Towards 6G-Enabled Internet of Vehicles

Towards 6G-Enabled Internet of Vehicles.md · GitHub

6G will be a prominent supporter for the evolution towards a truly Intelligent Transportation System and the realization of the Smart City concept by fulfilling the limitations of 5G
Providing security and privacy to critical systems should be a top priority as vulnerabilities can be catastrophic
There are huge concerns regarding data collected from sensors, people and their habits
6G plays a pivotal role on attaining the ambitious goals for IoV by satisfying the more rigorous key performance indicators (KPIs) that were partially fulfilled by 5G for vehicle communications
Security and privacy are critical to ensure the expected resilience and reliability of future wireless networks

Network Virtualization

Network softwarisation, the philosophy behind taking network control functions out of the traffic forwarding elements and implementing it in software.
Enabling network programmability with application programming interfaces (APIs) through splitting the network control and data planes
SDN proved to be the most widely accepted technology enabling network softwarization
Software-defined network and service management (NFV) are highly complementary to each other and leverage on each other for full potential
with increased base stations densities along with novel access techniques, thus minimizing the chances of congestion, increasing reliability and decreasing latency

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) that allows a platform to perform trusted tasks and transactions in an untrusted environment by dispensing a trusted entity
In 5G and beyond, blockchain and similar DLTs represent the most important enablers to address various problems related to security, automation, interoperability, and resource management in a distributed and decentralized manner
Towards 6G, blockchain will be critical to facilitate the evolution of these 5G services to comply with 6G requirements
Integrating blockchain into the IoV offers security and prevention of data manipulations by its ability to guarantee the data immutability
Centralized systems cannot always satisfy the rigorous QoS demands of IoV, thus decentralized solutions are attractive to allow trust management tasks being conducted

Traditionally, V2X communications use authentication schemes that are based on public key infrastructure (PKI), which require the transmission of certificates and signatures for sending safety-related information.
To circumvent this problem, physical layer authentication (PLA) emerge as a viable solution to provide secure communications with low latency and light signalling overhead, compatible with IoV applications, by relying on the unique channel properties.

The use of smaller cells (e.g., picocells and femtocells) is an efficient way to increase the next-generation network capacity, but, at the same time, this trend also leads to increasing inter-cell interference.
For further network denazification, small cells may even reduce rather than increase the network capacity.
One of the emerging 6G solutions to circunvent this issue is to utilize a fully decentralized massive MIMMO scheme so-called cell-free million-input-output (mMIMO)
A huge number of distributed access points (APs) cooperate with each other to serve a much smaller number of users instead of creating autonomous centralized cells
This architecture leads to a user-centric cellular network approach that is able to solve the intercell interference concerns and QoS variations inherent in conventional cellular networks
Terahertz (THz) communications have emerged as an enabling technology to provide low-latency communication and extremely high throughput to 6G mobile networks, thus favoring the emergence of new applications in the context of IoV.

A typical backscatter transmitter (also known as a tag), a legacy receiver, and a carrier emitter (e.g., radio-frequency-RF source).
The transmitter modulates and reflects the received signal from the emitter to neighboring receivers.
For a smooth operation of BC, the legacy receiver should be designed in such a form that it can decode the modulated signal sent by the transmitter
There are three major types of BC architectures: monostatic, bistatic, and ambient
End-to-end security, including data encryption and authentication, is ideal for providing confidentiality and privacy from the user's perspective

Standardization bodies and their workgroups involved in V2X include International Organization for Standardization (ISO) TC 204, European Council of Europe (ECE) Credential Management System (EU CCMS), and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) IPWAVE
The European Commission has been active in stimulating research, standardization, and deployment
In regards to softwarisation, the emphasis is largely on networking functions
Two types of certificates are exchanged with end-devices: an Enrolment Certificate, which is programmed into the end-device, and a commonly changing Authorisation Ticket
To assure privacy, Authorization Tickets and all other vehicle identifiers included in the messages should change at regular intervals
A Misbehavior Authority, dealing with detection of misbehavior, collection of data and mitigating actions will be key to misbehavior management