Intelligent transportation networks are increasingly integrating autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) to enable services essential for modernizing industries like transportation, logistics, and search and rescue. A significant beneficiary is the Internet of Connected Vehicles (IoCVs), where AAVs play a transformative role in supporting next-generation cellular networks. This paper addresses the challenge of minimizing the cost of delivering content to vehicles on road segments with congested traffic or insufficient infrastructure. Vehicles entering these segments request content from a AAV-hosted library that updates dynamically based on item popularity. Each vehicle submits a request, requiring the AAV to compute an optimal trajectory to maximize operational utility. Given the AAV’s limited energy, we aim to develop an energy-efficient solution. The problem is framed as a joint optimization of caching decisions, AAV trajectory planning, and radio resource allocation, formulated as a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem. The environment’s complexity, with random vehicle arrivals and fluctuating content, makes traditional optimization techniques inadequate. To address this, we reformulate the problem as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) and employ a primal-dual proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm, enhanced by a multi-scale generative transformer (MGFormer) for improved speed and accuracy over traditional deep neural networks (DNNs). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework reduces service costs by up to 30% and achieves robust performance even under high-density traffic and Doppler shifts, validating its superiority over traditional Primal-dual PPO.

The demand for higher broadband speeds is ever increasing whereas the deployment of full fibre to the premises is slower than initially predicted and remains costly. Solutions exploiting the existing, ubiquitous, copper network and increasing its capacity would be highly beneficial in the near term. One approach is to use surface wave (SW) transmission mode to transmit signals over the existing copper cabling network. We present proof-of-concept experimental SW data transmission on twisted pair cables. A surface wave launcher for low GHz carrier frequency operation is designed and optimised. Experimentally, we demonstrate data rates in excess of 12 Gb/s in a 1.15-3.25 GHz band over a 6.1 m twisted pair cable with an average bit error rate of$2.25 \times 10 ^{-5}$, without coding or feedback implementation. Furthermore, higher frequency bands are tested with data rates up to 3.4 Gb/s displaying their potential for surface wave transmission. S-parameter measurements allow capacity estimations of SW data transmission on longer cable lengths using water-filling algorithms. Our calculations predict over 13 Gb/s capacity on a 100 m cable using a 3.5 GHz transmission bandwidth, this may be further extended by further increases to the bandwidth used for SW transmission.

Automatic Identification System (AIS) is the de-facto communication standard used by vessels to broadcast identification and position information. However, being AIS communications neither encrypted nor authenticated, they can be eavesdropped and spoofed by adversaries, leading to potentially threatening scenarios. Existing solutions, including the ones conceived in the avionics domain, do not consider integration with the AIS standard, and they do not provide protection against rogue messages flooding. In this article, we propose Auth-AIS, a secure, flexible, standard-compliant, and backward-compatible authentication framework to secure AIS broadcast messages. Auth-AIS leverages existing sound cryptographic tools, including TESLA and Bloom Filters, inheriting their security properties while contextualizing them in the AIS technology. Auth-AIS is a software-only solution, that can be seamlessly integrated into existing AIS deployments, without requiring any hardware replacement. Its innovative design also provides backward-compatibility—i.e., Auth-AIS messages can be received also by AIS users not adopting Auth-AIS, while renouncing at its security guarantees. Auth-AIS can work in either two configuration modes: Deterministic Security Configuration, able to achieve low-delay authentication with a message overhead of 75 percent, or Probabilistic Security Configuration, reducing the message overhead down to 35.71 percent, while experiencing a marginal increase in the authentication delay. All these security configurations guarantee an 80 bits equivalent security level and false-positive rate less than 2--40. Note that these latter security parameters can easily be tuned to fit different security requirements. Finally, the source code of Auth-AIS in the GNURadio ecosystem has been released as open-source, to foster research activities from both Industry and Academia on secure AIS communications.