Free/libre open source software (FLOSS) are being rapidly employed in several companies and organizations, because it can be modified and used for free. Hence, the use of FLOSS could contribute to its originally intended benefits and to the competence of its users. In this study, we analyzed the effect of using FLOSS on related competences. We investigated the change in the competences through an empirical study before and after the use of FLOSS among project participants. Consequently, it was confirmed that the competences of the participants improved after utilizing FLOSS.

Many studies have revealed that the performance of software-based Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) is insufficient for mission-critical networks. Scaling-out approaches, such as auto-scaling of VNFs, could handle a huge amount of traffic; however, the exponential traffic growth confronts us the limitations of both expandability of physical resources and complexity of their management. In this paper, we propose a fast datapath processing method called Packet Aggregation Flow (PA-Flow) that is based on hop-by-hop packet aggregation for more efficient Service Function Chaining (SFC). PA-Flow extends a notion of existing intra-node packet aggregation toward network-wide packet aggregation, and we introduce following three novel features. First, packet I/O overheads at intermediate network devices including NFV-nodes are mitigated by reduction of packet amount. Second, aggregated packets are further aggregated as going through the service chain in a hop-by-hop manner. Finally, next-hop aware packet aggregation is realized using OpenFlow-based flow tables. PA-Flow is designed to be available with various VNF forms (e.g. VM/container/baremetal-based) and virtual I/O technologies (e.g. vhost-user/SR-IOV), and its implementation does not bring noticeable delay for aggregation. We conducted two evaluations: (i) a baseline evaluation for understanding fundamental performance characteristics of PA-Flow (ii) a simulation-based SFC evaluation for proving PA-Flow's effect in a realistic environment. The results showed that throughput of short packet forwarding was improved by 4 times. Moreover, the total number of packets was reduced by 93% in a large-scale SFC.

Since the development of food diaries could enable people to develop healthy eating habits, food image recognition is in high demand to reduce the effort in food recording. Previous studies have worked on this challenging domain with datasets having fixed numbers of samples and classes. However, in the real-world setting, it is impossible to include all of the foods in the database because the number of classes of foods is large and increases continually. In addition to that, inter-class similarity and intra-class diversity also bring difficulties to the recognition. In this paper, we solve these problems by using deep convolutional neural network features to build a personalized classifier which incrementally learns the user's data and adapts to the user's eating habit. As a result, we achieved the state-of-the-art accuracy of food image recognition by the personalization of 300 food records per user.

Edge-preserving smoothing filter smoothes the textures while preserving the information of sharp edges. In image processing, this kind of filter is used as a fundamental process of many applications. In this paper, we propose a new approach for edge-preserving smoothing filter. Our method uses 2D local filter to smooth images and we apply indicator function to restrict the range of filtered pixels for edge-preserving. To define the indicator function, we recalculate the distance between each pixel by using edge information. The nearby pixels in the new domain are used for smoothing. Since our method constrains the pixels used for filtering, its running time is quite fast. We demonstrate the usefulness of our new edge-preserving smoothing method for some applications.

Zero-effort bilateral authentication was introduced recently to use a trusted wristwear to continuously authenticate a smartphone user. A user is allowed to use the smartphone if both wristwear and smartphone are determined to be held by the same person by comparing the wristwear's motion with the smartphone's input or motion, depending on the grip — which hand holds the smartphone and which hand provides the input. Unfortunately, the scheme has several shortcomings. First, it may work improperly when the user is walking since the gait can conceal the wrist's motions of making touches. Second, it continuously compares the motions of the two devices, which incurs a heavy communication burden. Third, the acceleration-based grip inference, which assumes that the smartphone is horizontal with the ground is inapplicable in practice. To address these shortcomings, we propose WearAuth, wristwear-assisted user authentication for smartphones in this paper. WearAuth applies wavelet-based multi-resolution analysis to extract the desired touch-specific movements regardless of whether the user is stationary or moving; uses discrete Fourier transform-based approximate correlation to reduce the communication overhead; and takes a new approach to directly compute the relative device orientation without using acceleration to infer the grip more precisely. In two experiments with 50 subjects, WearAuth produced false negative rates of 3.6% or less and false positive rates of 1.69% or less. We conclude that WearAuth operates properly under various usage cases and is robust to sophisticated attacks.

In racetrack memories (RM), a position error (insertion or deletion error) results from unstable data reading. For position errors in RM with multiple read-heads (RHs), we propose a protograph-based LDPC coded system specified by a protograph and a protograph-aware permutation. The protograph-aware permutation facilitates the design and analysis of the coded system. By solving a multi-objective optimization problem, the coded system attains the properties of fast convergence decoding, a good decoding threshold, and a linear minimum distance growth. In addition, the coded system can adapt to varying numbers of RHs without any modification. The asymptotic decoding thresholds with a limited number of iterations verify the good properties of the system. Furthermore, for varying numbers of RHs, the simulation results with both small and large number of iterations, exhibit excellent decoding performances, both with short and long block lengths, and without error floors.

Recently, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has drawn attentions of many network researchers with great deal of flexibilities, and various network service chains can be used in an SDN/NFV environment. With the flexibility of virtual middlebox placement, how to place virtual middleboxes in order to optimize the performance of service chains becomes essential. Some past studies focused on placement problem of consolidated middleboxes which combine multiple functions into a virtual middlebox. However, when a virtual middlebox providing only a single function is considered, the placement problem becomes much more complex. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic method, the gradual switch clustering based virtual middlebox placement method, in order to improve the performance of service chains, with the constraints of end-to-end delay, bandwidth, and operation cost of deploying a virtual middlebox on a switch. The proposed method gradually finds candidate places for each type of virtual middlebox along with the sequential order of service chains, by clustering candidate switches which satisfy the constraints. Finally, among candidate places for each type of virtual middlebox, the best places are selected in order to minimize the end-to-end delays of service chains. The evaluation results, which are obtained through Mininet based extensive emulations, show that the proposed method outperforms than other methods, and specifically it achieves around 25% less end-to-end delay than other methods.

For the multi-objective time series search problem, Hasegawa and Itoh [Theoretical Computer Science, Vol.78, pp.58-66, 2018] presented the best possible online algorithm balanced price policy for any monotone function f:Rk→R. Specifically the competitive ratio with respect to the monotone function f(c1,...,ck)=(c1+…+ck)/k is referred to as the arithmetic mean component competitive ratio. Hasegawa and Itoh derived the explicit representation of the arithmetic mean component competitive ratio for k=2, but it has not been known for any integer k≥3. In this paper, we derive the explicit representations of the arithmetic mean component competitive ratio for k=3 and k=4, respectively. On the other hand, we show that it is computationally difficult to derive the explicit representation of the arithmetic mean component competitive ratio for arbitrary integer k in a way similar to the cases for k=2, 3, and 4.

FPGA-based switches are appealing nowadays due to the balance between hardware performance and software flexibility. Packet parser, as the foundational component of FPGA-based switches, is to identify and extract specific fields used in forwarding decisions, e.g., destination IP address. However, traditional parsers are too rigid to accommodate new protocols. In addition, FPGAs usually have a much lower clock frequency and fewer hardware resources, compared to ASICs. In this paper, we present PLANET, a programmable packet-level parallel parsing architecture for FPGA-based switches, to overcome these two limitations. First, PLANET has flexible programmability of updating parsing algorithms at run-time. Second, PLANET highly exploits parallelism inside packet parsing to compensate FPGA's low clock frequency and reduces resource consumption with one-block recycling design. We implemented PLANET on an FPGA-based switch prototype with well-integrated datacenter protocols. Evaluation results show that our design can parse packets at up to 100 Gbps, as well as maintain a relative low parsing latency and fewer hardware resources than existing proposals.

A key-order preserving structured overlay network is a class of structured overlay network that preserves, in its structure, the order of keys to support efficient range queries. This paper presents a novel key-order preserving structured overlay network “Suzaku”. Similar to the conventional Chord#, Suzaku uses a periodically updated finger table as a routing table, but extends its uni-directional finger table to bi-directional, which achieves ⌈log2 n⌉-1 maximum lookup hops in the converged state. Suzaku introduces active and passive bi-directional finger table update algorithms for node insertion and deletion. This method maintains good lookup performance (lookup hops increase nearly logarithmically against n) even in churn situations. As well as its good performance, the algorithms of Suzaku are simple and easy to implement. This paper describes the principles of Suzaku, followed by simulation evaluations, in which it showed better performance than the conventional networks, Chord# and Skip Graph.

Previous works have studied the throughput allocation of the heterogeneous storage system consisting of SSD and HDD in the dynamic setting where users are not all present in the system simultaneously, but those researches make multiple servers as one large resource pool, and cannot cope with the multi-server environment. We design a dynamic throughput allocation mechanism named DAM, which can handle the throughput allocation of multiple heterogeneous servers in the dynamic setting, and can provide a number of desirable properties. The experimental results show that DAM can make one dynamic throughput allocation of multiple servers for making sure users' local allocations in each server, and can provide one efficient and fair throughput allocation in the whole system.

In the context of Cyber-Physical System (CPS), analyzing the real world data accumulated in cyberspace would improve the efficiency and productivity of various social systems. Towards establishing data-driven society, it is desired to share data safely and smoothly among multiple services. In this paper, we propose a scheme that services authenticate users using information registered on a blockchain. We show that the proposed scheme has resistance to tampering and a spoofing attack.

Location-based forwarding is a key driver for location-based services. This paper designs forwarding information data structures for location-based forwarding in Internet Service Provider (ISP) scale networks based on Named Data Networking (NDN). Its important feature is a naming scheme which represents locations by leveraging space-filling curves.

The consistent alignment of point clouds obtained from multiple scanning positions is a crucial step for many 3D modeling systems. This is especially true for environment modeling. In order to observe the full scene, a common approach is to rotate the scanning device around a rotation axis using a turntable. The final alignment of each frame data can be computed from the position and orientation of the rotation axis. However, in practice, the precise mounting of scanning devices is impossible. It is hard to locate the vertical support of the turntable and rotation axis on a common line, particularly for lower cost consumer hardware. Therefore the calibration of the rotation axis of the turntable is an important step for the 3D reconstruction. In this paper we propose a novel calibration method for the rotation axis of the turntable. With the proposed rotation axis calibration method, multiple 3D profiles of the target scene can be aligned precisely. In the experiments, three different evaluation approaches are used to evaluate the calibration accuracy of the rotation axis. The experimental results show that the proposed rotation axis calibration method can achieve a high accuracy.

Today, trust plays a central role in services in distributed environments. Conventionally deployed trust has been based on static framework in which a server responds to a service request under statically determined policies. However, in accordance with evolution of distributed environments empowered with IoT and federated access mechanisms, dynamic behavior must be analyzed and taken into service provision, which conventional trust cannot properly handle. In this paper, we propose an extension of PDP (Policy Decision Point) in which assertions together with service requests are evaluated. Furthermore, the evaluation may be dynamically configured in dynamically evolving trust environment. We propose an elastic trust model in view of dynamic trust environment. This enables intuitionistic modeling of typical concrete elastic distributed services.

In this letter, we investigate the physical layer security in multi-user multi-relay networks, where each relay is not merely a traditional helper, but at the same time, can become a potential eavesdropper. We first propose an efficient low-complexity user and relay selection scheme to significantly reduce the amount of channel estimation as well as the amount of potential links for comparison. For the proposed scheme, we derive the closed-form expression for the lower bound of ergodic secrecy rate (ESR) to evaluate the system secrecy performance. Simulation results are provided to verify the validity of our expressions and demonstrate how the ESR scales with the number of users and relays.

Towards furthering the industrial revolution, the concept of a new cellular network began to be drawn up around 2010 as the fifth generation (5G) mobile wireless communication system. One of the main differences between the fourth generation (4G) mobile communication system Long Term Evolution (LTE) and 5G new radio (NR) is the frequency bands utilized. 5G NR assumes higher frequency bands. Effective utilization of the higher frequency bands needs to resolve the technical issue of the larger path-loss. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (Massive MIMO) beamforming (BF) technology contributes to overcome this problem, hence further study of Massive MIMO BF for each frequency band is necessary toward high-performance and easy implementation. In this paper, then, we propose a Massive MIMO method with fully-digital BF based on two-tap precoding for low super high frequency (SHF) band downlink (DL) transmissions (called as Digital FBCP). Additionally, three intersite coordination algorithms for Digital FBCP are presented for multi-site environments and one of the three algorithms is enhanced. It is shown that Digital FBCP achieves better throughput performance than a conventional algorithm with one-tap precoding. Considering performance of intersite coordination as well, it is concluded that Digital FBCP can achieve around 5 Gbps in various practical environments.

In fifth-generation mobile communications systems (5G), grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes have been considered as a way to accommodate the many wireless connections required for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In NOMA schemes, both system capacity enhancement and transmission protocol simplification are achieved, and an overload test of more than one hundred percent of the transmission samples over conducted. Multi-user shared multiple access (MUSA) has been proposed as a representative scheme for NOMA. However, the performance of MUSA has not been fully analyzed nor compared to other NOMA or orthogonal multiple access schemes. Therefore, in this study, we theoretically and numerically analyze the performance of MUSA in uplink fading environments and compare it with orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), space division multiple access-based OFDMA, low-density signature, and sparse code multiple access. The characteristics and superiority of MUSA are then clarified.

Fifth-generation mobile communication systems (5G) must offer significantly higher system capacity than 4G in order to accommodate the rapidly increasing mobile data traffic. Cell densification has been considered an effective way to increase system capacity. Unfortunately, each user equipment (UE) will be in line-of-sight to many more transmission points (TPs) and the resulting inter-cell interference will degrade system capacity. We propose large-scale coordinated multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (LSC-MU-MIMO), which combines MU-MIMO with joint transmission from all the TPs connected to a centralized baseband unit. We previously investigated the downlink performance of LSC-MU-MIMO by computer simulation and found that it can significantly reduce inter-TP interference and improve the system capacity of high-density small cells. In this paper, we investigate the throughput of LSC-MU-MIMO through an indoor trial where the number of coordinated TPs is up to sixteen by using an experimental system that can execute real-time channel estimation based on TDD reciprocity and real-time data transmission. To clarify the improvement in the system capacity of LSC-MU-MIMO, we compared the throughput measured in the same experimental area with and without coordinated transmission in 4-TP, 8-TP, and 16-TP configurations. The results show that with coordinated transmission the system capacity is almost directly proportional to the number of TPs.

A physical-layer network coding (PNC) scheme is developed using serially concatenated continuous phase modulation (SCCPM) with symbol interleavers in a two-way relay channel (TWRC), i.e., SCCPM-PNC. The decoding structure of the relay is designed and the corresponding soft input soft output (SISO) iterative decoding algorithm is discussed. Simulation results show that the proposed SCCPM-PNC scheme performs good performance in bit error rate (BER) and considerable improvements can be achieved by increasing the interleaver size and number of iterations.