We are happy to announce the organization of the first edition of the IEEE ICC workshop: Towards Standardized Secured IoT B5G networking - Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain (AB-SIoT). This workshop will solicit original work targeting beyond 5G (B5G) networking, focusing on research work addressing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain, and the integration of both. To add to the practicality of the presented work and have a more interesting fruitful discussion, the workshop will include an interactive session, where experimental testbeds and practical showcases can be demonstrated. The scope of the workshop is detailed below.
5G and massive Internet of Things (IoT) are finally here. While 5G networks will serve as the broadband backbones, IoT will bombard killer applications with the inclusion of smart sensors. The essence of smart city development typically starts from the aggregation of slower data rate through LPWAN, before being sent via 5G/B5G to the server for analysis. There will be ample room for data analytics and new challenges need to be tackled. Will the data be secured during transmission? Will the data be securely recorded? How do we provide confidentiality, integrity and availability in the IoT world? The IoT world is rather new, do we have any best practices and standards on the smart sensors? It seems not quite the case at this point. When there are not sufficient regulations in the smart sensor realm, in what way should we provide the required security level agreements? What is the meaning of service level in the B5G-IoT new era? There is much room for our exploration.
Research has already started on beyond 5G (B5G), which will shape future networking, especially towards 2030. Many research funding tools are targeting ideas for B5G, towards 2030 and after. For instance, in Europe, there is EU H2020 ICT-52-2020 Smart Connectivity beyond 5G.
The amazing IoT development offers a smart high-level concept for integrating physical and cyber objects. In the coming decade, there will be hundreds of billions of IoT connections. It is inevitable that IoT will find applications in all walks of our lives, spanning energy management, healthcare, transportation, and fin-tech, to name a few. Nonetheless, the intrinsic uncoordinated frequency band and the ever-growing IoT market may pose various critical challenges on public safety, cybersecurity and data privacy. To facilitate IoT best practices, various international and industrial standards should be brought to the scene. These include, but are not limited to, IEEE P2668*, IEEE 1451 family, ISO 27k family, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), etc.
(*P2668: https://standards.ieee.org/project/2668.html)
5G networks have been designed with intelligence, autonomy and flexibility in mind. Future B5G systems are expected to extend those properties even further. Hence, artificial intelligence (AI) will be in the heart of B5G networking. New foreseen applications and verticals will further push the burdens on privacy and security requirements. Blockchain is an emerging disruptive technology that was initially envisioned for crypto-currency, but since then has been widely adopted for its groundbreaking capabilities that can offer security, privacy, in addition to added reliability to networking. The future IoT B5G network is thus envisioned to widely adopt these two stepping-stone research building blocks, towards providing reliable, flexible, secured, high performance and resilient IoT networking, to fulfill high demands of current and future IoT applications and verticals.
This workshop specifically targets future networks of IoT B5G, mainly embracing AI and blockchain. The workshop also solicits papers addressing new ideas, standards, best practices, and innovative applications of IoT, including industrial IoT (IIoT), which will be adopted in the future, and their new requirements. The workshop will pay special attention to efforts integrating both areas, especially those contributing to the standardization of IoT devices, their applications, and the assessment of IoT devices, by proposing methods for grading and ranking of IoT devices in line with IEEE P2668*.
As an additional twist to show more practical solutions and encourage interesting fruitful discussion, the workshop will include a demonstration session, where authors will be able to showcase experimental setup of their work, either by bringing their testbeds, or through pre-recorded video-clips, showing their experiments. Priority will be given to papers, that include demonstrative testbeds or showcases.
Note: that authors of distinguished submissions in the workshop will be invited to submit extended versions to a special issue in MDPI Sensors (IF: 3.275):
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors/special_issues/AI_B5G
