Mobile cloud computing (MCC) can offload heavy computation from mobile devices onto nearby cloudlets or remote cloud to improve the performance as well as to save energy for these devices. Therefore, it is essential to consider how to achieve efficient computation offloading with constraints for multiple users. However, there are few works that aim at multi-objective problem for multiple users. Most existing works concentrate on only single objective optimization or aim to obtain a tradeoff solution for multiple objectives by simply setting weight values. In this paper, a multi-objective optimization model is built to minimize the average energy consumption, time and cost while satisfying the constraint of bandwidth. Furthermore, an improved multi-objective optimization algorithm called D-NSGA-II-ELS is presented to get Pareto solutions with better convergence and diversity. Compared to other existing works, the simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve better performance in terms of energy consumption, time and cost while satisfying the constraint of the bandwidth.

Moldable parallel tasks are widely used in different areas, such as weather forecast, biocomputing, mechanical calculation, and so on. Considering the deadline and the speedup, scheduling moldable parallel tasks becomes a difficulty. Past work majorly focuses on the LA (List Algorithms) or OMA (Optimizing the Middle Algorithms). Different from prior work, our work normalizes execution time and makes all tasks have the same scope in normalized execution time: [0,1], and then according to the normalized execution time, a method is used to search for the reference execution time without considering the deadline of tasks. According to the reference execution time, we get an initial scheduling result based on AFCFS (Adaptive First Comes First Served) policy. Finally, a heuristic approach is used to improve the performance of the initial scheduling result. We call our method HSRET (a Heuristic Scheduling method based on Reference Execution Time). Comparisons to other methods show that HSRET has good performance in AWT (Average Waiting Time), AET (Average Execution Time), and PUT (Percentages of Unfinished Tasks).

Spectrum sensing has attracted much attention due to its significant contribution to idle spectrum detection in Cognitive Radio Networks. However, specialized discussion is on complexity-based sensing strategy for spectrum sensing seldom considered. Motivated by this, this paper is devoted to complexity-based sensing strategy for spectrum sensing. Firstly, three efficiency functions are defined to estimate sensing efficiency of a spectrum scheme. Then a novel sensing strategy is proposed given sensing performance and computational complexity. After that, the proposed sensing strategy is extended to energy detector, Cyclostationary feature detector, covariance matrix detector and cooperative spectrum detector. The proposed sensing strategy provides a novel insight into sensing performance estimation for its consideration of both sensing capacity and sensing complexity. Simulations analyze three efficiency functions and optimal sensing strategy of energy detector, Cyclostationary feature detector and covariance matrix detector.

The paucity of pilot signals in Massive MIMO system is a vital issue. To accommodate substantial number of users, pilot signals are reused. This leads to interference, resulting in pilot contamination and degrades channel estimation at the Base Station (BS). Hence, mitigation of pilot contamination is exigency in Massive MIMO system. The proposed Time Shifted Pilot Signal Transmission with Pilot signal Hopping (TSPTPH), addresses the pilot contamination issue by transmitting pilot signals in non-overlapping time interval with hopping of pilot signals in each transmission slot. Hopping is carried by switching user to new a pilot signal in each transmission slot, resulting in random change of interfering users. This contributes to the change in channel coefficient, which leads to improved channel estimation at the BS and therefore enhances the efficiency of Massive MIMO system. In this system, Uplink Signal Power to Interference plus Noise Power Ratio (SINR) and data-rate are calculated for pilot signal reuse factor 1 and 3, by estimating the channel with Least Square estimation. The proposed system also reduces the uplink Signal power for data transmission of each User Equipment for normalized spectral efficiency with rising number of antennas at the BS and thus improves battery life.

Due to the rapid advancement in smart phones, numerous new specifications are developed for variety of applications ranging from health monitoring to navigations and tracking. The word indoor navigation means location identification, however, where GPS signals are not available, accurate indoor localization is a challenging task due to variation in the received signals which directly affect distance estimation process. This paper proposes a hybrid approach which integrates fingerprinting based K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN) and lateration based MinMax position estimation technique. The novel idea behind this hybrid approach is to use Euclidian distance formulation for distance estimates instead of indoor radio channel modeling which is used to convert the received signal to distance estimates. Due to unpredictable behavior of the received signal, modeling indoor environment for distance estimates is a challenging task which ultimately results in distance estimation error and hence affects position estimation process. Our proposed idea is indoor position estimation technique using Bluetooth enabled smart phones which is independent of the radio channels. Experimental results conclude that, our proposed hybrid approach performs better in terms of mean error compared to Trilateration, MinMax, K-NN, and existing Hybrid approach.

As low-power and low-rate WSNs are being widely used for industrial applications, the scheduling of such applications becomes a critical issue to guarantee meeting the stringent requirements of determinism and tight latencies. This paper studies the link scheduling problem for real-time industrial applications in time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH) networks. We propose a heuristic algorithm for centralized link scheduling referred to as path-collision aware least laxity first (PC-LLF) algorithm, which dynamically prioritizes the packets based on the laxity time to the end-to-end deadlines and the amount of collisions that messages might deal with along their designated paths to the destination device. We propose schedulability analysis of real-time applications scheduled under our prioritization approach over TSCH networks, based on the literature on real-time schedulability analysis of multiprocessors and distributed systems. We show that our methodology provides an improved schedulability condition with respect to the existing approaches. Performance evaluation studies quantify to quantify the performance of our proposed approach under a variety of scenarios.

In this paper, we focus on interference cancellation for three-hop cognitive radio networks (CRNs) over Rayleigh fading channels. In CRNs, secondary users (SUs) are allowed to opportunistically utilize the licensed spectrum during the idle time of primary users (PUs) to achieve spectrum sharing. However, the SUs maybe power constrained to avoid interference and cover a very short transmission range. We here propose an interference cancellation scheme (ICS) for three-hop CRNs to prolong the transmission range of SUs and improve their transmission efficiency. In the proposed scheme, a flexible transmission protocol is adopted to cancel the interference at both secondary relays and destinations at the same time. And a closed-form expression for the secondary outage probability over Rayleigh fading channels is derived to measure the system performance. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the secondary outage probability and increase the secondary diversity in comparison with the traditional cases.

Privacy-preserving collaborative filtering schemes take privacy concerns into its primary consideration without neglecting the prediction accuracy. Different schemes are proposed that are built upon different data partitioning scenarios such as a central server, two-, multi-party or peer-to-peer network. These data partitioning scenarios have been investigated in terms of claimed privacy promises, recently. However, to the best of our knowledge, any peer-to-peer privacy-preserving scheme lacks such study that scrutinizes privacy promises. In this paper, we apply three different attack techniques by utilizing auxiliary information to derive private ratings of peers and conduct experiments by varying privacy protection parameters to evaluate to what extent peers' data can be reconstructed.

In this paper, we put forward a delay-aware secure maximum distance separable (MDS) coded caching scheme to resist the eavesdropping attacks for device-to-device (D2D) content sharing by combining MDS coding with distributed caching. In particular, we define the average system delay to show the potential coupling of delay-content awareness, and learn the secure constraints to ensure that randomly distributed eavesdroppers cannot obtain enough encoded packets to recover their desired contents. Accordingly, we model such a caching problem as an optimization problem to minimize the average system delay with secure constraints and simplify it to its convex relaxation. Then we develop a delay-aware secure MDS coded caching algorithm to obtain the optimal caching policy. Extensive numerical results are provided to demonstrate the excellent performance of our proposed algorithm. Compared with the random coded caching scheme, uniform coded caching scheme and popularity based coded caching scheme, our proposed scheme has 3.7%, 3.3% and 0.7% performance gains, respectively.

Tone Injection (TI) scheme significantly reduces the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of Multicarrier Modulation (MCM). However, the computational complexity of the TI scheme rises exponentially with the extra freedom constellation number. Therefore, a novel immune evolutionary mechanism-based TI scheme is proposed in this paper to reduce the computational complexity. By restraining undesirable degeneracy during the processing, this IEM scheme can dramatically increase the population fitness. Monte Carlo results show that proposed IEM-based TI scheme can achieve a significant PAPR and BER improvement with a low complexity.

With the development of IT convergence technology, autonomous driving has gradually developed; however, the vehicle is still operated by the driver, who should always be in good health - but sometimes, this is not the case. It is especially dangerous to drive when drowsy, and unable to fully concentrate on driving, such as when taking certain medicines, or through fatigue. Drowsy driving is at least eight times more dangerous than normal driving, and as dangerous as drunk driving. Previous research has looked at technology to detect drowsiness, in order to wake up drivers when necessary, or to safely stop the vehicle. Furthermore, many studies have been conducted to find out when drowsiness occurs. However, it is more desirable for the driver to take sufficient rest during a break, in order to be able to continue to focus and drive. In other words, it is important to maintain a normal state before drowsiness. In this study, we introduce a sound source to increase driver concentration and prevent drowsiness, another that can improve the quality of sleep, and a system that produces these sound sources. The proposed system has a noise reduction effect of about 15 dB. We have confirmed that the proposed sound induces an EEG of the desired form.

This paper proposes a planar projection DV-hop location algorithm (PTCDV-hop) based on the LED semi-angle at half power (SAHP, which accounts for LED SAHP characteristics in visible light communication (VLC)) and uses the DV-hop algorithm for range-free localization. Distances between source nodes and nodes positioned in three-dimensional indoor space are projected onto a two-dimensional plane to reduce complexity. Circles are structured by assigning source nodes (projected onto the horizontal plane of the assigned nodes) to be centers and the projection distances as radii. The proposed PTCDV-hop algorithm then determines the position of node location coordinates using the trilateral-weighted-centroid algorithm. Simulation results show localization errors of the proposed algorithm are on the order of magnitude of a millimeter when three sources are used. The PTCDV-hop algorithm has higher positioning accuracy and stronger dominance than the traditional DV-hop algorithm.

Due to increasing interest in distributed agile software development, there is a need to systematically review the literature on challenges encountered in the agile software development environment. Using the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach, 32 relevant publications, dated between 2013 and 2018 were selected from four electronic databases. Data from these publications were extracted to identify the key challenges across the system development life cycle (SDLC) phases, which essentially are short phases in each agile-based iteration. 5 types of key challenges were identified as impacting the SDLC phases; these challenges are Communication, Coordination, Cooperation, Collaboration and Control. In the context of the SLDC phases, the Communication challenge was discussed the most often (79 times, 33%). The least discussed challenges were Cooperation and Collaboration (26 times, 11% each). The 5 challenges occur because of distances which occur in distributed environment. This SLR identified 4 types of distances which contribute to the occurrence of these key challenges - physical, temporal, social-cultural and knowledge/experience. Of the 32 publications, only 4 included research which proposed new solutions to address challenges in agile distributed software development. The authors of this article believe that the findings in this SLR are a resource for future research work to deepen the understanding of and to develop additional solutions to address the challenges in distributed agile software development.

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Information-Centric Networking (ICN) are essential network architectures for the future Internet. The advantages of MEC and ICN such as computation and storage capabilities at the edge of the network, in-network caching and named-data communication paradigm can greatly improve the quality of video streaming applications. However, the packet loss in wireless network environments still affects the video streaming performance and the existing loss recovery approaches in ICN does not exploit the capabilities of MEC. This paper proposes a Deep Learning based Loss Recovery Mechanism (DL-LRM) for video streaming over MEC based ICN. Different with existing approaches, the Forward Error Correction (FEC) packets are generated at the edge of the network, which dramatically reduces the workload of core network and backhaul. By monitoring network states, our proposed DL-LRM controls the FEC request rate by deep reinforcement learning algorithm. Considering the characteristics of video streaming and MEC, in this paper we develop content caching detection and fast retransmission algorithm to effectively utilize resources of MEC. Experimental results demonstrate that the DL-LRM is able to adaptively adjust and control the FEC request rate and achieve better video quality than the existing approaches.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) suffers from high computational complexity due to its quad-tree structure in motion estimation (ME). This paper exposes an adaptive search range decision algorithm for accelerating HEVC integer-pel ME on GPU which estimates the optimal search range (SR) using a MAP (Maximum A Posteriori) estimator. There are three main contributions; First, we define the motion feature as the standard deviation of motion vector difference values in a CTU. Second, a MAP estimator is proposed, which theoretically estimates the motion feature of the current CTU using the motion feature of a temporally adjacent CTU and its SR without any data dependency. Thus, the SR for the current CTU is parallelly determined. Finally, the values of the prior distribution and the likelihood for each discretized motion feature are computed in advance and stored at a look-up table to further save the computational complexity. Experimental results show in conventional HEVC test sequences that the proposed algorithm can achieves high average time reductions without any subjective quality loss as well as with little BD-bitrate increase.

Nowadays modern cities develop in a very rapid speed. Buildings become larger than ever and the interior structures of the buildings are even more complex. This drives a high demand for precise and accurate indoor navigation systems. Although the existing commercially available 2D indoor navigation system can help users quickly find the best path to their destination, it does not intuitively guide users to their destination. In contrast, an indoor navigation system combined with augmented reality technology can efficiently guide the user to the destination in real time. Such practical applications still have various problems like position accuracy, position drift, and calculation delay, which causes errors in the navigation route and result in navigation failure. During the navigation process, the large computation load and frequent correction of the displayed paths can be a huge burden for the terminal device. Therefore, the navigation algorithm and navigation logic need to be improved in the practical applications. This paper proposes an improved navigation algorithm and navigation logic to solve the problems, creating a more accurate and effective augmented reality indoor navigation system.

With the development of films, games and animation industry, analysis and reuse of human motion capture data become more and more important. Human motion segmentation, which divides a long motion sequence into different types of fragments, is a key part of mocap-based techniques. However, most of the segmentation methods only take into account low-level physical information (motion characteristics) or high-level data information (statistical characteristics) of motion data. They cannot use the data information fully. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised framework using both low-level physical information and high-level data information of human motion data to solve the human segmentation problem. First, we introduce the algorithm of CFSFDP and optimize it to carry out initial segmentation and obtain a good result quickly. Second, we use the ACA method to perform optimized segmentation for improving the result of segmentation. The experiments demonstrate that our framework has an excellent performance.

It is significant to construct deterministic measurement matrices with easy hardware implementation, good sensing performance and good cryptographic property for practical compressed sensing (CS) applications. In this paper, a deterministic construction method of bipolar chaotic measurement matrices is presented based on binary sequence family (BSF) and Chebyshev chaotic sequence. The column vectors of these matrices are the sequences of BSF, where 1 is substituted with -1 and 0 is with 1. The proposed matrices, which exploit the pseudo-randomness of Chebyshev sequence, are sensitive to the initial state. The performance of proposed matrices is analyzed from the perspective of coherence. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments show that the proposed matrices have limited influence on the recovery accuracy in different initial states and they outperform their Gaussian and Bernoulli counterparts in recovery accuracy. The proposed matrices can make the hardware implement easy by means of linear feedback shift register (LFSR) structures and numeric converter, which is conducive to practical CS.

Previous methods build image annotation model by leveraging three basic dependencies: relations between image and label (image/label), between images (image/image) and between labels (label/label). Even though plenty of researches show that multiple dependencies can work jointly to improve annotation performance, different dependencies actually do not "work jointly" in their diagram, whose performance is largely depending on the result predicted by image/label section. To address this problem, we propose the adaptive attention annotation model (AAAM) to associate these dependencies with the prediction path, which is composed of a series of labels (tags) in the order they are detected. In particular, we optimize the prediction path by detecting the relevant labels from the easy-to-detect to the hard-to-detect, which are found using Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) and Triplet Margin (TM) losses, respectively. Besides, in order to capture the inforamtion of each label, instead of explicitly extracting regional featutres, we propose the self-attention machanism to implicitly enhance the relevant region and restrain those irrelevant. To validate the effective of the model, we conduct experiments on three well-known public datasets, COCO 2014, IAPR TC-12 and NUSWIDE, and achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

Collaborative filtering recommender systems are vulnerable to shilling attacks in which malicious users may inject biased profiles to promote or demote a particular item being recommended. To tackle this problem, many robust collaborative recommendation methods have been presented. Unfortunately, the robustness of most methods is improved at the expense of prediction accuracy. In this paper, we construct a robust Bayesian probabilistic matrix factorization model for collaborative filtering recommender systems by incorporating the detection of user anomaly rating behaviors. We first detect the anomaly rating behaviors of users by the modified K-means algorithm and target item identification method to generate an indicator matrix of attack users. Then we incorporate the indicator matrix of attack users to construct a robust Bayesian probabilistic matrix factorization model and based on which a robust collaborative recommendation algorithm is devised. The experimental results on the MovieLens and Netflix datasets show that our model can significantly improve the robustness and recommendation accuracy compared with three baseline methods.

The paper is devoted to the detailed description of the distributed system for gathering data from Windows-based workstations and servers. The research presented in the beginning demonstrates that neither a solution for gathering data on attacks against Windows based PCs is available at present nor other security tools and supplementary programs can be combined in order to achieve the required attack data gathering from Windows computers. The design of the newly proposed system named Colander is presented, too. It is based on a client-server architecture while taking much inspiration from previous attempts for designing systems with similar purpose, as well as from IDS systems like Snort. Colander emphasizes its ease of use and minimum demand for system resources. Although the resource usage is usually low, it still requires further optimization, as is noted in the performance testing. Colander's ability to detect threats has been tested by real malware, and it has undergone a pilot field application. Future prospects and development are also proposed.

The lightweight block cipher Piccolo adopts Generalized Feistel Network structure with 64 bits of block size. Its key supports 80 bits or 128 bits, expressed by Piccolo-80 or Piccolo-128, respectively. In this paper, we exploit the security of reduced version of Piccolo from the first round with the pre-whitening layer, which shows the vulnerability of original Piccolo. As a matter of fact, we first study some linear relations among the round subkeys and the properties of linear layer. Based on them, we evaluate the security of Piccolo-80/128 against the meet-in-the-middle attack. Finally, we attack 13 rounds of Piccolo-80 by applying a 5-round distinguisher, which requires $2^{44}$ chosen plaintexts, $2^{67.39}$ encryptions and $2^{64.91}$ blocks, respectively. Moreover, we also attack 17 rounds of Piccolo-128 by using a 7-round distinguisher, which requires $2^{44}$ chosen plaintexts, $2^{126}$ encryptions and $2^{125.49}$ blocks, respectively. Compared with the previous cryptanalytic results, our results are the currently best ones if considering Piccolo from the first round with the pre-whitening layer.

Cloud computing provides a broad range of services like operating systems, hardware, software and resources. Availability of these services encourages data owners to outsource their intensive computations and massive data to the cloud. However, considering the untrusted nature of cloud server, it is essential to encrypt the data before outsourcing it to the cloud. Unfortunately, this leads to a challenge when it comes to providing search functionality for encrypted data located in the cloud. To address this challenge, this paper presents a public key encryption with equality test for heterogeneous systems (PKE-ET-HS). The PKE-ET-HS scheme simulates certificateless public encryption with equality test (CLE-ET) with the identity-based encryption with equality test (IBE-ET). This scheme provides the authorized cloud server the right to actuate the equivalence of two messages having their encryptions performed under heterogeneous systems. Basing on the random oracle model, we construct the security of our proposed scheme under the bilinear Diffie-Hellman (BDH) assumption. Eventually, we evaluate the size of storage, computation complexities, and properties with other related works and illustrations indicate good performance from our scheme.

Aimed at the disclosure risk of mobile terminal user's location privacy in location-based services, a location-privacy protection scheme based on similar trajectory substitution is proposed. On the basis of the anonymized identities of users and candidates who request LBS, this scheme adopts trajectory similarity function to select the candidate whose trajectory is the most similar to user's at certain time intervals, then the selected candidate substitutes user to send LBS request, so as to protect user's privacy like identity, query and trajectory. Security analyses prove that this scheme is able to guarantee such security features as anonymity, non-forgeability, resistance to continuous query tracing attack and wiretapping attack. And the results of simulation experiment demonstrate that this scheme remarkably improve the optimal candidate' trajectory similarity and selection efficiency.

In this paper, we introduce concepts of optimal and near optimal secret data hiding schemes. We present a new digital image steganography approach based on the Galois field $GF(p^m)$ using graph and automata to design the data hiding scheme of the general form ($k,N,{\lfloor}{\log}_2p^{mn}{\rfloor}$) for binary, gray and palette images with the given assumptions, where k, m, n, N are positive integers and p is prime, show the sufficient conditions for the existence and prove the existence of some optimal and near optimal secret data hiding schemes. These results are derived from the concept of the maximal secret data ratio of embedded bits, the module approach and the fastest optimal parity assignment method proposed by Huy et al. in 2011 and 2013. An application of the schemes to the process of hiding a finite sequence of secret data in an image is also considered. Security analyses and experimental results confirm that our approach can create steganographic schemes which achieve high efficiency in embedding capacity, visual quality, speed as well as security, which are key properties of steganography.

Plagiarism detection is increasingly exploiting text alignment. Text alignment involves extracting the plagiarism passages in a pair of the suspicious document and its source document. The heuristics have achieved excellent performance in text alignment. However, the further improvements of the heuristic methods mainly depends more on the experiences of experts, which makes the heuristics lack of the abilities for continuous improvements. To address this problem, machine learning maybe a proper way. Considering the position relations and the context of text segments pairs, we formalize the text alignment task as a problem of sequence labeling, improving the current methods at the model level. Especially, this paper proposes to use the probabilistic graphical model to tag the observed sequence of pairs of text segments. Hence we present the sequence labeling approach for text alignment in plagiarism detection based on Conditional Random Fields. The proposed approach is evaluated on the PAN@CLEF 2012 artificial high obfuscation plagiarism corpus and the simulated paraphrase plagiarism corpus, and compared with the methods achieved the best performance in PAN@CLEF 2012, 2013 and 2014. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state of the art methods.