Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication plays a pivotal role in the evolution of Internet of Things (IoT). Cellular networks are considered to be a key enabler for M2M communications, which are originally designed mainly for Human-to-Human (H2H) communications. The introduction of M2M users will cause a series of problems to traditional H2H users, i.e., interference between various traffic. Resource allocation is an effective solution to these problems. In this paper, we consider a shared resource block (RB) and power allocation in an H2H/M2M coexistence scenario, where M2M users are subdivided into delay-tolerant and delay-sensitive types. We first model the RB-power allocation problem as maximization of capacity under Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints of different types of traffic. Then, a learning framework is introduced, wherein a complex agent is built from simpler subagents, which provides the basis for distributed deployment scheme. Further, we proposed distributed Q-learning based autonomous RB-power allocation algorithm (DQ-ARPA), which enables the machine type network gateways (MTCG) as agents to learn the wireless environment and choose the RB-power autonomously to maximize M2M pairs' capacity while ensuring the QoS requirements of critical services. Simulation results indicates that with an appropriate reward design, our proposed scheme succeeds in reducing the impact of delay-tolerant machine type users on critical services in terms of SINR thresholds and outage ratios.

With the popularity of smart devices, mobile crowdsensing, in which the crowdsensing platform gathers useful data from users of smart devices, e.g., smartphones, has become a prevalent paradigm. Various incentive mechanisms have been extensively adopted for the crowdsensing platform to incentivize users of smart devices to offer sensing data. Existing works have concentrated on rewarding smart-device users for their short term effort to provide data without considering the long-term factors of smart-device users and the quality of data. Our previous work has considered the quality of data of smart-device users by incorporating the long-term reputation of smart-device users. However, our previous work only considered a quality maximization problem with budget constraints on one location. In this paper, multiple locations are considered. Stackelberg game is utilized to solve a two-stage optimization problem. In the first stage, the crowdsensing platform allocates the budget to different locations and sets price as incentives for users to maximize the total data quality. In the second stage, the users make efforts to provide data to maximize its utility. Extensive numerical simulations are conducted to evaluate proposed algorithm.

Image quality assessment (IQA) is a fundamental metric for image processing tasks (e.g., compression). With full-reference IQAs, traditional IQAs, such as PSNR and SSIM, have been used. Recently, IQAs based on deep neural networks (deep IQAs), such as LPIPS and DISTS, have also been used. It is known that image scaling is inconsistent among deep IQAs, as some perform down-scaling as pre-processing, whereas others instead use the original image size. In this paper, we show that the image scale is an influential factor that affects deep IQA performance. We comprehensively evaluate four deep IQAs on the same five datasets, and the experimental results show that image scale significantly influences IQA performance. We found that the most appropriate image scale is often neither the default nor the original size, and the choice differs depending on the methods and datasets used. We visualized the stability and found that PieAPP is the most stable among the four deep IQAs.

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) assisted by digital twins (DTs) integrate sensing-actuation loops over communication networks in various infrastructure services and applications. This study overviews the concept, methodology, and applications of the integrated communication quality estimation and control for the DT-assisted CPSs from both communications and control perspectives. The DT-assisted CPSs can be considered as networked control systems (NCSs) with virtual dynamic models of physical entities. A communication quality estimation observer (CQEO), which is an extended version of the communication disturbance observer (CDOB) utilized for time-delay compensation in NCSs, is proposed to estimate the integrated effects of the quality of services (QoS) and cyberattacks on the NCS applications. A path diversity technique with the CQEO is also proposed to achieve reliable NCSs. The proposed technique is applied to two kinds of NCSs: remote motor control and haptic communication systems. Moreover, results of the simulation on a haptic communication system show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. In the end, future research directions of the CQEO-based scheme are presented.

Tile-based virtual reality (VR) video consists of high-resolution tiles that are displayed in accordance with the users' viewing directions and a low-resolution tile that is the entire VR video and displayed when users change their viewing directions. Whether users perceive quality degradation when watching tile-based VR video depends on high-resolution tile size, the quality of high- and low-resolution tiles, and network condition. The display time of low-resolution tile (hereafter delay) affects users' perceived quality because longer delay makes users watch the low-resolution tiles longer. Since these degradations of low-resolution tiles markedly affect users' perceived quality, these points have to be considered in the quality-estimation model. Therefore, we propose a bitstream-quality-estimation model for tile-based VR video streaming services and investigate the effect of bitstream parameters and delay on tile-based VR video quality. Subjective experiments on several videos of different qualities and a comparison between other video quality-estimation models were conducted. In this paper, we prove that the proposed model can improve the quality-estimation accuracy by using the high- and low-resolution tiles' quantization parameters, resolution, framerate, and delay. Subjective experimental results show that the proposed model can estimate the quality of tile-based VR video more accurately than other video quality-estimation models.

In this paper, event-triggered control over a sensor network is studied as one of the control methods of cyber-physical systems. Event-triggered control is a method that communications occur only when the measured value is widely changed. In the proposed method, by solving an LMI (Linear Matrix Inequality) feasibility problem, an event-triggered output feedback controller such that the closed-loop system is asymptotically stable is derived. First, the problem formulation is given. Next, the control problem is reduced to an LMI feasibility problem. Finally, the proposed method is demonstrated by a numerical example.

Reducing the power consumption of capsule endoscopy is essential for its further development. We introduce K-SVD dictionary learning to design a dictionary for sparse coding, and improve reconstruction accuracy of capsule endoscopic images captured using compressed sensing. At a compression ratio of 20%, the proposed method improves image quality by approximately 4.4 dB for the peak signal-to-noise ratio.

To sustain and expand the agricultural economy even as its workforce shrinks, the efficiency of farm operations must be improved. One key to efficiency improvement is completely unmanned driving of farm machines, which requires stable monitoring and control of machines from remote sites, a safety system to ensure safe autonomous driving even without manual operations, and precise positioning in not only small farm fields but also wider areas. As possible solutions for those issues, we have developed technologies of wireless network quality prediction, an end-to-end overlay network, machine vision for safety and positioning, network cooperated vehicle control and autonomous tractor control and conducted experiments in actual field environments. Experimental results show that: 1) remote monitoring and control can be seamlessly continued even when connection between the tractor and the remote site needs to be switched across different wireless networks during autonomous driving; 2) the safety of the autonomous driving can automatically be ensured by detecting both the existence of people in front of the unmanned tractor and disturbance of network quality affecting remote monitoring operation; and 3) the unmanned tractor can continue precise autonomous driving even when precise positioning by satellite systems cannot be performed.

This paper studies using price incentives to shift bandwidth demand from peak to non-peak periods. In particular, cost discounts decrease as peak monthly usage increases. We take into account the delay sensitivity of different apps: during peak hours, the usage of hard real-time applications (HRAS) is not counted in the user's monthly data cap, while the usage of other applications (OAS) is counted in the user's monthly data cap. As a result, users may voluntarily delay or abandon OAS in order to get a higher fee discount. Then, a new data rate control algorithm is proposed. The algorithm allocates the data rate according to the priority of the source, which is determined by two factors: (I) the allocated data rate; and (II) the waiting time.

Code smells can be detected using tools such as a static analyzer that detects code smells based on source code metrics. Developers perform refactoring activities based on the result of such detection tools to improve source code quality. However, such an approach can be considered as reactive refactoring, i.e., developers react to code smells after they occur. This means that developers first suffer the effects of low-quality source code before they start solving code smells. In this study, we focus on proactive refactoring, i.e., refactoring source code before it becomes smelly. This approach would allow developers to maintain source code quality without having to suffer the impact of code smells. To support the proactive refactoring process, we propose a technique to detect decaying modules, which are non-smelly modules that are about to become smelly. We present empirical studies on open source projects with the aim of studying the characteristics of decaying modules. Additionally, to facilitate developers in the refactoring planning process, we perform a study on using a machine learning technique to predict decaying modules and report a factor that contributes most to the performance of the model under consideration.

Recently, information centric network (ICN) has attracted attention because cached content delivery from router's cache storage improves quality of service (QoS) by reducing redundant traffic. Then, adaptive video streaming is applied to ICN to improve client's quality of experience (QoE). However, in the previous approaches for the cache control, the router implicitly caches the content requested by a user for the other users who may request the same content subsequently. As a result, these approaches are not able to use the cache effectively to improve client's QoE because the cached contents are not always requested by the other users. In addition, since the previous cache control does not consider network congestion state, the adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithm works incorrectly and causes congestion, and then QoE degrades due to unnecessary congestion. In this paper, we propose an explicit cache placement notification for congestion-aware adaptive video streaming over ICN (CASwECPN) to mitigate congestion. CASwECPN encourages explicit feedback according to the congestion detection in the router on the communication path. While congestion is detected, the router caches the requested content to its cache storage and explicitly notifies the client that the requested content is cached (explicit cache placement and notification) to mitigate congestion quickly. Then the client retrieve the explicitly cached content in the router detecting congestion according to the general procedures of ICN. The simulation experiments show that CASwECPN improves both QoS and client's QoE in adaptive video streaming that adjusts the bitrate adaptively every video segment download. As a result, CASwECPN effectively uses router's cache storage as compared to the conventional cache control policies.

A non-volatile memory (NVM) employing MTJ has a lot of strong points such as read/write performance, best endurance and operating-voltage compatibility with standard CMOS. However, it consumes a lot of energy when writing the data. This becomes an obstacle when applying to battery-operated mobile devices. To solve this problem, we propose an approach to augment the capability of the precision scaling technique for the write operation in NVM. Precision scaling is an approximate computing technique to reduce the bit width of data (i.e. precision) for energy reduction. When writing image data to NVM with the precision scaling, the write energy and the image quality are changed according to the write time and the target bit range. We propose an energy-efficient approximate storing scheme for non-volatile flip-flops and a magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) that allows us to write the data by optimizing the bit positions to split the data and the write time for each bit range. By using the statistical model, we obtained optimal values for the write time and the targeted bit range under the trade-off between the write energy reduction and image quality degradation. Simulation results have demonstrated that by using these optimal values the write energy can be reduced up to 50% while maintaining the acceptable image quality. We also investigated the relationship between the input images and the output image quality when using this approach in detail. In addition, we evaluated the energy benefits when applying our approach to nine types of image processing including linear filters and edge detectors. Results showed that the write energy is reduced by further 12.5% at the maximum.

The spread of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the generation of large amounts of data, requiring massive communication, computing, and storage resources. Cloud computing plays an important role in realizing most IoT applications classified as massive machine type communication and cyber-physical control applications in vertical domains. To handle the increasing amount of IoT data, it is important to reduce the traffic concentrated in the cloud by distributing the computing and storage resources to the network edge side and to suppress the latency of the IoT applications. In this paper, we first present a recent literature review on fog/edge computing and data aggregation as representative traffic reduction technologies for efficiently utilizing communication, computing, and storage resources in IoT systems, and then focus on data aggregation control minimizing the latency in an IoT gateway. We then present a unified modeling for statistical and nonstatistical data aggregation and analyze its latency. We analytically derive the Laplace-Stieltjes transform and average of the stationary distribution of the latency and approximate the average latency; we subsequently apply it to an adaptive aggregation number control for the time-variant data arrival. The transient traffic characteristics, that is, the absorption of traffic fluctuations realizing a stable optimal latency, were clarified through a simulation with a time-variant Poisson input and non-Poisson inputs, such as a Beta input, which is a typical IoT traffic model.

For 360-degree video streaming, a 360-degree video is divided into segments temporally (i.e. some seconds). Each segment consists of multiple video tiles spatially. In this paper, we propose a tile quality selection method for tile-based video streaming. The proposed method suppresses the spatial quality variation within the viewport caused by a change of the viewport region due to user head movement. In the proposed method, the client checks whether the difference in quality level between the viewport and the region around the viewport is large, and if so, reduces it when assigning quality levels. Simulation results indicate that when the segment length is long, quality variation can be suppressed without significantly reducing the perceived video quality (in terms of bitrate). In particular, the quality variation within the viewport can be greatly suppressed. Furthermore, we verify that the proposed method is effective in reducing quality variation within the viewport and across segments without changing the total download size.

Recently, adaptive streaming over information centric network (ICN) has attracted attention. In adaptive streaming over ICN, the bitrate adaptation of the client often overestimates a bitrate for available bandwidth due to congestion because the client implicitly estimates congestion status from the content download procedures of ICN. As a result, streaming overestimated bitrate results in QoE degradation of clients such as cause of a stall time and frequent variation of the bitrate. In this paper, we propose a congestion-aware adaptive streaming over ICN combined with the explicit congestion notification (CAAS with ECN) to avoid QoE degradation. CAAS with ECN encourages explicit feedback of congestion detected in the router on the communication path, and introduces the upper band of the selectable bitrate (bitrate-cap) based on explicit feedback from the router to the bitrate adaptation of the clients. We evaluate the effectiveness of CAAS with ECN for client's QoE degradation due to congestion and behavior on the QoS metrics based on throughput. The simulation experiments show that the bitrate adjustment for all the clients improves QoE degradation and QoE fairness due to effective congestion avoidance.

This letter presents an image quality assessment (IQA) metric for scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images based on texture inpainting. Inspired by the observation that the texture information of SEM images is quite sensitive to distortions, a texture inpainting network is first trained to extract texture features. Then the weights of the trained texture inpainting network are transferred to the IQA network to help it learn an effective texture representation of the distorted image. Finally, supervised fine-tuning is conducted on the IQA network to predict the image quality score. Experimental results on the SEM image quality dataset demonstrate the advantages of the presented method.

Autonomous mobility machines, such as self-driving cars, transportation robots, and automated construction machines, are promising to support or enrich human lives. To further improve such machines, they will be connected to the network via wireless links to be managed, monitored, or remotely operated. The autonomous mobility machines must have self-status based on their positioning system to safely conduct their operations without colliding with other objects. The self-status is not only essential for machine operation but also it is valuable for wireless link quality management. This paper presents self-status-based wireless link quality prediction and evaluates its performance by using a prototype mobility robot combined with a wireless LAN system. The developed robot has functions to measure the throughput and receive signal strength indication and obtain self-status details such as location, direction, and odometry data. Prediction performance is evaluated in offline processing by using the dataset gathered in an indoor experiment. The experiments clarified that, in the 5.6 GHz band, link quality prediction using self-status of the robot forecasted the throughput several seconds into the future, and the prediction accuracies were investigated as dependent on time window size of the target throughput, bandwidth, and frequency gap.

An inpainting method via sparse representation based on a new phaseless quality metric is presented in this paper. Since power spectra, phaseless features, of local regions within images enable more successful representation of their texture characteristics compared to their pixel values, a new quality metric based on these phaseless features is newly derived for image representation. Specifically, the proposed method enables spare representation of target signals, i.e., target patches, including missing intensities by monitoring errors converged by phase retrieval as the novel phaseless quality metric. This is the main contribution of our study. In this approach, the phase retrieval algorithm used in our method has the following two important roles: (1) derivation of the new quality metric that can be derived even for images including missing intensities and (2) conversion of phaseless features, i.e., power spectra, to pixel values, i.e., intensities. Therefore, the above novel approach solves the existing problem of not being able to use better features or better quality metrics for inpainting. Results of experiments showed that the proposed method using sparse representation based on the new phaseless quality metric outperforms previously reported methods that directly use pixel values for inpainting.

The communications quality of content delivery networks (CDNs), which are geographically distributed networks that have been optimized for content delivery, deteriorates when interflow congestion conditions are severe. Herein, we propose an adaptive server and path switching scheme that is based on the estimated acquisition throughput of each path. We also provide simulation results that show our proposed method can provide higher throughput performance levels than existing methods.

Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) technology improves CPU throughput, but also causes unpredictable performance fluctuations for co-running workloads. Although recent major SMT processors have adopted some techniques to promote hardware support for quality-of-service (QoS), achieving both precise performance guarantees and high throughput on SMT architectures is still a challenging open problem. In this paper, we demonstrate through some comprehensive investigations on a cycle-accurate simulator that not only almost all in-core resources suffer from severe contention as workloads vary but also there is a non-linear relationship between performance and available quotas of resources. We consider these observations as the fundamental reason leading to the challenging problem above. Thus, we introduce QoSMT, a novel hardware scheme that leverages a closed-loop controlling mechanism consisting of detection, prediction and adjustment to enforce precise performance guarantees for specific targets, e.g. achieving 85%, 90% or 95% of the performance of a workload running alone respectively. We implement a prototype on GEM5 simulator. Experimental results show that the average control error is only 1.4%, 0.5% and 3.6%.