Search

The management of tandem extracranial internal carotid artery and intracranial large vessel occlusion during endovascular thrombectomy (EVT) for acute ischemic stroke (AIS) has been under-investigated. We sought to investigate outcomes of AIS patients with tandem occlusion (TO) treated with carotid artery stenting (CAS) compared to those not treated with CAS (no-CAS) during EVT.We performed a cohort study using data from AIS patients enrolled in the Italian Registry of Endovascular Treatment in Acute Stroke. Outcomes were 3 months' mortality, functional outcome, complete and successful recanalization, any intracranial hemorrhage, parenchymal hematoma and symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage.Among 466 AIS patients with TO, CAS patients were 122 and no-CAS patients were 226 (118 excluded). After adjustment for unbalanced variables, CAS was associated with a lower rate of 3 months' mortality (OR 0.407, 95% CI 0.171-0.969, p = 0.042). After adjustment for pre-defined variables, CAS was associated with a lower rate of 3 months' mortality (aOR 0.430, 95% CI 0.187-0.989, p = 0.047) and a higher rate of complete recanalization (aOR 1.986, 95% CI 1.121-3.518, p = 0.019), successful recanalization (aOR 2.433, 95% CI 1.263-4.686, p = 0.008) and parenchymal hematoma (aOR 2.876, 95% CI 1.173-7.050, p = 0.021). CAS was associated with lower 3 months mortality (OR 0.373, 95% CI 0.141-0.982, p = 0.046) and higher rates of successful recanalization (OR 2.082, 95% CI 1.099-3.942, p = 0.024) after adjustment for variables associated with 3 months' mortality and successful recanalization, respectively.Among AIS patients with TO, CAS during EVT was associated with a higher rate of successful reperfusion and a lower rate of 3 months' mortality.

Network slicing plays a key role in the 5G ecosystem for vertical industries to introduce new services. However, one widely-recognized challenge of network slicing is to provide traffic isolation and concurrently satisfy diverse performance requirements, e.g., bandwidth and latency. In this work, we showcase the capability to retain these two goals at the same time, via extending the 5Growth baseline architecture and designing a new data-plane pipeline, i.e., virtual queue, over the P4 switch. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, a proof-of-concept is presented serving different service requests over a mixed data path, including P4 switches and Open vSwitches (OvSs).

I Learning Management System (LMS) forniscono una vasta gamma di attività/moduli (ad esempio, sistema di messaggistica, forum, quiz, ecc.), pertanto alcuni più di altri riscontrano un alto o un basso successo in termini di utilizzo/accesso da parte degli utenti. I dati riguardanti l’utilizzo di un LMS devono essere processati al fine di ottenere informazioni concrete e immediate sulla qualità dell’apprendimento. A tale scopo, nell’ultimo decennio, gli LMS fanno affidamento al settore delle Learning Analytic che sono una collezione di metodologie (misurazioni, algoritmi, analisi e presentazioni di dati) per la valutazione formativa dell’apprendimento in ambiente online. Le analisi vengono presentate all’utente finale sotto forma di dashboard. L’obiettivo del contributo è presentare un prototipo di dashboard che possa rappresentare gli indicatori innovativi definiti nel corso delle attività di ricerca degli autori che prendono in considerazione l’aspetto sociale delle interazioni tra gli utenti di un LMS, focalizzando l’attenzione sulla comparazione tra pari. Gli indicatori definiti sono stati classificati sulla base della tipologia di utente che può accedere ad un LMS, cioè studente, docente, ed amministratore. Gli indicatori del prototipo di dashboard sviluppato sono stati testati considerando i dati di Moodle provenienti da tre anni accademici dell’ateneo di afferenza.

Congestion control algorithms are crucial in achieving high utilization while preventing overloading the network. Over the years, many different congestion control algorithms have been developed, each trying to improve over others inspecific situations. However, their interactions and co-existence has, to date, not been thoroughly evaluated, which is the focus of this paper. Through head-to-head comparisons of loss-based, delay-based and hybrid types of congestion control algorithms, we reveal that fairness in resources claimed is often not achieved,especially when flows sharing a link have different round-trip times or belong to different groups.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies provide applications opportunities to manipulate underlying network flows and topologies via network controllers during runtime. In cloud environments, networked virtual machines can be enhanced by SDN by providing applications with controllable infrastructures to meet system-level quality requirements; however, customizing a suitable network topology with optimally placed controller(s) for given quality requirements and workload characteristics is often not an easy task. We call such problem virtual SDN network planning problem. In this paper, a Topology-Controller planner (TCPlanner) is proposed for customizing the network topology and placing the controllers. Experiments with different scales of network show that our approach can effectively plan virtual SDN networks to meet the various QoS requirements and reduce costs.

Spatially-close network fibers have a significant chance of failing simultaneously in the event of man-made or natural disasters within their geographic area. Network operators are interested in the proper detection and grouping of any existing spatially-close fiber segments, to avoid service disruptions due to simultaneous fiber failures. Moreover, spatially-close fibers can further be differentiated by computing the intervals over which they are spatially close. In this paper, we propose (1) polynomial-time algorithms for detecting all the spatially-close fiber segments of different fibers, (2) a polynomial-time algorithm for finding the spatially-close intervals of a fiber to a set of other fibers, and (3) a fast exact algorithm for grouping spatially-close fibers using the minimum number of distinct risk groups. All of our algorithms have a fast running time when simulated on three real-world network topologies.

International audience; Nowadays, the rapid growth of Cloud computing services is stressing the network communication infrastructure in terms of resiliency and programmability. This evolution reveals missing blocks of the current Internet Protocol architecture, in particular in terms of virtual machine mobility management for addressing and locator-identifier mapping. In this paper, we propose some changes to the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) to cope this gap. We define novel control-plane functions and evaluate them exhaustively in the worldwide public LISP testbed, involving four LISP sites distant from a few hundred kilometers to many thousands kilometers. Our results show that we can guarantee service downtime upon virtual machine migration lower than the second across Asian and European LISP sites, and down to 300 ms within Europe. We discuss how much our approach outperforms standard LISP and triangular routing approaches in terms of service downtime as a function of datacenter-datacenter and client-datacenter distances.

Abies nebrodensis (Lojac.) Mattei is an endemic species of the north-west of Sicily located in an 84 ha area in the Madonie Regional park. The current population is limited to 30 relic adult trees and a fluctuating number of juveniles of natural regeneration. The species is defined as “Critically Endangered” in the Italian list of threatened plants and is classified as CR-D in the 2000 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. This article reports the key action undertaken by the LIFE4FIR project aimed at preserving A. nebrodensis, and the results obtained so far in three years of activity. OpenArrays SNPs genotyping revealed a high rate of inbreeding in the natural population and that the adult trees are genetically related. Controlled cross-pollination was consequently performed to increase the genetic variability of the progeny. Outbred offspring are currently being grown in the nursery. Reforestation has been planned by using 4000 selected outbred seedlings in 10 areas within Madonie Park to create re-diffusion cores. Support and protection of the relic population have been implemented through regular phytosanitary surveys, as well as new fencing and video surveillance systems against grazing and wild herbivores. A seedbank and cryobank for the long-term germplasm conservation have been established.

In this demonstration, we present dynamic allocation of accelerator resources to SSH tunnels in an NFV environment. In order to accelerate a VNF, its compute-intensive operations are offloaded to hardware cores running on an FPGA. The CPU utilization information of VNFs is continuously processed by a service management component to dynamically decide the suitable target to run VNF's crypto-operations. We also demonstrate switching between the non-accelerated and hardware-accelerated SSH-tunnels triggered by a change in the nature of the data traffic flowing through the tunnel and indicate throughput gains obtainable in dynamically switching contexts.

EgeUn###, As being one of the most popular applications in the last decade, dynamic adaptive video streaming applications are used by Internet users every day. In such applications, the underlying architecture allows users to change quality adaptively as their request. The purpose of quality or rate adaptation algorithm is to achieve highest QoE possible. In this paper, we propose a rate adaptation algorithm which allows to increase the quality of already buffered video by using Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method. Increasing the quality of the buffered video can be beneficial in areas from resiliency to entertainment. We propose to utilize SDN for deciding weights of MCDM method. For this purpose, SDN controller runs a machine learning algorithm by using its knowledge about current network conditions as an input of the learning algorithm. Simulation results show that users achieve higher QoE by using our approach when compared to conventional rate adaptation algorithm., COST Action - COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) [CA15127], This article is based upon work from COST Action CA15127 ("Resilient communication services protecting end user applications from disaster-based failures. RECODIS") supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). The authors thank to Seckin Eser from DEU for his valuable contributions on developing MCDM method.

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to expand at enormous rates. Smart Cities powered by connected sensors promise to transform public services from transportation to environmental monitoring and healthcare to improve citizen welfare. Furthermore, over the last few years, Fog Computing has been introduced to provide an answer to the massive growth of heterogeneous devices connected to the network. Nevertheless, providing a proper resource scheduling for delay-sensitive and data-intensive services in Fog Computing environments is still a key research domain. Therefore, in this paper, a network-aware scheduling approach for container-based applications in Smart City deployments is proposed. Our proposal has been validated on the Kubernetes platform, an open source orchestrator for the automatic management and deployment of micro-services. Our approach has been implemented as an extension to the default scheduling mechanism available in Kubernetes, enabling Kubernetes to make resource provisioning decisions based on the current status of the network infrastructure. Evaluations based on Smart City container-based applications have been carried out to compare the performance of the proposed scheduling approach with the standard scheduling feature available in Kubernetes. Results show that the proposed approach achieves reductions of 80% in terms of network latency when compared to the default scheduling mechanism.

International audience; Nowadays, the Smart Grid (SG) is becoming smarter thanks to the integration of different information and communication technologies to enhance the reliability and efficiency of the power grid. However, several issues should be met to ensure high SG performance. Among these issues, we cite the problem of electric vehicles (EVs) integration into the SG to avoid electricity intermittence due to the important load that EVs can create. Another issue is the SG communication network security that can be attempted by malicious intruders in order to create damages and make the power grid instable. In this context, we propose at a first level a Bayesian game-theory model that aims to integrate optimally EVs into the SG and maintain the equilibrium between the offer and the demand. At a second level, we propose an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to protect the SG from attacks that aim to disturb the state estimation. Numerical results prove the efficiency and robustness of our proposed models.

The contamination of water by metal compounds is a worldwide environmental problem. Heavy metals, such as cadmium (Cd), are released into the environment by industries. Cd is a highly toxic heavy metal. It can pass the blood-brain barrier and exert neurotoxic activity. In this work the effects of Cd on the brain of Danio rerio treated for 16 days with CdCl2 at dose of 1.0 mg/L were studied. Cadmium was detected in the brain of zebrafish at 2, 7 and 16 days of treatment by atomic absorption spectrometry and the tissue alterations were observed at light and electron microscope. We reveled that Cd accumulates in the brain in the time and it induces evident morphological alterations in treated animals compared to controls.

Ochratoxin A (OTA), a toxin produced by Aspergillus ochraceus and Penicillium verrucosum, is one of the most abundant food contaminating mycotoxins. we performed a toxicity test on zebrafish embryos at concentrations of 1 mg/L, 100 μg/L, 10 μg/L, 1 μg/L OTA. In this work we observed the induction of apoptosis by OTA in zebrafish embryos. In particular, apoptosis was evaluated as a direct result of oxidative stress and increased levels of lipid peroxidation using the system of deoxynucleotide terminal transferase (TUNEL). This method was performed on zebrafish embryos in the presence of 10 μg/L OTA. In 144 hpf embryos treated, however, has been observed that apoptotic events were more marked than the control. The results obtained by TUNEL were in agreement with the findings of recent studies linking an increase in apoptosis of ochratoxin A by the ability to induce oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation.