The use of computing resources on network is becoming active in the Internet and private networks. OpenFlow/Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is drawing attention as a method to control network virtualization for the cloud computing services and other carrier services. This paper introduces examples of OpenFlow/SDN technologies applied to commercial cloud services. Various activities to expand coverage over commercial carrier networks are also mentioned.

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) employs a hierarchical but location independent content naming scheme. While such a location independent naming brings various benefits including efficient content delivery, mobility, and multihoming, location independent name prefixes are hard to aggregate. This poses a serious scaling issue on the efficiency of looking up content names in a huge Forwarding Information Base (FIB) by longest prefix matching, which requires seeking the longest matching prefix through all candidate prefix lengths. We propose a new scheme for efficiently looking up non-aggregatable name prefixes in a large FIB. The proposed scheme is based on the observation that the bottleneck of FIB lookup is the random accesses to the high-latency off-chip DRAM for prefix seeking and this can be reduced by exploiting the information on the longest matching prefix length in the previous hop. Our evaluation results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves FIB lookup latency with a reasonable traffic parameters observed in today's Internet.

Due to network users' different time-preference, network traffic load usually significantly differs at different time. In traffic peak time, network congestion may happen, which make the quality of service for network users deteriorate. There are essentially two ways to improve the quality of services in this case: (1) Network service providers (NSPs) over-provision network capacity by investment; (2) NSPs use time-dependent pricing (TDP) to reduce the traffic at traffic peak time. However, over-provisioning network capacity can be costly. Therefore, some researchers have proposed TDP to control congestion as well as improve the revenue of NSP. But to the best of our knowledge, all of the literature related time-dependent pricing scheme only consider the monopoly NSP case. In this paper, a duopoly NSP case is studied. The NSPs try to maximize their overall revenue by setting time-dependent price, while users choose NSP by considering their own preference, congestion status in the networks and the price set by the NSPs. Analytical and experimental results show that the TDP benefits the NSPs, but the revenue improvement is limited due to the competition effect.

As a promising wireless access standard for machine-to-machine (M2M) networks, the IEEE 802.11 task group ah has been discussing a new standard which is based on the wireless local area network (WLAN) standard. This new standard will support an enormous number of stations (STAs) such as 6,000 STAs. To mitigate degradation of the throughput and delay performance in WLANs that employ a carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol, this paper proposes a virtual grouping method which exploits the random arbitration interframe space number scheme. This method complies with the CSMA/CA protocol, which employs distributed medium access control. Moreover, power saving is another important issue for M2M networks, where most STAs are operated by primary or secondary batteries. This paper proposes a new power saving method for the IEEE 802.11ah based M2M network employing the proposed virtual grouping method. With the proposed virtual grouping and power saving methods, the STAs can save their power by as much as 90% and maintain good throughput and delay performance.

Nowadays, with spreads of inexpensive small communication devices, a number of wireless local area networks (WLANs) have been deployed even in the same building for the Internet access services. Their wireless access-points (APs) are often independently installed and managed by different groups such as departments or laboratories in a university or a company. Then, a user host can access to multiple WLANs by detecting signals from their APs, which increases the energy consumption and the operational cost. It may also degrade the communication performance by increasing interferences. In this paper, we present an AP aggregation approach to solve these problems in multiple WLAN environments by aggregating deployed APs of different groups into limited ones using virtual APs. First, we formulate the AP aggregation problem as a combinatorial optimization problem and prove the NP-completeness of its decision problem. Then, we propose its heuristic algorithm composed of five phases. We verify the effectiveness through extensive simulations using the WIMNET simulator.

In general, the sensor network has a many-to-one communication architecture wherein each node transmits its data to a sink. This leads the congested nodes to die early and nodes nears the sink suffer from significant traffic concentrations. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer based routing and MAC protocol which is compatible with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard without additional overhead. The key mechanism is to provide dynamic route discovery and route maintenance operations to avoid and mitigate the most congested nodes by monitoring link status such as link delay, buffer occupancy and residential energy. In addition, the proposed protocol also provides a dynamic tuning of BE (Binary Exponent) and frame retransmission opportunities according to the hop distance to the sink node to mitigate funnel effects. We conducted simulations, verifying the performance over existing protocols.

Recently, the border security systems attract attention as large-scale monitoring system in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In the border security systems whose aim is the monitoring of illegal immigrants and the information management in long-period, it deploys a lot of sensor nodes that have the communication and sensing functions in the detection area. Hence, the border security systems are necessary to reduce the power consumption of the whole system in order to extend the system lifetime and accurately monitor the track of illegal immigrants. In this paper, we propose two effective barrier coverage construction methods by switch dynamically operation modes of sensor nodes to reduce the operating time of the sensing function that wastes a lot of power consumption. We carry out performance evaluations by computer simulations to show the effectiveness of two proposed methods and show that the proposed methods are suitable for the border security systems.

The “Blind Men and an Elephant” is an old Indian story about a group of blind men who encounter an elephant and do not know what it is. This story describes the difficulties of understanding a large concept or global view based on only local information. Modern technologies enable us to easily obtain and retain local information. However, simply collecting local information does not give us a global view, as evident in this old story. This paper gives a concrete model of this story on the plane to theoretically and mathematically discuss it. It analyzes what information we can obtain from collected local information. For a convex target object modeling the elephant and a convex sensing area, it is proven that the size and perimeter length of the target object are the only parameters that can be observed by randomly deployed sensors modeling the blind men. To increase the number of observable parameters, this paper argues that non-convex sensing areas are important and introduces composite sensor nodes as an approach to implement non-convex sensing areas. The paper also derives a model on the discrete space and analyzes it. The analysis results on the discrete space are applicable to some network related issues such as link quality estimation in a part of a network based on end-to-end probing.

Active measurement is an end-to-end measurement technique that can estimate network performance. The active measurement techniques of PASTA-based probing and periodic-probing are widely used. However, for the active measurement of delay and loss, Baccelli et al. reported that there are many other probing policies that can achieve appropriate estimation if we can assume the non-intrusive context (the load of the probe packets is ignored in the non-intrusive context). While the best policy in terms of accuracy is periodic-probing with fixed interval, it suffers from the phase-lock phenomenon created by synchronization with network congestion. The important point in avoiding the phase-lock phenomenon is to shift the cycle of the probe packet injection by adding fluctuations. In this paper, we analyse the optimal magnitude of fluctuations corresponding to the given autocovariance function of the target process. Moreover, we introduce some evaluation examples to provide guidance on designing experiments to network researchers and practitioners. The examples yield insights on the relationships among measurement parameters, network parameters, and the optimal fluctuation magnitude.

We analyze a power adaptation method to maximize the achievable rate under the finite block length regime, for MIMO block fading channel with channel state information available at both the transmitter and receiver side. We find a convex approximation to the lower bound of the achievable rate, and it leads to a simple power and rate adaptation method. We show that the method achieves near optimal channel rate under the finite block length regime. Compared to the classical waterfilling method, the proposed method can further improve achievable rate especially for short block lengths.

To mitigate the impact of the frequency selectivity of the wireless channel on the initial ranging (IR) process in 802.16 based WiMax systems, several well known pre-equalization techniques applied in the IR are first analyzed in detail, and the optimal pre-equalization scheme is further improved for the IR by overcoming its weaknesses. A numerical simulation shows that the proposed pre-equalization scheme significantly improves the performance of multiuser detection and parameter estimation in the IR process.

This paper studies the performance of code-aided (CA) soft-information based carrier phase recovery, which iteratively exploits the extrinsic information from channel decoder to improve the accuracy of phase synchronization. To tackle the problem of strong coupling between phase recovery and decoding, a semi-analytical model is proposed to express the distribution of extrinsic information as a function of phase offset. Piecewise approximation of the hyperbolic tangent function is employed to linearize the expression of soft symbol decision. Building on this model, open-loop characteristic and closed-loop performance of CA iterative soft decision-directed (ISDD) carrier phase synchronizer are derived in closed-form. Monte Carlo simulation results corroborate that the proposed expressions are able to characterize the performance of CA ISDD carrier phase recovery for systems with different channel codes.

Optical Code Division Multiplexing (OCDM) is a multiplexing technology for constructing future all-optical networks. Compared with other multiplexing technologies, it can be easily controlled and can establish lightpaths of smaller granularity. However, previous research has revealed that OCDM networks are vulnerable to cycle attacks. Cycle attacks are caused by multi-access interference (MAI), which is crosstalk noise on the same wavelength in OCDM networks. If cycle attacks occur, they disrupt all network services immediately. Previous research has proposed a logical topology design that is free of cycle attacks. However, this design assumes that path assignment is centrally controlled. It also does not consider the delay between each node and the centralized controller. In this paper, we propose novel logical topology designs that are free of cycle attacks and methods of establishing paths. The basic concepts underlying our methods are to autonomously construct a cycle-attack-free logical topology and to establish lightpaths by using a distributed controller. Our methods can construct a logical network and establish lightpaths more easily than the previous method can. In addition, they have network scalability because of their distributed control. Simulation results show that our methods have lower loss probabilities than the previous method and better mean hop counts than the centralized control approach.

Increasing demand for multicast transmission necessitates service-specific and precise quality-of-service (QoS) control. Since existing works provided limited methodologies such as best path selection, their ability is restricted by the given topology and the congestion status of the network. This paper proposes a fanout set partition (FSP) scheme to realize QoS-guaranteed multicast transmission. The FSP scheme adjusts the delay of the multicast flow by dividing its fanout set into smaller subsets. Since it is carried out based on the service requirement, service-specific QoS control is implemented. Mathematical analysis investigates the trade-offs, and the performance evaluation results show significant improvements under various traffic conditions.

With the diffusion of web services caused by the appearance of a new architecture known as cloud computing, a large number of websites have been used by attackers as hopping sites to attack other websites and user terminals because many vulnerable websites are constructed and managed by unskilled users. To construct hopping sites, many attackers force victims to download malware by using vulnerabilities in web applications. To protect websites from these malware infection attacks, conventional methods, such as using anti-virus software, filter files from attackers using pattern files generated by analyzing conventional malware files collected by security vendors. In addition, certain anti-virus software uses a behavior blocking approach, which monitors malicious file activities and modifications. These methods can detect malware files that are already known. However, it is difficult to detect malware that is different from known malware. It is also difficult to define malware since legitimate software files can become malicious depending on the situation. We previously proposed an access filtering method based on communication opponents, which are other servers or terminals that connect with our web honeypots, of attacks collected by web honeypots, which collect malware infection attacks to websites by using actual vulnerable web applications. In this blacklist-based method, URLs or IP addresses, which are used in malware infection attacks collected by web honeypots, are listed in a blacklist, and accesses to and from websites are filtered based on the blacklist. To reveal the effects in an actual attack situation on the Internet, we evaluated the detection ratio of anti-virus software, our method, and a composite of both methods. Our evaluation revealed that anti-virus software detected approximately 50% of malware files, our method detected approximately 98% of attacks, and the composite of the two methods could detect approximately 99% of attacks.

This paper presents a joint decoding scheme for the overloaded multiple input multiple output (MIMO)-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. In the overloaded MIMO system, the number of receive antenna elements is less than that of transmit antenna elements. It has been shown that under the overloaded condition the performance of joint detection deteriorates while diversity reduces the amount of performance degradation caused by signal multiplexing. Thus, this paper proposes a maximum likelihood joint decoding scheme of block coded signals in the overloaded MIMO-OFDM system. The performance of joint decoding over Rayleigh fading channels is evaluated through simulation and experiments. The simulation shows that the diversity through block coding prevents any performance degradation in the joint decoding of 2 Hamming coded signal streams. However, there are differences between numerical results obtained through computer simulation and experiments owing to channel estimation errors.

As a first step towards the realization of high-efficiency on-chip antennas for 60GHz-band wireless personal area networks, this paper proposes the fabrication of a patch antenna placed on a 200µm thick dielectric resin and fed through a hole in a silicon chip. Despite the large tan δ of the adopted material (0.015 at 50GHz), the thick resin reduces the conductor loss at the radiating element and a radiation efficiency of 78%, which includes the connecting loss from the bottom is predicted by simulation. This calculated value is verified in the millimeter-wave band by experiments in a reverberation chamber. Six stirrers are installed, one on each wall in the chamber, to create a statistical Rayleigh environment. The manufactured prototype antenna with a test jig demonstrates the radiation efficiency of 75% in the reverberation chamber. This agrees well with the simulated value of 76%, while the statistical measurement uncertainty of our handmade reverberation chamber is calculated as ±0.14dB.

In wireless networks, how to provide reliable data transfer is an important and challenging issue due to channel fading and interference. Several approaches, e.g., Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ), Hybrid ARQ (HARQ) and Network Coding (NC), are used to enhance reliability of transmission in wireless networks. However, we note that these schemes implement the data recovery process for mixed unicast and multicast (MUM) communications by simply separating the process into two phases, unicast and multicast phase. This is inefficient and expensive. In this paper, we propose an efficient retransmission scheme with network coding for MUM transmission, aiming at improving bandwidth utilization. UMNC searches for coding opportunities from both unicast and multicast flows, which offer the potential benefit of improved recovery in the event of packet loss. We theoretically prove that UMNC can effectively reduce the total number of retransmissions and thus improve bandwidth efficiency, compared with existing schemes.

This paper proposes a novel heterodyne multiband multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) receiver with baseband automatic gain control (AGC) for cognitive radios. The proposed receiver uses heterodyne reception implemented with a wide-passband band-pass filter in the radio frequency (RF) stage to be able to receive signals in arbitrary frequency bands. Even when an RF Hilbert transformer is utilized in the receiver, image-band interference occurs due to the imperfection of the Hilbert transformer. In the receiver, analog baseband AGC is introduced to prevent the baseband signals exceeding the voltage reference of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). This paper proposes a novel technique to estimate the imperfection of the Hilbert transformer in the heterodyne multiband MIMO receiver with baseband AGC. The proposed technique estimates not only the imperfection of the Hilbert transformer but also the AGC gain ratio, and analog devices imperfection in the feedback loop, which enables to offset the imperfection of the Hilbert transformer. The performance of the proposed receiver is verified by using computer simulations. As a result, the required resolution of the ADC is 9 bits in the proposed receiver. Moreover, the proposed receiver has less computational complexity than that with the baseband interference cancellation unless a frequency band is changed every 9 packets or less.

This paper proposes an improved discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-based channel estimation technique for time domain synchronous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (TDS-OFDM) communication systems. The proposed technique, based on the concept of significant channel tap detector (SCTD) scheme, can effectively improve the system performance of TDS-OFDM systems. The correlation of two successive preambles is employed to estimate the average noise power as the threshold for obtaining the SCTD threshold estimation error and loss path information in large delay spread channel environments. The proposed estimation scheme roughly predicts the noise power in order to choose the significant channel taps to estimate the channel impulse response. Some comparative simulations are given to show that the proposed technique has the potential to achieve bit error rate performance superior to that of the conventional least squares channel estimation.

Relay selection is a promising technique with which to achieve remarkable gains in multi-relay cooperative networks. Opportunistic relaying (OR) and selection cooperation (SC) are two major relay selection schemes for dual-hop decode-and-forward cooperative networks; they have been shown to be globally outage-optimal under an aggregate power constraint. However, due to channel fluctuations, the channel state information (CSI) used in the selection process may become outdated and differ from the CSI during the actual transmission of data. In this work, we study the effect of outdated CSI on OR and threshold-based SC (TSC) schemes under independent but not necessarily identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels. The source can possibly cooperate with the best relay for data transmission, with the destination performing maximal ratio combining of the signals from the source and the relay. In particular, we analyze the average symbol error probability (ASEP) of OR and TSC with outdated CSI by deriving approximate but tight closed-form expressions for the moment generating function of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio. We also investigate the asymptotic behavior of the ASEP. The results show that the diversity orders of OR and TSC reduce to one and two, respectively, due to the outdated CSI. However, TSC achieves full spatial diversity order when the relay-to-destination CSI is perfect. Finally, to verify the analytical results Monte Carlo simulations are performed, in which OR attains better ASEP than TSC in a perfect CSI scenario, while TSC is less susceptible to outdated CSI.

In this paper, joint transmit/receive frequency-domain equalization (FDE) is proposed for analog network coded (ANC) single-carrier (SC) bi-directional multi-antenna relay. In the proposed scheme, diversity transmission using transmit FDE is performed at relay station (RS) equipped with multiple antennas while receive FDE is carried out at base station (BS) and mobile terminal (MT) both equipped with single antenna. The transmit and receive FDE weights are jointly optimized so as to minimize the end-to-end mean square error (MSE). We evaluate, by computer simulation, the throughput performance and show that the joint transmit/receive FDE obtains the spatial and frequency diversity gains and accordingly achieve better throughput performance compared to either the transmit FDE only or the receive FDE only. It is also shown that ANC SC bi-directional multi-antenna relay can extend the communication coverage area for the given required throughput compared to conventional direct transmission.

In the literature, many resource allocation schemes have been proposed for multi-hop networks. However, the analyses provided focus mainly on the single cell case. Inter-cell interference severely degrades the performance of a wireless mobile network. Therefore, incorporating the analysis of inter-cell interference into the study of a scheme is required to more fully understand the performance of that scheme. The authors of this paper have proposed a parallel relaying scheme for a 2-hop OFDMA virtual cellular network (VCN). The purpose of this paper is to study a new version of that scheme which considers a multi-cell environment and evaluate the performance of the VCN. The ergodic channel capacity and outage capacity of the VCN in the presence of inter-cell interference are evaluated, and the results are compared to those of the single hop network (SHN). Furthermore, the effect of the location and number of wireless ports in the VCN on the channel capacity of the VCN is investigated, and the degree of fairness of the VCN relative to that of the SHN is compared. Using computer simulations, it is found that in the presence of inter-cell interference, a) the VCN outperforms the SHN even in the interference dominant transmission power region (when a single cell is considered, the VCN is better than the SHN only in the noise dominant transmission power region), b) the channel capacity of the VCN remains greater than that of the SHN even if the VCN is fully loaded, c) an optimal distance ratio for the location of the wireless ports can be found in the interval 0.2∼0.4, d) increasing the number of wireless ports from 3 to 6 can increase the channel capacity of the VCN, and e) the VCN can achieve better outage capacity than the SHN.

This paper studies channel sounding for selfish dynamic spectrum control (S-DSC) in which each link dynamically maps its spectral components onto a necessary amount of discrete frequencies having the highest channel gain of the common system band. In S-DSC, it is compulsory to conduct channel sounding for the entire system band by using a reference signal whose spectral components are sparsely allocated by S-DSC. Using nonuniform sampling theory, this paper exploits the finite impulse response characteristic of frequency selective fading channels to carry out the channel sounding. However, when the number of spectral components is relatively small compared to the number of discrete frequencies of the system band, reliability of the channel sounding deteriorates severely due to the ill-conditioned problem and degradation in channel capacity of the next frame occurs as a result. Aiming at balancing frequency selection diversity effect and reliability of channel sounding, this paper proposes an S-DSC which allocates an appropriate number of spectral components onto discrete frequencies with low predicted channel gain besides mapping the rest onto those with high predicted channel gain. A numerical analysis confirms that the proposed S-DSC gives significant enhancement in channel capacity performance.

We seek a resource allocation algorithm through carrier allocation and modulation mode selection for improving the quality of service (QoS) that can adapt to various screen sizes and dynamic channel variations. In terms of visual quality, the expected visual entropy (EVE) is defined to quantify the visual information of being contained in each layer of the scalable video coding (SVC). Fairness optimization is conducted to maximize the EVE using an objective function for given constraints of radio resources. To conduct the fairness optimization, we propose a novel approximation algorithm for resource allocation for the maximal EVE. Simulations confirm that the QoS in terms of the EVE or peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) is significantly improved by using the novel algorithm.

Temporal Decorrelation source SEParation (TDSEP) is a blind separation scheme that utilizes the time structure of the source signals, typically, their periodicities. The advantage of TDSEP over non-Gaussianity based methods is that it can separate Gaussian signals as long as they are periodic. However, its shortcoming is that separation performance (SEP) heavily depends upon the values of the time shift parameters (TSPs). This paper proposes a method to automatically and blindly estimate a set of TSPs that achieves optimal SEP against periodic Gaussian signals. It is also shown that, selecting the same number of TSPs as that of the source signals, is sufficient to obtain optimal SEP, and adding more TSPs does not improve SEP, but only increases the computational complexity. The simulation example showed that the SEP is higher by approximately 20dB, compared with the ordinary method. It is also shown that the proposed method successfully selects just the same number of TSPs as that of incoming signals.