present a spectrum of mechanisms to secure VC systems. We provide a solution that can be quickly adopted and deployed. In the second article we present our progress toward the implementation of our architecture and results on the performance of the secure VC system, along with a discussion of upcoming research challenges and our related current results.

/pdf/secure-vehicular-communication-systems-design-and-417ruy2758.pdf

Secure vehicular communication systems: design and architecture

Effective and robust operations, as well as security and privacy are critical for the deployment of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Efficient and easy-to-manage security and privacy-enhancing mechanisms are essential for the wide-spread adoption of the VANET technology. In this paper, we are concerned with this problem; and in particular, how to achieve efficient and robust pseudonym-based authentication. We design mechanisms that reduce the security overhead for safety beaconing, and retain robustness for transportation safety, even in adverse network settings. Moreover, we show how to enhance the availability and usability of privacy-enhancing VANET mechanisms: Our proposal enables vehicle on-board units to generate their own pseudonyms, without affecting the system security.

/pdf/efficient-and-robust-pseudonymous-authentication-in-vanet-39971ym816.pdf

Efficient and robust pseudonymous authentication in VANET

Secure operation of the routing protocol is one of the major challenges to be met for the proliferation of the mobile ad hoc networking (MANET) paradigm. Nevertheless, security enhancements have been proposed mostly for reactive MANET protocols. The proposed secure link state routing protocol (SLSP) provides secure proactive topology discovery, which can be beneficial to network operation in a number of ways. SLSP can be employed as a stand-alone protocol, or fit naturally into a hybrid routing framework, when combined with a reactive protocol. SLSP is robust against individual attackers, is capable of adjusting its scope between local and network-wide topology discovery, and is capable of operating in networks of frequently changing topology and membership.

https://people.ece.cornell.edu/haas/wnl/Publications/saahn03.pdf

Panos Papadimitratos

Papers

Vehicular communication systems: Enabling technologies, applications, and future outlook on intelligent transportation

Securing vehicular communications

Secure vehicular communication systems: design and architecture

Efficient and robust pseudonymous authentication in VANET

Secure link state routing for mobile ad hoc networks