Web tracking is widely used as a means to track user's behavior on websites. While web tracking provides new opportunities of e-commerce, it also includes certain risks such as privacy infringement. Therefore, analyzing such risks in the wild Internet is meaningful to make the user's privacy transparent. This work aims to understand how the web tracking has been adopted to prominent websites. We also aim to understand their resilience to the ad-blocking techniques. Web tracking-enabled websites collect the information called the web browser fingerprints, which can be used to identify users. We develop a scalable system that can detect fingerprinting by using both dynamic and static analyses. If a tracking site makes use of many and strong fingerprints, the site is likely resilient to the ad-blocking techniques. We also analyze the connectivity of the third-party tracking sites, which are linked from multiple websites. The link analysis allows us to extract the group of associated tracking sites and understand how influential these sites are. Based on the analyses of 100,000 websites, we quantify the potential risks of the web tracking-enabled websites. We reveal that there are 226 websites that adopt fingerprints that cannot be detected with the most of off-the-shelf anti-tracking tools. We also reveal that a major, resilient third-party tracking site is linked to 50.0 % of the top-100,000 popular websites.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks based on HTTP and HTTPS (i.e., HTTP(S)-DDoS) are increasingly popular among attackers. Overlay-based mitigation solutions attract small and medium-sized enterprises mainly for their low cost and high scalability. However, conventional overlay-based solutions assume content inspection to remotely mitigate HTTP(S)-DDoS attacks, prompting trust concerns. This paper reports on a new overlay-based method which practically adds a third level of client identification (to conventional per-IP and per-connection). This enhanced identification enables remote mitigation of more complex HTTP(S)-DDoS categories without content inspection. A novel behavior-based reputation and penalty system is designed, then a simplified proof of concept prototype is implemented and deployed on DeterLab. Among several conducted experiments, two are presented in this paper representing a single-vector and a multi-vector complex HTTP(S)-DDoS attack scenarios (utilizing LOIC, Slowloris, and a custom-built attack tool for HTTPS-DDoS). Results show nearly 99.2% reduction in attack traffic and 100% chance of legitimate service. Yet, attack reduction decreases, and cost in service time (of a specified file) rises, temporarily during an approximately 2 minutes mitigation time. Collateral damage to non-attacking clients sharing an attack IP is measured in terms of a temporary extra service time. Only the added identification level was utilized for mitigation, while future work includes incorporating all three levels to mitigate switching and multi-request per connection attack categories.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology is one of the key enablers in the fifth generation mobile communications (5G), in order to accommodate growing traffic demands and to utilize higher super high frequency (SHF) and extremely high frequency (EHF) bands. In the paper, we propose a novel transmit precoding named “nonlinear block multi-diagonalization (NL-BMD) precoding” for multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) downlink toward 5G. Our NL-BMD precoding strategy is composed of two essential techniques: block multi-diagonalization (BMD) and adjacent inter-user interference pre-cancellation (IUI-PC). First, as an extension of the conventional block diagonalization (BD) method, the linear BMD precoder for the desired user is computed to incorporate a predetermined number of interfering users, in order to ensure extra degrees of freedom at the transmit array even after null steering. Additionally, adjacent IUI-PC, as a nonlinear operation, is introduced to manage the residual interference partially allowed in BMD computation, with effectively-reduced numerical complexity. It is revealed through computer simulations that the proposed NL-BMD precoding yields up to 67% performance improvement in average sum-rate spectral efficiency and enables large-capacity transmission regardless of the user distribution, compared with the conventional BD precoding.

This paper presents indoor and outdoor experiments that confirm 4-Gbps throughput based on 400-MHz bandwidth transmission when applying carrier aggregation (CA) with 4 component carriers (CCs) and 4-by-4 single-user multiple-in multiple-out multiplexing (MIMO) in the 15-GHz frequency band in the downlink of 5G cellular radio access. A new radio interface with time division duplexing (TDD) and radio access based on orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) is implemented in a 5G testbed to confirm ultra-high speed transmission with low latency. The indoor experiment in an entrance hall shows that the peak throughput is 4.3Gbps in front of the base station (BS) antenna where the reference signal received power (RSRP) is -40dBm although the channel correlation at user equipment (UE) antenna is 0.8. The outdoor experiment in an open-space parking area shows that the peak throughput is 2.8Gbps in front of a BS antenna with a high RSRP although rank 2 is selected due to the high channel correlation. The results also show that the average throughput of 2Gbps is achieved 120m from the BS antenna. In a courtyard enclosed by building walls, 3.6Gbps is achieved in an outdoor-to-outdoor environment with a high RSRP and in an outdoor-to-indoor environment where the RSRP is lower due to the penetration loss of glass windows, but the multipath rich environment contributes to realizing the low channel correlation.

This paper proposes a new user association method to maximize the downlink system throughput in a cellular network, where the system throughput is defined based on (p,α)-proportional fairness. The proposed method assumes a fully decentralized approach, which is practical in a real system as complicated inter-base station (BS) cooperation is not required. In the proposed method, each BS periodically and individually broadcasts supplemental information regarding its bandwidth allocation to newly connected users. Assisted by this information, each user calculates the expected throughput that will be obtained by connecting to the respective BSs. Each user terminal feeds back the metric for user association to the temporally best BS, which represents a relative increase in throughput through re-association to that BS. Based on the reported metrics from multiple users, each BS individually updates the user association. The proposed method gives a general framework for optimal user association for (p,α)-proportional fairness-based system throughput maximization and is especially effective in heterogeneous cellular networks where low transmission-power pico BSs overlay a high transmission-power macro BS. Computer simulation results show that the proposed method maximizes the system throughput from the viewpoint of the given (p,α)-proportional fairness.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising multiple access scheme for further improving the spectrum efficiency compared to orthogonal multiple access (OMA) in the 5th Generation (5G) mobile communication systems. As inter-user interference cancellers for NOMA, two kinds of receiver structures are considered. One is the reduced complexity-maximum likelihood receiver (R-ML) and the other is the codeword level interference canceller (CWIC). In this paper, we show that the R-ML is superior to the CWIC in terms of scheduling flexibility. In addition, we propose a link to system (L2S) mapping scheme for the R-ML to conduct a system level evaluation, and show that the proposed scheme accurately predicts the block error rate (BLER) performance of the R-ML. The proposed L2S mapping scheme also demonstrates that the system level throughput performance of the R-ML is higher than that for the CWIC thanks to the scheduling flexibility.

This paper experimentally verifies the potential of higher order space division multiplexing in line-of-sight (LOS) channels for multiuser massive MIMO. We previously proposed an inter-user interference (IUI) cancellation scheme and a simplified user scheduling method for Massive Antenna Systems for Wireless Entrance (MAS-WE). In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed techniques, channel state information (CSI) for a 1×32 SIMO channel is measured in a real propagation environment with simplified test equipment. Evaluations of the measured CSI data confirm the effectiveness of our proposals; they offer good equal gain transmission (EGT) performance, reduced spatial correlation with enlarged angular gap between users, and quite small channel state fluctuation. Link level simulations elucidate that the simple IUI cancellation method is stable in practical conditions. The degradation in symbol error rate with the measured CSI, relative to that yielded by the output of the theoretical LOS channel model, is insignificant.

Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication system offers high rate transmission and/or support of a large number of users by invoking the power of a large array antenna, but one of its problem is the heavy computational burden required for the design and signal processing. Assuming the utilization of a large array in the transmitter side and much fewer users than the maximum possible value, this paper first presents a subarray based design approach of MIMO system with a low computational load taking into account efficient subarray grouping for the realization of higher performance; a large transmit array is first divided into subarrays based on channel gain or channel correlation, then block diagonalization is applied to each of them, and finally a large array weight is reconstructed by maximal ratio combining (MRC). In addition, the extension of the proposed method to two-stage design is studied in order to support a larger number of users; in the process of reconstruction to a large array, subarrays are again divided into groups, and block diagonalization is applied to those subarray groups. Through computer simulations, it is shown that the both channel gain and correlation based grouping strategies are effective under certain conditions, and that the number of supported users can be increased by two-stage design if certain level of performance degradation is acceptable.

The user authorization query (UAQ) problem determines whether there exists an optimum set of roles to be activated to provide a set of permissions requested by a user. It has been deemed as a key issue for efficiently handling user's access requests in role-based access control (RBAC). Unfortunately, the weight is a value attached to a permission/role representing its importance, should be introduced to UAQ, has been ignored. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive definition of the weighted UAQ (WUAQ) problem with the role-weighted-cardinality and permission-weighted-cardinality constraints. Moreover, we study the computational complexity of different subcases of WUAQ, and show that many instances in each subcase are intractable. In particular, inspired by the idea of the genetic algorithm, we propose an algorithm to approximate solve an intractable subcase of the WUAQ problem. An important observation is that this algorithm can be efficiently modified to handle the other subcases of the WUAQ problem. The experimental results show the advantage of the proposed algorithm, which is especially fit for the case that the computational overhead is even more important than the accuracy in a large-scale RBAC system.

This paper discusses key technologies specific for fifth generation (5G) cellular systems which are expected to connect internet of things (IoT) based vertical sectors. Because services for 5G will be expanded drastically, from information transfer services to mission critical and massive connection IoT connection services for vertical sectors, and requirement for cellular systems becomes quite different compared to that of fourth generation (4G) systems, after explanation for the service and technical trends for 5G, key wireless access technologies will be discussed, especially, from the view point of what is new and how import. In addition to the introduction of new technologies for wireless access, flexibility of networking is also discussed because it can cope with QoS support services, especially to cope with end-to-end latency constraint conditions. Therefore, this paper also discuss flexible network configuration using mobile edge computing (MEC) based on software defined network (SDN) and network slicing.

Cost-effective cloud storage services are attracting users with their convenience, but there is a trade-off between service availability and usage cost. We develop two cloud provider selection models for cloud storage services to minimize the total cost of usage. The models select multiple cloud providers to meet the user requirements while considering unavailability. The first model, called a user-copy (UC) model, allows the selection of multiple cloud providers, where the user copies its data to multiple providers. In addition to the user copy function of the UC model, the second model, which is called a user and cloud-provider copy (UCC) model, allows cloud providers to make copies of the data to deliver them to other cloud providers. The cloud service is available if at least one cloud provider is available. We formulate both models as integer linear programming (ILP) problems. Our performance evaluation observes that both models reduce the total cost of usage, compared to the single cloud provider selection approach. As the cost of bandwidth usage between a user and a cloud provider increases, the UCC model becomes more beneficial than the UC model. We implement the prototype for cloud storage services, and demonstrate our models via Science Information Network 5.

For a service-oriented architecture based system, the problem of synthesizing a concrete model, i.e., behavioral model, for each service configuring the system from an abstract specification, which is referred to as choreography, is known as the choreography realization problem. In this paper, we assume that choreography is given by an acyclic relation. We have already shown that the condition for the behavioral model is given by lower and upper bounds of acyclic relations. Thus, the degree of freedom for behavioral models increases; developing algorithms of synthesizing an intelligible model for users becomes possible. In this paper, we introduce several metrics for intelligibility of state machines, and study the algorithm of synthesizing Pareto efficient state machines.

Artificial lighting is responsible for a large portion of total energy consumption and has great potential for energy saving. This paper designs an LED light control algorithm based on users' localization using multiple battery-less binary human detection sensors. The proposed lighting control system focuses on reducing office lighting energy consumption and satisfying users' illumination requirement. Most current lighting control systems use infrared human detection sensors, but the poor detection probability, especially for a static user, makes it difficult to realize comfortable and effective lighting control. To improve the detection probability of each sensor, we proposed to locate sensors as close to each user as possible by using a battery-less wireless sensor network, in which all sensors can be placed freely in the space with high energy stability. We also proposed to use a multi-sensor-based user localization algorithm to capture user's position more accurately and realize fine lighting control which works even with static users. The system is actually implemented in an indoor office environment in a pilot project. A verification experiment is conducted by measuring the practical illumination and power consumption. The performance agrees with design expectations. It shows that the proposed LED lighting control system reduces the energy consumption significantly, 57% compared to the batch control scheme, and satisfies user's illumination requirement with 100% probability.

This contribution presents and analyzes the statistical regularity related to the noise power spectrum series and the speech spectrum series. It also undertakes a thorough inquiry of the quasi-Gaussian distributed power spectrum series obtained using the radical root transformation. Consequently, a noise-estimation algorithm is proposed for speech enhancement. This method is effective for separating the noise power spectrum from the noisy speech power spectrum. In contrast to standard noise-estimation algorithms, the proposed method requires no speech activity detector. It was confirmed to be conceptually simple and well suited to real-time implementations. Practical experiment tests indicated that our method is preferred over previous methods.

This paper studies the supervisory control of partially observed quantitative discrete event systems (DESs) under the fixed-initial-credit energy objective. A quantitative DES is modeled by a weighted automaton whose event set is partitioned into a controllable event set and an uncontrollable event set. Partial observation is modeled by a mapping from each event and state of the DES to the corresponding masked event and masked state that are observed by a supervisor. The supervisor controls the DES by disabling or enabling any controllable event for the current state of the DES, based on the observed sequences of masked states and masked events. We model the control process as a two-player game played between the supervisor and the DES. The DES aims to execute the events so that its energy level drops below zero, while the supervisor aims to maintain the energy level above zero. We show that the proposed problem is reducible to finding a winning strategy in a turn-based reachability game.

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has become a popular solution for media delivery over the mobile Internet. However, existing HAS systems are based on the pull-based HTTP/1.1 protocol, leading to high overheads (e.g., in terms of energy, processing, bandwidth) for clients, servers, as well as network nodes. The new HTTP/2 protocol provides a server push feature, which allows the client to receive more than one video segment for each request in order to reduce request-related overheads. In this study, we propose an adaptation method to leverage the push feature of HTTP/2. Our method takes into account not only the request-related overhead but also buffer stability and gradual transitions. The experimental results show that our proposed method performs well under strong throughput variations of mobile networks.

This paper proposes a practical application of Massive MIMO technology, Massive Antenna Systems for Wireless Entrance (MAS-WE), and along with related inter-user interference cancellation (IUIC) and scheduling techniques. MAS-WE, in which the entrance base station (EBS) employs a large number of antennas, can effectively provide high capacity wireless entrance links to a large number of access points (APs) distributed over a wide coverage area. The proposed techniques are simplified to practical implementation; EBS side uses around 100 antenna elements to spatially multiplex more than 16 signal streams. SIR performance is evaluated by system level simulations that consider imperfect channel state information (CSI). The results show that MAS-WE with the proposed techniques can reliably achieve high spectral efficiency with high level space division multiplexing.

In this letter, we propose a Hadoop-based Video Transcoding System (HVTS), which is designed to run on all major cloud computing services. HVTS is highly adapted to the structure and policies of Hadoop, thus it has additional capacities for transcoding, task distribution, load balancing, and content replication and distribution. To evaluate, our proposed system, we carry out two performance tests on our local testbed, transcoding and robustness to data node and task failures. The results confirmed that our system delivers satisfactory performance in facilitating seamless streaming services in cloud computing environments.

To ensure secure mobile communication, the communicating entities must know their mutual identities. The entities which need to be identified in a mobile communication system are mobile devices and the network. Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has specified Evolved Packet System Authentication and Key Agreement (EPS AKA) procedure for the mutual authentication of user and the Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. EPS AKA certainly overcomes most of the vulnerabilities in the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) access procedures. However, the LTE access procedure still has security weaknesses against some of the sophisticated security threats, such as, Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, rogue base station attacks and fails to ensure privacy protection for some of the important parameters. This paper proposes an improved security framework for the LTE access procedure by ensuring the confidentiality protection of International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) and random-challenge RAND. Also, our proposed system is designed to reduce the impact of DoS attacks which try to overwhelm the network with useless computations. We use a one-time shared key with a short lifetime between the UE and MME to protect IMSI and RAND privacy. Finally, we explore the parameters design for the proposed system which leads to satisfy the requirements imposed on computational load and latency as well as security strength.

Wi-Fi Direct is a promising and available technology for device-to-device (D2D) proximity communications. To improve the performances of Wi-Fi Direct communication, optimized radio resource allocations are important. This paper proposes network assisted Wi-Fi Direct (NAWD), which operates based on the media independent services framework of IEEE 802.21 standard, for optimizing radio resource allocations. The NAWD is enhanced Wi-Fi Direct with the assistance of infrastructure networks (e.g., cellular network) and allocates radio resources (e.g., frequency channels and transmit power) to reduce radio interferences among Wi-Fi Direct devices (e.g., smart phones and set-top boxes). The NAWD includes mechanisms for gathering configuration information (e.g., location information and network connection information) of Wi-Fi Direct devices and allocating optimized radio resources (e.g., frequency channels and transmit power) to reduce radio interferences among Wi-Fi Direct devices. Simulation results show that the proposed NAWD increases significantly SINR, power efficiency, and areal capacity compared to legacy Wi-Fi Direct, where areal capacity is total traffic throughput per unit area.