Mobile networks are now rising to the status of critical infrastructure: there will be 11.6 billion mobile-connected devices by 2021, exceeding the world’s population. As the market transitions from existing technologies to an all-IP ecosystem, the need to innovate the way services are delivered is critical. This drives us to change our approach to interconnection, leading towards a more global and flexible model. Over the past years we have been witnessing the shift from a unilateral, network-centric communications market to an environment with many market players around the user and its powerful device. Though Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) used to have a monopoly on these services, this is now being challenged. For example, Mobile Network Aggregators (MNAs) such as Google Fi are gaining popularity among end-users. MNAs are able to multiplex clients across multiple MNOs in order to ensure optimal service and sustained quality of experience (QoE). In this context, there is a stringent and immediate need for MNOs to develop sustainable strategies including next-generation interconnections to adapt and remain relevant. Understanding, monitoring and innovating how mobile end-users consume and reach content, especially under dynamic mobility scenarios (e.g., international roaming), is of paramount importance. My scientific goal in this project is to design fluid interconnection models between the end-user, the MNOs and the IP Exchange (IPX) providers. I plan to illuminate the current cellular interconnection ecosystem and design novel solutions to facilitate and enable next-generation IP interconnection models. I propose to explore novel technologies (e.g., distributed ledger technology) that enable MNOs to interact directly and offer their users customized services (e.g., using crypto-currencies). This will increase the number of connected people, while enabling MNOs to extend their coverage and sustain a healthy stream of revenue from market growth.

In an increasingly hyperconnected society, cybersecurity concerns take on a broader dimension, which can impact citizens’ safety. This has been widely recognized in the EU through specific legal instruments, such as the Cybersecurity Act and the recent Cybersecurity Strategy for the Digital Decade. The development of the IoT technologies have fostered the deployment of data-driven services for everyday scenarios, such as transport, health and energy, but have also increased the probability and impact of new cybersecurity threats. Recent and well-known attacks have demonstrated the need to develop AI-based techniques to identify such attacks in IoT scenarios. In this context, the objective of this project is to build a decentralized framework to learn the IoT devices’ intended behavior throughout their lifecycle, in order to distinguish abnormal behavior that may reflect a security attack or threat. The proposal will build an edge-based and federated learning architecture to enable IoT devices to participate in the learning process by using lightweight security protocols. This architecture will include the use of blockchain through a novel approach in which different ledgers will be interconnected to improve the performance and practicability of existing approaches. Furthermore, the proposal will be the first effort to quantify the impact of human-machine interactions on the devices’ intended behavior. The project will be validated quantitatively and qualitatively to identify potential tradeoffs for its deployment in different IoT-enabled scenarios. It will leverage the candidate’s extensive knowledge and experience in IoT cybersecurity, which will be strengthened by the host institution to improve his technical and transferable skills in a multidisciplinary environment. The proposed project represents a unique contribution to reinforcing the culture of cybersecurity in the EU that will boost the candidate's professional development during and after the fellowship.