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This paper addresses the admissible consensus problem for homogenous descriptor multiagent systems with undirected graphs and disturbances. First, to achieve the consensus objective and attenuate the effects of disturbances, the distributed controllers are formulated and the admissible consensus problems are formulated. Another improvement emphasizes that the proposed approach can simplify the complexity of the admissible consensus analysis by using the state transformation during the admissible analysis and disturbances suppression analysis. Moreover, based on Riccati inequalities and linear matrix inequalities, two necessary and sufficient conditions are presented to ensure the admissible consensus and disturbances suppression objectives. Finally, two simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the optimal output synchronization control problem for a class of heterogeneous complex dynamical networks (CDNs) with partially unknown system dynamics. By defining a new quadratic performance index including the information of state couplings, an optimal controller consisting of a feedback control and a compensated feedforward control is then designed. A necessary and sufficient condition for the optimal control minimizing the quadratic performance index is established. Especially, an algebraic Riccati equation (ARE) associated with a discount factor is obtained, and a novel online iteration algorithm by iteratively solving the ARE is proposed to compute the optimal controller gain for the case that the CDNs are with partially unknown system dynamics. Moreover, it is proved that the output synchronization errors converge to zero asymptotically by applying the optimal control laws. Finally, two simulation examples are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security is the main concern and bottleneck for widely deployed wireless applications due to the fact that wireless channels are vulnerable to attacks and that wireless bandwidth is a constrained resource. In this sense, it is desirable to adaptively achieve security according to the available resource. In particular, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) based on cooperative communication (CC) present significant challenges to security issues, as well as issues of network performance and management. In this paper, we focus on authentication and topology control issues. Although authentication and topology control are separately studied in most existing works, they are, in fact, closely correlated in MANETs. For example, both authentication and topology control schemes have significant impacts on throughput. In this paper, we jointly consider authentication and topology control. Specifically, we analyze the effective throughput with upper layer authentication schemes and physical-layer schemes related to channel conditions and relay selections for CCs. A joint authentication and topology control (JATC) scheme is proposed to improve the throughput. JATC is formulated as a discrete stochastic optimization problem, which does not require prior perfect channel status but only channel estimate. We also mathematically prove the tracking convergence property and the convergence rate of the discrete stochastic optimization approach in this paper. Simulation results show that our scheme can substantially improve throughput in MANETs with CC. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is the first in a two-part series analyzing human arm and hand motion during a wide range of unstructured tasks. The wide variety of motions performed by the human arm during daily tasks makes it desirable to find representative subsets to reduce the dimensionality of these movements for a variety of applications, including the design and control of robotic and prosthetic devices. This paper presents a novel method and the results of an extensive human subjects study to obtain representative arm joint angle trajectories that span naturalistic motions during Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). In particular, we seek to identify sets of useful motion trajectories of the upper limb that are functions of a single variable, allowing, for instance, an entire prosthetic or robotic arm to be controlled with a single input from a user, along with a means to select between motions for different tasks. Data driven approaches are used to discover clusters and representative motion averages for the wrist 3 degree of freedom (DOF), elbow-wrist 4 DOF, and full-arm 7 DOF motions. The proposed method makes use of well-known techniques such as dynamic time warping (DTW) to obtain a divergence measure between motion segments, Ward’s distance criterion to build hierarchical trees, and functional principal component analysis (fPCA) to evaluate cluster variability. The emerging clusters associate various recorded motions into primarily hand start and end location for the full-arm system, motion direction for the wrist-only system, and an intermediate between the two qualities for the elbow-wrist system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of new technological paradigms such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), we are going to see an unprecedented growth of connected vehicles on the roads. Also, with the ever-increasing complexity of vehicular electronics and with the increasing number of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) inside these next-generation vehicles, the need for verification of the firmware and software running on these ECUs using attestation techniques is heightened all the more. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and secure authentication and attestation scheme for attesting vehicles while they are on the roads. Since this attestation is proposed to be carried out on moving vehicles, there is also a need for authenticating the vehicles with the Road Side Units (RSUs) first before carrying out attestation. Therefore, a combined attestation and authentication scheme for verification of the vehicle ECU firmware is presented here. The ECU firmware running on the vehicles can be attested from the edge servers connected to the RSUs while the vehicles are in-transit and passing through these RSUs. We perform a security analysis of the proposed attestation and authentication protocol and compare it with other similar existing protocols. We also do a performance analysis of the proposed protocol and show the feasibility of its deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming very popular nowadays due to the emergence of application areas such as the Internet of Drones (IoD). They are finding wide applicability in areas ranging from package delivery systems to automated military applications. Nevertheless, communication security between a UAV and its ground station (GS) is critical for completing its task without leaking sensitive information either to the adversaries or to unauthenticated users. UAVs are especially vulnerable to physical capture and node tampering attacks. Further, since UAV devices are generally equipped with small batteries and limited memory storage, lightweight security techniques are best suited for them. Addressing these issues, a lightweight mutual authentication scheme based on Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) for UAV-GS authentication is presented in this paper. The UAV-GS authentication scheme is extended further to support UAV-UAV authentication. We present a formal security analysis as well as old-fashioned cryptanalysis and show that our protocol provides various security features such as mutual authentication, user anonymity, etc, and is resilient against many security attacks such as masquerade, replay, node tampering, and cloning attacks, etc. We also compare the performance of our protocol with state-of-the-art authentication protocols for UAVs, based on computation, communication, and memory storage cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a distributed observer-type consensus controller design for general linear multiagent systems over directed digital networks with limited communication data rates. Considering that each agent can only exchange binary symbolic sequence with its neighbors due to bandwidth constraints, we adopt the probabilistic quantization approach in the distributed consensus controller design. Compared to the existing works, the main contribution is that we use distributed observer-type controllers to inhibit the impact of quantization noises in agent states. First, we study the observer-type protocols with total quantized communications, where the relative-state information of each agent is quantized. The quantized consensus can be achieved, and the upper bounds of steady-state errors in the mean-square sense are also characterized, which are related to the scale of networks, the control parameters, the quantization levels, and the structures of agents. Further, we extend the controller design based on total quantization to the partial quantization case where only the neighbors’ information is quantized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the consensus issue for a class of multiagent systems with Markovian switching topology under aperiodic sampled data measurements. By constructing a novel piecewise stochastic Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, some novel conditions with less conservative are established such that the consensus is achieved in the mean square sense. In contrast to some previous publications, the sample period is no longer fixed and the transition probability matrix of Markovian switching topology is uncertain. This issue which is of practical and theoretical significance is further investigated when the sampled data controller of each agent is suffered from distinct time-varying input delay. Quite different with the related studies, a maximally allowable input delay upper bound is replaced by the permissible input delay interval. Furthermore, the corresponding consensus is elegantly obtained in terms of linear matrix inequalities. Finally, the effectiveness and practicability of our consensus criteria are well illustrated by the numerical examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IOTA is a lightweight quantum-resistant distributed ledger protocol designed for Internet of Things devices. The protocol uses a one-time cryptographic signature scheme that is resistant against attacks by quantum computers. This one-time signature scheme results in a portion of an address's private key being revealed in the signature of each outgoing transaction from that address. If an address is used for multiple outgoing transfers, it is feasible for an adversary to forge a signature by using parts of the private key associated with the address that have been revealed. In this paper, we propose the use of the cuckoo filter in the IOTA core lightweight client in order to avoid address reuse. We validate our proposed approach by implementation and evaluation in the real IOTA architecture. The obtained performance results show that the cuckoo filter integration in the IOTA core lightweight client avoids address reuse and makes the process of new address generation much more efficient and secure. Additionally, our approach can be integrated directly into the current IOTA core lightweight client. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the ${N}$ -step model predictive control (MPC) problem for a class of constrained systems with persistent bounded disturbances under the stochastic communication protocol (SCP). The control signals are transmitted to the plant via a shared network subject to a prescribed SCP for the purpose of avoiding data collisions. The SCP scheduling, which is governed by a Markov chain, is applied to orchestrate the transmission order of the controller nodes. Under the SCP, only one control node is allowed to update the control signal sent to the plant at each communication instant. Our aim is to design a set of desired controllers in the framework of ${N}$ -step MPC such that the mean-square input-to-state stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed. An optimization algorithm consisting of both off-line and online parts is developed to cope with the design problem of the ${N}$ -step controller. Finally, a numerical example is utilized to illustrate the validity of the proposed ${N}$ -step MPC strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the consensus problem for high-order discrete-time multiagent systems with state, input, and communication delays, where the input and communication delays can be arbitrarily large yet exactly known. Moreover, the communication delays are different for different agents. Nested predictor-based state feedback protocols and full-order/reduced-order observer-based output feedback protocols are established to solve the problem. It is shown that both the input and communication delays can be compensated completely. Furthermore, linear matrix inequalities-based approaches are provided to design state feedback gains and observer gains. A numerical example is worked out to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel benchmark is introduced for evaluating local image descriptors. We demonstrate limitations of the commonly used datasets and evaluation protocols, that lead to ambiguities and contradictory results in the literature. Furthermore, these benchmarks are nearly saturated due to the recent improvements in local descriptors obtained by learning from large annotated datasets. To address these issues, we introduce a new large dataset suitable for training and testing modern descriptors, together with strictly defined evaluation protocols in several tasks such as matching, retrieval and verification. This allows for more realistic, thus more reliable comparisons in different application scenarios. We evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art descriptors and analyse their properties. We show that a simple normalisation of traditional hand-crafted descriptors is able to boost their performance to the level of deep learning based descriptors once realistic benchmarks are considered. Additionally we specify a protocol for learning and evaluating using cross validation. We show that when training state-of-the-art descriptors on this dataset, the traditional verification task is almost entirely saturated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a two-way relaying (TWR) network with a battery-assisted energy harvesting (EH) relay. The relay uses limited battery energy to augment the harvested energy and aid communication between the two source terminals. Considering a time-switching relaying (TSR) protocol at the EH relay, we investigate the performance of the TWR system in terms of outage, throughput, and ergodic rate. Assuming that the source with a better channel to the relay transfers energy in the EH phase, we investigate statistical and instantaneous channel state information (CSI)-based optimization of the TSR parameter to maximize throughput for a fixed amount of relay battery energy usage. We observe that the instantaneous CSI-based optimization results in higher throughput with less battery energy usage. Furthermore, we investigate the problem of minimization of battery energy consumption for target throughput using the statistical and instantaneous CSI-based optimization of the TSR parameter. We show that battery energy consumption can be drastically reduced by availability of instantaneous CSI. The derived insights are crucial from a designer point of view. Simulation results are presented to confirm accuracy of the derived analytical expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ever increasing demands for mobile network access have resulted in a significant increase in bandwidth usage. By improving the system spectral efficiency, multi-way relay networks (MWRNs) provide promising approaches to address this challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel linear beamforming design, namely partial zero-forcing (PZF), for MWRNs with a multiple-input-multiple-output relay. Compared to zero-forcing (ZF), PZF relaxes the constraints on the relay beamforming matrix such that only partial user-interference, instead of all, is canceled at the relay. The users eliminate the remaining interferences through self-interference and successive interference cancellation. A sum-rate maximization problem is formulated and solved to exploit the extra degrees-of-freedom resulted from PZF. Simulation results show that the proposed PZF relay beamforming design achieves significantly higher network sum-rates than the existing linear beamforming designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents the design, feasibility evaluation, and performance validation of ICMR, a novel cross layer protocol that can maximize concurrent transmissions and avoid data frame interference in wireless networks, achieving a higher throughput comparing with the 802.11 standard and other state-of-the-art protocols. Observations on the 802.11 standard reveal that nodes around both the transmitter and receiver of the ongoing link waste concurrent transmission opportunities, degrading the network throughput dramatically. A state-of-the-art protocol IRMA is proposed to improve the network throughput through exploiting concurrent transmissions at the transmitter side. In this paper, a new ICMR protocol focuses on the receiver side to further improve the network throughput, through exploiting discernible interference cancellation, a physical layer mechanism that can successfully detect data frames when collided by control frames. We analyze the concurrent transmission opportunities of one link from the transmitter's transmission opportunities and the receiver's reception opportunities, then formulate the opportunities and give theoretical analysis to indicate that ICMR will have a higher opportunity over other protocols. Feasibility of the discernible interference cancellation mechanism is demonstrated through experiment results based on USRP2, and the throughput improvement of ICMR comparing with the other protocols is confirmed through simulations based on ns-2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an optimization problem to maximize the energy efficiency of a hybrid automatic repeat request with incremental redundancy (HARQ-IR) is considered for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Because a sum rate for multiple HARQ-IR rounds is approximated by a Gaussian distribution, a problem maximizing energy efficiency becomes tractable. In particular, a simplified form of energy efficiency for massive MIMO transmissions with an HARQ-IR protocol is derived using an outage probability, which is given by a tail probability of the Gaussian distribution. By exploiting the proposed simplified form, we show that the energy efficiency of the system is approximated by a piecewise quasi-concave function. Using these properties, an algorithm finding the optimal transmission power and number of transmission rounds for maximizing energy efficiency is proposed. Moreover, we show that the optimal number of HARQ transmission rounds can be less than the maximum allowable retransmissions when considering the constant power consumption of the massive MIMO system with an HARQ-IR protocol. Simulation results verify the theoretical analysis and show the performance of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the following combinatorial version of the Slepian–Wolf coding scheme. Two isolated Senders are given binary strings $X$ and $Y$ , respectively; the length of each string is equal to $n$ , and the Hamming distance between the strings is at most $\alpha n$. The Senders compress their strings and communicate the results to the Receiver. Then, the Receiver must reconstruct both the strings $X$ and $Y$. The aim is to minimize the lengths of the transmitted messages. For an asymmetric variant of this problem (where one of the Senders transmits the input string to the Receiver without compression) with deterministic encoding, a nontrivial bound was found by Orlitsky and Viswanathany. In this paper, we prove a new lower bound for the schemes with syndrome coding, where at least one of the Senders uses linear encoding of the input string. For the combinatorial Slepian–Wolf problem with randomized encoding, the theoretical optimum of communication complexity was known earlier, even though effective protocols with optimal lengths of messages remained unknown. We close this gap and present a polynomial-time-randomized protocol that achieves the optimal communication complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information and operational technologies merge into the so-called industrial Internet of Things, which is one of the basic pillars of the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Roughly speaking, yet-to-come services will be offered in the automation scenario by industrial devices having an internet connection for sharing data in the cloud. Currently, most efforts are in the development of protocols able to ensure horizontal interoperability among heterogeneous applications. Consequently, poor attention is devoted to time-related performance. In this paper, a new, full software, platform-independent approach is proposed for experimentally evaluating the delay in transferring information across local and intercontinental routes by applications leveraging on messaging middleware. The application is realized using the node-RED web-based framework, due to its availability on different platforms; the widely accepted message queue telemetry transport protocol has been chosen thanks to its low overhead and complexity. For sake of completeness, five different, private and public, brokers are used. The adopted industrial-grade hardware, complemented by global positioning system time reference, permits an overall synchronization and timestamping accuracy of a few milliseconds. The vast measurement campaign highlighted that, generally, quality of service (QoS) type 1 offers low end-to-end delay (average value less than 0.5 s) with reduced variability (0.1 s). However, the maximum end-to-end one-way delay ranges from 1 s for QoS 0 to less than 1.5 s for fully acknowledged QoS 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compute-and-forward (C&F) recently finds new applications in random-access networks focusing on the single access point (AP) scenario. In this paper, we extend the use of C&F from the single AP scenario to the multi-AP scenario. To achieve this, we identify two major challenges and propose two novel solutions. First, we introduce an AP cooperation problem and develop an efficient distributed algorithm. Second, we introduce a joint channel estimation and active user recovery problem and propose a solution based on spare recovery techniques. In addition, we provide accurate throughput and delay expressions for C&F-based carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) protocols. These expressions, together with our trace-driven simulations, demonstrate the significant advantages of C&F-based CSMA over conventional CSMA in the multi-AP scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The amount of electronic systems in agriculture machinery grows, becoming more complex and multifunctional. Due to the increasing number of devices connected to the network and the complexity of their functions, the current controller area network (CAN) becomes overloaded and CAN with flexible data rate (CAN FD) emerges as an alternative. This paper presents the simulation of an agriculture machine vehicular network using the higher layer protocols J1939 and ISO11783 (ISOBUS) and the performance comparison of the network using CAN, CAN FD 8 B and CAN FD 64 B. The presented contribution is mainly twofold: the proposal of an SAE J1939/ISOBUS compliant CAN FD 64 B model for a highly demanding vehicular network, and a detailed analysis of the real-time properties of this model compared to CAN and CAN FD 8 B. In the performed experiments, on the network permanent regime, periodic messages of machine control functions and network management data were sent by the devices connected to the network. The bus load usage, the response time, and jitter of these messages were analyzed to evaluate the real-time characteristics of the network. Compared to CAN, CAN FD had faster object pool transference, lower bus load usage, shorter worst case response time, and lower jitter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a new cloud computing model for context-aware Internet of Things services. The proposed computing model is hierarchically composed of two layers: a cloud control layer (CCL) and a user control layer (UCL). The CCL manages cloud resource allocation, service scheduling, service profile, and service adaptation policy from a system performance point of view. Meanwhile, the UCL manages end-to-end service connection and service context from a user performance point of view. The proposed model can support nonuniform service binding and its real-time adaptation using meta-objects. Furthermore, it supports intelligent service-context management using a supervised and reinforcement learning-based machine learning framework. We implemented a lightweight prototype of the proposed computing model. Evaluations confirm that the proposed computing model offers enhanced performance compared with legacy uniform computing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demagnetization of warship is needed to reduce residual magnetization to avoid the detection of magnetic mines. However, after demagnetized, it could be magnetized again by the earth magnetic field during the operation. In order to accomplish a robust deperming protocol to avoid the influence of earth magnetic field after demagnetization, this paper proposes a demagnetization protocol which utilize the interaction field inside the material to maintain magnetization state of a small coercive particles. By using the Preisach modeling combined with finite-element method, it was confirmed that the proposed protocol reduces the effect of the earth magnetic field and it was verified by the experimental measurements. Coincident results in different coercive materials showed an effectiveness of this protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many wireless systems, the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio that is applicable to a certain transmission, referred to as channel state information (CSI), can only be learned after the transmission has taken place and is thereby delayed (outdated). In such systems, hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocols are often used to achieve high throughput with low latency. This paper put forth the family of expandable message space (EMS) protocols, that generalize the HARQ protocol and allow for rate adaptation based on delayed CSI at the transmitter (CSIT). Assuming a block-fading channel, the proposed EMS protocols are analyzed using dynamic programming. When full delayed CSIT is available and there is a constraint on the average decoding time, it is shown that the optimal zero outage EMS protocol has a particularly simple operational interpretation and that the throughput is identical to that of the backtrack retransmission request (BRQ) protocol. We also devise EMS protocols for the case in which CSIT is only available through a finite number of feedback messages. The numerical results demonstrate that BRQ approaches the ergodic capacity quickly compared with HARQ, while EMS protocols with only three and four feedback messages achieve throughputs, that are only slightly worse than that of BRQ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-hop relaying is well known to extend the range of wireless communications. However, the end-to-end performance of the multi-hop relaying channel degrades compared to that observed at the first hop. This performance degradation mainly arises due to: 1) half-duplex loss and 2) hopping or relaying loss. In this paper, we analyze the degradation in outage probability and ergodic capacity due to hopping loss in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) dual-hop decode-and-forward relaying network over Rayleigh fading channels. In particular, we characterize analytically the performance degradation by deriving closed-form approximations of ergodic capacity and outage probability in the single-source single-relay single-user, single-source multiple-relay single-user, and single-source single-relay multiple-user topologies. These approximations also provide insights on how to overcome performance degradations due to hopping loss. Moreover, we show that cooperative relaying schemes can recover a significant portion of the hopping loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a cooperative diffusion-based molecular communication (MC) network consisting of single source, single decode-and-forward relay, and single destination. The source and the relay nodes use different types of molecules for information transmission. Considering both the relay and the direct links at the destination node, we have two different received signals that can be used by the destination node to retrieve the data transmitted by the source node. Therefore, diversity arises at the destination node. For detection, we adopt the energy detector applying the diversity combining technique. Since the optimum relay position in relay-aided networks plays a crucial role to enhance their performance, we study the relay location optimization problem. We first derive a closed-form expression for the bit error probability of the proposed detection scheme in which the received energy from the source and the relay nodes are linearly combined at the destination node. Then, in order to find the optimum relay position as well as the optimal destination decision threshold for a given number of molecules released by the source and the relay nodes, we formulate a joint optimization problem whose objective is to minimize the bit error probability of the network. To solve this optimization problem, we propose an iterative algorithm based on the block coordinate descent algorithm and study its convergence behavior. Numerical results show that the error performance can be improved by optimizing the position of the relay node. Our analyses help us in designing a reliable cooperative diffusion-based MC network. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Measuring contact friction in soft-bodies usually requires a specialised physics bench and a tedious acquisition protocol. This makes the prospect of a purely non-invasive, video-based measurement technique particularly attractive. Previous works have shown that such a video-based estimation is feasible for material parameters using deep learning, but this has never been applied to the friction estimation problem which results in even more subtle visual variations. Because acquiring a large dataset for this problem is impractical, generating it from simulation is the obvious alternative. However, this requires the use of a frictional contact simulator whose results are not only visually plausible, but physically-correct enough to match observations made at the macroscopic scale. In this paper, which is an extended version of our former work A. H. Rasheed, V. Romero, F. Bertails-Descoubes, S. Wuhrer, J.-S. Franco, and A Lazarus, “Learning to measure the static friction coefficient in cloth contact,” in Proc. IEEE/CVF Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit., 2020, pp. 9909–9918, we propose to our knowledge the first non-invasive measurement network and adjoining synthetic training dataset for estimating cloth friction at contact, for both cloth-hard body and cloth-cloth contacts. To this end we build a protocol for validating and calibrating a state-of-the-art frictional contact simulator, in order to produce a reliable dataset. We furthermore show that without our careful calibration procedure, the training fails to provide accurate estimation results on real data. We present extensive results on a large acquired test set of several hundred real video sequences of cloth in friction, which validates the proposed protocol and its accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, two new families of asynchronous channel-hopping (CH) sequences—Symmetric Maximum-Length CH (SML-CH) Sequences and Relaxed Difference Set (RDS) of Maximum-Length CH (RDSML-CH) Sequences—are constructed. For the first time, the maximum-length sequences (also called as m-sequences) are used to create 2-D CH matrices with a reduced number of “jump” columns. The two new constructions carry the desirable properties of maximum rendezvous diversity (MRD) and even channel use (ECU) and, more importantly, have the shortest periods in their categories of constructions. Another contribution is on the embedment of optical orthogonal codes (OOCs) to eliminate “stay” columns in the RDSML-CH matrices, thus resulting in the first and only family of the asynchronous CH sequences that can asymptotically achieve the theoretical period lower bound. To support the RDSML-CH construction, a new shortened RDS algorithm for creating the OOCs with smaller weight-to-length ratios than the existing ones is proposed. Numerical and simulation analyses show that the two new constructions have a good balance of short period, MRD, ECU, short time-to-rendezvous (TTR) mean, small TTR variance, and short maximum-TTR, thus more suitable for practical CR wireless networks than the existing constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) and device-to-device (D2D) communication are two promising technologies for improving transmission reliability between transceivers in communication systems. In this paper, we consider the design of reliable communication between the access point (AP) and actuators for a downlink multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) system in the industrial IoT (IIoT) scenario. We propose a two-stage protocol combining IRS with D2D communication so that all actuators can successfully receive the message from AP within a given delay. The superiority of the protocol is that the communication reliability between AP and actuators is doubly augmented by the IRS-aided first-stage transmission and the second-stage D2D transmission. A joint optimization problem of active and passive beamforming is formulated, which aims to maximize the number of actuators with successful decoding. We study the joint beamforming problem for cases where the channel state information (CSI) is perfect and imperfect. For each case, we develop efficient algorithms that include convergence and complexity analysis. Simulation results demonstrate the necessity and role of IRS with a well-optimized reflection matrix, and the D2D network in promoting reliable communication. Moreover, the proposed protocol can enable reliable communication even in the presence of stringent latency requirements and CSI estimation errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce Ouroboros, a new family of Key Exchange protocols based on coding theory. The protocols propose a middle ground between the cryptosystems based on $\mathsf {QC}$ - $\mathsf {MDPC}$ codes, which feature small parameter sizes, but have a security reduction to two problems: the syndrome decoding problem and the indistinguishability of the code, and the HQC protocol, which features bigger parameters but has a security reduction to the syndrome decoding problem only. Ouroboros features a reduction to the syndrome decoding problem with only a small overhead compared to the $\mathsf {QC}$ - $\mathsf {MDPC}$ based cryptosystems. The approach is based on an ideal structure and also works for the rank metric. This yields a simple, secure and efficient approach for key exchange, the Ouroboros family of protocols. For the Hamming metric we obtain the same type of parameters (and almost the same simple decoding) as for $\mathsf {MDPC}$ based cryptosystems, but with a security reduction to decoding random quasi-cyclic codes in the Random Oracle Model. This represents a reduction of up to 38% on the public key size compared to HQC, for the most secure parameters. For the rank metric, we obtain better parameters than for RQC, saving up to 31% on the public key for the most secure set of parameters, using non homogeneous errors in Ouroboros. In this full version, the protocol and decoding algorithm have been slightly improved, additional details are given in the security proof, and the protocol is fully described for the rank metric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile terminals have been widely used in the communication applications (e.g., vehicular network, e-Health, smart grid and e-Commerce) as they can obtain all kinds of services and upload data for users anytime and anywhere. With the number of users increasing dramatically and user demands diversifying, multi-server architecture was proposed to solve issues on lack of service resources that single-server architecture remains. However, multi-server architecture faces a series of challenges in applications, such as security and authentication efficiency requirements. Thus, many authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocols are presented, yet most of them require unacceptable computation and communication overhead, which is inefficient indeed. In this paper, we propose an adaptive secure handover authenticated key agreement protocol for multi-server architecture. Specifically, broadcast mechanism is utilized to assist users to select appropriate service providers with the lowest cost. Users can realize efficient handover authentication with multiple servers in the proposed scheme, that is, after completing initial authentication, users can switch to other servers and complete authentication through simple operations. Security analysis shows the proposed protocol can meet all security requirements and compared with other relevant protocols, it greatly reduces the computation and communication overhead. In addition, the above advantages grow significantly as the number of servers to be authenticated increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The IEEE 1588 protocol has received recent interest as a means of delivering sub-microsecond level clock phase synchronization over packet-switched mobile backhaul networks. Due to the randomness of the end-to-end delays in packet networks, the recovery of clock phase from packet timestamps in IEEE 1588 must be treated as a statistical estimation problem. A number of estimators for this problem have been suggested in the literature, but little is known about the best achievable performance. In this paper, we describe new minimax estimators for this problem, that are optimum in terms of minimizing the maximum mean squared error over all possible values of the unknown parameters. Minimax estimators that utilize information from past timestamps to improve accuracy are also introduced. Simulation results indicate that significant performance gains over conventional estimators can be obtained via such optimum processing techniques. These minimax estimators also provide fundamental limits on the performance of phase offset estimation schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote access laboratories (RALs) are online environments for operating instruments and collecting measurement data over the Internet. Such systems are often deployed by universities to support undergraduate students and generally follow the client–server paradigm. This paper discusses a RAL system that enables peer-to-peer (P2P) experimental design and sharing. For this, a modular design is required, which allows participating nodes to create rigs and host those individually at distributed locations. The proposed architecture is generic and can be used with any distributed P2P network control systems over the Internet. In this paper, a distributed remote control framework is presented with regard to a P2P RAL system. The experiments in the RAL require three subsystems handling the user interface, instruction interpretation, and instruction execution which can be organized and operated in different manners depending upon the experiment. The key component for creating and controlling experiments is the microcontrollers that can be easily obtained, configured, and set up for use over the Internet. The most popular microcontrollers are examined for suitability to the distributed control architecture. The basic layout of a message-based network protocol suitable for programming the devices and communication between peers for remote instrumentation and control is discussed, and queuing and flow control mechanisms are compared and tested for the proposed framework. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the design, online, of an electrical machine's healthy reference by means of statistical tools. The definition of a healthy reference enables the computation of normalized fault indicators whose value is independent of the system's characteristics. This is a great advantage when diagnosing a broad range of systems with different power, coupling, inertia, load, etc. In this paper, an original method called spectral kurtosis with reference is presented to design a system's healthy reference. Its principle is first explained on a synthetic signal. This approach is then evaluated for mechanical unbalance detection in an induction machine using the stator current instantaneous frequency. The normalized behavior of the proposed indicator is then confirmed for different operating conditions, and its robustness with respect to load variations is demonstrated. Finally, the advantages of using a statistical indicator based on a healthy reference compared with a raw fault signature are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When software engineers fix bugs, they may have several options as to how to fix those bugs. Which fix they choose has many implications, both for practitioners and researchers: What is the risk of introducing other bugs during the fix? Is the bug fix in the same code that caused the bug? Is the change fixing the cause or just covering a symptom? In this paper, we investigate alternative fixes to bugs and present an empirical study of how engineers make design choices about how to fix bugs. We start with a motivating case study of the Pex4Fun environment. Then, based on qualitative interviews with 40 engineers working on a variety of products, data from six bug triage meetings, and a survey filled out by 326 Microsoft engineers and 37 developers from other companies, we found a number of factors, many of them non-technical, that influence how bugs are fixed, such as how close to release the software is. We also discuss implications for research and practice, including how to make bug prediction and localization more accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been widely used in inventory management in many scenarios, e.g., warehouses, retail stores, hospitals, etc. This paper investigates a challenging problem of complete identification of missing tags in large-scale RFID systems. Although this problem has attracted extensive attention from academy and industry, the existing work can hardly satisfy the stringent real-time requirements. In this paper, a Slot Filter-based Missing Tag Identification (SFMTI) protocol is proposed to reconcile some expected collision slots into singleton slots and filter out the expected empty slots as well as the unreconcilable collision slots, thereby achieving the improved time-efficiency. The theoretical analysis is conducted to minimize the execution time of the proposed SFMTI. We then propose a cost-effective method to extend SFMTI to the multi-reader scenarios. The extensive simulation experiments and performance results demonstrate that the proposed SFMTI protocol outperforms the most promising Iterative ID-free Protocol (IIP) by reducing nearly 45% of the required execution time, and is just within a factor of 1.18 from the lower bound of the minimum execution time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Owing to its attractive features such as fast identification and relatively long interrogating range over the classical barcode systems, radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology possesses a promising prospect in many practical applications such as inventory control and supply chain management. However, unknown tags appear in RFID systems when the tagged objects are misplaced or unregistered tagged objects are moved in, which often causes huge economic losses. This paper addresses an important and challenging problem of unknown tag identification in large-scale RFID systems. The existing protocols leverage the Aloha-like schemes to distinguish the unknown tags from known tags at the slot level, which are of low time-efficiency, and thus can hardly satisfy the delay-sensitive applications. To fill in this gap, two filtering-based protocols (at the bit level) are proposed in this paper to address the problem of unknown tag identification efficiently. Theoretical analysis of the protocol parameters is performed to minimize the execution time of the proposed protocols. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the protocols. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocols significantly outperform the currently most promising protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a decode-and-forward-based wireless multihop network with a single source node, a single destination node, and $N$ intermediate nodes. To increase the spectral efficiency and energy efficiency of the system, we propose a cooperative multihop communication protocol with spatial reuse, in which interference is treated as noise or can be canceled. The performance of a spatial-reused space–time-coded cooperative multihop network is analyzed over Rayleigh fading channels. In particular, the exact closed-form expression for the outage probability at the $n$th receiving node is derived when there are multiple interference sources over non-i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channels. Furthermore, the outage probability expressions are derived when nodes are equipped with more than one antenna. In addition, to reduce the effect of interference on multihop transmission, we propose a simple power control scheme that is only dependent on the statistical knowledge of channels. In the second approach for managing the interference, linear interference cancelation schemes are employed for both noncooperative and cooperative spatial-reused multihop transmissions. Finally, the analytic results were confirmed by simulations. Simulation results show that the spatial-reused multihop transmission outperforms the interference-free multihop transmission in terms of energy efficiency in low- and medium-signal-to-noise scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates leaderless consensus and leader-following consensus of multiagent systems with Lipschitz nonlinearity and input delay. For such systems, the observer-based truncated prediction feedback protocols are designed via dropping the distributed term and remaining the exponential term of the solution of the system equation over the delay period. Using Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional approach, two sufficient criteria are, respectively, established for achieving leaderless and leader-following consensus. The observer and controller gains are then obtained by means of an iterative linear matrix inequality procedure. A numerical simulation verifies the effectiveness of the proposed control design approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the finite-time time-varying formation tracking problems for high-order multiagent systems (MASs) under the influences of both mismatched disturbances and the leader’s unknown input. The outputs of the followers can not only realize the prespecified finite-time formation but also track the desired trajectory generated by the leader in finite time. First, a disturbance observer is designed for every follower to estimate the disturbances in finite time. Then, based on the homogeneous finite-time control, the integral sliding mode control, and the super-twisting algorithm, a distributed formation tracking protocol is presented utilizing the neighboring interaction. The proposed protocol is continuous, so the large chattering of the control inputs can be avoided effectively. Furthermore, it is proved that the desired formation tracking can be realized in finite time by MASs in the presence of mismatched disturbances and the leader’s unknown input. Finally, a simulation example is designed to verify the theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]