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Computer Science Networking

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Tuesday 8 September

Networking

QoS-Aware RACH Preamble Slicing via Quota-Projected Branching Deep Reinforcement Learning

Quality-of-service (QoS)-aware random access requires adaptive allocation of a finite random access channel (RACH) preamble budget across heterogeneous traffic and access procedures. This paper proposes QP-BD3QN-RACH, a quota-projected branching deep reinforcement learning controller for mixed two-step (2RA) and four-step (4RA) contention-based random access. Four action branches correspond to the delay-sensitive and delay-tolerant 2RA/4RA preamble pools. A branching dueling Double DQN selects pool-specific multipliers, and deterministic quota projection converts them to nonnegative integer allocations that preserve the preamble budget. With five actions per branch, the controller represents 625 pre-projection branch-action tuples using 20 branch-action outputs. Evaluation covers five arrival loads, cross-method comparison under nominal seed 42, six-seed sensitivity of QP-BD3QN-RACH, and targeted ablations. Across the five-load grid, its mean direction-aligned differences relative to four comparators are positive: 5.74 to 8.21 percentage points for success/collision, 1.23 to 1.92 percentage points for fallback, 0.35 to 0.68 percentage points for blocking, and 0.128 to 0.456 decision intervals for successful-access delay. Load-wise results exhibit metric-dependent tradeoffs, particularly under intermediate and overload conditions.
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All authors Jiulin Guo, Jiahan Xu, Jiashuo Zhang, Heng Yang, Yizhen Sun, Yutong Xie, Shanshan Li, Zhenyu Liu, Lei Zhang

Networking

Information-Entropy-Driven Fault Propagation Modeling for Probabilistic Network Performance Prediction

Network faults can trigger cascading effects that cause abrupt and nonstationary performance degradation. Existing learning-based performance predictors mainly focus on normal operation or treat fault-induced topology and routing changes as static inputs, and typically produce deterministic point estimates. They overlook fault-propagation dynamics and uncertainty in performance evolution. The predefined-rule and purely data-driven propagation models lack a unified representation of fault definition, propagation mechanism, and impact quantification. Additionally, generic denoisers in conditional diffusion models fail to incorporate fault propagation into uncertainty modeling. To address these limitations, we propose an information-entropy-driven fault propagation paradigm (IEFP) that characterizes fault propagation via relative entropy, mutual information and transfer entropy. We then design a fault-aware graph message-passing mechanism that propagation contexts modulate network representation learning. We further develop FEMNet, which employs this mechanism as a tailored denoiser within a conditional diffusion model to enable probabilistic network performance prediction under complex fault scenarios. Compared with the strongest baselines, IEFP improves fault-prediction performance, while FEMNet reduces errors in both point and probabilistic KPI prediction.
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All authors Lusha Mo, Fengxiao Tang, Xiaonan Wang, Ming Zhao

Networking

6SEVEN: System for EValuating IPv6 ENumeration algorithms

The vast, sparsely populated, and often ephemeral IPv6 address space makes discovering active addresses challenging. In response, the community has developed over thirty different IPv6 Target Generation Algorithms (TGAs). TGAs learn addressing structure from seed (training) datasets, build a representative model, and generate candidate addresses. Unfortunately, the existing literature employs a wide variety of input seeds, data cleansing, and metrics of success that prevent ready comparison. Toward making TGA evaluation consistent, we present 6SEVEN, an extensible framework that hosts TGAs as plugins and links them to shared data cleaning, probing, dealiasing, and result tabulation components. We port as 6SEVEN plugins eight popular TGAs and demonstrate a controlled case study. Our results show that the performance of these TGAs varies substantially due to factors independent of the main algorithm—especially the seed set composition, dealiasing, and tabulation procedures. We observe tradeoffs between desirable features of TGA performance, including yield and exploration. We envision 6SEVEN as an enabling community resource to advance the science of current and future TGAs, and, by extension, IPv6 measurement.
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All authors Chase Kanipe, Erik Rye, Dave Levin, Robert Beverly

Monday 7 September

Networking

Movable Antennas Enabled Wireless Powered Networks: Principles and Technologies

As an emerging framework, movable antenna (MA)-enabled wireless powered networks (WPNs) have attracted growing attention. WPNs integrate wireless communication and energy transfer. MA can dynamically adjust the position of antenna units by introducing additional spatial degrees of freedom, so as to make full use of channel gain, optimize the effect of energy beamforming, and further improve the performance of WPNs. In this article, we first classify the implementations of MA, and review the fundamental principles of WPNs. We then highlight the key advantages of MA-enabled WPNs in enhancing wireless power transfer efficiency, realizing flexible and adaptive beamforming, and improving system robustness and interference resilience. Furthermore, four representative application scenarios and three key enabling technologies are discussed. A case study is also presented to show the improvement of energy harvesting performance brought by MA for WPNs. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future directions of MA-enabled WPNs, aiming to provide reference for future research and practice.
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All authors Zhendong Li, Yiran Zheng, Tianyu Li, Zhou Su, Wen Chen, Ying Wang

Networking

The OCUDU dApp Platform: An Open Runtime and E3 Interface for Real-Time AI-RAN

Machine learning has shown its largest gains in the band below 10 ms inside a 3GPP new radio (NR) 5G distributed unit (DU): link adaptation, per-slot scheduling, channel estimation, and the receiver itself. No open platform has let independently built software run there. Prior dApp frameworks reached the band only as external observers of an export stream. This paper is a guided introduction to the OCUDU dApp platform, an open runtime and E3 interface under which signed AI-RAN applications execute inside a production DU under three timing contracts: resident on the GPU receive chain (Class A), inside the scheduler's 100 us admitted deadline (Class B), or as never-blocking observers whose results the scheduler consumes (Class C). The conventional path is never displaced, and every authority is typed, validated, and operator-bounded. The paper explains how the runtime, the embedded E3 agent, and the three public repositories fit together; shows a dApp's source, its signed package, and its lifecycle state machine; defines the contracts a module is written against; and shows how one management surface serves a Python script, an operator's console, and an LLM agent. On a GB10 gNB with attached handsets, dApps of all three classes, including an out-of-tree neural equalizer, ran together on a live cell without a single fallback, and equalizer variants were compared over the air by lifecycle operations alone. Every measured checkpoint is reported with its conditions and its gaps. Platform, SDK, and a zero-hardware quickstart are public under BSD-3-Clause-Clear as a preview release of the OCUDU AI-RAN Working Group 2, inviting feedback, new use cases, and independent vetting ahead of upstreaming into the OCUDU mainline.
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Networking

Real-Time dApps for AI-RAN: Measured Interface Requirements for Inline PHY and Slot-Level Control

Distributed applications (dApps) bring AI to the microsecond-to-millisecond band beside the 5G distributed unit (DU), but every public dApp framework realizes them the same way: an external process that receives an indication and returns a control message. That boundary is right for sensing and advisory workloads. It cannot express a neural receiver that must finish inside a slot, and it cannot hold a scheduling decision the MAC is waiting on. This paper asks what a dApp interface must deliver, in latency and bandwidth, for the AI-RAN use cases now filed under that name to be realized as dApps at all. It treats the coupling between a dApp and the DU as a design axis with two legitimate ends, a C ABI inside the DU process and a protocol-standard E3AP association over SCTP, and places the three OCUDU dApp classes on it. An audited corpus of 39 runtime AI-RAN use cases, sized by 5G NR timing, shows that more than half cannot cross the observer boundary: inline PHY work because an indication has no return path into the same slot, and bounded control because of the tail under load. Measuring the mechanisms each framework actually uses, on a quiet host and with a live cell on the air, shows that every carrier meets a 100 us control deadline on an idle host and that only the in-process paths still do once the DU is running. The asynchronous use cases remain feasible at every position, so the protocol-standard end is kept as a first-class option; what in-process placement adds for them is accountable staleness and an observation-to-decision path with no message on it. These measurements derive the released ABI, a stream for inline work, a validated call for bounded control, and a choice of lease, supervised ring, or portable E3 client for observation, and four dApps of all three classes are validated together on one over-the-air cell.
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Networking

How Bitcoin Forms Its Network: Peer-Table Sampling and Structural Properties

The global structure of P2P networks underlying modern cryptocurrencies is hidden by design: each node only knows its neighbors and maintains a local peer table of IP addresses. The peer table of a node can be seen as the node's “local view” of the set of nodes currently in the network: it is constantly updated with information collected from the neighbors and it is used by the node to establish new connections when needed. The maintenance rules of the nodes' peer tables determine the global structure of the network and its evolution. Even though the global structure is unknown to any node of the network as well as to any external observer, the rules for the exchange of information between neighbors are compatible with the design and use of network crawlers that can query the nodes and extract some information about their peer tables. In this paper we first analyze the data we crawled from nodes of the Bitcoin and Dogecoin P2P networks, to collect information about the distribution of IP addresses in the peer tables and to estimate the evolution of network size and churn rate; we then use the estimates to set up the parameters for a simulation of the Bitcoin network and we analyze the evolution of the network structure that we get from the simulation. Overall, our results show that Bitcoin's peer-table maintenance rules induce non-uniform, heavy-tailed visibility patterns while nevertheless generating a well-connected and structurally robust network.
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All authors Taki E.M. Abedesselam, Antonio Cruciani, Fabio Giacomelli, Lucianna Kiffer, Francesco Pasquale

Networking · Cross-listed from cs.LG

No-Regret Mixing of LRU and LFU with Optimal Switching Cost

Caching systems often rely on simple eviction policies such as Least Recently Used (LRU) and Least Frequently Used (LFU), which perform well in complementary request regimes. Recent policies such as LeCar and Cacheus combine LRU and LFU using ideas from the experts problem in online learning. Specifically, upon a miss, they randomize between the two eviction rules using probabilities derived from scores updated by tracking the history of past evictions. While these policies exhibit strong empirical performance, it remains unclear whether they are guaranteed, on every request sequence, to perform asymptotically as well as the better of LRU and LFU, i.e., whether they achieve sublinear regret with respect to this benchmark. We first show that LeCar suffers linear regret against an oblivious adversary, even with unbounded history. We then propose H-MC, a Hedge-based mixture of virtual LRU and LFU caches that preserves Hedge's selection probabilities, and hence its regret guarantees, while minimizing the switching cost among all joint selection rules with these marginals.
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Networking

Perception-Aware Joint Power and Sub-Band Allocation for 6G In-Body Subnetworks

In-body subnetworks (IBSs) are expected to become a key enabler of immersive eXtended Reality (XR) services in sixth-generation (6G) networks by providing ultra-short-range, low-latency wireless connectivity around the human body. However, the dense coexistence of multiple IBSs leads to severe co-channel interference, requiring increased transmit power to satisfy the stringent latency requirements of XR applications. Existing interference management approaches allocate radio resources solely according to application-level Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements, overlooking the perceptual limitations of human users. This paper proposes perception-aware joint power control and sub-band allocation framework that integrates users' delay perception into radio resource allocation for XR-oriented IBSs. A learning-based perception model is first developed by combining Gaussian mixture modeling (GMM) with supervised learning to develop a statistical model of the delay perception threshold. The learned perception model is then incorporated into a stochastic radio resource allocation problem, which is reformulated using a Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty and solved through a low-complexity per-slot resource allocation procedure. System-level simulations under realistic intra- and inter-IBS propagation conditions demonstrate that the proposed approach substantially improves radio resource efficiency, achieving up to 26% transmit power reduction under stringent latency requirements and approximately 60% power savings in dense IBS deployments, while maintaining the required Quality of Experience (QoE).
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Networking

Blockchain-based Proportional Fair Scheduling for Multi-Operator O-RAN

The openness and disaggregation of Open radio access network (O-RAN) facilitate resource sharing and coordination across networks, creating new demands for efficient and trustworthy cross-operator scheduling. However, such scheduling is beyond the scope and capability of conventional proportional fair scheduling (PFS), which lacks mechanisms for establishing trust among independent operators. To fulfill this gap, we propose the blockchain-based proportional fair scheduling (BC-PFS) that enables trustworthy inter-network coordination and resource pooling across operators in O-RAN. Specifically, we design four core smart contracts including registration, status reporting, scheduling, and settlement contracts with corresponding Solidity implementations to ensure trustworthy on-chain execution. Theoretically, to evaluate the BC-PFS performance, we develop an analytical framework to derive the user average throughput via both probabilistic and ordinary differential equation (ODE) approaches, and provide a simplified closed-form solution. Based on the above performance assessment, we quantify the pooling effect in O-RAN achieved through trustworthy cross-operator collaboration via BC-PFS, and point out that this effect grows monotonically in both the numbers of operator networks and users. Simulations validate the theoretical analysis and show the performance of the BC-PFS in O-RAN.
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All authors Kun Huang, Xintong Ling, Meining Wu, Jiaheng Wang, Zhi Ding, Xiqi Gao

Networking

Det-5G: Closing the Determinism Gap in 5G-Advanced for Industrial Closed-Loop Control

The ultra-reliable low-latency communication (uRLLC) capability of 5G has created significant opportunities for industrial wireless connectivity, yet widespread use of cellular networks for closed-loop control remains challenging. Closed-loop control requires more than low packet latency and high reliability: cyclic command/feedback exchanges must complete within predictable time bounds despite changing channel conditions, recovery transmissions, mobility, and multi-device contention. This paper introduces Deterministic-5G (Det-5G), a unified radio resource allocation framework for industrial closed-loop control. Det-5G treats the complete bidirectional control cycle as the scheduling object and combines coordinated downlink/uplink allocation, adaptive bundled transmissions, group-oriented downlink communication, and optimized multi-user uplink scheduling over 5G air-interface. Its performance is evaluated through a combination of closed-form analysis and Monte Carlo scheduling experiments, with comparisons against conventional dynamic grant-based scheduling, semi-persistent scheduling/configured grant operation, and fixed proactive repetition. The evaluation shows that Det-5G improves predictability of cycle completion, maintains the target reliability under changing link conditions, and scales more effectively to multi-device control than conventional reactive scheduling, while adapting radio resource use instead of continuously provisioning for the worst case as in fixed repetition. These characteristics make cycle-oriented scheduling a pragmatic solution for reducing the determinism gap that limits the use of 5G for closed-loop control in different verticals, especially as it evolves through 5G-Advanced toward 6G.
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Networking

Ollama in the Wild: A Longitudinal Measurement of Exposed Ollama LLM Endpoints at Internet Scale

Self-hosted large language model (LLM) serving is emerging as a distinct category of Internet service, but we still know little about how these deployments appear and change on the public Internet. We present a 365-day longitudinal measurement of exposed Ollama endpoints (port 11434) from February 2025 to February 2026, combining daily active probing with GeoIP/ASN enrichment, PTR and port-443 host observations, and survival analysis. Across 362 observation days and approximately 4.8 million IP$\times$day observations, 26.4% of the 152,137 cumulative IPs appear for a single day; across five selected CVEs, only 0.43-2.90% of below-fix IPs upgraded in place; the top five countries/regions account for over 70% of weighted observations; and cloud and hosting providers dominate the top ASNs. These results characterize exposed Ollama as a structural exposure surface: persistent, growing, and heavily concentrated. At the same time, old versions, common model choices, cloud and hosting ASNs, PTR categories, and TLS certificate patterns remain visible across the year, indicating recurring insecure deployment practices in cloud infrastructure and the potential reach of provider-level mitigation.
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All authors Zuyao Xu, Xiang Li, Yuqi Qiu, Lu Sun

Networking

ASTRA: Low-Overhead Runtime Architecture for STReam Adaptation in Video Analytics

Real-time video analytics is crucial for smart city applications and cloud-connected vehicle control. To improve analytics accuracy, it is desirable to process the video at the highest resolution and frame rate. However, due to limited resources, streaming and processing video at the highest resolution and frame rate from all cameras is not feasible and adversely affects the analytics latency. Intelligent adaptation of cameras' resolutions and frame rates based on network conditions and the video content is crucial in order to optimize the performance. In this paper, we present ASTRA, a low-overhead runtime architecture for online adaptation of live camera analytics at the edge. ASTRA can execute various online algorithms as a black box. We deployed ASTRA in the realistic NSF COSMOS testbed and uniquely assessed its real-time performance using COSMOS' street-level cameras. We further evaluated ASTRA with up to eight emulated cameras by streaming a comprehensive video dataset under real-world network conditions. We used ASTRA's architecture to evaluate the practical performance of several classes of adaptation algorithms, including theoretical and empirical methods. The results indicate that ASTRA can provide system reliability (i.e., the probability of meeting accuracy and latency requirements) of more than 90% while maintaining performance within a deviation of less than 10% from optimal offline performance with average GPU utilization overhead of around 2% per camera.
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All authors Mahshid Ghasemi, Zoran Kostic, Javad Ghaderi, Gil Zussman

Sunday 6 September

Networking · Cross-listed from cs.CR

WAPP: Safe Learning of Positive Security WAF Policies from Live Traffic

Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) mainly rely on signatures to detect known attacks, which can leave gaps against modified or previously unseen payloads. Positive security provides a complementary approach by learning legitimate traffic and blocking inputs that fall outside the learned profile. However, learning directly from live traffic can be unsafe when malicious requests contaminate the training data. This paper presents the Whitelisting Autonomous Policy Producer (WAPP), a framework that combines trust filtering, deterministic rule synthesis, confidence scoring, and validation before enforcement. WAPP is evaluated on three controlled applications using a live Coraza and OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS) stack. Results show that, on the tested DVWA username field, unfiltered learning becomes Degraded at 0.2% poisoned traffic and Broken at 0.5%, while the evaluated free text field can admit malicious inputs even without poisoning. On the frozen poisoning dataset, the ablation configuration with all seven candidate signals improves the measured poisoning resilience from 53% to 90%, compared with 62% for the Kruegel–Vigna baseline. The deterministic synthesizer provides attack blocking comparable to the tested language model without model inference cost. WAPP blocks confirmed CRS bypasses on constrained fields, while free text inputs remain a precision challenge that requires character level operator control.
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All authors Heba Osama, Zeyad Ahmed, Mohamed Amgad, Ahmed Saafan, Jana Elfeky, Mariam Abdelati, Haitham Ghalwash

Networking

An FPGA-in-the-Loop Testbed for MU-MIMO OFDM Beamforming over Ray-Traced Wireless Channels

Wireless networks face ever expanding throughput demands from heterogeneous, high-density user populations, requiring beamforming algorithms that adapt to channel conditions with low latency. Validating such algorithms requires either costly over-the-air testbeds or simulation environments that lack the timing and resource constraints of real hardware, leaving a gap between algorithm design and hardware-realizable deployment. This work presents a frame-based hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed that closes that gap by coupling an FPGA-based implementation of OFDM Waveforms with MU-MIMO beamforming to NVIDIA Sionna's ray-tracing channel simulator, enabling a physical base-station architecture to transmit and receive against a Sionna-rendered digital-twin propagation environment. Unlike prior work that validates beamforming algorithms either purely in simulation or on full RF testbeds, this architecture allows beamforming logic running on actual FPGA fabric to be evaluated under realistic, controllable, and repeatable channel conditions, including UE mobility and site-specific multi-path, without requiring an anechoic chamber or live RF front end. We detail the FPGA OFDM transmit/receive pipeline, the synchronization and data interface between the FPGA and the Sionna environment, and validation of signal quality under AWGN and ray-traced channel conditions, establishing this testbed as a platform for hardware-validated beamforming research.
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Networking

Enabling Emergency Communication via Semantic Radar-Centric ISAC

Combat aircraft and other modern military platforms field two co-located RF assets: a radar for sensing and a dedicated radio for communication. In contested battlefield environments, however, the dedicated communication path is highly likely to be targeted and disrupted by jamming, blockage, or physical damage, while the radar remains fully operational. A natural fallback is to repurpose the surviving radar aperture as an emergency communication channel. The difficulty is that radar is purposely engineered for sensing rather than communication, so loading any information onto its waveform perturbs the beampattern and inevitably erodes sensing performance: the more bits we push, the more sensing we lose. We identify the core problem as enabling emergency communication via a radar-centric integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) link while preserving the radar's primary sensing function. Therefore, we propose a semantic radar-centric ISAC framework that pairs a learned vector-quantized semantic encoder, which compresses task-relevant content into a few tens to a few hundred bits, with a wideband phased-MIMO radar restricted to a conservative spatial-spectral configuration subset that respects a bounded sensing-degradation budget. Experiments on SAR target classification and text classification show that our framework supports reliable emergency communication for downstream tasks while keeping the radar beampattern almost unchanged.
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All authors Mohaimin Al Barat, Chaoyu Zhang, Hexuan Yu, Kai Zeng, Y. Thomas Hou, Wenjing Lou

Networking

Measurement-Device Placement in MDI-QKD Networks with Minimal Trusted Relays

Measurement-Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution (MDI-QKD) removes detector side-channel vulnerabilities by delegating measurements to an untrusted relay that, when shared by several user pairs, acts as a Bell-state measurement (BSM) hub. Channel loss still limits the reach of MDI-QKD links, so long-range services rely on trusted relays for key forwarding. As MDI-QKD moves toward metropolitan deployment, a key network-planning question arises: how should BSM hubs be placed on existing fiber infrastructure to minimize the use of trusted relays? In this work, we formalize this challenge as the MDI-QKD Hub Deployment (MHD) problem. We first prove that the MHD problem is NP-hard, and then formulate it as a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first formulation for MDI-QKD network planning that captures the structural features specific to MDI-QKD, namely a shared BSM hub, two-link user-to-hub routing, and loss-balancing constraints, while jointly determining hub placement, user-to-hub assignment, and trusted-relay demand allocation. Our solution accounts for realistic budget and capacity constraints, including practical insights from real-world deployments of commercial MDI-QKD solutions. Numerical evaluations on three metropolitan topologies (12 to 50 nodes) at realistic geographic distances show that topology structure governs trusted-relay demand: hub placement alone eliminates all trusted relays in compact urban meshes, while in sparse topologies, relaxing the loss-balancing constraint removes the dominant source of trusted-relay usage at no additional infrastructure cost. The key-rate threshold at which trusted relays first appear shifts monotonically with the network diameter, i.e., the largest shortest-path distance between any node pair in fiber kilometers, delineating the feasibility boundary of pure MDI-QKD deployment.
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All authors Tianqu Luo, Ibrahim Arslantas, Sezin Ozturk, Qiaolun Zhang, Alberto Sebastián-Lombraña, Mehdi Bolourian, Jiaheng Xiong, Francesco Musumeci, Vicente Martín, Raouf Boutaba, Massimo Tornatore

Networking

The LQ Digital Mode Family: Protocol Architecture and Reference Specification for Weak-Signal Communications

This paper introduces LQ8, an open-source weak-signal digital mode for amateur radio that completes structured two-way contacts in 4 transmissions (60 s), achieving a 1.50x speedup over canonical 6-transmission exchanges (90 s) and 1.25x over 5-transmission RR73 exchanges (75 s) while preserving complete bidirectional exchange of Maidenhead grid locators, signal reports, and mutual acknowledgments. By replacing fixed-width message-type headers with variable-length prefix codes matched to physical-layer bit budgets, LQ8 packs the answering station's grid locator and measured signal report into a single 77-bit reply. In multi-station pileup operations, LQ8 confirms up to two answering stations simultaneously within a single-carrier 50.0 Hz transmission with a 0.0 dB RF power-splitting penalty, achieving a peak rate of 240 QSOs/h in continuous pileup (4x over single-carrier FT8; 480 QSOs/h dual-carrier) while retaining -21.0 dB SNR sensitivity. The protocol family also defines three extended profiles (LQ16, LQ4, and LQ2) tailored for extreme sensitivity, VHF/UHF contesting, and fast-burst channels.
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Networking · Cross-listed from eess.SY

A Theory of Information Architecture for Networked Decisions: Freshness, Locality, and Coordination

Networked systems face a tradeoff between the scope of the information behind a decision and its freshness: a broader view of the system supports better coordination, but assembling and communicating it takes time, so it arrives older. We study this tradeoff for a team of agents that repeatedly choose actions to minimize a shared quadratic cost driven by an environment that evolves on its own, unaffected by the agents' actions. An information architecture specifies what each agent observes, from where, and with what delay; we measure an architecture by the cost it loses relative to a decision made with complete, current information. We first compare fresh local observations with a complete but delayed global view. When every component of the environment decorrelates at a common exponential rate, this comparison reduces to a closed-form threshold on the ratio of delay to coherence time. We then study intermediate architectures in which each agent acts on a time-aligned, and therefore older, snapshot of a wider neighborhood. The optimal neighborhood radius occurs where the marginal value of added scope equals the marginal cost of lost freshness. In a canonical spatial model, this radius is set by the spatial-correlation, decision-relevance, and temporal-propagation lengths. Throughout, architecture performance is governed by the predictability of the optimal decision rather than of the raw state.
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Saturday 5 September

Networking

Exploring the Initial Performance of NB-IoT NTN over GEO: Measurement and Analysis

With the standardization of Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) to provide direct satellite connectivity to massive, low-power Internet of Things (IoT) devices, 3GPP IoT-NTN bridges the worlds of cellular and satellite communications. While holding great potential for global connectivity with IoT devices, there exist several concerns about the system performance of IoT-NTN over Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO), which covers multiple dimensions such as end-to-end delay and energy consumption considering the ultra-long transmission distance from ground IoT terminals to GEO satellite. To answer these concerns, we have conducted the first comprehensive and in depth measurement for NB-IoT NTN over GEO. Based on real NB-IoT NTN testbeds including both Skylo and Tiantong, measurements covering more than six months confirm that the available implementation of NB-IoT NTN remains in the initial stage. Amplified by ultra-long Round-Trip Time (RTT) between ground IoT terminals and GEO satellite, there exists plenty of time and energy consumption during the access process. Interestingly, it also reveals that as an energy-saving mechanism, Power Saving Mode (PSM) fundamentally reshapes NB-IoT NTN traffic into a bursty and access-driven communication pattern and thus has a considerable influence on the end-to-end delay and energy consumption. Finally, we propose corresponding optimization schemes to reduce the delay and energy, which lays a good foundation for the implementation of NB-IoT NTN in the near future.
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All authors Xiong Wang, Yumin Du, Bin Gu, Zheng Lin, Xiaoyang Li, Yi Gong, Wei Gong, Linghe Kong

Networking · Cross-listed from cs.LG

SeaCausal-FL: Federated Fuzzy Causal Learning for Maritime IoT Fault Diagnosis and Counterfactual Reasoning

Reliable marine-engine fault diagnosis in maritime IoT is challenged by distributed data ownership, heterogeneous fault distributions, and continuously changing operating conditions. This paper proposes SeaCausal-FL, a federated fuzzy causal learning framework that combines a shared temporal diagnostic path with mechanism-conditioned causal reasoning. An interval type-2 fuzzy layer represents uncertain and overlapping operating mechanisms, while each mechanism is associated with a physics-constrained structural causal model. Before aggregation, locally learned mechanisms are aligned using operating context, causal structure, and conditional intervention-response signatures. Model parameters are then aggregated according to sample, class, mechanism, and mechanism-class evidence instead of client sample size alone. The learned structural equations further support interval counterfactual reasoning through abduction, action, and prediction. Experiments on a marine-engine fault dataset and a real-data-calibrated semi-synthetic causal benchmark show that SeaCausal-FL achieves an average F1 score of 87.07% across four client partitions, with AUROC and AUPRC of 98.98% and 94.81%, respectively. It also maintains strong performance under unseen loads and fault-type omission during training. On the causal benchmark, SeaCausal-FL reaches an Edge-F1 of approximately 0.58 and an Edge-AUPRC of 0.68, reduces coefficient RMSE to about 0.14, and provides favorable counterfactual estimation and intervention decisions.
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All authors Yuhang Qiu, Haihan Zhu, Koteeswaran Seerangan, Longsheng Zhu, Xiong Wang, Yijun Lu, Zheng Lin, Fangmin Ren, Jialiang Xie

Networking

Task-Oriented Semantic Communication for Hazard Warning and Remote Operation in Connected Vehicle Platoons

Connected and automated vehicle platoons require reliable dissemination of task-relevant hazard information to enable appropriate downstream responses, with unresolved situations additionally requiring remote human intervention. However, the limited channel bandwidth of V2X communication makes high-volume sensor data transmission challenging, motivating the exchange of only task-relevant information rather than raw sensor data. This paper proposes an integrated semantic and task-oriented communication framework for cooperative hazard response and remote operation in automated vehicle platoons. The framework combines onboard instance segmentation and monocular depth estimation for task-oriented hazard decision-making with Stable Diffusion Variational Autoencoder (SD-VAE)-based semantic scene compression. Task-relevant hazard information and the compact semantic representation are jointly disseminated through a broadcast-based Emergency Semantic Message (ESM) over the existing V2X protocol stack. Evaluation demonstrates that SD-VAE consistently outperforms JPEG and JPEG 2000 on task-relevant reconstruction metrics, exhibiting graceful degradation rather than a sharp cliff effect under low-SINR conditions, demonstrating its feasibility for remote scene reconstruction when human intervention is required. Moreover, an extensive campaign of 7,290 simulation runs shows a low overall inter-vehicle collision rate of 0.99%, with collisions occurring mainly under extreme high-speed and short-gap conditions.
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All authors S M Sabit Bananee, Shahriar Hasan, Muhammad Mahbub Alam, Nafiul Rashid

Networking

Rethinking Channel Charting: A Graph Perspective

Channel charting is a self-supervised framework that learns low-dimensional spatial representations from high-dimensional channel state information. We revisit channel charting from a graph-theoretic perspective, and show that the position-diffusion objective is equivalent to a graph Laplacian smoothness functional. We propose a Graph Neural Network (GNN) formulation that replaces the Siamese network's global geodesic dissimilarity objective with a graph smoothness objective. We consider the reformulated objective to be the position diffusion objective. Without diverging from the original optimization objective, the GNN replaces the quadratic-cost self-correlation encoding with linear-cost message passing over an Angle-Delay Profile (ADP)-similarity graph, achieving comparable positioning accuracy with 512 times fewer parameters. Using Laplacian spectral analysis, we demonstrate that obstacles compress the ADP graph spectrum, while the GNN acts as a spectral decompressor against obstacles and other environmental semantics, but as a compressor against excessive ADP embedding space. Beyond this, the second eigenvector of the learned embedding encodes the line-of-sight/non-line-of-sight boundary rather than spatial coordinates.
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All authors Yifei Jin, Yuxin Zhao, Dandan Hao, Gabor Fodor

Networking

SESO-ISAC: Service-Aware End-to-End Sensing Orchestration for 6G ISAC

Unlike conventional communication services, 6G Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) services require complete end-to-end sensing operations, from data collection to processing, result generation, and exposure. In this article, we propose SESO-ISAC, a service-aware end-to-end sensing orchestration framework that maps a sensing service request to a complete sensing configuration under the sensing execution context. Rather than treating sensing configuration decisions independently, SESO-ISAC captures their interdependence across the end-to-end sensing operation, evaluates candidate configurations according to the applicable QoS requirements, and re- evaluates the selected configuration as the sensing execution context changes. Through two representative case studies, we show that the preferred sensing configuration depends on the overall performance across the applicable QoS dimensions and can change during operation.
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All authors Youbin Jeon, Laeyoung Kim, Myungjune Youn, Sangheon Pack

Networking

Delay and Throughput Analysis of Computation Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing: A Queueing Network Approach

Mobile edge computing (MEC) enables mobile devices to offload computation to nearby edge servers and to the cloud in order to reduce end-to-end delay for applications such as AR/VR, real-time inference, and sensor-driven analytics. In this paper, we study static computation offloading when each task consists of multiple dependent subtasks represented by a rooted directed tree. We develop a product-form queueing-network (PFQN) model with an approximation to capture the computation and communication dynamics of tree-structured task execution in a multi-tier MEC system. Based on this model, we derive closed-form expressions for effective server utilizations and waiting times, and then construct a recursive algorithm for evaluating the average delay of general tree-structured tasks. We formulate the static offloading design problem as the minimization of the rate-weighted average task delay over the routing probabilities, and solve it through a differentiable optimization framework based on softmax parameterization, log-sum-exp smoothing, and a stability barrier on server utilizations. Numerical results show that the proposed PFQN approximation provides accurate delay estimates and that the delay-optimized static policy consistently outperforms the considered baseline algorithms in terms of both average task delay and empirical maximum stable throughput.
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Networking

Programmable Data Plane Switch based Heavy Hitter Flow Detection using Packet-Count and Packet-Size features

In data networks carrying large numbers of flows, Heavy Hitters (HHs) or Elephant flows are the flows exceeding pre-determined thresholds (e.g. number of packets or bytes) in a given time window. Such HH flows need to be handled differently in order to minimize their impact on other smaller flows. HH detection techniques have been shown to be more effective when implemented in programmable data plane switches. In recent work, it was shown that the inter-packet gap can be used to identify heavy hitters. Such schemes use a limited-size hash table for storing flow state information and using this for the detection. However, when hash collisions occur, it is possible that a valid HH flow in the table can be replaced by a non-HH flow resulting in missing detection of HH flows. To address this problem, this paper incorporates a flow's medium-term Packet Count (PC) feature. In order to limit the packet count field size in the hash table, counting is done only till hash collision occurs so as to reduce the range of values to be stored and thus, the required number of bits. Also, another flow's medium-term feature, Packet Size (PS) is incorporated independently. The proposed scheme has been implemented in the P4 language and tested on Intel Tofino hardware. Performance evaluation has been performed using CAIDA and MAWI-based real-life traffic traces. The results show that in several scenarios cases, we can significantly reduce the False Negatives for HHs by using the packet count data effectively and efficiently.
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All authors Adarsha K. Sasidhar, Krishna M. Sivalingam, Gauravdeep Shami, Marc Lyonnais, Rodney Wilson

Networking

SLA-Safe Energy Control for AI-Native NG-RAN Using Stability-Aware Constrained PPO

One important AI-for-RAN use case is energy saving, in which radio resources and cell energy modes must be dynamically controlled without violating user quality-of-service (QoS) or service-level agreement (SLA) requirements. However, aggressive sleep-state or deactivation decisions may reduce energy consumption at the cost of throughput degradation, delay increase, SLA violations, and unstable mode switching, especially under time-varying and bursty traffic conditions. This paper proposes a stability-aware constrained reinforcement learning framework for SLA-safe energy control in 5G NG-RAN. The problem is formulated as a constrained Markov decision process in which an AI-native controller selects closed-loop energy-saving actions based on cell load, queue status, active-user information, current energy mode, and SLA-related indicators. The proposed framework uses constrained proximal policy optimization with adaptive Lagrangian penalties to account for throughput, delay, and SLA constraints. To improve operation under traffic distribution shift, the controller is trained using mixed nominal and stress traffic regimes, while a switching-stability penalty is introduced to reduce oscillatory transitions between active and low-power modes. Simulation results in a seven-cell NG-RAN environment show that the proposed controller reduces energy consumption by approximately 41.4% under nominal traffic, 10.5% under stress traffic, and 22.9% under unseen-stress traffic relative to the Always-On baseline. Under stress and unseen-stress traffic, the controller preserves zero SLA violation and zero throughput loss, indicating service-preserving operation under challenging conditions. The proposed method also reduces switching activity compared with basic threshold-based energy saving.
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Networking

Biased Backpressure Routing for Multihop Wireless Networks with Heterogeneous Interfaces

Heterogeneous-interface multihop wireless networks (Het-MuNets) are emerging as a promising paradigm for tactical networks and for infrastructure-light applications such as vehicular communications, wireless backhaul, and non-terrestrial connectivity. To exploit the diverse profiles of heterogeneous communication technologies in penetration, interference, and bandwidth, packet-to-interface assignment must be determined on a per-hop basis, making routing and scheduling highly complex. In this work, we develop a unified framework for joint packet routing, link scheduling, and interface assignment in Het-MuNets with multiple concurrent flows. By modeling packet-to-interface assignment as transmission between virtual subnodes, we transform interface assignment into intra-device virtual routing, which is solved jointly with physical routing and scheduling under a unified multi-layer shortest path-biased Backpressure (SP-BP) scheme. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms SP-BP operating on other baseline graph models and non-backpressure routing schemes in goodput, latency, and packet delivery rate.
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All authors Yujun Ming, Zhongyuan Zhao, Fikadu Dagefu, Justin Kong, Terrence Moore, Kevin Chan, Ananthram Swami, Santiago Segarra

Networking

Comparative Performance of Graphene-Enabled Transmitarray Antenna and Reflectors for Wide-Angle Terahertz Beam Steering

This work compares a hemispherical graphene-based transmitarray antenna with its planar reflector counterpart for wide-angle beam steering in the THz regime. The theoretical framework of the planar reflector is formulated and numerically evaluated, yielding an elevation beam-steering range of \pm60{\deg}. In contrast, the transmitarray extends the elevation steering range to \pm78{\deg} while maintaining full 360{\deg} azimuthal coverage. The planar reflector exhibits a larger HPBW variation of 26.48{\deg}, compared with 13.1{\deg} for the transmitarray, resulting in a broader reflected-beam distribution and reduced directional power density, directivity, and gain. Meanwhile, the transmitarray maintains a more stable and controllable beamwidth response with greater directional power concentration over a wide steering range. The performance advantages of the transmitarray are demonstrated through comparisons with experimental results reported in the literature for planar reflectors and antennas. We further provide a comprehensive assessment of the performance advantages of the transmitarray over planar configurations across the remaining metrics.
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Networking

HalifaxDT: A Wireless Digital Twin from Open Geospatial Data

Wireless digital twins can support site-specific analysis, planning, and experimentation for future wireless networks. However, constructing them at city scale remains challenging when accurate 3D city models are unavailable. This paper presents HalifaxDT, a wireless digital twin of the Halifax Peninsula in Nova Scotia, Canada, constructed from heterogeneous open geospatial and spectrum data. HalifaxDT combines building footprints, LiDAR elevation products, building metadata, and spectrum licensing records through a workflow that reconciles multiple sources of building-height information while preserving the provenance of geometry decisions. The resulting terrain, buildings, and gateway metadata are integrated into Sionna RT for wireless simulation. We evaluate HalifaxDT through two use cases. The first compares its coverage predictions with a reference derived from field measurements and with an analytical baseline. The second uses the digital twin to predict the received signal under normal operating conditions and detect interference. The coverage results show that HalifaxDT better preserves the spatial structure of the measured radio map than the analytical baseline. The interference study shows that deviations from the predicted reference can reveal interference that is difficult to detect from received power alone. We also identify current fidelity limitations, including simplified material representation, missing vegetation, and the need for broader RF calibration and synchronization with live measurements.
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All authors Alexis Delplace, Xinyi Li, Samer Lahoud, Nur Zincir-Heywood