The Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is a term describing a broad range of complex, multi-disciplinary, physically-aware next generation engineered system that integrates embedded computing technologies (cyber part) into the physical world. In order to define and understand CPS more precisely, this article presents a detailed survey of the related work, discussing the origin of CPS, the relations to other research fields, prevalent concepts, and practical applications. Further, this article enumerates an extensive set of technical challenges and uses specific applications to elaborate and provide insight into each specific concept. CPS is a very broad research area and therefore has diverse applications spanning different scales. Additionally, the next generation technologies are expected to play an important role on CPS research. All of CPS applications need to be designed considering the cutting-edge technologies, necessary system-level requirements, and overall impact on the real world.

Currently, increasing numbers of access points (AP) are being deployed in enterprise offices, campuses and municipal downtowns for flexible Internet connectivity, but most of these access points are idle or redundant most of the time, which causes significant energy waste. Therefore, with respect to power conservation, applying energy efficient strategies in WIFI networks is strongly advocated. One feasible method is dynamically managing network resources, particularly APs, by powering devices on or off. However, when an AP is powered on, the device is initialized through a long boot time, during which period clients cannot be associated with it; therefore, the network performance would be greatly impacted. In this paper, based on a global view of an entire WLAN, we propose an AP selection technology, known as Temporary Access Selection (TAS). The criterion of TAS is a fusion metric consisting of two evaluation indexes which are based on throughput and battery life, respectively. TAS is both service and clients' preference specific through balancing the data rate, battery life and packet size. TAS also works well independently in traditional WLANs in which no energy efficient strategy is deployed. Moreover, this paper demonstrates the feasibility and performance of TAS through experiments and simulations with Network Simulator version 3 (NS3).

In order to ensure the wireless connectivity and seamless service to mobile users, the next generation network system will be an integration of multiple wireless access networks. In a heterogeneous wireless access system, bandwidth allocation becomes crucial for load balancing to avoid network congestion and improve system utilization efficiency. In this article, we propose a new dynamic bandwidth allocation scheme for hierarchical wireless network systems. First, we derive a multi-objective decision criterion for each access point. Second, a bargaining strategy selection algorithm is developed for the dynamic bandwidth re-allocation. Based on the intervenient Stackelberg game model, the proposed scheme effectively formulates the competitive interaction situation between several access points. The system performance of proposed scheme is evaluated by using extensive simulations. With a simulation study, it is confirmed that the proposed scheme can achieve better performance than other existing schemes under widely diverse network environments.

In this paper, we investigate the degrees of freedom (DOF) of the Y channel consisting of three single-antenna users and a two-antenna common access relay, where each user intends to exchange independent messages with the other two users with the assistance of the relay. We show that the DOF of this particular scenario is 1.5. In order to prove this result, we firstly derive a DOF upper bound based on cut-set bound by allowing cooperation among users, which shows that the total DOF is upper bounded by 1.5. Then we propose a novel transmission scheme based on asymmetric signal space alignment (ASSA) to demonstrate the achievability of the upper bound. Theoretical evaluation and numerical results confirm that the upper bound can be achieved by utilizing ASSA, which also proves the optimality of the ASSA-based scheme in terms of DOF. Combining the upper bound and achievability, we conclude that the exact DOF is 1.5. Moreover, we present a novel iterative joint beamforming optimization (I-JBO) algorithm to further improve the sum rate. Numerical simulations have been provided to demonstrate the convergence speed and performance advantage of the I-JBO algorithm.

Previous papers analyzed the throughput performance of the CDMA ALOHA system in Rayleigh fading channel, but they assume that the channel coefficient of Rayleigh fading was the same in the whole packet, which is not realistic. We recently proposed the finite-state Markov channel (FSMC) model to the throughput analysis of DS uncoded CDMA/unslotted ALOHA networks for fixed length data traffic in the mobile environment. We now propose the FSMC model to the throughput analysis of coded DS CDMA/unslotted ALOHA networks with variable length data traffic and one or two user classes in the mobile environment. The proposed DS CDMA/unslotted ALOHA wireless networks for two user classes with access control can maintain maximum throughput for the high priority user class under high message arrival per packet duration.

Multicast group communication has many advantages in data centers and thus is widely used by many applications. It can efficiently reduce the network traffic and improve the application throughput. For the multicast application in data centers, an essential problem is how to find a minimal multicast tree, which has been proved to be NP-hard. In this paper, we propose an approximation tree-building method for the minimal multicast problem, named HD（Hamming Distance）-based multicast tree. Consider that many new network structures have been proposed for data centers. We choose three representative ones, including BCube, FBFLY, and HyperX, whose topological structures can be regarded as the generalized hypercube. Given a multicast group in BCube, the HD-based method can jointly schedule the path from each of receiver to the only sender among multiple disjoint paths; hence, it can quickly construct an efficient multicast tree with the low cost. The experimental results demonstrate that our method consumes less time to construct an efficient multicast tree, while considerably reduces the cost of the multicast tree compared to the representative methods. Our approach for BCube can also be adapted to other generalized hypercube network structures for data centers after minimal modifications.

When the load in a multi-cell orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system is allowed to excessively increase in face of frequent handover, the cell area becomes smaller than the designed size, and thus continuity of quality of service (QoS) for handover requests cannot be guaranteed. To efficiently support the mobility of a mobile terminal (MT), we should adaptively cope with the resource demand of handover calls. This paper proposes a twofold resource-reservation scheme for OFDMA systems to guarantee continuity of QoS for various mobile multimedia services during MT handover from lightly to heavily loaded cells. Our twofold scheme attempts to guarantee service continuity for handover and to maximize resource allocation efficiency. We performed a simulation to evaluate our scheme in terms of outage probability, handover failure rate, total throughput, and blocking rate.

Robotic sensor network (RSN) contains mobile sensors and robots providing feasible solution for many multi-agent applications. One of the most critical issues in RSN and its application is how to effectively assign tasks. This paper presents a novel connectivity preserving hybrid task allocation strategy to answer the question particularly for RSN. Firstly, we model the task allocation in RSN to distinguish the discovering and allocating processes. Secondly, a fully distributed simple Task-oriented Unoccupied Neighbor Algorithm, named TUNA, is developed to allocate tasks with only partial view of the network topology. A connectivity controller is finally developed and integrated into the strategy to guarantee the global connectivity of entire RSN, which is critical to most RSN applications. The correctness, efficiency and scalability of TUNA are proved with both theoretical analysis and experimental simulations. The evaluation results show that TUNA can effectively assign tasks to mobile robots with the requirements of only a few messages and small movements of mobile agents.

Network coding is a promising technology that increases system throughput by reducing the number of packet transmissions from the source node to the destination node in a saturated traffic scenario. Nevertheless, some packets can suffer from end-to-end delay, because of a queuing delay in an intermediate node waiting for other packets to be encoded with exclusive or (XOR). In this paper, we analyze the delay according to packet arrival rate and propose two network coding schemes, iXOR (Intelligent XOR) and oXOR (Optimal XOR) with Markov Decision Process (MDP). They reduce the average delay, even under an unsaturated traffic load, through the Holding-${\chi}$ strategy. In particular, we are interested in the unsaturated network scenario. The unsaturated network is more practical because, in a real wireless network, nodes do not always have packets waiting to be sent. Through analysis and extensive simulations, we show that iXOR and oXOR are better than the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) without XOR (the general forwarding scheme) and XOR with DCF with respect to average delay as well as delivery ratio.

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have recently gained increased interest due to the widespread use of smart mobile devices. Group communication applications, serving for better cooperation between subsets of business members, become more significant in the context of MANETs. Multicast routing mechanisms are very useful communication techniques for such group-oriented applications. This paper deals with multicast routing problems in terms of stability and scalability, using the concept of stable core. We propose LMRSC (Lightweight Multicast Routing Based on Stable Core), a lightweight multicast routing technique for MANETs, in order to avoid periodic flooding of the source messages throughout the network, and to increase the duration of multicast routes. LMRSC establishes and maintains mesh architecture for each multicast group member by dividing the network into several zones, where each zone elects the most stable node as its core. Node residual energy and node velocity are used to calculate the node stability factor. The proposed algorithm is simulated by using NS-2 simulation, and is compared with other multicast routing mechanisms: ODMRP and PUMA. Packet delivery ratio, multicast route lifetime, and control packet overhead are used as performance metrics. These metrics are measured by gradual increase of the node mobility, the number of sources, the group size and the number of groups. The simulation performance results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other mechanisms in terms of routes stability and network density.

It is widely observed that in practical wireless cooperative communication systems, different links may experience different fading characteristics. In this paper, we investigate into the outage probability and channel capacity of two-way amplify-and-forward (TWAF) relaying systems operating over a mixed asymmetric Rician and Rayleigh fading scenario, with different amplification policies (AP) adopted at the relay, respectively. As TWAF relay network carries concurrent traffics towards two opposite directions, both end-to-end and overall performance metrics were considered. In detail, both uniform exact expressions and simplified asymptotic expressions for the end-to-end outage probability (OP) were presented, based on which the system overall OP was studied under the condition of the two source nodes having non-identical traffic requirements. Furthermore, exact expressions for tight lower bounds as well as high SNR approximations of channel capacity of the considered scenario were presented. For both OP and channel capacity, with different APs, effective power allocation (PA) schemes under different constraints were given to optimize the system performance. Extensive simulations were carried out to verify the analytical results and to demonstrate the impact of channel asymmetry on the system performance.

We present joint radio selection and relay scheme that delivers data from a source to a sink in heterogeneous stationary sensor networks consisting of various radio interfaces. The proposed scheme finds the optimal relay nodes and their corresponding radio interfaces that minimize energy consumption throughout the network while satisfying the end-to-end packet deadline requirement. We formulate the problem of routing through radio interface selection into binary integer programs, and obtain the optimal solution by solving with an optimization solver. We examine a trade-off relationship between energy consumption and packet delay based on network level simulations. We show that given the end-to-end deadline requirement, our routing algorithm finds the most energy-efficient routing path and radio interface across mesh hops. We demonstrate that the proposed routing scheme exploits the given packet delivery time to turn into network benefit of reducing energy consumption compared to routing based on single radio interface.

The bibliometric analysis is widely used for understanding research domains, trends, and knowledge structures in a particular field. The analysis has majorly been used in the field of information science, and it is currently applied to other academic fields. This paper describes the analysis of academic literatures for classifying research domains and for suggesting empty research areas in the telecommunications policy. The application software is developed for retrieving Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge (WoK) data via web services. It also used for conducting text mining analysis from contents and citations of publications. We used three text mining techniques: the Keyword Extraction Algorithm (KEA) analysis, the co-occurrence analysis, and the citation analysis. Also, R software is used for visualizing the term frequencies and the co-occurrence network among publications. We found that policies related to social communication services, the distribution of telecommunications infrastructures, and more practical and data-driven analysis researches are conducted in a recent decade. The citation analysis results presented that the publications are generally received citations, but most of them did not receive high citations in the telecommunications policy. However, although recent publications did not receive high citations, the productivity of papers in terms of citations was increased in recent ten years compared to the researches before 2004. Also, the distribution methods of infrastructures, and the inequity and gap appeared as topics in important references. We proposed the necessity of new research domains since the analysis results implies that the decrease of political approaches for technical problems is an issue in past researches. Also, insufficient researches on policies for new technologies exist in the field of telecommunications. This research is significant in regard to the first bibliometric analysis with abstracts and citation data in telecommunications as well as the development of software which has functions of web services and text mining techniques. Further research will be conducted with Big Data techniques and more text mining techniques.

We propose a novel lane detection method based on classification in image sequences. Both structural and statistical features of the extracted bright shape are applied to the neural network for finding correct lane marks. The features used in this paper are shown to have strong discriminating power to locate correct traffic lanes. The traffic lanes detected in the current frame is also used to estimate the traffic lane if the lane detection fails in the next frame. The proposed method is fast enough to apply for real-time systems; the average processing time is less than 2msec. Also the scheme of the local illumination compensation allows robust lane detection at nighttime. Therefore, this method can be widely used in intelligence transportation systems such as driver assistance, lane change assistance, lane departure warning and autonomous vehicles.

This article presents a reformulation of the Grey Edge framework for colour constancy. Colour constancy is the ability of a visual system to perceive objects' colours independently of their scenes' illuminants. Colour constancy algorithms try to estimate the colour of an illuminant from image values. This estimation can later be used to correct the image as though it were taken under a white illuminant. The modification presented allows the framework to incorporate image-specific filters instead of the commonly used edge detectors. A colour constancy algorithm is proposed using PCA and FastICA linear component analyses methods for the construction of such filters. The results show that the proposed method improves the accuracies of the Grey Edge framework algorithms whilst on the other hand, achieving comparable accuracies with the state-of-the-art methods, but improving their time efficiencies.

Motivated by the Weber's Law, this paper proposes an efficient and robust shape descriptor based on the perceptual stimulus model, called Weber's Law Shape Descriptor (WLSD). It is based on the theory that human perception of a pattern depends not only on the change of stimulus intensity, but also on the original stimulus intensity. Invariant to scale and rotation is the intrinsic properties of WLSD. As a global shape descriptor, WLSD has far lower computation complexity while is as discriminative as state-of-art shape descriptors. Experimental results demonstrate the strong capability of the proposed method in handling shape retrieval.

The effective extraction of key frames from a video stream is an essential task for summarizing and representing the content of a video. Accordingly, this paper proposes a new and fast method for extracting key frames from a compressed video. In the proposed approach, after the entire video sequence has been segmented into elementary content units, called shots, key frame extraction is performed by first assigning the number of key frames to each shot, and then distributing the key frames over the shot using a probabilistic approach to locate the optimal position of the key frames. Moreover, we implement our proposed framework in Android to confirm the validity, availability and usefulness. The main advantage of the proposed method is that no time-consuming computations are needed for distributing the key frames within the shots and the procedure for key frame extraction is completely automatic. Furthermore, the set of key frames is independent of any subjective thresholds or manually set parameters.

A (n,t,n) secret sharing scheme is to share a secret among n group members, where each member also plays a role of a dealer,and any t shares can be used to recover the secret. In this paper, we propose a strong (k,t,n) verifiable multi-secret sharing scheme, where any k out of n participants operate as dealers. The scheme realizes both threshold structure and adversary structure simultaneously, and removes a trusted third party. The secret reconstruction phase is performed using an additive homomorphism for decreasing the storage cost. Meanwhile, the scheme achieves the pre-verification property in the sense that any participant doesn't need to reveal any information about real master shares in the verification phase. We compare our proposal with the previous (n,t,n) secret sharing schemes from the perspectives of what kinds of access structures they achieve, what kinds of functionalities they support and whether heavy storage cost for secret share is required. Then it shows that our scheme takes the following advantages: (a) realizing the adversary structure, (b) allowing any k out of n participants to operate as dealers, (c) small sized secret share. Moreover, our proposed scheme is a favorable candidate to be used in many applications, such as secure multi-party computation and privacy preserving data mining, etc.

Authentication of videos and images based on the content is becoming an important problem in information security. Unfortunately, previous studies lack the consideration of Kerckhoffs's principle in order to achieve this (i.e., a cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public knowledge). In this paper, a solution to the problem of finding a relationship between a frame's index and its content is proposed based on the creative utilization of a robust manifold feature. The proposed solution is based on a novel semi-fragile watermarking scheme for H.264/AVC video content authentication. At first, the input I-frame is partitioned for feature extraction and watermark embedding. This is followed by the temporal feature extraction using the Isometric Mapping algorithm. The frame index is included in the feature to produce the temporal watermark. In order to improve security, the spatial watermark will be encrypted together with the temporal watermark. Finally, the resultant watermark is embedded into the Discrete Cosine Transform coefficients in the diagonal positions. At the receiver side, after watermark extraction and decryption, temporal tampering is detected through a mismatch between the frame index extracted from the temporal watermark and the observed frame index. Next, the feature is regenerate through temporal feature regeneration, and compared with the extracted feature. It is judged through the comparison whether the extracted temporal watermark is similar to that of the original watermarked video. Additionally, for spatial authentication, the tampered areas are located via the comparison between extracted and regenerated spatial features. Experimental results show that the proposed method is sensitive to intentional malicious attacks and modifications, whereas it is robust to legitimate manipulations, such as certain level of lossy compression, channel noise, Gaussian filtering and brightness adjustment. Through a comparison between the extracted frame index and the current frame index, the temporal tempering is identified. With the proposed scheme, a solution to the Kerckhoffs's principle problem is specified.

In this paper, we present a high-quality image authentication scheme based on absolute moment block truncation coding. In the proposed scheme, we use the parity of the bitmap (BM) to generate the authentication code for each compressed image block. Data hiding is used to authenticate whether the content has been altered or not. For image authentication, we embed the authentication code to quantization levels of each image block compressed by absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC) which will be altered when the host image is manipulated. The embedding position is generated by a pseudo-random number generator for security concerned. Besides, to improve the detection ability we use a hierarchical structure to ensure the accuracy of tamper localization. A watermarked image can be precisely inspected whether it has been tampered intentionally or incautiously by checking the extracted watermark. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed scheme achieved high-quality embedded images and good detection accuracy, with stable performance and high expansibility. Performance comparisons with other block-based data hiding schemes are provided to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme.

Authentication mechanisms coupled with strong encryption techniques are used for network security purposes; however, given sufficient time, well-equipped intruders are successful for compromising system security. The authentication protocols often fail when they are analysed critically. Formal approaches have emerged to analyse protocol failures. In this study, Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) which is an abstract language designed especially for the description of communication patterns is employed. Rank functions are also used for verification and analysis which are helpful to establish that some critical information is not available to the intruder. In order to establish this, by assigning a value or rank to each critical information, it is shown that all the critical information that can be generated within the network have a particular characterizing property. This paper presents an application of rank functions approach to an authentication protocol that combines delaying the decryption process with timed authentication while keys are dynamically renewed under pseudo-secure situations. The analysis and verification of authentication properties and results are presented and discussed.

Image compression is a popular research issue that focuses on the problems of reducing the size of multimedia files. Vector Quantization (VQ) is a well-known lossy compression method which can significantly reduce the size of a digital image while maintaining acceptable visual quality. A locally adaptive scheme (LAS) was proposed to improve the compression rate of VQ in 1997. However, a LAS needs extra indicators to indicate the sources, consequently the compression rate of LAS will be affected. In this paper, we propose a novel method to eliminate the LAS indicators and so improve the compression rate. The proposed method uses the concept of data hiding to conceal the indicators, thus further improving the compression rate of LAS. From experimental results, it is clearly demonstrated that the proposed method can actually eliminate the extra indicators while successfully improving the compression rate of the LAS.

Integrity authentication of biometric data in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a critical issue because the sensitive data transmitted over broadcast wireless channels could be attacked easily. However, traditional cryptograph-based integrity authentication schemes are not suitable for WBAN as they consume much computational resource on the sensor nodes with limited memory, computational capability and power. To address this problem, a novel lightweight integrity authentication scheme based on reversible watermark is proposed for WBAN and implemented on a TinyOS-based WBAN test bed in this paper. In the proposed scheme, the data is divided into groups with a fixed size to improve grouping efficiency; the histogram shifting technique is adopted to avoid possible underflow or overflow; local maps are generated to restore the shifted data; and the watermarks are generated and embedded in a chaining way for integrity authentication. Our analytic and experimental results demonstrate that the integrity of biometric data can be reliably authenticated with low cost, and the data can be entirely recovered for healthcare applications by using our proposed scheme.

In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN), an authentication technique can be compromised due to the distributed network architecture, the broadcast nature of the wireless medium and dynamic network topology. Several vulnerabilities exist in different protocols for WMNs. Hence, in this paper, we propose trust based authentication and key establishment for secure routing in WMN. Initially, a trust model is designed based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to exchange the trust information among the nodes. The routing table is utilized to select the destination nodes, for which the link information is updated and the route verification is performed. Based on the trust model, mutual authentication is applied. When a node moves from one operator to another for accessing the router, inter-authentication will be performed. When a node moves within the operator for accessing the router, then intra-authentication will be performed. During authentication, keys are established using identity based cryptography technique. By simulation results, we show that the proposed technique enhances the packet delivery ratio and resilience with reduced drop and overhead.