Edge computing offers computing capability with ultra-low response times by leveraging servers close to end-user devices. Due to the mobility of end-user devices, the latency between the servers and the end-user devices can become long and the response time might become unacceptable for an application service. Service (container) migration that follows the handover of end-user devices retains the response time. Service migration following the mass movement of people in the same geographic area and at the same time due to an event (e.g., commuting) generates heavy bandwidth usage in the mobile backhaul network. Heavy usage by service migration reduces available bandwidth for ordinary application traffic in the network. Shaping the migration traffic limits the bandwidth usage while delaying service migration and increasing the response time of the container for the moving end-user device. Furthermore, targets of migration decisions increase (i.e., the system load) because delaying a migration process accumulates containers waiting for migration. In this paper, we propose a migration scheduling method to control bandwidth usage for migration in a network and ensure timely processing of service migration. Simulations that compare the proposal with state-of-the-art methods show that the proposal always suppresses the bandwidth usage under the predetermined threshold. The method reduced the number of containers exceeding the acceptable response time up to 40% of the compared state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the proposed method minimized the targets of migration decisions.

History data of edit operations are more beneficial than those stored in version control systems since they provide detailed information on how source code was changed. Meanwhile, a large number of recorded edit operations discourage developers and researchers from roughly understanding the changes. To assist with this task, it is desirable that they easily obtain traceability links for changed program elements over two source code snapshots before and after a code change. In this paper, we propose a graph representation called Operation History Graph (OHG), which presents code change information with such traceability links that are inferred from the history of edit operations. An OHG instance is generated by parsing any source code snapshot restored by edit histories and combining resultant abstract syntax trees (ASTs) into a single graph structure. To improve the performance of building graph instances, we avoided simply maintaining every program element. Any program element presenting the inner-structure of methods and non-changed elements are omitted. In addition, we adopted a lightweight static analysis for type name resolving to reduce required memory resource in the analysis while the accuracy of name resolving is preserved. Moreover, we assign a specific ID to each node and edge in the graph instance so that a part of the graph data can be separately stored and loaded on demand. These decisions make it feasible to build, manipulate, and store the graph with limited computer resources. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed operation history graph and verify whether detected traceability links are sufficient to reveal actual changes of program elements, we implemented tools to generate and manipulate OHG instances. The evaluation on graph generation performance shows that our tool can reduce the required computer resource as compared to another tool authors previously proposed. Moreover, the evaluation on traceability shows that OHG provides traceability links with sufficient accuracy as compared to the baseline approach using GumTree.

Recently, adaptive streaming over information centric network (ICN) has attracted attention. In adaptive streaming over ICN, the bitrate adaptation of the client often overestimates a bitrate for available bandwidth due to congestion because the client implicitly estimates congestion status from the content download procedures of ICN. As a result, streaming overestimated bitrate results in QoE degradation of clients such as cause of a stall time and frequent variation of the bitrate. In this paper, we propose a congestion-aware adaptive streaming over ICN combined with the explicit congestion notification (CAAS with ECN) to avoid QoE degradation. CAAS with ECN encourages explicit feedback of congestion detected in the router on the communication path, and introduces the upper band of the selectable bitrate (bitrate-cap) based on explicit feedback from the router to the bitrate adaptation of the clients. We evaluate the effectiveness of CAAS with ECN for client's QoE degradation due to congestion and behavior on the QoS metrics based on throughput. The simulation experiments show that the bitrate adjustment for all the clients improves QoE degradation and QoE fairness due to effective congestion avoidance.

High level synthesis (HLS) is a source-code-driven Register Transfer Level (RTL) design tool, and the performance, the power consumption, and the area of a generated RTL are limited partly by the description of a HLS input source code. In order to break through such kind of limitation and to get a further optimized RTL, the optimization of the input source code is indispensable. Routing congestion is one of such problems we need to consider the refinement of a HLS input source code. In this paper, we propose a novel HLS flow that performs code improvements by detecting congested parts directly from HLS input source code without using physical logic synthesis, and regenerating the input source code for HLS. In our approach, the origin of the wire congestion is detected from the HLS input source code by applying pattern matching on Program-Dependence Graph (PDG) constructed from the HLS input source code, the possibility of wire congestion is reported.

When using a gesture-based interface for pointing to targets on a wide screen, displaying a large pointer instead of a typical spot pattern reduces disturbance caused by measurement errors of user's pointing posture. However, it remains unclear why a large pointer helps facilitate easy pointing. To examine this issue, in this study we propose a mathematical model that formulates human pointing motions affected by a large pointer. Our idea is to describe the effect of the large pointer as human visual perception, because the user will perceive the pointer-target distance as being shorter than it actually is. We embedded this scheme, referred to as non-linear distance filter (NDF), into a typical feedback loop model designed to formulate human pointing motions. We also proposed a method to estimate NDF mapping from pointing trajectories, and used it to investigate the applicability of the model under three typical disturbance patterns: small vibration, smooth shift, and step signal. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed NDF-based model could accurately reproduced actual pointing trajectories, achieving high similarity values of 0.89, 0.97, and 0.91 for the three respective disturbance patterns. The results indicate the applicability of the proposed method. In addition, we confirmed that the obtained NDF mappings suggested rationales for why a large pointer helps facilitate easy pointing.

Recording source code changes comes to be well recognized as an effective means for understanding the evolution of existing software and making its future changes efficient. Therefore, modern integrated development environments (IDEs) tend to employ tools that record fine-grained textual changes of source code. However, there is still no satisfactory tool that accurately records textual changes. We propose ChangeMacroRecorder that automatically and silently records all textual changes of source code and in real time correlates those textual changes with actions causing them while a programmer is writing and modifying it on the Eclipse's Java editor. The improvement with respect to the accuracy of recorded textual changes enables both programmers and researchers to exactly understand how the source code was evolved. This paper presents detailed information on how ChangeMacroRecorder achieves the accurate recording of textual changes and demonstrates how accurate textual changes were recorded in our experiment consisting of nine programming tasks.

This paper introduces a user study regarding the effects of hand- and ocular-dominances to pointing gestures. The result of this study is applicable for designing new gesture interfaces which are close to a user's cognition, intuitive, and easy to use. The user study investigates the relationship between the participant's dominances and pointing gestures. Four participant groups—right-handed right-eye dominant, right-handed left-eye dominant, left-handed right-eye dominant and left-handed left-eye dominant—were prepared, and participants were asked to point at the targets on a screen by their left and right hands. The pointing errors among the different participant groups are calculated and compared. The result of this user study shows that using dominant eyes produces better results than using non-dominant eyes and the accuracy increases when the targets are located at the same side of dominant eye. Based on these interesting properties, a method to find the dominant eye for pointing gestures is proposed. This method can find the dominant eye of an individual with more than 90% accuracy.

Embedding efficiency is an important issue in steganography methods. Matrix embedding (1, n, h) steganography was proposed by Crandall to achieve high embedding efficiency for palette images. This paper proposes a steganography method based on multilayer matrix embedding for palette images. First, a parity assignment is provided to increase the image quality. Then, a multilayer matrix embedding (k, 1, n, h) is presented to achieve high embedding efficiency and capacity. Without modifying the color palette, hk secret bits can be embedded into n pixels by changing at most k pixels. Under the same capacity, the embedding efficiency of the proposed method is compared with that of pixel-based steganography methods. The comparison indicates that the proposed method has higher embedding efficiency than pixel-based steganography methods. The experimental results also suggest that the proposed method provides higher image quality than some existing methods under the same embedding efficiency and capacity.

On the Internet, end hosts and network nodes interdependently work to smoothly transfer traffic. Observed traffic dynamics are the result of those interactions among those entities. To manage Internet traffic to provide satisfactory quality services, such dynamics need to be well understood to predict traffic patterns. In particular, some nodes have a function that sends back-pressure signals to backward nodes to reduce their sending rate and mitigate congestion. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) congestion control in end-hosts also mitigates traffic deviation to eliminate temporary congestion by reducing the TCP sending rate. How these congestion controls mitigate congestion has been extensively investigated. However, these controls only throttle their sending rate but do not reduce traffic volume. Such congestion control fails if congestion is persistent, e.g., for hours, because unsent traffic demand will infinitely accumulate. However, on the actual Internet, even with persistent congestion, such accumulation does not seem to occur. During congestion, users and/or applications tend to reduce their traffic demand in reaction to quality of service (QoS) degradation to avoid negative service experience. We previously estimated that 2% packet loss results in 23% traffic reduction because of this upper-layer reaction [1]. We view this reduction as an upper-layer congestion-avoidance mechanism and construct a closed-loop model of this mechanism, which we call the Upper-Layer Closed-Loop (ULCL) model. We also show that by using ULCL, we can predict the degree of QoS degradation and traffic reduction as an equilibrium of the feedback loop. We applied our model to traffic and packet-loss ratio time series data gathered in an actual network and demonstrate that it effectively estimates actual traffic and packet-loss ratio.

A context-aware system always needs to adapt its behaviors according to context changes; therefore, modeling context-aware requirements is a complex task. With the increasing use of mobile computing, research on methods of modeling context-aware requirements have become increasingly important, and a large number of relevant studies have been conducted. However, no comprehensive analysis of the challenges and achievements has been performed. The methodology of systematic literature review was used in this survey, in which 68 reports were selected as primary studies. The challenges and methods to confront these challenges in context-aware requirement modeling are summarized. The main contributions of this work are: (1) four challenges and nine sub-challenges are identified; (2) eight kinds of methods in three categories are identified to address these challenges; (3) the extent to which these challenges have been solved is evaluated; and (4) directions for future research are elaborated.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables flexible deployment and innovation of new networking applications by decoupling and abstracting the control and data planes. It has radically changed the concept and way of building and managing networked systems, and reduced the barriers to entry for new players in the service markets. It is considered to be a promising solution providing the scale and versatility necessary for IoT. However, SDN may also face many challenges, i.e., the centralized control plane would be a single point of failure. With the advent of blockchain technology, blockchain-based SDN has become an emerging architecture for securing a distributed network environment. Motivated by this, in this work, we summarize the generic framework of blockchain-based SDN, discuss security challenges and relevant solutions, and provide insights on the future development in this field.

Thanks to the ability to bring immersive experiences to users, Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have been gaining popularity in recent years. A key component in VR systems is omnidirectional content, which can provide 360-degree views of scenes. However, at a given time, only a portion of the full omnidirectional content, called viewport, is displayed corresponding to the user's current viewing direction. In this work, we first develop Weighted-Viewport PSNR (W-VPSNR), an objective quality metric for quality assessment of omnidirectional content. The proposed metric takes into account the foveation feature of the human visual system. Then, we build a subjective database consisting of 72 stimuli with spatial varying viewport quality. By using this database, an evaluation of the proposed metric and four conventional metrics is conducted. Experiment results show that the W-VPSNR metric well correlates with the mean opinion scores (MOS) and outperforms the conventional metrics. Also, it is found that the conventional metrics do not perform well for omnidirectional content.

This paper proposes a novel Depth From Defocus (DFD) technique based on the property that two images having different focus settings coincide if they are reblurred with the opposite focus setting, which is referred to as the “cross reblurring” property in this paper. Based on the property, the proposed technique estimates the block-wise depth profile for a target object by minimizing the mean squared error between the cross-reblurred images. Unlike existing DFD techniques, the proposed technique is free of lens parameters and independent of point spread function models. A compensation technique for a possible pixel disalignment between images is also proposed to improve the depth estimation accuracy. The experimental results and comparisons with the other DFD techniques show the advantages of our technique.

CCN/NDN (Content-Centric Networking/Named-Data Networking) is one of the most promising content-oriented network architectures. In CCN/NDN, forwarding information base (FIB) might have multiple entries for a same content name prefix, which means CCN/NDN potentially supports multi-source download. When a content is obtained from multiple sources, the technical knowledge obtained for congestion control in the current Internet cannot be simply applied. This is because in the current Internet, FIB is restricted to have only one entry for each IP address prefix, which causes quite different path feature from CCN/NDN. This paper proposes a new congestion control for CCN/NDN with multi-source content retrieval. The proposed congestion control is composed of end-to-end window flow control and router assisted Interest forwarding control, and enables transmission rate regulation only on a congested branch.

Since software becomes more complex during its life cycle, the verification cost becomes higher, especially for such methods which are using model checking in general and assume-guarantee reasoning in specific. To address the problem of reducing the assume-guarantee verification cost, this paper presents a method to generate locally minimum and strongest assumptions for verification of component-based software. For this purpose, we integrate a variant of membership queries answering technique to an algorithm which considers candidate assumptions that are smaller and stronger first, larger and weaker later. Because the algorithm stops as soon as it reaches a conclusive result, the generated assumptions are the locally minimum and strongest ones. The correctness proof of the proposed algorithm is also included in the paper. An implemented tool, test data, and experimental results are presented and discussed.

The aim of this research is to support real-time drawingin talking by using multimodal user interface technologies. In this situation, if talking and drawing are considered as commands by mistake during presentation, it will disturb users' natural talking and drawing. To prevent this problem, we introduce two modes of a command mode and a free mode, and explore smooth mode switching techniques that does not interfere with users' natural talking and drawing. We evaluate four techniques. Among them, a technique that specifies the command mode after actions using a pen gesture was the most effective. In this technique, users could quickly draw diagrams, and specifying mode switching didn't interfere with users' natural talk.

ECN, as a decisive approach for TCP congestion control, has been proposed for many years. However, its deployment on the Internet is much slower than expected. In this paper, we investigate the state of the deployment of ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) on the Internet from a different viewpoint. We use the data set of web domains published by Alexa as the hosts to be tested. We negotiate an ECN-Capable and a Not ECN-Capable connections with each host and collect all packets belonging to the connections. By analyzing the header fields of the TCP/IP packets, we dig out the deployment rate, connectivity, variation of round-trip time and time to live between the Not ECN-Capable and ECN-Capable connections as well as the rate of IPv6-Capable web servers. Especially, it is clear that the connectivity is different from the domains (regions on the Internet). We hope that the findings acquired from this study would incentivize ISPs and administrators to enable ECN in their network systems.

Packet losses significantly degrade TCP performance in high-latency environments. This is because TCP needs at least one round-trip time (RTT) to recover lost packets. The recovery time will grow longer, especially in high-latency environments. TCP keeps transmission rate low while lost packets are recovered, thereby degrading throughput. To prevent this performance degradation, the number of retransmissions must be kept as low as possible. Therefore, we propose a scheme to apply a technology called “forward error correction” (FEC) to the entire TCP operation in order to improve throughput. Since simply applying FEC might not work effectively, three function, namely, controlling redundancy level and transmission rate, suppressing the return of duplicate ACKs, interleaving redundant packets, were devised. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme was demonstrated by simulation evaluations in high-latency environments.

In order to provide an alternative solution of human machine interfaces, this paper proposed to recognize 10 human hand gestures regularly used in the consumer electronics controlling scenarios based on a three-dimensional radar array. This radar array was composed of three low cost 24GHz K-band Doppler CW (Continuous Wave) miniature I/Q (In-phase and Quadrature) transceiver sensors perpendicularly mounted to each other. Temporal and spectral analysis was performed to extract magnitude and phase features from six channels of I/Q signals. Two classifiers were proposed to implement the recognition. Firstly, a decision tree classifier performed a fast responsive recognition by using the supervised thresholds. To improve the recognition robustness, this paper further studied the recognition using a two layer CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) classifier with the frequency spectra as the inputs. Finally, the paper demonstrated the experiments and analysed the performances of the radar array respectively. Results showed that the proposed system could reach a high recognition accurate rate higher than 92%.

Contemporary software projects often utilize a README.md to share crucial information such as installation and usage examples related to their software. Furthermore, these files serve as an important source of updated and useful documentation for developers and prospective users of the software. Nonetheless, both novice and seasoned developers are sometimes unsure of what is required for a good README file. To understand the contents of README, we investigate the contents of 43,900 JavaScript packages. Results show that these packages contain common content themes (i.e., ‘usage’, ‘install’ and ‘license’). Furthermore, we find that application-specific packages more frequently included content themes such as ‘options’, while library-based packages more frequently included other specific content themes (i.e., ‘install’ and ‘license’).