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1. Measuring the Performance of iCloud Private Relay

   Trevisan, M. ; Drago, I. ; Schmitt, P. ; Bronzino, F. ( March 2023 , Springer)

   Recent developments in Internet protocols and services aim to provide enhanced security and privacy for users’ traffic. Apple’s iCloud Private Relay is a premier example of this trend, introducing a well-provisioned, multi-hop architecture to protect the privacy of users’ traffic while minimizing the traditional drawbacks of additional network hops (e.g., latency). Announced in 2021, the service is currently in the beta stage, offering an easy and cheap privacy-enhancing alternative directly integrated into Apple’s operating systems. This seamless integration makes a future massive adoption of the technology very likely, calling for studies on its impact on the Internet. Indeed, the iCloud Private Relay architecture inherently introduces computational and routing overheads, possibly hampering performance. In this work, we study the service from a performance perspective, across a variety of scenarios and locations. We show that iCloud Private Relay not only reduces speed test performance (up to 10x decrease) but also negatively affects page load time and download/upload throughput in different scenarios. Interestingly, we find that the overlay routing introduced by the service may increase performance in some cases. Our results call for further investigations into the effects of a large-scale deployment of similar multi-hop privacy-enhancing architectures. For increasing the impact of our work we contribute our software and measurements to the community. 

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2. Massive MIMO Cognitive Cooperative Relaying

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23597-0_8  

   Dinh, S. ; Liu, H. ; Ouyang, F. ( June 2019 , Springer LNCS Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications)

   This paper proposes a novel cognitive cooperative transmission scheme by exploiting massive multiple-input multiple-output (MMIMO) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) radio technologies, which enables a macrocell network and multiple cognitive small cells to cooperate in dynamic spectrum sharing. The macrocell network is assumed to own the spectrum band and be the primary network (PN), and the small cells act as the secondary networks (SNs). The secondary access points (SAPs) of the small cells can cooperatively relay the traffic for the primary users (PUs) in the macrocell network, while concurrently accessing the PUs’ spectrum to transmit their own data opportunistically through MMIMO and NOMA. Such cooperation creates a “win-win” situation: the throughput of PUs will be significantly increased with the help of SAP relays, and the SAPs are able to use the PU’s spectrum to serve their secondary users (SUs). The interplay of these advanced radio techniques is analyzed in a systematic manner, and a framework is proposed for the joint optimization of cooperative relay selection, NOMA and MMIMO transmit power allocation, and transmission scheduling. Further, to model network-wide cooperation and competition, a two-sided matching algorithm is designed to find the stable partnership between multiple SAPs and PUs. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves significant performance gains for both primary and secondary users, compared to the baselines. 

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3. Optimal Path Construction with Decode and Forward Relays in mmWave Backhaul Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICNC47757.2020.9049696  

   Yan, Yan ; Hu, Qiang ; Blough, Douglas M. ( February 2020 , Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications)

   In this paper, we consider the problem of constructing paths using decode and forward (DF) relays for millimeter wave (mmWave) backhaul communications in urban environments. Due to the large number of obstacles in urban environments, line-of-sight (LoS) wireless links, which are necessary for backhaul communication, often do not exist between small-cell base stations. To address this, some earlier works proposed creating multi-hop paths that use mmWave relay nodes with LoS communication between every pair of consecutive nodes to form logical links between base stations. We present algorithms, based on a novel widest-path formulation of the problem, for selecting decode and forward relay node locations in such paths. Our main algorithm is the first polynomial-time algorithm that constructs a relay path with a throughput that is proven to be the maximum possible. We also present variations of this algorithm for constrained problems in which: 1) each possible relay location can host only one relay node, and 2) minimizing the number of hops in the relay path is also an objective. For all of the proposed algorithms, the achievable throughput and numbers of relays are evaluated through simulation based on a 3-D model of a section of downtown Atlanta. The results show that, over a large number of random cases, our algorithm can always find paths with very high throughput using a small number of relays. We also compare and contrast the results with our earlier work that studied the use of amplify-and-forward (AF) relays for the same scenario. 

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4. Enabling Cross-technology Communication from LoRa to ZigBee via Payload Encoding in Sub-1 GHz Bands

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3470452  

   Shi, Junyang ; Mu, Di ; Sha, Mo ( February 2022 , ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks)

   null (Ed.)

   Low-power wireless mesh networks (LPWMNs) have been widely used in wireless monitoring and control applications. Although LPWMNs work satisfactorily most of the time thanks to decades of research, they are often complex, inelastic to change, and difficult to manage once the networks are deployed. Moreover, the deliveries of control commands, especially those carrying urgent information such as emergency alarms, suffer long delay, since the messages must go through the hop-by-hop transport. Recent studies show that adding low-power wide-area network radios such as LoRa onto the LPWMN devices (e.g., ZigBee) effectively overcomes the limitation. However, users have shown a marked reluctance to embrace the new heterogeneous communication approach because of the cost of hardware modification. In this article, we introduce LoRaBee, a novel LoRa to ZigBee cross-technology communication (CTC) approach, which leverages the energy emission in the Sub-1 GHz bands as the carrier to deliver information. Although LoRa and ZigBee adopt distinct modulation techniques, LoRaBee sends information from LoRa to ZigBee by putting specific bytes in the payload of legitimate LoRa packets. The bytes are selected such that the corresponding LoRa chirps can be recognized by the ZigBee devices through sampling the received signal strength. Experimental results show that our LoRaBee provides reliable CTC communication from LoRa to ZigBee with the throughput of up to 281.61 bps in the Sub-1 GHz bands. 

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5. Joint Link-level and Network-level Reconfiguration for mmWave Backhaul Survivability in Urban Environments

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3345768.3355913  

   Liu, Yuchen ; Hu, Qiang ; Blough, Douglas M. ( January 2019 , Proceedings of the 22nd International ACM Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems)

   mmWave communication has been recognized as a highly promising technology for 5G wireless backhaul, which is capable of providing multi-gigabit per second transmission rates. However, in urban wireless backhaul environments, unforeseen events can cause short-term blockages or node failures and, therefore, network survivability is extremely important. In this paper, we investigate a novel relay-assisted mmWave backhaul network architecture, where a number of small-cell BSs and relays are deployed, e.g. on the lampposts of urban streets. Relays are used to provide multi-hop line-of-sight paths between small-cell BSs, which form logical links of the network. In this scenario, the interconnected logical links make up a mesh network, which offers opportunities for both link-level and network-level reconfiguration. We propose two joint link-network level reconfiguration schemes for recovery after exceptional events. One prioritizes relay path (link-level) reconfiguration and uses alternate network-level paths only if necessary. The other splits traffic on both reconfigured links and backup paths to improve network throughput. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed schemes significantly outperform purely link-level and purely network-level reconfiguration schemes. The proposed approaches are shown to not only maintain high network throughput but to also provide robust blockage/fault tolerance across a range of scenarios for urban mmWave backhaul networks. 

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