Extension Of Protocol Research Articles

OLSR Fuzzy Cost (OLSR-FC): an extension to OLSR protocol based on fuzzy logic and applied to avoid selfish nodes

The mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) are those whose nodes have mobility, energy restriction and operate simultaneously as end systems and router. One of the main problems found in MANETs is the occurrence of selfish nodes, which are those that refuse to route packets for other nodes. To address the issue of selfish nodes in MANETs and improve the flow of traffic in these networks, this paper proposes an extension to the OLSR protocol, based on Fuzzy logic, called OLSR Fuzzy Cost (OLSR -FC). Using the NS-2 simulator, the OLSR-FC proposal was compared to other extensions of OLSR protocol (e.g., OLSR-ETX, OLSR-ML e OLSR-MD) concerning the performance metrics: packet loss, end-to-end delay, Jitter, power consumption, routing overhead and throughput. The results showed that OLSR-FC obtains better performance than the evaluated extensions, avoiding selfish nodes and selecting routes whose links have little packet losses.

Transitions: A Protocol-Independent View of the Future Internet

Countless novel approaches to communication protocols, overlay networks, and distributed middleware are published every year, yet the adoption of such novel findings in the global Internet landscape progresses at a slow pace. Many of such new communication mechanisms excel (only) under specific deployment conditions, while user mobility and application usage patterns lead to dynamic operation conditions. This mismatch is one reason that makes a wide deployment of new specialized mechanisms particularly hard as observed, for example, for multipath transport protocol extensions until the emergence of multipath transmission control protocol (TCP). This paper formalizes the concept of Transitions, i.e., a method to instrumentalize adaptivity at runtime in communication systems. It allows to exchange communication mechanisms in a running system to optimize the communication quality. In the following, we describe the building blocks required to: 1) capture the features and relations within a communication system and 2) express and optimize the decision making process in such a system. We show how this concept maps intuitively to the Internet model which makes a protocol-independent deployment of applications feasible in the future Internet.

SDQaaS: software defined networking for quantum key distribution as a service.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) holds the potential of providing long-term integrity and confidentiality for data and communications. Currently, many fiber-based QKD systems have been commercialized and several QKD networks have been deployed. Given the high cost and complexity of QKD network deployment, QKD as a service (QaaS) becomes a promising pattern for future QKD networks. The QaaS concept is that multiple users can apply for QKD services to obtain their required secret-key rates (SKRs) from the same QKD network infrastructure instead of deploying their dedicated QKD networks. Accordingly, how to provide efficient and flexible QaaS for fulfilling the SKR requirements of multiple users over a QKD network infrastructure becomes a new challenge. This study introduces the software defined networking (SDN) technique to overcome this challenge, since SDN can add flexibility together with efficient QKD network management. A new framework of SDN for QaaS (SDQaaS) is proposed, where the QaaS functions are developed in the SDN controller. We present the protocol extension, intercommunication workflow, and routing and SKR assignment strategy for QaaS implementation in the SDQaaS framework. We also establish a SDQaaS experimental testbed and perform the numerical simulation to verify our presented approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that our presented approaches can achieve efficient and flexible QaaS over the QKD network. Moreover, simulation results indicate that the success probability of QKD service requests can be increased via lowering the flexibility of SKR requirements for QKD service creation, sacrificing more cost to produce higher SKR over the QKD network, or gradually reducing SKR requirements with the modification of QKD service.

Multi-tenant provisioning over software defined networking enabled metropolitan area quantum key distribution networks

Quantum key distribution (QKD) has potential to provide long-term security for communications across the Internet. As security-hungry applications dramatically rise nowadays, a growing number of QKD networks are promising to be deployed in the immediate future. Nevertheless, a high-security-demand institution (e.g., a bank) needs to pay a high price to deploy its dedicated QKD network, while a cost-effective way of overcoming this challenge is to make multiple tenants share a QKD network. Each tenant represents a high-security-demand institution and can obtain secret keys on demand from the QKD network infrastructure for security purposes. Hence, how to achieve efficient and flexible multi-tenant provisioning over a QKD network becomes a crucial problem. This work introduces software defined networking (SDN) to address this problem. We experimentally demonstrate multi-tenant provisioning (including tenant establishment, adjustment, and deletion) over SDN-enabled metropolitan area QKD networks. A SDN-enabled metropolitan area QKD network architecture is introduced. We present a workflow, protocol extensions, and an on-demand secret-key resource allocation strategy for multi-tenant provisioning, which are all demonstrated by establishing an experimental testbed in the lab. Experimental results verify the effectiveness and flexibility of our SDN-based approaches for multi-tenant provisioning over metropolitan area QKD networks. Moreover, we conduct the simulation and discover the ways of improving the success probability of multi-tenant provisioning over metropolitan area QKD networks.

Sámi’s Reindeer Husbandry and EU Legislation (beyond Finland and Sweden’s Accession Treaty)

The 1995 Treaty concerning the accession of Finland and Sweden to the EU makes some express exceptions for their domestic legislation vis-à-vis EU legislation regarding some aspects of traditional reindeer husbandry carried out by the Sámi people. However, other fields in the EU law lack an express regulation concerning reindeer husbandry and this has led to much controversy. In Sweden, legislation on EU Natura 2000 areas identifies reindeer herders as stakeholders among many others, i.e. it does not as such address the Sámi as indigenous people. In Finland, the Act on Metsähallitus was amended in 2016 to be in compliance with EU trade laws; however, the new Act does not recognise any special status of the Sámi as indigenous people, giving rise to concerns especially with regards to reindeer husbandry. The extension of Protocol No 3 to the Accession Treaty to other matters by a unanimous vote of the Council could be a solution to protect Sámi’s reindeer husbandry vis-à-vis EU legislation. Simultaneously, EU legislation should be interpreted in the light of the relevant rules of international law concerning indigenous peoples.

Consensus-Based Formation of Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems via Linear-Transformation-Based Partial Stability Approach

The paper studies the time-invariant formation problem of second-order multi-agent systems under a time-invariant directed communication topology. Extensions of the consensus protocol are introduced in the formation control. By choosing appropriate consensus states, the state-linear-transformation approach and the partial stability theory are adopted to analyze the formation problem. Sufficient and necessary algebraic criteria are derived for the formation regulation problem with or without velocity constrains and the formation tracking problem. They are expressed in terms of Hurwitz stability of matrices which are constructed from the gain matrices of formation control protocols.

Silicon clusters with six and seven unsubstituted vertices via a two-step reaction from elemental silicon.

Unsaturated silicon clusters with only partial substitution, and thus, "naked" Si atoms are well studied species as they are proposed intermediates in gas-phase deposition processes. Although a remarkable number of stable molecular clusters has been reported, they are typically still obtained by multi-step syntheses. Herein we introduce a newly developed synthetic approach which led to the formation of the anionic species {Si(TMS)3}3Si9 - (1a) and {Si(TMS)3}2Si9 2- (1b), and an extension of this synthetic protocol resulted in the first covalent attachment of ligands through metal atoms to these clusters, (SnCy3)3Si9 - (2a) and (SnCy3)2Si9 2- (2b). The influence of the substituents on the electron localization in the central Si9 unit is analyzed by means of intrinsic bond orbital (IBO) analysis and partial atomic charge distribution. The IBO analyses reveal a new type of delocalization including 5-center-6-electron besides 3-center-2-electron bonds. The Raman spectra of 1b and 2b allow an assignment of the Si-Si intra-cluster vibrations by comparison to calculated (DFT-PBE0) spectra. The anions are formed in a one-step synthesis from binary K12Si17 which can easily be obtained by fusing the elements K and Si. The anions are characterized by ESI mass spectrometry and comprehensive NMR studies (1H, 13C, 29Si, 119Sn). Attempts to crystallize 1a and 2a as their (K-222crypt)+ salts yielded after the loss of one of the substituents single crystals containing 1b and 2b. The single crystal X-ray structure analyses reveal the presence of anionic siliconoids with surfaces of seven unsubstituted silicon atoms.

Secure and Energy-Efficient Data Aggregation Method Based on an Access Control Model

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of sensor nodes that are distributed to capture the information about an area of interest. In WSN, many of the secure data aggregation works are conducted without addressing the authentication process. It is challenging to implement authentication while preserving the energy consumption in the network. The previous research that focus on these issues have several limitations, such as sharing the security key and the key length with a base station node, and not much attention is given to enhance the authentication of the Medium Access Control (MAC) server. This makes the data aggregation network are exposed to malicious activities. This paper presents a new protocol to address the security and energy issue in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). This newly developed protocol is named Secure and Energy-Efficient Data Aggregation (SEEDA), which is the extension of SDAACA protocol. The proposed protocol aims to enhance authentication by generating a random value and random timestamp with a secret key. The base station node will verify the fake aggregated data when the packets are received using the generated key earlier. Furthermore, the attacks are detected and prevented by utilizing secure node authentication, data fragmentation algorithms, fully homomorphic encryption, and access control model. The secure node authentication algorithm prevents attacks from accessing the network. To avoid network delays, the base station node utilizes the distance information between the participating nodes. To ensure the reliability of our proposed method, we simulate two well-known attacks, called Sybil and sinkhole attacks. Several experimental scenarios are conducted to observe their effect. Evaluation metrics such as malicious activity detection rate, energy consumption, end-to-end delay, and resilience time are measured. The performance of the proposed protocol is compared with SDA, SDAT, SDALFA, EESSDA, SDAACA, and EESDA, which is a widely used protocol in the area of secure data aggregation. The simulation results show that the proposed SEEDA method outperforms the existing scheme with 98.84% malicious nodes detection rate, 3.04 joules for energy consumption, the maximum delay of 0.038 seconds, and the resilient time 0.054, 0.075 seconds when 8%,16% of malicious nodes affecting the network.

Regulation and Control of AP-1 Binding Activity in Embryotoxicity.

The electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA) is a sensitiveand relatively straightforward methodology used to detect sequence-specific DNA-protein interactions. It is the fundamental procedure of several variants that allow qualitative and quantitative assessments of protein-nucleic acid complexes. Classically, nuclear proteins and DNA are combined, and the resulting mixture is electrophoretically separated in polyacrylamide or agarose gel under native conditions. The distribution within the gel is generally detected with autoradiography of the 32P-labelled DNA. The underlying principle is that nucleic acid with protein bound to it will migrate more slowly through a gel matrix than the free nucleic acid. In this chapter, a representative protocol is described that addresses specific challenges of using whole embryos as the nuclear protein source, and the most common and informative EMSA variant, the "super-shift", is also presented. The important points are underscored, and approaches for troubleshooting are explained. References are provided for alternative methods and extensions of the basic protocol.

TRICKS—Time TRIggered Covert Key Sharing for Controller Area Networks

There are dozens of proposals for securing the controller area network (CAN); however, only a few of them are concerned on how to share secret keys between CAN nodes. Recently, some works have used the non-destructive property of CAN arbitration in order to exchange a secret key and achieve information theoretic security for the key exchange. In our proposals, we exploit both delays and the non-destructive arbitration of CAN to achieve a secure key exchange. While our approach is less efficient when it comes to bandwidth, we do not require any kind of additional hardware and we build our implementation on the software layer which is accessible for any CAN-based application. To boost efficiency, we finally bootstrap secret keys by means of the guessing-resilient protocols, such as encrypted-key-exchange (EKE) and simple password exponential key exchange (SPEKE). In principle, a few dozen frames suffice for a secure key-exchange between two CAN nodes. We discuss several protocol versions and extensions for the case of more than two parties. We also present the experimental results on modern automotive-grade controllers to prove the performance of our solution.

An Effective Extension of Anti-Collision Protocol for RFID in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is often presented as a concept that is significantly changing industry, yet continuous improvements in the identification and automation of objects are still required. Such improvements are related to communication speed, security, and reliability, critical attributes for industrial environments. In this context, the radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems present some issues related to frame collision when there are several tags transmitting data. The dynamic framed-slotted ALOHA (DFSA) is a widely used algorithm to solve collision problems in RFID systems. DFSA dynamically adjusts the frame length based on estimations of the number of labels that have competed for slots in the previous frame. Thus, the accuracy of the estimator is directly related to the label identification performance. In the literature, there are several estimators proposed to improve labels identification accuracy. However, they are not efficient when considering a large tag population, requiring a considerable amount of computational resources to perform the identification. In this context, this work proposes an estimator, which can efficiently identify a large number of labels without requiring additional computational resources. Through a set of simulations, the results demonstrate that the proposed estimator has a nearly ideal channel usage efficiency of 36.1%, which is the maximum efficiency of the DFSA protocol.

Effect of the duration of antimicrobial exposure on the development of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) for macrolide antibiotics: protocol for a systematic review with a network meta-analysis

BackgroundAntimicrobial resistance generates a huge health and economic burden and has the potential to become the leading cause of death globally, but its underlying drivers are yet to be fully described. The association between a microbe’s exposure to antimicrobials and subsequent development of, or selection for, resistance is well documented, as are the exacerbating microbial and human factors. However, the nature and extent of this risk, and how it varies by antimicrobial class and duration of treatment, is poorly defined. The goal of our systematic review and network meta-analysis is to determine the relationship between the duration of antimicrobial exposure and selection for resistance. We will use macrolides as the antimicrobial class of interest and Streptococcus pneumoniae carriage as an indicator organism. Our secondary outcomes include duration of symptoms, risk of treatment failure and recurrence, and descriptions of resistance mechanisms.MethodsWe will conduct a systematic review, selecting studies if they are published randomised controlled trials (RCTs) which report the relationship between taking a macrolide for any indication and incidence of resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae in patients of any age group. We will use a predefined search strategy to identify studies meeting these eligibility criteria in MEDLINE, Embase, Global Health and the Cochrane Central Register of RCTs. Two authors will independently screen titles and abstracts, review the full texts and undertake data extraction. We will use the Cochrane Collaboration’s tool to assess the quality of included RCTs. If feasible, we will perform pair-wise meta-analysis modelling to determine the relationship between the duration of macrolide treatment and development of macrolide resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae. If the identified studies meet the assumptions for a network meta-analysis (NMA), we will additionally model this relationship using indirect comparisons. Our protocol utilises reporting guidance by Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) and the extensions for protocols (PRISMA-P) and network meta-analyses (PRISMA for NMA). Our review will also report to these standards.DiscussionEstablishing the relationship between the duration of antimicrobial exposure and development of, or selection for, resistance will inform the design of antimicrobial prescriptions, treatment guidelines and the behaviour of both physicians and patients. This work will therefore be a strong contribution towards the full realisation of current antimicrobial resistance stewardship strategies.Systematic review registrationPROSPERO CRD42018089275

Parent-to-parent support interventions for parents of babies cared for in a neonatal unit\u2014protocol of a systematic review of qualitative and quantitative evidence

BackgroundParents of babies admitted to neonatal units experience an arduous emotional journey. Feelings of helplessness, fear, sadness, guilt, grief and anger are common. These feelings can lead to anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress which may persist long after discharge from the unit. Support from a parent with first-hand experience able to empathise with problems and challenges may help. This systematic review will identify quantitative and qualitative evidence to address the role of parent-to-parent support interventions for families of babies cared for in neonatal units, and combine the findings in an integrated synthesis.MethodsWe are working in collaboration with a study-specific Parent Advisory Group (PAG) of parents who have relevant and varied lived experience of having a baby in neonatal care and those who have been involved in providing peer support. With the PAG, we will carry out a systematic review bringing together all existing research on parent-to-parent support for parents of babies cared for in neonatal units. This will be reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement. The protocol has been produced in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Protocol extension (PRISMA-P). We have co-produced a plain language protocol summary with the PAG which details the different stages of the project, and this is available via our website (http://clahrc-peninsula.nihr.ac.uk/research/parent-to-parent-support) for anyone interested in learning more about the detail of the project.DiscussionAll outputs will be available on the NIHR CLAHRC South West Peninsula (PenCLAHRC) website and promoted via PenCLAHRC networks as well as organisations that have been contacted throughout the project. PAG members will be involved in writing and reviewing the academic paper and final report and in co-producing dissemination products such as plain language summaries. The PAG will influence the main conclusions of the systematic review, aid interpretation and help to communicate results in the most appropriate ways. We will hold an impact conference with representatives from neonatal units, national neonatal networks, commissioners of services and parents to discuss what the findings mean for clinical practice and service provision.Systematic review registrationPROSPERO CRD42018090569

Preparation of plant tissue to enable Spatial Transcriptomics profiling using barcoded microarrays.

Elucidation of the complex processes involved in plant growth requires analysis of the spatial gene expression patterns in all affected tissues. This protocol extension is an adaptation of a protocol that describes how to use barcoded oligo-dT microarrays to evaluate spatial global gene expression profiles in mammalian tissue to enable it to be applied to plant material. Here, we explain the required adjustments for preparing and treating plant tissue sections on the array surface, specifically in regard to how to permeabilize and remove the tissue. Once the tissue has been removed, the cDNA-mRNA hybrid that is left on the slide is processed in the same way as cDNA obtained during experiments on mammalian tissue; thus the later stages of the protocol are not included here, and readers should follow the accompanying protocol for those. We have previously used our protocol to generate high-quality sequencing libraries for Arabidopsis thaliana inflorescence, Populus tremula developing and dormant leaf buds, and Picea abies female cones. However, we anticipate that the protocol can be adapted to other tissue types and species. The entire protocol for preparing samples and processing libraries can be completed in 3-4 d.

Consistently High MIMO Rates via Switched-Beam Antennas

The demand for wireless bandwidth is rising to unprecedented levels. The industry has responded with the inclusion of advanced PHY techniques, most notably multi-user (MU) MIMO, in the most recent Wi-Fi and LTE standards. However, despite the theoretical promise for large multiplexing gains, in practice the rate gains are modest due to a combination of large overhead to collect channel state information and not-so-well-conditioned channel matrices. In this paper, we propose to replace omni-directional antennas with inexpensive switched-beam antennas to produce well-conditioned channel matrices for MU-MIMO purposes with very low overhead. Remarkably, the experimental results with both software-defined radios and commercial Wi-Fi chipsets show that, when appropriate antenna modes are used, this leads to a $3.5\times-5\times $ average throughput improvement in indoor environments. What is more, our backward compatible protocol extension coupled with an efficient algorithm to select appropriate antenna modes, achieve the aforementioned gains with almost zero overhead.

Universal and distortion-free entanglement concentration of multiqubit quantum states in the W class

We propose a multipartite extension of Matsumoto and Hayashi's distortion-free entanglement concentration protocol, which takes $n$ copies of a general multipartite state and, via local measurements, produces a maximally-entangled multipartite state between local spaces of dimensions $\sim 2^{n E_i}$, where $E_i$ are the local entropies of the input state. However, the extended protocol is generally not universal in the sense that for the same measurement outcomes, the output state will still depend on the input state. Our main result is that when specialized to any state in the multiqubit W class, the protocol is also universal, so that as in the biparatite version, the output is a unique, maximally-entangled state for each given set of measurement outcomes. Our analysis brings to the forefront a new and interesting family of maximally-entangled multipartite states, which we term Kronecker states. A recurrence relation to obtain the coefficients of the W-class Kronecker states is also given.

Extending OpenID Connect Towards Mission Critical Applications

Abstract Single Sign-On (SSO) decreases the complexity and eases the burden of managing many accounts with a single authentication mechanism. Mission critical application such as banking demands highly trusted identity provider to authenticate its users. The existing SSO protocol such as OpenID Connect protocol provides secure SSO but it is applicable only in the consumer-to-social-network scenarios. Owing to stringent security requirements, the SSO for banking service necessitates a highly trusted identity provider and a secured private channel for user access. The banking system depends on a dedicated central banking authority which controls the monetary policy and it must assume the role of the identity provider. This paper proposes an extension of OpenID Connect protocol that establishes a central identity provider for bank users, which facilitates the users to access different accounts using single login information. The proposed Enhanced OpenID Connect (EOIDC) modifies the authorization code flow of OpenID Connect to build a secure channel from a single trusted identity provider that supports multiple banking services. Moreover, the EOIDC tightens the security mechanism with the help of SAT to avoid impersonation attack using replay and redirect. The formal security analysis and validation demonstrate the strength of the EOIDC against possible attacks such as impersonation, eavesdropping, and a brute force login. The experimental results reveal that the proposed EOIDC system is efficient in providing secured SSO protocol for banking services.

A Practical Deployment of a Communication Infrastructure to Support the Employment of Multiple Surveillance Drones Systems

In many incidents involving amateur drones (ADr), the big challenge is to quickly deploy a surveillance system that countermeasures the threat and keeps track of the intruders. Depending on the area under concern, launching a single surveillance drone (SDr) to hunt the intruder is not efficient, but employing multiple ones can cope with the problem. However, in order to make this approach feasible, an easy to use mission setup and control station for multiple SDr is required, which by its turn, requires a communication infrastructure able to handle the connection of multiple SDr among themselves and their ground control and payload visualization station. Concerning this Issue, this paper presents a proposal of a network infrastructure to support the operation of multiple SDr and its practical deployment. This infrastructure extends the existing Micro Air Vehicle Link (MAVLink) protocol to support multiple connections among the SDrs and between them and a ground control station. Encouraging results are obtained, showing the viability of this proposed protocol extension.

Optical Power Control in Translucent Flexible Optical Networks With GMPLS Control Plane

The continuously increasing traffic of Internet services (cloud services, video streaming, social networks, and recently, Internet of Things services) is leading to huge traffic growth in core optical networks. This traffic evolution is pushing network operators to efficiently exploit their infrastructures in order to postpone, as much as possible, the expensive deployment of new infrastructures. In this respect, the migration from fixed-to flex-grid optical networks was triggered in order to efficiently use optical network capacity, taking benefits from the improved spectral efficiency of flexible transponders. In our previous work [J. Opt. Commun. Netw., vol. 8, no. 8, p. 553, Aug. 2016], we demonstrated that migrating towards flexible networks while keeping in use existing optical amplifiers will cause a power saturation problem over highly loaded links due to the increase in the number of optical channels. To overcome this problem, we proposed in that work a power adaptation process that consists of converting transmission performance margins into optical power attenuation over optical links. However, the realized work considered only a transparent optical network controlled by the generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS) protocol suite. In this paper, we consider the case of a translucent optical network where optical regeneration is required, and thus, the power adaptation process is adapted to this kind of network. A new routing algorithm and protocol extensions are proposed to take into account power and regeneration information in the GMPLS control plane of translucent networks.

Determination of the contribution of humic substances to iron complexation in seawater by catalytic cathodic stripping voltammetry

Improving our understanding of iron cycling in ocean waters is one of the most challenging tasks in oceanographic studies and requires new analytical strategies. The low solubility of inorganic iron in oxygen saturated waters is increased by organic complexation with a variety of natural ligands, the nature of which is a topic of debate. Electrochemical methods are important for speciation studies since they allow direct measurement of iron complexes at limits of detection below iron concentrations in ocean waters. Most of the natural iron ligands do not form electrolabile iron complexes with working electrodes currently in use. Humic substances are the exception as their iron complexes can be detected by cathodic voltammetry if a strong oxidant such as bromate is added for a catalytic reoxidation of iron. Here we propose a rearrangement and extension of the original analytical protocol (Laglera et al., 2007) [1]. Firstly, the humic standard prepared in ultrapure water is carefully saturated with iron before use, preventing underestimation of the iron-humic complexes during calibration. Secondly, before starting the common voltammetric analysis under iron saturation, extra voltammograms are collected at the natural iron concentration. We demonstrate that this rearrangement permits the determination of the percentage of iron-binding groups of humic substances in the sample that were originally bound to iron. After calibration, the concentration of iron present in the sample as humic complexes can be quantified. This is the first analytical development leading to the quantification of the contribution of a determined type of natural ligands to the organic speciation of iron in seawater. As a proof of concept we measured the concentration of Fe-HS complexes in Arctic Ocean waters characterized by a high content in terrigenous organic matter. We corroborated the importance of humic substances in the lateral transport of high concentrations of iron from the Arctic Ocean into the North Atlantic Ocean.