One of the key technologies for the fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication system is massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) that applies beamforming in order to effectively compensate for large propagation losses in high frequency bands and enable the spatial multiplexing of a large number of signal streams over multiple users. To further improve a system throughput, a coordinated cluster system in which a large number of massive MIMO base stations are deployed in high density has been investigated. The dense deployment greatly improves the system capacity by controlling base stations from a centralized base band unit. However, when clusters are closely located in order to serve densely populated areas, inter-beam interference between adjacent clusters becomes more severe. To suppress the interference to adjacent clusters, only a simple beam switch control scheme at a cluster boundary has been investigated as a conventional scheme. In this paper, the scheduling algorithm for massive MIMO downlink transmission near cluster boundaries, which combines two scheduling algorithms, has been proposed. In the proposed scheme, each base station divides its own cell to multiple areas, switches supporting areas sequentially, and serves users in those areas. The numerical results show that the throughputs improve with a little reduction in a fairness index (FI) when the number of users per resource block is one. The FI reaches the highest when the number of users per cell is equal to the number of divided areas. The proposed scheme reduces computational complexity as compared with those of conventional two schemes.

In this paper, user set selection in the allocation sequences of round-robin (RR) scheduling for distributed antenna transmission with block diagonalization (BD) pre-coding is proposed. In prior research, the initial phase selection of user equipment allocation sequences in RR scheduling has been investigated. The performance of the proposed RR scheduling is inferior to that of proportional fair (PF) scheduling under severe intra-cell interference. In this paper, the multi-input multi-output technology with BD pre-coding is applied. Furthermore, the user equipment (UE) sets in the allocation sequences are eliminated with reinforcement learning. After the modification of a RR allocation sequence, no estimated throughput calculation for UE set selection is required. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that the maximum selection, one of the criteria for initial phase selection, outperforms the weighted PF scheduling in a restricted realm in terms of the computational complexity, fairness, and throughput.

Weighted Round-Robin (WRR) is often used, due to its simplicity, for scheduling packets or tasks. With WRR, a number of packets equal to the weight allocated to a flow can be served consecutively, which leads to a bursty service. Interleaved Weighted Round-Robin (IWRR) is a variant that mitigates this effect. We are interested in finding bounds on worst-case delay obtained with IWRR. To this end, we use a network calculus approach and find a strict service curve for IWRR. The result is obtained using the pseudo-inverse of a function. We show that the strict service curve is the best obtainable one, and that delay bounds derived from it are tight (i.e., worst-case) for flows of packets of constant size. Furthermore, the IWRR strict service curve dominates the strict service curve for WRR that was previously published. We provide some numerical examples to illustrate the reduction in worst-case delays caused by IWRR compared to WRR.

In a heterogeneous unreliable multiaccess network, wherein terminals share a common wireless channel with distinct error probabilities, existing works have shown that a persistent round-robin (RR-P) scheduling policy can be arbitrarily worse than the optimum in terms of Age of Information (AoI) under standard Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ). In this paper, practical Hybrid ARQ (HARQ) schemes which are widely-used in today's wireless networks are considered. We show that RR-P is very close to optimum with asymptotically many terminals in this case, by explicitly deriving tight, closed-form AoI gaps between optimum and achievable AoI by RR-P. In particular, it is rigorously proved that for RR-P, under HARQ models concerning fading channels (resp. finite-blocklength regime), the relative AoI gap compared with the optimum is within a constant of 6.4% (resp. 6.2% with error exponential decay rate of 0.5). In addition, RR-P enjoys the distinctive advantage of implementation simplicity with channel-unaware and easy-to-decentralize operations, making it favorable in practice. A further investigation considering constraint imposed on the number of retransmissions is presented. The performance gap is indicated through numerical simulations.

One of key technologies in the fifth generation mobile communications is a distributed antenna system (DAS). As DAS creates tightly packed antenna arrangements, inter-user interference degrades its spectrum efficiency. Round-robin (RR) scheduling is known as a scheme that achieves a good trade-off between computational complexity and spectrum efficiency. This paper proposes a user equipment (UE) allocation scheme for RR scheduling. The proposed scheme offers low complexity as the phase of UE allocation sequences are predetermined. Four different phase selection criteria are compared in this paper. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that maximum selection, which sequentially searches for the phase with the maximum tentative throughput realizes the best spectrum efficiency next to full search. There is an optimum number of UEs which obtains the largest throughput in single-user allocation while the system throughput improves as the number of UEs increases in 2-user RR scheduling.

Topological inference is the foundation of network performance analysis and optimization. Due to the difficulty of obtaining prior topology information of wireless sensor networks, we propose routing topology inference, RTI, which reconstructs the routing topology from source nodes to sink based on marking packets and probing locally. RTI is not limited to any specific routing protocol and can adapt to a dynamic and lossy networks. We select topological distance and reconstruction time to evaluate the correctness and effectiveness of RTI and then compare it with PathZip and iPath. Simulation results indicate that RTI maintains adequate reconstruction performance in dynamic and packet loss environments and provides a global routing topology view for wireless sensor networks at a lower reconstruction cost.

Software-defined networking (SDN) has rapidly emerged as a promising new technology for future networks and gained considerable attention from both academia and industry. However, due to the separation between the control plane and the data plane, the SDN controller can easily become the target of denial-of service (DoS) attacks. To mitigate DoS attacks in OpenFlow networks, our solution, MinDoS, contains two key techniques/modules: the simplified DoS detection module and the priority manager. The proposed architecture sends requests into multiple buffer queues with different priorities and then schedules the processing of these flow requests to ensure better controller protection. The results show that MinDoS is effective and adds only minor overhead to the entire SDN/OpenFlow infrastructure.

At FSE 2014, Grosso et al. proposed LS-designs which are a family of bitslice ciphers aiming at efficient masked implementations against side-channel analysis. They also presented two specific LS-designs, namely the non-involutive cipher Fantomas and the involutive cipher Robin. The designers claimed that the longest impossible differentials of these two ciphers only span 3 rounds. In this paper, for the two ciphers, we construct 4-round impossible differentials which are one round more than the longest impossible differentials found by the designers. Furthermore, with the 4-round impossible differentials, we propose impossible differential attacks on Fantomas and Robin reduced to 6 rounds (out of the full 12/16 rounds). Both of the attacks need 2119 chosen plaintexts and 2101.81 6-round encryptions.

Wireless Ad hoc networks have been rapidly developed in recent years since they promise a wide range of applications. However, their structures, which are based on the IEEE 802.11 standard, cause a severe unfairness problem in bandwidth sharing among different users. This is an extreme drawback because in wireless ad hoc networks, all users need to be treated fairly regardless of their geographical positions. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the fairness among flows by sensing channel access of other nodes based on the information obtained at the link layer and then, controlling the packet sending rate from the link layer to the MAC layer and the dequeue rate from the queue. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves a better fairness with a good total throughput compared to conventional methods.

Most existing deterministic multithreading systems are costly on pipeline parallel programs due to load imbalance. In this letter, we propose a Load-Balanced Deterministic Runtime (LBDR) for pipeline parallelism. LBDR deterministically takes some tokens from non-synchronization-intensive threads to synchronization-intensive threads. Experimental results show that LBDR outperforms the state-of-the-art design by an average of 22.5%.

In NGN standards, End Host, also referred to as Terminal Equipment (TE), holds an important place in end-to-end path performance. However, most researchers neglect TE performance when considering performance of end-to-end paths. As far as the authors' knowledge goes, no previous study has proposed a model for TE performance. This paper proposes a method for measuring performance of TE and model extraction based on measurement data. The measurement was made possible with the use of a special NPU (Network Processing Unit) implemented as a programmable NIC. Along with the probing itself, a framework for removing the skew between the NPU and OS is developed in this paper. The multidimensional analysis includes method of probing, packet size and background traffic volume, and studies their effect on TE performance. A method for extracting a generic TE model is proposed. The outcome of this research can be used for modelling TE in simulations and in modelling end-to-end performance when considering QoS in NGN.

Internet group-based application layer services such as the overlay networks and P2P systems can benefit from end-to-end network status information. An efficient and accurate bandwidth measurement technique plays an important role in acquiring this information. We propose an end-to-end bottleneck link capacity measurement technique that utilizes path signatures combined with graphical analyses. This feature reduces the probe overhead and decreases the convergence time. We used ns-2 simulations and actual Internet measurements, which resulted in a high level of accuracy and a short probe time with low overhead.

We propose a novel probing scheme capable of discovering shared bottlenecks among multiple paths between two multihomed hosts simultaneously, without any specific help from the network routers, and a subsequent grouping approach for partitioning these paths into groups. Simulation results show that the probing and grouping have an excellent performance under different network conditions.

Both multiplexing and multi-user diversity are exploited based on Round Robin (RR) scheduling to achieve tradeoffs between average throughput and fairness in distributed antenna systems (DAS). Firstly, a parallel Round Robin (PRR) scheduling scheme is presented based on the multi-user multiplexing in spatial domain to enhance the throughput, which inherits the excellent fairness performance of RR. Then a parallel grouping Round Robin (PGRR) is proposed to exploit multi-user diversity based on PRR. Due to the integration of multi-user diversity and multi-user multiplexing, a great improvement of throughput is achieved in PGRR. However, the expense of the improvement is at the degradation of fairness since the "best channel criteria" is used in PGRR. Simulations verify analysis conclusions and show that tradeoffs between throughput and fairness can be achieved in PGRR.

People are being inundated under enormous volumes of information and they often dither about making the right choices from these. Interactive user support by information service system such as concierge services will effectively assist such people. However, human-machine interaction still lacks naturalness and thoughtfulness despite the widespread utilization of intelligent systems. The system needs to estimate user's interest to improve the interaction and support the choices. We propose a novel approach to estimating the interest, which is based on the relationship between the dynamics of user's eye movements, i.e., the endogenous control mode of saccades, and machine's proactive presentations of visual contents. Under a specially-designed presentation phase to make the user express the endogenous saccades, we analyzed the timing structures between the saccades and the presentation events. We defined resistance as a novel time-delay feature representing the duration a user's gaze remains fixed on the previously presented content regardless of the next event. In experimental results obtained from 10 subjects, we confirmed that resistance is a good indicator for estimating the interest of most subjects (75% success in 28 experiments on 7 subjects). This demonstrated a higher accuracy than conventional estimates of interest based on gaze duration or frequency.

With the wide expansion of voice services over the IP networks (VoIP), the volume of this delay sensitive traffic is steadily growing. The current packet schedulers for IP networks meet the delay constraint of VoIP traffic by simply assigning its packets the highest priority. This technique is acceptable as long as the amount of VoIP traffic is relatively very small compared to other non-voice traffic. With the notable expansion of VoIP applications, however, the current packet schedulers will significantly sacrifice the fairness deserved by the non-voice traffic. In this paper, we extend the conventional Deficit Round-Robin (DRR) scheduler by including a packet classifier, a Token Bucket and a resource reservation scheme and propose an integrated packet scheduler architecture for the growing VoIP traffic. We demonstrate through both theoretical analysis and extensive simulation that the new architecture makes it possible for us to significantly improve the fairness to non-voice traffic while still meeting the tight delay requirement of VoIP applications.

Topology information has become more important for management of LANs due to the increasing number of hosts attached to a LAN. We describe three Ethernet topology discovery techniques that can be used even in LANs with Ethernet switches that have no management functionality. Our "Shared Switch Detection (SSD)" technique detects the Ethernet tree topology by testing whether two paths in the network share a switch. SSD uses only general MAC address learning. By borrowing MAC addresses from hosts, SSD can be run from a single host. The second technique determines whether two paths between two pairs of hosts contain a switch. The third reduces the number of shared switch detections. Simulation showed that these techniques can be used to detect the Ethernet topology with a reasonable search cost. Examination on a real-world testbed showed that they could detect an Ethernet topology consisting of six hosts and two switches within one second.

Logical operations in CMOS digital integration are highly prone to fail as the amount of power supply (PS) drop approaches to failure threshold. PS voltage variation is characterized by built-in noise monitors in a 32-bit microprocessor of 90-nm CMOS technology, and related with operation failures by instruction-level programming for logical failure analysis. Combination of voltage drop size and activated logic path determines failure sensitivity and class of failures. Experimental observation as well as simplified simulation is applied for the detailed understanding of the impact of PS noise on logical operations of digital integrated circuits.

Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) technology enhances instruction throughput by issuing multiple instructions from multiple threads within one clock cycle. For in-order pipeline to each thread, SMT processors can provide large number of issued instructions close to or surpass than using out-of-order pipeline. In this work, we show an efficient issue logic for predicated instruction sequence with the parallel flag in each instruction, where the predicate register based issue control is adopted and the continuous instructions with the parallel flag of '0' are executed in parallel. The flag is pre-defined by a compiler. Instructions from different threads are issued based on the round-robin order. We also introduce an Instruction Queue skip mechanism for thread if the queue is empty. Using this kind of issue logic, we designed a 6 threads, 7-stage, in-order pipeline processor. Based on this processor, we compare round-robin issue policy (RR(T1-Tn)) with other policies: thread one always has the highest priority (PR(T1)) and thread one or thread n has the highest priority in turn (PR(T1-Tn)). The results show that RR(T1-Tn) policy outperforms others and PR(T1-Tn) is almost the same to RR(T1-Tn) from the point of view of the issued instructions per cycle.

Bandwidth management over wired bottleneck links has been an effective way to utilize network resources. For the rapidly emerging IEEE 802.11b Wireless LAN (WLAN), the limited WLAN bandwidth becomes a new bottleneck and requires bandwidth management. Most possible existing solutions only exclusively focus on optimizing multimedia traffic, pure downlink or pure uplink fairness, or are incompatible with IEEE 802.11b. This study proposes a cooperative deficit round robin (co-DRR), an IEEE 802.11b-compatible host-based fair scheduling algorithm based on the deficit round robin (DRR) and distributed-DRR (DDRR) schemes, to make the uplink and downlink quantum calculations cooperate to simultaneously control uplink and downlink bandwidth. Co-DRR uses the standard PCF mode to utilize the contention-free period to compensate for the unfairness in the contention period. Numerical results demonstrate that: co-DRR can scale up to 100 mobile hosts even under high bit error rate (0.0001) while simultaneously achieving uplink/downlink long-term fairness (CoV<0.01) among competing mobile hosts.