OneSource (Portugal)

Privacy concerns are rapidly growing, demanding tighter integration within the Agile software development lifecycle. Existing approaches rely on audits that are not integrated into the DevOps lifecycle, which greatly hinders both the analysis of privacy risks and the correction of privacy flaws. Even integrated tools are primarily reactive, treating privacy as an afterthought rather than a design principle. The currently used privacy engineering methodologies tend to be too general and have lackluster tooling to be enforced. Furthermore, privacy quantification is very domain-dependent, which makes it hard to automate without the help of an expert. DevPrivOps, a proposed extension to DevOps, focused on continuous privacy verification and user transparency, suffers from a lack of concrete tools. This paper proposes a novel tool for the DevPrivOps lifecycle that bridges the gap between privacy engineering methodology and the Agile planning phase, promoting the adoption of privacy by design strategies. This tool serves as a foundation for building and integrating further DevPrivOps tools, fostering a proactive approach to privacy within Agile development. We present the interface of this tool and its role in the DevPrivOps framework

The emergence of 6G networks paves the way for a new era of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-empowered integration of Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and extended reality (XR). This will revolutionise the ways users (e.g., humans, robots) interact with each other and their surroundings expanding their awareness beyond immediate boundaries. Driven by demand for more effective emergency response fuelled by adverse and increasing impacts of climate change, in this paper, we conceptually explore an architectural framework for intelligent emergency response services in 6G networks. The proposed architecture bridges an evolution of supporting technologies in 5G with future intelligent emergency response service requirements. We identify integration of 3D networking (3DN) and ambient IoT (A-IoT), empowered by native AI, network sensing and localisation, as key technologies for the proposed framework. We conclude the paper with discussion on current technology gaps and recommendations that would lead towards future 6G intelligent emergency response.

With the increasing deployment of 5G Non-public Networks, the telco environment is becoming massively multi- administrated with a wide range of full networks deployed close and covering only the use case area. To benefit the most of this, a roaming solution must be set in place enabling devices to safely communicate using visited infrastructures either with local service or with the ones from the home networks. As a first step in this direction, this article proposes a new architecture for Non-public Networks roaming, stemming from the 3GPP 5G macro-operator roaming and adapted to the specifics of the communication for geographically-distant, small networks interconnected by third party unreliable backhauls. Furthermore, the architecture is exemplified, and its potential is evaluated as further extensions to the Fraunhofer FOKUS Open5GCore, showing that it outperforms today’s roaming solution in terms of flexibility and privacy of deployment, backhaul usage and reduced network administration.

Participatory budgeting (PB) is currently one of the most widely adopted democratic innovations. ICT platforms are key enablers of PB processes, by supporting citizen engagement. They support the establishment of diverse participation channels to build candidate proposals, for the voting process, and for monitoring proposals' implementation. PB platforms differ from electronic voting systems, reflecting the intrinsic nature of PB processes. While vote secrecy and trustworthiness of voting results is still a major requirement, other factors weight in, such as the focus on the whole process and the need for engaging several citizens by providing multiple participation channels. PB processes take place at multiple scales (municipal, national) requiring flexible deployment and dimensioning approaches. EMPATIA is an ICT platform for PB, based on multiple dimensioning and deployment options that reflect the scenarios where PB tools are expected to operate. The evaluation results provide relevant inputs to the design and implementation of similar participatory and/or voting platforms.

Cloud computing enables the on-demand delivery of resources for a multitude of services and gives the opportunity for small agile companies to compete with large industries. In the telco world, cloud computing is currently mostly used by mobile network operators (MNO) for hosting non-critical support services and selling cloud services such as applications and data storage. MNOs are investigating the use of cloud computing to deliver key telecommunication services in the access and core networks. Without this, MNOs lose the opportunities of both combining this with over-the-top (OTT) and value-added services to their fundamental service offerings and leveraging cost-effective commodity hardware. Being able to leverage cloud computing technology effectively for the telco world is the focus of mobile cloud networking (MCN). This paper presents the key results of MCN integrated project that includes its architecture advancements, prototype implementation, and evaluation. Results show the efficiency and the simplicity that a MNO can deploy and manage the complete service lifecycle of fully cloudified, composed services that combine OTT/IT- and mobile-network-based services running on commodity hardware. The extensive performance evaluation of MCN using two key proof-of-concept scenarios that compose together many services to deliver novel converged elastic, on-demand mobile-based but innovative OTT services proves the feasibility of such fully virtualized deployments. Results show that it is beneficial to extend cloud computing to telco usage and run fully cloudified mobile-network-based systems with clear advantages and new service opportunities for MNOs and end-users.

Machine-to-Machine technology supports several application scenarios, such as smart metering, automotive, healthcare and city monitoring. Smart metering applications have attracted the interest of companies and governments since these applications bring many benefits (e.g. costs reduction and increased reliability) for production, monitoring and distribution of utilities, such as gas, water and electricity. Multi-hop wireless communication is a cost-effective technology for smart metering applications because it extends the wireless range and enables fast deployment. Smart metering data communicated via wireless multi-hop approaches needs mechanisms that makes the communication less vulnerable to security threats and saves the device resources. Data encryption and data aggregation mechanisms emerge as potential solutions to fulfill these requirements. However, the simultaneous execution of data encryption and data aggregation mechanisms is not a trivial task. This is because the data encryption prevents the data aggregation mechanism to summarize the data along the path. Another challenge is to manage both mechanisms according to the concurrent Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications interests. In this context, we present sMeter, which is a framework that deals with multiple applications interests, avoiding interest conflicts of concurrent users and supporting the management of data aggregation and data encryption. sMeter is implemented using low-cost hardware in an indoor environment. The communication is performed via a wireless multi-hop technology, and the performance of this communication is evaluated in terms of delay, data reception ratio and received signal strength indication.