In this paper, a macro cell switching scheme for distributed antennas is proposed. In conventional distributed antenna transmission (DAT), the macro cell to which each antenna belongs is fixed. Though a cell-free system has been investigated because of its higher system throughput, the implementation cost of front-hauls can be excessive. To increase the flexibility of resource allocation in the DAT with moderate front-haul complexity, we propose the macro cell switching of distributed antennas (DAs). In the proposed scheme, DAs switch their attribution macro cells depending on the amount of pre-assigned connections. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that the proposed scheme realizes a better system throughput than the conventional system, especially when the number of user equipments (UEs) is smaller and the distance between DAs are larger.

We developed a mantle-cloak antenna by controlling the surface reactance of a dielectric-loaded dipole antenna. First, a mantle-cloak antenna with an assumed ideal metasurface sheet was designed, and band rejection characteristics were obtained by controlling the surface reactance of the mantle cloak. The variable range of the frequency spacing between the operating and stopband frequencies of the antenna was clarified by changing the value of the surface reactance. Next, a mantle-cloak antenna that uses vertical strip conductors was designed to clarify the characteristics and operating principle of the antenna. It was confirmed that the stopband frequency was 1130MHz, and the proposed antenna had a 36.3% bandwidth (|S11| ≤ -10dB) from 700 to 1010MHz. By comparing the |S11| characteristics and the input impedance characteristics of the proposed antenna with those of the dielectric-loaded antenna, the effect of the mantle cloak was confirmed. Finally, a prototype of the mantle-cloak antenna that uses vertical strip conductors was developed and measured to validate the simulation results. The measurement results were consistent with the simulation results.

Smart contracts are protocols that can automatically execute a transaction including an electronic contract when a condition is satisfied without a trusted third party. In a representative use-case, a smart contract is executed when multiple parties fairly trade on a blockchain asset. On blockchain systems, a smart contract can be regarded as a system participant, responding to the information received, receiving and storing values, and sending information and values outwards. Also, a smart contract can temporarily keep assets, and always perform operations in accordance with prior rules. Many cryptocurrencies have implemented smart contracts. At POST2018, Atzei et al. give formulations of seven fair exchange protocols using smart contract on Bitcoin: oracle, escrow, intermediated payment, timed commitment, micropayment channels, fair lotteries, and contingent payment. However, they only give an informal discussion on security. In this paper, we verify the fairness of their seven protocols by using the formal verification tool ProVerif. As a result, we show that five protocols (the oracle, intermediated payment, timed commitment, micropayment channels and fair lotteries protocols) satisfy fairness, which were not proved formally. Also, we re-find known attacks to break fairness of two protocols (the escrow and contingent payment protocols). For the escrow protocol, we formalize the two-party scheme and the three-party scheme with an arbitrator, and show that the two-party scheme does not satisfy fairness as Atzei et al. showed. For the contingent payment protocol, we formalize the protocol with the non-interactive zero-knowledge proof (NIZK), and re-find the attack shown by Campanelli et al. at CCS 2017. Also, we show that a countermeasure with subversion NIZK against the attack works properly while it is not formally proved.

A backdoor attack is a type of attack method inducing deep neural network (DNN) misclassification. An adversary mixes poison data, which consist of images tampered with adversarial marks at specific locations and of adversarial target classes, into a training dataset. The backdoor model classifies only images with adversarial marks into an adversarial target class and other images into the correct classes. However, the attack performance degrades sharply when the location of the adversarial marks is slightly shifted. An adversarial mark that induces the misclassification of a DNN is usually applied when a picture is taken, so the backdoor attack will have difficulty succeeding in the physical world because the adversarial mark position fluctuates. This paper proposes a new approach in which an adversarial mark is applied using fault injection on the mobile industry processor interface (MIPI) between an image sensor and the image recognition processor. Two independent attack drivers are electrically connected to the MIPI data lane in our attack system. While almost all image signals are transferred from the sensor to the processor without tampering by canceling the attack signal between the two drivers, the adversarial mark is injected into a given location of the image signal by activating the attack signal generated by the two attack drivers. In an experiment, the DNN was implemented on a Raspberry pi 4 to classify MNIST handwritten images transferred from the image sensor over the MIPI. The adversarial mark successfully appeared in a specific small part of the MNIST images using our attack system. The success rate of the backdoor attack using this adversarial mark was 91%, which is much higher than the 18% rate achieved using conventional input image tampering.

This letter proposes a transmission scheme called spatial vector (SV), which is effective for Nakagami-m fading multiple-input multiple-output channels. First, the analytical error rate of SV is derived for Nakagami-m fading MIMO channels. Next, an example of SV called integer SV (ISV) is introduced. The error performance was evaluated over Nakagami-m fading from m = 1 to m = 50 and compared with spatial modulation (SM), enhanced SM, and quadrature SM. The results show that for m > 1, ISV outperforms the SM schemes and is robust to m variations.

A 6.5Gb/s shared bus that uses a 65nm CMOS pulse transceiver chip with a low frequency equalizer and electromagnetic connectors based on two types of transmission line couplers is presented. The amount of backplane wiring is reduced by a factor of 1/16 and total connector volume by a factor of 1/246. It reduces the size and weight of a satellite processor system by 60%, increases the data rate by a factor of 2.6, and satisfies the EMC standard for withstanding the strong shock of rocket launch.

Network virtualization has become a promising paradigm for supporting diverse vertical services in Software Defined Networks (SDNs). Each vertical service is carried by a virtual network (VN), which normally has a chaining structure. In this way, a Service Function Chain (SFC) is composed by an ordered set of virtual network functions (VNFs) to provide tailored network services. Such new programmable flexibilities for future networks also bring new network management challenges: how to collect and analyze network measurement data, and further predict and diagnose the performance of SFCs? This is a fundamental problem for the management of SFCs, because the VNFs could be migrated in case of SFC performance degradation to avoid Service Level Agreement (SLA) violation. Despite the importance of the problem, SFC performance analysis has not attracted much research attention in the literature. In this current paper, enabled by a novel detailed network debugging technology, In-band Network Telemetry (INT), we propose a learning based framework for early SFC fault prediction and diagnosis. Based on the SFC traffic flow measurement data provided by INT, the framework firstly extracts SFC performance features. Then, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks are utilized to predict the upcoming values for these features in the next time slot. Finally, Support Vector Machine (SVM) is utilized as network fault classifier to predict possible SFC faults. We also discuss the practical utilization relevance of the proposed framework, and conduct a set of network emulations to validate the performance of the proposed framework.

In this paper, we propose rate adaptation mechanisms for robust and low-latency video transmissions exploiting multiple access points (Multi-AP) wireless local area networks (WLANs). The Multi-AP video transmissions employ link-level broadcast and packet-level forward error correction (FEC) in order to realize robust and low-latency video transmissions from a WLAN station (STA) to a gateway (GW). The PHY (physical layer) rate and FEC rate play a key role to control trade-off between the achieved reliability and airtime (i.e., occupancy period of the shared channel) for Multi-AP WLANs. In order to finely control this trade-off while improving the transmitted video quality, the proposed rate adaptation controls PHY rate and FEC rate to be employed for Multi-AP transmissions based on the link quality and frame format of conveyed video traffic. With computer simulations, we evaluate and investigate the effectiveness of the proposed rate adaptation in terms of packet delivery rate (PDR), airtime, delay, and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). Furthermore, the quality of video is assessed by using the traffic encoded/decoded by the actual video encoder/decoder. All these results show that the proposed rate adaptation controls trade-off between the reliability and airtime well while offering the high-quality and low-latency video transmissions.

Recently, segment routing, which is a modern forwarding mechanism, and Topology Independent Loop-free Alternate, which is an IP fast-reroute method using segment routing, have been proposed and have begun to be applied to real networks. When a failure occurs in a network, TI-LFA quickly restores packet forwarding without waiting for other nodes to update their routing tables. It does so by using segment routing to forward sections that may cause loops in the rerouting path. However, determining the segment routing sections has a high computational cost because it requires computation for each destination. This paper therefore proposes an algorithm to determine the egress node that is the exit of the segment routing section for all destination nodes with only three shortest-path tree calculations. The evaluation results of the proposed algorithm showed that the average tunnel lengths are at most 2.0 to 2.2 hops regardless of the size of the network. I also showed that the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is O(Nlog N).

In this paper, we propose an image adjustment method for multi-exposure images based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We call image regions without information due to saturation and object moving in multi-exposure images lacking areas in this paper. Lacking areas cause the ghosting artifact in fused images from sets of multi-exposure images by conventional fusion methods, which tackle the artifact. To avoid this problem, the proposed method estimates the information of lacking areas via adaptive inpainting. The proposed CNN consists of three networks, warp and refinement, detection, and inpainting networks. The second and third networks detect lacking areas and estimate their pixel values, respectively. In the experiments, it is observed that a simple fusion method with the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art fusion methods in the peak signal-to-noise ratio. Moreover, the proposed method is applied for various fusion methods as pre-processing, and results show obviously reducing artifacts.

Data hiding techniques are usually applied into digital watermarking or digital fingerprinting, which is used to protect intellectual property rights or to avoid illegal copies of the original works. It has been pointed out that data hiding can be utilized as a communication medium. In conventional digital watermarking frameworks, it is required that the difference between the cover objects and the stego objects are quite small, such that the difference cannot be recognized by human sensory systems. On the other hand, the authors have proposed a ‘hearable’ data hiding technique for audio signals that can carry secret messages and can be naturally recognized as a musical piece by human ears. In this study, we extend the idea of the hearable data hiding into video signals by utilizing the visual effects. As visual effects, we employ fade-in and fade-out effects which can be used as a kind of visual rendering for scene transitions. In the proposed schemes, secret messages are generated as one-dimensional barcodes which are used for fade-in or fade-out effects. The present paper shows that the proposed schemes have the high accuracy in extracting the embedded messages even from the video signals captured by smartphones or tablets. It is also shown that the video signals conveying the embedded messages can be naturally recognized by human visual systems through subjective evaluation experiments.

In this letter, we propose a novel transferable sparse regression (TSR) method, for cross-database facial expression recognition (FER). In TSR, we firstly present a novel regression function to regress the data into a latent representation space instead of a strict binary label space. To further alleviate the influence of outliers and overfitting, we impose a row sparsity constraint on the regression term. And a pairwise relation term is introduced to guide the feature transfer learning. Secondly, we design a global graph to transfer knowledge, which can well preserve the cross-database manifold structure. Moreover, we introduce a low-rank constraint on the graph regularization term to uncover additional structural information. Finally, several experiments are conducted on three popular facial expression databases, and the results validate that the proposed TSR method is superior to other non-deep and deep transfer learning methods.

Active network monitoring based on Boolean network tomography is a promising technique to localize link failures instantly in transport networks. However, the required set of monitoring trails must be recomputed after each link failure has occurred to handle succeeding link failures. Existing heuristic methods cannot compute the required monitoring trails in a sufficiently short time when multiple-link failures must be localized in the whole of large-scale managed networks. This paper proposes an approach for computing the required monitoring trails within an allowable expected period specified beforehand. A random walk-based analysis estimates the number of monitoring trails to be computed in the proposed approach. The estimated number of monitoring trails are computed by a lightweight method that only guarantees partial localization within restricted areas. The lightweight method is repeatedly executed until a successful set of monitoring trails achieving unambiguous localization in the entire managed networks can be obtained. This paper demonstrates that the proposed approach can compute a small number of monitoring trails for localizing all independent dual-link failures in managed networks made up of thousands of links within a given expected short period.

The present paper proposes orthogonal variable spreading factor codes over finite fields for multi-rate communications. The proposed codes have layered structures that combine sequences generated by discrete Fourier transforms over finite fields, and have various code lengths. The design method for the proposed codes and examples of the codes are shown.

Computing the Lempel-Ziv Factorization (LZ77) of a string is one of the most important problems in computer science. Nowadays, it has been widely used in many applications such as data compression, text indexing and pattern discovery, and already become the heart of many file compressors like gzip and 7zip. In this paper, we show a linear time algorithm called Xone for computing the LZ77, which has the same space requirement with the previous best space requirement for linear time LZ77 factorization called BGone. Xone greatly improves the efficiency of BGone. Experiments show that the two versions of Xone: XoneT and XoneSA are about 27% and 31% faster than BGoneT and BGoneSA, respectively.

Pain is an essential physiological phenomenon of human beings. Accurate assessment of pain is important to develop proper treatment. Although self-report method is the gold standard in pain assessment, it is not applicable to individuals with communicative impairment. Non-verbal pain indicators such as pain related facial expressions and changes in physiological parameters could provide valuable insights for pain assessment. In this paper, we propose a multimodal-based Stream Integrated Neural Network with Different Frame Rates (SINN) that combines facial expression and biomedical signals for automatic pain assessment. The main contributions of this research are threefold. (1) There are four-stream inputs of the SINN for facial expression feature extraction. The variant facial features are integrated with biomedical features, and the joint features are utilized for pain assessment. (2) The dynamic facial features are learned in both implicit and explicit manners to better represent the facial changes that occur during pain experience. (3) Multiple modalities are utilized to identify various pain states, including facial expression and biomedical signals. The experiments are conducted on publicly available pain datasets, and the performance is compared with several deep learning models. The experimental results illustrate the superiority of the proposed model, and it achieves the highest accuracy of 68.2%, which is up to 5% higher than the basic deep learning models on pain assessment with binary classification.

A Silent Speech Interface (SSI) is a sensor-based, Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled system in which articulation is performed without the use of the vocal chords, resulting in a voice interface that conserves the ambient audio environment, protects private data, and also functions in noisy environments. Though portable SSIs based on ultrasound imaging of the tongue have obtained Word Error Rates rivaling that of acoustic speech recognition, SSIs remain relegated to the laboratory due to stability issues. Indeed, reliable extraction of acoustic features from ultrasound tongue images in real-life situations has proven elusive. Recently, Representation Learning has shown considerable success in learning underlying structure in noisy, high-dimensional raw data. In its unsupervised form, Representation Learning is able to reveal structure in unlabeled data, thus greatly simplifying the data preparation task. In the present article, a 3D Convolutional Neural Network architecture is applied to unlabeled ultrasound images, and is shown to reliably predict future tongue configurations. By comparing the 3DCNN to a simple previous-frame predictor, it is possible to recognize tongue trajectories comprising transitions between regions of stability that correlate with formant trajectories in a spectrogram of the signal. Prospects for using the underlying structural representation to provide features for subsequent speech processing tasks are presented.

Focusing on the planar slab structure of OLEDs, it is found the threshold value of the in-plane wave number at which the spectrum component of the electromagnetic field at the outermost boundary is divided into a radiation mode and a guided (confined) mode. This is equivalent to the total reflection condition in the ray optics. The spectral integral of the Poynting power was calculated from the boundary values of the electromagnetic fields in each. Both become average power and reactive power respectively, and the sum of them becomes the total volt-amperes from the light emitting dipole. Therefore, the ratio of average power to this total is the power factor that can be a quantitative index of light extraction.

With the commercialization of 5G mobile phones, Android drivers are increasing rapidly to utilize a large quantity of newly emerging feature-rich hardware. Most of these drivers are developed by third-party vendors and lack proper vulnerabilities review, posing a number of new potential risks to security and privacy. However, the complexity and diversity of Android drivers make the traditional analysis methods inefficient. For example, the driver-specific argument formats make traditional syscall fuzzers difficult to generate valid inputs, the pointer-heavy code makes static analysis results incomplete, and pointer casting hides the actual type. Triggering code deep in Android drivers remains challenging. We present CoLaFUZE, a coverage-guided and layout-aware fuzzing tool for automatically generating valid inputs and exploring the driver code. CoLaFUZE employs a kernel module to capture the data copy operation and redirect it to the fuzzing engine, ensuring that the correct size of the required data is transferred to the driver. CoLaFUZE leverages dynamic analysis and symbolic execution to recover the driver interfaces and generates valid inputs for the interfaces. Furthermore, the seed mutation module of CoLaFUZE leverages coverage information to achieve better seed quality and expose bugs deep in the driver. We evaluate CoLaFUZE on 5 modern Android mobile phones from the top vendors, including Google, Xiaomi, Samsung, Sony, and Huawei. The results show that CoLaFUZE can explore more code coverage compared with the state-of-the-art fuzzer, and CoLaFUZE successfully found 11 vulnerabilities in the testing devices.

In [31], Shin et al. proposed a Leakage-Resilient and Proactive Authenticated Key Exchange (LRP-AKE) protocol for credential services which provides not only a higher level of security against leakage of stored secrets but also secrecy of private key with respect to the involving server. In this paper, we discuss a problem in the security proof of the LRP-AKE protocol, and then propose a modified LRP-AKE protocol that has a simple and effective measure to the problem. Also, we formally prove its AKE security and mutual authentication for the entire modified LRP-AKE protocol. In addition, we describe several extensions of the (modified) LRP-AKE protocol including 1) synchronization issue between the client and server's stored secrets; 2) randomized ID for the provision of client's privacy; and 3) a solution to preventing server compromise-impersonation attacks. Finally, we evaluate the performance overhead of the LRP-AKE protocol and show its test vectors. From the performance evaluation, we can confirm that the LRP-AKE protocol has almost the same efficiency as the (plain) Diffie-Hellman protocol that does not provide authentication at all.