The Technical Committee on Communication Behavior Engineering addresses the research question “How do we construct a communication network system that includes users?”. The growth in highly functional networks and terminals has brought about greater diversity in users' lifestyles and freed people from the restrictions of time and place. Under this situation, the similarities of human behavior cause traffic aggregation and generate new problems in terms of the stabilization of network service quality. This paper summarizes previous studies relevant to communication behavior from a multidisciplinary perspective and discusses the research approach adopted by the Technical Committee on Communication Behavior Engineering.

With the ever-increasing number of web services registered in service communities, many users are apt to find their interested web services through various recommendation techniques, e.g., Collaborative Filtering (i.e., CF)-based recommendation. Generally, CF-based recommendation approaches can work well, when a target user has similar friends or the target services (i.e., services preferred by the target user) have similar services. However, when the available user-service rating data is very sparse, it is possible that a target user has no similar friends and the target services have no similar services; in this situation, traditional CF-based recommendation approaches fail to generate a satisfying recommendation result. In view of this challenge, we combine Social Balance Theory (abbreviated as SBT; e.g., “enemy's enemy is a friend” rule) and CF to put forward a novel data-sparsity tolerant recommendation approach Ser_RecSBT+CF. During the recommendation process, a pruning strategy is adopted to decrease the searching space and improve the recommendation efficiency. Finally, through a set of experiments deployed on a real web service quality dataset WS-DREAM, we validate the feasibility of our proposal in terms of recommendation accuracy, recall and efficiency. The experiment results show that our proposed Ser_RecSBT+CF approach outperforms other up-to-date approaches.

This paper looks at the history of research in the Technical Committee on Information Networks from the time of its inception to the present and provides an overview of the latest research in this area based on the topics discussed in recent meetings of the committee. It also presents possible future developments in the field of information networks.

IEEE 802.11ah is an emerging wireless LAN standard in the sub-1-GHz license-exempt bands for cost-effective and range-extended communication. One of the most challenging issues that need to be overcome in relation to IEEE 802.11ah is to ensure that thousands of stations are able to associate efficiently with a single access point. During network initialization, several thousand stations try to associate with the access point, leading to heavy channel contention and long association delay. Therefore, IEEE 802.11ah has introduced an authentication control mechanism that classifies stations into groups and only a small number of stations in a group are allowed to access the medium in a beacon interval. This grouping strategy provides fair channel access to a large number of stations. However, the approach to grouping the stations and determining the best group size is undefined in the draft of IEEE 802.11ah. In this paper, we first model the authentication/association in IEEE 802.11ah. Our analysis shows that there exists the best group size that results in minimal association delay. Consequently, the analytical model is extended to determine the best group size. Finally, an enhanced authentication control algorithm, which utilizes the best group size to provide the minimum association delay, is proposed. The numerical and the simulation results we obtained with the proposed method demonstrate that our method succeeds in minimizing the association delay.

This paper proposes a proportional fair-based joint optimization method for user association and the bandwidth ratio of protected radio resources exclusively used by pico base stations (BSs) for inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) in heterogeneous networks where low transmission-power pico BSs overlay a high transmission-power macro BS. The proposed method employs an iterative algorithm, in which the user association process for a given bandwidth ratio of protected radio resources and the bandwidth ratio control of protected radio resources for a given user association are applied alternately and repeatedly up to convergence. For user association, we use our previously reported decentralized iterative user association method based on the feedback information of each individual user assisted by a small amount of broadcast information from the respective BSs. Based on numerical results, we show that the proposed method adaptively achieves optimal user association and bandwidth ratio control of protected radio resources, which maximizes the geometric mean user throughput within the macrocell coverage area. The system throughput of the proposed method is compared to that for conventional approaches to show the performance gain.

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.

In multi-view social networks field, a flexible Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) based framework is proposed which integrates multi-view relation data and feature data for community discovery. Benefit with a relaxed pairwise regularization and a novel orthogonal regularization, it outperforms the-state-of-art algorithms on five real-world datasets in terms of accuracy and NMI.

The increase in network access devices and demand for high quality of service (QoS) by the users have led to insufficient capacity for the network operators. Moreover, the existing control equipment and mechanisms are not flexible and agile enough for the dynamically changing environment of heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets). This non-agile control plane is hard to scale with ever increasing traffic demand and has become the performance bottleneck. Furthermore, the new HetNet architecture requires tight coordination and cooperation for the densely deployed small cell base stations, particularly for interference mitigation and dynamic frequency reuse and sharing. These issues further complicate the existing control plane and can cause serious inefficiencies in terms of users' quality of experience and network performance. This article presents an SDN control framework for energy efficient downlink/uplink scheduling in HetNets. The framework decouples the control plane from data plane by means of a logically centralized controller with distributed agents implemented in separate entities of the network (users and base stations). The scheduling problem consists of three sub-problems: (i) user association, (ii) power control, (iii) resource allocation and (iv) interference mitigation. Moreover, these sub-problems are coupled and must be solved simultaneously. We formulate the DL/UL scheduling in HetNet as an optimization problem and use the Markov approximation framework to propose a distributed economical algorithm. Then, we divide the algorithm into three sub-routines for (i) user association, (ii) power control, (iii) resource allocation and (iv) interference mitigation. These sub-routines are then implemented on different agents of the SDN framework. We run extensive simulation to validate our proposal and finally, present the performance analysis.

The development of smart devices has led to the growth of Location-Based Social Networking Services (LBSNSs). In this paper, we introduce an l-Close Range Friends query that finds all l-hop friends of a user within a specified range. We also propose a query processing method on Social Grid Index (SGI). Using real datasets, the performance of our method is evaluated.

In Twitter-like services, countless messages are being posted in real-time every second all around the world. Timely knowledge about what kinds of information are diffusing in social media is quite important. For example, in emergency situations such as earthquakes, users provide instant information on their situation through social media. The collective intelligence of social media is useful as a means of information detection complementary to conventional observation. We have developed a system for monitoring and analyzing information diffusion data in real-time by tracking retweeted tweets. A tweet retweeted by many users indicates that they find the content interesting and impactful. Analysts who use this system can find tweets retweeted by many users and identify the key people who are retweeted frequently by many users or who have retweeted tweets about particular topics. However, bursting situations occur when thousands of social media messages are suddenly posted simultaneously, and the lack of machine resources to handle such situations lowers the system's query performance. Since our system is designed to be used interactively in real-time by many analysts, waiting more than one second for a query results is simply not acceptable. To maintain an acceptable query performance, we propose a capacity control method for filtering incoming tweets using extra attribute information from tweets themselves. Conventionally, there is a trade-off between the query performance and the accuracy of the analysis results. We show that the query performance is improved by our proposed method and that our method is better than the existing methods in terms of maintaining query accuracy.

Social Media has already become a new arena of our lives and involved different aspects of our social presence. Users' personal information and activities on social media presumably reveal their personal interests, which offer great opportunities for many e-commerce applications. In this paper, we propose a principled latent variable model to infer user consumption preferences at the category level (e.g. inferring what categories of products a user would like to buy). Our model naturally links users' published content and following relations on microblogs with their consumption behaviors on e-commerce websites. Experimental results show our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly in inferring a new user's consumption preference. Our model can also learn meaningful consumption-specific topics automatically.

In this paper, we investigate the problem of maximizing the weighted sum outage rate in multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) interference channels, where the transmitters have no knowledge of the exact values of channel coefficients, only the statistical information. Unfortunately, this problem is nonconvex and very difficult to deal with. We propose a new, provably convergent iterative algorithm where in each iteration, the original problem is approximated as second-order cone programming (SOCP) by introducing slack variables and using convex approximation. Simulation results show that the proposed SOCP algorithm converges in a few steps, and yields a better performance gain with a lower computational complexity than existing algorithms.

By installing the various types of cells, imbalance in traffic load and excessive handover among cells in a heterogenous network can be prevalent. To deal with this problem, we propose a mobility-based cell association algorithm for load balancing in a heterogenous network. By defining a dynamic system load as a function of the mobility of mobile stations (MSs) and the transmit powers of cells, the proposed algorithm is designed such that it can optimize a utility function based on the fairness of the dynamic system load. Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm improves the user perceived rate of MSs located at cell edges with slight increase in the number of handovers compared to a conventional cell association based on received signal strength.

With the surge of social media platform, users' profile information become treasure to enhance social network services. However, attributes information of most users are not complete, thus it is important to infer latent attributes of users. Contemporary attribute inference methods have a basic assumption that there are enough labeled data to train a model. However, in social media, it is very expensive and difficult to label a large amount of data. In this paper, we study the latent attribute inference problem with very small labeled data and propose the SRW-COND solution. In order to solve the difficulty of small labeled data, SRW-COND firstly extends labeled data with a simple but effective greedy algorithm. Then SRW-COND employs a supervised random walk process to effectively utilize the known attributes information and link structure of users. Experiments on two real datasets illustrate the effectiveness of SRW-COND.

Bistatic multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar has the capability of measuring the transmit angle from the receiving array, which means the existence of information redundancy and benefits data association. In this paper, a data association decision for bistatic MIMO radar is proposed and the performance advantages of bistatic MIMO radar in data association is analyzed and evaluated. First, the parameters obtained by receiving array are sent to the association center via coordinate conversion. Second, referencing the nearest neighbor association (NN) algorithm, an improved association decision is proposed with the transmit angle and target range as association statistics. This method can evade the adverse effects of the angle system errors to data association. Finally, data association probability in the presence of array directional error is derived and the correctness of derivation result is testified via Monte Carlo simulation experiments. Besides that performance comparison with the conventional phased array radar verifies the excellent performance of bistatic MIMO Radar in data association.

On SNS (Social Networking Services), detecting Sybils is an urgent demand. The most famous approach is called “SybilRank” scheme where each node evenly distributes its trust value starting from honest seeds and detects Sybils based on the trust value. Furthermore, Zhang et al. propose to avoid trust values from being distributed into Sybils by pruning suspicious relationships before performing SybilRank. However, we point out that the above two schemes have shortcomings that must be remedied. In the former scheme, seeds are concentrated on the specific communities because they are selected from nodes that have largest number of friends, and thus the trust value is not evenly distributed. In the latter one, a sophisticated attacker can avoid graph pruning by making relationships between Sybil nodes. In this paper, we propose a robust seed selection and graph pruning scheme to detect Sybil nodes more accurately. To more evenly distribute trust value into honest nodes, we first detect communities in the SNS and select honest seeds from each detected community. And then, by leveraging the fact that Sybils cannot make dense relationships with honest nodes, we also propose a graph pruning scheme based on the density of relationships between trusted nodes. We prune the relationships which have sparse relationships with trusted nodes and this enables robust pruning malicious relationships even if the attackers make a large number of common friends. By the computer simulation with real dataset, we show that our scheme improves the detection accuracy of both Sybil and honest nodes.

The recent popularization of social network services (SNSs), such as YouTube, Dailymotion, and Facebook, enables people to easily publish their personal videos taken with mobile cameras. However, at the same time, such popularity has raised a new problem: video privacy. In such social videos, the privacy of people, i.e., their appearances, must be protected, but naively obscuring all people might spoil the video content. To address this problem, we focus on videographers' capture intentions. In a social video, some persons are usually essential for the video content. They are intentionally captured by the videographers, called intentionally captured persons (ICPs), and the others are accidentally framed-in (non-ICPs). Videos containing the appearances of the non-ICPs might violate their privacy. In this paper, we developed a system called BEPS, which adopts a novel conditional random field (CRF)-based method for ICP detection, as well as a novel approach to obscure non-ICPs and preserve ICPs using background estimation. BEPS reduces the burden of manually obscuring the appearances of the non-ICPs before uploading the video to SNSs. Compared with conventional systems, the following are the main advantages of BEPS: (i) it maintains the video content, and (ii) it is immune to the failure of person detection; false positives in person detection do not violate privacy. Our experimental results successfully validated these two advantages.

Software peer review is regarded as one of the most important approaches to preserving software quality. Due to the distributed collaborations in Open Source Software (OSS) development, the review techniques and processes conducted in OSS environment differ from the traditional review method that based on formal face-to-face meetings. Unlike other related works, this study investigates peer review processes of OSS projects from the social perspective: communication and interaction in peer review by using social network analysis (SNA). Moreover, the relationship between peer review contributors and their activities is studied. We propose an approach to evaluating contributors' activeness and social relationship using SNA named Peer Review Social Network (PeRSoN). We evaluate our approach by empirical case study, 326,286 review comments and 1,745 contributors from three representative industrial OSS projects have been extracted and analyzed. The results indicate that the social network structure influences the realistic activeness of contributors significantly. Based on the results, we suggest our approach can support project leaders in assigning review tasks, appointing reviewers and other activities to improve current software processes.

Cache memories are the major application of high-speed SRAMs, and they are frequently installed in high performance logic VLSIs including microprocessors. This paper presents a 4-way set-associative, SOI cache-tag memory. To obtain higher operating speed with less power dissipation, we devised an I/O-separated memory cell with a dual-rail wordline, which is used to transmit complementary selection signals. The address decoding delay was shortened using CMOS dual-rail logic. To enhance the maximum operating frequency, bitline's recovery operations after writing data were eliminated using a memory array configuration without half-selected cells. Moreover, conventional, sensitive but slow differential amplifiers were successfully removed from the data I/O circuitry with a hierarchical bitline scheme. As regards the stored data management, we devised a new hardware-oriented LRU-data replacement algorithm on the basis of 6-bit directed graph. With the experimental results obtained with a test chip fabricated with a 0.25-µm CMOS/SIMOX process, the core of the cache-tag memory with a 1024-set configuration can achieve a 1.5-ns address access time under typical conditions of a 2-V power supply and 25°C. The power dissipation during standby was less than 14 µW, and that at the 500-MHz operation was 13-83 mW, depending on the bit-stream data pattern.

Wi-Fi P2P has been deployed extensively in mobile devices. However, Wi-Fi P2P is not efficient because it requires an IP layer connection for transmitting even short messages to nearby devices, especially in high density or highly mobile environments owing to the fact that a user on the move has difficulty selecting service-available devices, and a user device has to frequently connect to and be released from nearby devices. This paper proposes a new messaging framework that enables application-level messages to be exchanged between nearby devices with no IP layer connectivity over Wi-Fi P2P. The pre-association messaging framework (PAMF) supports both broadcast and unicast transmission to maximize the delivery success rate, considering the number of peers and messages. Evaluations of PAMF conducted under real scenarios show that application-level messages can be exchanged within a few seconds, with high success rate. PAMF provides high portability and extensibility because it does not breach the Wi-Fi P2P standard. Moreover, the demonstrations show that PAMF is practical for new proximity services such as local marketing and urgent messaging.