Networking and Internet Architecture Papers

ALT Intent-based networking (IBN) promises QoS provisioning in which the network derives the configuration from operator-stated goals. Its first step, translating a natural-language intent into enforceable service-level objectives (SLOs) grounded in a live snapshot of the network state, increasingly relies on large language models (LLMs). These large models add cost and energy to the management loop and typically require multi-GPU, cloud-hosted infrastructure. Can lightweight open LLMs take over this step dependably? We answer this question with a five-dimensional evaluation of ten LLMs with <10B parameters from five families, under four prompting setups, on 716 placement intents. We evaluate translation performance, intent validation, hallucination, energy impact, and robustness to diverse phrasing. The best configurations translate intents with a strict F1 of 0.943 and reject up to 191 of 195 invalid intents. With few-shot reasoning, the strongest models hallucinate unsupported QoS requi

ALT In 2003, Clark et al. proposed the "Knowledge Plane", a layer of intelligent agents that share rich information about network state in order to collaboratively manage the Internet across administrative boundaries. The technology of the day lacked the two capabilities it demanded most: reasoning and unstructured communication. Thus, automated network management has remained largely confined to single domains, while interdomain problems are still resolved by human operators on the phone. We argue that agentic large language models can finally unlock the potential of the Knowledge Plane, but that doing so will require solving new research problems that arise particularly in this decentralized, multi-agent, coopetitive setting that have received limited attention in the literature thus far.

ALT Mobile networks are evolving toward service-aware operation to support heterogeneous applications with diverse quality-ofservice (QoS) and quality-of-experience (QoE) requirements. In practice, however, the widespread use of encryption makes service types difficult to observe directly, which limits the deployment of service-aware optimization in operational networks. Recent raw-byte representation learning methods have improved offline encrypted-traffic classification, but their robustness in realistic deployment remains limited due to temporal drift and the lack of explicit labels for online adaptation. This paper proposes Stable Encrypted-Traffic Representation and Online Adaptation (SEROA), a deployment-oriented framework for encryptedtraffic classification in service-aware mobile networks. In the offline stage, SEROA exploits protocol structure to learn temporally stable representations by applying masked modeling to stable fields, protocolaware transformations and contrastive lear

ALT Blockwise distillation methods for architecture search, such as DNA, DONNA, LANA and Puzzle, score each candidate replacement block in isolation and assemble a child network by minimizing the sum of per-block scores. We test this additive assumption on DeiT-S and DeiT-B with seven replacement blocks per layer, seven block-latency budgets from 70% to 40%, three fine-tuning seeds and paired bootstrap confidence intervals. (i) At mild compression the additive integer linear program (ILP) is close to a pairwise integer quadratic program (IQP) that models block interactions, but the post-fine-tuning gap widens sharply between the 60% and 55% budgets: at 55%-40% the ILP trails the IQP by 3.3-16.6 top-1 points on ImageNet-100. (ii) We split the KL additivity error into a metric component, caused by the non-linearity of the KL in summed logit changes and computable from cached single-block logits, and a functional component, the score-level effect of non-additive logit changes. The metric comp

ALT SSL has been adopted for encrypted traffic classification to learn representations from unlabeled traces and reduce reliance on manual feature engineering. However, recent studies show that data leakage can inflate reported performance and that pretrained models can underperform shallow classifiers once leakage is controlled. These findings raise questions about what information SSL can learn from encrypted traffic and how different pretraining mechanisms exploit this information. In this paper, we systematically investigate these questions by examining the sources of learnable information, the effectiveness of contextual pretraining, alternative self-supervision mechanisms, and the limits of representation learning. We first find that visible protocol fields retain contextual dependencies that are strongest between adjacent bytes, while payload interventions establish the classification value of retained plaintext structure. Guided by these insights, we investigate byte-level contextu

ALT A major evolutionary goal and challenge for next-generation wireless systems is seamless multiple radio access technology (multi-RAT) mobility. In a multi-RAT environment, handover decisions must account for both user quality of service and network priorities, including signal quality, resource availability, energy consumption, latency, and security. Although WiFi/cellular mobility is well explored in research and standardization, many conventional handover mechanisms continue to rely primarily on received signal strength. Such decisions may overlook link delay, congestion, and the distinct operating characteristics of heterogeneous RATs. In this work, we present the Reinforced Flexible Multi-RAT Selection framework (ReFlexMRS), a configurable Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based approach for multi-criteria handover target selection. ReFlexMRS is evaluated using an SDN-enabled multi-RAT testbed. The decision problem is formulated as a Markov Decision Process with a finite action spa

ALT The design of sixth generation (6G) mobile systems requires measurements of artificial intelligence (AI) service traffic under controlled network conditions. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Service and System Aspects Working Group 4 (SA4) documents such measurements in draft Technical Report 26.870. In this paper, we describe the open testbed used for the study and analyze the results recorded in version 0.6.2 and its companion workbook. The testbed combines network emulation, packet capture, application measurements, and scenario execution against hosted and self-hosted models. The reported uplink to downlink volume ratios span more than six orders of magnitude. A personal assistant agent has a ratio of 0.007 at its local control interface and 0.50 on its wide-area egress. Deterministic agent signaling follows the configured round-trip delay. In a tokenized video experiment with 125 questions per profile, the number of correct answers changes by at most three through 10%

ALT Proportional fair (PF) scheduling in fifth-generation (5G) New Radio (NR) ranks user equipment (UE) by instantaneous rate over an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) of delivered service. We identify a served-but-undelivered denial-of-service (DoS) attack in which rank indicator (RI) inflation induces persistent physical resource block (PRB) starvation. Unsupported spatial layers cause first-attempt delivery failure, keeping the attacker's service EWMA low; the evaluated PF allocator repeatedly grants it the full PRB pool, denying honest UEs transmission opportunities. We formalize this recurrence and evaluate it in 3,300 paired, 200 slot multi-user shards spanning rank 1 and rank 2 Sionna Ray Tracing geometries, three link adaptation controllers, PF and round robin (RR), four target identities, and five seeds. On the rank 2 geometry, selective RI inflation yields 94–95% target capture, reduces PRB Jain fairness from 0.997 to 0.28, and produces mean honest zero-grant runs of 4

ALT Grant-free uplink access in low-Earth-orbit (LEO) non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) poses a coordination challenge when multiple UEs share a satellite channel without real-time centralized scheduling under long propagation delays and time-varying channels. Conventional random access does not exploit peer context, leading to collisions and inefficient channel use as contention increases. To address this problem, we propose IRIS, a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for decentralized grant-free direct-to-satellite (D2S) uplink access, with A2A-IRIS as its sidelink-assisted Agent-to-Agent (A2A) realization. Each UE executes a shared binary transmission policy using local traffic/channel information augmented by compact peer states exchanged over UE-to-UE sidelink, while Vanilla-IRIS serves as a local-only ablation. Evaluations in rural and suburban LEO D2S deployments use TLE-based trajectories propagated using the Simplified General Perturbations 4 (SGP4), with a Walker-Delta con

ALT Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite networks are reshaping maritime connectivity, offering much lower latency and higher capacity than traditional geostationary (GEO) links. As a single user terminal (UT) cannot serve hundreds to thousands of passengers, a cruise ship often deploys several UTs behind an onboard multi-WAN router for aggregated capacity and load balancing. Consequently, passenger connectivity depends not only on the satellite links but also on how the router distributes sessions among UTs. In this paper, we measure Starlink maritime connectivity on two cruise ships of different scales, Utopia of the Seas near the Bahamas in December 2025 and Silver Muse in the Adriatic Sea in July 2026, combining UT telemetry, inside-out measurements from a passenger device, and outside-in measurements from cloud servers near Starlink Points of Presence (PoPs). We find that the onboard network, rather than the satellite links, largely determines the passenger experience, as cruise lines rate

ALT Drone-assisted live media production stresses cellular networks by combining high-rate uplink video, continuous telemetry, and latency-sensitive command/control on a mobile aerial platform. This paper presents ReDrone5G, an end-to-end field-trial platform evaluated across two practical fifth-generation (5G) deployment paths: a commercial public non-standalone (NSA) network in Sivas, Turkiye, and a private OpenAirInterface (OAI)-based standalone (SA) testbed in Trondheim, Norway. The same drone, media, telemetry/control, and monitoring stack is used in both trials, which are treated as complementary, non- equivalent field deployments rather than a controlled A/B comparison. Results show that the commercial deployment sustains remote drone media operation, while the evaluated private deployment exhibits lower control RTT and video latency and higher video throughput. The private setup also exposes signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), reference signal received power (RSRP), modulation and coding

ALT Cellular-connected UAV corridors reuse terrestrial infrastructure to provide predictable aerial connectivity, but coexistence with ground users (GUEs) creates competing demands on antenna tilt and physical resource blocks (PRBs). Prior work optimizes tilt for signal quality alone and does not address joint tilt-PRB planning under corridor rate and GUE delay constraints, nor the allocation policy needed when combined resource claims exceed the PRB budget. We address both gaps by formulating a joint antenna-tilt and PRB-allocation problem that maximizes GUE sum-log-rate subject to a minimum UAV corridor rate and an M/G/1-based GUE mean-delay bound. We decompose the problem into two subproblems: antenna tilts are adapted via projected gradient ascent, while PRB allocation follows a techno-economic approach. Under resource scarcity, we cast the PRB scarcity as a bankruptcy problem and apply the weighted Talmud rule to balance GUE and UAV claims. Simulation results demonstrate that relaxing

ALT Starlink and other low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband systems exhibit stochastic access dynamics whose effects propagate from network measurements to throughput prediction and adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming, making reasoning over multiple plausible futures essential. Existing studies mainly characterize realized traces or individual system layers, leaving cross-layer world modeling of these evolving dynamics largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose StarWorld, a cross-layer world model for Starlink prediction and streaming. StarWorld couples learned stochastic network dynamics with executable prediction, control, and playback processes to imagine multi-step cross-layer futures, while a calibrated Trust Gate determines whether these futures are sufficiently reliable for use. On real Starlink measurements, StarWorld achieves the lowest network-future distributional errors among the comparison methods at the principal horizons and reduces pairwise controller quality-of-

ALT Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication is a promising enabler for beyond-fifth-generation wireless networks. However, RIS phase shifters typically rely on a tuning element (for example a variable-length stub), which can be optimally configured for only one carrier frequency at a time. This constraint complicates RIS deployment in multi-carrier systems and often necessitates additional measures, such as using multiple RIS panels or partitioning RIS elements across carriers. In this work, we propose a novel scheme in which all RIS elements simultaneously serve multiple carriers, delivering improved performance over existing approaches. Our method leverages the multiple reflections captured by physically consistent RIS models to realize the desired phase shifts for all carriers using a single stub length setting. We further develop a joint active and passive beamforming optimization framework tailored to multi-carrier, physically

ALT 2030 is expected to witness the first commercial 6G systems. However, traditional modular communication architectures cannot meet the latency, optimisation, and integration requirements demanded by various sub-millisecond, data-intensive emerging 6G applications. End-to-end (E2E) communication addresses these limitations by replacing traditional processing blocks with neural networks. Nevertheless, conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs) in E2E systems use dense computation. This results in substantial energy consumption and computational resource requirements, which may not be feasible in resource constrained devices. This paper addresses the aforementioned challenge by developing a spiking neural network (SNN) encoder that targets lower encoder inference energy while maintaining communication reliability. In particular, the SNN encoder combines sparse spike activity, sinusoidal temporal modulation, and weighted temporal aggregation to map one-hot encoded messages to distinguis

ALT During disasters, public mobile networks may become unavailable, congested, or degraded, requiring deployable communication systems to support emergency operations. This article proposes a mission-critical communications system supporing Mission Critical Push-to-Talk (MCPTT), Mission Critical Video (MCVideo), and Mission Critical Data (MCData) over a private 5G standalone network with Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) connectivity. A context-aware Quality, Priority, and Pre-emption (QPP) mechanism is proposed to dynamically adapt network resource allocation according to the operational state of Mission Critical Services (MCX). Extensions to the Open5GS Policy Control Function (PCF) and Session Management Function (SMF) enable priority and pre-emption updates for existing flows without session re-establishment. The architecture supports tactical edge deployment of service and media functions while retaining centralized service control. Experimental evaluation considers three configurations:

ALT Executing service workflows with directed acyclic graph (DAG) dependencies over wireless distributed computing networks requires joint control of function placement, routing, and scheduling, together with synchronization of inputs from the same request at merge points. We study throughput-optimal control of these networks under stochastic request arrivals, time-varying wireless links, and interference constraints. We use a valid mapping abstraction that assigns each service function to a computation node and each DAG dependency to a routing path. Using this abstraction, we characterize the network capacity region to support service DAGs, and prove that synchronizing the packets of a request at merge points does not shrink the region. We develop Dynamic Computing Network Control for service DAGs (DCNC-DAG), a dynamic control policy that selects queue-aware valid mappings and schedules service DAG execution by nearest-to-origin (NTO) while enforcing input synchronization at merge points.

ALT Modern datacenter applications demand high network bandwidth, motivating packet-level multipath transport to exploit the aggregate capacity of multiple paths. However, packet reordering under packet spraying poses challenges for hardware transports. Excessive packet reordering makes it difficult to infer packet loss, imposes substantial pressure on NIC resources, and ultimately degrades performance. Existing transports either prioritize throughput without controlling packet reordering, or mitigate reordering by restricting transmissions, which leaves available path capacity unused. In this paper, we identify two fundamental sources of packet reordering: transient inter-path queueing differences caused by control dynamics, and persistent path-delay differences due to path heterogeneity. These observations motivate a joint design of a multipath controller and a packet scheduler to address transient and persistent delay differences, respectively. We present Rondo, a packet-level multipath

ALT The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), mobile edge computing (MEC) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) provides an effective solution for computation-intensive and latency-sensitive services in infrastructure-deficient environments. However, the joint optimization of UAV trajectories, task offloading, communication and computing resources under heterogeneous task priorities results in a highly coupled mixed-integer non-convex problem. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Hierarchical Intelligent Evolutionary Algorithm (HIEA) for priority-aware multi-UAV cooperative NOMA-MEC networks, which integrates multi-head deep Q-network (MH-DQN)-based intelligent decision generation, communication-aware initialization, adaptive evolutionary exploration and successive convex approximation (SCA)-based precision refinement. Specifically, a novel communication-aware initialization mechanism, termed Channel Quality Indicator (CQI)-guided Load-Aware Trajectory Initializ

ALT A frontier AI model is trained in an AI data center, on tens of thousands of accelerators joined by a dedicated network, and every training step ends with all of them exchanging data at once. Between racks, that network is optical, and each of its four layers, from lasers to switches, runs a fixed or after-the-fact policy. Lasers sharing an enclosure, cooling, and power can fail together. At a fixed spare ratio, correlated failure provably caps a pool's availability however large it grows. In this paper, we present a comprehensive predictive control plane framework, called Halley, that reads each resource's next state and acts before the failure occurs. It has four components, each carrying a formal guarantee: LightReserve that sizes the laser pool to provide a coverage bound, FoldFit that schedules the switch within 11/9 of the optimal, ThermaLead that holds a microring with one-step-ahead control, and TriageGuard that protects the highest-risk modules first. Halley gives each layer a