With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) the world is projecting towards a scenario where every object in the world (including humans) acts as a sender and receiver of data and if we were to see that concept mature we would soon be talking of billions more users of the cloud networks. The cloud technology is a very apt alternative to permanent storage when it comes to bulk storage and reporting. It has however shown weaknesses concerning real-time data accessibility and processing. The bandwidth availability of the cloud networks is limited and combined with the highly centralized storage structure and geographical vastness of the network in terms of distance from the end user the cloud just does not seem like a friendly environment for real-time IOT data. This paper aims at highlighting the importance of Flavio Bonomi's idea of Fog Computing which has been glamorized and marketed by Cisco but has not yet been given a proper service architecture that would explain how it would be used in terms of various service models i-e IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, of the Cloud. The main contribution of the paper would be models for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS for Fog environments. The paper would conclude by highlighting the importance of the presented models and giving a consolidated overview of how they would work. It would also calculate the respective latencies for fog and cloud to prove that our models would work. We have used CloudSim and iFogSim to show the effectiveness of the paradigm shift from traditional cloud architecture to our Fog architecture.

A major challenge in cloud infrastructure is the efficient allocation of virtual network elements on top of substrate network elements. Path algebra is a mathematical framework which allows the validation and convergence analysis of the mono-constraint or multi-constraint routing problems independently of the network topology or size. The present study proposes a new heuristic approach based on mathematical framework "paths algebra" to map virtual nodes and links to substrate nodes and paths in cloud. In this approach, we define a measure criterion to rank the substrate nodes, and map the virtual nodes to substrate nodes according to their ranks by using a greedy algorithm. In addition, considering multi-constraint routing in virtual link mapping stage, the used paths algebra framework allows a more flexible and extendable embedding. Obtained results of simulations show appropriate improvement in acceptance ratio of virtual networks and cost incurred by the infrastructure networks.

To mitigate the performance degradation caused by performance anomaly, a number of channel assignment algorithms have been proposed for multi-rate wireless mesh networks. However, network conditions have not been fully considered for routing process in these algorithms. In this paper, a joint scheme called Multi-rate Dijkstra's Shortest path - Rate Separated (MDSRS) is proposed, combining routing metrics and channel assignment algorithm. In MDSRS, the routing metric are determined through the synthesized deliberations of link costs and rate matches; then the rate separated channel assignment is operated based on the determined routing metric. In this way, the competitions between high and low rate links are avoided, and performance anomaly problem is settled, and the network capacity is efficiently improved. Theoretical analysis and NS-3 simulation results indicate that, the proposed MDSRS can significantly improve the network throughput, and decrease the average end-to-end delay as well as packet loss probability. Performance improvements could be achieved even in the heavy load network conditions.

Content distribution technology, which routes content to the cache servers, is considered as an effective method to reduce the response time of the user requests. However, due to the exponential increases of content traffic, traditional content routing methods suffer from high delay and consequent inefficient delivery. In this paper, a content selection policy is proposed, which combines the histories of cache hit and cache hit rate to collaboratively determine the content popularity. Specifically, the CGM policy promotes the probability of possible superior paths considering the storage cost and transmission cost of content network. Then, the content routing table is updated with the proportion of the distribution on the paths. Extensive simulation results show that our proposed scheme improves the content routing and outperforms existing routing schemes in terms of Internet traffic and access latency.

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a new Internet architecture with routing and caching centered on contents. Through its receiver-driven and connectionless communication model, CCN natively supports the seamless mobility of nodes and scalable content acquisition. In-network caching is one of the core technologies in CCN, and the research of efficient caching scheme becomes increasingly attractive. To address the problem of unbalanced cache load distribution in some existing caching strategies, this paper presents a neighbor cooperation based in-network caching scheme. In this scheme, the node with the highest betweenness centrality in the content delivery path is selected as the central caching node and the area of its ego network is selected as the caching area. When the caching node has no sufficient resource, part of its cached contents will be picked out and transferred to the appropriate neighbor by comprehensively considering the factors, such as available node cache, cache replacement rate and link stability between nodes. Simulation results show that our scheme can effectively enhance the utilization of cache resources and improve cache hit rate and average access cost.

In this paper, we investigate the security performance for cooperative networks over Nakagami-m fading channels. Based on whether the channel state information (CSI) of wiretap link is available or not, optimal relay selection (ORS) and suboptimal relay selection (SRS) schemes are considered. Also, multiple relays combining (MRC) scheme is considered for comparison purpose. The exact and asymptotic closed-form expressions for secrecy outage probability (SOP) are derived and simulations are presented to validate the accuracy of our proposed analytical results. The numerical results illustrate that the ORS is the best scheme and SRS scheme is better than MRC scheme in some special scenarios such as when the destination is far away from the relays. Furthermore, through asymptotic analysis, we obtain the closed-form expressions for the secrecy diversity order and secrecy array gain for the three different selection schemes. The secrecy diversity order is closely related to the number of relays and fading parameter between relay and destination.

Recently, the pipeline-forwarding has been proposed as a new technique to resolve the end-to-end latency problem of the duty-cycle MAC protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Some protocols based on this technique such as PMAC and PRI-MAC have shown an improvement not only in terms of reducing end-to-end latency but also in terms of reducing power consumption. In these protocols, however, the sensor nodes still waste a significant amount of energy for unnecessary idle listening during contention period of upstream nodes to check the channel activity. This paper proposes a new pipeline-forwarding duty-cycle MAC protocol, named RP-MAC (Reduced Pipelined duty-cycle MAC), which tries to reduce the waste of energy. By taking advantage of ACK mechanism and shortening the handshaking procedure, RP-MAC minimizes the time for checking the channel and therefore reduces the energy consumption due to unnecessary idle listening. When comparing RP-MAC with the existing solution PRI-MAC and RMAC, our QualNet-based simulation results show a significant improvement in term of energy consumption.

Wireless communication is a telecommunication technology, which enables wireless transmission between the portable devices to provide wireless access in all types of environments. In this research, the measurements and various empirical models are analysed and compared in order to find out a suitable propagation model to provide guidelines for cell planning of wireless communication systems. The measured data was taken in urban region with low vegetation and some trees at 900 MHz frequency band. Path loss models are useful planning tools, which permit the designers of cellular communication to obtain optimal levels for the base station deployment and meeting the expected service level requirements. Outcomes show that these empirical models tend to overestimate the propagation loss. As one of the key outputs, it was observed that the calculations of Weissberger model fit with the measured data in urban environment.

The construction of completely random sensing matrices of Compressive Sensing requires a large number of random numbers while that of deterministic sensing operators often needs complex mathematical operations. Thus both of them have difficulty in acquiring large signals efficiently. This paper focuses on the enhancement of the practicability of the structurally random matrices and proposes a semi-deterministic sensing matrix called Partial Kronecker product of Identity and Hadamard (PKIH) matrix. The proposed matrix can be viewed as a sub matrix of a well-structured, sparse, and orthogonal matrix. Only the row index is selected at random and the positions of the entries of each row are determined by a deterministic sequence. Therefore, the PKIH significantly decreases the requirement of random numbers, which has a complex generating algorithm, in matrix construction and further reduces the complexity of sampling. Besides, in order to process large signals, the corresponding fast sampling algorithm is developed, which can be easily parallelized and realized in hardware. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed sensing matrix maintains almost the same performance but with at least 50% less random numbers comparing with the popular sampling matrices. Meanwhile, it saved roughly 15%-35% processing time in comparison to that of the SRM matrices.

Various types of social media make the people share their personal experience in different ways. In some social networking sites. Some users post their reviews, some users can support these reviews with comments, and some users just rate the reviews as kind of support or not. Unfortunately, there is rare explicit negative comments towards other reviews. This means if there is a link between two users, it must be positive link. Apparently, the negative link is invisible in these social network. Or in other word, the negative links are redundant to positive links. In this work, we first discuss the feature extraction from social media data and propose new method to compute the distance between each pair of comments or reviews on social media. Then we investigate whether we can predict negative links via regression analysis when only positive links are manifested from social media data. In particular, we provide a principled way to mathematically incorporate multi-facet data in a novel framework, Constructing Negative Links, CsNL to predict negative links for discovering the hidden information. Additionally, we investigate the ways of solution to general negative link predication problems with CsNL and its extension. Experiments are performed on real-world data and results show that negative links is predictable with multi-facet of social media data by the proposed framework CsNL. Essentially, high prediction accuracy suggests that negative links are redundant to positive links. Further experiments are performed to evaluate coefficients on different kernels. The results show that user generated content dominates the prediction performance of CsNL.

Multi-hop networks are a low-setup-cost solution for enlarging an area of network coverage through multi-hop routing. Carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) is frequently used in multi-hop networks. Multi-hop networks face multiple problems, such as a rise in contention for the medium, and packet loss under heavy-load, saturated conditions, which consumes more bandwidth due to re-transmissions. The number of re-transmissions carried out in a multi-hop network plays a major role in the achievable quality of service (QoS). This paper presents a statistical, analytical model for the end-to-end delay of contention-based medium access control (MAC) strategies. These strategies schedule a packet before performing the back-off contention for both differentiated heterogeneous data and homogeneous data under saturation conditions. The analytical model is an application of Markov chain theory and queuing theory. The M/M/1 model is used to derive access queue waiting times, and an absorbing Markov chain is used to determine the expected number of re-transmissions in a multi-hop scenario. This is then used to calculate the expected end-to-end delay. The prediction by the proposed model is compared to the simulation results, and shows close correlation for the different test cases with different arrival rates.

In most of the existing literature, the definition of the class label has the following characteristics. First, the class label of the samples from the same object has an absolutely fixed value. Second, the difference between class labels of the samples from different objects should be maximized. However, the appearance of a face varies greatly due to the variations of the illumination, pose, and expression. Therefore, the previous definition of class label is not quite reasonable. Inspired by discriminative least squares regression algorithm (DLSR), a noisy label based discriminative least squares regression algorithm (NLDLSR) is presented in this paper. In our algorithm, the maximization difference between the class labels of the samples from different objects should be satisfied. Meanwhile, the class label of the different samples from the same object is allowed to have small difference, which is consistent with the fact that the different samples from the same object have some differences. In addition, the proposed NLDLSR is expanded to the kernel space, and we further propose a novel kernel noisy label based discriminative least squares regression algorithm (KNLDLSR). A large number of experiments show that our proposed algorithms can achieve very good performance.

Regression-based image super resolution (SR) methods have shown great advantage in time consumption while maintaining similar or improved quality performance compared to other learning-based methods. In this paper, we propose a novel single image SR method based on hierarchical regression to further improve the quality performance. As an improvement to other regression-based methods, we introduce a hierarchical scheme into the process of learning multiple regressors. First, training samples are grouped into different clusters according to their geometry similarity, which generates the structure layer. Then in each cluster, a compact dictionary can be learned by Sparse Coding (SC) method and the training samples can be further grouped by dictionary atoms to form the detail layer. Last, a series of projection matrixes, which anchored to dictionary atoms, can be learned by linear regression. Experiment results show that hierarchical scheme can lead to regression that is more precise. Our method achieves superior high quality results compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

This paper presents a dual exposure fusion method for image enhancement. Images taken with a short exposure time usually contain a sharp structure, but they are dark and are prone to be contaminated by noise. In contrast, long-exposure images are bright and noise-free, but usually suffer from blurring artifacts. Thus, we fuse the dual exposures to generate an enhanced image that is well-exposed, noise-free, and blur-free. To this end, we present a new scale-space patch-match method to find correspondences between the short and long exposures so that proper color components can be combined within a proposed dual non-local (DNL) means framework. We also present a residual filtering method that eliminates the structure component in the estimated noise image in order to obtain a sharper and further enhanced image. To this end, the entropy is utilized to determine the proper size of the filtering window. Experimental results show that our method generates ghost-free, noise-free, and blur-free enhanced images from the short and long exposure pairs for various dynamic scenes.

Co-saliency detection is a task of detecting same or similar objects in multi-scene, and has been an important preprocessing step for multi-scene image processing. However existing methods lack efficiency to match similar areas from different images. In addition, they are confined to single image detection without a unified framework to calculate co-saliency. In this paper, we propose a novel model called Superpixel Matching-Cellular Automata (SMCA). We use Hausdorff distance adjacent superpixel sets instead of single superpixel since the feature matching accuracy of single superpixel is poor. We further introduce Cellular Automata to exploit the intrinsic relevance of similar regions through interactions with neighbors in multi-scene. Extensive evaluations show that the SMCA model achieves leading performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on both efficiency and accuracy.

Generally, research of classical image classification algorithms assume that training data and testing data are derived from the same domain with the same distribution. Unfortunately, in practical applications, this assumption is rarely met. Aiming at the problem, a domain adaption image classification approach based on multi-sparse representation is proposed in this paper. The existences of intermediate domains are hypothesized between the source and target domains. And each intermediate subspace is modeled through online dictionary learning with target data updating. On the one hand, the reconstruction error of the target data is guaranteed, on the other, the transition from the source domain to the target domain is as smooth as possible. An augmented feature representation produced by invariant sparse codes across the source, intermediate and target domain dictionaries is employed for across domain recognition. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has received considerable attention due to its effectiveness of reducing high dimensional data and importance of producing a parts-based image representation. Most of existing NMF variants attempt to address the assertion that the observed data distribute on a nonlinear low-dimensional manifold. However, recent research results showed that not only the observed data but also the features lie on the low-dimensional manifolds. In addition, a few hard priori label information is available and thus helps to uncover the intrinsic geometrical and discriminative structures of the data space. Motivated by the two aspects above mentioned, we propose a novel algorithm to enhance the effectiveness of image representation, called Dual graph-regularized Constrained Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (DCNMF). The underlying philosophy of the proposed method is that it not only considers the geometric structures of the data manifold and the feature manifold simultaneously, but also mines valuable information from a few known labeled examples. These schemes will improve the performance of image representation and thus enhance the effectiveness of image classification. Extensive experiments on common benchmarks demonstrated that DCNMF has its superiority in image classification compared with state-of-the-art methods.

This paper proposes a new offline electronic payment (e-payment) system that satisfies the major security requirements of e-payment, i.e. anonymity, unlinkability, unforgeability, double spending control, conditional traceability, and fraud prevention. The central idea is the use of Hwang et al.'s RSA-based untraceable blind signature (BS), which disables the link between the e-coin and its owner and ensures the anonymity of both the customer and the merchant. It attaches an expiration, a deposit and the transaction dates to each e-coin in order to manage the database of the bank effectively, to correctly calculate the interest on the e-coin and to aid arbitration if a dishonest customer attempts to double-spend the coin. It also ensures the anonymity of the customer as long as the coin is spent legitimately. Only when a fraudulent e-coin transaction is detected can the bank, with the help of the central authority (a trusted entity), determine the identity of the dishonest customer. The system is referred to as offline since the bank does not need to be concurrently involved in transactions between a customer and a merchant. Finally, analyses of the performance of the prototype and the primary security requirements of the proposed system are also presented.

Equipped with the advantages of flexible access control and fine-grained authentication, attribute based signcryption is diffusely designed for security preservation in many scenarios. However, realizing efficient key evolution and reducing the calculation costs are two challenges which should be given full consideration in attribute based cryptosystem. In this paper, we present a key-policy attribute based signcryption scheme (KP-ABSC) with delegated computation and efficient key updating. In our scheme, an access structure is embedded into user's private key, while ciphertexts corresponds a target attribute set. Only the two are matched can a user decrypt and verify the ciphertexts. When the access privileges have to be altered or key exposure happens, the system will evolve into the next time slice to preserve the forward security. What's more, data receivers can delegate most of the de-signcryption task to data server, which can reduce the calculation on client's side. By performance analysis, our scheme is shown to be secure and more efficient, which makes it a promising method for data protection in data outsourcing systems.

Crypton is a SP-network block cipher that attracts much attention because of its excellent performance on hardware. Based on Crypton, mCrypton is designed as a lightweight block cipher suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The security of Crypton and mCrypton under meet-in-the-middle attack is analyzed in this paper. By analyzing the differential properties of cell permutation, several differential characteristics are introduced to construct generalized ${\delta}-sets$. With the usage of a generalized ${\delta}-set$ and differential enumeration technique, a 6-round meet-in-the-middle distinguisher is proposed to give the first meet-in-the-middle attack on 9-round Crypton-192 and some improvements on the cryptanalysis of 10-round Crypton-256 are given. Combined with the properties of nibble permutation and substitution, an improved meet-in-the-middle attack on 8-round mCrypton is proposed and the first complete attack on 9-round mCrypton-96 is proposed.

Finite field arithmetic over GF($2^m$) is used in a variety of applications such as cryptography, coding theory, computer algebra. It is mainly used in various cryptographic algorithms such as the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Twofish etc. The multiplication in a finite field is considered as highly complex and resource consuming operation in such applications. Many algorithms and architectures are proposed in the literature to obtain efficient multiplication operation in both hardware and software. In this paper, a modified serial multiplication algorithm with interleaved modular reduction is proposed, which allows for an efficient realization of a sequential polynomial basis multiplier. The proposed sequential multiplier supports multiplication of any two arbitrary finite field elements over GF($2^m$) for generic irreducible polynomials, therefore made versatile. Estimation of area and time complexities of the proposed sequential multiplier is performed and comparison with existing sequential multipliers is presented. The proposed sequential multiplier achieves 50% reduction in area-delay product over the best of existing sequential multipliers for m = 163, indicating an efficient design in terms of both area and delay. The Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) and the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation results indicate a significantly less power-delay and area-delay products of the proposed sequential multiplier over existing multipliers.

Key generation is essential for protecting wireless networks. Based on wireless channel reciprocity, transceivers can generate shared secret keys by measuring their communicating channels. However, due to non-simultaneous measurements, asymmetric noises and other interferences, channel measurements collected by different transceivers are highly correlated but not identical and thus might have some discrepancies. Further, these discrepancies might lead to mismatches of bit sequences after quantization. The referred mismatches significantly affect the efficiency of key generation. In this paper, an efficient key generation scheme leveraging wireless channel reciprocity is proposed. To reduce the bit mismatch rate and enhance the efficiency of key generation, the involved transceivers separately apply discrete cosine transform (DCT) and inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT) to pre-process their measurements. Then, the outputs of IDCT are quantified and encoded to establish the bit sequence. With the implementations of information reconciliation and privacy amplification, the shared secret key can be generated. Several experiments in real environments are conducted to evaluate the proposed scheme. During each experiment, the shared key is established from the received signal strength (RSS) of heterogeneous devices. The results of experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme can efficiently generate shared secret keys between transceivers.

Steganographic schemes which are based on minimizing an additive distortion function defined the overall impacts after embedding as the sum of embedding costs for individual image element. However, mutual impacts during embedding are often ignored. In this paper, an adaptive JPEG steganographic method based on weight distribution for embedding costs is proposed. The method takes mutual impacts during embedding in consideration. Firstly, an analysis is made about the factors that affect embedding fluctuations among JPEG coefficients. Then the Distortion Update Strategy (DUS) of updating the distortion costs is proposed, enabling to dynamically update the embedding costs group by group. At last, a kind of adaptive JPEG steganographic algorithm is designed combining with the update strategy and well-known additive distortion function. The experimental result illustrates that the proposed algorithm gains a superior performance in the fight against the current state-of-the-art steganalyzers with high-dimensional features.

With the purpose of copyright protection for digital video, a novel H.264/AVC watermarking algorithm based on JND model is proposed. Firstly, according to the characteristics of human visual system, a new and more accurate JND model is proposed to determine watermark embedding strength by considering the luminance masking, contrast masking and spatial frequency sensitivity function. Secondly, a new embedding strategy for H.264/AVC watermarking is proposed based on an analysis on the drift error of energy distribution. We argue that more robustness can be achieved if watermarks are embedded in middle and high components of $4{\times}4$ integer DCT since these components are more stable than dc and low components when drift error occurs. Finally, according to different characteristics of middle and high components, the watermarks are embedded using different algorithms, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking algorithm not only meets the imperceptibility and robustness requirements, but also has a high embedding capacity.

A fuzzy identity based signature (FIBS) scheme allows a signer with identity ${\omega}$ to generate a signature which could be verified under identity ${\omega}^{\prime}$ if and only if ${\omega}$ and ${\omega}^{\prime}$ are within a certain distance of each other as judged by some metric. In this paper, we propose an efficient FIBS scheme from lattice assumption, which can resist quantum-computer attacks. Without using the Bonsai Tree technique, we utilize the lattice basis delegation technique to generate the private key, which has the advantage of keeping the lattice dimension invariant. We also prove that our proposed scheme is existentially unforgeable under an adaptive chosen message and identity attack in the random oracle model. Compared with existing scheme, our proposed scheme is much more efficient, especially in terms of communication overhead. Since our FIBS scheme possesses similar error-tolerance property, it can be well applied in post-quantum communication biometric authentication environments, where biometric identifiers such as fingerprints, voice, iris and gait are used in human identification.

In the age of big data, distributed data providers need to ensure the privacy, while data analysts need to mine the value of data. Therefore, how to find the privacy-utility tradeoff has become a research hotspot. Besides, the adversary may have the background knowledge of the data source. Therefore, it is significant to solve the privacy-utility tradeoff problem in the distributed environment with side information. This paper proposes a distributed privacy-utility tradeoff method using distributed lossy source coding with side information, and quantitatively gives the privacy-utility tradeoff region and Rate-Distortion-Leakage region. Four results are shown in the simulation analysis. The first result is that both the source rate and the privacy leakage decrease with the increase of source distortion. The second result is that the finer relevance between the public data and private data of source, the finer perturbation of source needed to get the same privacy protection. The third result is that the greater the variance of the data source, the slighter distortion is chosen to ensure more data utility. The fourth result is that under the same privacy restriction, the slighter the variance of the side information, the less distortion of data source is chosen to ensure more data utility. Finally, the provided method is compared with current ones from five aspects to show the advantage of our method.

Forward-secure signature is a specific type of signature, which can mitigate the damage caused by the signing key exposure. Most of the existing forward-secure (identity-based) signature schemes can update users' secret keys at each time period, achieve the existential unforgeability, and resist against classical computer attacks. In this paper, we first revisit the framework of forward-secure identity-based signatures, and aim at supporting flexible key update at multi time period. Then we propose a post-quantum forward-secure identity-based signature scheme from lattices and use the basis delegation technique to provide flexible key update. Finally, we prove that the proposed scheme is strongly unforgeable under the short integer solution (SIS) hardness assumption in the random oracle model.