A Sidelink-Aided Approach for Secure Multicast Service Delivery: from Human-Oriented Multimedia Traffic to Machine Type Communications

TL;DR

This paper proposes a secure, efficient multicast protocol leveraging sidelink D2D communications in 5G IoT networks, focusing on NB-IoT to enhance capacity, energy efficiency, and security for machine-type communications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel protocol tailored for NB-IoT that manages multicast services securely using D2D communications and social trust mechanisms in 5G IoT environments.

Findings

Improved network efficiency and resource utilization.

Enhanced security through cyber and social trust mechanisms.

Effective management of multicast services in 5G IoT scenarios.

Abstract

To date, group-oriented communications have been mainly exploited for delivering multimedia services in human-oriented communications while, in future fifth generation (5G) cellular networks, objects will be the main target. Internet of Things (IoT) will undoubtedly play a key role in 5G networks, wherein massive machine-type communications (mMTC) feature a use case as crucial as challenging since cellular IoT connections are predicted to grow heavily in the next future. To boost capacity and energy efficiency, the 5G network can leverage device-to-device (D2D) communications which are recognized as an effective offloading technique. This is achieved thanks to the fact that, in legacy D2D communications, data are directly sent from one device to another, avoiding the crossing of the network. Obviously, the distributed nature of such a communication paradigm and the inherent broadcast nature of the wireless channel make it necessary to think how to secure the so called "sidelink" transmissions. This work proposes a protocol for the efficient and reliable management of multicast services in a 5G-oriented IoT scenario, in which security is a crucial requirement to be met. The proposed protocol is tailored to Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and makes use of D2D communications with the aim of improving network efficiency and optimizing network resource utilization. In addition, cyber security and social trustworthiness mechanisms are exploited to secure D2D communications.