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Routine coronal paraffin-sections through the dorsal frontal and parieto-occipital cortex of a total of sixty cases with divergent causes of death were immunohistochemically (IHC) stained with an antibody against TMEM119. Samples of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of the same cases were collected by suboccipital needle-puncture, subjected to centrifugation and processed as cytospin preparations stained with TMEM119. Both, cytospin preparations and sections were subjected to computer-assisted density measurements. The density of microglial TMEM119-positive cortical profiles correlated with that of cytospin results and with the density of TMEM119-positive microglial profiles in the medullary layer. There was no statistically significant correlation between the density of medullary TMEM119-positive profiles and the cytospin data. Cortical microglial cells were primarily encountered in supragranular layers I, II, and IIIa and in infragranular layers V and VI, the region of U-fibers and in circumscribed foci or spread in a diffuse manner and high density over the white matter. We have evidence that cortical microglia directly migrate into CSF without using the glympathic pathway. Microglia in the medullary layer shows a strong affinity to the adventitia of deep vessels in the myelin layer. Selected rapidly fatal cases including myocardial infarcts and drowning let us conclude that microglia in cortex and myelin layer can react rapidly and its reaction and migration is subject to pre-existing external and internal factors. Cytospin preparations proved to be a simple tool to analyze and assess complex changes in the CNS after rapid fatal damage. There is no statistically significant correlation between cytospin and postmortem interval. Therefore, the quantitative analyses of postmortem cytospins obviously reflect the neuropathology of the complete central nervous system. Cytospins provide forensic pathologists a rather simple and easy to perform method for the global assessment of CNS affliction.

Intramuscular hemorrhages at autopsy can have a variety of traumatic as well as non-traumatic causes, but their recognition in electrical deaths is almost a rarity. We report on two autopsy cases of electrical fatalities, the first relating to a portion of the right upper human extremity, consisting (only) of the forearm and hand, while the other case relates to a female child who died after a high voltage electrical shock. In both cases, layered dissection of the upper limb revealed fresh intramuscular hemorrhages in the skeletal muscles that could be topographically related to the path taken by the current through the body. Externally visible electric marks were present in both cases. The hemorrhages were most likely caused by current-induced tetanic muscle contractions, producing an internal muscle trauma with rupture of fibers and bleedings. In complex situations, such as inconspicuous marks or a complete lack of visible signs on the body, the finding may be helpful in solving the case in consideration of the case history and circumstances. The vitality, topography, and pattern of the hemorrhages are discussed in the light of the available literature.

Zusammenfassung„Black esophagus“ oder „akute Ösophagusnekrose“ (AÖN) ist eine seltene Erkrankung, die sich makroskopisch durch eine zirkumferente Schwarzverfärbung der Ösophagusmukosa mit abruptem Ende am gastroösophagealen Übergang auszeichnet. Die genaue Pathogenese ist unbekannt; es werden multifaktorielle Einflüsse wie z. B. Säurereflux, Ischämie und verringerte Schutzmechanismen der Mukosa als mögliche Ursachen diskutiert.Vorgestellt werden 2 Obduktionsfälle, die typische Befunde einer AÖN aufwiesen. Zusätzlich hatten Fall 1 eine Candida-Infektion und Fall 2 eine Appendizitis, sodass eine infektiöse Genese in beiden Fällen eine Rolle gespielt haben könnte.

The aim of this study was to investigate if the biomarkers myelin basic protein (MBP) and neurofilament-H (NF-H) yielded informative value in forensic diagnostics when examining cadaveric cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biochemically via an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and comparing the corresponding brain tissue in fatal traumatic brain injury (TBI) autopsy cases by immunocytochemistry versus immunohistochemistry. In 21 trauma and 19 control cases, CSF was collected semi-sterile after suboccipital puncture and brain specimens after preparation. The CSF MBP (p = 0.006) and NF-H (p = 0.0002) levels after TBI were significantly higher than those in cardiovascular controls. Immunohistochemical staining against MBP and against NF-H was performed on cortical and subcortical samples from also biochemically investigated cases (5 TBI cases/5 controls). Compared to the controls, the TBI cases showed a visually reduced staining reaction against MBP or repeatedly ruptured neurofilaments against NF-H. Immunocytochemical tests showed MBP-positive phagocytizing macrophages in CSF with a survival time of > 24 h. In addition, numerous TMEM119-positive microglia could be detected with different degrees of staining intensity in the CSF of trauma cases. As a result, we were able to document that elevated levels of MBP and NF-H in the CSF should be considered as usefulneuroinjurybiomarkers of traumatic brain injury.

In forensic science determination of the origin and sex of skeletal remains is an important task for identification purposes. In this study we investigated the krotaphion-sphenion distance (K‑S distance) in the pterion region of German, Euro-American, African-American and Rwandan skulls of modern individuals from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century to look for statistically significant differences in sex and ancestry. We found a statistically significant sex-specific difference in the K‑S distance, which was greater in male skulls than in female skulls for both sides of the skull. Our study also showed that there is a statistically significant difference in the K‑S distance between the four populations studied. Landmarks and morphometric parameters measured in our investigations, which were not used for the present examination were provided to the software program Fordisc for its reference data to enhance the range of its usability for identification of unknown skulls or partial skulls of European individuals., Bei der forensischen Begutachtung zur Identifizierung unbekannter Skelettfunde spielen Herkunftsanlaysen und Geschlechtsbestimmungen eine bedeutende Rolle. In unserer Studie an euroamerikanischen, afroamerikanischen, ruandischen und deutschen Schädeln untersuchte unsere Arbeitsgruppe die sog. Krotaphion-Sphenion-Distanz in der Pterion Region am menschlichen Schädel, um geschlechts- und herkunftsspezifische Unterschiede näher zu beleuchten. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen einen signifikanten Unterschied in der K‑S-Distanz: Männliche Individuen zeigten auf beiden Seiten des Schädels signifikant größere Werte als weibliche Individuen, des Weiteren waren signifikante Unterschiede unter den vier untersuchten Populationen festzustellen. Die weiteren, im Rahmen der Studie gemessenen, jedoch für die vorliegende Auswertung nicht verwendeten Landmarken und morphometrischen Parameter der Schädel gingen in die Datenbank für die Identifizierungs-Software Fordisc ein, um deren Datengrundlage und damit Nutzbarkeit zur Identifikation unbekannter Schädel oder Schädelteile europäischer Individuen zu verbessern.

The aim of the present study was a refined analysis of neuroinflammation including TMEM119 as a useful microglia-specific marker in forensic assessments of traumatic causes of death, e.g., traumatic brain injury (TBI). Human brain tissue samples were obtained from autopsies and divided into cases with lethal TBI (n = 25) and subdivided into three groups according to their trauma survival time and compared with an age-, gender-, and postmortem interval-matched cohort of sudden cardiovascular fatalities as controls (n = 23). Brain tissue samples next to cortex contusions and surrounding white matter as well as samples of the ipsilateral uninjured brain stem and cerebellum were collected and stained immunohistochemically with antibodies against TMEM119, CD206, and CCR2. We could document the highest number of TMEM119-positive cells in acute TBI death with highly significant differences to the control numbers. CCR2-positive monocytes showed a significantly higher cell count in the cortex samples of TBI cases than in the controls with an increasing number of immunopositive cells over time. The number of CD206-positive M2 microglial cells increased survival time-dependent. After 3 days of survival, the cell number increased significantly in all four regions investigated compared with controls. In sum, we validate a specific and robustly expressed as well as fast reacting microglia marker, TMEM119, which distinguishes microglia from resident and infiltrating macrophages and thus offers a great potential for the estimation of the minimum survival time after TBI. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s00414-020-02384-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Intrakranielle Blutungen sind im Säuglingsalter seltene, aber lebensbedrohende Ereignisse. Neben Gefäßmissbildungen, Stoffwechseldefekten sowie Störungen der Blutgerinnung kommen v. a. nichtakzidentielle Traumata, Schütteltrauma in Betracht. Die klinische Diagnostik umfasst hinsichtlich der Blutungsgenese neben Sonographie und MRT als apparatives Verfahren auch eine Fundoskopie sowie laborchemische Analysen, insbesondere der Gerinnungsparameter. Für die Blutgerinnung ist das fettlösliche Vitamin K essenziell: Frühe, klassische und späte Vitamin-K-Mangel-Blutungen werden dabei unterschieden. Um ein gehäuftes Wiederauftreten von Vitamin-K-Mangel-Blutungen bei Neugeborenen und jungen Säuglingen zu verhindern, bedarf es einer hinreichenden Aufklärung der Eltern. Eine Verweigerung der Prophylaxe scheint Folge einer weltanschaulich begründeten Ablehnung der Schulmedizin und ein zunehmendes Phänomen in wohlhabenden Industrieländern zu sein., Intracranial hemorrhages in infants are rare but life-threatening events. Apart from vascular malformations, metabolic disorders and coagulopathies, nonaccidental trauma, in particular shaken baby syndrome must be taken into consideration. Clinical diagnostic tests and procedures to further evaluate the etiology of the hemorrhage include sonography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as imaging procedures as well as fundoscopy and laboratory tests, especially with respect to coagulation parameters. Fat-soluble vitamin K is essential for blood coagulation. A differentiation is made between classical and delayed hemorrhages due to vitamin K deficiency. In order to avoid an increased recurrence of bleeding due to vitamin K deficiency in neonates and young infants, an adequate clarification for the parents is necessary. A refusal of prophylaxis seems to be the result of an ideologically founded rejection of classical medicine and an increasing phenomenon in affluent industrial countries.

The aim of this pilot study was to investigate the diagnostic potential of TMEM119 as a useful microglia-specific marker in combination with immunostainings for phagocytic function and infiltrating capacity of monocytes in cases of lethal monosubstance intoxications by morphine (MOR), methamphetamine (METH), and of ethanol-associated death (ETH) respectively. Human brain tissue samples were obtained from forensic autopsies of cases with single substance abuse (MOR, n = 8; ETH, n = 10; METH, n = 9) and then compared to a cohort of cardiovascular fatalities as controls (n = 9). Brain tissue samples of cortex, white matter, and hippocampus were collected and stained immunohistochemically with antibodies against TMEM119, CD68KiM1P, and CCR2. We could document the lowest density of TMEM119-positive cells in MOR deaths with highly significant differences to the control densities in all three regions investigated. In ETH and METH deaths, the expression of TMEM119 was comparable to cell densities in controls. The results indicate that the immunoreaction in brain tissue is different in these groups depending on the drug type used for abuse.

Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) based on the IEEE 802.16 standards [IEEE 802.16, 2004] [IEEE 802.16, 2005], also known as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), is gaining momentum as more and more field trials are transformed in commercial roll-outs. Very much likely, this is certainly a merit of the combined effort of the IEEE 802.16 standardization community, the WiMAX Forum [WiMAX Forum a, 2008] [WiMAX Forum b, 2008] and the research community. As of today, standards have matured, the WiMAX Forum has setup its certification program in order to foster interoperability, and the research community went through technological details up to an extent, such that many operators consider the risks associated with commercial deployment predictable. Yet, WiMAX is still not deemed as globally established. This technology is very new and a competing system, namely Long-Term Evolution (LTE) [3GPP, 2009], is progressing in a similar pace. Which technology will finally make it through in the market, or will we have even several co-existing ones, is, among others, influenced by the research community. The better a technology is understood, the more likely it will be adopted by manufacturers, vendors and operators. Key to scientific consideration is the availability of reliable simulation tools. This applies equally to WiMAX and any other technology and is embodied by an emerging business of commercial simulators like OPNET [OPNET] and Qualcomm [Qualcomm]. Unfortunately, these simulators are fairly expensive and/or their use is strictly licensed. As monetary considerations and openness frequently prevail, in particular in academia, NS-2 [NS-2], as open-source alternative, still retains its position. Naturally, open-source software rarely approaches commercial standards, especially in terms of completeness and documentation. This is, for example, the case for the public available WiMAX module for NS-2. This module supports several WiMAX features but lacks a very essential one, Quality of Service (QoS) support. The lack of this feature 34

Blood-brain barrier (BBB) integrity is one of the important elements of central nervous system (CNS) homeostasis. MicroRNAs (miRs) have been demonstrated to play a role in many CNS disorders such as stroke and traumatic brain injury. MiR-212/132 are highly expressed in the CNS but their role at the BBB has not been characterized yet. Thus, we analyzed the expression of miR-212/132 in hypoxic mouse and human brain microvascular endothelial cells (BMEC) as well as in posttraumatic mouse and human brain tissue and serum exosomes. MiR-212/132 expression was detected in brain capillaries by in situ hybridization and was increased up to ten times in hypoxic BMEC. Over-expression of pre-miR-212/132 in BMEC decreased barrier properties and reduced migration of BMEC in the wound healing assay. We identified and validated tight junction proteins claudin-1 (Cldn1), junctional adhesion molecule 3 (Jam3), and tight junction-associated protein 1 (Tjap1) as potential miR-212/132 targets. Over-expression of miRs led to a decrease in mRNA and protein expression of Cldn1, Jam3, and Tjap1, which could be rescued by a respective anti-miR. In conclusion, our study identifies miR-212/132 as critical players at the hypoxic BBB. In addition, we propose three new direct miR-212/132 targets to be involved in miR-212/132-mediated effects on BBB properties. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s12975-018-0683-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

In the last few years, quantitative analysis of metabolites in body fluids using LC/MS has become an established method in laboratory medicine and toxicology. By preparing metabolite profiles in biological specimens, we are able to understand pathophysiological mechanisms at the biochemical and thus the functional level. An innovative investigative method, which has not yet been used widely in the forensic context, is to use the clinical application of metabolomics. In a metabolomic analysis of 41 samples of postmortem cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples divided into cohorts of four different causes of death, namely, cardiovascular fatalities, isoIated torso trauma, traumatic brain injury, and multi-organ failure, we were able to identify relevant differences in the metabolite profile between these individual groups. According to this preliminary assessment, we assume that information on biochemical processes is not gained by differences in the concentration of individual metabolites in CSF, but by a combination of differently distributed metabolites forming the perspective of a new generation of biomarkers for diagnosing (fatal) TBI and associated neuropathological changes in the CNS using CSF samples.

In this casuistry, two accidents from Germany and Switzerland are presented that happened during the shot of recoilless anti-tank weapons. In both cases, the injuries led to the death of two soldiers: A 22-year-old soldier in Germany was struck by the counter mass of a so-called Davis gun which had been fired by a comrade during a firing exercise; he died from his severe injuries, especially in the abdominal part of the body. As a peculiarity of the wound morphology, it was found to be a thick-layered, metallic, gray material in the wound cavity, which corresponded to the material of the counter mass that was ejected opposite to the shooting direction. The other case took place in Switzerland, where a 24-year-old soldier was seriously injured during an exercise with portable anti-tank rockets. At the time the shot was fired, he stood behind the launcher and was hit by the propulsion jet of the rocket motor. He died as well from his severe injuries, which were located at the chest done by the gas jet and by the very high pressure. In both cases, two different causes of death were present: massive blunt violence in the first case versus a jet of hot gases of very high speed and temperature in the second case.

The fast growing development of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) trends and the remarkable progress of Software Defined Networking (SDN) have yielded a synergy between both, towards the provision of convergent networking solutions. Since the traditional networking principles were not designed according to the NFV principles, a work has emerged dedicated to protocol redesign among the academic fellows and the industry representatives. A typical example that has been introduced in such eco-system is the concept of network service chaining, as a composition of virtual network functions stitched together in a logically ordered fashion, to create an integral networking service that can be owned by network administrators, programmers, cloud- and telco-operators. This appoints SDN as an essential technology enabler in administering advanced traffic steering techniques, thanks to the SDN controller's capability to dynamically manage VNFs virtual connections and underlying dataplane flows. Despite the rapid progression, the strategies for traffic steering in NFV environment, are still facing imminent challenges to be addressed. This paper joins NFV and SDN technology into a novel traffic steering solution based on open source reference implementations (such as SDK for SDN, virtual Traffic Classifier, virtual Media Transcoder, and WAN Infrastructure Connection Manager) designed with performance and network optimizations in mind. We have successfully deployed and tested the system prototype in a real datacenter. The evaluation results of the prototype system: (1) validated the presented chain use cases, (2) affirmed an efficient performance and scalability of the chaining method, and (3) certified good quality of video traffic transmission and transcoding. HighlightsHolistic approach in SFC delivery and OpenFlow-based traffic steering mechanism in OpenDaylight.Set of four components/services delivered, each of them contributing to the open source community.Implementation reference and support for all components.SFC solution deployed in SDN-NFV environment and proof of concept validated.End-to-end service chaining tests over different traffic types, to showcase a chained traffic characterization and performance implications of the same.A thorough State of the Art in standards, academic and industry implementations of SFC.

Injuries caused by blunt force are seen frequently in daily forensic casework. Sometimes, especially when there is less information about the surrounding circumstances, it might become difficult to figure out the cause and background of injuries: accident, criminal violence or self-infliction? In the study presented, face injuries caused by blunt force in 694 cases were analyzed comparing the injury patterns in accidents to those in crimes. It turned out injuries of the ear and retroauricular region clearly indicate a crime. Also, soft tissue injuries of nose, upper jaw, and lower jaw point towards a criminal violence, whereas tooth injuries occur with a similar frequency in both crimes and accidents.

Cloud computing can greatly enhance robotic applications, not only by complementing robotic resources (e.g., CPU/GPU, memory, storage), but also by providing global-scale highly available services, distributed application management solutions, proven development and deployment practices. However, several challenges have to be addressed in order to bridge the gap between cloud and robotic development, including ROS and cloud design assumptions, networking, and mobile robots. In this chapter we present ECRP, a Platform as a Service solution for building ROS-based cloud robotics applications.

Distributed cloud storage solutions are currently gaining high momentum in industry and academia. The enterprise data volume growth and the recent tendency to move as much as possible data to the cloud is strongly stimulating the storage market growth. In this context, and as a main requirement for cloud native applications, it is of utmost importance to guarantee resilience of the deployed applications and the infrastructure. Indeed, with failures frequently occurring, a storage system should quickly recover to guarantee service availability. In this paper, we focus on containerized cloud storage, proposing a resilience monitoring solution for the recently developed Rook storage operator. While, Rook brings storage systems into a cloud-native container platform, in this paper we design an additional module to monitor and evaluate the resilience of the Rook-based system. Our proposed module is validated in a production environment, with software components generating a constant load and a controlled removal of system elements to evaluate the self-healing capability of the storage system. Failure recovery time revealed to be 41 and 142 seconds on average for a 32GB and a 215GB object storage device respectively.

This paper states the research done in building a Wildfire Propagation Simulation tool able to present graphically, how the fire will be propagated in case of a wildfire. The core of this tool was developed using Cellular Automata (CA) relayed on mathematical foundations for modeling the propagation and the transition rules of the CA. Also, the mathematical model was combined with a geographical information system provided by Google Maps API, allowing to conduct a simulation that considers the kind and density of vegetation in a specific zone of interest. Finally, we define and perform a full simulation providing information for managing and predicting wildfires and, the future works derived from this research.

In medico-legal literature, only a small number of publications deal with lethal injuries caused by shots with modified guns. This might lead to the conclusion that such cases are extremely rare. However, there are cases again and yet again. During the investigation process, the modified gun is of particular importance since it can show an unusual ballistic behaviour. The present paper reports on a suicide of a 60-year-old man, committed with a modified revolver and a lead bullet. The man had a single gunshot wound with entrance at the right temporal bone. Autopsy revealed that the bullet had fragmented into two major parts. The smaller one stood outside the cranial cavity and pushed its way alongside between the cranial bone and scalp to its end position in the left temporal area. The bigger part entered the cranial cavity and ended in the left parietal lobe. In shots on ballistic soap and on a head-model, the ballistics of the weapon and lead bullet were characterized. The angle necessary for bullet fragmentation was determined by shots on ballistic soap and turned out to be 55°-60° at a velocity of around 200 m/s. This knowledge was transferred to contact shots on a head-model consisting of a layered polyurethane sphere filled with 10 % ballistic gelatine and covered with a skin-like cap almost all around. The resulting injury pattern corresponded to the one of the suicide person. The bigger bullet part entered the skull while the smaller part pushed its way alongside between skin and skull causing an outer contour shot. Furthermore, the revolver was documented firing off two bullets by one trigger pull-a phenomenon of importance for forensic casework the authors have not found reported in forensic literature.

As systems get more complex testing has also increased not only in complexity but in the total IT cost, which is estimated to increase even more by 2020. Testing large complex distributed applications is hard, time consuming and lacks tooling. Given that the digitalisation of business has proved to be a key aspect for improving the productivity of developers in the delivery of the service to end-users, in this paper we present early results showing how these capabilities can also be provided to testers of software and services, by adopting standard interfaces and leveraging the tools provided by an early research open-source platform, capable of efficiently testing large scale systems, ElasTest.

White paper by the ElasTest team that provides an overview of the ElasTest project and its goals, while providing answers to industrial and research challenges.

Running applications in the cloud efficiently requires much more than deploying software in virtual machines. Cloud applications have to be continuously managed: (1) to adjust their resources to the incoming load and (2) to face transient failures replicating and restarting components to provide resiliency on unreliable infrastructure. Continuous management monitors application and infrastructural metrics to provide automated and responsive reactions to failures (health management) and changing environmental conditions (auto-scaling) minimizing human intervention. In the current practice, management functionalities are provided as infrastructural or third party services. In both cases they are external to the application deployment. We claim that this approach has intrinsic limits, namely that separating management functionalities from the application prevents them from naturally scaling with the application and requires additional management code and human intervention. Moreover, using infrastructure provider services for management functionalities results in vendor lock-in effectively preventing cloud applications to adapt and run on the most effective cloud for the job. In this paper we discuss the main characteristics of cloud native applications, propose a novel architecture that enables scalable and resilient self-managing applications in the cloud, and relate on our experience in porting a legacy application to the cloud applying cloud-native principles.

The objective of this paper is to illustrate how to monetize infrastructures and services. This is achieved by a combination of measuring consumption, applying pricing strategies and client invoicing. Furthermore, a range of billing solutions are available in order to cover the Rating, Charging and Billing process. The focus here is on the comparison of solution based suitability, which depends on complexity of records and volume of transactions. RCB Cyclops, as an open source solution, is presented and evaluated in terms of data throughputs focusing on doubling host machines and yielding 70–80% boost in performance.

The setup of distributed computing clusters and the installation of data analysis frameworks can be cumbersome and requires a great deal of knowledge in a plenitude of fields. We have developed DISCO, a service which is alleviating the data scientist from these hurdles. This paper shows up the competitiveness of DISCO with an existing solution.

Robots are moving out of factories, service robotics is bringing them to our homes, work environments, cities, and outdoors. While the Robot Operating System (ROS) is promising to open the world of robotics to developers, a proper platform and ecosystem supporting robotic applications development is still missing. This work presents an example of cloud robotics application in which cloud computing is not just complementing limited robot capabilities, but is leveraged to provide a development and operations environment supporting the complete life-cycle of a robotics-enabled application. We relate on our experience building cloud robotics applications spanning heterogeneous hardware (i.e., robots and cloud servers) through a use case scenario.

Network Functions Virtualization allows Communication Service Providers to extend their traditional service portfolio to new models of service offerings, such as Virtualized Network Functions as a Service (VNFaaS), in which network functions can be traded following the “on-demand” Cloud paradigm. Incremental deployment and interoperability with legacy infrastructure, in particular Wide Area Network (WAN) domains and enterprise services, are key requirements to make this vision come true in the short/medium term. This paper discusses the main challenges that need be addressed for the adoption of VNFaaS in production environments and is particularly focused on the integration of NFV and WAN. To this end, two components are proposed: Netfloc, to support traffic steering inside NFV infrastructure points of presence, and the WAN Infrastructure Connectivity Manager (WICM), to handle the integration of virtualized network functions with WAN connectivity services, as a composed end-to-end network service.

In the present study, a series of reflectance spectra of postmortem lividity, pallor, and putrefaction-affected skin for 195 investigated cases in the course of cooling down the corpse has been collected. The reflectance spectrometric measurements were stored together with their respective metadata in a MySQL database. The latter has been managed via a scientific information repository. We propose similarity measures and a criterion of similarity that capture similar spectra recorded at corpse skin. We systematically clustered reflectance spectra from the database as well as their metadata, such as case number, age, sex, skin temperature, duration of cooling, and postmortem time, with respect to the given criterion of similarity. Altogether, more than 500 reflectance spectra have been pairwisely compared. The measures that have been used to compare a pair of reflectance curve samples include the Euclidean distance between curves and the Euclidean distance between derivatives of the functions represented by the reflectance curves at the same wavelengths in the spectral range of visible light between 380 and 750 nm. For each case, using the recorded reflectance curves and the similarity criterion, the postmortem time interval during which a characteristic change in the shape of reflectance spectrum takes place is estimated. The latter is carried out via a software package composed of Java, Python, and MatLab scripts that query the MySQL database. We show that in legal medicine, matching and clustering of reflectance curves obtained by means of reflectance spectrometry with respect to a given criterion of similarity can be used to estimate the postmortem interval.

In the last years we have experienced a growing industrial interest in Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) as the opportunity to exploit the cloud computing paradigm through Network Function Virtualization (NFV), primarily with the goal to reduce CAPEX/OPEX for future mobile networks deployment and operation. The gain from the point of view of infrastructure costs reduction is almost clear and recognized, while many technical challenges are still to be solved, especially with industry-mature solutions, due to the complexity of managing such type of infrastructures. In particular, the dynamicity and flexibility introduced by the virtualization of network functions add novel requirements on the service management and orchestration layers. In this perspective, this paper originally presents the architecture and primary implementation guidelines of the Mobile Cloud Networking framework developed within a large EU FP7 project. More specifically, it focuses on the innovative technical elements of our solution for service management and orchestration, namely i) orchestration strategies based on resource unit affinity and ii) compliance with emerging Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) standards. To practically demonstrate the suitability of the proposed approach, a specific real use case has been implemented, i.e., the cloudification of the 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), by reporting and analyzing the related performance results.

Current trends in broadband mobile networks are addressed towards the placement of different capabilities at the edge of the mobile network in a centralised way. On one hand, the split of the eNB between baseband processing units and remote radio headers makes it possible to process some of the protocols in centralised premises, likely with virtualised resources. On the other hand, mobile edge computing makes use of processing and storage capabilities close to the air interface in order to deploy optimised services with minimum delay. The confluence of both trends is a hot topic in the definition of future 5G networks. The full centralisation of both technologies in cloud data centres imposes stringent requirements to the fronthaul connections in terms of throughput and latency. Therefore, all those cells with limited network access would not be able to offer these types of services. This paper proposes a solution for these cases, based on the placement of processing and storage capabilities close to the remote units, which is especially well suited for the deployment of clusters of small cells. The proposed cloud-enabled small cells include a highly efficient microserver with a limited set of virtualised resources offered to the cluster of small cells. As a result, a light data centre is created and commonly used for deploying centralised eNB and mobile edge computing functionalities. The paper covers the proposed architecture, with special focus on the integration of both aspects, and possible scenarios of application. European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No 671596

Cloud computing enables the on-demand delivery of resources for a multitude of services and gives the opportunity for small agile companies to compete with large industries. In the telco world, cloud computing is currently mostly used by mobile network operators (MNO) for hosting non-critical support services and selling cloud services such as applications and data storage. MNOs are investigating the use of cloud computing to deliver key telecommunication services in the access and core networks. Without this, MNOs lose the opportunities of both combining this with over-the-top (OTT) and value-added services to their fundamental service offerings and leveraging cost-effective commodity hardware. Being able to leverage cloud computing technology effectively for the telco world is the focus of mobile cloud networking (MCN). This paper presents the key results of MCN integrated project that includes its architecture advancements, prototype implementation, and evaluation. Results show the efficiency and the simplicity that a MNO can deploy and manage the complete service lifecycle of fully cloudified, composed services that combine OTT/IT- and mobile-network-based services running on commodity hardware. The extensive performance evaluation of MCN using two key proof-of-concept scenarios that compose together many services to deliver novel converged elastic, on-demand mobile-based but innovative OTT services proves the feasibility of such fully virtualized deployments. Results show that it is beneficial to extend cloud computing to telco usage and run fully cloudified mobile-network-based systems with clear advantages and new service opportunities for MNOs and end-users.

Cloud-based deployments have become more and more mainstream in recent years, with many companies evaluating moving their infrastructure to the cloud, whether a public cloud, a private cloud, or a mix of the two through the hybrid cloud concept. One service offered by many clouds providers is Database-as-a-Service, where a user is offered a direct endpoint and access credentials to a chosen type of database. In this paper, we evaluate the performance impact of application splitting in a Hybrid Cloud environment. In this context, the database may be located in a cloud setting and the application servers on another cloud or on-premises, or the other way around. We found that for applications with low database latency and throughput requirements, moving to a public cloud environment can be a cost saving solution. None of the cloud providers evaluated were able to provide comparable performance for database-heavy database applications when compared to an optimized enterprise environment. Evaluating application splitting, we conclude that bursting to the cloud is a viable option in most cases, provided that the data is moved to the cloud before performing the requests.

Cloud-Native Applications (CNA) are designed to run on top of cloud computing infrastructure services with inherent support for self-management, scalability and resilience across clustered units of application logic. Their systematic design is promising especially for recent hybrid virtual machine and container environments for which no dominant application development model exists. In this paper, we present a case study on a business application running as CNA and demonstrate the advantages of the design experimentally. We also present Dynamite, an application auto-scaler designed for containerised CNA. Our experiments on a Vagrant host, on a private OpenStack installation and on a public Amazon EC2 testbed show that CNA require little additional engineering.

IEEE 802.16 is yet a very recent technology and released hardware does frequently only support standards partially. The same applies to public available simulation tools, in particular for NS-2. As the latter is the de-facto standard in science and as we use it for our research in the context of the WEIRD project, we evaluate the IEEE 802.16 support for NS-2. We present several general but also specific issues, which areimportant in order to carry out reliable research based on thesetools. In particular, we show in much detail where modulesdeviate significantly and even fail totally.

In this paper we consider how energy efficiency aspects can be added to Openstack. With the objective of devising an energy efficient resource manager for Openstack, we first analyze resource and energy utilization on our cloud resources. We observe that there is a large fixed cost associated with server usage patterns and powering down servers is necessary to achieve energy savings. Following this we consider migration mechanisms which are necessary to perform load consolidation: we find that hybrid live migration has the necessary robustness to be part of a sophisticated load management solution. Finally we discuss ongoing work on realizing a load manager for Openstack based on these observations.

In the present days of rapid adoption of cloud services and varying cost models it is imperative to have a system which converts the cloud resource usage data into a measurable and payable cost. The system should be able to collect the cloud resource usage data, process it against a dynamically determined rate to get a charge for which the customer could be billed upon. These operations need to be done in a secured manner with appropriate authentication and authorization checks. As the cloud services are still evolving, the rating, charging and billing components for cloud are at a nascent stage of its maturity. In this paper we are describing a novel modular and micro services based design & architecture for developing a dynamic rating, charging and billing for cloud service providers with emphasis being given to the validation of the architecture through mathematical modeling and the implementation experience of the micro services.

With the ongoing advancements in Cloud Computing, new technologies and standards are being developed, ever increasing the complexity of this environment along with the associated risks, thus making it difficult for companies to take advantage of the benefits Cloud Computing brings without being exposed to them. Due to this increased complexity, there is an increased chance of a deviation from the normal operation which can lead to a reduction or interruption of quality of service, to service shortages, to an incident. Cloud Incident Management is thus an important research direction that is being addressed in this paper, which focuses on providing a complete support for the cloud incident lifecycle from its detection to its resolution. The paper covers existing solutions and standards, challenges and open issues as well as proposes an architecture for Cloud Incident Management.

The most important signs of vitality in burned bodies are soot deposits in the respiratory tract, the esophagus and the stomach as well as elevated CO-Hb values in the blood. But these findings show only that a person was exposed to fire fumes while alive; they are no indicator for vital heat exposure. As the external findings in burned bodies are often not very conclusive due to postmortem consumption by the fire, the internal findings are all the more important. Macroscopic signs that hot fumes were inhaled may be edematous swelling and vesicular detachment of the mucosa in the pharynx, the larynx and/or the upper section of the esophagus. As histological changes in the respiratory tract soot deposits, vesicular detachment of the epithelium, hyperemia and edema of the tracheal and bronchial mucosa as well as increased secretion of mucus have been described. These findings may partly be absent although the victim was alive during the fire, which can make diagnosis more difficult. Especially in peracute deaths vitality findings are usually sparse. The significance of the macroscopic and histological parameters of vitality was systematically investigated on the basis of our own autopsy material from the years 1996-2002 (88 cases) and compared with the statements found in the literature. In our study material, the vitality parameters were incomplete in 23% of the burned corpses. In 3% of the cases the question whether there was an antemortem heat exposure could not be answered.

On a day in November, the body of a 31-year-old man was found near a swimming lake with two open and partly emptied fish tins lying next to him. Further investigations showed that the man had been allergic to fish protein and suffered from severe depression and drug psychosis. Already some days before the suicide, he had repeatedly asked for fish to kill himself. Although the results of the chemical and toxicological examinations were negative, the autopsy findings and histological tests suggest that death was caused by an anaphylactic reaction.

Long Term Evolution (LTE) represents the fourth generation (4G) technology which is capable of providing high data rates as well as support of high speed mobility. The EU FP7 Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) project integrates the use of cloud computing concepts in LTE mobile networks in order to increase LTE's performance. In this way a shared distributed virtualized LTE mobile network is built that can optimize the utilization of virtualized computing, storage and network resources and minimize communication delays. Two important features that can be used in such a virtualized system to improve its performance are the user mobility and bandwidth prediction. This paper introduces the architecture and challenges that are associated with user mobility and bandwidth prediction approaches in virtualized LTE systems.

The maturity reached by virtualisation technology enabled great innovation for efficient applications and services development and delivery, independent of the underlying hardware equipment, especially with the large deployment of off-the-shelf hardware based cloud infrastructures. In order to take advantage of this technology, the existing network functions have to be developed and adapted to the new paradigm. However, traditional telecom services are still implemented on dedicated hardware resulting in high deployment and maintenance costs compared to the other already cloudified services. ETSI Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) aims to fill this gap by applying to telecom the virtualisation technologies. This paper introduces a set of three software architectures for efficient virtualisation of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) in different operator environments responding to the high level requirements of the ETSI NFV use case for virtualizing operator core network functions. Additionally, a management architecture for simplifying the deployment and runtime orchestration of such a virtual service on top of a cloud infrastructure is presented. Furthermore, one of the IMS software architectures was implemented based on the Fraunhofer FOKUS Open IMS Core, measured and evaluated on top of an OpenStack cloud.

In this position paper we describe the current status and plans for a Swiss National Research Infrastructure. Swiss academic and research institutions are very autonomous. While being loosely coupled, they do not rely on any centralized management entities. Therefore, a coordinated national research infrastructure can only be established by federating the various resources available locally at the individual institutions. The Swiss Multi-Science Computing Grid and the Swiss Academic Compute Cloud projects serve already a large number of diverse user communities. These projects also allow us to test the operational setup of such a heterogeneous federated infrastructure.

In this paper we present an idea of a propriety Software Defined residential Network (SDrN) and we show as a use case, a multicast streaming service that can be hosted on such networks. To verify the feasibility of the service in the context of quality of service, we offer to the providers of online streaming services (in some cases the ISPs themselves), APIs to control and validate the QoS of the users in the service. The QoS control APIs were tested on SDN based simulation environment.

This paper proposes a methodology to establish a billing model in a streaming service that can achieve high provider's profit and increased users' welfare. We relate three types of the service's topology: P2P (multicast), P2P-Cloud (hybrid) and Cloud (unicast) to different user profiles and analyze their effect on the provider's cost and profit. The evaluation shows that increased user cooperation, significantly decreases the provider's cloud infrastructure cost and make his profit highest when 50%-100% of the users cooperate. More cooperation increases the overall users' welfare in terms of monetary remuneration.

In cloud environments High Availability characteristics are established by the usage of failover software (like e.g. HAProxy, Keepalive or Pacemaker). Though these tools enable automatic recovery of cloud services from outages, the recovery can still be very slow if it is not configured adequately. In this paper we developed a "Recovery Time Test" to determine if recovery time depends on configuration of the failover software and how recovery time depends on configuration settings. Another goal of the Recovery Time Test is to determine the factor by which recovery time can be decreased by a given configuration. As proof of concept, we applied the Recovery Time Test to an OpenStack cloud environment which is controlled by the Pacemaker failover software. Pacemaker mean recovery time can take a value between 110 and 160 seconds, if the tool is configured badly. We found that with a proper configuration Pacemaker mean recovery time can be reduced significantly to a value between 15 and 20 seconds.