This paper studies using price incentives to shift bandwidth demand from peak to non-peak periods. In particular, cost discounts decrease as peak monthly usage increases. We take into account the delay sensitivity of different apps: during peak hours, the usage of hard real-time applications (HRAS) is not counted in the user's monthly data cap, while the usage of other applications (OAS) is counted in the user's monthly data cap. As a result, users may voluntarily delay or abandon OAS in order to get a higher fee discount. Then, a new data rate control algorithm is proposed. The algorithm allocates the data rate according to the priority of the source, which is determined by two factors: (I) the allocated data rate; and (II) the waiting time.

While websites are becoming more and more complex daily, the difficulty of managing them is also increasing. It is important to conduct regular maintenance against these complex websites to strengthen their security and improve their cyber resilience. However, misconfigurations and vulnerabilities are still being discovered on some pages of websites and cyberattacks against them are never-ending. In this paper, we take the novel approach of applying the concept of security governance to websites; and, as part of this, measuring the consistency of software settings and versions used on these websites. More precisely, we analyze multiple web pages with the same domain name and identify differences in the security settings of HTTP headers and versions of software among them. After analyzing over 8,000 websites of popular global organizations, our measurement results show that over half of the tested websites exhibit differences. For example, we found websites running on a web server whose version changes depending on access and using a JavaScript library with different versions across over half of the tested pages. We identify the cause of such governance failures and propose improvement plans.

The composite right/left-handed (CRLH) coaxial line (CL) with wideband electromagnetic band gap (EBG) is applied to the wideband choke structure for a monocone antenna with short elements, and the resulting characteristics are considered. In the proposed antenna, impedance matching and leakage current suppression can be achieved across a wideband off. The lowest frequency (|S11| ≤ -10dB) of the proposed antenna is about the same as that of the monocone antenna on an infinite ground plane. In addition, the radiation patterns of the proposed antenna are close to the figure of eight in wideband. The proposed antenna is prototyped, and the validity of the simulation is verified through measurement.

In Feb 2021, As the competition for commercialization of 5G mobile communication has been increasing, 5G SA Network and Vo5G are expected to be commercialized soon. 5G mobile communication aims to provide 20 Gbps transmission speed which is 20 times faster than 4G mobile communication, connection of at least 1 million devices per 1 km2, and 1 ms transmission delay which is 10 times shorter than 4G. To meet this, various technological developments were required, and various technologies such as Massive MIMO (Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output), mmWave, and small cell network were developed and applied in the area of 5G access network. However, in the core network area, the components constituting the LTE (Long Term Evolution) core network are utilized as they are in the NSA (Non-Standalone) architecture, and only the changes in the SA (Standalone) architecture have occurred. Also, in the network area for providing the voice service, the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) infrastructure is still used in the SA architecture. Here, the issue is that while 5G mobile communication is evolving openly to provide various services, security elements are vulnerable to various cyber-attacks because they maintain the same form as before. Therefore, in this paper, we will look at what the network standard for 5G voice service provision consists of, and what are the vulnerable problems in terms of security. And We Suggest Possible Attack Scenario using Security Issue, We also want to consider whether these problems can actually occur and what is the countermeasure.

Herein, a novel self-oscillating active integrated array antenna (AIAA) is proposed for beam switching X-band applications. The proposed AIAA comprises four linearly polarized microstrip antenna elements, a Gunn oscillator, two planar magic-Ts, and two single-pole single-throw (SPST) switches. The in/anti-phase signal combination approach employing planar magic-Ts is adopted to attain bidirectional radiation patterns in the φ =90° plane with a simple structure. The proposed antenna can switch its beam using the SPST switches. The antenna is analyzed through simulations, and a prototype of the antenna is fabricated and tested to validate the concept. The proposed concept is found to be feasible; the prototype has an effective isotropic radiated power of +15.98dBm, radiated power level of +4.28dBm, and cross-polarization suppression of better than 15dB. The measured radiation patterns are in good agreement with the simulation results.

This paper provides on a theoretical and numerical study of the probability density function (PDF) of the on-off keying (OOK) signals in ASE-limited systems. We present simple closed formulas of PDFs for the optical intensity and the received baseband signal. To confirm the validity of our model, the calculation results yielded by the proposed formulas are compared with those of numerical simulations and the conventional Gaussian model. Our theoretical and numerical results confirm that the signal distribution differs from a Gaussian profile. It is also demonstrated that our model can properly evaluate the signal distribution and the resultant BER performance, especially for systems with an optical bandwidth close to the receiver baseband width.

Human gait analysis has been widely used in medical and health fields. It is essential to extract spatio-temporal gait features (e.g., single support duration, step length, and toe angle) by partitioning the gait phase and estimating the footprint position/orientation in such fields. Therefore, we propose a method to partition the gait phase given a foot position sequence using mutually constrained piecewise linear approximation with dynamic programming, which not only represents normal gait well but also pathological gait without training data. We also propose a method to detect footprints by accumulating toe edges on the floor plane during stance phases, which enables us to detect footprints more clearly than a conventional method. Finally, we extract four spatial/temporal gait parameters for accuracy evaluation: single support duration, double support duration, toe angle, and step length. We conducted experiments to validate the proposed method using two types of gait patterns, that is, healthy and mimicked hemiplegic gait, from 10 subjects. We confirmed that the proposed method could estimate the spatial/temporal gait parameters more accurately than a conventional skeleton-based method regardless of the gait pattern.

Any Internet-connected device is vulnerable to being hacked and misused. Hackers can find vulnerable IoT devices, infect malicious codes, build massive IoT botnets, and remotely control IoT devices through C&C servers. Many studies have been attempted to apply various security features on IoT devices to prevent IoT devices from being exploited by attackers. However, unlike high-performance PCs, IoT devices are lightweight, low-power, and low-cost devices and have limitations on performance of processing and memory, making it difficult to install heavy security functions. Instead of access to applying security functions on IoT devices, Internet-wide scanning (e.g., Shodan) studies have been attempted to quickly discover and take security measures massive IoT devices with weak security. Over the Internet, scanning studies remotely also exist realistic limitations such as low accuracy in analyzing security vulnerabilities due to a lack of device information or filtered by network security devices. In this paper, we propose a system for remotely collecting information from Internet-connected devices and using scanning techniques to identify and manage vulnerability information from IoT devices. The proposed system improves the open-source Zmap engine to solve a realistic problem when attempting to scan through real Internet. As a result, performance measurements show equal or superior results compared to previous Shodan, Zmap-based scanning.

The continuous development of the mobile computing environment has led to the emergence of fintech to enable convenient financial transactions in this environment. Previously proposed financial identity services mostly adopted centralized servers that are prone to single-point-of-failure problems and performance bottlenecks. Blockchain-based self-sovereign identity (SSI), which emerged to address this problem, is a technology that solves centralized problems and allows decentralized identification. However, the verifiable credential (VC), a unit of SSI data transactions, guarantees unlimited right to erasure for self-sovereignty. This does not suit the specificity of the financial transaction network, which requires the restriction of the right to erasure for credit evaluation. This paper proposes a model for VC generation and revocation verification for credit scoring data. The proposed model includes double zero knowledge - succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zk-SNARK) proof in the VC generation process between the holder and the issuer. In addition, cross-revocation verification takes place between the holder and the verifier. As a result, the proposed model builds a trust platform among the holder, issuer, and verifier while maintaining the decentralized SSI attributes and focusing on the VC life cycle. The model also improves the way in which credit evaluation data are processed as VCs by granting opt-in and the special right to erasure.

Lightweight cryptographic systems for services delivered by the recently developed Internet of Things (IoT) are being continuously researched. However, existing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)-based cryptographic algorithms are difficult to apply to IoT services delivered using lightweight devices. Therefore, encryption, authentication, and signature systems based on Certificateless Public Key Cryptography (CL-PKC), which are lightweight because they do not use the certificates of existing PKI-based cryptographic algorithms, are being studied. Of the various public key cryptosystems, signcryption is efficient, and ensures integrity and confidentiality. Recently, CL-based signcryption (CL-SC) schemes have been intensively studied, and a multi-receiver signcryption (MRSC) protocol for environments with multiple receivers, i.e., not involving end-to-end communication, has been proposed. However, when using signcryption, confidentiality and integrity may be violated by public key replacement attacks. In this paper, we develop an efficient CL-based MRSC (CL-MRSC) scheme using CL-PKC for IoT environments. Existing signcryption schemes do not offer public verifiability, which is required if digital signatures are used, because only the receiver can verify the validity of the message; sender authenticity is not guaranteed by a third party. Therefore, we propose a CL-MRSC scheme in which communication participants (such as the gateways through which messages are transmitted) can efficiently and publicly verify the validity of encrypted messages.

This study investigated the influence of reading time while building a closed concept map on reading comprehension and retention. It also investigated the effect of having access to the text during closed concept map creation on reading comprehension and retention. Participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk (N =101) read a text, took an after-text test, and took part in one of three conditions, “Map & Text”, “Map only”, and “Double Text”, took an after-activity test, followed by a two-week retention period and then one final delayed test. Analysis revealed that higher reading times were associated with better reading comprehension and better retention. Furthermore, when comparing “Map & Text” to the “Map only” condition, short-term reading comprehension was improved, but long-term retention was not improved. This suggests that having access to the text while building closed concept maps can improve reading comprehension, but long term learning can only be improved if students invest time accessing both the map and the text.

Scene character recognition has been intensively investigated for a couple of decades because it has a great potential in many applications including automatic translation, signboard recognition, and reading assistance for the visually-impaired. However, scene characters are difficult to recognize at sufficient accuracy owing to various noise and image distortions. In addition, Japanese scene character recognition is more challenging and requires a large amount of character data for training because thousands of character classes exist in the language. Some researchers proposed training data augmentation techniques using Synthetic Scene Character Data (SSCD) to compensate for the shortage of training data. In this paper, we propose a Random Filter which is a new method for SSCD generation, and introduce an ensemble scheme with the Random Image Feature (RI-Feature) method. Since there has not been a large Japanese scene character dataset for the evaluation of the recognition systems, we have developed an open dataset JPSC1400, which consists of a large number of real Japanese scene characters. It is shown that the accuracy has been improved from 70.9% to 83.1% by introducing the RI-Feature method to the ensemble scheme.

A hybrid Retinex-based image enhancement algorithm is proposed to improve the quality of images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in this paper. Hyperparameters of the employed multi-scale Retinex with chromaticity preservation (MSRCP) model are automatically tuned via a two-phase evolutionary computing algorithm. In the two-phase optimization algorithm, the Rao-2 algorithm is applied to performing the global search and a solution is obtained by maximizing the objective function. Next, the Nelder-Mead simplex method is used to improve the solution via local search. Real UAV-taken images of bad quality are collected to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm. Meanwhile, four famous image enhancement algorithms, Multi-Scale Retinex, Multi-Scale Retinex with Color Restoration, Automated Multi-Scale Retinex, and MSRCP are utilized as benchmarking methods. Meanwhile, two commonly used evolutionary computing algorithms, particle swarm optimization and flower pollination algorithm, are considered to verify the efficiency of the proposed method in tuning parameters of the MSRCP model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best performance compared with benchmarks and thus the proposed method is applicable for real UAV-based applications.

As a mobile phone progresses with the third, fourth, and fifth generations, the frequency bands used in mobile phones are increasing dramatically. RF components for mobile phone terminals correspond to this increasing frequency band. In the case of power amplifier (PA), which is one of the RF components, it is necessary to correspond many frequency bands in one PA. In this case, the wideband of the matching circuit is a typical one of the technical problems of PA. In this study, we focus on two-stage and three-stage connections of LC ladder matching circuits widely applied in PA, and compare them from the viewpoint of broadband. In order to efficiently analyze multi-stage LC-matching circuits, the following two new methods were devised. First, we derived the analysis formula of LC and CL-matching circuits when the termination impedance was extended to a complex number. Second, we derived a condition in which the frequency derivative of the input impedance is zero.

This paper proposes a switched pinning control method with a multi-rating mechanism for vehicle platoons. The platoons are expressed as multi-agent systems consisting of mass-damper systems in which pinning agents receive target velocities from external devices (ex. intelligent traffic signals). We construct model predictive control (MPC) algorithm that switches pinning agents via mixed-integer quadratic programmings (MIQP) problems. The optimization rate is determined according to the convergence rate to the target velocities and the inter-vehicular distances. This multi-rating mechanism can reduce the computational load caused by iterative calculation. Numerical results demonstrate that our method has a reduction effect on the string instability by selecting the pinning agents to minimize errors of the inter-vehicular distances to the target distances.

With the rapid progress of the integrated nanophotonics technology, the optical neural network architecture has been widely investigated. Since the optical neural network can complete the inference processing just by propagating the optical signal in the network, it is expected more than one order of magnitude faster than the electronics-only implementation of artificial neural networks (ANN). In this paper, we first propose an optical vector-matrix multiplication (VMM) circuit using wavelength division multiplexing, which enables inference processing at the speed of light with ultra-wideband. This paper next proposes optoelectronic circuit implementation for batch normalization and activation function, which significantly improves the accuracy of the inference processing without sacrificing the speed performance. Finally, using a virtual environment for machine learning and an optoelectronic circuit simulator, we demonstrate the ultra-fast and accurate operation of the optical-electronic ANN circuit.

Accumulate Repeat-4 Jagged-Accumulate (AR4JA) codes, which are channel codes designed for deep-space communications, are a series of QC-LDPC codes. Structures of these codes' generator matrix can be exploited to design reconfigurable encoders. To make the decoder reconfigurable and achieve shorter convergence time, turbo-like decoding message passing (TDMP) is chosen as the hardware decoder's decoding schedule and normalized min-sum algorithm (NMSA) is used as decoding algorithm to reduce hardware complexity. In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable decoder and present its FPGA implementation results. The decoder can achieve throughput greater than 74 Mbps.

Optical logic circuits based on integrated nanophotonics attract significant interest due to their ultra-high-speed operation. However, the power dissipation of conventional optical logic circuits is exponential to the number of inputs of target logic functions. This paper proposes a synthesis method reducing power dissipation to a polynomial order of the number of inputs while exploiting the high-speed nature. Our method divides the target logic function into multiple sub-functions with Optical-to-Electrical (OE) converters. Each sub-function has a smaller number of inputs than that of the original function, which enables to exponentially reduce the power dissipated by an optical logic circuit representing the sub-function. The proposed synthesis method can mitigate the OE converter delay overhead by parallelizing sub-functions. We apply the proposed synthesis method to the ISCAS'85 benchmark circuits. The power consumption of the conventional circuits based on the Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) is at least three orders of magnitude larger than that of the optical logic circuits synthesized by the proposed method. The proposed method reduces the power consumption to about 100mW. The delay of almost all the circuits synthesized by the proposed method is kept less than four times the delay of the conventional BDD-based circuit.

A properly designed stopping criterion for iterative decoding algorithms can save a number of iterations and lead to a considerable reduction of system latency. The symbol flipping decoding algorithms based on prediction (SFDP) have been proposed recently for efficient decoding of non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. To detect the decoding frames with slow convergence or even non-convergence, we track the number of oscillations on the value of objective function during the iterations. Based on this tracking number, we design a simple stopping criterion for the SFDP algorithms. Simulation results show that the proposed stopping criterion can significantly reduce the number of iterations at low signal-to-noise ratio regions with slight error performance degradation.

A construction method of self-orthogonal and self-dual quasi-cyclic codes is shown which relies on factorization of modulus polynomials for cyclicity in this study. The smaller-size generator polynomial matrices are used instead of the generator matrices as linear codes. An algorithm based on Chinese remainder theorem finds the generator polynomial matrix on the original modulus from the ones constructed on each factor. This method enables us to efficiently construct and search these codes when factoring modulus polynomials into reciprocal polynomials.