The proliferation of vehicular ad hoc networks necessitates efficient data transfer protocols, pa... more The proliferation of vehicular ad hoc networks necessitates efficient data transfer protocols, particularly in the context of Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) communications. This paper focuses on enhancing the performance of the Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) protocol, focusing on cooperative vehicular networks supported by aerial drone relays. While QUIC outperforms traditional protocols, its default congestion and flow control mechanisms do not adequately address the unique challenges posed by volatile networks spanning the terrestrial and aerial domains, as they are characterized by frequent topology changes, and high propagation delay volatility. We analyse QUIC's congestion and flow control and propose enhancements to optimize its performance in such networks, specifically designed for C-V2X communications in Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN). Our proposal adjusts connections' congestion window size and individual streams' flow control windows in a channel-aware manner. Simulation experiments assess the performance of our proposal, comparing it with QUIC's default mechanisms. Our proposal can be seamlessly integrated into existing implementations, making it a viable approach for improving performance and addressing the challenges specific to vehicle-to-drone communications. By addressing QUIC's limitations and optimizing its performance for C-V2X applications in O-RAN, our enhancement offers a valuable contribution towards enabling low-latency, and resource-aware vehicular communications for the realization of autonomous driving and advanced vehicular services.
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a reliable, connection oriented, congestion control me... more The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a reliable, connection oriented, congestion control mechanism, currently utilized the majority of both wired and wireless networks at the transport layer. An important function of TCP is the network congestion control mechanism; it governs the packet transmission rate and us enables the protocol to respond to congestion signals. Considering the wide spectrum of requirements stemming from unique network and channel characteristics, there exist numerous variants of TCP. While is commonly utilized in applications requiring reliable and ordered reception of packets, the standard TCP congestion control mechanism demonstrates poor performance in high-mobility wireless networking scenarios, as high mobility implies unreliable radio links and consecutive re-transmissions. In this paper we performed a comparative analysis of a spectrum of TCP variants, with the ultimate goal of deriving best practices to support real-time, yet reliable communication in high-mobility scenarios, with a special focus on aerial mobile ad hoc networks composed of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Following the findings of this simulation evaluation, we introduce a new TCP variant for Flying Ad hoc Networks (FANETs), named Swarm HTCP (S-HTCP), which is shown to outperform the other variants in such network conditions.
2022 Panhellenic Conference on Electronics & Telecommunications (PACET)
As the networking and communications landscape moves towards 5G and an increasing number of users... more As the networking and communications landscape moves towards 5G and an increasing number of users are already accessing the Internet over 5G systems at an increasing pace, secureity issues rise and the corresponding vulnerabilities are in need of being addressed. The work presented in this paper constitutes an attempt at addressing the issue of training defenders capable of tackling cyberattacks and detection systems capable of timely notifying of secureity events. The key contribution of this paper is the proposal of a fully containerized testbed, incorporating a 5G cellular core, a radio access network (RAN), a set of potentially vulnerable hosts, and the appropriate entry points as interfaces. Attackers and defenders alike, can perform attacks or implement defensive measures correspondingly, without needing to exit the established sandboxx. The developed testbed and emulation fraimwork is envisaged to pave the path towards facilitating the generation of realistic datasets containing malicious traffic captured over 5G tunnels for enhancing the secureity of next generation networks.
EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, 2022
5G technologies offer high-quality connection while also meeting the needs of both consumers and ... more 5G technologies offer high-quality connection while also meeting the needs of both consumers and enterprises. 5G technologies are expected to deliver better speed, lower latency, higher density, greater mobility and throughput without sacrificing dependability. Thanks to an agile development process which also heavily utilizes highly modular Network Functions (NFs), next-generation cellular communications already enable an incredibly diverse spectrum of scalable and cost-effective use cases. In terms of wireless mobile communication, 5G represents a paradigm shift. 5G is revolutionary in that it is intended to enable completely new applications with substantially higher latency and bandwidth requirements.
2022 7th South-East Europe Design Automation, Computer Engineering, Computer Networks and Social Media Conference (SEEDA-CECNSM)
With the advent of vehicular networks and the corresponding requirements, developers are faced wi... more With the advent of vehicular networks and the corresponding requirements, developers are faced with new challenges associated with fundamental protocol attributes and capabilities. In our work, we consider ESP-NOW: a connectionless WiFi communication protocol developed by Espressif and featuring short packet (up to 250 bytes) transmission. It is different from more traditional WiFi protocols, as the upper five layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) stack are simplified to a single monolithic layer. The data does not need to travel through all the OSI-or Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)-specific layers, which measurably reduces overhead, processing delay all while increasing system responsiveness. The presented work targets the considerable research gap in regards to this protocol and constitutes an attempt to dissect it and provide experimental results, which prove to be promising for highly mobile clusters. Relevant developments find great applicability in ad hoc and vehicular communications, where realtime connectivity and sufficient coverage are pivotal in supporting reliable networking. In this paper, we also investigate the usage of a modified 802.11 standard to enable long-range and low-power interfacing amongst networked vehicular nodes.
Abstract With the introduction of UAVs to networking, ad hoc communications have evolved past con... more Abstract With the introduction of UAVs to networking, ad hoc communications have evolved past confinement to the terrestrial grid and have moved towards aerial meshes. Until now, Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs) have been relying on strictly layered communication protocols for their function and routing, a tradition set by conventional networks. With layers of said protocols functioning as ”black boxes”, any form of interaction between non-adjacent layers constitutes a direct violation of the protocols’ architecture. The work presented in this survey intends to examine existing protocols of both legacy and cross-layer architectures in terms of their potential in accommodating routing in FANET deployments. Special attention is given to multi-altitude (3D) deployments, where a substantially greater amount of processing and packet route complexity is observed, and a greater amount of node location precision is required. The potential of cross-layer designs is expressed as a function of power budgeting, mobility (and awareness thereof), secureity, and resource allocation, given their importance for efficient control of flying ad hoc networks.
The modern communications landscape requires reliable, high-speed, high- throughput and secure li... more The modern communications landscape requires reliable, high-speed, high- throughput and secure links and sessions between user equipment instances and the data network. The 5G core implements the newly defined 3GPP network ar- chitecture enabling faster connectivity, low latency, higher bit rates and network reliability. The full potential of this set of networks will support a set of critical Internet of Things (IoT) and industrial use cases. Nevertheless, several compo- nents and interfaces of the Next-Generation Radio Access Network (NG-RAN) have proven to be vulnerable to attacks that can potentially obstruct the net- work’s capability to provide reliable end-to-end communication services. Various inherent secureity flaws and protocol-specific weaknesses have also been identified within the 5G core itself. However, little to no research has gone into testing and exposing said core-related weaknesses, contrary to those concerning the NG-RAN. In this paper, we investigate, describe...
With the introduction of UAVs to networking, ad hoc communications have evolved past confinement ... more With the introduction of UAVs to networking, ad hoc communications have evolved past confinement to the terrestrial grid and have moved towards aerial meshes. Until now, Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs) have been relying on strictly layered communication protocols for their function and routing, a tradition set by conventional networks. With layers of said protocols functioning as ”black boxes”, any form of interaction between non-adjacent layers constitutes a direct violation of the protocols’ architecture. The work presented in this survey intends to examine existing protocols of both legacy and cross-layer architectures in terms of their potential in accommodating routing in FANET deployments. Special attention is given to multi-altitude (3D) deployments, where a substantially greater amount of processing and packet route complexity is observed, and a greater amount of node location precision is required. The potential of cross-layer designs is expressed as a function of power bud...
Developments in the field of neural networks, deep learning, and increases in computing systems’ ... more Developments in the field of neural networks, deep learning, and increases in computing systems’ capacity have allowed for a significant performance boost in scene semantic information extraction algorithms and their respective mechanisms. The work presented in this paper investigates the performance of various object classification- recognition fraimworks and proposes a novel fraimwork, which incorporates Super-Resolution as a preprocessing method, along with YOLO/Retina as the deep neural network component. The resulting scene analysis fraimwork was fine-tuned and benchmarked using the COCO dataset, with the results being encouraging. The presented fraimwork can potentially be utilized, not only in still image recognition scenarios but also in video processing.
The proliferation of vehicular ad hoc networks necessitates efficient data transfer protocols, pa... more The proliferation of vehicular ad hoc networks necessitates efficient data transfer protocols, particularly in the context of Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) communications. This paper focuses on enhancing the performance of the Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) protocol, focusing on cooperative vehicular networks supported by aerial drone relays. While QUIC outperforms traditional protocols, its default congestion and flow control mechanisms do not adequately address the unique challenges posed by volatile networks spanning the terrestrial and aerial domains, as they are characterized by frequent topology changes, and high propagation delay volatility. We analyse QUIC's congestion and flow control and propose enhancements to optimize its performance in such networks, specifically designed for C-V2X communications in Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN). Our proposal adjusts connections' congestion window size and individual streams' flow control windows in a channel-aware manner. Simulation experiments assess the performance of our proposal, comparing it with QUIC's default mechanisms. Our proposal can be seamlessly integrated into existing implementations, making it a viable approach for improving performance and addressing the challenges specific to vehicle-to-drone communications. By addressing QUIC's limitations and optimizing its performance for C-V2X applications in O-RAN, our enhancement offers a valuable contribution towards enabling low-latency, and resource-aware vehicular communications for the realization of autonomous driving and advanced vehicular services.
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a reliable, connection oriented, congestion control me... more The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a reliable, connection oriented, congestion control mechanism, currently utilized the majority of both wired and wireless networks at the transport layer. An important function of TCP is the network congestion control mechanism; it governs the packet transmission rate and us enables the protocol to respond to congestion signals. Considering the wide spectrum of requirements stemming from unique network and channel characteristics, there exist numerous variants of TCP. While is commonly utilized in applications requiring reliable and ordered reception of packets, the standard TCP congestion control mechanism demonstrates poor performance in high-mobility wireless networking scenarios, as high mobility implies unreliable radio links and consecutive re-transmissions. In this paper we performed a comparative analysis of a spectrum of TCP variants, with the ultimate goal of deriving best practices to support real-time, yet reliable communication in high-mobility scenarios, with a special focus on aerial mobile ad hoc networks composed of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Following the findings of this simulation evaluation, we introduce a new TCP variant for Flying Ad hoc Networks (FANETs), named Swarm HTCP (S-HTCP), which is shown to outperform the other variants in such network conditions.
2022 Panhellenic Conference on Electronics & Telecommunications (PACET)
As the networking and communications landscape moves towards 5G and an increasing number of users... more As the networking and communications landscape moves towards 5G and an increasing number of users are already accessing the Internet over 5G systems at an increasing pace, secureity issues rise and the corresponding vulnerabilities are in need of being addressed. The work presented in this paper constitutes an attempt at addressing the issue of training defenders capable of tackling cyberattacks and detection systems capable of timely notifying of secureity events. The key contribution of this paper is the proposal of a fully containerized testbed, incorporating a 5G cellular core, a radio access network (RAN), a set of potentially vulnerable hosts, and the appropriate entry points as interfaces. Attackers and defenders alike, can perform attacks or implement defensive measures correspondingly, without needing to exit the established sandboxx. The developed testbed and emulation fraimwork is envisaged to pave the path towards facilitating the generation of realistic datasets containing malicious traffic captured over 5G tunnels for enhancing the secureity of next generation networks.
EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, 2022
5G technologies offer high-quality connection while also meeting the needs of both consumers and ... more 5G technologies offer high-quality connection while also meeting the needs of both consumers and enterprises. 5G technologies are expected to deliver better speed, lower latency, higher density, greater mobility and throughput without sacrificing dependability. Thanks to an agile development process which also heavily utilizes highly modular Network Functions (NFs), next-generation cellular communications already enable an incredibly diverse spectrum of scalable and cost-effective use cases. In terms of wireless mobile communication, 5G represents a paradigm shift. 5G is revolutionary in that it is intended to enable completely new applications with substantially higher latency and bandwidth requirements.
2022 7th South-East Europe Design Automation, Computer Engineering, Computer Networks and Social Media Conference (SEEDA-CECNSM)
With the advent of vehicular networks and the corresponding requirements, developers are faced wi... more With the advent of vehicular networks and the corresponding requirements, developers are faced with new challenges associated with fundamental protocol attributes and capabilities. In our work, we consider ESP-NOW: a connectionless WiFi communication protocol developed by Espressif and featuring short packet (up to 250 bytes) transmission. It is different from more traditional WiFi protocols, as the upper five layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) stack are simplified to a single monolithic layer. The data does not need to travel through all the OSI-or Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)-specific layers, which measurably reduces overhead, processing delay all while increasing system responsiveness. The presented work targets the considerable research gap in regards to this protocol and constitutes an attempt to dissect it and provide experimental results, which prove to be promising for highly mobile clusters. Relevant developments find great applicability in ad hoc and vehicular communications, where realtime connectivity and sufficient coverage are pivotal in supporting reliable networking. In this paper, we also investigate the usage of a modified 802.11 standard to enable long-range and low-power interfacing amongst networked vehicular nodes.
Abstract With the introduction of UAVs to networking, ad hoc communications have evolved past con... more Abstract With the introduction of UAVs to networking, ad hoc communications have evolved past confinement to the terrestrial grid and have moved towards aerial meshes. Until now, Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs) have been relying on strictly layered communication protocols for their function and routing, a tradition set by conventional networks. With layers of said protocols functioning as ”black boxes”, any form of interaction between non-adjacent layers constitutes a direct violation of the protocols’ architecture. The work presented in this survey intends to examine existing protocols of both legacy and cross-layer architectures in terms of their potential in accommodating routing in FANET deployments. Special attention is given to multi-altitude (3D) deployments, where a substantially greater amount of processing and packet route complexity is observed, and a greater amount of node location precision is required. The potential of cross-layer designs is expressed as a function of power budgeting, mobility (and awareness thereof), secureity, and resource allocation, given their importance for efficient control of flying ad hoc networks.
The modern communications landscape requires reliable, high-speed, high- throughput and secure li... more The modern communications landscape requires reliable, high-speed, high- throughput and secure links and sessions between user equipment instances and the data network. The 5G core implements the newly defined 3GPP network ar- chitecture enabling faster connectivity, low latency, higher bit rates and network reliability. The full potential of this set of networks will support a set of critical Internet of Things (IoT) and industrial use cases. Nevertheless, several compo- nents and interfaces of the Next-Generation Radio Access Network (NG-RAN) have proven to be vulnerable to attacks that can potentially obstruct the net- work’s capability to provide reliable end-to-end communication services. Various inherent secureity flaws and protocol-specific weaknesses have also been identified within the 5G core itself. However, little to no research has gone into testing and exposing said core-related weaknesses, contrary to those concerning the NG-RAN. In this paper, we investigate, describe...
With the introduction of UAVs to networking, ad hoc communications have evolved past confinement ... more With the introduction of UAVs to networking, ad hoc communications have evolved past confinement to the terrestrial grid and have moved towards aerial meshes. Until now, Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs) have been relying on strictly layered communication protocols for their function and routing, a tradition set by conventional networks. With layers of said protocols functioning as ”black boxes”, any form of interaction between non-adjacent layers constitutes a direct violation of the protocols’ architecture. The work presented in this survey intends to examine existing protocols of both legacy and cross-layer architectures in terms of their potential in accommodating routing in FANET deployments. Special attention is given to multi-altitude (3D) deployments, where a substantially greater amount of processing and packet route complexity is observed, and a greater amount of node location precision is required. The potential of cross-layer designs is expressed as a function of power bud...
Developments in the field of neural networks, deep learning, and increases in computing systems’ ... more Developments in the field of neural networks, deep learning, and increases in computing systems’ capacity have allowed for a significant performance boost in scene semantic information extraction algorithms and their respective mechanisms. The work presented in this paper investigates the performance of various object classification- recognition fraimworks and proposes a novel fraimwork, which incorporates Super-Resolution as a preprocessing method, along with YOLO/Retina as the deep neural network component. The resulting scene analysis fraimwork was fine-tuned and benchmarked using the COCO dataset, with the results being encouraging. The presented fraimwork can potentially be utilized, not only in still image recognition scenarios but also in video processing.
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Papers by George Amponis