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Following the COVID-19 outbreak, the health sector is undergoing a deep transformation that is increasingly pushing it towards the exploitation of technology, thus fostering the growth of digital health (eHealth). Cellular networks play a pivotal role in promoting the digitalization of healthcare, and researchers are banking on beyond fifth-generation (B5G) and sixth-generation (6G) technologies to reach the turning point, given that, according to forecasts, 5G will not be able to meet future expectations. Security is an aspect that definitely should not be overlooked for the success of eHealth to occur. This work aims to address the security issue from a poorly explored viewpoint, namely that of economics. In this paper, we first describe the main eHealth services, highlighting the key stakeholders involved. Then, we discuss how next-generation technologies could support these services to identify possible business relationships and, therefore, to realize an innovative business-oriented security analysis. A qualitative assessment of the impact of specific security breaches in diverse business conditions is provided. Moreover, we examine a case study in order to show the effects of security attacks in a definite scenario and discuss their impact on business dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The era of the fifth-generation (5G) New Radio (NR) technology has just begun, and its promises to substantially improve the system performance have turned into reality. The 5G NR enabled Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) is almost upon us and will represent an effective solution to provide services anytime, anywhere, and over wider coverage areas. In this context, high throughput satellite systems with advanced multi-beam transmissions have gained significant attention owing to their ability to boost the system capacity through beam frequency re-use, increased user data rates, and system spectral efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel radio resource management scheme, named Single-Frequency Multi-Beam Transmission (SF-MBT), for efficient delivery of the enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) services over the 5G NR multi-beam NTN systems. The main thinking is to group beams into the dedicated Beam Areas, wherein a certain content flow is delivered via simultaneous multi-beam transmissions over the same radio resources without causing inter-beam interference. A simulation campaign is conducted under different scenarios to assess the effectiveness of the proposed SF-MBT algorithm as compared to the current schemes based on frequency reuse. System-wide performance is evaluated in terms of the aggregate data rate, mean throughput, and system spectral efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, group-oriented communications have been mainly exploited for delivering multimedia services in human-oriented communications while, in future fifth generation (5G) cellular networks, objects will be the main target. Internet of Things (IoT) will undoubtedly play a key role in 5G networks, wherein massive machine-type communications (mMTC) feature a use case as crucial as challenging since cellular IoT connections are predicted to grow heavily in the next future. To boost capacity and energy efficiency, the 5G network can leverage device-to-device (D2D) communications which are recognized as an effective offloading technique. This is achieved thanks to the fact that, in legacy D2D communications, data are directly sent from one device to another, avoiding the crossing of the network. Obviously, the distributed nature of such a communication paradigm and the inherent broadcast nature of the wireless channel make it necessary to think how to secure the so called “sidelink” transmissions. This work proposes a protocol for the efficient and reliable management of multicast services in a 5G-oriented IoT scenario, in which security is a crucial requirement to be met. The proposed protocol is tailored to Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and makes use of D2D communications with the aim of improving network efficiency and optimizing network resource utilization. In addition, cyber security and social trustworthiness mechanisms are exploited to secure D2D communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expected growth in mobile video demand over broadband cellular networks is one of the key factors driving the wireless industry to develop the fifth generation of network technology. This scenario is fueling the need for group-oriented services (i.e., multicast and broadcast) in order to efficiently manage the radio resources, and consequently grant different groups of users simultaneous access to the same multimedia content with differentiated quality of service. The evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service (eMBMS), standardized by the Third Generation Partnership Project, is one of the technologies likely to be extended to 5G systems with the aim of addressing point-to-multipoint services. In addition, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) techniques are also being considered as a driver to increase the efficient use of the spectrum in multi-user environments with asymmetric data delivery. The present article proposes the joint use of subgrouping multicast techniques and NOMA in an eMBMS-like scenario. Performance is evaluated in envisaged 5G environments, where different quality video services are delivered to a group of users interested in the same contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Future fifth-generation (5G) cellular systems are set to give a strong boost to the large-scale deployment of Internet of things (IoT). In the view of a future converged 5G-IoT infrastructure, cellular IoT solutions such as narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and device-to-device (D2D) communications are key technologies for supporting IoT scenarios and applications. However, some open issues still need careful investigation. An example is the risk of threats to privacy and security when IoT mobile services rely on D2D communications. To guarantee efficient and secure connections to IoT services involving exchange of sensitive data, reputation-based mechanisms to identify and avoid malicious devices are fast gaining ground. In order to tackle the presence of malicious nodes in the network, this paper introduces reliability and reputation notions to model the level of trust among devices engaged in an opportunistic hop-by-hop D2D-based content uploading scheme. To this end, social awareness of devices is considered as a means to enhance the identification of trustworthy nodes. A performance evaluation study shows that the negative effects due to malicious nodes can be drastically reduced by adopting the proposed solution. The performance metrics that proved to benefit from the proposed solution are data loss, energy consumption, and content uploading time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number and variety of mobile multicast applications are growing at an unprecedented and unanticipated pace. Mobile network providers are in front of a dramatic increase in multicast traffic load, and this growth is forecasted to continue in fifth-generation (5G) networks. The major challenges come from the fact that multicast traffic not only targets groups of end-user devices; it also involves machine-type communications (MTC) for the Internet of Things (IoT). The increase in the MTC load, predicted for 5G, calls into question the effectiveness of the current multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS). The aim of this paper is to provide a survey of 5G challenges in the view of effective management of multicast applications, and to identify how to enhance the mobile network architecture to enable multicast applications in future 5G scenarios. By accounting for the presence of both human and machine-related traffic, strengths and weaknesses of the state-of-the-art achievements in multicasting are critically analyzed to provide guidelines for future research on 5G networks and more conscious design choices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

mcMTC is starting to play a central role in the industrial Internet of Things ecosystem and have the potential to create high-revenue businesses, including intelligent transportation systems, energy/ smart grid control, public safety services, and high-end wearable applications. Consequently, in the 5G of wireless networks, mcMTC have imposed a wide range of requirements on the enabling technology, such as low power, high reliability, and low latency connectivity. Recognizing these challenges, the recent and ongoing releases of LTE systems incorporate support for lowcost and enhanced coverage, reduced latency, and high reliability for devices at varying levels of mobility. In this article, we examine the effects of heterogeneous user and device mobility -- produced by a mixture of various mobility patterns -- on the performance of mcMTC across three representative scenarios within a multi-connectivity 5G network. We establish that the availability of alternative connectivity options, such as D2D links and drone-assisted access, helps meet the requirements of mcMTC applications in a wide range of scenarios, including industrial automation, vehicular connectivity, and urban communications. In particular, we confirm improvements of up to 40 percent in link availability and reliability with the use of proximate connections on top of the cellular-only baseline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multimedia content delivery over satellite systems is considered as a promising service in emerging 5G networks. The aim of this paper is to design a novel radio resource management algorithm for efficiently managing multicast multimedia content transmission over satellite network. The proposed approach performs the spectrum management on a per-group basis, by splitting multicast terminals into different subgroups according to the experienced channel qualities. We demonstrate that subgrouping policy defined by the authors as multicast subgrouping-maximum satisfaction index (MS-MSI), based on a new metric (i.e., MSI), overcomes the weakness of the previous techniques proposed in the literature and provides the best tradeoff between user throughput and fairness. As a further result, we demonstrate that MS-MSI is robust to the long propagation delay of satellite links. An extensive simulation campaign has been conducted by considering several satellite environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is considered as one of the key enabling technologies for fifth-generation (5G) networks as it allows data offloading generated by the huge number of connected devices. In this respect, group-oriented services are among the most interesting usage scenarios. Indeed, D2D can improve the performance of the conventional multicast scheme (CMS) in cellular networks, which is known to suffer from low spectral efficiency. Security is a further key field of investigation for 5G systems, as any threat to privacy and security may lead to both deteriorated user experience and inefficient network resources’ utilization. Security issues are even more in focus for D2D connections between devices that are in mutual proximity. To improve the CMS performance and also sustain security requirements of the 5G network, this work proposes a secure D2D data transmission algorithm. Making use of mechanisms such as encryption and signature, this algorithm aims to protect the exchanged data and the privacy of the devices involved in the communication. A simulation campaign conducted using MATLAB shows the ability of the proposed solution to take advantage of the establishment of secure D2D communications and efficiently utilize network resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]