RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs) are programmable platforms that enable data-driven closed-loop control in the O-RAN architecture. They collect telemetry and data from the RAN, process it in custom applications, and enforce control or new configurations on the RAN. Such custom applications in the Near-Real-Time (RT) RIC are called xApps, and enable a variety of use cases related to radio resource management. Despite numerous open-source and commercial projects focused on the Near-RT RIC, developing and testing xApps that are interoperable across multiple RAN implementations is a time-consuming and technically challenging process. This is primarily caused by the complexity of the protocol of the E2 interface, which enables communication between the RIC and the RAN while providing a high degree of flexibility, with multiple Service Models (SMs) providing plug-and-play functionalities such as data reporting and RAN control. In this paper, we propose xDevSM, an open-source flexible framework for O-RAN service models, aimed at simplifying xApp development for the O-RAN Software Community (OSC) Near-RT RIC. xDevSM reduces the complexity of the xApp development process, allowing developers to focus on the control logic of their xApps and moving the logic of the E2 service models behind simple Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework by deploying and testing xApps across various RAN software platforms, including OpenAirInterface and srsRAN. This framework significantly facilitates the development and validation of solutions and algorithms on O-RAN networks, including the testing of data-driven solutions across multiple RAN implementations.

Today’s advancement in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) constitutes a cornerstone in ensuring traffic safety in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In this context, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications are a pivotal enabler for road safety, traffic optimization, and pedestrian protection. However, V2V communications lack effective and efficient security solutions that can adequately ensure the trustworthiness of the source of the transmitted content. In this work, we originally propose DIVA, i.e., a Decentralized Identifier-based reputation system for secure transmission in VAnets. In particular, we claim the suitability of utilizing IOTA, a Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based ledger, to securely store reputation scores and of leveraging Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) to identify participating vehicles. DIVA also incorporates and implements a reputation algorithm that computes reputation scores by analyzing both safety and non-safety messages, exchanged among vehicles and Road Side Units (RSUs) in compliance with the related European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) standards. Thus, DIVA can effectively identify malicious contributors and decrease their reputation scores. The reported experimental results clearly show the feasibility and effectiveness of DIVA, by working on an extended and comprehensive dataset of realistic V2V messages; the dataset has been made openly accessible to the research community, also to increase result reproducibility.

Today’s advancements in IoT devices and edge computing platforms have given rise to new scenarios enabling context-aware applications in extremely interconnected environments. To promote the standardization of these platforms the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) proposed the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) standard, enabling the execution of cloud-like services at the network edge. In this work, we propose the design of a novel MEC-compliant architecture that leverages underutilized far-edge resources to enlarge MEC edge node computational capacity and enhance service availability in highly mobile networks. Our approach allows far-edge devices to participate in a negotiation process embodying a rewarding system while addressing resource volatility as these devices join and leave the edge node resource infrastructure. Furthermore, we developed an original simulation framework to replicate the proposed architecture by using vehicle resources as far-edge devices. Its primary purpose is to demonstrate the viability and flexibility of our proposal, as well as to investigate novel application scenarios using real-world datasets. Our preliminary results show the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposal when using vehicular-based virtual resources in realistically simulated 5G networks.

Vehicular cloud computing is gaining popularity thanks to the rapid advancements in next generation wireless communication networks. Similarly, Edge Computing, along with its standard proposals such as European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), will play a vital role in these scenarios, by enabling the execution of cloud-based services at the edge of the network. Together, these solutions have the potential to create real micro-datacenters at the network edge, favoring several benefits like minimal latency, real-time data processing, and data locality. However, the research community has not yet the opportunity to use integrated simulation frameworks for the easy testing of applications that exploit both the vehicular cloud paradigm and MEC-compliant 5G deployment environments. In this paper, we present our simulation tool as a platform for researchers and engineers to design, test, and enhance applications utilizing the concepts of vehi cular and edge cloud. The tool implements our ETSI MEC-compliant architecture that leverages resources provided by vehicles. Moreover, the paper analyzes and reports performance results for our simulation platform, as well as provides a use case where our simulator is used to support the design, test, and validation of an algorithm to distribute MEC application components on vehicular cloud resources.