SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Erkki Harjula

Publications and source records attributed to Erkki Harjula.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

Adaptive Security at the Edge for 6G-Enabled Healthcare IoT

Healthcare IoT services increasingly rely on edge gateways to relay routine telemetry and deliver rare but timecritical alarms. Even short traffic bursts can inflate worstcase delay and interfere with urgent messages. We present NANOEDGEGUARD, a kernel-plane closed-loop controller that observes per-source traffic intensity at the edge and enforces an auditable, multi-tier rate policy using in-kernel traffic-control hooks. Unlike static firewall rules or user-space control loops, our design prioritizes fast actuation and explicit recovery through hysteresis, and it records policy transitions for auditability. Using a Raspberry Pi gateway hosting an MQTT broker and two ESP32 endpoints generating vitals, alarms, and a timed burst, we show that adaptive kernel-plane rate control reduces the 99th-percentile alarm RTT by 13.3% compared to a user-space firewall baseline while maintaining no-enforcement-level RTT, and it reduces excess admitted burst traffic by 46% compared to no enforcement. These early results indicate that adaptive, auditable enforcement at the gateway can improve resilience for healthcare IoT, and it can be extended toward on-demand policy deployment in future edge intelligence.

cs.CR

Co-Existence of Private 5G Network and Wireless Hospital Systems

This paper investigates the feasibility of deploying private 5G networks in hospital environments, with a focus on the operating room at the brand new Oulu University Hospital, Finland. The study aims to evaluate the interference risk with other wireless systems, and electromagnetic safety of a private 5G network in the 3.9-4.1 GHz band, while ensuring compatibility with legacy wireless systems, such as LTE and Wi-Fi. We conducted a measurement campaign, employing state-of-the-art instrumentation and a methodology that combined high resolution and long-duration spectrum scans. The results demonstrate no measurable interference between the hospital's private 5G network with adjacent LTE (4G) or Wi-Fi bands, confirming the spectral isolation of the 5G transmissions, and vise versa. Additionally, RF exposure levels in the operating room were found to be well below ICNIRP, WHO, and IEEE safety thresholds, ensuring that the network poses negligible biological risk to patients and hospital staff. The study also proposes spectrum management strategies for private 5G networks in hospitals, focusing on adaptive sensing and guardband planning. These findings provide a solid foundation for the integration of private 5G infrastructure in hospitals environments, supporting digital transformation in patient care without compromising electromagnetic compatibility or patient safety. The results also contribute to ongoing discussions around private 5G network deployments in sensitive sectors and provide actionable guidelines for future hospitals' wireless systems planning.

eess.SP

6G Resilience -- White Paper

6G must be designed to withstand, adapt to, and evolve amid prolonged, complex disruptions. Mobile networks' shift from efficiency-first to sustainability-aware has motivated this white paper to assert that resilience is a primary design goal, alongside sustainability and efficiency, encompassing technology, architecture, and economics. We promote resilience by analysing dependencies between mobile networks and other critical systems, such as energy, transport, and emergency services, and illustrate how cascading failures spread through infrastructures. We formalise resilience using the 3R framework: reliability, robustness, resilience. Subsequently, we translate this into measurable capabilities: graceful degradation, situational awareness, rapid reconfiguration, and learning-driven improvement and recovery. Architecturally, we promote edge-native and locality-aware designs, open interfaces, and programmability to enable islanded operations, fallback modes, and multi-layer diversity (radio, compute, energy, timing). Key enablers include AI-native control loops with verifiable behaviour, zero-trust security rooted in hardware and supply-chain integrity, and networking techniques that prioritise critical traffic, time-sensitive flows, and inter-domain coordination. Resilience also has a techno-economic aspect: open platforms and high-quality complementors generate ecosystem externalities that enhance resilience while opening new markets. We identify nine business-model groups and several patterns aligned with the 3R objectives, and we outline governance and standardisation. This white paper serves as an initial step and catalyst for 6G resilience. It aims to inspire researchers, professionals, government officials, and the public, providing them with the essential components to understand and shape the development of 6G resilience.

eess.SP

Resource Slicing through Intelligent Orchestration of Energy-aware IoT services in Edge-Cloud Continuum

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications inflicts high requirements for computing resources and network bandwidth. A growing number of service providers are applying edge-cloud computing to improve the quality of their services. Deploying IoT applications to optimal computing nodes to minimize energy consumption and enhance system performance remains an open challenge. In this paper, we present an intelligent orchestration concept for breaking down IoT applications into granular microservices, called nanoservices, and deploying them in an energy-aware manner to optimal computing nodes in the edge-cloud continuum by applying resource and network slicing methods. With this consolidated slicing scheme, we can efficiently allocate network and compute resources to meet the needs of these nanoservices.

cs.DC

Adaptive Lightweight Security for Performance Efficiency in Critical Healthcare Monitoring

The healthcare infrastructure requires robust security procedures, technologies, and policies due to its critical nature. Since the Internet of Things (IoT) with its diverse technologies has become an integral component of future healthcare systems, its security requires a thorough analysis due to its inherent security limitations that arise from resource constraints. Existing communication technologies used for IoT connectivity, such as 5G, provide communications security with the underlying communication infrastructure to a certain level. However, the evolving healthcare paradigm requires adaptive security procedures and technologies that can adapt to the varying resource constraints of IoT devices. This need for adaptive security is particularly pronounced when considering components outside the security sandbox of 5G, such as IoT nodes and M2M connections, which introduce additional security challenges. This article brings forth the unique healthcare monitoring requirements and studies the existing encryption-based security approaches to provide the necessary security. Furthermore, this research introduces a novel approach to optimizing security and performance in IoT in healthcare, particularly in critical use cases such as remote patient monitoring. Finally, the results from the practical implementation demonstrate a marked improvement in the system performance.

cs.CR

Energy Profiling and Analysis of 5G Private Networks: Evaluating Energy Consumption Patterns

Private 5G networks provide enhanced security, a wide range of optimized services through network slicing, reduced latency, and support for many IoT devices in a specific area, all under the owner's full control. Higher security and privacy to protect sensitive data is the most significant advantage of private networks, in e.g., smart hospitals. For long-term sustainability and cost-effectiveness of private 5G networks, analyzing and understanding the energy consumption variation holds a greater significance in reaching toward green private network architecture for 6G. This paper addresses this research gap by providing energy profiling of network components using an experimental laboratory setup that mimics real private 5G networks under various network conditions, which is a missing aspect in the existing literature.

eess.SY

Adaptive Security in 6G for Sustainable Healthcare

6G will fulfill the requirements of future digital healthcare systems through emerging decentralized computing and secure communications technologies. Digital healthcare solutions employ numerous low-power and resource-constrained connected things, such as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). However, the current digital healthcare solutions will face two major challenges. First, the proposed solutions are based on the traditional IoT-Cloud model that will experience latency and reliability challenges to meet the expectations and requirements of digital healthcare, while potentially inflicting heavy network load. Second, the existing digital healthcare solutions will face security challenges due to the inherent limitations of IoMT caused by the lack of resources for proper security in those devices. Therefore, in this research, we present a decentralized adaptive security architecture for the successful deployment of digital healthcare. The proposed architecture leverages the edge-cloud continuum to meet the performance, efficiency, and reliability requirements. It can adapt the security solution at run-time to meet the limited capacity of IoMT devices without compromising the security of critical data. Finally, the research outlines comprehensive methodologies for validating the proposed security architecture.

cs.CR

Edge computing server placement with capacitated location allocation

The deployment of edge computing infrastructure requires a careful placement of the edge servers, with an aim to improve application latencies and reduce data transfer load in opportunistic Internet of Things systems. In the edge server placement, it is important to consider computing capacity, available deployment budget, and hardware requirements for the edge servers and the underlying backbone network topology. In this paper, we thoroughly survey the existing literature in edge server placement, identify gaps and present an extensive set of parameters to be considered. We then develop a novel algorithm, called PACK, for server placement as a capacitated location-allocation problem. PACK minimizes the distances between servers and their associated access points, while taking into account capacity constraints for load balancing and enabling workload sharing between servers. Moreover, PACK considers practical issues such as prioritized locations and reliability. We evaluate the algorithm in two distinct scenarios: one with high capacity servers for edge computing in general, and one with low capacity servers for Fog computing. Evaluations are performed with a data set collected in a real-world network, consisting of both dense and sparse deployments of access points across a city area. The resulting algorithm and related tools are publicly available as open source software.

cs.NI

Challenges of AI in Wireless Networks for IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT), hailed as the enabler of the next industrial revolution, will require ubiquitous connectivity, context-aware and dynamic service mobility, and extreme security through the wireless network infrastructure. Artificial Intelligence (AI), thus, will play a major role in the underlying network infrastructure. However, a number of challenges will surface while using the concepts, tools and algorithms of AI in wireless networks used by IoT. In this article, the main challenges in using AI in the wireless network infrastructure that facilitate end-to-end IoT communication are highlighted with potential generalized solution and future research directions.

cs.NI

Orchestrating Service Migration for Low Power MEC-Enabled IoT Devices

Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is a key enabling technology for Fifth Generation (5G) mobile networks. MEC facilitates distributed cloud computing capabilities and information technology service environment for applications and services at the edges of mobile networks. This architectural modification serves to reduce congestion, latency, and improve the performance of such edge colocated applications and devices. In this paper, we demonstrate how reactive service migration can be orchestrated for low-power MEC-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Here, we use open-source Kubernetes as container orchestration system. Our demo is based on traditional client-server system from user equipment (UE) over Long Term Evolution (LTE) to the MEC server. As the use case scenario, we post-process live video received over web real-time communication (WebRTC). Next, we integrate orchestration by Kubernetes with S1 handovers, demonstrating MEC-based software defined network (SDN). Now, edge applications may reactively follow the UE within the radio access network (RAN), expediting low-latency. The collected data is used to analyze the benefits of the low-power MEC-enabled IoT device scheme, in which end-to-end (E2E) latency and power requirements of the UE are improved. We further discuss the challenges of implementing such schemes and future research directions therein.

cs.NI