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In this paper, we spotlight vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications in 5G cellular networks. Cellular V2X (C-V2X) communications in 5G enable more advanced services with requirements of ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability. How to make full use of the limited physical-layer resources is a key determinant to guarantee the quality of service (QoS). Therefore, resource allocation plays an essential role in exchanging information between vehicles, infrastructure, and other devices. In order to intelligently and reasonably allocate resources, a self-adaptive fuzzy logic-based strategy is developed in this paper. To evaluate the network performance for this adaptive strategy, a system model for V2X communications is built for urban areas, and typical safety and non-safety services are deployed in the network. Simulation results reveal that the proposed fuzzy logic-based algorithm can substantially improve resource utilization and satisfy the requirements of V2X services, compared with prior counterparts, which cannot provide guaranteed services due to low resource utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current distributed control methods have a lack of information exchange infrastructure to enable spatially evolving multiagent formations. Specifically, these methods are designed based on information exchange rules represented by a network having a single layer, where they lead to multiagent formations with fixed, nonevolving spatial properties. For situations where capable agents have to control the resulting formation through these methods, they can often do so if such agents have global information exchange ability. Yet, global information exchange is not practical for cases that have large numbers of agents and low-bandwidth peer-to-peer communications. Motivated from this standpoint, the contribution of this paper is to show how information exchange rules, which are represented by a network having multiple layers (multiplex information networks), can be designed for enabling spatially evolving multiagent formations. In particular, we first consider the formation assignment problem and then the formation tracking problem and introduce new distributed control architectures that allow capable agents to spatially alter the size and the orientation of the resulting formation without requiring global information exchange ability. In addition, tools and methods from differential potential fields are further utilized in order to generalize the proposed distribute control architecture for the formation tracking problem to allow for connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance needed in real-world applications. Stability of the proposed architectures is theoretically analyzed and their efficacy is illustrated on numerical examples and on multiagent formation experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex networks have now become integral parts of modern information infrastructures. This paper proposes a user-centric method for detecting anomalies in heterogeneous information networks, in which nodes and/or edges might be from different types. In the proposed anomaly detection method, users interact directly with the system and anomalous entities can be detected through queries. Our approach is based on tensor decomposition and clustering methods. We also propose a network generation model to construct synthetic heterogeneous information network to test the performance of the proposed method. The proposed anomaly detection method is compared with state-of-the-art methods in both synthetic and real-world networks. Experimental results show that the proposed tensor-based method considerably outperforms the existing anomaly detection methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information related to Universal Business Language (UBL), which provides a royalty-free set of XML-based business documents, and the areas of development in it. The business documents provided by UBL includes purchase orders for e-commerce invoicing and ordering. The UBL was crafted by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. Its original goal was to fuel global e-commerce by simplifying paper-heavy processes. UBL 1.0 became an OASIS standard in November 2004 and UBL 2.0 appeared in December 2006. UBL's founders say that it will play an increasing role for governmental agency IT groups trying to cut the costs of paper-based processes.

In order to provide various customized services, network slicing as a key technology for fifth-generation mobile networks enables wireless infrastructure to be sliced into multiple isolated logical networks. Thanks to the softwarization and virtualization, slices which often in competition for physical resources are realized in standardized servers. Despite the advances in the realization of network slicing, analyzing the impact of resource allocation on the traffic performance of slices still faces some challeges. In this paper, a multilayer complex network model is introduced to catch the results of resource allocation and slice deployment. This model facilitates real-time resource monitoring and topology information updating for infrastructure network providers. With this model, we investigate the impact of changing resource allocation parameters by modelling the traffic data which are transmitted within the slices. To avoid the traffic congestion caused by the resource competition, the traffic performance of slices is analyzed. The analysis results enable us to propose two cost-effective control strategies which are increasing the capacity of hub nodes and enlarging the scale of the infrastructure network by adding more servers. These strategies aim to suppress the congestion while guaranteeing the traffic performance of slices. Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of high-throughput sequencing machines ensures rapid generation of up to billions of short nucleotide fragments in a short period of time. This massive amount of sequence data can quickly overwhelm today's storage and compute infrastructure. This paper explores the use of hardware acceleration to significantly improve the runtime of short-read alignment, a crucial step in preprocessing sequenced genomes. We focus on the Levenshtein distance (edit-distance) computation kernel and propose the ASAP accelerator, which utilizes the intrinsic delay of circuits for edit-distance computation elements as a proxy for computation. Our design is implemented on an Xilinx Virtex 7 FPGA in an IBM POWER8 system that uses the CAPI interface for cache coherence across the CPU and FPGA. Our design is $200\times$ faster than an equivalent Smith-Waterman-C implementation of the kernel running on the host processor, $40-60\times$ faster than an equivalent Landau-Vishkin-C++ implementation of the kernel running on the IBM Power8 host processor, and $2\times$ faster for an end-to-end alignment tool for 120–150 base-pair short-read sequences. Further the design represents a $3760\times$ improvement over the CPU in performance/Watt terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a key enabling technology for 5G network softwarization, network function virtualization (NFV) provides an efficient paradigm to optimize network resource utility for the benefits of both network providers and users. However, the inherent network dynamics and uncertainties from 5G infrastructure, resources, and applications are slowing down the further adoption of NFV in many emerging networking applications. Motivated by this, in this paper, we investigate the issues of network utility degradation when implementing NFV in dynamic networks, and design a proactive NFV solution from a fully stochastic perspective. Unlike existing deterministic NFV solutions, which assume given network capacities and/or static service quality demands, this paper explicitly integrates the knowledge of influential network variations into a two-stage stochastic resource utilization model. By exploiting the hierarchical decision structures in this problem, a distributed computing framework with two-level decomposition is designed to facilitate a distributed implementation of the proposed model in large-scale networks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution not only improves 3~5 folds of network performance, but also effectively reduces the risk of service quality violation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Networks are prevalent in many high impact domains. Moreover, cross-domain interactions are frequently observed in many applications, which naturally form the dependencies between different networks. Such kind of highly coupled network systems are referred to as multi-layered networks, and have been used to characterize various complex systems, including critical infrastructure networks, cyber-physical systems, collaboration platforms, biological systems, and many more. Different from single-layered networks where the functionality of their nodes is mainly affected by within-layer connections, multi-layered networks are more vulnerable to disturbance as the impact can be amplified through cross-layer dependencies, leading to the cascade failure to the entire system. To manipulate the connectivity in multi-layered networks, some recent methods have been proposed based on two-layered networks with specific types of connectivity measures. In this paper, we address the above challenges in multiple dimensions. First, we propose a family of connectivity measures (SubLine) that unifies a wide range of classic network connectivity measures. Third, we reveal that the connectivity measures in the SubLine family enjoy diminishing returns property, which guarantees a near-optimal solution with linear complexity for the connectivity optimization problem. Finally, we evaluate our proposed algorithm on real data sets to demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Energy saving and emission reduction are important in the industrial field, and the transmitting loss of electric energy has been getting wide attention. The development of advanced metering infrastructures and information technology has enabled a massive accumulation of electricity data. Therefore, data-driven method is prospective to be applied to the calculation and analysis of energy loss. In order to establish an efficient data-driven theoretical energy loss calculation method for the transformer district, the following researches are carried out in this article: 1) In order to determine the input variables for the calculation model, the optimal types and number of input variables are determined through sample preclassification, grey correlation analysis and the 10-fold cross-validation method; 2) The structure of the convolutional neural networks is improved for accurately revealing the nonlinear relationship between multidimensional input data and theoretical energy loss; 3) A sample expansion method for transformer district based on generative adversarial networks is proposed, and the effect of the size of samples on the theoretical energy loss calculation in transformer district is analyzed. The simulations show that the proposed method results in acceptable calculation accuracy, training efficiency, and generalization ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing is being widely accepted and utilized in the business world. From the perspective of businesses utilizing the cloud, it is critical to meet their customers’ requirements by achieving service-level-objectives. Hence, the ability to accurately characterize and optimize cloud-service performance is of great importance. In this paper a stochastic multi-tenant framework is proposed to model the service of customer requests in a cloud infrastructure composed of heterogeneous virtual machines. Two cloud-service performance metrics are mathematically characterized, namely the percentile and the mean of the stochastic response time of a customer request, in closed form. Based upon the proposed multi-tenant framework, a workload allocation algorithm, termed max-min-cloud algorithm, is then devised to optimize the performance of the cloud service. A rigorous optimality proof of the max-min-cloud algorithm is also given. Furthermore, the resource-provisioning problem in the cloud is also studied in light of the max-min-cloud algorithm. In particular, an efficient resource-provisioning strategy is proposed for serving dynamically arriving customer requests. These findings can be used by businesses to build a better understanding of how much virtual resource in the cloud they may need to meet customers’ expectations subject to cost constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effects of the Cyclic Delay Diversity (CDD) transmit diversity scheme on DYB-H networks. Transmit diversity improves reception and Quality of Service (QoS) in areas of poor coverage such as sparsely populated or obscured locations. The technique not only provides robust reception in mobile environments thus improving QoS, but it also reduces network costs in terms of the transmit power, number of infrastructure elements, antenna height and the frequency reuse factor over indoor and outdoor environments. In this paper, the benefit and effectiveness of CDD transmit diversity is tackled through simulation results for comparison in several scenarios of coverage in DVB-H networks. The channel model used in the simulations is based on COST207 and a basic radio planning technique is used to illustrate the main principles developed in this paper. The work reported in this paper was supported by the European Commission IST project-PLUTO (Physical Layer DVB Transmission Optimization). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optical access networks (OANs) with passive optical network technology have been globally deployed on a massive scale, serving as the fundamental information infrastructure of teleCommunication networks. Some telecom service providers are re-architecting their networks based on cloud central office with software-defined networking and network functions virtualization capabilities to provide service agility, intelligence, and scalability. In this article, we present a synthesized analysis of the inherent value and practical use cases of access network (AN) slicing in the context of software-defined OANs. A novel hierarchical abstraction model and a workflow of end-to-end network slicing are presented to illustrate the support of multi-service and multi-tenancy applications over a converged OAN platform by enabling automatic life cycle management of AN slicing. Two successful trials utilizing the model and the workflow are also demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure with numerous diverse physical devices are growing up rapidly, which need a dynamic services coordination approach that can integrate those heterogeneous physical devices into the context-aware IoT infrastructure. This paper proposes a situation-aware dynamic IoT services coordination approach. First, focusing on the definition of formal situation event pattern with event selection and consumption strategy, an automaton-based situational event detection algorithm is proposed. Second, the enhanced event-condition-action is used to coordinate the IoT services effectively, and also the collaboration process decomposing algorithm and the rule mismatch detection algorithms are proposed. Third, the typical scenarios of IoT services coordination for smart surgery process are also illustrated and the measurement and analysis of the platform’s performance are reported. Finally, the conclusions and future works are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the problem of survivability of many-to-one flows in wireless networks, such as wireless mesh networks (WMNs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Traditional protection schemes are either resource-hungry like the (1+ 1) protection scheme, or introduce a delay and interrupt the network operation like the (1 : N) protection scheme. In this paper, we present a network coding-based protection technique that overcomes the deficiencies of the traditional schemes. We derive and prove the necessary and sufficient conditions our solution on a restricted network topology. Then we relax these connectivity requirements and show how to generalize the sufficient and necessary conditions to work with any other topology. We also show how to perform deterministic coding with {0,1} coefficients to achieve linear independence. Moreover, we discuss some of the practical considerations related to our approach. Specifically, we show how to adapt our solution when the network has a limited min-cut; we therefore define a more general problem that takes this constraint into account, which prove to be NP-complete. Furthermore, we discuss the decoding process at the sink, and show how to make use of our solution in the upstream communication (from sink to sources). We also study the effect of the proposed scheme on network performance. Finally, we consider the implementation of our approach when all network nodes have single transceivers, and we solve the problem through a greedy algorithm that constructs a feasible schedule for the transmissions from the sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the problem of multiuser resource management in multihop cognitive radio networks for delay-sensitive applications. Since tolerable delay does not allow propagating global information back and forth throughout the multihop network to a centralized decision maker, the source nodes and relays need to adapt their actions (transmission frequency channel and route selections) in a distributed manner, based on local network information. We propose a distributed resource-management algorithm that allows network nodes to exchange information and that explicitly considers the delays and cost of exchanging the network information over multihop cognitive radio networks. In this paper, the term "cognitive" refers to both the capability of the network nodes to achieve large spectral efficiencies by dynamically exploiting available frequency channels and their ability to learn the "environment" (the actions of interfering nodes) based on the designed information exchange. Note that the node competition is due to the mutual interference of neighboring nodes using the same frequency channel. Based on this, we adopt a multiagent-learning approach, i.e., adaptive fictitious play, which uses the available interference information. We also discuss the tradeoff between the cost of the required information exchange and the learning efficiency. The results show that our distributed resource-management approach improves the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of multiple video streams by more than 3 dB, as opposed to the state-of-the-art dynamic frequency channel/route selection approaches without learning capability, when the network resources are limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The successful dissemination of emergency messages in vehicular ad hoc networks can make a difference between life and death. To achieve the life-saving goals, emergency message dissemination needs timely and lossless medium access in vehicular ad hoc networks. Although there are existing medium access control (MAC) protocols that support priority medium access in the literature, these protocols focus on providing statistical priority for unicast flows instead of strict priority for individual packets. This paper proposes a new MAC scheme to address this issue. With its novel pulse-based control mechanism, the proposed MAC scheme realizes strict packet-level priority scheduling for emergency packets in a fully distributed way. With the same mechanism, the proposed scheme supports multiple levels of strict priority for emergency packets. The comprehensive simulation results in this paper show the effectiveness of the proposed MAC scheme in serving emergency messages in vehicular ad hoc networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Next-generation network infrastructure should support different services and several levels of quality of service (QoS) and resilience. The main requirements for such multiservice networks are flexibility, effective utilization of network resources, and ability to react to traffic demand changes with time. These requisites lead to the fact that next-generation networks should, to some extend, be ‘self-adapting,’ to cope with the need of promptly reacting to traffic demand changes, in an effective way, while taking into account the different requirements in terms of QoS. This paper sketches the reference network scenario and discusses the subject of self-adapting networks, attempting to focus on the key issues that need to be solved to realize future infrastructures. As a relevant example, this paper briefly reports a system developed by the authors' laboratory that implements a traffic engineering solution able to fulfill the mentioned requirements. This system could be regarded as a first concrete step toward the realization of self-adapting networks. In addition, some relevant results that were obtained either by simulation or by experiments on a real test bed are reported to discuss the main characteristics of such a system and assess the feasibility of the concept. Finally, the paper reviews the main hot issues that need to be addressed, in the authors' opinion, by the international research community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider wireless multicarrier communications systems applying different transmit-antenna diversity techniques. Whereas the transmitter has available multiple antennas, we assume a single antenna at the receiver. Thus, we consider multiple-input single-output multicarrier transmission systems which are of special interest for downlink mobile radio applications. For these systems, we investigate the matched-filter bounds (MFBs) which represent the performance in an environment free of any interference and, thus, are lower bounds on the achievable performance. Especially, we focus on the analytical determination of the MFBs for selection diversity (SD), since this transmit-antenna diversity technique requires the least amount of preprocessing at the transmitter. Based on the derived MFBs, SD is investigated in detail, and compared with other transmit-antenna diversity techniques which are based on the maximum-ratio and the equal-gain transmission principles, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper derives lower bounds on the redundancy, the protection capacity to working capacity ratio, needed by link-protection or link-restoration. Homogeneity conditions, on which the well-known redundancy bound 1/(d¯-1) holds for a network, are also identified, where d¯ is the average nodal degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of the products of diverse fields, including the human component, into complex systems has created major difficulties in the development of efficient mechanisms for analyzing system performance. One of the problems can be traced to the variety of terminologies used in describing performance across different fields. A designer or user is faced with vague terms that may be complementary, synonymous, or some combination thereof. There is a need to develop a common understanding of the meaning of widely used terms without reference to a specific discipline. The work described in this paper aims to develop a framework that helps identify a set of performance indicators for complex systems, such as information infrastructures. The objective is not to propose yet another concept, but rather to identify from the existing concepts the proper definitions, attributes, intersections, and evaluation measures. Dependability, fault-tolerance, reliability/availability, security, and survivability are used as representative examples for describing the proposed framework. This framework could eventually help furnish the basis towards adoption of standard terminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we rewrite the Minimal-Connected-Component (MCC) model in 2-D meshes in a fully-distributed manner without using global information so that not only can the existence of a Manhattan-distance-path be ensured at the source, but also such a path can be formed by routing-decisions made at intermediate nodes along the path. We propose the MCC model in 3-D meshes, and extend the corresponding routing in 2-D meshes to 3-D meshes. We consider the positions of source & destination when the new faulty components are constructed. Specifically, all faulty nodes will be contained in some disjoint fault-components, and a healthy node will be included in a faulty component only if using it in the routing will definitely cause a non-minimal routing-path. A distributed process is provided to collect & distribute MCC information to a limited number of nodes along so-called boundaries. Moreover, a sufficient & necessary condition is provided for the existence of a Manhattan-distance-path in the presence of our faulty components. As a result, only the routing having a Manhattan-distance-path will be activated at the source, and its success can be guaranteed by using the information of boundary in routing-decisions at the intermediate nodes. The results of our Monte-Carlo-estimate show substantial improvement of the new fault-information model in the percentage of successful Manhattan-routing conducted in 3-D meshes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an algorithm that forms a dynamic and self-organizing network is demonstrated. The hypothesis of this work is that in order to achieve a resilient and adaptive peer-to-peer (P2P) network, each network node must proactively maintain a minimum number of edges. Specifically, low-level communication protocols are not sufficient by themselves to achieve high-service availability, especially in the case of ad hoc or dynamic networks with a high degree of node addition and deletion. The concept has been evaluated within a P2P agent application in which each agent has a goal to maintain a preferred number of connections to a number of service providing agents. Using this algorithm, the agents update a weight value associated with each connection, based on the perceived utility of the connection to the corresponding agent. This utility function can be a combination of several node or edge parameters, such as degree k of the target node, or frequency of the message response from the node. This weight is updated using a set of Hebbian-style learning rules, such that the network as a whole exhibits adaptive self-organizing behavior. The principal result is the finding that by limiting the connection neighborhood within the overlay topology, the resulting P2P network can be made highly resilient to targeted attacks on high-degree nodes, while maintaining search efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a method is proposed to construct spectrally efficient unitary space-time codes for high-rate differential communications over multiple-antenna channels. Unlike most of the known methods which are designed to maximize the diversity product (the minimum determinant distance), our objective is to increase the spectral efficiency. The simulation results indicate that for high spectral efficiency and for more than one receive antenna, the new method significantly outperforms the existing alternatives. In the special case of two transmit antennas, which is the main focus of this paper, the relation between the proposed code and the Alamouti scheme helps us to provide an efficient maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding algorithm. Also, we demonstrate that similar ideas can be applied to designing codes for more than two transmit antennas. As an example, we present a construction for 4-by-4 unitary constellations which has a good performance, compared with the other known codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crosstalk between multiple services transmitting through the same telephone cable is the primary limitation to digital subscriber line (DSL) services. From a spectrum management point of view, it is important to have an accurate map of all the services that generate crosstalk into a given pair. This paper on crosstalk identification is motivated by an important practical consideration: the signals constituting the crosstalk are transmitted at different rates in xDSL systems. Therefore, we here propose to use the ‘blocking technique,’ we derive blocked state-space models for multirate xDSL networks, and we set up the mapping relationship between available input and output data. Further, we use the least-squares principle to identify the crosstalk functions, and study the convergence rate and upper bound of the parameter-estimation error. Finally, we illustrate and verify the theoretical findings with simulation examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we provide an asymptotic performance analysis of channel-aware packet scheduling based on the extreme value theory. We first address the average throughput of systems with a homogeneous average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and obtain its asymptotic expression. Compared with the exact throughput expression, the asymptotic one, which is applicable to a broader range of fading channels, is more concise and easier from which to get insights. Furthermore, we confirm the accuracy of the asymptotic results by theoretical analysis and numerical simulation. For a system with heterogeneous SNRs, normalized-SNR-based scheduling needs to be used for fairness. We also investigate the asymptotic average throughput of the normalized-SNR-based scheduling, and prove that the average throughput in this case is less than that in the homogeneous case with a power constraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the problem of designing globally stable, scalable congestion control algorithms for the Internet. Prior work has primarily used linear stability as the criterion for such a design. Global stability has been studied only for single node, single source problems. Here, we obtain conditions for a general topology network accessed by sources with heterogeneous delays. We obtain a sufficient condition for global stability in terms of the increase/decrease parameters of the congestion control algorithm and the price functions used at the links. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A curriculum for a master's level course called Integrating Information Systems Technologies is presented. The course content is drawn from industry practice, and teaches ways of integrating large scale information systems. The teaching method used is similar to the method used to teach architecture. Students are asked to design complex systems in the form of posters; in each class these posters are discussed. Course evaluations from 95 students suggest that students find posters more effective than written papers and slide presentations. Specifically, students find that posters not only encourage visualization, but also provide them a way of seeing the thought processes of fellow students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

V2X communication in the mmWave band is one way to achieve high data rates for applications like infotainment, cooperative perception, augmented reality assisted driving, and so on. MmWave communication relies on large antenna arrays, and configuring these arrays poses high training overhead. In this article, we motivate the use of infrastructure mounted sensors (which will be part of future smart cities) to aid establishing and maintaining mmWave vehicular communication links. We provide numerical and measurement results to demonstrate that information from these infrastructure sensors reduces the mmWave array configuration overhead. Finally, we outline future research directions to help materialize the use of infrastructure sensors for mmWave communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IoT technology is a fundamental infrastructure for information transmission and integration in smart city implementations to achieve effective fine-grained city management, efficient operations, and improved life quality of citizens. Smartcity IoT systems usually involve high volume and a variety of information circulation. The information life-cycle also involves many parties, stakeholders, and entities such as individuals, businesses, and government agencies with their own objectives which needed to be incentivized properly. As such, recent studies have modeled smart-city IoT systems as a market, where information is treated as a commodity by market participants. In this work, we first present a general information-centric system architecture to analyze smart-city IoT systems. We then discuss features of market-oriented approaches in IoT, including market incentive, IoT service pattern, information freshness, and social impacts. System design challenges and related works are also reviewed. Finally, we optimize information trading in smart-city IoT systems, considering direct and indirect network externalities in a social domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new flow control scheme improving performance of the future broadband satellite networks is proposed and analyzed in this paper. The proposed scheme is particularly suitable for the Internet-based services in broadband satellite networks. The complexity of the proposed scheme is comparable with the existing flow control techniques, as it does not require the additional information to be provided by either the satellite or the earth stations. The throughput and the satellite queue size performances of the proposed scheme are mathematically analyzed and simulated. The results show the significant improvement in the proposed scheme comparing with the conventional window-based and rate-based flow control techniques. Such a scheme can be used in the future satellite networks, which are an important component in the global information infrastructure (GII). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose the TelcoFog architecture as a novel, secure, highly distributed, and ultra-dense fog computing infrastructure, which can be allocated at the extreme edge of a wired/wireless network for a telecom operator to provide multiple unified, cost-effective, and new 5G services, such as NFV, MEC, and services for third parties (e.g., smart cities, vertical industries, and IoT). The distributed and programmable fog technologies that are proposed in TelcoFog are expected to strengthen the position of the mobile network and cloud markets. TelcoFog, by design, is capable of integrating an ecosystem for network operators willing to provide NFV, MEC, and IoT services. TelcoFog's key benefits are the dynamic deployment of new distributed low-latency services. The novel TelcoFog architecture consists of three main building blocks: a scalable TelcoFog node, which is seamlessly integrated in the telecom infrastructure; a TelcoFog controller, focused on service assurance and based on service data modeling using YANG, which is integrated in the management and orchestration architecture of the telecom operator; and TelcoFog services, which are able to run on top of the TelcoFog and telecom infrastructure. The TelcoFog architecture is validated through a proof of concept for IoT services. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a multiparty video conference, multiple users simultaneously distribute video streams to their receivers. As the traditional server-based solutions incur high infrastructure and bandwidth cost, conventional peer-to-peer (P2P) solutions only leveraging end-users' upload bandwidth are normally not self-sustainable: The video streaming workload increases quadratically with the number of users as each user could generate and distribute video streams, while the user upload bandwidth only increases linearly. Recently, hybrid solutions have been proposed that employ helpers to address the bandwidth deficiency in P2P video-conferencing swarms. It is also noticed that a system hosting multiple parallel conferencing swarms can benefit from cross-swarm bandwidth sharing. However, how to optimally share bandwidth in such systems has not been explored so far. In this paper, we study the optimal bandwidth sharing in multiswarm multiparty P2P video-conferencing systems with helpers and investigate two cross-swarm bandwidth-sharing scenarios: 1) swarms are independent and peers from different swarms share a common pool of helpers; 2) swarms are cooperative and peers in a bandwidth-rich swarm can further share their bandwidth with peers in a bandwidth-poor swarm. For each scenario, we develop distributed algorithms for intraswarm and interswarm bandwidth allocation under a utility-maximization framework. Through analysis and simulation, we show that the proposed algorithms are robust to peer dynamics and can adaptively allocate peer and helper bandwidth across swarms so as to achieve the system-wide optimum. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Online games are a rapidly growing Internet application. In order to run a successful online game, game companies and game infrastructure providers must properly manage game workloads and content so that they can maximize player satisfaction while minimizing their own costs. Toward this end, this paper provides a comprehensive, long-term analysis of several popular online games and their players using one of the richest data sets available for online games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel circularly polarized button antenna is proposed. The antenna is constructed on a disk-shaped FR-4 substrate. This disk is located on the top of a textile layer and supported by a feeding probe. The antenna works in the 5.47–5.725 GHz Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure worldwide band, with over 14% relative impedance bandwidth and over 7% relative axial ratio bandwidth. A prototype has been fabricated and measured. A good agreement is found between measured and simulated results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overlay routing has emerged as a promising approach to improving performance and reliability of Internet paths. To fully realize the potential of overlay routing under the constraints of deployment costs in terms of hardware, network connectivity and human effort, it is critical to carefully place infrastructure overlay nodes to balance the tradeoff between performance and resource constraints. In this paper, we investigate approaches to perform intelligent placement of overlay nodes to facilitate (i) resilient routing and (ii) TCP performance improvement. We formulate objective functions to capture application behavior: reliability and TCP performance, and develop several placement algorithms, which offer a wide range of tradeoffs in complexity and required knowledge of the client-server location and traffic load. Using simulations on synthetic and real Internet, topologies, and PlanetLab experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the placement algorithms and objective functions developed, respectively. We conclude that a hybrid approach combining greedy and random approaches provides the best tradeoff between computational efficiency and accuracy. We also uncover the fundamental challenge in simultaneously optimizing for reliability and TCP performance, and propose a simple unified algorithm to achieve both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quality of service (QoS) is becoming an attractive feature for high-performance networks and parallel machines because, in those environments, there are different traffic types, each one having its own requirements. In that sense, deadline-based algorithms can provide powerful QoS provision. However, the cost associated with keeping ordered lists of packets makes these algorithms impractical for high-performance networks. In this paper, we explore how to efficiently adapt the Earliest Deadline First family of algorithms to high-speed network environments. The results show excellent performance using just two virtual channels, FIFO queues, and a cost feasible with today's technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a yield learning infrastructure that has been developed and deployed to help rapidly ramp 65-nm random and systematic yield. This infrastructure consists of a 4-Mb addressable-array test circuit with >8000 unique test structures along with customized software and automated analysis routines to distill the large datasets generated. Examples of the successful application of this methodology are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-business successes in traditional organizations have prompted much interest among researchers in many disciplines such as strategic management, information systems, and economics. However, the complexity of e-business implementation process has been overlooked, and it remains unclear. This paper investigates causal relationships among strategic initiative, information technology (IT)-related resources, and e-business capabilities; and their roles in the implementation process. From the resource-based view (RBV) of a firm and e-business strategic stand-point, we propose a model of e-business implementation process. We divide the process into four stages, and 11 hypotheses are developed in seeking relationships among six proposed constructs. Drawing from a sample of 56 enterprises within Hubei Province in China, we provide theoretical support for a critical causal link from e-business strategic initiatives to utilization of IT-related resources, and consequently, creating distinctive e-business capabilities. We find that information sharing capabilities are intermediate and transferable forces that help translating IT-related organizational resources into the collaborative process capabilities. The causal relationships expand our understanding of the dynamics of organizational transformation enabled by the Internet. The practical implications offer managers guidelines to the roles played by strategy, resource, and capabilities for e-business success. It helps in recognizing the value of their potential contributions to the organization as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamic sharing of the common physical network is envisioned as a key enabler for the emerging Internet technologies. This paper addresses challenges related to resource sharing in the physical layer., and analyzes the performance of infrastructure service provision with control plane mechanisms based on Generalized Multi Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS). In our approach, the provisioning of infrastructure services is supported by two novel concepts for GMPLS traffic engineering (TE): resource visibility and inter-domain exchange. Resource visibility is a new network control plane concept, which defines the usage polices for transmission, multiplexing, and switching resources in multiple GMPLS layers. In our architecture, every network resource may exhibit different visibility to different services at different layers. The inter-domain exchange, here referred to as GMPLS Exchange Point (GXP), is the physical layer equivalent of the Internet Exchange Point (IXP). Just as how the IXP manages interconnections of autonomous systems (AS) in the Internet, the GXP manages dynamic interconnections of multiple provider domains land enables them to advertise their physical resources to other domains. We model the dynamic provisioning of infrastructure services using graph theory and deploy GMPLS traffic engineering (TE) to optimize the routing and resource yields. The results obtained demonstrate that traffic engineering with resource visibility and GXP brings significant performance benefits in resource utilization and infrastructure extensibility, especially when network providers set up LSPs as a result of collaborative and carrier-neutral traffic engineering where they share information about resource capabilities and utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first proposes three improved gossip mechanisms by mapping links into metric space and dynamically adapting the number of selected neighbors to disseminate messages. Experiments and comparisons show that these mechanisms can improve the performance of gossip in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. This is the effect of mapping a network into a metric space that differentiates nodes and links according to linking characteristics and controlling local information flow with knowing such differences. A further study about query routing on P2P semantic link network shows that mapping a network into a semantic space can also improve the performance. An intrinsic rule is found by experimental comparisons and analysis: The performance of a P2P network can be improved by designing an appropriate mapping from the network into metric space or semantic space. A general framework for networking with metric space and semantic space is suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an open environment such as the Internet, the decision to collaborate with a stranger (e.g., by granting access to a resource) is often based on the characteristics (rather than the identity) of the requester, via digital credentials: Access is granted if Alice's credentials satisfy Bob's access policy. The literature contains many scenarios in which it is desirable to carry out such trust negotiations in a privacy-preserving manner, i.e., so as minimize the disclosure of credentials and/or of access policies. Elegant solutions were proposed for achieving various degrees of privacy-preservation through minimal disclosure. In this paper, we present protocols that protect both sensitive credentials and sensitive policies. That is, Alice gets the resource only if she satisfies the policy, Bob does not learn anything about Alice's credentials (not even whether Alice got access), and Alice learns neither Bob's policy structure nor which credentials caused her to gain access. Our protocols are efficient in terms of communication and in rounds of interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel approach is proposed for estimating traffic matrices. Our method, called PamTram for PArtial Measurement of TRAffic Matrices, couples lightweight origin-destination (OD) flow measurements along with a computationally lightweight algorithm for producing OD estimates. The first key aspect of our method is to actively select a small number of informative OD flows to measure in each estimation interval. To avoid the heavy computation of optimal selection, we use intuition from game theory to develop randomized selection rules, with the goals of reducing errors and adapting to traffic changes. We show that it is sufficient to measure only one flow per measurement period to drastically reduce errors⪢thus rendering our method lightweight in terms of measurement overhead. The second key aspect is an explanation and proof that an Iterative Proportional Fitting algorithm approximates traffic matrix estimates when the goal is a minimum mean-squared error; this makes our method lightweight in terms of computation overhead. A one-step error bound is provided for PamTram that bounds the average error for the worst scenario. We validate our method using data from Sprint's European Tier-1 IP backbone network and demonstrate its consistent improvement over previous methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much interest in admission control schemes that place the burden of admission control decisions on the end users. In these schemes, referred to as Endpoint Admission Control, the decision to join the network is taken by the user, based on the probing of the network using probe packets. Depending on the level of congestion, routers mark the probe packets and thus inform the user of the state of the network. In this paper, we analyze three mechanisms for providing Endpoint Admission Control: virtual-queue marking, random-early marking and tail drop. For each scheme, we analyze the probing duration necessary to guarantee the required QoS and achieve high link utilization. Our main conclusion is that very few probe packets have to be sent when early marking is used, whereas tail drop requires a large number of probe packets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peer-to-peer (P2P) system is an overlay network of peer computers without centralized servers, and many applications have been developed for such networks such as file sharing systems. Because a set of peers dynamically changes, design and verification of efficient protocols is a challenging task. In this paper, we consider an object searching problem under a resource model such that there are some replicas in a system and the lower bound of the ratio p = n'/n is known in advance, Where n' is a lower bound of the number of peers that hold original or replica for any object type and n is the total number of peers. In addition, we consider object searching with probabilistic success, i.e., for each object search, object must be found with at least probability 0 < σ < 1. To solve such a problem efficiently, we propose a new communication structure, named probabilistic weak quorum systems (PWQS), which is an extension of coterie. Then, we propose a fault-tolerant protocol for searching for objects in a P2P system. lb our method, each peer does not maintain global information such as the set of all peers and a logical topology with global consistency. In our protocol, each peer communicates only a small part of a peer set and, thus, our protocol is adaptive for huge scale P2P network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managers charged with assessing investment opportunities for information technologies such as e-business projects face considerable uncertainty in their decision-making processes. Contemporary theories of the firm and the normative prescriptions thereof emphasize the potential for such investments to augment firm-level knowledge and relational capabilities. However, prior research has not examined the relative emphases that managers place on the knowledge and relational capability-augmenting characteristics of the e-business investments. In this paper, we develop a model to assess whether managerial evaluations of e-business investment opportunities are consistent with these normative and theoretical prescriptions. A test of the model using survey data on 485 project assessments by e-business managers suggests that managerial assessment and choice are guided by the criteria suggested by the knowledge and relational theories in evaluating potential e-business initiatives. Our results demonstrate that the ability of firms to exploit their intangible assets through such investments explicitly enter managerial calculus and provide new insights into the relative importance ascribed to these factors. The overarching insight is that managers ascribe relatively more weight to knowledge-based considerations than to relational considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a practical payment protocol with scalable anonymity for Internet purchases, and analyzes its role- based access control (RBAC). The protocol uses electronic cash for payment transactions. It is an offline payment scheme that can prevent a consumer from spending a coin more than once. Consumers can improve anonymity if they are worried about disclosure of their identities to banks. An agent provides high anonymity through the issue of a certification. The agent certifies reencrypted data after verifying the validity of the content from consumers, but with no private information of the consumers required. With this new method, each consumer can get the required anonymity level, depending on the available time, computation, and cost. We use RBAC to manage the new payment scheme and improve its integrity. With ABAC, each user may be assigned one or more roles, and each role can be assigned one or more privileges that are permitted to users in that role. To reduce conflicts of different roles and decrease complexities of administration, duty separation constraints, role hierarchies, and scenarios of end-users are analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]