The COVID‐19 crisis is having a significant impact on the quality of life and future of young people; it can also lead to disruption in education. A disruption would pose a severe threat to the entire society in the postcrisis period. Therefore, educational institutions must respond quickly and ensure the continuity of the educational processes. Our research goal has been to develop and implement a model enabling a rapid transition from the traditional to the distance learning model in a state of emergency. Our focus has been on conceiving technical, organizational, and pedagogical changes that educational organizations need to implement to enable different interaction methods, ensure continuity, and provide high‐quality education. We have defined and implemented a model, which is described in detail in this paper, thus giving guidelines for a rapid transition to distance learning, which is not restricted to the crisis times only. We have evaluated our approach by monitoring the IT solutions and surveying students and teachers at the School of Computing, Union University of Belgrade. The results indicate the high satisfaction of these participants in the educational processes. They imply the acceptability of prolonged distance learning, if needed, and embrace the hybrid education model for the next generation of students.

The academic and professional community has recently started to develop the concept of 6G networks. The scientists have defined key performance indicators and pursued large-scale automation, ambient sensing intelligence, and pervasive artificial intelligence. They put great efforts into implementing new network access and edge computing solutions. However, further progress depends on developing a more flexible core infrastructure according to more complex QoS requirements. Our research aims to provide 5G/6G core flexibility by customizing and optimizing network slices and introducing a higher level of programmability. We bind similar services in a group, manage them as a single slice, and enable a higher level of programmability as a prerequisite for dynamic QoS. The current 5G solutions primarily use predefined queues, so we have developed highly flexible, dynamic queue management software and moved it entirely to the application layer (reducing dependence on the physical network infrastructure). Further, we have emulated a testbed environment as realistically as possible to verify the proposed model capabilities. Obtained results confirm the validity of the proposed dynamic QoS management model for configuring queues’ parameters according to the service management requirements. Moreover, the proposed solution can also be applied efficiently to 5G core networks to resolve complex service requirements.

Software-defined networking (SDN) provides many benefits, including traffic programmability, agility, and network automation. However, budget constraints burdened with technical (e.g., scalability, fault tolerance, security issues) and, sometimes, business challenges (user acceptance and confidence of network operators) make providers indecisive for full SDN deployment. Therefore, incremental deployment of SDN functionality through the placement of a limited set of SDN devices among traditional devices represents a rational and efficient environment that can offer customers modern and more data-intensive services. However, while hybrid SDN provides many benefits, it also has specific challenges addressed in the literature. This paper answers one of these challenges by presenting the research and development of a new load balancing scheme

An optimal selection of a WSN topology protocol and a suitable lightweight cipher algorithm is a highly important task, whose success ensures both the maximum utilization and the security of a wireless sensor network. This paper presents a method to determine the optimal combination of a WSN topology protocol and a lightweight cipher algorithm in the context of power consumption throughout an entire network. A selection method based on multi-attribute decision-making methods is proposed. These methods, used for the first time in a study of sensor networks, provide a ranking of the optimal combinations of topologies and encryption algorithms that meet the requirements of wireless sensor networks such as authentication, data integrity, reliability, availability, confidentiality, and energy efficiency.

Numerous studies have evaluated the publication performance of universities worldwide, but studies examining intra-institutional performance still remain scarce. In this paper, as a case study, we provide an in-depth quantitative-qualitative analysis of University of Belgrade (UB) leading institutions performance. The results show that the UB scientific institutes, faculties of sciences and mathematics, together with the Faculty of Medicine and several faculties of technology and engineering sciences exhibit excellent scientific results. The Faculty of Medicine and Institute Vinča lead the way in terms of number of published papers, while Institute of Physics excels when taking into account the quality of journals. Results pointed out that the Faculty of Technology and Metallurgy, besides the number of papers, has a strong showing in terms of citation metrics. In addition, using a network graph we present collaboration patterns within the UB. This analysis may be a step in the right direction towards a model for evaluating and ranking institutions within a particular university.

5G and 6G represent next‐generation communication technologies that provide high spectral and energy efficiency, low latency, and massive connectivity due to extensive growth in Internet‐of‐Things devices. Their impact on the quality of life will be significant and enable them to shape modern society's future. The intensive network softwarization and cloudification represent leading drivers for future core network development. Therefore, educational institutions must respond quickly and ensure these technologies' easy and rapid adoption. It is necessary to introduce new approaches to engineers' education, shifting the focus from traditional network technologies toward more programmable network concepts based on network softwarization and cloudification. Our research goal has been to develop and implement a course while focusing on conceiving technical and pedagogical solutions to provide high‐quality education. We have used globally available APIs, tools, and open‐source software to achieve deeper student involvement in our course. We have evaluated our approach by surveying students at the School of Computing, Union University of Belgrade. The results indicate students' high satisfaction with the proposed course. At the same time, they reveal specific problems that affect the effective acceptance of knowledge from certain areas covered in the course. Finally, we have prepared a list of guidelines for teaching courses of 5G/6G core.

Software-defined networking (SDN) provides many benefits, including traffic programmability, agility, and network automation. However, budget constraints burdened with technical (e.g., scalability, fault tolerance, security issues) and, sometimes, business challenges (user acceptance and confidence of network operators) make providers indecisive for full SDN deployment. Therefore, incremental deployment of SDN functionality through the placement of a limited set of SDN devices among traditional devices represents a rational and efficient environment that can offer customers modern and more data-intensive services. However, while hybrid SDN provides many benefits, it also has specific challenges addressed in the literature. This paper answers one of these challenges by presenting the research and development of a new load balancing scheme in the hybrid SDN environment built with a minimal SDN device set (controller and one switch). We propose a novel load balancing scheme to monitor current server load indicators and apply multi-parameter metrics for scheduling connections to balance the load on the servers as efficiently as possible. The base of the new load balancing scheme is continuous monitoring of server load indicators and implementations of multi-parameter metrics (CPU load, I/O Read, I/O Write, Link Upload, Link Download) for scheduling connections. The testing performed on servers aims to balance the server's load as efficiently as possible. The obtained results have shown that this mechanism achieves better results than existing load balancing schemes in traditional and SDN networks. Moreover, a proposed load balancing scheme can be used with various services and applied in any client-server environment.