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Transport layer security (TLS) protocol is the most widely used security protocol in modern network communications. However, protocol vulnerabilities caused by the design of the network protocol or its implementation by programmers emerge one after another. Meanwhile, various versions of TLS protocol implementations exhibit different behavioral characteristics. Researchers are attempting to find the differences in protocol implementations based on differential testing, which is conducive to discovering the vulnerabilities. This paper provides a solution to find the differences more efficiently by targeting the TLS protocol handshake process. The differences of different implementations during the fuzzing process, such as code coverage and response data, are taken to guide the mutation of test cases, and the seeds are mutated based on the TLS protocol syntax. In addition, the definition of duplicate discrepancies is theoretically explored to investigate the root cause of the discrepancies and to reduce the number of duplicate cases that are caused by the same reason. Besides, the necessary conditions for excluding duplicate cases are further analyzed to develop the deduplication strategy. The proposed method is developed based on open-source tools, i.e., NEZHA and TLS-diff. Three types of widely used TLS protocol implementations, i.e., OpenSSL, BoringSSL, and LibreSSL, are taken for experimental testing. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively improve the ability to find differences between different implementations. Under the same test scale or the same time, the amount of discrepancies increases by about 20% compared to TLS-diff, indicating the effectiveness of the deduplication strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing importance of CO2 in reservoir engineering demands more accurate models for predicting interfacial tension (IFT). We investigated the use of neural networks to predict the IFT of ternary systems CO2/CH4/Water-Brine in a wide range of reservoir conditions, since the existing correlations do not capture all of the system's mechanisms. We introduced an optimization associated with k-fold cross validation to find optimal architecture and ensure an unbiased model. The average absolute relative error obtained is 1.33% (water) and 1.99% (brine) considerably more accurate than the best empirical models tested: 9.87% (water) and 19.11% (brine). Molecular dynamics simulation performed confirms the high superficial activity of CO2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical requirement in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) is its ability to automatically discover existing services as well as their locations. Several solutions have been proposed in various communication domains which could be classified into two categories: (1) directory based, and (2) directory-less. The former is efficient but suffers from the amount of control messages being exchanged to maintain all directories in an agile environment. However, the latter approach attempts to reduce the amount of control messages to update directories, by simply sending broadcast messages to discover services; which is also a non-desirable approach in MANETs. This research work builds on top of our prior work (Nazeeruddin et al. in IFIP/IEEE international conference on management of multimedia networks and services, Springer, Berlin, 2006)) where we introduced a new efficient protocol for service discovery in MANETs (MSLD); a lightweight, robust, scalable, and flexible protocol which supports node heterogeneity and dynamically adapts to network changes while not flooding the network with extra protocol messages—a major challenge in today's network environments, such as Internet of Things (IoT). Extensive simulations study was conducted on MSLD to: (1) initially evaluate its performance in terms of latency, service availability, and overhead messages, then (2) compare its performance to Dir-Based, Dir-less, and PDP protocols under various network conditions. For most performance metrics, simulation results show that MSLD outperforms Dir-Based, Dir-less, and PDP by either matching or achieving high service availability, low service discovery latency, and considerably less communication overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most existing network communication systems, such as the Internet, are built around the TCP/IP protocol stack. However, TCP/IP cannot effectively support the upcoming network communication systems with more wireless communication links and higher requirements in terms of throughput, latency, and reliability. In this article, we introduce a general network communication protocol design based on batched network coding (BNC), which includes the existing framework as a special case and whose design can be guided by channel coding theory. BNC-based protocols can have significant throughput gain for single-hop or multihop wireless communications and provide better trade-off among throughput, latency and reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is the central part of Intelligent systems. Business Intelligence (BI) utilizes ICT resources and capabilities to enhance decision-making from the available information. One of the core components of ICT resources is the network. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in a network model responsible for handling "requests" in a transmission session. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) establishes connections session and keeps track of the state of the communication session. Unfortunately, a request from a critical online transaction over TCP in a BI environment is bound to face some uncertainty. There is a lack of studies on the impact of communication over transmission sessions on BI operations. This paper presented an experimental evaluation of the BI transaction transmission session. Various transactions were performed to monitor and analyze the request made with HTTP over a TCP transmission session. Both the HTTP and TCP features for all transactions were captured. The finding indicates that time is highly associated with less traffic congestion and transaction overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exercise induced performance fatigue has been shown to impair many aspects of fine motor function in the distal upper limb. However, most fatiguing protocols do not reflect the conditions experienced with computer use. The purpose of this study was to determine how a prolonged, low-force mouse clicking fatigue protocol impacts performance fatigue of the distal upper limb for gamers and non-gamers. Participants completed a total of 1 h of mouse clicking at 5 clicks per second. Muscle fatigue and performance were intermittently assessed. RMS amplitude increased for the forearm flexors throughout the fatigue protocol. Accuracy decreased following the first bout of clicking and returned to baseline values after 40-min. EDC and ECU displayed the greatest muscle activity while aiming, producing 11.4% and 12.9% of MVC, respectively. These findings indicate that mouse clicking may not result in performance fatigue, however, high levels of extensor activity may explain common injuries among gamers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial Internet-of-Things systems suffer from a vast and vulnerable attack surface, raising widespread concerns about shielding IIoT devices from malicious attacks and reducing cyber risks. Device identification is the prerequisite to safeguard IIoT systems. We leverage the observation that IIoT network protocol implementations vary due to different hardware architectures/configurations and design tasks of IIoT devices, which cause the difference in their network traffic payloads. Specifically, we develop a novel neural network to learn the semantic/syntax features among multiple IIoT packets. The neural network has multiple branches, each of which consists of convolution layers, attention modules, and highway units for learning the classification model of IIoT devices. To validate the precision and recall of our neural network in IIoT devices fingerprinting, we have implemented a prototype of the proposed IIoT device identification system. Our results show that our approach achieves 95.8% precision and 95.4% recall, significantly outperforming other classification models. • We propose a novel IIoT fingerprinting approach based on neural network. • We conduct experiments to validate the effectiveness of it. • The results show that our approach can achieve 95.8% precision. • We demonstrate the usefulness of fingerprinting in application. • Our approach is useful in shielding industrial systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time cost is an important indicator for evaluating the control protocol of the designed network system. The issue of flocking in Cucker–Smale type models is investigated in this article. Two new switching protocols are articulated to achieve finite-time (FT) and fixed-time (FDT) flocking. Sufficient conditions and the upper bounds of time cost (TC) for flocking are obtained. The influence of parameters and group size on TC is revealed. Especially, the new control strategy proposed successfully reduces the convergence time compared to the general FT and FDT control protocols. • The new switching protocols can ensure the Cucker–Smale type models achieve finite-time and fixed-time flocking. • The upper bound estimation of flocking time cost convincingly illustrates that the models achieve flocking faster. • It is revealed that the time cost is closely related to both the control parameters and the group size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the output feedback H ∞ control is investigated for the networked singularly perturbed systems (SPSs) with Markov lossy network, in which the packet loss probability varies in different modes. A new network mode-dependent round-robin-like protocol (RRLP) is introduced to the networked SPSs, which can dynamically adjust the number of the selected sensor nodes according to the network environment condition. Based on this RRLP and Markov lossy network, a Markov mode and scheduling order co-dependent output feedback controller is constructed to ensure the system control performance. By constructing a novel Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional dependent on the singular perturbation parameter, Markov mode, and scheduling order simultaneously, sufficient conditions of mean square stability for SPSs are obtained, and numerical stiffness is avoided. Finally, a direct current motor-controlled inverted pendulum example is proposed to verify the effectiveness of our main results. • Compared with the conventional RRP, a network mode-dependent RRLP is first introduced into SPSs, by which the number of scheduled sensors can be adjusted appropriately according to different network environments. • Based on the Markov lossy network and multi-node RRP, a novel output feedback controller is designed, which can effectively improve the control performance of system. • By constructing a new Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional dependent on SPP, Markov mode, and scheduling order simultaneously, the sufficient condition of the mean square stability is obtained for SPSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anonymity is a desirable yet challenging requirement of communication networks. In this paper, we present the first quantum anonymous notification (QAN) protocol that introduces anonymity for both sender and the receiver in practical quantum networks. Our QAN protocol features tracelessness, i.e., it is impossible to trace the encoding operations back to the encoding party even if all network communication including qubits and measurement results are made available to an adversary. Additionally, we demonstrate the QAN protocol in a four-node network using IBM quantum computer to benchmark its performance in practical settings. QAN protocol can be of independent interest as a powerful component of several applications ranging from multiparty quantum computation to quantum Internet. Security analysis shows that this protocol is robust against external adversaries and malicious participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software defined networking is an emerging network architecture that separates the control plane from the data plane of network devices and places the control plane on one or more control servers capable of managing the rules traffic forwarding of all communication devices under your domain. This article describes the architecture, different modules, and event sequences of the HyPASS for real-time protection from address-forged attacks with proactive host discovery and address validation. Such attacks cause the wastage of network bandwidth, processing power, and network resources available to the user. We performed the latency, throughput, and attack prevention tests using POX & RYU controllers on the Mininet network simulator with and without HyPASS. The system performance is analyzed for accuracy and efficiency in four different SDN scenarios categorized as fully OpenFlow enabled and Hybrid. The proposed system discovers all the live hosts in the network, updates Host Table at the handshaking between controller and OpenFlow switches. Experiments show that the system prevented all the address-forged attacks by validating the source address in different SDN environments. It achieves a 99.99% filtering accuracy level in a fully OpenFlow-enabled setup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clustering is one of the most energy-efficient techniques for extending the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In a clustered WSN, each sensor node transmits the data acquired from the sensing field to the leader node (cluster head). The cluster head (CH) is in charge of aggregating and routing the collected data to the Base station (BS) of the deployed network. Thereby, the selection of the optimum CH is still a crucial issue to reduce the consumed energy in each node and extend the network lifetime. To determine the optimal number of CHs, this paper proposes an Enhanced Fuzzy-based LEACH (E-FLEACH) protocol based on the Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC). The FLC system relies on three inputs: the residual energy of each node, the distance of each node from the base station (sink node), as well as the node's centrality. The proposed protocol is implemented using the Castalia simulator in conjunction with OMNET++, and simulation results indicate that the proposed protocol outperforms the traditional LEACH protocol in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, and stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A dynamic-distributed structure is designed as a satellite organizational structure. • An improved contract network protocol under the dynamic-distributed structure is proposed. • A blackboard model mechanism is proposed to coordinate the satellites under uncertainty. • An online single-satellite scheduling algorithm is designed. • The applicability of the proposed methods to different implementations of problems is studied. To meet the demand for real-time response to emergent events in the uncertain environment, the multi-autonomous-satellite system with real-time inter-satellite links and on-board scheduling capability has been proposed. This paper focuses on the multi-autonomous-satellite coordination and scheduling problem which is formulated by a novel mathematical model based on the multi-agent system (MAS). To solve the problem, we firstly analyze general organizational structures for the MAS and propose a new dynamic-distributed organizational structure. For these different structures, an improved contract network protocol (ICNP) and a blackboard model (BM) negotiation mechanism are proposed to coordinate the satellites. Then, an online single-satellite scheduling algorithm is proposed to schedule the tasks. In the experiments, we build up a multi-satellite system to analyze the performance of different autonomous coordination mechanisms. Experimental results indicate that the ICNP mechanism can increase the total revenue and reduce the inter-satellite communication cost. In scenarios where satellites could break down randomly, the BM can reduce the revenue losses and the number of task failures efficiently, which proves the good performance of the proposed methods in terms of robustness. The proposed methods have important practicality in the real application of the multi-autonomous-satellite system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-power wireless communication is a central building block of cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things. Conventional low-power wireless protocols make avoiding packet collisions a cornerstone design choice. The concept of synchronous transmissions challenges this view. As collisions are not necessarily destructive, under specific circumstances, commodity low-power wireless radios are often able to receive useful information even in the presence of superimposed signals from different transmitters. We survey the growing number of protocols that exploit synchronous transmissions for higher robustness and deficiency as well as unprecedented functionality and versatility compared to conventional designs. The illustration of protocols based on synchronous transmissions is cast in a conceptional framework we establish, with the goal of highlighting differences and similarities among the proposed solutions. We conclude this article with a discussion on open questions and challenges in this research field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The handoff process in WiFi networks has a very important role to provide continuity of the service to wireless users where the access points (APs) are in numerous numbers. In traditional WiFi networks, the handoff process takes a few seconds and is initiated by the wireless devices, but these few seconds could be a reason for information loss when dealing with delay sensitive applications. In this paper, we propose a reduced detection and discovery time approach (DeRy), which generates a solution based on software defined WiFi networks (SD‐WiFi). A simple network management protocol (SNMP) manager and received signal strength indicator (RSSI) manager are employed to report the AP traffic conditions and RSSI values to the SDN controller and instead of the wireless devices, the handoff decisions are taken at the controller end. When to initiate the handoff (detection phase) and which destination AP to associate to (discovery phase) are handled by the centralized SDN controller. To implement DeRy, extensive simulation runs are carried out on Mininet‐NS3‐WiFi network simulator. The simulation results show that the DeRy significantly reduces the handoff times by 60–70% and reduces the average number of retransmission by 4–49%, hence maintaining the throughput for delay sensitive applications such as VoIP, when compared to the standard RSSI‐based handoff scheme, channel measurement based access selection scheme (CMAS) and (DL‐SINR) downlink‐signal to interference plus noise ratio AP selection scheme (DASA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Satisfying the stringent 5G quality of service requirements necessitates efficient resource utilization by mobile networks. Consequently, we argue that multi-connectivity (MC) is an effective solution to leverage the limited radio resources from multiple base stations in order to enhance user throughput, provide seamless connectivity, and increase data reliability. For this, we study different MC architectures, where distinct network entities and protocol layers are used to split or aggregate the user traffic. The benefits and challenges of MC are analyzed as well as the open issues that network/device vendors and mobile network operators have to address for its use. Finally, through experimental evaluations, we illustrate the importance of MC design decisions for overall network performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid evolution of wireless networking technologies opens the door to the evolution of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and their applications in different fields. The WSN consists of small energy sensor nodes used in a harsh environment. The energy needed to communicate between the sensors networks can be identified as one of the major challenges. It is essential to avoid massive loss, or loss of packets, as well as rapid energy depletion and grid injustice, which lead to lower node efficiency and higher packet delivery delays. For this purpose, it was very important to track the usage of energy by nodes in order to improve general network efficiency by the use of intelligent methods to reduce the energy used to extend the life of the WSN and take successful routing decisions. For these reasons, designing an energy-efficient system that utilizes intelligent approaches is considered as the most powerful way to prolong the lifetime of the WSN. The proposed system is divided into four phases (sensor deployment phase, clustering phase, intra-cluster phase, and inter-cluster phase). Each of these phases uses a different intelligent algorithm with some enhancements. The performance of the proposed system was analyzed and evaluations were elaborated with well-known existing routing protocols. To assess the proficiency of the proposed system and evaluate the endurance of the network, efficiency parameters such as network lifetime, energy consumption, and packet delivery to the Sink (Base station) were exploited. The experimental outcomes justify that the proposed system surpasses the existing mechanisms by 50%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To evaluate pneumatic vitreolysis (PVL) in eyes with vitreomacular traction (VMT) with and without full-thickness macular hole (FTMH). Two multicenter (28 sites) studies: a randomized clinical trial comparing PVL with observation (sham injection) for VMT without FTMH (Protocol AG) and a single-arm study assessing PVL for FTMH (Protocol AH). Participants were adults with central VMT (vitreomacular adhesion was ≤3000 μm). In Protocol AG, visual acuity (VA) was 20/32 to 20/400. In Protocol AH, eyes had a FTMH (≤250 μm at the narrowest point) and VA of 20/25 to 20/400. Pneumatic vitreolysis using perfluoropropane (C 3 F 8) gas. Central VMT release at 24 weeks (Protocol AG) and FTMH closure at 8 weeks (Protocol AH). From October 2018 through February 2020, 46 participants were enrolled in Protocol AG, and 35 were enrolled in Protocol AH. Higher than expected rates of retinal detachment and tear resulted in early termination of both protocols. Combining studies, 7 of 59 eyes (12% [95% CI, 6%–23%]; 2 eyes in Protocol AG, 5 eyes in Protocol AH) that received PVL developed rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (n = 6) or retinal tear (n = 1). At 24 weeks in Protocol AG, 18 of 23 eyes in the PVL group (78%) versus 2 of 22 eyes in the sham group (9%) achieved central VMT release without rescue vitrectomy (adjusted risk difference, 66% [95% CI, 44%–88%]; P < 0.001). The mean change in VA from baseline at 24 weeks was 6.7 letters in the PVL group and 6.1 letters in the sham group (adjusted difference, –0.8 [95% CI, –6.1 to 4.5]; P = 0.77). In Protocol AH, 10 of 35 eyes (29% [95% CI, 16%–45%]) achieved FTMH closure without rescue vitrectomy at 8 weeks. The mean change in VA from baseline at 8 weeks was –1.5 letters (95% CI, –10.3 to 7.3 letters). In most eyes with VMT, PVL induced hyaloid release. In eyes with FTMH, PVL resulted in hole closure in approximately one third of eyes. These studies were terminated early because of safety concerns related to retinal detachments and retinal tears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future network is expected to support extremely large bandwidth, ultra-low latency or deterministic delay, extremely high reliability, and massive connectivity for novel forward-looking scenarios. As one of the most fundamental parts of the network, routing plays a vital role in a well-performed network. Recently, some new techniques using machine intelligence to optimize the network routing have been proposed. Although they have demonstrated great potential to improve the network performance, it is still a great challenge to apply machine intelligence-based routing in real network environment due to the limitations of current network architectures and protocols. Fortunately, the future network research program is on-going for designing new network paradigms, which provides an opportunity to address those limitations. In this paper, we investigate state-of-the-art techniques in machine intelligence-enabled network routing and discuss the development trends of machine intelligence-enabled routing optimization techniques for the future network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A coarse cereal is one of the most important crops rich in nutrients. However, the frequently-occurred issues on food quality and safety have seriously endangered the trust in recent years, for example, the abuse of chemicals, heavy metals exceeding the standard, and harmful germs. Therefore, a traceability system is an urgent need for coarse cereals, in order to bridge the trust between farms and consumers, where the source of agricultural coarse foods can be rapidly traced through multi-party efficient collaboration. Most current traceability systems focus on recording data using bar or QR codes, radio frequency identification, and wireless sensor networks. But the tracing information is broken easily between upstream and downstream, leading to the blur transferred data, particularly on the long and scattered supply-chain of agricultural foods, including cultivation, processing, logistics, storage, and sales. Furthermore, the traditional traceability system cannot efficiently supervise the data records of each company, when quality and safety issues occur. As such, it is impossible to recall the problematic foods in time, much less to accurately locate the responsible party. Fortunately, blockchain technology can be utilized to integrate the distributed architecture, storage, and verification in the block, peer-to-peer network protocols, encryption, consensus mechanisms, identity authentication, and smart contracts. The data disclosure can also be used to enhance trust with fewer intermediate links. Therefore, this study aims to deal with the long supply-chain of coarse cereals, many trace entities, the differentiate share of data ledger, and the real-time monitoring of on-chain data. A novel traceability system was designed to implement the supervisable food products using the multi-chain architecture of blockchain and supply chain in coarse cereal. The forward and reverse traceability data was also collected ranging from the planting, processing, warehousing, transportation, and sales, using cameras, sensors, Beidou positioning devices, and IoT devices in real-time. Moreover, a systematic investigation was made on the business process and supervision characteristics of the supply-chain, as well as the full life cycle of coarse cereal. In addition, a new architecture of supervision-oriented multi-chain data storage was proposed for the actual production of coarse cereal. Specifically, the off-chain CouchDB state database was selected to store the key-value traceability data, particularly on the key-index instead of traversal query to improve the query efficiency. More importantly, a network access mechanism was designed using the regulatory authority, further to realize the collaborative supervision on- and off-chain through smart contracts. Correspondingly, blockchain technology was used to ensure the deep connection of various production factor resources with the real economy of coarse cereal. Anyway, the supply chain of coarse cereal integrated with the blockchain was utilized to strengthen the multi-party collaboration through mutual identity authentication, especially on data expansion, data sharing, and supervision. In terms of security, the average change rate of ciphertext in the enterprise network authorization diffusivity test was 82.53%, the average change rate of ciphertext in the enterprise network authorization correlation test was 82.39%, indicating higher security and less confusion. In terms of efficiency, the average time for consumers to query public traceability data was 0.415 s, and the average time for regulators to call cross-link port to query enterprise sensitive traceability data was 0.871 s. Furthermore, an actual traceability system was implemented to verify the model using Hyperledger Fabric for data privacy protection, data differentiation sharing, and the penetration supervision of traceability data, together with the real-time management, and control of traceability nodes. The in-depth mining was realized for the value of coarse cereal traceability big data, and sustainable development of the traced network. As such, farmers can receive professional or industrial policy guidance, whereas, companies can obtain the market trends and price conditions in real-time, and regulatory authorities can accurately control traceability data and transaction behavior. The finding can greatly improve the quality and safety of coarse cereal, production efficiency, and economic benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health big data has already been the most important big data for its serious privacy disclosure concerns and huge potential value of secondary use. Measurements must be taken to balance and compromise both the two serious challenges. One holistic solution or strategy is regarded as the preferred direction, by which the risk of reidentification from records should be kept as low as possible and data be shared with the principle of minimum necessary. In this article, we present a comprehensive review about privacy protection of health data from four aspects: health data, related regulations, three strategies for data sharing, and three types of methods with progressive levels. Finally, we summarize this review and identify future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most prominent protocols for data transfer in internet of things (IoT) are message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) and constrained application protocol (CoAP). The existing clients from both sides are unable to communicate directly because of the packet's header structure difference in application and transport layer. In response, this paper aims to develop a bidirectional conversion server used to translate the specified messaging protocol interchangeably in the OpenFlow network and transmit the converted packet from both sides. The conversion server integrated the MQTT subscriber and CoAP POST object for converting the MQTT message into CoAP data. Similarly, the CoAP-MQTT translation was processed by CoAP GET and MQTT publisher object. The research was evaluated by analysing the round trip time (RTT) value, conversion delay, and power consumption. The RTT value for MQTT-CoAP required 0.5 s while the CoAP-MQTT was accumulated in 0.1 s for single-packet transmission. In addition, the SDN controller and the conversion server only consumed less than 1% central processing unit (CPU) usage during the experiment. The result indicated that the proposed conversion server could handle the translation even though there was an overwhelming request from the clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authentication bugs of SIM cards in Global System for Mobile (GSM) have led us to write the new protocols for these networks using the principles of quantum cryptography. We provide two protocols for detecting and removing a copied SIM card. The first protocol uses the three-particle entangled source and the quantum channel when the original SIM card and its copy login into the mobile network. The second protocol uses quantum memory embedded in the SIM. These two protocols can help us to authenticate the duplicated SIMs in the next generation of mobile networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing connectivity between the Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and the outside world, safety and security have become stringent problems. The Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is the most commonly used in-vehicle network protocol, which lacks security mechanisms by design, so it is vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel intrusion detection model called CNN-LSTM with Attention model (CLAM) for the in-vehicle network, especially CAN. The CLAM model uses one-dimensional convolution (Conv1D) to extract the abstract features of the signal values at each time step and feeds it into the Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) to extract the time dependence. By combining the attention mechanisms, we calculate the weight of each hidden state output by Bi-LSTM and perform a weighted summation, so that the model focuses only on locally important time steps, which can improve the convergence speed of the model and prediction accuracy. The proposed model uses the bit flip rate to extract continuous signal boundaries in the 64-bit CAN data, so it does not need to parse the CAN communication matrix and is suitable for different vehicles. The extensive evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed CLAM model can effectively detect CAN attacks, with an average F1-score of 0.951 and an error rate of 2.16%. Compared with the work in related research fields, the accuracy of attack detection is improved by 2.5%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The blockchain technology introduced by bitcoin, with its decentralised peer-to-peer network and cryptographic protocols, provides a public and accessible database of bitcoin transactions that have attracted interest from both economics and network science as an example of a complex evolving monetary network. Despite the known cryptographic guarantees present in the blockchain, there exists significant evidence of inconsistencies and suspicious behavior in the chain. In this paper, we examine the prevalence and evolution of two types of anomalies occurring in coinbase transactions in blockchain mining, which we reported on in earlier research. We further develop our techniques for investigating the impact of these anomalies on the blockchain transaction network, by building networks induced by anomalous coinbase transactions at regular intervals and calculating a range of network measures, including degree correlation and assortativity, as well as inequality in terms of wealth and anomaly ratio using the Gini coefficient. We obtain time series of network measures calculated over the full transaction network and three sub-networks. Inspecting trends in these time series allows us to identify a period in time with particularly strange transaction behavior. We then perform a frequency analysis of this time period to reveal several blocks of highly anomalous transactions. Our technique represents a novel way of using network science to detect and investigate cryptographic anomalies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the consensus‐based distributed filtering problem for a class of general nonlinear systems over sensor networks with communication protocols. In order to avoid data collisions, the stochastic protocol and the Round‐Robin protocol are respectively introduced to schedule the data transmission between each node and its neighboring ones. A consensus‐based unscented Kalman filtering (UKF) algorithm is developed for the purpose of estimating the system states over sensor networks subject to communication protocols. Moreover, the exponential boundedness of estimation error in mean square is proved for the proposed algorithm. Finally, compared with the extended Kalman filtering, an experimental simulation example is provided to validate the effectiveness of the consensus‐based UKF algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet was conceptualized as a technology that would be capable of bringing about a better future, but recent literature in science and technology studies and adjacent fields provides numerous examples of how this pervasive sociotechnical system has been shaped and used to dystopic ends. This article examines different future imaginaries present in Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2006 to 2016, whose goal was to incorporate social values while building new protocols to replace Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol to transfer and route information across the ever-expanding Internet. I examine the findings from two of the NSF's FIA projects—Mobility First (MF) and eXpressive Internet Architecture—to understand the projects' trajectories and values directives through their funding cycle and their projections into the future. I discuss how project documentation and participant articulations fall into the following three distinct themes about past experience and speculation: understanding the public, negotiating resources, and carrying project values into the future. I conclude that if the future Internet is to promote positive sociotechnical relationships, its architects must recognize that complex social and political decisions pervade each step of technical work and do more to honor this fact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The low-rate denial of service (LDoS) attack mainly exploits security vulnerabilities of adaptive mechanisms in network protocols and application services. The high-rate attack pulses within a short time interval are sent periodically, which will result in the degradation of service quality. The attack traffic is similar to normal traffic from legitimate users in the network, consequently, it is easy to escape the traditional detection methods because of its intermittence. Research works have demonstrated that there are fractal characteristics (self-similarity) of the network traffic over the large scale of time. Although the fractal characteristics of the network traffic will be changed under the LDoS attack, the variations of the fractal characteristics in some network states are not apparent in real-time detection. Based on the fractal characteristics, the fractal residual of the network traffic is analyzed through the Hurst parameters calculating process by R/S algorithm in this article. It can be found that the fractal residual of the network traffic can better reflect the different states of the LDoS attack. Combining the idea behind the sliding window, a novel fractal residual based real-time detection (FR-RED) method of the LDoS attack is proposed. The effectiveness of the method in this article is verified by performing some experiments on two platforms, the NS2 and test-bed. The results manifest the beginning and end of the LDoS attack can be estimated in real-time with high detection accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive radio (CR) is a new intelligent wireless technology that aims at improving spectrum utilization by allowing opportunistic access to the underutilized licensed spectrum. Wireless CR operating environment is typically characterized by its unreliable and unpredictable channel conditions and time availability due to fading and the randomness of primary radio (PR) activities. In such environment, packet fragmentation is needed to enhance the probability of success/packet delivery and reduce the needed number of packet re-transmission attempts. Specifically, the quality and availability of the PR channels along with the data packet size should be considered when designing communication protocols for CR networks (CRNs) such that the packet success probability is improved. Based on the quality and availability of the PR channels, an optimal-packet size metric is derived, which is defined as the packet size that can be transmitted over a selected channel while guarantying a predefined probability of success. In this paper, we propose three fragmentation-based channel assignment algorithms: fixed-fragment size algorithm, first-fit algorithm and near-exact fit algorithm. The first algorithm divides the packet equally over the selected channels while the other algorithms use variable fragment size. The main objectives of the algorithms are to enhance network throughput, decrease the number of dropped packets and reduce the average number of retransmission attempts. This preserves more channels for potential future CR transmissions, resulting in higher network throughput with less energy consumption. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform existing CRN channel assignment algorithms with no fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless blockchain network is proposed to enable a decentralized and safe wireless networks for various blockchain applications. To achieve blockchain consensus in wireless network, one of the important steps is to broadcast new block using wireless channel. Under wireless network protocols, the block transmitting will be affected significantly. In this work, we focus on the consensus process in blockchain-based wireless local area network (B-WLAN) by investigating the impact of the media access control (MAC) protocol, CSMA/CA. With the randomness of the backoff counter in CSMA/CA, it is possible for latter blocks to catch up or outpace the earlier one, which complicates blockchain forking problem. In view of this, we propose mining strategies to pause mining for reducing the forking probability, and a discard strategy to remove the forking blocks that already exist in CSMA/CA backoff procedure. Based on the proposed strategies, we design Block Access Control (BAC) approaches to effectively schedule block mining and transmitting for improving the performance of B-WLAN. Then, Markov chain models are presented to conduct performance analysis in B-WLAN. The results show that BAC approaches can help the network to achieve a high transaction throughput while improving block utilization and saving computational power. Meanwhile, the trade-off between transaction throughput and block utilization is demonstrated, which can act as a guidance for practical deployment of blockchain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, the wireless sensor network (WSN) plays an important role in our daily life. In addition, it is used in many applications such as military, medical, greenhouse, and transport. Due to the sending data between its nodes or to the base station requires a connection link, the sensor nodes can be exposed to the many attacks that exploit the weaknesses of the network. One of the most important types of these attacks is the denial of service (DoS). DoS attack exhausts the system's resources that lead the system to be out of service. In this paper, a cyber-security algorithm is proposed for physical level of WSN that adopts message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol for data transmission and networking. This algorithm predicts the DoS attacks at the first time of happening to be isolated from the WSN. It includes three stages of detecting the attack, predicting the effects of this attack and preventing the attacks by excluding the predicted nodes from the WSN. We applied a type of DoS attack that is a DoS injection attack (DoSIA) on the network protocol. The proposed algorithm is tested by adopting three case studies to cover the most common cases of attacks. The experiment results show the superior of the proposed algorithm in detecting and solving the cyber-attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upgraded network technology presents an advanced technological platform for telecare medicine information systems (TMIS) for patients. However, TMIS generally suffers various attacks since the information being shared through the insecure channel. Recently, many authentication techniques have been proposed relying on the chaotic map. However, many of these designs are not secure against the known attacks. In spite of the fact that some of the constructions attain low computation overhead, they cannot establish an anonymous communication and many of them fail to ensure forward secrecy. In this work, our aim is to present authentication and key agreement protocol for TMIS utilizing a chaotic map to achieve both security and efficiency. The underlying security assumptions are chaotic theory assumptions. This scheme supports forward secrecy and a secure session is established with just two messages of exchange. Moreover, we present a comparative analysis of related authentication techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To model the power measurement conditions of an energy system, an initial reference should be made within the specification of a generic energy consumption (EC) model. This EC model is based on the energy state of a system comprising goods, networks, and services, which supports energy management capabilities. Therefore, a prototype tool to record power consumption (PC) at the device level is designed and implemented, thereby enabling devise use optimization. The core is to collect energy-related information in internet protocol networks that support the simple network management protocol, in addition to the standard proposed in RFC-7460, and the green information technology. The information obtained is related to the energy consumed by devices that support those technologies. Then, the information is processed to evaluate different PC characteristics of the network. This research impacts the knowledge gap of information system management, where the objective sought is to establish metrics and methodological schemes for obtaining data regarding measurable behaviors in the EC field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is the standard network layer protocol for achieving efficient routing in IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). Resource-constrained and non-tamper resistant nature of smart sensor nodes makes RPL protocol susceptible to different threats. An attacker may use insider or outsider attack strategy to perform Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks against RPL based networks. Security and Privacy risks associated with RPL protocol may limit its global adoption and worldwide acceptance. A proper investigation of RPL specific attacks and their impacts on an underlying network needs to be done. In this paper, we present and investigate one of the catastrophic attacks named as a copycat attack, a type of replay based DoS attack against the RPL protocol. An in-depth experimental study for analyzing the impacts of the copycat attack on RPL has been done. The experimental results show that the copycat attack can significantly degrade network performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, and average power consumption. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that extensively studies the impact of RPL specific replay mechanism based DoS attack on 6LoWPAN networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the real world, rule makers can only restrict, not completely control the behavior of the governed, while the governed can only choose their behavior patterns under these restrictions. In this paper, we design a new control protocol called free protocol to describe this situation. First, we calculate consensus probabilities based on the information of the interaction networks. Then, sufficient conditions are obtained for all agents converging to a same value with probability one. Finally, numerical simulation results are given to verify the above results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high throughput, the time saving, and the lower energy consumption are fundamental issues that draw in the consideration of the Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) field specialists. Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in UWSNs are significant methods used for increasing the network lifetime and decreasing the consumption rate of energy. ALOHA Protocol that is a class of random-access MAC protocols is considered as the precept of all the complex designs of MAC protocol such as multi-channel networks. This paper proposes a new protocol for handling the previously mentioned issues called a Buffering_Slotted_ALOHA protocol. The main idea of this protocol is based on dividing the network into small parts called closed clusters to reduce the movement of nodes from one cluster to another. Each closed cluster in the network contains some small clusters with a specific number of nodes to reduce the traffic in the network and to avoid the collision and then reduce the transmission time to the least value. In this protocol, the uw-sink node interacts with a small number of nodes and that is a one of the benefits of using a small cluster. Each node in the small cluster has two choices to send its packets, either to the uw-sink or to the uw-main sink depending on the slot status. Moreover, each node has a buffer that holds the transmitted packets until getting their acknowledgment. This buffer has a large capacity to store a lot of packets. Checking the status of the slot before the transmission is a significant point in our protocol to speed the transmission process. The simulation results of this new protocol proved a good performance related to the throughput rate, the average delay, the energy consumption, and the number of dropped nodes in comparison with the other three most common slotted protocols: Slotted ALOHA, Slotted carrier sense ALOHA protocol (Slotted-CS-ALOHA), and time-saving ALOHA protocol with slotted carrier sense (ST-Slotted-CS-ALOHA protocol). Also, the results proved that the higher the density of the network, the higher the performance of our protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor technology has penetrated various domains of today's life and plays a vital role in the advanced technology. Numerous researchers have combined this outstanding technology with other fields such as resource mining, industry, healthcare, automobile system, gaming industry, and dramas. However, in traditional resource mining, long mining time leads to incomplete mining results along with low accuracy. In order to improve the effect of resource mining, we have proposed an effective Quantum Generic Algorithm (QGA) based on drama resource mining by using wireless sensor technology. In our proposed scheme, we have combined the RFID technology of wireless sensor with wireless network protocol stack for the purpose of collecting drama resources on the network platform. We have classified the drama resources on the network platform by using QGA based on the results of resources collection. Additionally, we have mined the semantic association features of frequent patterns of the drama resources on the platform and combined with the fuzzy attribute feature detection method. The experimental results show that this method is superior to the traditional methods in terms of resource mining time, mining results' comprehensiveness, and mining results' accuracy, which shows that this method has practical application value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of networked nonlinear control system is a very challenging problem due to the coupling of the system uncertainties (e.g., model accuracy, noise, nonlinearity) and network effects (e.g., packet dropouts, time delay). In this paper, a deep representation-based predictive compensation method is proposed for networked nonlinear systems with packet-dropouts in the feedback and forward channel. Different from the existing compensation methods based on open-loop prediction, the proposed method is based on feedback compensation and does not require a nominal system model, so that it can avoid the coupling of system uncertainties and network effects as well as the occupation of network bandwidth. Specifically, a deep sequence to sequence learning scheme is firstly employed to encode the correlations of state and control sequences into deep feature representations. Furthermore, within the embedding space spanned by the learned features, according to the state-control sequence of each sampling step, a prediction of the next control command is generated as compensation for packet dropout. The stability of the overall system is rigorously proved by the Lyapunov theory, which reveals that the control errors for the networked control systems with packet dropouts asymptotic converge to a small neighborhood of the origin. We further evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy on a wheeled mobile robots simulation platform, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve high compensation accuracy and robustness concerning packet dropouts, even in the case of the maximum continuous packet dropouts specified by the network communication protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The combination of edge and cloud computing is going to make the Internet of Things (IoT) rapid, light, and more reliable. IoT and cloud-edge computing are distinct disciples that have evolved separately over time. However, they are increasingly becoming interdependent, and are what the future holds. A crucial aspect is how to design a compound of cloud and edge computing architectures, and implement IoT effectively. In this paper, we proposed a combination of Cloud and Edge Computing architecture and built a set of an intelligent air-quality monitoring system in Tunghai University as a case study. In this case, we implemented container-based virtualization which constructs Kubernetes Minion (Nodes) in the Docker container service independently for each service on the Edge side. Finally, to monitor the high-performance computing systems, clusters, and networks, we used Ganglia Monitoring System. Ganglia collects relevant information such as Central Processing Unit (CPU), memory, network and usage of Protocol Data Unit (PDU) to monitor the power consumption and makes a measurement and evaluation for Kubernetes Pods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the networks, a transport layer is responsible for reliable data with guaranteed Quality of Service. A Modified‐QUIC protocol provides improved throughput and reduced latency of the network. This work proposes a modification in handshaking mechanism for QUIC protocol to minimize overhead due to control signals and time required to update the congestion‐window size. This modification fine‐tunes the window update mechanism with the acknowledgment frame, which results in a smooth variation in the congestion‐window size. This leads to the control congestion by regulating traffic in the network. In the proposed mechanism, unnecessary time out events are avoided by updating the congestion‐window on receipt of the acknowledgment frame. This work has been carried out using two different testbed setups to verify the transport layer and a browser network performance. It has been observed that a Modified‐QUIC protocol is easy to deploy, improves the throughput and data rate by 35% and 3.43%, respectively, over the QUIC protocol. The average fairness index is increased with a file size and for the long live traffic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a full duplex (FD) cooperative non‐orthogonal multiple access system that employs power splitting relaying (PSR)‐based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique, that is, FD‐PSR‐NOMA system. A single cell network is considered consisting of a base station (BS) and two pre‐paired users, where the near user is configured to act as FD relay to assist the BS for information delivery to the far user. It is assumed that the far user implements maximal ratio combining to combine the direct link signal arriving from the BS and the relayed signal from the near user, to exploit the diversity advantage. Analytical expressions are derived for the outage probabilities of the downlink users, system outage probability, and the throughput of the considered network under imperfect successive interference cancellation (i‐SIC). Analytical expressions are also derived for the outage probabilities and throughput of half duplex (HD) cooperative NOMA system under PSR‐based SWIPT, that is, HD‐PSR‐NOMA system. Further, the asymptotic outage probabilities and diversity orders are derived as well. The optimal power allocation factors at the BS that minimize the system outage probabilities of FD/HD‐PSR‐NOMA networks are determined. Extensive simulation results are provided to corroborate the analytical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of things (IoT) is getting bigger as communication infrastructure and device capabilities are getting improved day-by-day, creating a huge market for IoT devices for commercial as well as personal usage. This paper sheds light on the compromises done by vendors on the grounds of security, resources and flexibility to lure customers with low prices, smaller and fancier designs of IoT device and its consequences. Most of the IoT devices are resource-constrained and hence standardization bodies such as IEEE and IETF gave many protocols for IoT devices which are defined over IoT protocol stack. The degree of security in each layer of IoT protocol stack is discussed and it is found that NFC protocol which operates on physical-data link layer and 6LoWPAN, a network layer protocol, lack proper key management while encrypting the data. A most important part of key management in cryptographic algorithms is key generation and storage (if needed). Different types and methods of key generation techniques are also discussed which might give a solution over a variety of situations combining the level of security requirement and resources available in strengthening the abovementioned communication protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-channel ad hoc networks are promising technology to alleviate the spectrum scarcity in dense networks. The main challenge for channel access in distributed multi-channel ad hoc networks is channel synchronization and competition with neither common control channel nor dedicated control transceiver. In this paper, a Tight Synchronized MAC protocol with distributed synchronization and competition process without any dedicated control channel is proposed. The protocol uses a simple handshaking mechanism to create a channel table for each node, which contains its neighbors and channels' status. By this, any node knows the priority of its channels and also the priority of neighbors' channels. By assigning priorities, a sender node starts synchronization. If sender and receiver nodes have a common channel, the proposed method finds it directly or indirectly using the common neighbor mechanism. The other feature of the proposed scheme is using a fair preemptive data transmission phase, which reduces the number of switchings along data transmission. The fair preemptive mechanism is achieved by an analytical solution to estimate the number of competing nodes and thus, estimates the number of assigned data slots. Simulation results show the performance improvements in terms of synchronization delay and packet delivery ratio over HMMAC and MSRMMAC protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era that requests facilitating access to most services by providing the online platforms, the need to own a small electronic device is increasing. The smartphone is the ideal choice for most people due to its multifunctionality. On the other hand, the rate of physical crimes on these devices raised, especially theft and counterfeiting. As a solution to mitigate these crimes, stolen or counterfeit devices are prevented from connecting to the cellular network, but is this solution effective in mitigating the problem? To answer this question, this paper conducts a comprehensive survey on the current solutions tackled the smartphone theft or counterfeit issues, and it provides a taxonomy classify the current solutions into three categories: manufacturers solutions, cellular service provider solutions, and third-party solutions. The proposed smartphone authentication model for cellular network authentication utilizes the permissioned Blockchain network and consists of three protocols, which are smartphone registration protocol, ownership transfer protocol, and cellular network authentication protocol. In order to overcome the two serious physical crimes (theft and counterfeiting), the paper identifies five main requirements that must be met in any cellular network authentication approach, namely ability to detect counterfeit IMEI, ability to identify the device owner, ability to block the service on the stolen/lost devices, less processing time, and acceptable performance. The comparisons with related solutions showed that the proposed work meets all the requirements to mitigate smartphone theft and counterfeiting crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work investigates a finite-time H ∞ robust congestion control issue for transmission control protocol network systems. By means of the backstepping technique, finite-time control method and H ∞ control theory, a novel robust H ∞ finite-time controller design approach is presented to guarantee the finite-time convergence of the queue tracking error. Furthermore, the closed-loop network system has an L 2 gain less than or equal to a given positive real number. Comparative simulation results show that the proposed control method performs better than the existing control approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An event-triggered-based external consensus control protocol with delay compensation for networked multiagent systems (NMASs) with nonlinear dynamics and network-induced delays is discussed in this paper. An RBF-ARX modelling method is adopted to approximate a nonlinear system. By utilizing the RBF-ARX model, the locally linearized time series model can be obtained to describe the behaviour of agents with nonlinear characteristics. An event-triggered control protocol with communication delay compensation is proposed to reduce the effects of network-induced delays and the times of the agent's control update and communication between others by applying the idea of a prediction strategy. The event-triggered mechanism for each agent only depends on the deviation between its own output and the delay-compensated output of neighboring agents. Then, a distributed event-triggered-based and delay-compensated external consensus control protocol is given. Under this proposed control protocol, both the consensus and stability of the system can be proved. Finally, a numerical simulation is performed to verify the availability of our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]