Meet the NORCICS PhDs and PostDocs - Trond Vatten

Trond Vatten is pursuing his Ph.D. at NTNU in Trondheim, at the Department of Information Security and Communication Technology, within NORCICS' work package 3 task 3.1: “5G and beyond as an element of critical services”. His work focuses on making modern mobile networks (5G, 6G) secure, robust, and survivable enough to work as a communication network for the critical infrastructures of the future.

Today, an average user of the 5G network would probably not experience any difference if speed and reliability in the network were increased by 10x. You probably did not notice a difference between 4G and 5G in your day-to-day life: video streaming, messaging, or web browsing. While it is true that most use cases for mobile networks are fulfilled by 5G today, we could utilize the full technological possibilities of 5G to create new use cases. Use cases that will provide immense value for society, leveraging extreme speed and reliability to support a modern critical infrastructure.

Trond is currently investigating the resilience and survivability of these networks through modeling and simulation, especially during adverse scenarios such as extreme weather, bugs in software updates, or even cyber-attacks. To support entertainment services like Netflix while simultaneously providing a communication network for our critical infrastructures, 5G and beyond must be super-fast and ultra-reliable at the same time. A network disruption of merely a second could have fatal consequences in emergencies.

Another issue is that regular 5G and 5G for critical services will operate on the same physical network, but still, they cannot impact each other. Even though 5G use in an area during a concert will drastically increase, it cannot degrade the performance of the communication network that nearby critical services use. There is a need for differentiation and isolation.

One of the key new elements of 5G is the high level of virtualization and programmability, making the network flexible and capable of quickly reacting to network disruptions. Relying only on the manual repair of physical equipment when undesired events happen is too slow. While repairing the equipment, we also require autonomous mechanisms that can instantaneously reoptimize the network to ensure the continuous operation of critical services.

Such communication networks could facilitate remote surgical operations in places that were previously impossible to reach, allowing specialists to operate on patients instantaneously with perfect precision. They could provide the backbone communication network for fully autonomous cities and transportation, increasing efficiency and accelerating sustainable growth across sectors. In emergencies like natural disasters, we can leverage these networks to provide a communication network for all emergency services needed in the area.

Imagine a well-functioning 5G network in your city, serving your Netflix browsing and autonomous vehicles in the city center. Suddenly, extreme weather takes out 20 % of the 5G antennas and data centers connected to the network, making it unable to serve all needs in the city. In a traditional network, most physical components perform specific tasks, leaving little room for flexibility. In 5G and beyond, however, we can swiftly and dynamically allocate resources around the network with concepts such as Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and network slicing. While waiting for physical elements to repair, we can use autonomous algorithms to temporarily "borrow" the resources used for Netflix browsing to ensure continuous communication between the autonomous vehicles still driving around the city center. In addition, we leverage the same concepts and instantly provide a communication network to the emergency services used to recover after the incident.

Even though Netflix-browsing and self-driving cars may feel like corny examples, they still illustrate some of the possibilities inherent in the technology. A super-fast communication network that can operate continuously, even in the face of undesired events, can enable opportunities with great value for our society. There are, however, several technological challenges we must tackle first. Achieving a high-speed network is one thing. Providing a guarantee that the network will not go down is an entirely different story, requiring research that Trond and other researchers at NORCICS are currently devoted to achieving.