In this paper, we propose a Mobile Edge Internet of Things (MEIoT) architecture by leveraging the fiber-wireless access technology, the cloudlet concept, and the software defined networking framework. The MEIoT architecture brings computing and storage resources close to Internet of Things (IoT) devices in order to speed up IoT data sharing and analytics. Specifically, the IoT devices (belonging to the same user) are associated to a specific proxy Virtual Machine (VM) in the nearby cloudlet. The proxy VM stores and analyzes the IoT data (generated by its IoT devices) in real-time. Moreover, we introduce the semantic and social IoT technology in the context of MEIoT to solve the interoperability and inefficient access control problem in the IoT system. In addition, we propose two dynamic proxy VM migration methods to minimize the end-to-end delay between proxy VMs and their IoT devices and to minimize the total on-grid energy consumption of the cloudlets, respectively. Performance of the proposed methods is validated via extensive simulations.

This letter presents two outage-optimal relaying schemes to improve the performance of a wireless energy harvesting system in cognitive radio networks. The performance of both schemes is then evaluated and compared by carrying out numerical simulations, and we also derive the analytic expression for the outage probability of the secondary system.

In this paper, we consider a two-hop communication system with an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay under channel estimation errors. According to the channel quality of the link between the base station (BS) and the relay, we investigate two typical relay scenarios. We study the capacity performance for both In-Band Full-Duplex (IBFD) and Half-Duplex (HD) transmission modes. Moreover, we consider two operation modes of the user equipment (UE) for each scenario. Closed-form expressions of ergodic capacities with channel estimation errors are obtained for scenario-1. And we derive accurate approximations of ergodic capacities for scenario-2. Numerical experiments are conducted to verify the analytical results and show that our theoretical derivations are perfectly matched with the simulations. We show that with practical signal-to-noise ratio values and effective interference cancellation techniques, IBFD transmission is preferable in terms of capacity.

In this letter, we study a scenario based on decoupled RF energy harvesting networks (DRF-EHNs) that separate energy sources from information sources to overcome the doubly near-far problem and improve harvesting efficiency. We propose an algorithm to maximize energy efficiency (EE) while satisfying constraints on the maximum transmit power of the hybrid access point (H-AP) and power beacon (PB), while further satisfying constraints on the minimum quality of service and minimum amount of harvested power in multi-user Rayleigh fading channel. Using nonlinear fractional programming and Lagrangian dual decomposition, we optimize EE with four optimization arguments: the transmit power from the H-AP and PB, time-splitting ratio, and power-splitting ratio. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm is more energy-efficient compared to baseline schemes.

In this study, we first developed a simultaneous measurement system for accommodation and convergence eye movement and evaluated its precision. Then, using a stuffed animal as the target, whose depth should be relatively easy to perceive, we measured convergence eye movement and accommodation at the same time while a tablet displaying a 3D movie was moved in the depth direction. By adding the real 3D display depth movement to the movement of the 3D image, subjects showed convergence eye movement that corresponds appropriately to the dual change of parallax in the 3D movie and real display, even when a subject's convergence changed very little. Accommodation also changed appropriately according to the change in depth.

In this paper, we consider wireless powered sensor networks. In these networks, the energy access point (EAP) transmits the energy packets to the sensor nodes and then, the sensor nodes send their sensing data to the information access point (IAP) by exploiting the harvested energy. Because the sensor nodes have a limited information queue (data storage) and energy queue (battery), energy packet/data packet scheduling is important. Accordingly, to reduce the total energy required to support the associated sensor network and simultaneously avoid sensing data loss, the energy packet/data packet transmission periods are jointly optimized. Furthermore, analyses identify the optimal location of EAP which will yield energy-efficient wireless powered sensor networks. Through the computer simulations, the performance of the proposed packet scheduling and deployment policy is demonstrated.

Cognitive orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems are spectrum-efficient yet vulnerable to intercarrier interference (ICI), especially in high-mobility scenarios. In this paper, the energy efficiency optimization problem in high-mobility cognitive OFDM system is considered. The aim is to maximize the energy efficiency by adapting subcarrier bandwidth, power allocation and sensing duration in the presence of ICI, under the constraints of the total power budget of secondary networks, the probabilistic interference limits for the protection of primary networks, and the subcarrier spacing restriction for high-mobility OFDM systems. In order to tackle the intractable non-convex optimization problem induced by ICI, an ICI-aware power allocation algorithm is proposed, by referring to noncooperative game theory. Moreover, a near-optimal subcarrier bandwidth search algorithm based on golden section methods is also presented to maximize the system energy efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can achieve a considerable energy efficiency improvement by up to 133% compared to the traditional static subcarrier bandwidth and power allocation schemes.

The emergency response process is quite complex since there is a wide variety of elements to be evaluated for taking decisions. Uncertainties generated by subjectivity and imprecision affect the safety and effectiveness of actions. The aim of this paper is to develop an onto-logy for emergency response protocols, in particular, to fires in buildings. This developed ontology supports the knowledge sharing, evaluation and review of the protocols used, contributing to the tactical and strategic planning of organizations. The construction of the ontology was based on the methodology Methontology. The domain specification and conceptualization were based in qualitative research, in which were evaluated 131 terms with definitions, of which 85 were approved by specialists. From there, in the Protégé tool, the domain's taxonomy and the axioms were created. The specialists validated the ontology using the assessment by human approach (taxonomy, application and structure). Thus, a sustainable ontology model to the rescue tactical phase was ensured.

This paper discusses design challenges and possible solutions for 3D NAND. A 3D NAND array inherently has a larger parasitic capacitance and thereby critical area in terms of product yield. To mitigate such issues associated with 3D NAND technology, array control and divided array architecture for improving reliability and yield and for reducing area overhead, program time, energy per bit and array noise are proposed.

The likelihood-ratio based score level fusion (LR fusion) scheme is known as one of the most promising multibiometric fusion schemes. This scheme verifies a user by computing a log-likelihood ratio (LLR) for each modality, and comparing the total LLR to a threshold. It can happen in practice that genuine LLRs tend to be less than 0 for some modalities (e.g., the user is a “goat”, who is inherently difficult to recognize, for some modalities; the user suffers from temporary physical conditions such as injuries and illness). The LR fusion scheme can handle such cases by allowing the user to select a subset of modalities at the authentication phase and setting LLRs corresponding to missing query samples to 0. A recent study, however, proposed a modality selection attack, in which an impostor inputs only query samples whose LLRs are greater than 0 (i.e., takes an optimal strategy), and proved that this attack degrades the overall accuracy even if the genuine user also takes this optimal strategy. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the modality selection attack in more details. Specifically, we investigate whether the overall accuracy is improved by eliminating “goat” templates, whose LLRs tend to be less than 0 for genuine users, from the database (i.e., restricting modality selection). As an overall performance measure, we use the KL (Kullback-Leibler) divergence between a genuine score distribution and an impostor's one. We first prove the modality restriction hardly increases the KL divergence when a user can select a subset of modalities (i.e., selective LR fusion). We second prove that the modality restriction increases the KL divergence when a user needs to input all biometric samples (i.e., non-selective LR fusion). We conduct experiments using three real datasets (NIST BSSR1 Set1, Biosecure DS2, and CASIA-Iris-Thousand), and discuss directions of multibiometric fusion systems.

Wireless sensor networks usually deploy sensor nodes with limited energy resources in unattended environments so that people have difficulty in replacing or recharging the depleted devices. In order to balance the energy dissipation and prolong the network lifetime, this paper proposes a routing spanning tree-based clustering algorithm (RSTCA) which uses routing spanning tree to analyze clustering. In this study, the proposed scheme consists of three phases: setup phase, cluster head (CH) selection phase and steady phase. In the setup phase, several clusters are formed by adopting the K-means algorithm to balance network load on the basis of geographic location, which solves the randomness problem in traditional distributed clustering algorithm. Meanwhile, a conditional inter-cluster data traffic routing strategy is created to simplify the networks into subsystems. For the CH selection phase, a novel CH selection method, where CH is selected by a probability based on the residual energy of each node and its estimated next-time energy consumption as a function of distance, is formulated for optimizing the energy dissipation among the nodes in the same cluster. In the steady phase, an effective modification that counters the boundary node problem by adjusting the data traffic routing is designed. Additionally, by the simulation, the construction procedure of routing spanning tree (RST) and the effect of the three phases are presented. Finally, a comparison is made between the RSTCA and the current distributed clustering protocols such as LEACH and LEACH-DT. The results show that RSTCA outperforms other protocols in terms of network lifetime, energy dissipation and coverage ratio.

Scaling the supply voltage (Vdd) and threshold voltage (Vth) for minimizing the energy consumption of processors dynamically is highly desired for applications such as wireless sensor network and Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we refer to the pair of Vdd and Vth, which minimizes the energy consumption of the processor under a given operating condition, as a minimum energy point (MEP in short). Since the MEP is heavily dependent on an operating condition determined by a chip temperature, an activity factor, a process variation, and a performance required for the processor, it is not very easy to closely track the MEP at runtime. This paper proposes a simple but effective algorithm for dynamically tracking the MEP of a processor under a wide range of operating conditions. Gate-level simulation of a 32-bit RISC processor in a 65nm process demonstrates that the proposed algorithm tracks the MEP under a situation that operating condition widely vary.

This paper describes a design of energy-efficient Standard Cell Memory (SCM) using Silicon-on-Thin-BOX (SOTB). We present automatic place and routing (P&R) methodology for optimal body-bias separation (BBS) for SCM, which enables to apply different body bias voltages to latches and to other peripheral circuits within SCM. Capability of SOTB to effectively reduce leakage by body biasing is fully exploited in BBS. Simulation results demonstrated that our approach allows us to design SCM with 40% smaller energy dissipation at the energy minimum voltage as compared to the conventional design flow. For the process and temperature variations, Adaptive Body Bias (ABB) for SCM with our BBS provided 70% smaller leakage energy than ABB for the conventional SCM, while achieving the same clock frequency.

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) with sparseness and smoothness constraints has attracted increasing attention. When these properties are considered, NMF is usually formulated as an optimization problem in which a linear combination of an approximation error term and some regularization terms must be minimized under the constraint that the factor matrices are nonnegative. In this paper, we focus our attention on the error measure based on the Euclidean distance and propose a new iterative method for solving those optimization problems. The proposed method is based on the Hierarchical Alternating Least Squares (HALS) algorithm developed by Cichocki et al. We first present an example to show that the original HALS algorithm can increase the objective value. We then propose a new algorithm called the Gauss-Seidel HALS algorithm that decreases the objective value monotonically. We also prove that it has the global convergence property in the sense of Zangwill. We finally verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm through numerical experiments using synthetic and real data.

Scaling supply voltage (VDD) and threshold voltage (Vth) dynamically has a strong impact on energy efficiency of CMOS LSI circuits. Techniques for optimizing VDD and Vth simultaneously under dynamic workloads are thus widely investigated over the past 15 years. In this paper, we refer to the optimum pair of VDD and Vth, which minimizes the energy consumption of a circuit under a specific performance constraint, as a minimum energy point (MEP). Based on the simple transregional models of a CMOS circuit, this paper derives a simple necessary and sufficient condition for the MEP operation. The simple condition helps find the MEP of CMOS circuits. Measurement results using standard-cell based memories (SCMs) fabricated in a 65-nm process technology also validate the condition derived in this paper.

In this paper, a weighted multiple bit flipping (WMBF) algorithman for decoding low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is proposed first. Then the improved WMBF algorithm which we call the efficient weighted bit-flipping (EWBF) algorithm is developed. The EWBF algorithm can dynamically choose either multiple bit-flipping or single bit-flipping in each iteration according to the log-likelihood ratio of the error probability of the received bits. Thus, it can efficiently increase the convergence speed of decoding and prevent the decoding process from falling into loop traps. Compared with the parallel weighted bit-flipping (PWBF) algorithm, the EWBF algorithm can achieve significantly lower computational complexity without performance degradation when the Euclidean geometry (EG)-LDPC codes are decoded. Furthermore, the flipping criterion does not require any parameter adjustment.

A relay assignment scheme is proposed in this paper that minimizes the mean delay of transmission for energy harvesting (EH) cooperative communication systems, whose source node and relay nodes are all equipped with energy harvesters. We jointly consider the long-term channel side information (CSI) and energy side information (ESI) of all nodes, and formulate the delay minimization problem as an integer programming problem. To solve this problem, a refined cyclic coordinate method (RCCM) is proposed that considers the cases of fixed-packet-length (FPL) and variable-packet-length (VPL) transmission. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves performance close to that of the real-time relay selection (RRS) scheme with instantaneous CSI and ESI, which gives upper bound of the performance. Moreover, compared with the simple relay rotation (SRR) scheme where each relay has equal service time, the performance of the proposed scheme is significantly improved.

Coordinated checkpointing is a widely-used checkpoint/restart protocol for fault-tolerance in large-scale HPC systems. However, this protocol will involve massive amounts of I/O concentration, resulting in considerably high checkpoint overhead and high energy consumption. This paper focuses on speculative checkpointing, a CPR mechanism that allows for temporal distribution of checkpointings to avoid I/O concentration. We propose execution time and energy models for speculative checkpointing, and investigate energy-performance characteristics when speculative checkpointing is adopted in exascale systems. Using these models, we study the benefit of speculative checkpointing over coordinated checkpointing under various realistic scenarios for exascale HPC systems. We show that, compared to coordinated checkpointing, speculative checkpointing can achieve up to a 11% energy reduction at the cost of a relatively-small increase in the execution time. In addition, a significant energy-performance trade-off is expected when the system scale exceeds 1.2 million nodes.

A number of battery-driven sensor nodes are deployed to operate a wireless sensor network, and many routing protocols have been proposed to reduce energy consumption for data communications in the networks. We have proposed a new routing policy which employs a nearest-neighbor forwarding based on hop progress. Our proposed routing method has a topology parameter named forwarding angle to determine which node to connect with as a next-hop, and is compared with other existing policies to clarify the best topology for energy efficiency. In this paper, we also formulate the energy budget for networks with the routing policy by means of stochastic-geometric analysis on hop-count distributions for random planar networks. The formulation enables us to tell how much energy is required for all nodes in the network to forward sensed data in a pre-deployment phase. Simulation results show that the optimal topology varies according to node density in the network. Direct communication to the sink is superior for a small-sized network, and the multihop routing is more effective as the network becomes sparser. Evaluation results also demonstrate that our energy formulation can well approximate the energy budget, especially for small networks with a small forwarding angle. Discussion on the error with a large forwarding angle is then made with a geographical metric. It is finally clarified that our analytical expressions can obtain the optimal forwarding angle which yields the best energy efficiency for the routing policy when the network is moderately dense.

The aim of this letter is to guarantee the ability of low probability of intercept (LPI) and anti-jamming (AJ) by maximizing the energy efficiency (EE) to improve wireless communication survivability and sustain wireless communication in jamming environments. We studied a scenario based on one transceiver pair with a partial-band noise jammer in a Rician fading channel and proposed an EE optimization algorithm to solve the optimization problem. With the proposed EE optimization algorithm, the LPI and AJ can be simultaneously guaranteed while satisfying the constraint of the maximum signal-to-jamming-and-noise ratio and combinatorial subchannel allocation condition, respectively. The results of the simulation indicate that the proposed algorithm is more energy-efficient than those of the baseline schemes and guarantees the LPI and AJ performance in a jamming environment.