In satellite positioning, both the reception of ranging signals and the acquisition of navigation messages are necessary. In general, the acquisition of navigation messages does not always require the reception of radiowaves; however, when radiowaves are used for acquisition, a period of continuous reception significantly longer than one second is required. The European satellite positioning system, Galileo, started broadcasting new navigation messages from August 2022. The improvement is based on a secondary synchronization pattern, secondary forward error correction, and reduced ephemeris to aid in the rapid recovery from interruptions in message acquisition caused by temporary deterioration in radio reception. This paper evaluates the recovery characteristics from interruptions in navigation message acquisition by moving reception of this improved I/NAV navigation message.

In this study, the most recent topics related to the precise global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning technology are discussed. Precise positioning here means that the position can be estimated with centimeter-level accuracy. Technologies supporting precise GNSS positioning include an increase in the number of positioning satellites and the availability of correction data. Smartphones are now capable of centimeter-level positioning. For correction data, real-time kinematic positioning (RTK)-GNSS, which has primarily been used in surveying, and the new precise point positioning-real-time kinematic (PPP-RTK) and PPP, are garnering attention. The Japanese Quasi-Zenith Satellite System was among the first to broadcast PPP-RTK and PPP correction data free of charge. RTKLIB has long been popular for both real-time and post-processing precise positioning. Here, I briefly present a method for improving this software. Precise positioning technology remains crucial as the use of GNSS in highly reliable applications, such as advanced driver-assistance systems, autonomous drones, and robots, is increasing. To ensure precise positioning, improving multipath mitigation techniques is essential; therefore, key factors related to these techniques are discussed. I also introduce my efforts to develop software GNSS receivers for young researchers and engineers as a basis for this purpose. This study is aimed at introducing these technologies in light of the most recent trends.

Software refactoring is an important process in software development. During software refactoring, code smell is a popular research topic that refers to design or implementation flaws in the software. Large class is one of the most concerning code smells in software refactoring. Detecting and refactoring such problem has a profound impact on software quality. In past years, software metrics and clustering techniques have commonly been used for the large class detection. However, deep-learning-based approaches have also received considerable attention in recent studies. In this study, we apply graph neural networks (GNNs), an important division of deep learning, to address the problem of large class detection. First, to support the extensive data requirements of the deep learning task, we apply a semiautomatic approach to generate a substantial number of data samples. Next, we design a new type of directed heterogeneous graph (DHG) as an input graph using the methods similarity matrix and software metrics. We construct an input graph for each class sample and make the graph classification with GNNs to identify the smelly classes. In our experiments, we apply three typical GNN model architectures for large class detection and compare the results with those of previous studies. The results show that the proposed approach can achieve more accurate and stable detection performance.

With the popularization of software defined networks, switch migration as an important network management strategy has attracted increasing attention. Most existing switch migration strategies only consider local conditions and simple load thresholds, without fully considering the overall optimization and dynamics of the network. Therefore, this article proposes a switch migration algorithm based on global optimization. This algorithm adds a load prediction module to the migration model, determines the migration controller, and uses an improved whale optimization algorithm to determine the target controller and its surrounding controller set. Based on the load status of the controller and the traffic priority of the switch to be migrated, the optimal migration switch set is determined. The experimental results show that compared to existing schemes, the algorithm proposed in this paper improves the average flow processing efficiency by 15% to 40%, reduces switch migration times, and enhances the security of the controller.

A 0.13mJ/prediction with 68.6% accuracy wired-logic deep neural network (DNN) processor is developed in a single 16-nm field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. Compared with conventional von-Neumann architecture DNN processors, the energy efficiency is greatly improved by eliminating DRAM/BRAM access. A technical challenge for conventional wired-logic processors is the large amount of hardware resources required for implementing large-scale neural networks. To implement a large-scale convolutional neural network (CNN) into a single FPGA chip, two technologies are introduced: (1) a sparse neural network known as a non-linear neural network (NNN), and (2) a newly developed raster-scan wired-logic architecture. Furthermore, a novel high-level synthesis (HLS) technique for wired-logic processor is proposed. The proposed HLS technique enables the automatic generation of two key components: (1) Verilog-hardware description language (HDL) code for a raster-scan-based wired-logic processor and (2) test bench code for conducting equivalence checking. The automated process significantly mitigates the time and effort required for implementation and debugging. Compared with the state-of-the-art FPGA-based processor, 238 times better energy efficiency is achieved with only a slight decrease in accuracy on the CIFAR-100 task. In addition, 7 times better energy efficiency is achieved compared with the state-of-the-art network-optimized application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC).

In the software testing phase, software reliability growth models (SRGMs) are commonly used to evaluate the reliability of software systems. Traditional SRGMs are restricted by their assumption of a continuous growth pattern for the failure detection rate (FDR) throughout the testing phase. However, the assumption is compromised by Change-Point phenomena, where FDR fluctuations stem from variations in testing personnel or procedural modifications, leading to reduced prediction accuracy and compromised software reliability assessments. Therefore, the objective of this study is to improve software reliability prediction using a novel approach that combines genetic algorithm (GA) and deep learning-based SRGMs to account for the Change-point phenomenon. The proposed approach uses a GA to dynamically combine activation functions from various deep learning-based SRGMs into a new mutated SRGM called MuSRGM. The MuSRGM captures the advantages of both concave and S-shaped SRGMs and is better suited to capture the change-point phenomenon during testing and more accurately reflect actual testing situations. Additionally, failure data is treated as a time series and analyzed using a combination of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Attention mechanisms. To assess the performance of MuSRGM, we conducted experiments on three distinct failure datasets. The results indicate that MuSRGM outperformed the baseline method, exhibiting low prediction error (MSE) on all three datasets. Furthermore, MuSRGM demonstrated remarkable generalization ability on these datasets, remaining unaffected by uneven data distribution. Therefore, MuSRGM represents a highly promising advanced solution that can provide increased accuracy and applicability for software reliability assessment during the testing phase.

Recent embedded systems require both traditional machinery control and information processing, such as network and GUI handling. A dual-OS platform consolidates a real-time OS (RTOS) and general-purpose OS (GPOS) to realize efficient software development on one physical processor. Although the dual-OS platform attracts increasing attention, it often suffers from energy inefficiency in the GPOS for guaranteeing real-time responses of the RTOS. This paper proposes an energy minimization method called DVFS virtualization, which allows running multiple DVFS policies dedicated to the RTOS and GPOS, respectively. The experimental evaluation using a commercial microcontroller showed that the proposed hardware could change the supply voltage within 500 ns and reduce the energy consumption of typical applications by 60 % in the best case compared to conventional dual-OS platforms. Furthermore, evaluation using a commercial microprocessor achieved a 15 % energy reduction of practical open-source software at best.

In software defined radio systems, a channelizer plays an important role in extracting the desired signals from a wideband signal. Compared to the conventional methods, the proposed scheme provides a solution to design a digital channelizer extracting the multiple subband signals at different center frequencies with low complexity. To do this, this paper formulates the problem as an optimization problem, which minimizes the required multiplications number subject to the constraints of the ripple in the passbands and the stopbands for single channel and combined multiple channels. In addition, a solution to solve the optimization problem is also presented and the corresponding structure is demonstrated. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme requires smaller number of the multiplications than other conventional methods. Moreover, unlike other methods, this structure can process signals with different bandwidths at different center frequencies simultaneously only by changing the status of the corresponding multiplexers without hardware reimplementation.

This paper presents a unified software and hardware wireless AI platform (USHWAP) for developing and evaluating machine learning in wireless systems. The platform integrates multi-software development such as MATLAB and Python with hardware platforms like FPGA and SDR, allowing for flexible and scalable device and edge computing application development. The USHWAP is implemented and validated using FPGAs and SDRs. Wireless signal classification, wireless LAN sensing, and rate adaptation are used as examples to showcase the platform's capabilities. The platform enables versatile development, including software simulation and real-time hardware implementation, offering flexibility and scalability for multiple applications. It is intended to be used by wireless-AI researchers to develop and evaluate intelligent algorithms in a laboratory environment.

Wireless technology improvements have been continually increasing, resulting in greater needs for system design and implementation to accommodate all newly emerging standards. As a result, developing a system that ensures compatibility with numerous wireless systems has sparked interest. As a result of their flexibility and scalability over alternative wireless design options, software-defined radios (SDRs) are highly motivated for wireless device modelling. This research paper delves into the difficulties of designing a reconfigurable multi modulation baseband modulator for SDR systems that can handle a variety of wireless protocols. This research paper has proposed an area-efficient Reconfigurable Baseband Modulator (RBM) model to accomplish multi modulation scheme and resolve the adaptability and flexibility issues with the wide range of wireless standards. This also presents the feasibility of using a multi modulation baseband modulator to maximize adaptability with the least possible computational complexity overhead in the SDR system for next-generation wireless communication systems and provides parameterization. Finally, the re-configurability is evaluated concerning the appropriate symbols generations and analyzed its performance metrics through hardware synthesize results.

With the recent commercialization of fifth-generation mobile communication systems (5G), wireless communications are being used in various fields. Accordingly, the number of situations in which sensitive information, such as personal data is handled in wireless communications is increasing, and so is the demand for confidentiality. To meet this demand, we proposed a chaos-based radio-encryption modulation that combines physical layer confidentiality and channel coding effects, and we have demonstrated its effectiveness through computer simulations. However, there are no demonstrations of performances using real signals. In this study, we constructed a transmission system using Universal Software Radio Peripheral, a type of software-defined radio, and its control software LabVIEW. We conducted wired transmission experiments for the practical use of radio-frequency encrypted modulation. The results showed that a gain of 0.45dB at a bit error rate of 10-3 was obtained for binary phase-shift keying, which has the same transmission efficiency as the proposed method under an additive white Gaussian noise channel. Similarly, a gain of 10dB was obtained under fading conditions. We also evaluated the security ability and demonstrated that chaos modulation has both information-theoretic security and computational security.

Defect prediction approaches have been greatly contributing to software quality assurance activities such as code review or unit testing. Just-in-time defect prediction approaches are developed to predict whether a commit is a defect-inducing commit or not. Prior research has shown that commit-level prediction is not enough in terms of effort, and a defective commit may contain both defective and non-defective files. As the defect prediction community is promoting fine-grained granularity prediction approaches, we propose our novel class-level prediction, which is finer-grained than the file-level prediction, based on the files of the commits in this research. We designed our model for Python projects and tested it with ten open-source Python projects. We performed our experiment with two settings: setting with product metrics only and setting with product metrics plus commit information. Our investigation was conducted with three different classifiers and two validation strategies. We found that our model developed by random forest classifier performs the best, and commit information contributes significantly to the product metrics in 10-fold cross-validation. We also created a commit-based file-level prediction for the Python files which do not have the classes. The file-level model also showed a similar condition as the class-level model. However, the results showed a massive deviation in time-series validation for both levels and the challenge of predicting Python classes and files in a realistic scenario.

At ToSC 2021, Sakamoto et al. proposed Rocca, an AES-based encryption scheme, for Beyond 5G applications. They presented a class of round functions that achieved impressive performance in software by improving the design strategy for constructing an efficient AES-based round function that was proposed by Jean and Nikolić at FSE 2016. In this paper, we revisit their design strategy for finding more efficient round functions. We add new requirements further to improve speed of Rocca. Specifically, we focus on the number of temporary registers for updating the round function and search for round functions with the minimum number of required temporary registers. As a result, we find a class of round functions with only one required temporary register, while round function of Rocca requires two temporary registers. We show that new round functions are significantly faster than that of Rocca on the latest Ice Lake and Tiger Lake architectures. We emphasize that, regarding speed, our round functions are optimal among the Rocca class of round functions because the search described in this paper covers all candidates that satisfy the requirements of Rocca.

Industrial networks need to provide reliable communication services, usually in a redundant transmission (RT) manner. In the past few years, several device-redundancy-based, layer 2 solutions have been proposed. However, with the evolution of industrial networks to the Industrial Internet, these methods can no longer work properly in the non-redundancy, layer 3 environments. In this paper, an SDN-based reliable communication framework is proposed for the Industrial Internet. It can provide reliable communication guarantees for mission-critical applications while servicing non-critical applications in a best-effort transmission manner. Specifically, it first implements an RT-based reliable communication method using the Industrial Internet's link-redundancy feature. Next, it presents a redundant synchronization mechanism to prevent end systems from receiving duplicate data. Finally, to maximize the number of critical flows in it (an NP-hard problem), two ILP-based routing & scheduling algorithms are also put forward. These two algorithms are optimal (Scheduling with Unconstrained Routing, SUR) and suboptimal (Scheduling with Minimum length Routing, SMR). Numerous simulations are conducted to evaluate its effectiveness. The results show that it can provide reliable, duplicate-free services to end systems. Its reliable communication method performs better than the conventional best-effort transmission method in terms of packet delivery success ratio in layer 3 networks. In addition, its scheduling algorithm, SMR, performs well on the experimental topologies (with average quality of 93% when compared to SUR), and the time overhead is acceptable.

With the rapid increase in the number of CPU cores, software that can utilize these many cores is required. A lock-free algorithm based on compare-and-swap (CAS) operations is one of the concurrency control methods to implement such multi-threading software. A multi-word CAS (MwCAS) operation is an extension of a CAS operation to swap multiple words atomically. However, we noticed that the performance of the existing MwCAS implementation is limited because of garbage collection even if in a low-contention environment. To achieve high performance in low-contention workloads, we propose a new MwCAS algorithm without garbage collection. Experimental results show that our approach is three to five times faster than implementation with garbage collection in low-contention workloads. Moreover, the performance of the proposed method is also superior in a high-contention environment.

One of the features of a software-defined network (SDN) is a logically centralized control plane hosting one or more SDN controllers. As SDN controller placement can impact network performance, it is widely studied as the controller placement problem (CPP). For a cost-effective network design, network providers need to minimize the number of SDN controllers used in the network since each SDN controller incurs installation and maintenance costs. Moreover, the network providers need to deal with the failure of SDN controllers. Existing studies that consider SDN controller failures use the scheme of connecting each SDN switch to one Master controller and one or more Slave controllers. The problem with this scheme is that the computing capacity of each SDN controller cannot be used efficiently since one SDN controller handles the load of all SDN switches connected to it. The number of SDN controllers required can be reduced by distributing the load of each SDN switch among multiple SDN controllers. This paper proposes a controller placement model that allows the distribution against SDN controller failures. The proposed model determines the ratios of computing capacity demanded by each SDN switch on the SDN controllers connected to it. The proposed model also determines the number and placement of SDN controllers and the assignment of each SDN switch to SDN controllers. Controller placement is determined so that a network provider can continue to manage all SDN switches if no more than a certain number of SDN controller failures occur. We develop two load distribution methods: split and even-split. We formulate the proposed model with each method as integer linear programming problems. Numerical results show that the proposed model reduces the number of SDN controllers compared to a benchmark model; the maximum reduction ratio is 38.8% when the system latency requirement between an SDN switch and an SDN controller is 100[ms], the computing capacity of each SDN controller is 6 × 106[packets/s], and the maximum number of SDN controllers that can fail at the same time is one.

OpenFlow is a widely adopted implementation of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture. Since conventional network monitoring systems are unable to cope with OpenFlow networks, researchers have developed various monitoring systems tailored for OpenFlow networks. However, these existing systems either rely on a specific controller framework or an API, both of which are not part of the OpenFlow specification, and thus limit their applicability. This article proposes a transparent and low-overhead monitoring system for OpenFlow networks, referred to as Opimon. Opimon monitors the network topology, switch statistics, and flow tables in an OpenFlow network and visualizes the result through a web interface in real-time. Opimon monitors a network by interposing a proxy between the controller and switches and intercepting every OpenFlow message exchanged. This design allows Opimon to be compatible with any OpenFlow switch or controller. We tested the functionalities of Opimon on a virtual network built using Mininet and a large-scale international OpenFlow testbed (PRAGMA-ENT). Furthermore, we measured the performance overhead incurred by Opimon and demonstrated that the overhead in terms of latency and throughput was less than 3% and 5%, respectively.

To safeguard critical services and assets in a distributed environment, collaborative intrusion detection systems (CIDSs) are usually adopted to share necessary data and information among various nodes, and enhance the detection capability. For simplifying the network management, software defined networking (SDN) is an emerging platform that decouples the controller plane from the data plane. Intuitively, SDN can help lighten the management complexity in CIDSs, and a CIDS can protect the security of SDN. In practical implementation, trust management is an important approach to help identify insider attacks (or malicious nodes) in CIDSs, but the challenge is how to ensure the data integrity when evaluating the reputation of a node. Motivated by the recent development of blockchain technology, in this work, we design BlockCSDN — a framework of blockchain-based collaborative intrusion detection in SDN, and take the challenge-based CIDS as a study. The experimental results under both external and internal attacks indicate that using blockchain technology can benefit the robustness and security of CIDSs and SDN.

Global software engineering education faces unique challenges to reflect as close as possible real-world distributed team development in various forms. The complex nature of planning, collaborating, and upholding partnerships present administrative difficulties on top of budgetary constrains. These lead to limited opportunities for students to gain international experiences and for researchers to propagate educational and practical insights. This paper presents an empirical view on three different course structures conducted by the same research and educational team over a four-year time span. The courses were managed in Japan and Germany, facing cultural challenges, time-zone differences, language barriers, heterogeneous and homogeneous team structures, amongst others. Three semesters were carried out before and one during the Covid-19 pandemic. Implications for a recent focus on online education for software engineering education and future directions are discussed. As administrational and institutional differences typically do not guarantee the same number of students on all sides, distributed teams can be 1. balanced, where the number of students on one side is less than double the other, 2. unbalanced, where the number of students on one side is significantly larger than double the other, or 3. one-sided, where one side lacks students altogether. An approach for each of these three course structures is presented and discussed. Empirical analyses and reoccurring patterns in global software engineering education are reported. In the most recent three global software engineering classes, students were surveyed at the beginning and the end of the semester. The questionnaires ask students to rank how impactful they perceive factors related to global software development such as cultural aspects, team structure, language, and interaction. Results of the shift in mean perception are compared and discussed for each of the three team structures.

Software developers often use a web search engine to improve work efficiency. However, web search strategies (e.g., frequently changing web search keywords) may be different for each developer. In this study, we attempted to define a better web search strategy. Although many previous studies analyzed web search behavior in programming, they did not provide guidelines for web search strategies. To suggest guidelines for web search strategies, we asked 10 subjects four questions about programming which they had to solve, and analyzed their behavior. In the analysis, we focused on the subjects' task time and the web search metrics defined by us. Based on our experiment, to enhance the effectiveness of the search, we suggest (1) that one should not go through the next search result pages, (2) the number of keywords in queries should be suppressed, and (3) previously used keywords must be avoided when creating a new query.