In this paper, we study the problem of mobile data offloading for a network that contains multiple mobile network operators (MNOs), multiple WiFi or femtocell access points (APs) and multiple mobile users (MUs). MNOs offload their subscribed MUs' data traffic by leasing the unused Internet connection bandwidth of third party APs. We propose a combinatorial auction-based two-stage matching mechanism comprised of MU-AP matching and AP-MNO matching. The MU-AP matching is designed to match the MUs to APs in order to maximize the total offloading data traffic and achieve better MU satisfaction. Conversely, for AP-MNO matching, MNOs compete for APs' service using the Nash bargaining solution (NBS) and the Vickrey auction theories and, in turn, APs will receive monetary compensation. We demonstrated that the proposed mechanism converges to a distributed stable matching result. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm well capture the tradeoff among the total data traffic, social welfare and the QoS of MUs compared to other schemes. Moreover, the proposed mechanism can considerably offload the total data traffic and improve the network social welfare with less computation complexity and communication overhead.

In this paper, a joint destination-relay selection and antenna mode selection scheme for full-duplex (FD) relay network is investigated, which consists of one source node, N FD amplify-and-forward (AF) relays and M destination nodes. Multiple antennas are configured at the source node, and beamforming technique is adopted. Two antennas are employed at each relay, one for receiving and the other for transmitting. Only one antenna is equipped at each destination node. In the proposed scheme, the best destination node is firstly selected according to the direct links between the source node and destination nodes. Then the transmit and receive mode of two antennas at each relay is adaptively selected based on the relaying link condition. Meanwhile, the best relay with the optimal Tx/Rx antenna configuration is selected to forward the signals. To characterize the performance of the proposed scheme, the closed-form expression of the outage probability is derived; meanwhile, the simple asymptotic expressions are also obtained. Our analysis shows that the proposed scheme obtains the benefits of multi-relay diversity and multi-destination diversity. Moreover, extra space diversity in the medium SNR region can be achieved due to the antenna selection at the relay. Finally, Monte-Carlo simulations are provided to consolidate the analytical results, and show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSN) are usually constrained in energy supply, which makes energy efficiency a key factor to extend the network lifetime. The management of the network topology has been widely used as a mechanism to enhance the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSN), and this work presents an alternative to this. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a well-known technology in data center applications that separates the data and control planes during the network management. This paper proposes a solution based on SDN that optimizes the energy use in MWSN. The network intelligence is placed in a controller that can be accessed through different controller gateways within a MWSN. This network intelligence runs a Topology Control (TC) mechanism to build a backbone of coordinator nodes. Therefore, nodes only need to perform forwarding tasks, they reduce message retransmissions and CPU usage. This results in an improvement of the network lifetime. The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated and compared with a distributed approach using the OMNeT++ simulation framework. Results show that the network lifetime increases when 2 or more controller gateways are used.

Recent studies have shown that the flow table size of hardware SDN switch cannot match the number of concurrent flows. Combined SDN Forwarding Element (CFE), which comprises several software switches and a hardware switch, becomes an alternative approach to tackle this problem. Due to the limited capacity of software switch, the way to route concurrent flows in CFE can largely affect the maximum delay that a flow suffers at CFE. As delay-guarantee is a nontrivial task for network providers with the increasing number of delay-sensitive applications, we propose an analytical model of CFE to evaluate a rules placement solution first. Next, we formulate the problem of Rules Placement with delay guarantee in CFE (RPCFE), and present the genetic-based rules placement (GARP) algorithm to solve the RPCFE problem. Further, we validate the analytical model of CFE through simulations in NS-3 and compare the performance of GARP with three benchmark algorithms.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted lots of attention in recent years due to their potential for various applications. In this paper, we seek how to efficiently deploy relay nodes into traditional static WSNs with constrained locations, aiming to satisfy specific requirements of the industry, such as average energy consumption and average network reliability. This constrained relay node deployment problem (CRNDP) is known as NP-hard optimization problem in the literature. We consider addressing this multi-objective (MO) optimization problem with an improved Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm with a linear local search (MOABCLLS), which is an extension of an improved ABC and applies two strategies of MO optimization. In order to verify the effectiveness of the MOABCLLS, two versions of MO ABC, two additional standard genetic algorithms, NSGA-II and SPEA2, and two different MO trajectory algorithms are included for comparison. We employ these metaheuristics on a test data set obtained from the literature. For an in-depth analysis of the behavior of the MOABCLLS compared to traditional methodologies, a statistical procedure is utilized to analyze the results. After studying the results, it is concluded that constrained relay node deployment using the MOABCLLS outperforms the performance of the other algorithms, based on two MO quality metrics: hypervolume and coverage of two sets.

Inadequate and inappropriate intake of food is known to cause various health issues and diseases. Due to lack of concise information about healthy diet, people have to rely on medicines instead of taking preventive measures in food intake. Due to diversity in food components and large number of dietary sources, it is challenging to perform real-time selection of diet patterns that must fulfill one's nutrition needs. Particularly, selection of proper diet is critical for patients suffering from various diseases. In this article, we highlight the issue of selection of proper diet that must fulfill patients' nutrition requirements. To address this issue, we present a cloud based food recommendation system, called Diet-Right, for dietary recommendations based on users' pathological reports. The model uses ant colony algorithm to generate optimal food list and recommends suitable foods according to the values of pathological reports. Diet-Right can play a vital role in controlling various diseases. The experimental results show that compared to single node execution, the convergence time of parallel execution on cloud is approximately 12 times lower. Moreover, adequate accuracy is attainable by increasing the number of ants.

In geo-location database oriented spectrum sharing system, the entire geographic area is divided into meshes to classify, store and delivery the cognitive information. In this paper, we propose a flexible polygon mesh division scheme to reduce the number of meshes. Hence the cognitive information can be reduced correspondingly. Besides, polygon mesh can approximate the real environment and reduce the error of cognitive information because the edges of polygon are selected along the boundaries of the networks. We have designed the polygon approximation algorithm and have analyzed the relation between the error and the number of polygon's edges. Finally, the simulation results are provided to verify the algorithm and analysis. The polygon mesh division scheme in this paper provides an efficient approach for cognitive information organization in database oriented spectrum sharing system.

An improved energy-efficient compressed network coding method is proposed for the data communication in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In the method, the compressed sensing and network coding are jointly used to improve the energy efficiency, and the two-hop neighbor information is employed to choose the next hop to further reduce the number of the transmissions. Moreover, a new packet format is designed to facilitate the intermediate node selection. To theoretically verify the efficiency of the proposed method, the expressions for the number of the transmissions and receptions are derived. Simulation results show that, the proposed method has higher energy efficiency compared with the available schemes, and it only requires a few packets to reconstruct measurements with reasonable quality.

The Top-K query is currently played a key role in a wide range of road network, decision making and quantitative financial research. In this paper, a Top-K recommendation algorithm is proposed to solve the cold-start problem and a tag generating method is put forward to enhance the semantic understanding of the OLAP session. In addition, a recommendation system for OLAP sessions called "OLAP4R" is designed using collaborative filtering technique aiming at guiding the user to find the ultimate goals by interactive queries. OLAP4R utilizes a mixed system architecture consisting of multiple functional modules, which have a high extension capability to support additional functions. This system structure allows the user to configure multi-dimensional hierarchies and desirable measures to analyze the specific requirement and gives recommendations with forthright responses. Experimental results show that our method has raised 20% recall of the recommendations comparing the traditional collaborative filtering and a visualization tag of the recommended sessions will be provided with modified changes for the user to understand.

In recent years, there has been an increasing number of studies focused on identifying a set of spreaders to maximize the influence of spreading in complex networks. Although the k-core decomposition can effectively identify the single most influential spreader, selecting a group of nodes that has the largest k-core value as the seeds cannot increase the performance of the influence maximization because the propagation sphere of this group of nodes is overlapped. To overcome this limitation, we propose a neighborhood coreness cover and discount heuristic algorithm named "NCCDH" to identify a set of influential and decentralized seeds. Using this method, a node in the high-order shell with the largest neighborhood coreness and an uncovered status will be selected as the seed in each turn. In addition, the neighbors within the same shell layer of this seed will be covered, and the neighborhood coreness of the neighbors outside the shell layer will be discounted in the subsequent round. The experimental results show that with increases in the spreading probability, the NCCDH outperforms other algorithms in terms of the affected scale and spreading speed under the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) and Susceptible-Infected (SI) models. Furthermore, this approach has a superior running time.

With rapid growth of web technology and dissemination of smart devices, social networking service(SNS) is widely used. As a result, huge amount of data are generated from SNS such as Twitter, and sentiment analysis of SNS data is very important for various applications and services. In the existing sentiment analysis based on the $Na{\ddot{i}}ve$ Bayes algorithm, a same number of attributes is usually employed to estimate the weight of each class. Moreover, uncountable and meaningless attributes are included. This results in decreased accuracy of sentiment analysis. In this paper two methods are proposed to resolve these issues, which reflect the difference of the number of positive words and negative words in calculating the weights, and eliminate insignificant words in the feature selection step using Multinomial $Na{\ddot{i}}ve$ Bayes(MNB) algorithm. Performance comparison demonstrates that the proposed scheme significantly increases the accuracy compared to the existing Multivariate Bernoulli $Na{\ddot{i}}ve$ Bayes(BNB) algorithm and MNB scheme.

In this paper, we propose a joint power control strategy for both the uplink and downlink transmission by considering the energy requirements of the user equipments' uplink data transmissions in data and energy integrated communication networks (DEINs). In DEINs, the base station (BS) adopts the power splitting (PS) aided simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique in the downlink (DL) transmissions, while the user equipments (UEs) carry out their own uplink (UL) transmissions by exploiting the energy harvested during the BS's DL transmissions. In our DEIN model, there are M UEs served by the BS in order to fulfil both of their DL and UL transmissions. The orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technique is adopted for supporting the simultaneous transmissions of multiple UEs. Furthermore, a transmission frame is divided into N time slots in the medium access control (MAC) layer. The mathematical model is established for maximizing the sum-throughput of the UEs' DL transmissions and for ensuring their fairness during a single transmission frame T, respectively. In order to achieve these goals, in each transmission frame T, we optimally allocate the BS's power for each subcarrier and the PS factor for each UE during a specific time slot. The original optimisation problems are transformed into convex forms, which can be perfectly solved by convex optimisation theories. Our numerical results compare the optimal results by conceiving the objective of maximising the sum-throughput and those by conceiving the objective of maximising the fair-throughput. Furthermore, our numerical results also reveal the inherent tradeoff between the DL and the UL transmissions.

The main processes of a cognitive radio system include spectrum sensing, spectrum decision, spectrum sharing, and spectrum conversion. Experimental results show that these stages introduce a time delay that affects the spectrum sensing accuracy, reducing its efficiency. To reduce the time delay, the frequency spectrum prediction was proposed to alleviate the burden on the spectrum sensing. In this paper, the deep recurrent neural network (DRNN) was proposed to predict the spectrum of multiple time slots, since the existing methods only predict the spectrum of one time slot. The continuous state of a channel is divided into a many time slots, forming a time series of the channel state. Since there are more hidden layers in the DRNN than in the RNN, the DRNN has fading memory in its bottom layer as well as in the past input. In addition, the extended Kalman filter was used to train the DRNN, which overcomes the problem of slow convergence and the vanishing gradient of the gradient descent method. The spectrum prediction based on the DRNN was verified with a WiFi signal, and the error of the prediction was analyzed. The simulation results proved that the multiple slot spectrum prediction improved the spectrum efficiency and reduced the energy consumption of spectrum sensing.

Nowadays, the utilization of multiprocessor environments has been increased due to the increase in time complexity of application programs and decrease in hardware costs. In such architectures during the compilation step, each program is decomposed into the smaller and maybe dependent segments so-called tasks. Precedence constraints, required execution times of the tasks, and communication costs among them are modeled using a directed acyclic graph (DAG) named task-graph. All the tasks in the task-graph must be assigned to a predefined number of processors in such a way that the precedence constraints are preserved, and the program's completion time is minimized, and this is an NP-hard problem from the time-complexity point of view. The results obtained by different approaches are dominated by two major factors; first, which order of tasks should be selected (sequence subproblem), and second, how the selected sequence should be assigned to the processors (assigning subproblem). In this paper, a hybrid proposed approach has been presented, in which two different artificial ant colonies cooperate to solve the multiprocessor task-scheduling problem; one colony to tackle the sequence subproblem, and another to cope with assigning subproblem. The utilization of background knowledge about the problem (different priority measurements of the tasks) has made the proposed approach very robust and efficient. 125 different task-graphs with various shape parameters such as size, communication-to-computation ratio and parallelism have been utilized for a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed approach, and the results show its superiority versus the other conventional methods from the performance point of view.

Currently, various technological models and services are emerging because of the development of information and communication technology and the convergence of industries. The ICT car field is expanding because of technological convergence in the automobile industry. However, ICT convergence services are still being developed based solely on technology; characterization of users and their needs is lacking. Therefore, two types of ICT car services that apply human-centered design processes are developed in this study. These processes create services and models while considering the quality and functions of products based on users (instead of technology) when developing products or services. Usability evaluation was performed on the developed services; a human-centered design process was applied to the results to confirm that the derived services resulted in high satisfaction. In the future, these research results will provide useful applications when developing ICT car services and strategies.

Video images captured by vehicle cameras often contain blurry or dithering frames due to inadvertent motion from bumps in the road or by insufficient illumination during the morning or evening, which greatly reduces the perception of objects expression and recognition from the records. Therefore, a real-time electronic stabilization method to correct fuzzy video from driving recorders has been proposed. In the first stage of feature detection, a coarse-to-fine inspection policy and a scale nonlinear diffusion filter are proposed to provide more accurate keypoints. Second, a new antiblurry binary descriptor and a feature point selection strategy for unintentional estimation are proposed, which brought more discriminative power. In addition, a new evaluation criterion for affine region detectors is presented based on the percentage interval of repeatability. The experiments show that the proposed method exhibits improvement in detecting blurry corner points. Moreover, it improves the performance of the algorithm and guarantees high processing speed at the same time.

The intelligent monitoring system has been successfully applied in many fields such as: monitoring of production lines, transportation, etc. Smart surveillance systems have been developed and proven effective in some specific areas such as monitoring of human activity, traffic, etc. Most of critical application monitoring systems involve object tracking as one of the key steps. However, task of tracking of moving object is not easy. In this paper, the authors propose a method to implement human object tracking in outdoor environment based on human features in shearlet domain. The proposed method uses shearlet transform which combines the human features with context-sensitiveness in order to improve the accuracy of human tracking. The proposed algorithm not only improves the edge accuracy, but also reduces wrong positions of the object between the frames. The authors validated the proposed method by calculating Euclidean distance and Mahalanobis distance values between centre of actual object and centre of tracked object, and it has been found that the proposed method gives better result than the other recent available methods.

We present a method for 3D shape reconstruction of inextensible deformable surfaces from a single image. The key of our approach is to represent the surface as a 3D triangulated mesh and formulate the reconstruction problem as a sequence of Linear Programming (LP) problems. The LP problem consists of data constraints which are 3D-to-2D keypoint correspondences and shape constraints which are designed to retain original lengths of mesh edges. We use a closed-form method to generate an initial structure, then refine this structure by solving the LP problem iteratively. Compared with previous methods, ours neither involves smoothness constraints nor temporal consistency, which enables us to recover shapes of surfaces with various deformations from a single image. The robustness and accuracy of our approach are evaluated quantitatively on synthetic data and qualitatively on real data.

We present a computerized framework for producing color pastel painting from the visual information extracted from a photograph. To express color pastel painting, we propose a multi-layered framework where each layer possesses pastel stroke patterns of different colors. The stroke patterns in the separate layers are merged by a rendering equation based on a participating media rendering scheme. To produce the stroke patterns in each layer, we review the physical properties of pastels and the mechanism of a convolution framework, which is the most widely used scheme to simulate stick-shaped media such as pencils. We devise the following computational models to extend the convolution framework to produce pastel strokes: a bold noise model, which mimics heavy and clustered deposition of pigment, and a thick convolution filter model, which produces various pastel stroke patterns. We also design a stochastic color coordination scheme to mimic pastel artists' color expression and to separate strokes in different layers. To demonstrate the soundness of approach, we conduct several experiments using the models and compare the results with existing works or real pastel paintings. We present the results for several pastel paintings to demonstrate the excellent performance of our framework.

For "generic" multivariate public key cryptography (MPKC) systems, experts believe that the Unbalanced Oil-Vinegar (UOV) scheme is a feasible signature scheme with good efficiency and acceptable security. In this paper, we address two problems that are to find inversion solution of quadratic multivariate equations and find another structure with some random Oil-Oil terms for UOV, then propose a novel signature scheme based on hyper-sphere (HS-Sign for short) which directly answers these two problems. HS-Sign is characterized by its adding Oil-Oil terms and more advantages compared to UOV. On the one side, HS-Sign is based on a new inversion algorithm from hyper-sphere over finite field, and is shown to be a more secure UOV-like scheme. More precisely, according to the security analysis, HS-Sign achieves higher security level, so that it has larger security parameters choice ranges. On the other side, HS-Sign is beneficial from both the key side and computing complexity under the same security level compared to many baseline schemes. To further support our view, we have implemented 5 different attack experiments for the security analysis and we make comparison of our new scheme and the baseline schemes with simulation programs so as to show the efficiencies. The results show that HS-Sign has exponential attack complexity and HS-Sign is competitive with other signature schemes in terms of the length of the message, length of the signature, size of the public key, size of the secret key, signing time and verification time.

In this paper, we propose an image enhancement algorithm to improve license plate extraction rate in various environments (Day Street, Night Street, Underground parking lot, etc.). The proposed algorithm is composed of image enhancement algorithm and license plate extraction algorithm. The image enhancement method can improve an image quality of the degraded image, which utilizes a histogram information and overall gray level distribution of an image. The proposed algorithm employs an interpolated probability distribution value (PDV) in order to control a sudden change in image brightness. Probability distribution value can be calculated using cumulative distribution function (CDF) and probability density function (PDF) of the captured image, whose values are achieved by brightness distribution of the captured image. Also, by adjusting the image enhancement factor of each part region based on image pixel information, it provides a function that can adjust the gradation of the image in more details. This processed gray image is converted into a binary image, which fuses narrow breaks and long thin gulfs, eliminates small holes, and fills gaps in the contour by using morphology operations. Then license plate region is detected based on aspect ratio and license plate size of the bound box drawn on connected license plate areas. The images have been captured by using a video camera or a personal image recorder installed in front of the cars. The captured images have included several license plates on multilane roads. Simulation has been executed using OpenCV and MATLAB. The results show that the extraction success rate is more improved than the conventional algorithms.

Rectification is an essential procedure for simplifying the disparity extraction of stereo matching algorithms by removing vertical mismatches between left and right images. To support real-time stereo matching, studies have introduced several look-up table (LUT)- and computational logic (CL)-based rectification approaches. However, to support high-resolution images, the LUT-based approach requires considerable memory resources, and the CL-based approach requires numerous hardware resources for its circuit implementation. Thus, this paper proposes a multi-level accumulation-based rectification method as a simple CL-based method and its circuit implementation. The proposed method, which includes distortion correction, reduces addition operations by 29%, and removes multiplication operations by replacing the complex matrix computations and high-degree polynomial calculations of the conventional rectification with simple multi-level accumulations. The proposed rectification circuit can rectify $1,280{\times}720$ stereo images at a frame rate of 135 fps at a clock frequency of 125 MHz. Because the circuit is fully pipelined, it continuously generates a pair of left and right rectified pixels every cycle after 13-cycle latency plus initial image buffering time. Experimental results show that the proposed method requires significantly fewer hardware resources than the conventional method while the differences between the results of the proposed and conventional full rectifications are negligible.

Android malware steals users' private information, and embedded unsafe advertisement (ad) libraries, which execute unsafe code causing damage to users. The majority of such traffic is HTTP and is mixed with other normal traffic, which makes the detection of malware and unsafe ad libraries a challenging problem. To address this problem, this work describes a novel HTTP traffic flow mining approach to detect and categorize Android malware and unsafe ad library. This work designed AndroCollector, which can automatically execute the Android application (app) and collect the network traffic traces. From these traces, this work extracts HTTP traffic features along three important dimensions: quantitative, timing, and semantic and use these features for characterizing malware and unsafe ad libraries. Based on these HTTP traffic features, this work describes a supervised classification scheme for detecting malware and unsafe ad libraries. In addition, to help network operators, this work describes a fine-grained categorization method by generating fingerprints from HTTP request methods for each malware family and unsafe ad libraries. This work evaluated the scheme using HTTP traffic traces collected from 10778 Android apps. The experimental results show that the scheme can detect malware with 97% accuracy and unsafe ad libraries with 95% accuracy when tested on the popular third-party Android markets.

With the development of wireless access technologies and the popularity of mobile intelligent terminals, cloud computing is expected to expand to mobile environments. Attribute-based encryption, widely applied in cloud computing, incurs massive computational cost during the encryption and decryption phases. The computational cost grows with the complexity of the access policy. This disadvantage becomes more serious for mobile devices because they have limited resources. To address this problem, we present an efficient verifiable outsourced scheme based on the bilinear group of prime order. The scheme is called the verifiable outsourced computation ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption scheme (VOC-CP-ABE), and it provides a way to outsource intensive computing tasks during encryption and decryption phases to CSP without revealing the private information and leaves only marginal computation to the user. At the same time, the outsourced computation can be verified by two hash functions. Then, the formal security proofs of its (selective) CPA security and verifiability are provided. Finally, we discuss the performance of the proposed scheme with comparisons to several related works.

Building appropriate trust evaluation models is an important research issue for security guarantee in social networks. Most of the existing works usually consider the trust values at the current time slot, and model trust as the stochastic variable. However, in fact, trust evolves over time, and trust is a stochastic process. In this paper, we propose a novel time-variant stochastic trust evaluation (TSTE) model, which models trust over time and captures trust evolution by a stochastic process. Based on the proposed model, we derive the time-variant bound of untrustworthy probability, which provides stochastic trust guarantee. On one hand, the time-variant trust level of each node can be measured by our model. Meanwhile, by tolerating nodes with relatively poor performance, our model can effectively improve the node resource utilization rate. Numerical simulations are conducted to verify the accuracy and consistency of the analytical bounds on distinguishing misbehaved nodes from normal ones. Moreover, simulation results on social network dataset show the tradeoff between trust level and resource utilization rate, and verify that the successful transmission rate can be improved by our model.