A power-saving mechanism for smartphone devices is developed by analyzing the features of data that are received from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors devices to optimize the data processing policies. In the proposed GreenIoT architecture for power-saving in IoT, the power saving and feedback mechanism are implemented in the IoT middleware. When the GreenIoT application in the power-saving IoT architecture is launched, IoT devices collect the sensor data and send them to the middleware. After the scanning module in the IoT middleware has received the data, the data are analyzed by a feature evaluation module and a threshold analysis module. Based on the analytical results, the policy decision module processes the data in the device or in the cloud computing environment. The feedback mechanism then records the power consumed and, based on the history of these records, dynamically adjusts the threshold value to increase accuracy. Two smart living applications, a biomedical application and a smart building application, are proposed. Comparisons of data processed in the cloud computing environment show that the power-saving mechanism with IoT architecture reduces the power consumed by these applications by 24% and 9.2%.

The research on optimization of cellular network's energy efficiency (EE) towards environmental and economic sustainability has attracted increasing attention recently. In this survey, we discuss the opportunities, trends and challenges of this challenging topic. Two major contributions are presented namely 1) survey of proposed energy efficiency metrics; 2) survey of proposed energy efficient solutions. We provide a broad overview of the state of-the-art energy efficient methods covering base station (BS) hardware design, network planning and deployment, and network management and operation stages. In order to further understand how EE is assessed and improved through the heterogeneous network (HetNet), BS's energy-awareness and several typical HetNet deployment scenarios such as macrocell-microcell and macrocell-picocell are presented. The analysis of different HetNet deployment scenarios gives insights towards a successful deployment of energy efficient cellular networks.

Mobile cloud computing has recently become a new paradigm for the utilization of a variety of shared mobile resources via wireless network environments. However, due to the inherent characteristics of mobile devices, a limited battery life, and a network access requirement, it is necessary for mobile servers to provide a dynamic approach for managing mobile resources efficiently in mobile cloud computing environments. Since on-demand job requests occur frequently and the number of mobile devices is drastically increased in mobile cloud computing environments, a different mobile resource management method is required to maximize the computational power. In this paper, we therefore propose a cooperative, mobile resource sharing method that considers both the inherent properties and the number of mobile devices in mobile cloud environments. The proposed method is composed of four main components: mobile resource monitor, job handler, resource handler, and results consolidator. In contrast with conventional mobile cloud computing, each mobile device under the proposed method can be either a service consumer or a service provider in the cloud. Even though each device is resource-poor when a job is processed independently, the computational power is dramatically increased under the proposed method, as the devices cooperate simultaneously for a job. Therefore, the mobile computing power throughput is dynamically increased, while the computation time for a given job is reduced. We conduct case-based experiments to validate the proposed method, whereby the feasibility of the method for the purpose of cooperative computation is shown.

Recently, energy harvesting technology has been integrated into wireless sensor networks to ameliorate the nodes' energy limitation problem. In theory, the wireless sensor node equipped with an energy harvesting module can work permanently until hardware failures happen. However, due to the change of power supply, the traditional hierarchical network routing protocol can not be effectively adopted in energy harvesting wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we improve the Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol to make it suitable for the energy harvesting wireless sensor networks. Specifically, the cluster heads are selected according to the estimation of nodes' harvested energy and consumed energy. Preference is given to the nodes with high harvested energy while taking the energy consumption rate into account. The utilization of harvested energy is mathematically formulated as a max-min optimization problem which maximizes the minimum energy conservation of each node. We have proved that maximizing the minimum energy conservation is an NP-hard problem theoretically. Thus, a polynomial time algorithm has been proposed to derive the near-optimal performance. Extensive simulation results show that our proposed routing scheme outperforms previous works in terms of energy conservation and balanced distribution.

Network virtualization provides an effective way to overcome the Internet ossification problem. As one of the main challenges in network virtualization, virtual network embedding refers to mapping multiple virtual networks onto a shared substrate network. However, existing heuristic embedding algorithms evaluate the embedding potential of the nodes simply by the product of different resource attributes, which would result in an unbalanced embedding. Furthermore, ignoring the hops of substrate paths that the virtual links would be mapped onto may restrict the ability of the substrate network to accept additional virtual network requests, and lead to low utilization rate of resource. In this paper, we introduce and extend five node attributes that quantify the embedding potential of the nodes from both the local and global views, and adopt the technique for order preference by similarity ideal solution (TOPSIS) to rank the nodes, aiming at balancing different node attributes to increase the utilization rate of resource. Moreover, we propose a novel two-stage virtual network embedding algorithm, which maps the virtual nodes onto the substrate nodes according to the node ranks, and adopts a shortest path-based algorithm to map the virtual links. Simulation results show that the new algorithm significantly increases the long-term average revenue, the long-term revenue to cost ratio and the acceptance ratio.

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are self-configuring networks where the nodes are vehicles equipped with wireless communication technologies. In such networks, limitation of signal coverage and fast topology changes impose difficulties to the proper functioning of the routing protocols. Traditional Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) routing protocols lose their performance, when communicating between vehicles, compromising information exchange. Obviously, most applications critically rely on routing protocols. Thus, in this work, we propose a methodology for investigating the performance of well-established protocols for MANETs in the VANET arena and, at the same time, we introduce a routing protocol, called Genetic Network Protocol (G-NET). It is based in part on Dynamic Source Routing Protocol (DSR) and on the use of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) for maintenance and route optimization. As G-NET update routes periodically, this work investigates its performance compared to DSR and Ad Hoc on demand Distance Vector (AODV). For more realistic simulation of vehicle movement in urban environments, an analysis was performed by using the VanetMobiSim mobility generator and the Network Simulator (NS-3). Experiments were conducted with different number of vehicles and the results show that, despite the increased routing overhead with respect to DSR, G-NET is better than AODV and provides comparable data delivery rate to the other protocols in the analyzed scenarios.

In this paper, we investigate the problem of achieving proportional fairness in hierarchical wireless sensor networks. Combining clustering formulation and scheduling, we maximize total bandwidth utility for proportional fairness while controlling the power consumption to a minimum value. This problem is decomposed into two sub-problems and solved in two stages, which are Clustering Formulation Stage and Scheduling Stage, respectively. The above algorithm, called CSPF_PC, runs in a network formulation sequence. In the Clustering Formulation Stage, we let the sensor nodes join to the cluster head nodes by adjusting transmit power in a greedy strategy; in the Scheduling Stage, the proportional fairness is achieved by scheduling the time-slot resource. Simulation results verify the superior performance of our algorithm over the compared algorithms on fairness index.

Range-free localization algorithm computes a normal node's position by estimating the distance to anchors which know their actual position. In recent years, reliable anchor selection research has been gained a lot of attention because this approach improves localization accuracy by selecting the only subset of anchors called reliable anchor. The distance estimation accuracy and the geometric shape formed by anchors are the two important factors which need to be considered when selecting the reliable anchors. In this paper, we study the relationship between a relative position of three anchors and localization error. From this study, under ideal condition, which is with zero localization error, we find two conditions for anchor selection, thereby proposing a novel anchor selection algorithm that selects three anchors matched most closely to the two conditions, and the validities of the conditions are proved using two theorems. By further employing the conditions, we finally propose a novel range-free localization algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm shows considerably improved performance as compared to other existing works.

This paper analyzes interference alignment in the two-way relay network with compute-and-forward in both single relay and multiple relays networks. The advantages of compute-and-forward over other relaying strategies are that it can relay only linear combinations of the useful signals and remove the noise. The algorithm proposed in this paper adopts the criterion of maximum SINR to derive the pre-coding matrix. The experimental results show that the performance of interference alignment in two-way relay channel via compute-and-forward is better than that of amplify-and-forward, and the total sum rate in the two-way multiple relay networks is larger than that in the two-way single relay networks.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) based on IEEE 802.11s have emerged as one of the prominent technologies in multi-hop communications. However, the deployment of WMNs suffers from serious interference problem which severely limits the system capacity. Using multiple radios for each mesh router over multiple channels, the interference can be reduced and improve system capacity. Nevertheless, interference cannot be completely eliminated due to the limited number of available channels. An effective approach to mitigate interference is to apply dynamic channel switching (DCS) in WMNs. Conventional DCS schemes trigger channel switching if interference is detected or exceeds a predefined threshold which might cause unnecessary channel switching and long protocol overheads. In this paper, a P-learning based dynamic switching algorithm known as learning automaton (LA)-based DCS algorithm is proposed. Initially, an optimal channel for communicating node pairs is determined through the learning process. Then, a novel switching metric is introduced in our LA-based DCS algorithm to avoid unnecessary initialization of channel switching. Hence, the proposed LA-based DCS algorithm enables each pair of communicating mesh nodes to communicate over the least loaded channels and consequently improve network performance.

This paper proposes a novel channel assignment scheme that is based on finite projective plane (FPP) theory. The proposed scheme involves using a Markov chain model to allocate N channels to N users through intermixed channel group arrangements, particularly when channel resources are idle because of inefficient use. The intermixed FPP-based channel group arrangements successfully related Markov chain modeling to punch through ratio formulations proposed in this study, ensuring fair resource use among users. The simulation results for the proposed FPP scheme clearly revealed that the defined throughput increased, particularly under light traffic load conditions. Nevertheless, if the proposed scheme is combined with successive interference cancellation techniques, considerably higher throughput is predicted, even under heavy traffic load conditions.

Multiple attribute for decision making including user preference will increase the complexity of route selection process. Various approaches have been proposed to solve the optimal route selection problem. In this paper, multi attribute decision making (MADM) algorithms such as Simple Additive Weighting (SAW), Weighted Product Method (WPM), Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method and Total Order Preference by Similarity to the Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods have been proposed for acoustic signature based optimal route selection to facilitate user with better quality of service. The traffic density state conditions (very low, low, below medium, medium, above medium, high and very high) on the road segment is the occurrence and mixture weightings of traffic noise signals (Tyre, Engine, Air Turbulence, Exhaust, and Honks etc) is considered as one of the attribute in decision making process. The short-term spectral envelope features of the cumulative acoustic signals are extracted using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Classifier (ANFC) is used to model seven traffic density states. Simple point method and AHP has been used for calculation of weights of decision parameters. Numerical results show that WPM, AHP and TOPSIS provide similar performance.

Network coding, as a new technique to improve the throughput, is studied combined with multi-relay model in this paper to address the challenges of long distance and power limit in deep space communication. First, an amplify-and-forward relaying approach based on analog network coding (AFNC) is proposed in multi-relay network to improve the capacity for deep space communication system, where multiple relays are introduced to overcome the long distance link loss. The design of amplification coefficients is mathematically formulated as the optimization problem of maximizing SNR under sum-power constraint over relays. Then for a dual-hop relay network with a single source, the optimal amplification coefficients are derived when the multiple relays introduce non-coherent noise. Through theoretic analysis and simulation, it is shown that our approach can achieve the maximum transmission rate and perform better over single link transmission for deep space communication.

The changes new technologies have brought to banking over the past decade are enormous in their impact on the ways of doing business and providing customer services, most notably in the areas of customer service channels. Banks have been trying to move away from the traditional, branch-based and costly staff-assisted channels toward self-assisted channels, i.e. internet banking and mobile banking, to drive down costs and improve customer loyalty. How internet and mobile have reshaped the user experience of banking service channel? To provide valuable insights for this question, this research investigates and compares customer's channel choice behavior and profit changes from bank's branch closure. Applying the propensity scoring matching method, the results of analysis demonstrates that the mobile channel can be a realistic alternative to conventional branches. Also, the reserch result shows banks can reduce conventional branches while experiencing a positive implications on their profits from the customers. Another significant implication from the research is, to accelerate the shift to digital channels, banks need to put more efforts on developing functions in the mobile channel that will allow friendly interaction with customers and consultation, such as video consultation, interactive chat, and location-based product recommendation.

Passive wireless devices have increasing civilian and military applications, especially in the scenario with wearable devices and Internet of Things. In this paper, we study indoor localization of a target equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) device in ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless networks. With known room layout, deterministic multipath components, including the line-of-sight (LOS) signal and the reflected signals via multipath propagation, are employed to locate the target with one transmitter and a single inaccurate receiver. A factor graph corresponding to the joint posterior position distribution of target and receiver is constructed. However, due to the mixed distribution in the factor node of likelihood function, the expressions of messages are intractable by directly applying belief propagation on factor graph. To this end, we approximate the messages by Gaussian distribution via minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) between them. Accordingly, a parametric message passing algorithm for indoor passive localization is derived, in which only the means and variances of Gaussian distributions have to be updated. Performance of the proposed algorithm and the impact of critical parameters are evaluated by Monte Carlo simulations, which demonstrate the superior performance in localization accuracy and the robustness to the statistics of multipath channels.

Indoor positioning is considered an enabler for a variety of applications, the demand for an indoor positioning service has also been accelerated. That is because that people spend most of their time indoor environment. Meanwhile, the smartphone integrated powerful camera is an efficient platform for navigation and positioning. However, for high accuracy indoor positioning by using a smartphone, there are two constraints that includes: (1) limited computational and memory resources of smartphone; (2) users' moving in large buildings. To address those issues, this paper uses the TC-OFDM for calculating the coarse positioning information includes horizontal and altitude information for assisting smartphone camera-based positioning. Moreover, a unified representation model of image features under variety of scenarios whose name is FAST-SURF is established for computing the fine location. Finally, an optimization marginalized particle filter is proposed for fusing the positioning information from TC-OFDM and images. The experimental result shows that the wide location detection accuracy is 0.823 m (1σ) at horizontal and 0.5 m at vertical. Comparing to the WiFi-based and ibeacon-based positioning methods, our method is powerful while being easy to be deployed and optimized.

As various pieces of information can be provided through the web, schemes that provide search results optimized for individual users are required in consideration of user preference. Since the existing social search schemes use users' profiles, the accuracy of the search deteriorates. They also decrease the reliability of a search result because they do not consider a search time. Therefore, a new social search scheme that considers temporal information as well as popularities and user preferences is required. In this paper, we propose a new mobile social search scheme considering popularities and user preferences based on temporal information. Popularity is calculated by collecting the visiting records of users, while user preference is generated by the actual visiting information among the search results. In order to extract meaningful information from the search target objects that have multiple attributes, a skyline processing method is used, and rank is given to the search results by combining the user preference and the popularity with the skyline processing result. To show the superiority of the proposed scheme, we conduct performance evaluations of the existing scheme and the proposed scheme.

Object recognition and object location have always drawn much interest. Also, recently various computational models have been designed. One of the big issues in this domain is the lack of an appropriate model for extracting important part of the picture and estimating the object place in the same environments that caused low accuracy. To solve this problem, a new Salient Based Bag of Visual Word (SBBoVW) model for object recognition and object location estimation is presented. Contributions lied in the present study are two-fold. One is to introduce a new approach, which is a Salient Based Bag of Visual Word model (SBBoVW) to recognize difficult objects that have had low accuracy in previous methods. This method integrates SIFT features of the original and salient parts of pictures and fuses them together to generate better codebooks using bag of visual word method. The second contribution is to introduce a new algorithm for finding object place based on the salient map automatically. The performance evaluation on several data sets proves that the new approach outperforms other state-of-the-arts.

Traditional radio-based gesture recognition approaches usually require the target to carry a device (e.g., an EMG sensor or an accelerometer sensor). However, such requirement cannot be satisfied in many applications. For example, in smart home, users want to control the light on/off by some specific hand gesture, without finding and pressing the button especially in dark area. They will not carry any device in this scenario. To overcome this drawback, in this paper, we propose three algorithms able to recognize the target gesture (mainly the human hand gesture) without carrying any device, based on just Radio Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI). Our platform utilizes only 6 telosB sensor nodes with a very easy deployment. Experiment results show that the successful recognition radio can reach around 80% in our system.

In this paper, a method of mood classification based on user brainwaves is proposed for real-time application in commercial services. Unlike conventional mood analyzing systems, the proposed method focuses on classifying real-time user moods by analyzing the user's brainwaves. Applying brainwave-related research in commercial services requires two elements - robust performance and comfortable fit of. This paper proposes a filter based on Regularized Common Spatial Patterns (RCSP) and presents its use in the implementation of mood classification for a music service via a wireless consumer electroencephalography (EEG) device that has only 14 pins. Despite the use of fewer pins, the proposed system demonstrates approximately 10% point higher accuracy in mood classification, using the same dataset, compared to one of the best EEG-based mood-classification systems using a skullcap with 32 pins (EU FP7 PetaMedia project). This paper confirms the commercial viability of brainwave-based mood-classification technology. To analyze the improvements of the system, the changes of feature variations after applying RCSP filters and performance variations between users are also investigated. Furthermore, as a prototype service, this paper introduces a mood-based music list management system called MyMusicShuffler based on the proposed mood-classification method.

In this paper, a speed-up technique for the non-local means (NLM) image denoising method based on local binary descriptor (LBD) is proposed. In the NLM, most of the computation time is spent on searching for non-local similar patches in the search window. The local binary descriptor which represents the structure of patch as binary strings is employed to speed up the search process in the NLM. The descriptor allows for a fast and accurate preselection of non-local similar patches by bitwise operations. Using this approach, a tradeoff between time-saving and noise removal can be obtained. Simulations exhibit that despite being principally constructed for speed, the proposed algorithm outperforms in terms of denoising quality as well. Furthermore, a parallel implementation on GPU brings NLM-LBD to real-time image denoising.

Underwater image enhancement has received considerable attention in last decades, due to the nature of poor visibility and low contrast of underwater images. In this paper, we propose a new automatic underwater image enhancement algorithm, which combines nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain enhancement techniques with the mechanism of the human visual system (HVS). We apply the multiscale retinex algorithm based on the HVS into NSCT domain in order to eliminate the non-uniform illumination, and adopt the threshold denoising technique to suppress underwater noise. Our proposed algorithm incorporates the luminance masking and contrast masking characteristics of the HVS into NSCT domain to yield the new HVS-based NSCT. Moreover, we define two nonlinear mapping functions. The first one is used to manipulate the HVS-based NSCT contrast coefficients to enhance the edges. The second one is a gain function which modifies the lowpass subband coefficients to adjust the global dynamic range. As a result, our algorithm can achieve contrast enhancement, image denoising and edge sharpening automatically and simultaneously. Experimental results illustrate that our proposed algorithm has better enhancement performance than state-of-the-art algorithms both in subjective evaluation and quantitative assessment. In addition, our algorithm can automatically achieve underwater image enhancement without any parameter tuning.

Due to an increasing number of cyberattacks globally, cybersecurity has become a crucial part of national security in many countries. In particular, the Digital Pearl Harbor has become a real and aggressive security threat, and is considered to be a global issue that can introduce instability to the dynamics of international security. Against this context, the cyberattacks that targeted nuclear power plants (NPPs) in the Republic of Korea triggered concerns regarding the potential effects of cyber terror on critical infrastructure protection (CIP), making it a new security threat to society. Thus, in an attempt to establish measures that strengthen CIP from a cybersecurity perspective, we perform a case study on the cyber-terror attacks that targeted the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., Ltd. In order to fully appreciate the actual effects of cyber threats on critical infrastructure (CI), and to determine the challenges faced when responding to these threats, we examine factual relationships between the cyberattacks and their responses, and we perform analyses of the characteristics of the cyberattack under consideration. Moreover, we examine the significance of the event considering international norms, while applying the Tallinn Manual. Based on our analyses, we discuss implications for the cybersecurity of CI in South Korea, after which we propose a framework for strengthening cybersecurity in order to protect CI. Then, we discuss the direction of national policies.

Certificate-based cryptography is a useful public key cryptographic primitive that combines the merits of traditional public key cryptography and identity-based cryptography. It not only solves the key escrow problem inherent in identity-based cryptography, but also simplifies the cumbersome certificate management problem in traditional public key cryptography. In this paper, by giving a concrete attack, we first show that the certificate-based encryption scheme without bilinear pairings proposed by Yao et al. does not achieve either the chosen-ciphertext security or the weaker chosen-plaintext security. To overcome the security weakness in Yao et al.'s scheme, we propose an enhanced certificate-based encryption scheme that does not use the bilinear pairings. In the random oracle model, we formally prove it to be chosen-ciphertext secure under the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme enjoys obvious advantage in the computation efficiency compared with the previous certificate-based encryption schemes. Without costly pairing operations, it is suitable to be employed on the computation-limited or power-constrained devices.

Threshold signature is very important in identity authentication and some other applications. In December 2010, Chinese Encryption Administration released the SM2 elliptic curve digital signature algorithm as the first standard of the digital signature algorithm in China. At present, the papers on the threshold signature scheme based on this algorithm are few. A SM2 elliptic curve threshold signature scheme without a trusted center is proposed according to the Joint-Shamir-RSS algorithm, the Joint-Shamir-ZSS algorithm, the sum or diff-SS algorithm, the Mul-SS algorithm, the Inv-SS algorithm and the PM-SS algorithm. The proposed scheme is analyzed from correctness, security and efficiency. The correctness analysis shows that the proposed scheme can realize the effective threshold signature. The security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can resist some kinds of common attacks. The efficiency analysis shows that if the same secret sharing algorithms are used to design the threshold signature schemes, the SM2 elliptic curve threshold signature scheme will be more efficient than the threshold signature scheme based on ECDSA.

In the mobile distributed environment, an entity may move across domains with great frequency. How to utilize the trust information in the previous domains and quickly establish trust relationships with others in the current domain remains a challenging issue. The classic trust models do not support cross-domain and the existing cross-domain trust models are not in a fully distributed way. This paper improves the outstanding Certified Reputation (CR) model and proposes a Lightweight Cross-domain Trust (LCT) model for the mobile distributed environment in a fully distributed way. The trust certifications, in which the trust ratings contain various trust aspects with different interest preference weights, are collected and provided by the trustees. Furthermore, three factors are comprehensively considered to ease the issue of collusion attacks and make the trust certifications more accurate. Finally, a cross-domain scenario is deployed and implemented, and the comprehensive experiments and analysis are conducted. The results demonstrate that our LCT model obviously outperforms the Bayesian Network (BN) model and the CR model in our cross-domain scenario, and significantly improves the successful interaction rates of the honest entities without increasing the risks of interacting with the malicious entities.

In this paper, we present a novel authenticated group key distribution scheme for large and dynamic multicast groups without employing traditional symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic operations. The security of our scheme is mainly based on the basic theories for solving linear equations. In our scheme, a large group is divided into many subgroups, where each subgroup is managed by a subgroup key manager (SGKM) and a group key generation center (GKGC) further manages all SGKMs. The group key is generated by the GKGC and then propagated to all group members through the SGKMs, such that only authorized group members can recover the group key but unauthorized users cannot. In addition, all authorized group members can verify the authenticity of group keys by a public one-way function. The analysis results show that our scheme is secure and efficient, and especially it is very appropriate for secure multicast communications in large and dynamic client-server networks.