News

Between May 19 and 23, the city of Natal (RN) hosted the
43rd edition of the Brazilian Symposium on Computer Networks and Distributed Systems (SBRC 2025), one of the leading scientific events in the field of networking in Brazil. Researchers affiliated with the SMARTNESS Engineering Research Center participated in different sessions of the event, presenting work that spans from programmable network security to drone applications and quantum networks.

One of the highlights of SMARTNESS’s participation was the organization of theII Workshop on Quantum Networks (WQuNets 2025), dedicated to discussing current advances and future perspectives on quantum networking in Brazil. The workshop was coordinated by researchers Antônio Abelém (UFPA), Diego Abreu (UFPA), José Ferreira de Rezende (UFRJ), and Christian Esteve Rothenberg (UNICAMP), all members of SMARTNESS. In addition to his role as co-organizer, Professor Antônio Abelém also took part as a panelist in the roundtable Quantum Computing and Internet, which brought together experts to debate the technical and institutional challenges of developing quantum-based communication infrastructure.



Throughout the event, SMARTNESS also hosted a dedicated booth where ongoing research initiatives and demo applications were presented. Visitors had the opportunity to learn more about the center’s projects, explore interactive demonstrations, and engage with researchers involved in multiple areas of network innovation. Among the visitors was Prof. Robert Metcalfe, a pioneering figure in computer networking and current researcher at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and, one of the keynote speakers at SBRC 2025. During his visit to the booth, Prof. Metcalfe showed interest in the research showcased by the SMARTNESS team




Beyond the workshop, the SMARTNESS team contributed five papers to the main tracks of the symposium, covering topics such as programmable hardware security, volumetric video streaming, cloud gaming, attack detection, and drone-based logistics:

TP5 – Network and Distributed Systems Security
A Comparative Study of Stream Ciphers ChaCha, Forró, and Xote Implemented on Programmable Hardware Data Planes
Authors: Rodrigo Pierini, Caio Teixeira, Christian Rothenberg, Marco Henriques
Available on Zenodo

TP6 – 5G/6G Networks
Programmable Environment for Volumetric Video Streaming and QoE Assessment
Authors: Alan Teixeira, Fabricio Rodríguez Cesen, Rafael Pedrosa Silva Clerici, Christian Esteve Rothenberg, Eduardo Cerqueira, Vanessa Testoni
Available on Zenodo

TP3 – Edge-Cloud Integration
DCTPQ: Machine Learning-Based Cloud Gaming Traffic Prioritization Using Multi-Queueing for Enhanced QoE
Authors: Alireza Shirmarz, Carlos Marques, Fábio Luciano Verdi, Suneet Singh, Christian Rothenberg
Available on Zenodo

TP7 – Anomaly and Attack Detection
Semi-Supervised Quantum Generative Adversarial Network (sQGAN) for Attack Detection
Authors: Diego Abreu, David Fernandes Moura, Christian Rothenberg, Antonio Abelem
Available on Zenodo

TP10 – IoT, Drones, and Wireless Sensor Networks
Drone Delivery Performance Evaluation: Collision and Repair Logistics in the Loop
Authors: Leonel Feitosa, Vandirleya Barbosa, Luiz Fernando Bittencourt, Fabíola Oliveira, José R. Junior, Francisco Silva
Available on Zenodo

In the Demo Session, the project UNetyEmu: Unity-based simulator for aerial and non-aerial vehicles with integrated network emulation was presented by Mauricio Rodriguez Cesen, Ariel Góes de Castro, Ibini Anuar Santana Santana, Ramon Fontes, Fabricio Rodríguez Cesen, and Christian Esteve Rothenberg. The tool enables integrated simulations between aerial and ground vehicles with network emulation support, making it useful for mobility and connectivity studies in complex environments.
Available on Zenodo

SMARTNESS’s participation in SBRC 2025 reaffirms its role as a collaborative center for research in advanced network infrastructures and services. We congratulate all the authors and organizers involved in the event for their valuable contributions.

The full papers and demo presented at the symposium are available in our Zenodo community. We invite all interested readers to visit the page and explore the broader research developed by our center.