Open-access femtocell networks assure the cellular user of getting a better and stronger signal. However, due to the small range of femto base stations (FBSs), any motion of the user may trigger handover. In a dense environment, the possibility of such handover is very frequent. To avoid frequent communication disruptions due to phenomena such as the ping-pong effect, it is necessary to ensure the effectiveness of the cell selection method. Existing selection methods commonly uses a measured channel/cell quality metric such as the channel capacity (between the user and the target cell). However, the throughput experienced by the user is time-varying because of the channel condition, i.e., owing to the propagation effects or receiver location. In this context, the conventional approach does not reflect the future performance. To ensure the efficiency of cell selection, user's decision needs to depend not only on the current state of the network, but also on the future possible states (horizon). To this end, we implement a learning algorithm that can predict, based on the past experience, the best performing cell in the future. We present in this paper a reinforcement learning (RL) framework as a generic solution for the cell selection problem in a non-stationary femtocell network that selects, without prior knowledge about the environment, a target cell by exploring past cells' behavior and predicting their potential future states based on Q-learning algorithm. Then, we extend this proposal by referring to a fuzzy inference system (FIS) to tune Q-learning parameters during the learning process to adapt to environment changes. Our solution aims at minimizing the frequency of handovers without affecting the user experience in terms of channel capacity. Simulation results demonstrate that· our solution comes very close to the performance of the opportunistic method in terms of capacity, while fewer handovers are required on average.· the use of fuzzy rules achieves better performance in terms of received reward (capacity) and number of handovers than fixing the values of Q-learning parameters.

High-speed wireless access technologies have evolved over the last years setting new challenges for TCP. That is, to effectively utilize the available network resources and to minimize the effects of wireless channel errors on TCP performance. This paper introduces a new TCP variant, called TCP-BIAD aiming at enhancing TCP performance in broadband wireless access networks. We provide analytical expressions for evaluating the stability, throughput, fairness and friendliness properties of our proposal, and we validate our results by means of computer simulations. Initial results presented in this paper show that this approach achieves high network utilization levels in a wide range of network conditions, while maintaining an adequately fair and friendly behavior with respect to coexisting TCP flows.

Cognitive radio is one of the most promising wireless technologies and has been recognized as a new way to improve the spectral efficiency of wireless networks. In a cognitive radio network, secondary users exchange control information for network coordination such as transmitter-receiver handshakes, for sharing spectrum sensing results, for neighbor discovery, to maintain connectivity, and so on. Spectrum utilization and resource optimizations thus rely on information exchange among secondary users. Normally, secondary users exchange the control information via a predefined channel, called a common control channel (CCC). Most of the medium access control (MAC) protocols for cognitive radio networks were designed by assuming the existence of a CCC, and further assuming that it was available for every secondary user. However, the main drawback of using a static CCC is it is susceptible to primary user activities since the channel can be occupied by primary users at any time. In this paper, we propose a MAC protocol for cognitive radio networks with dynamic control channel assignment, called DYN-MAC. In DYN-MAC, a control channel is dynamically assigned based on spectrum availability. Thus, it can tolerate primary user activities. DYN-MAC also supports collision free network-wide broadcasting and addresses other major problems such as primary/secondary user hidden terminal problems.

Single Carrier — Frequency Domain Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) is a multiple access technique employed in LTE uplink transmission. SC-FDMA can improve system throughput by frequency selective scheduling (FSS). In cellular systems using SC-FDMA in the uplink, interference arising from user equipments (UEs) in neighboring cells degrades the system throughput, especially the throughput of cell-edge UEs. In order to overcome this drawback, many papers have considered fractional frequency reuse (FFR) techniques and analyzed their effectiveness. However, these studies have come to different conclusions regarding the effectiveness of FFR because the throughput gain of FFR depends on the frequency reuse design and evaluation conditions. Previous papers have focused on the frequency reuse design. Few papers have examined the conditions where FFR is effective, and only the UE traffic conditions have been evaluated. This paper reveals other conditions where FFR is effective by demonstrating the throughput gain of FFR. In order to analyze the throughput gain of FFR, we focus on the throughput relationship between FFR and FSS. System level simulation results demonstrate that FFR is effective when the following conditions are met: (i) the number of UEs is small and (ii) the multipath delay spread is large or close to 0.

Smart city services are implemented using various data collected from houses and infrastructure within a city. As the volume and variety of the smart city data becomes huge, individual services have suffered from expensive computation effort and large processing time. In order to reduce the effort and time, this paper proposes a concept of Materialized View as a Service (MVaaS). Using the MVaaS, every application can easily and dynamically construct its own materialized view, in which the raw data is converted and stored in a convenient format with appropriate granularity. Thus, once the view is constructed, the application can quickly access necessary data. In this paper, we design a framework of MVaaS specifically for large-scale house log, managed in a smart-city data platform. In the framework, each application first specifies how the raw data should be filtered, grouped and aggregated. For a given data specification, MVaaS dynamically constructs a MapReduce batch program that converts the raw data into a desired view. The batch is then executed on Hadoop, and the resultant view is stored in HBase. We present case studies using house log in a real home network system. We also conduct an experimental evaluation to compare the response time between cases with and without MVaaS.

In this invited paper, software defined network (SDN)-based approaches for future cost-effective optical mobile backhaul (MBH) networks are discussed, focusing on key principles, throughput optimization and dynamic service provisioning as its use cases. We propose a novel physical-layer aware throughput optimization algorithm that confirms > 100Mb/s end-to-end per-cell throughputs with ≥2.5Gb/s optical links deployed at legacy cell sites. We also demonstrate the first optical line terminal (OLT)-side optical Nyquist filtering of legacy 10G on-off-keying (OOK) signals, enabling dynamic >10Gb/s Orthogonal Frequency Domain Multiple Access (OFDMA) λ-overlays for MBH over passive optical network (PON) with 40-km transmission distances and 1:128 splitting ratios, without any ONU-side equipment upgrades. The software defined flexible optical access network architecture described in this paper is thus highly promising for future MBH networks.

We consider the problems of access control and encrypted keyword search for cryptographic cloud storage in such a way that they can be implemented for a multiple users setting. Our fine-grained access control aware multi-user secure keyword search approach interdependently harmonizes these two security notions, access control and encrypted keyword search. Owing to the shrinkage of the cloud server's search space to the user's decryptable subset, the proposed scheme both decreases information leakage and is shown to be efficient by the results of our contrastive performance simulation.

The success of any project can be affected by requirements changes. Requirements elicitation is a series of activities of adding, deleting, and modifying requirements. We refer to the completion of requirements elicitation of a software component as requirements maturation. When the requirements of each component have reached the 100% maturation point, no requirement will come to the component. This does not mean that a requirements analyst (RA) will reject the addition of requirements, but simply, that the additional requirements will not come to the project. Our motivation is to provide measurements by which an RA can estimate one of the maturation periods: the early, middle, or late period of the project. We will proceed by introducing the requirements maturation efficiency (RME). The RME of the requirements represents how quickly the requirements of a component reach 100% maturation. Then, we will estimate the requirements maturation period for every component by applying the RME. We assume that the RME is derived from its accessibility from an RA to the requirements source and the stability of the requirements. We model accessibility as the number of information flows from the source of the requirements to the RA, and further, model stability with the requirements maturation index (RMI). According to the multiple regression analysis of a case, we are able to get an equation on RME derived from these two factors with a significant level of 5%. We evaluated the result by comparing it to another case, and then discuss the effectiveness of the measurements.

Dynamic spectrum access is the key approach in cognitive wireless regional area networks, and it is adopted by secondary users to access the licensed radio spectrum opportunistically. In order to realize real-time secondary spectrum usage, a dynamic spectrum access model based on stochastic differential games is proposed to realize dynamic spectrum allocation; a Nash equilibrium solution to the model is given and analyzed in this paper. From an overall perspective, the relationships between available spectrum percentage and the spectrum access rate are studied. Changes in the available spectrum percentage of the cognitive wireless regional area networks involve a deterministic component and a stochastic component which depends upon an r-dimensional Wiener process. The Wiener process represents an accumulation of random influences over the interval, and it reflects stochastic and time-varying properties of the available spectrum percentage. Simulation results show that the dynamic spectrum access model is efficient, and it reflects the time-varying radio frequency environment. Differential games are useful tools for the spectrum access and management in the time-varying radio environment.

This paper proposes a multipacket-per-slot reservation-based random access protocol with multiuser detection (MD) and automatic repeat request (ARQ), called MPRMD, and analyzes its performance by computer simulations. In MPRMD, before data packet (DP) transmission, a user terminal (UT) transmits a small access request packet (AP) that is composed of an orthogonal preamble sequence and a UT identifier (UT-ID) in a randomly selected minislot during a short dedicated period. Even when several APs collide, a base station (BS) distinguishes them by matched filtering against the preamble part and then extracts the UT-IDs after separating each AP by MD. If the APs are not successfully detected, a small number of minislots are additionally arranged to retransmit them. Thus, by using MD under AP crowded conditions, BS can maximally detect the access requests in a short period, which results in reducing the overhead. Furthermore, in the assignment of a slot, BS intentionally assigns one slot to multiple UTs in order to enhance the efficiency and separates UT's DPs by MD. Since MPRMD can detect a multitude of access requests by utilizing MD in the short period and efficiently assign the slot to separable DPs by MD, it can enhance the system throughput. Computer simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of MPRMD. It is shown that the maximum throughputs of MPRMD with the average SNR of 30dB reach 1.4 and 1.7 packets/slot when a data packet is 10 times and 50 times as long as a control packet, respectively.

Information-Based Access Control (IBAC) has been proposed as an improvement to History-Based Access Control (HBAC) model. In modern component-based systems, these access control models verify that all the code responsible for a security-sensitive operation is sufficiently authorized to execute that operation. The HBAC model, although safe, may incorrectly prevent the execution of operations that should be executed. The IBAC has been shown to be more precise than HBAC maintaining its safety level while allowing sufficiently authorized operations to be executed. However the verification problem of IBAC program has not been discussed. This paper presents a formal model for IBAC programs based on extended weighted pushdown systems (EWPDS). The mapping process between the IBAC original semantics and the EWPDS structure is described. Moreover, the verification problem for IBAC programs is discussed and several typical IBAC program examples using our model are implemented.

We propose a notion of attribute-based identification (ABID) in two flavors: prover-policy ABID (PP-ABID) and verifier-policy ABID (VP-ABID). In a PP-ABID scheme, a prover has an authorized access policy written as a boolean formula over attributes, while each verifier maintains a set of attributes. The prover is accepted when his access policy fits the verifier's set of attributes. In a VP-ABID scheme, a verifier maintains an access policy written as a boolean formula over attributes, while each prover has a set of authorized attributes. The prover is accepted when his set of attributes satisfies the verifier's access policy. Our design principle is first to construct key-policy and ciphertext-policy attribute-based key encapsulation mechanisms (KP-ABKEM and CP-ABKEM). Second, we convert KP-ABKEM and CP-ABKEM into challenge-and-response PP-ABID and VP-ABID, respectively, by encapsulation-and-decapsulation. There, we show that KP-ABKEM and CP-ABKEM only have to be secure against chosen-ciphertext attacks on one-wayness (OW-CCA secure) for the obtained PP-ABID and VP-ABID to be secure against concurrent man-in-the-middle attacks (cMiM secure). According to the design principle, we construct concrete KP-ABKEM and CP-ABKEM with the OW-CCA security by enhancing the KP-ABKEM of Ostrovsky, Sahai and Waters and CP-ABKEM of Waters, respectively. Finally, we obtain concrete PP-ABID and VP-ABID schemes that are proved to be selectively secure in the standard model against cMiM attacks.

Wireless access in the vehicular environment (WAVE) architecture of intelligent transportation system (ITS) has been standardized in the IEEE 802.11p specification and it is going to be widely deployed in many roadway environments in order to provide prompt emergency information and internet services. A typical WAVE network consists of a number of WAVE devices, in which one is the road-side-unit (RSU) and the others are on-board-units (OBUs), and supports one control channel (CCH) and one or more service channels (SCH) for OBU access. The CCH is used to transport the emergency messages and service information of SCHs and the SCHs could be used to carry internet traffic and non-critical safety traffic of OBUs. However, the IEEE 802.11p contention-based medium access control protocol would suffer degraded transmission efficiency if the number of OBUs contending on an SCH is large. Moreover, synchronizing all WAVE devices to periodically and equally access the CCH and an SCH will waste as much as 50% of the channel resources of the SCH [1]. As a solution, we propose an efficiency-improvement scheme, namely the agent-based coordination (ABC) scheme, which improves the SCH throughput by means of electing one OBU to be the agent to schedule the other OBUs so that they obtain the access opportunities on one SCH and access the other SCH served by RSU in a contention-free manner. Based on the ABC scheme, three different scheduling and/or relaying strategies are further proposed and compared. Numerical results and simulation results confirm that the proposed ABC scheme significantly promotes the standard transmission efficiency.

In order to analyze an impact of threshold voltage (Vth) fluctuation induced by random telegraph noise (RTN) on LSI circuit design, we measured a 40-nm 6-Tr-SRAM TEG which enables to evaluate individual bit-line current. RTN phenomenon was successfully measured and we also identified that the transfer MOSFET in an SRAM bit-cell was the most sensitive MOSFET. The proposed word line boosting technique, which applies slightly extra stress to the transfer MOSFET, improves about 30% of detecting probability of fail-bit cells caused by RTN.

The Discrete Memory Machine (DMM) and the Unified Memory Machine (UMM) are theoretical parallel computing models that capture the essence of the shared memory and the global memory of GPUs. It is assumed that warps (or groups of threads) on the DMM and the UMM work synchronously in a round-robin manner. However, warps work asynchronously in real GPUs, in the sense that they are randomly (or arbitrarily) dispatched for execution. The first contribution of this paper is to introduce asynchronous versions of these models in which warps are arbitrarily dispatched. In addition, we assume that threads can execute the “syncthreads” instruction for barrier synchronization. Since the barrier synchronization operation may be costly, we should evaluate and minimize the number of barrier synchronization operations executed by parallel algorithms. The second contribution of this paper is to show a parallel algorithm to the sum of n numbers in optimal computing time and few barrier synchronization steps. Our parallel algorithm computes the sum of n numbers in O(n/w+llog n) time units and O(log l/log w+log log w) barrier synchronization steps using wl threads on the asynchronous UMM with width w and latency l. Since the computation of the sum takes at least Ω(n/w+llog n) time units, this algorithm is time optimal. Finally, we show that the prefix-sums of n numbers can also be computed in O(n/w+llog n) time units and O(log l/log w+log log w) barrier synchronization steps using wl threads.

In this paper, we focus on a centralized spectrum access strategy in a cognitive radio network, in which a single licensed spectrum with one primary user (PU) and several secondary users (SUs) (multiple input streams) are considered. We assume the spectrum can be divided into multiple channels and the packets from variable SUs can arrive at the system simultaneously. Taking into account the priority of the PU, we suppose that one PU packet can occupy the whole licensed spectrum, while one SU packet will occupy only one of the channels split from the licensed spectrum when that channel is not used. Moreover, in order to reduce the blocking ratio of the SUs, a buffer with finite capacity for the SUs is set. Regarding the packet arrivals from different SUs as multiple input streams, we build a two-dimensional Markov chain model based on the phase of the licensed spectrum and the number of SU packets in the buffer. Then we give the transition probability matrix for the Markov chain. Additionally, we analyze the system model in steady state and derive some important performance measures for the SUs, such as the average queue length in the buffer, the throughput and the blocking ratio. With the trade-off between different performance measures, we construct a net benefit function. At last, we provide numerical results to show the change trends of the performance measures with respect to the capacity of the SU buffer under different network conditions, and optimize the capacity of the SU buffer accordingly.

Cognitive Radio (CR) is aimed at increasing the efficiency of spectrum utilization by allowing unlicensed users to access, in an opportunistic and non-interfering manner, some licensed bands temporarily and/or spatially unoccupied by the licensed users. The analysis of CR systems usually requires the spectral activity of the licensed system to be represented and characterized in a simple and tractable, yet accurate manner, which is accomplished by means of spectrum models. In order to guarantee the realism and accuracy of such models, the use of empirical spectrum occupancy data is essential. In this context, this paper explains the complete process of spectrum modeling, from the realization of field measurements to the obtainment of the final validated model, and highlights the main relevant aspects to be taken into account when developing spectrum usage models for their application in the context of the CR technology.

Designing a medium access control (MAC) protocol is a key for implementing any practical wireless network. In general, a MAC protocol is responsible for coordinating users in accessing spectrum resources. Given that a user in cognitive radio(CR) networks do not have priority in accessing spectrum resources, MAC protocols have to perform dynamic spectrum access (DSA) functions, including spectrum sensing, spectrum access, spectrum allocation, spectrum sharing and spectrum mobility, beside conventional control procedure. As a result, designing MAC protocols for CR networks requires more complicated consideration than that needed for conventional/primary wireless network. In this paper, we focus on two major perspectives related to the design of a CR-MAC protocol: dynamic spectrum access functions and network infrastructure. Five DSA functions are reviewed from the point of view of MAC protocol design. In addition, some important factors related to the infrastructure of a CR network including network architecture, control channel management, the number of radios in the CR device and the number of transmission data channels are also discussed. The remaining challenges and open research issues are addressed for future research to aim at obtaining practical CR-MAC protocols.

Multiple access (MA) technology is of most importance for beyond long term evolution (LTE) system. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) utilizing power domain and advanced receiver has been considered as a candidate MA technology recently. In this paper, power assignment method, which plays a key role in performance of NOMA, is investigated. The power assignment on the basis of maximizing geometric mean user throughput requires exhaustive search and thus has an unacceptable computational complexity for practical systems. To solve this problem, a novel power assignment method is proposed by exploiting tree search and characteristic of serial interference cancellation (SIC) receiver. The proposed method achieves the same performance as the exhaustive search while greatly reduces the computational complexity. On the basis of the proposed power assignment method, the performance of NOMA is investigated by link-level and system-level simulations in order to provide insight into suitability of using NOMA for future MA. Simulation results verify effectiveness of the proposed power assignment method and show NOMA is a very promising MA technology for beyond LTE system.

To solve the problems of the existing trusted network access protocols for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) mesh networks, we propose a new trusted network access protocol for WLAN mesh networks, which is abbreviated as WMN-TNAP. This protocol implements mutual user authentication and Platform-Authentication between the supplicant and Mesh Authenticator (MA), and between the supplicant and Authentication Server (AS) of a WLAN mesh network, establishes the key management system for the WLAN mesh network, and effectively prevents the platform configuration information of the supplicant, MA and AS from leaking out. Moreover, this protocol is proved secure based on the extended Strand Space Model (SSM) for trusted network access protocols.