Low Latency and Highly Secure Protocols for Critical Communications

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As more devices are developed and interconnected, the communication infrastructure becomes critical and time-sensitive for many applications such as drone control, remote surgery and vehicle to vehicle communication. These critical communications must be resilient to interference, jamming, intrusions, and are often required to provide services with extremely low latency. The goal of this proposal is to explore various solutions to issues related to this critical communication infrastructure. The proposal encompasses several topics spanning the field of digital communications. It centers around two main topics: low-latency communications and traffic analysis, but involves several layers of the communication stack, ranging from the physical layer to the application layer. Standing at the crossroad between two key domains: latency optimization and security in communication networks, the proposed project aims at the ambitious objective of significantly reducing latency in secure communication networks. This objective is furthermore circumscribed by taking into account the transmission of two different message types: short critical messages, and long non-critical messages. The 'critical' aspect of said message types herein refers to their latency requirement. A critical message requires lower latency (faster end-to-end transmission) than a non-critical message. A typical critical message relates to signaling and control information for real-time, or near real-time, systems (i.e. remote drone control, utility infrastructure monitoring, telemedicine, etc.). In order to achieve this global objective, a systemic approach based on the monitoring of network conditions is proposed. Research activities involving the definition, the real-time extraction and the analysis of such network condition metrics are also provisioned in the work-plan. Leveraging network-wide metrics with local, i.e. network segment level, performance data will support the deployment of novel secure routing and planning schemes which shall have a significant positive impact on latency.