arXiv subjects

Berk Canberk

Publications and source records attributed to Berk Canberk.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Scalable machine learning-based approaches for energy saving in densely deployed Open RAN

Densely deployed base stations are responsible for the majority of the energy consumed in Radio access network (RAN). While these deployments are crucial to deliver the required data rate in busy hours of the day, the network can save energy by switching some of them to sleep mode and maintain the coverage and quality of service with the other ones. Benefiting from the flexibility provided by the Open RAN in embedding machine learning (ML) in network operations, in this work we propose Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based energy saving solutions. Firstly we propose 3 different DRL-based methods in the form of xApps which control the Active/Sleep mode of up to 6 radio units (RUs) from Near Real time RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC). We also propose a further scalable federated DRL-based solution with an aggregator as an rApp in None Real time RIC and local agents as xApps. Our simulation results present the convergence of the proposed methods. We also compare the performance of our federated DRL across three layouts spanning 6--24 RUs and 500--1000\,m regions, including a composite multi-region scenario. The results show that our proposed federated TD3 algorithm achieves up to 43.75\% faster convergence, more than 50\% network energy saving and 37. 4\% lower training energy versus centralized baselines, while maintaining the quality of service and improving the robustness of the policy.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

A Digital Twin Platform for QoS Optimization Under DoS Attacks for Next Generation Radio Networks

Digital Twins are being used as an enabling technology in 6G applications across various domains, valued for their data-driven insights and real-time decision-making capabilities. However, integrating Digital Twins into 6G environments presents challenges in maintaining consistent network services under adverse conditions such as including denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, while ensuring consistent Quality of Service (QoS). In this work, we present a Digital Twin Platform to facilitate bidirectional communication between User Equipment (UEs) and application-specific digital twins to enhance UE traffic under UDP flood attacks. By leveraging AI to analyze key digital twin parameters such as throughput and delay, our framework derives actionable insights that enhance QoS management in DoS attack scenarios, ultimately advancing real-world applications of digital twins in critical infrastructure domains. The performance of this Digital Twin Platform is validated through an emergency management use-case in 6G networks while the network is under attack with UDP flood attacks in terms of packet reception success rate, average packet delay, and average throughput metrics.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

PRZK-Bind: A Physically Rooted Zero-Knowledge Authentication Protocol for Secure Digital Twin Binding in Smart Cities

Digital twin (DT) technology is rapidly becoming essential for smart city ecosystems, enabling real-time synchronisation and autonomous decision-making across physical and digital domains. However, as DTs take active roles in control loops, securely binding them to their physical counterparts in dynamic and adversarial environments remains a significant challenge. Existing authentication solutions either rely on static trust models, require centralised authorities, or fail to provide live and verifiable physical-digital binding, making them unsuitable for latency-sensitive and distributed deployments. To address this gap, we introduce PRZK-Bind, a lightweight and decentralised authentication protocol that combines Schnorr-based zero-knowledge proofs with elliptic curve cryptography to establish secure, real-time correspondence between physical entities and DTs without relying on pre-shared secrets. Simulation results show that PRZK-Bind significantly improves performance, offering up to 4.5 times lower latency and 4 times reduced energy consumption compared to cryptography-heavy baselines, while maintaining false acceptance rates more than 10 times lower. These findings highlight its suitability for future smart city deployments requiring efficient, resilient, and trustworthy DT authentication.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Digital Twin-Guided Energy Management over Real-Time Pub/Sub Protocol in 6G Smart Cities

Although the emergence of 6G IoT networks has accelerated the deployment of enhanced smart city services, the resource limitations of IoT devices remain as a significant problem. Given this limitation, meeting the low-latency service requirement of 6G networks becomes even more challenging. However, existing 6G IoT management strategies lack real-time operation and mostly rely on discrete actions, which are insufficient to optimise energy consumption. To address these, in this study, we propose a Digital Twin (DT)-guided energy management framework to jointly handle the low latency and energy efficiency challenges in 6G IoT networks. In this framework, we provide the twin models through a distributed overlay network and handle the dynamic updates between the data layer and the upper layers of the DT over the Real-Time Publish Subscribe (RTPS) protocol. We also design a Reinforcement Learning (RL) engine with a novel formulated reward function to provide optimal data update times for each of the IoT devices. The RL engine receives a diverse set of environment states from the What-if engine and runs Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) to output continuous actions to the IoT devices. Based on our simulation results, we observe that the proposed framework achieves a 37% improvement in 95th percentile latency and a 30% reduction in energy consumption compared to the existing literature.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

JamShield: A Machine Learning Detection System for Over-the-Air Jamming Attacks

Wireless networks are vulnerable to jamming attacks due to the shared communication medium, which can severely degrade performance and disrupt services. Despite extensive research, current jamming detection methods often rely on simulated data or proprietary over-the-air datasets with limited cross-layer features, failing to accurately represent the real state of a network and thus limiting their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce JamShield, a dynamic jamming detection system trained on our own collected over-the-air and publicly available dataset. It utilizes hybrid feature selection to prioritize relevant features for accurate and efficient detection. Additionally, it includes an auto-classification module that dynamically adjusts the classification algorithm in real-time based on current network conditions. Our experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in detection rate, precision, and recall, along with reduced false alarms and misdetections compared to state-of-the-art detection algorithms, making JamShield a robust and reliable solution for detecting jamming attacks in real-world wireless networks.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

Accurate AI-Driven Emergency Vehicle Location Tracking in Healthcare ITS Digital Twin

Creating a Digital Twin (DT) for Healthcare Intelligent Transportation Systems (HITS) is a hot research trend focusing on enhancing HITS management, particularly in emergencies where ambulance vehicles must arrive at the crash scene on time and track their real-time location is crucial to the medical authorities. Despite the claim of real-time representation, a temporal misalignment persists between the physical and virtual domains, leading to discrepancies in the ambulance's location representation. This study proposes integrating AI predictive models, specifically Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Deep Neural Networks (DNN), within a constructed mock DT data pipeline framework to anticipate the medical vehicle's next location in the virtual world. These models align virtual representations with their physical counterparts, i.e., metaphorically offsetting the synchronization delay between the two worlds. Trained meticulously on a historical geospatial dataset, SVR and DNN exhibit exceptional prediction accuracy in MATLAB and Python environments. Through various testing scenarios, we visually demonstrate the efficacy of our methodology, showcasing SVR and DNN's key role in significantly reducing the witnessed gap within the HITS's DT. This transformative approach enhances real-time synchronization in emergency HITS by approximately 88% to 93%.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Lightweight Authenticated Task Offloading in 6G-Cloud Vehicular Twin Networks

Task offloading management in 6G vehicular networks is crucial for maintaining network efficiency, particularly as vehicles generate substantial data. Integrating secure communication through authentication introduces additional computational and communication overhead, significantly impacting offloading efficiency and latency. This paper presents a unified framework incorporating lightweight Identity-Based Cryptographic (IBC) authentication into task offloading within cloud-based 6G Vehicular Twin Networks (VTNs). Utilizing Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), our approach optimizes authenticated offloading decisions to minimize latency and enhance resource allocation. Performance evaluation under varying network sizes, task sizes, and data rates reveals that IBC authentication can reduce offloading efficiency by up to 50% due to the added overhead. Besides, increasing network size and task size can further reduce offloading efficiency by up to 91.7%. As a countermeasure, increasing the transmission data rate can improve the offloading performance by as much as 63%, even in the presence of authentication overhead. The code for the simulations and experiments detailed in this paper is available on GitHub for further reference and reproducibility [1].

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Generative AI-enabled Digital Twins for 6G-enhanced Smart Cities

6G networks are envisioned to enable a wide range of applications, such as autonomous vehicles and smart cities. However, this rapid expansion of network topologies makes the management of 6G wireless networks more complex and leads to performance degradation. Even though state-of-the-art applications on network services are providing promising results, they also risk disrupting the network's performance. To overcome this, the services have to leverage what-if implementations covering a variety of scenarios. At this point, traditional simulations fall short of encompassing the dynamism and complexity of a physical network. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Generative AI-based Digital Twins. For this, we derive an optimization formula to differentiate different network scenarios by considering the specific key performance indicators (KPIs) for wireless networks. Then, we fed this formula to the generative AI with the historical twins and real-time twins to start generating the desired topologies. To evaluate the performance, we implement network and smart-city-oriented services, namely massive connectivity, tiny instant communication, right-time synchronization, and truck path routes. The simulation results reveal that our approach can achieve 38% more stable network throughput in high device density scenarios. Furthermore, the generated scenario accuracy is able to reach up to 98% level, surpassing the baselines.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

Q-CSM: Q-Learning-based Cognitive Service Management in Heterogeneous IoT Networks

The dramatic increase in the number of smart services and their diversity poses a significant challenge in Internet of Things (IoT) networks: heterogeneity. This causes significant quality of service (QoS) degradation in IoT networks. In addition, the constraints of IoT devices in terms of computational capability and energy resources add extra complexity to this. However, the current studies remain insufficient to solve this problem due to the lack of cognitive action recommendations. Therefore, we propose a Q-learning-based Cognitive Service Management framework called Q-CSM. In this framework, we first design an IoT Agent Manager to handle the heterogeneity in data formats. After that, we design a Q-learning-based recommendation engine to optimize the devices' lifetime according to the predicted QoS behaviour of the changing IoT network scenarios. We apply the proposed cognitive management to a smart city scenario consisting of three specific services: wind turbines, solar panels, and transportation systems. We note that our proposed cognitive method achieves 38.7% faster response time to the dynamical IoT changes in topology. Furthermore, the proposed framework achieves 19.8% longer lifetime on average for constrained IoT devices thanks to its Q-learning-based cognitive decision capability. In addition, we explore the most successive learning rate value in the Q-learning run through the exploration and exploitation phases.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

AI-based traffic analysis in digital twin networks

In today's networked world, Digital Twin Networks (DTNs) are revolutionizing how we understand and optimize physical networks. These networks, also known as 'Digital Twin Networks (DTNs)' or 'Networks Digital Twins (NDTs),' encompass many physical networks, from cellular and wireless to optical and satellite. They leverage computational power and AI capabilities to provide virtual representations, leading to highly refined recommendations for real-world network challenges. Within DTNs, tasks include network performance enhancement, latency optimization, energy efficiency, and more. To achieve these goals, DTNs utilize AI tools such as Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), Reinforcement Learning (RL), Federated Learning (FL), and graph-based approaches. However, data quality, scalability, interpretability, and security challenges necessitate strategies prioritizing transparency, fairness, privacy, and accountability. This chapter delves into the world of AI-driven traffic analysis within DTNs. It explores DTNs' development efforts, tasks, AI models, and challenges while offering insights into how AI can enhance these dynamic networks. Through this journey, readers will gain a deeper understanding of the pivotal role AI plays in the ever-evolving landscape of networked systems.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

Optimized Resource Allocation for Cloud-Native 6G Networks: Zero-Touch ML Models in Microservices-based VNF Deployments

6G, the next generation of mobile networks, is set to offer even higher data rates, ultra-reliability, and lower latency than 5G. New 6G services will increase the load and dynamism of the network. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) aids with this increased load and dynamism by eliminating hardware dependency. It aims to boost the flexibility and scalability of network deployment services by separating network functions from their specific proprietary forms so that they can run as virtual network functions (VNFs) on commodity hardware. It is essential to design an NFV orchestration and management framework to support these services. However, deploying bulky monolithic VNFs on the network is difficult, especially when underlying resources are scarce, resulting in ineffective resource management. To address this, microservices-based NFV approaches are proposed. In this approach, monolithic VNFs are decomposed into micro VNFs, increasing the likelihood of their successful placement and resulting in more efficient resource management. This article discusses the proposed framework for resource allocation for microservices-based services to provide end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) using the Double Deep Q Learning (DDQL) approach. Furthermore, to enhance this resource allocation approach, we discussed and addressed two crucial sub-problems: the need for a dynamic priority technique and the presence of the low-priority starvation problem. Using the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) model, an Adaptive Scheduling model is developed that effectively mitigates the starvation problem. Additionally, the impact of incorporating traffic load considerations into deployment and scheduling is thoroughly investigated.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

DTRAN: A Special Use Case of RAN Optimization using Digital Twin

The emergence of beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G networks underscores the critical role of advanced computer-aided tools, such as network digital twins (DTs), in fostering autonomous networks and ubiquitous intelligence. Existing solutions in the DT domain primarily aim to model and automate specific tasks within the network lifecycle, which lack flexibility and adaptability for fully autonomous design and management. Unlike the existing DT approaches, we propose RAN optimization using the Digital Twin (DTRAN) framework that follows a holistic approach from core to edge networks. The proposed DTRAN framework enables real-time data management and communication with the physical network, which provides a more accurate and detailed digital replica than the existing approaches. We outline the main building blocks of the DTRAN and describe the details of our specific use case, which is RAN configuration optimization, to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework for a real-world scenario.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

Real-Time Digital Twin Platform: A Case Study on Core Network Selection in Aeronautical Ad-Hoc Networks

The development of Digital Twins (DTs) is hindered by a lack of specialized, open-source solutions that can meet the demands of dynamic applications. This has caused state-of-the-art DT applications to be validated using offline data. However, this approach falls short of integrating real-time data, which is one of the most important characteristics of DTs. This can limit the validating effectiveness of DT applications in cases such as aeronautical ad-hoc networks (AANETs). Considering this, we develop a Real-Time Digital Twin Platform and implement core network selection in AANETs as a case study. In this, we implement microservice-based architecture and design a robust data pipeline. Additionally, we develop an interactive user interface using open-source tools. Using this, the platform supports real-time decision-making in the presence of data retrieval failures.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

Continuous Transfer Learning for UAV Communication-aware Trajectory Design

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) emerges as a prime solution for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) trajectory planning, offering proficiency in navigating high-dimensional spaces, adaptability to dynamic environments, and making sequential decisions based on real-time feedback. Despite these advantages, the use of DRL for UAV trajectory planning requires significant retraining when the UAV is confronted with a new environment, resulting in wasted resources and time. Therefore, it is essential to develop techniques that can reduce the overhead of retraining DRL models, enabling them to adapt to constantly changing environments. This paper presents a novel method to reduce the need for extensive retraining using a double deep Q network (DDQN) model as a pretrained base, which is subsequently adapted to different urban environments through Continuous Transfer Learning (CTL). Our method involves transferring the learned model weights and adapting the learning parameters, including the learning and exploration rates, to suit each new environment specific characteristics. The effectiveness of our approach is validated in three scenarios, each with different levels of similarity. CTL significantly improves learning speed and success rates compared to DDQN models initiated from scratch. For similar environments, Transfer Learning (TL) improved stability, accelerated convergence by 65%, and facilitated 35% faster adaptation in dissimilar settings.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

What-if Analysis Framework for Digital Twins in 6G Wireless Network Management

This study explores implementing a digital twin network (DTN) for efficient 6G wireless network management, aligning with the fault, configuration, accounting, performance, and security (FCAPS) model. The DTN architecture comprises the Physical Twin Layer, implemented using NS-3, and the Service Layer, featuring machine learning and reinforcement learning for optimizing carrier sensitivity threshold and transmit power control in wireless networks. We introduce a robust "What-if Analysis" module, utilizing conditional tabular generative adversarial network (CTGAN) for synthetic data generation to mimic various network scenarios. These scenarios assess four network performance metrics: throughput, latency, packet loss, and coverage. Our findings demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed what-if analysis framework in managing complex network conditions, highlighting the importance of the scenario-maker step and the impact of twinning intervals on network performance.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

Ransomware: Analysis and Evaluation of Live Forensic Techniques and the Impact on Linux based IoT Systems

Ransomware has been predominantly a threat to Windows systems. But, Linux systems became interesting for cybercriminals and this trend is expected to continue. This endangers IoT ecosystems, whereas many IoT systems are based on Linux (e.g. cloud infrastructure and gateways). This paper researches how currently employed forensic techniques can be applied to Linux ransomware and evaluates the maturity as well as the impact on the system. While Windows-based ransomware predominantly uses RSA and AES for key management, a variety of approaches was identified for Linux. Cybercriminals appear to be deliberately moving away from RSA and AES to make Live forensic investigations more difficult. Linux ransomware is developed for a predefined goal and does not exploit the full potential of damage. It appears in an early stage and is expected to reach a similar potential to Windows-based malware. The results generated provided an excellent basic understanding to discuss and assess implications on the IoT industry at an early stage of development.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Does Twinning Vehicular Networks Enhance Their Performance in Dense Areas?

This paper investigates the potential of Digital Twins (DTs) to enhance network performance in densely populated urban areas, specifically focusing on vehicular networks. The study comprises two phases. In Phase I, we utilize traffic data and AI clustering to identify critical locations, particularly in crowded urban areas with high accident rates. In Phase II, we evaluate the advantages of twinning vehicular networks through three deployment scenarios: edge-based twin, cloud-based twin, and hybrid-based twin. Our analysis demonstrates that twinning significantly reduces network delays, with virtual twins outperforming physical networks. Virtual twins maintain low delays even with increased vehicle density, such as 15.05 seconds for 300 vehicles. Moreover, they exhibit faster computational speeds, with cloud-based twins being 1.7 times faster than edge twins in certain scenarios. These findings provide insights for efficient vehicular communication and underscore the potential of virtual twins in enhancing vehicular networks in crowded areas while emphasizing the importance of considering real-world factors when making deployment decisions.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

How to synchronize Digital Twins? A Communication Performance Analysis

Synchronization is fundamental for mirroring real-world entities in real-time and supporting effective operations of Digital Twins (DTs). Such synchronization is enabled by the communication between the physical and virtual realms, and it is mostly assumed to occur in real-time. However, this is not the case, as real-life scenarios witness performance degradation that may lead to synchronization problems. Hence, as such a problem has yet to be thoroughly analyzed in the literature, this work attempts to uncover potential challenges by emulating and analyzing the DT traffic flows in networks of different scales, for different communication protocols, and with various flow configurations. We propose a Twin Alignment Ratio metric to evaluate the synchronization performance to achieve this goal. Consequently, the findings reveal the interplay of network infrastructure, protocol selection, and twinning rate on synchronization and performance.

cs.NI↗