Connectivity has become essential to modern manufacturing, but it also introduces new security challenges. Industrial IoT ecosystems rely on public-key cryptography to protect communications, firmware, and operational data. However, the emergence of quantum computing threatens to undermine these cryptographic foundations, exposing long-lived manufacturing systems to future attacks. This paper presents the Quantum-Secure IoT-based Digital Manufacturing Pilot, developed within the EU-funded QUBIP project, which investigates the integration of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) into IoT environments. The pilot aims to demonstrate how quantum resistant algorithms can be efficiently deployed across heterogeneous devices with limited resources to ensure data exchange and authentication. By combining software and hardware-based approaches, the proposed pilot provides a replicable model for PQC migration in digital manufacturing, ensuring long-term data integrity and resilience in the quantum era.

The paper presents a step forward in the design and implementation of a Transport Layer Security (TLS) handshake protocol that enables the use of Verifiable Credential (VC) while maintaining full compliance with RFC-8446 and preserving all the security features of TLS 1.3. The improvement over our previous work lies in the handshake design, which now only uses messages already defined for TLS 1.3. The design has an incredibly positive impact on the implementation, as we made minimal changes to the OpenSSL library and relied mostly on a novel external provider to handle VC and Decentralized IDentifier (DID) related operations. The experimental results prove the feasibility of the design and show comparable performance to the original solution based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and X.509 certificates. These results pave the way for the adoption of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) in large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) systems, with a clear benefit in terms of reducing the cost of identity management.

Verifiable Credentials (VCs) can play a crucial role for the identity layer of the Internet. VCs allow Holders to share cryptographically verifiable claims issued by trusted Issuers for authentication purposes. However, plaintext VCs can compromise the privacy of the Holder, as they must disclose entire VCs even when only partial information is required. To address this growing concern, the concept of anonymous credentials has been introduced. In addition, with the advent of Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computers, many cryptography fields, including that of anonymous credentials, face significant security challenges. This threat urge the design, development, and the implementation of Post-Quantum Anonymous Verifiable Credential frameworks. This paper contributes to this challenge by presenting the analysis and selection of a practical PQ Anonymous Credential framework, the adaptation of the framework to the VC concept introduced by the Self-Sovereign Identity Model, and the software implementation with 128 bit security with the initial performance evaluation.

Telco operators are using Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) to virtualise a wide range of network functions and link or chain them together to create, deploy and deliver network connectivity services. In such a distributed software networking environment, operators use Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) with Internet Key Exchange (IKEv2) to provide secure connectivity between container network functions running on different computing nodes in their infrastructure. This paper discusses the adoption of the Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) model in IKEv2 for authentication purposes to avoid the high costs associated with identity management of IPsec endpoints using Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) and X. 509 certificates, while preserving all the security features of the protocol. The paper presents a novel design of the IKEv2 message flow with Verifiable Credentials (VCs), its open source implementation as a fork of the strongSwan library, and the successful experimental validation.

The integration of automotive communications in 5G systems must build on a clear understanding of the performance of services for connected vehicles in today's LTE deployments. In this paper, we carry out a simulation-based performance evaluation of automotive communications in LTE, with particular attention to realism: to that end, we investigate the impact of different road traffic models, employ a state-of-the-art commercial LTE tool, and study a practical service use case. Our results demonstrate that unrealistic road traffic datasets can bias network simulations in urban vehicular environments, and provide insights on the limitations of the current radio access architecture, when confronted to connected vehicles.

The recently proposed Time-Division Unbalanced Carrier Sense Multiple Access (TDuCSMA) coordination function has been shown to cope very efficiently with many different data flows with widely different bitrates and packet lengths. This case may happen in a typical wireless home network setting where HD video, voice, videosurveillance and videoconference applications are used concurrently. This paper illustrates the advantages of TDuCSMA in such a scenario compared to the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA), currently provided by the IEEE 802.11 standard, in terms of both performance from the end user's point of view and network resource utilization. The results show that TDuCSMA provides much better performance than EDCA, especially regarding video quality, delay and packet loss rate for voice streams, and stability over time. Moreover, the TDuCSMA performance is consistent as the network load increases while the EDCA performance significantly decreases.

This work addresses the implications of using the Time-Division Unbalanced Carrier Sense Multiple Access (TDuCSMA) coordination function to support triple-play services. Firstly, the theoretical background of TDuCSMA is reported, presenting its advantages and discussing its full compliance with the IEEE 802.11 standard. Secondly, a prototype of TDuCSMA is discussed in details. Then, a set of experiments with the prototype implementation of TDuCSMA is presented, showing for the first time the advantages of TDuCSMA in a realistic setting with audio, video and elastic data applications. Experimental results show the superiority of TDuCSMA over the legacy 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) in terms of both channel utilization and Quality of Experience (QoE) as measured at the application level.

This paper presents the work of prototyping a weakly synchronous and distributed coordination function called Time-Division Unbalanced Carrier Sense Multiple Access (TDuCSMA). The prototype, designed and developed by modification of the wireless Atheros drivers, is meant to demonstrate the feasibility of TDuCSMA and its capabilities in bandwidth management and QoS provisioning. Furthermore, the bandwidth reservation model, derived and verified by simulations in previous works, is validated by real communication experiments.

This work analyzes the impact of medium access control (MAC) layer on the performance of real-time cooperative positioning in ad-hoc mobile wireless networks. The probability mass function (pmf) of the latency introduced by the MAC layer is here derived to assess the influence of MAC parameters on the latency and then operate on those to improve the positioning performance while reducing the number of position estimation iterations.

Time-division Unbalanced Carrier Sense Multiple Access (TDuCSMA) is a distributed MAC discipline compliant to the IEEE 802.11 standard that supports resource management and Quality of Service provisioning in Wi-Fi networks. This paper further highlights the compliance of TDuCSMA with IEEE 802.11 standard by suggesting the coexistence of TDuCSMA and CSMA/CA entities within the same node. The resulting distributed network functionalities are described by an analytical models which are also validated by simulations. The proposed models are meant to support network and service designs.

We propose a run-time distributed and dynamic scheduling protocol for Quality-of-Service oriented Networks-on-Chip implementing Time Division Multiplexing of the channels. Our protocol automatically allocates the channel time-slots according to the specific routing algorithm implemented by the routers and the communication requirements of the applications currently executing. We present a theoretical analysis to model the protocol performance based on the traffic characteristics and to optimize the configuration of the NoC architecture which we propose to implement the protocol. This architecture relies on two independent and parallel networks: the first network transfers QoS-demanding data while the second is used to control the first and for best-effort traffic. System-level simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by showing that the runtime-generated reservation requests for QoS-demanding data are accepted by the NoC with very low blocking probability and that once a reservation has been established the requested latency and throughput guarantees are consistently met.

A synchronous distributed coordination function called Time-Division Unbalanced Carrier Sense Multiple Access (TD-uCSMA) has been proposed to provide CSMA/CA with a mechanism for bandwidth management over single-hop wireless networks. TD-uCSMA relies on synchronization among nodes and the time-driven switching of Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) parameters inside nodes. The solution, currently assessed in single-hop scenarios with CBR traffic profiles, is here validated on multi-hop scenarios and generalized to support heterogeneous traffic aggregates. This requires the definition of a bandwidth reservation model able to manage traffic aggregates with variable bit-rate and packet length. Notably the devised model shows a first order dependence only on bit-rate and on packet length statistics (mean and variance) due to a straight-forward consequence of the TD-uCSMA operating principles. Simulations validate this simple bandwidth reservation model and show its effectiveness over multi-hop wireless access networks.

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) have been extensively studied in the last years. Despite the availability of IEEE 802.11p transceivers, most of the literature presents simulation results, rather than real-world measurements. This is mainly due to the capability of simulations to facilitate interpretations of results; in fact any event can be decomposed into basic sub-events and the related causes analyzed in depth. However, this requires realistic settings of simulations to lead to consistent conclusions. Nowadays, most of the network simulators neglect the probabilistic nature of the decoding process at the receiver and this may have significant impact on the results. This paper is meant to fill this gap by proposing an analytical Packet Error Rate (PER) model for 802.11preceivers, particularly suitable for the implementation within packet-level simulators. It is completely parameterized as a stochastic function of line-rate, Signal to Noise ratio (SNR) and packet length, and it is consistent with experimental measurements.

Scheduling techniques are often deployed at the network edge to maximize the quality of the video communication while satisfying a given constraint on the maximum high priority usable bandwidth. For the case of video communications, the importance of each packet, in terms of the distortion that would be caused by its loss, can be used to decide which packets should be prioritized in order to maximize the expected video quality. However, the resulting performance strictly depends on the length of the video stream segment considered, at each time instant, by the distortion-aware scheduling algorithms. This work focuses on improving the performance of those algorithms by predicting the characteristics of the near-future part of video streams, exploiting the short and long term dependencies in packet distortion values. This approach could be particularly valuable in live video scenarios where accessing the future part of the video would imply the insertion of an additional delay. Several distortion prediction models are derived and their performance evaluated with actual scheduling algorithms. Results show that the best predictions are provided by neural network models, yielding significant improvements of the video communication quality.

This paper proposes TD-uCSMA a synchronous distributed coordination function which is meant to provide CSMA/CA with a mechanism for QoS provisioning and bandwidth management over WiFi networks. TD-uCSMA relies on synchronization among nodes and the time-driven switching of contention parameters inside nodes. The TD-uCSMA operating principles and preliminary synchronization issues are presented here together with an extensive simulation analysis showing the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Previous works showed that the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of multimedia applications can be optimally satisfied by pipeline forwarding (PF) by providing end-to-end delay guarantees as well as high network resource utilization. However, the unavoidable mismatch between reserved resources and the unpredictable traffic profile of a video stream has an impact on the resulting application layer quality. Therefore, a new low-complexity H.264 video encoding and packetization scheme based on a distortion-optimized macroblock grouping technique is designed here to maximize the performance of video transmission on PF networks. The scheme considers the perceptual importance of the different parts of the video data to group the most important information in few packets that are the natural candidates to receive the deterministic service provided by PF. Results show peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) gains up to 2.5 dB over traditional video encoding and packetization schemes, as well as more graceful degradation in case of high network load.

This paper proposes a novel adaptive AQM (advanced queue management) approach called Time-Driven Early Discard (TED). The basic underlying idea is to set a deadline on packet service time in routers, beyond which packets are discarded. TED is shown to improve fairness among TCP connections sharing congested links when the deadline is chosen proportional to their round trip time (RTT). TED is adaptive in limiting the throughput of only those connections that traverse congested links. In fact, as demonstrated by the presented results, TCP connections traversing parts of the network with enough available capacity can achieve the maximum throughput enabled by their transmission window as corresponding packets do not reach their deadline . Finally, the paper shows how TED can be instrumental in enabling TCP to deploy shorter retransmission timeouts, which results in prompter reactivity to loss, hence improved performance overall in terms of achieved goodput.

This paper tackles the issue of optimizing the transport of video over packet networks with respect to both resource utilization and user perceived quality. Previous work showed that the quality of service requirements of multimedia applications can be satisfied by pipeline forwarding of packets. However, the current Internet is not based on such technology and its incremental introduction raises questions on how to handle video packets generated by pipeline forwarding unaware sources at the interface between a subnetwork deploying conventional packet scheduling techniques and one implementing pipeline forwarding. This work proposes to use the perceptual importance of the carried video samples to determine which packets shall be transferred with pipeline forwarding - thus receiving deterministic service - and which with a traditional, e.g., best effort or differentiated, service. Simulation results with the first implemented variants of this solution are presented.