Communication Network Infrastructure Research Articles

Users Perceptions towards Networking and Resource Sharing among Selected Libraries in Odisha

The present study confined only 3 universities of Odisha on the basis of NAAC accreditation rank. This study has been conducted in order to examine existing infrastructure facilities and identify the factors responsible for improvement of the University libraries especially for networked services. Questionnaire designed in structural form and based on the nature, scope and objectives of the research. The questionnaire was divided into different sections representing specific facets concerning to computerization of the library, network infrastructure facilities ,computer and communication infrastructure, electronic resources, networked services, manpower and training.

User requirements for national research and education networks for research in West and Central Africa

National research and education networks (NRENs) play a critical role in the development of communication network infrastructure and networked services for researchers and educators. They help close ‘digital divides’ between and within countries and are an essential factor for national and international development. In collaboration with the West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN), the TANDEM project has developed a roadmap for the development of NRENs in the region. This was based on the results of a survey that was conducted to investigate user requirements of networked services. The analysis of the 561 responses to a three-part questionnaire divided into 11 education, 22 research and 2 technical management questions identified key educational and research service needs. This article reports on the results of the survey with respect to research services. Highlights include respondents wanting regular access to online conference and academic articles (89%), a range of research services including online library resources, video conferencing, collaboration tools, online data access and storage, online library resources and inter-university login (>87%), access to remote computing facilities (80%) and high performance computing facilities (77%). A desire to share data with others online (74%) was also identified. Respondents also indicated that they would like to access research services through a range of device types–Laptops (96%), Fixed PC (86%) and Mobile Devices (81%). Poor network connectivity was consistently identified as being a major barrier to research in the region.

Using Cell‐Phone Tower Signals for Detecting the Precursors of Fog

AbstractIn the last decade, published research has indicated the potential of commercial microwave links that comprise the data transmission infrastructure of cellular communication networks as an environmental monitoring technology. Different weather phenomena cause interference in the wireless communication links that can therefore essentially act as a low‐cost sensor network, already deployed worldwide, for atmospheric monitoring. In this study we focus on the attenuation effect caused in commercial microwave networks due to gradients in the atmospheric refractive index with altitude as a result of the combination of temperature inversions and falls in the atmospheric humidity trapped beneath them. These conditions, when combined with high relative humidity near ground level, are precursors to the creation of fog. The current work utilizes this novel approach to demonstrate the potential for detecting these preconditions of fog, a phenomenon associated with severe visibility limitations that can lead to dangerous accidents, injuries, and loss of lives.

A Proposed Concept of Communication Network For Emergency Phases In Banda Aceh

Communication problems during emergency situations caused by diverse natural phenomenon, especially earthquake, often occurred in Banda Aceh. This is due to an increase in user traffic on the communication network that made most of the providers overwhelmed. Therefore, the existence of a sophisticated network infrastructure for an effective communication in time of emergency phase must be provided. Considering the needs for better communication that can lead to efficient responses in disaster emergency, we try to present a concept of Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) as one of the most effective communication network solutions for today that can perform well in crisis phases. This concept is expected to help the local government, related parties, and communities in doing various communication needs in time of crisis phase. The idea of this WMN is also expected to be taken into consideration for all providers in building their network infrastructure in the future. Keywords : emergency phase , communication network , WMN.

The Tactile Internet: Automation or Augmentation of the Human?

The idea of remotely controlling machines via the Internet for the purpose of automated tele-manufacturing and shared use of manufacturing facilities by users worldwide has been studied since the late 1990s. This idea is now part of the vision of the emerging Tactile Internet, which lies at the nexus of computerization, automation, and robotization. Similar to future 5G cellular networks, the Tactile Internet is anticipated to rely on the full yet flexible convergence of different fixed and mobile access technologies, given that some use cases do not require mobility all the time. While necessary, though, the design of ultra-reliable and low-latency converged communication network infrastructures is not sufficient to unleash the full potential of the Tactile Internet. In this paper, we put forward the idea that the Tactile Internet may be the harbinger of human augmentation and human–machine symbiosis envisioned by contemporary and early-day Internet pioneers. In search for synergies between humans and machines/robots, we explore the idea of treating the human as a “member” of a team of intelligent machines rather than keep viewing him as a conventional “user” while putting a particular focus on developing systems that are human-aware and help advance the human condition, e.g., economic inequality.

Medical Image Security Using Quantum Cryptography

Aim/Purpose: Medical images are very sensitive data that can be transferred to medical laboratories, professionals, and specialist for referral cases or consultation. Strict security measures must be utilized to keep these data secured in computer networks when transferred to another party. On a daily basis, unauthorized users derive ways to gain access to sensitive patient medical information. Background: One of the best ways to which medical image could be kept secured is through the use of quantum cryptography Methodology : Applying the principles of quantum mechanics to cryptography has led to a remarkable new dimension in secured network communication infrastructure. This enables two legitimate users to produce a shared secret random bit string, which can be used as a key in cryptographic applications, such as message encryption and authentication. Contribution: This paper can make it possible for the healthcare and medical professions to construct cryptographic communication systems to keep patients’ transferred data safe and secured. Findings: This work has been able to provide a way for two authorized users who are in different locations to securely establish a secret network key and to detect if eavesdropping (a fraudulent or disruption in the network) has occurred Recommendations for Practitioners: This security mechanism is recommended for healthcare providers and practitioners to ensure the privacy of patients’ medical information. Recommendation for Researchers: This paper opens a new chapter in secured medical records Impact on Society Quantum key distribution promises network security based on the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics by solving the problems of secret-key cryptography . Future Research: The use of post-quantum cryptography can be further researched.

End-to-end energy models for Edge Cloud-based IoT platforms: Application to data stream analysis in IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) is bringing an increasing number of connected devices that have a direct impact on the growth of data and energy-hungry services. These services are relying on Cloud infrastructures for storage and computing capabilities, transforming their architecture into more a distributed one based on edge facilities provided by Internet Service Providers (ISP). Yet, between the IoT device, communication network and Cloud infrastructure, it is unclear which part is the largest in terms of energy consumption. In this paper, we provide end-to-end energy models for Edge Cloud-based IoT platforms. These models are applied to a concrete scenario: data stream analysis produced by cameras embedded on vehicles. The validation combines measurements on real test-beds running the targeted application and simulations on well-known simulators for studying the scaling-up with an increasing number of IoT devices. Our results show that, for our scenario, the edge Cloud part embedding the computing resources consumes 3 times more than the IoT part comprising the IoT devices and the wireless access point.

Communication Framework for Tele-rehabilitation Systems with QoS Guarantee

Nowadays, there is great interest in developing telemedicine technologies. These technologies will provide health care from distance swiftly and lightly, as well as reduce the expenses for activities, such as rehabilitation. Telemedicine applications are possible due to the advances in information technologies and the ever-expanding communication network infrastructure. The network characteristics bandwidth, packet loss, latency, jitter and policies are crucial for the performance of tele-rehabilitation systems. Because in tele-rehabilitation human lives are at stake, guaranteeing the Quality of Service (QoS) is important. In this paper, an approach for assuring the QoS for information transmission in tele-rehabilitation systems is proposed.

Linking Virtual Machine Mobility to User Mobility

Cloud applications heavily rely on the network communication infrastructure, whose stability and latency directly affect the quality of experience. As mobile devices need to rapidly retrieve data from the cloud, it becomes an extremely important goal to deliver the lowest possible access latency at the best reliability. In this paper, we specify a cloud access overlay protocol architecture to improve the cloud access performance in distributed data-center (DC) cloud fabrics. We explore how linking virtual machine (VM) mobility and routing to user mobility can compensate performance decrease due to increased user-cloud network distance, by building an online cloud scheduling solution to optimally switch VM routing locators and to relocate VMs across DC sites, as a function of user-DC overlay network states. We evaluate our solution: 1) on a real distributed DC testbed spanning all of France, showing that we can grant a very high transfer time gain and 2) by emulating the situation of Internet service providers (ISPs) and over-the-top (OTT) cloud providers, exploiting thousands of real France-wide user displacement traces, finding a median throughput gain from 30% for OTT scenarii to 40% for ISP scenarii, the large majority of this gain being granted by adaptive VM mobility.

Integrated Nationwide Electronic Health Records system: Semi-distributed architecture approach.

The integration of heterogeneous electronic health records systems by building an interoperable nationwide electronic health record system provides undisputable benefits in health care, like superior health information quality, medical errors prevention and cost saving. This paper proposes a semi-distributed system architecture approach for an integrated national electronic health record system incorporating the advantages of the two dominant approaches, the centralized architecture and the distributed architecture. The high level design of the main elements for the proposed architecture is provided along with diagrams of execution and operation and data synchronization architecture for the proposed solution. The proposed approach effectively handles issues related to redundancy, consistency, security, privacy, availability, load balancing, maintainability, complexity and interoperability of citizen's health data. The proposed semi-distributed architecture offers a robust interoperability framework without healthcare providers to change their local EHR systems. It is a pragmatic approach taking into account the characteristics of the Greek national healthcare system along with the national public administration data communication network infrastructure, for achieving EHR integration with acceptable implementation cost.

Survivable strategy set design for malicious attack propagation in NEMO scenario

Large-scale failures triggered by undesirable events such as natural disasters, massive power malfunction, and malicious attacks are attracting serious concerns in communication network infrastructure perspective. However, there have been few survivability strategy analyses in network mobility (NEMO) scenarios. To properly address this issue, this paper proposes two novel survivability strategies to handle malicious attack propagation in NEMO scenario. We use fraction of active users (FAU) to illustrate the NEMO survivability performance based on continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) and find the relationship between survivability performance and survivable strategy when facing malicious attack in NEMO scenario. The performance analysis is helpful for us to choose the right survivable strategy in the proper time.

Combined energy hub optimisation and demand side management for buildings

The deployment of innovative energy management (EM) approaches based on systematic modelling and optimisation techniques has received an increasing amount of attention in the last decade. This has been often prompted by more stringent energy policy objectives aiming at reducing carbon emissions, phasing out nuclear plants and promoting overall energy efficiency, while containing both capital and operating costs. In this respect the energy hub concept has proven to be a popular approach for operating technologies and units comprising diversified energy carriers, small-scale production units, storage devices and converter systems. Additionally, developments in communication network and control infrastructure afford the possibility, at least in principle, to actively steer and adjust the load on the demand side of the energy balance, leading to the formulation of demand side management (DSM) techniques. This paper proposes an EM solution that combines the features and advantages of both of the aforementioned approaches, i.e. the energy hub framework and DSM methods. The key idea is to combine the supply-side characteristics of energy hubs with the demand side flexibility yielded by the deployment of DSM schemes. This combined approach is validated on an existing building complex by formalizing its energy supply system as an integrated hub and by modelling its heating demand based on thermodynamic principles. Numerical results based on this experimental setup are presented, illustrating that the combined approach can lead to overall savings typically exceeding 10% compared to a baseline scenario where no EM solution is applied, i.e. where only a rule-based heuristic is employed to control the available energy assets, and underscoring the advantages brought by a systematically integrated modelling and optimisation approach. The proposed solution is thus of interest for a broad host of installations in the residential and commercial domain, and for the latter a specific real-world example has been explicitly considered and analysed. The obtained results are encouraging and warrant further analysis and investigation.

Inertial measurement unit based indoor localization for construction applications

Abstract Localization and tracking of resources on construction jobsites are an emerging area where the location of materials, labor, and equipment is used to estimate productivity, measure project's progress and/or enhance jobsite safety. GPS has been widely used for outdoor tracking of construction operations. However, GPS is not suitable for indoor applications due to the lack of signal coverage; particularly inside tunnels or buildings. Several indoor localization research studies had been attempted, however such developments rely heavily on extensive external communication network infrastructures. These developments also are susceptible to electromagnetic interference in noisy construction jobsites. This paper presents indoor localization system using a microcontroller equipped with an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The IMU contains a cluster of sensors: accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer. The microcontroller uses a direct cosine matrix algorithm to fuse sensors data and calculate non-gravitational acceleration using nine-degrees-of-freedom motion equations. Current position is calculated based on measured acceleration and heading, while accounting for growing error in speed estimation utilizing jerk integration algorithm. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the relative effectiveness of the developed system, which is able to operate independently of any external aids and visibility conditions.

A Review of Motion Planning Techniques for Automated Vehicles

Intelligent vehicles have increased their capabilities for highly and, even fully, automated driving under controlled environments. Scene information is received using onboard sensors and communication network systems, i.e., infrastructure and other vehicles. Considering the available information, different motion planning and control techniques have been implemented to autonomously driving on complex environments. The main goal is focused on executing strategies to improve safety, comfort, and energy optimization. However, research challenges such as navigation in urban dynamic environments with obstacle avoidance capabilities, i.e., vulnerable road users (VRU) and vehicles, and cooperative maneuvers among automated and semi-automated vehicles still need further efforts for a real environment implementation. This paper presents a review of motion planning techniques implemented in the intelligent vehicles literature. A description of the technique used by research teams, their contributions in motion planning, and a comparison among these techniques is also presented. Relevant works in the overtaking and obstacle avoidance maneuvers are presented, allowing the understanding of the gaps and challenges to be addressed in the next years. Finally, an overview of future research direction and applications is given.

Co-simulation of Power System and Synchrophasor Communication Network on a Single Simulation Platform

Analysis of the impact of communication network infrastructure performance on critical power system applications that rely on wide area synchrophasor measurements can be realistically achieved only through co-simulation of the power system and the synchrophasor communication network. In this paper, a single simulation platform, an electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation program - PSCAD/EMTDC, was used to implement the detailed models of the components in a wide area synchrophasor network. Using the developed components models, a simple wide area damping control application was co-simulated to demonstrate the impact of communication latency, packet losses, and bit flip errors on the controller performance. It was shown that with the aid of co-simulations, application specific issues can be diagnosed and appropriate solutions can be investigated.

Matching of Energy Provisions in Multihop Wireless Infra-Structures

Recently there have been large advances in energy technologies for battery-operated systems, including green energy resources and high capacity batteries. The effective use of battery energy resources in wireless infrastructure networks to improve the versatility and reliability of wireless communications is an important issue. Emerging applications of smart cities, Internet of Things (IoT), and emergency responses highly rely on the basic communication network infrastructures that enable ubiquitous network connections. However, energy consumption by nodes in a wireless infrastructure network depends on the transmissions of other nodes in the network. Considering this inter-dependence is necessary to achieve efficient provision of energy in wireless networks. This paper studies the issue of energy provision for wireless relay nodes in Wireless Multihop Infrastructures (WMI) assuming constraints on the total energy provision. We introduce a scheme of Energy Provision Matching (Matching-EP) for WMI which optimizes energy provision based on matching of energy provision with estimates of differentiated position-dependent energy consumption by wireless nodes distributed in the network. The evaluation results show that Matching-EP with 4%–34% improvement in energy matching degree enables 10%–40% improvement of the network lifetime, and 5%–40% improvement of packet delivery compared with conventional WMI networks.

Cellular Network Infrastructure: The Future of Fog Monitoring?

Abstract Severe visibility limitations resulting from fog may lead to acute transportation accidents and high losses of property and lives. Thus, reliable monitoring facilities are of extreme importance. Nevertheless, current monitoring instruments suffer from low spatial resolution, high costs, or lack of precision at near-surface levels. It has, however, recently been shown that the commercial microwave links that form the infrastructure of cellular communication networks can provide crucial information regarding the appearance of dense fog and its intensity. Typical microwave systems currently in operation make use of frequencies between 6 and 40 GHz and, thus, can only monitor heavy fog. However, there is a growing demand for high data rates and expanded bandwidth in modern mobile radio networks. As a result, higher frequencies (e.g., around 80 GHz) are being implemented in order to fulfill these increased requirements. Notably, the attenuation induced as a result of fog at a given intensity increases as operating frequency rises, allowing, for the first time, the possibility of using this system to monitor typical fog intensities, at high resolution and low cost. Here, a theoretical simulation is presented in which simulated fog patches are introduced into an area where a network of links is deployed. Two-dimensional maps are generated utilizing the simulated microwave network to represent sensitivity thresholds for fog detection at three different frequencies: 20, 38, and 80 GHz. Real-data measurements of fog are also demonstrated using 38-GHz band links. The results indicate the vast future potential of commercial microwave links as an opportunistic system for monitoring fog.

A Fuzzy-Multiagent Service Restoration Scheme for Distribution System With Distributed Generation

This paper proposes a new multiagent control system (MACS) for service restoration in distribution systems with integrated distributed generation (DG) units. First, the MACS detects and locates faults, then decides the optimal reconfiguration of the network for restoring de-energized loads, and finally regulates the nodes voltages. Unintentional islanding operation of DG units is avoided and different postfault response modes of DG unit are addressed in the MACS design. The MACS has a hybrid centralizeddecentralized structure where agents are arranged in two layers with different responsibilities and communication capabilities. Agents at load buses in the first layer can only communicate directly with its next neighbor load agents on the same feeder and to its feeder agent, whereas the higher level agents in the second layer can communicate directly with each other. This MACS structure reduces the possibilities of control system failures for a moderate communication network infrastructure. Full dynamic simulation model for evaluating the MACS is implemented.

Applications of Intelligent Agents in Mobile Commerce

Mobile phone usage and its adoption have been growing at exponential rates. It is this exponential growth rate that has led many to predict Mobile Commerce (M-Commerce) as the next major evolution of Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce). While M-Commerce comes rich with unique features, it is currently lacking in usage when compared to traditional e-commerce. There are many challenges that must be addressed in this respect. These challenges are mostly inherent in the mobile devices, communication network, legal and regulatory infrastructure. The use of agents in e-commerce has long been explored in the context, resulting in a number of agent based e-commerce systems. It is not surprising then to note that many researchers believe that the problems that the M-Commerce now faces can be addressed well using agent technology. While there is an abundance of information on the use of agent based systems in other areas, there has been no great surge yet in the use of agent based systems in real world M-Commerce applications. We believe that this slow adoption of this agent technology is due to a lack of standards. There has been a quite an amount of research work carried out in the use of software intelligent agents in the M-Commerce applications like Shopping, Hotel, and Airline industries. These are outlined in the paper with appropriate screenshots and descriptions.

Enhancing network service survivability in large-scale failure scenarios

Large-scale failures resulting from natural disasters or intentional attacks are now causing serious concerns for communication network infrastructure, as the impact of large-scale network connection disruptions may cause significant costs for service providers and subscribers. In this paper, we propose a new framework for the analysis and prevention of network service disruptions in large-scale failure scenarios. We build dynamic deterministic and probabilistic models to capture the impact of regional failures as they evolve with time. A probabilistic failure model is proposed based on wave energy behaviour. Then, we develop a novel approach for preventive protection of the network in such probabilistic large-scale failure scenarios. We show that our method significantly improves uninterrupted delivery of data in the network and reduces service disruption times in large-scale regional failure scenarios.