Seamless Network Research Articles

A Survey on Green 6G Network: Architecture and Technologies

While 5G is being commercialized worldwide, research institutions around the world have started to look beyond 5G and 6G is expected to evolve into green networks, which deliver high Quality of Service and energy efficiency. To meet the demands of future applications, significant improvements need to be made in mobile network architecture. We envision 6G undergoing unprecedented breakthrough and integrating traditional terrestrial mobile networks with emerging space, aerial and underwater networks to provide anytime anywhere network access. This paper presents a detailed survey on wireless evolution towards 6G networks. In this survey, the prime focus is on the new architectural changes associated with 6G networks, characterized by ubiquitous 3D coverage, introduction of pervasive AI and enhanced network protocol stack. Along with this, we discuss related potential technologies that are helpful in forming sustainable and socially seamless networks, encompassing terahertz and visible light communication, new communication paradigm, blockchain and symbiotic radio. Our work aims to provide enlightening guidance for subsequent research of green 6G.

How to approach to suicide prevention

In early 2018, the National Action Plan for Preventing Suicide was announced by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and related ministries. The Action Plan presents a realistic goal of reducing suicide mortality to two-thirds of the present level, which would make it 1.4 times higher than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average (in contrast to current circumstances, in which it is 2.4 times higher than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average). Several public and private organizations are engaged in various suicide prevention activities. However, it is crucial for a seamless network to be formed, including government organizations, medical institutions, private organizations, and religious organizations. In medical settings, it is imperative that clinicians assess patients' risk of depression or suicide and arrange for a referral service. We need to connect modern social trends with classical mental health treatment modalities by using technologies such as smartphones and the internet. Strategies for research and development and for actual implementation must be established. Suicide prevention requires the active cooperation of not only mental health professionals, but also all physicians and health professionals. Experts in philosophy, sociology, economics, religion, and anthropology must also collaborate to find ways of affirming the importance of human life.

Seizure episodes detection via smart medical sensing system

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) consist of seamless network of sensors and actuators integrated with physical processes related to human activities. The CPS exploits sensors and actuators to monitor and control different physical process that can affect the computations of the devices. This paper presents the monitoring of physical activities exploiting wireless devices as sensors used in medical cyber-physical systems. Patients undergoing epileptic seizures experience involuntary body movements such as jerking, muscle twitching, falling, and convulsions. The proposed method exploits S-Band sensing used in medical CPS that leverage wireless devices such as omni-directional antenna at the transmitter side, four-beam patch antenna at the receiver side, RF signal generator and vector signal analyzer that perform signal conditioning by providing amplitude and raw phase data. The method uses wireless monitoring and recording system for measurement and classification of a clinical condition (epileptic seizures) versus normal daily routine activities. The data acquired that are perturbations of the radio signal is analyzed as amplitude, phase information, and statistical models. Extracting the statistical features, we leverage various machine learning algorithms such as support vector machine, random forest, and K-nearest neighbor that classify the data to differentiate patient’s various activities such as press-ups, walking, sitting, squatting, and seizure episodes. The performance parameters used in three machine learning algorithms are accuracy, precision, recall, Cohen’s Kappa coefficient, and F-measure. The values obtained using five performance parameters provide the accuracy of more than 90%.

Partnership to Health Pathways

Introduction: In July 2015, HealthPathways HP was implemented by a Local Health District and a Primary Health Network. Type 2 Diabetes T2DM was identified as a priority area. HealthPathways is a dynamic online health information portal aimed at General Practitioners GPs. It supports integration by bringing together general practice and hospital-based clinicians to develop agreed local pathways. It provides guidance for assessment, management, and referral of diverse conditions linked to local resources. New pathways are constantly developed and existing pathways regularly reviewed. Methods: The study used a programmatic approach and mixed-methods including literature reviews, site visits, semi-structured interviews stakeholders and GPs, and surveys GPs and patients to understand the development, implementation and acceptance of T2DM pathways. Electronic surveys were analysed using SPSS Version 20. Cronbach’s alpha was calculated to assess internal consistency of Likert scales responses. Interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed and evaluated using NVivo10 for thematic analysis. Initial codes were abstracted further to identify concepts and categories to generate final themes. Results: 57 GPs responded to the electronic survey. 86% reported awareness of HP and 30% had used diabetes pathways. Of those using diabetes pathways: Over 80% reported it improves quality of care, keeps them informed and supports diagnostic processes 93% agreed information is of high quality and practical 68% reported improvement in referral quality 87% reported assisted in providing more health care in the community and made their job easier Access, workflow and perceived utility were reported as barriers to use Patient survey data including wait times, frequency of clinic and emergency department visits and hospitalisations will form a baseline for later evaluations. **Preliminary analysis of the 12 stakeholder interviews has identified: Implementation Enablers: Key stakeholders’ commitment Seamless networks and collaboration between parties Clear processes and accountabilities Facilitating Factors: Identified as an effective and practical tool with high quality information Supports diagnostic process and patient management Improves referral and triage process for secondary care. Barriers: Longer consultations Prior knowledge and beliefs of health professionals Access difficulties i.e. username/password Increasing size and overly prescriptive nature of website Availability of other online resources Lack of content awareness and how it will add to the consultation/management of patients. Discussion: This preliminary analysis suggest that those who use HP have found it to be a practical tool that supports their diagnostic and referral processes and provides information of high quality. However, there may be a lack of awareness of the HP within general practices. Conclusions: HP is reported to be an effective tool which has improved referral and triage process for secondary care. It helps in improving patient outcomes and management. Lessons: Early evaluation of the pathways can only provide information on development and project implementation, rather than clinical outcomes. Study Limitations: Small survey sample size; Low GP recruitment Suggestions for Future: Broader scope for evaluation of multiple pathways to identify the best ways of ensuring sustainability, identify outcomes related to patient care and provide lessons for other regions. **NOTE: Currently on final stages of qualitative data analysis.

A survey on fog computing: research challenges in security and privacy issues

With the rapid advancement of Internet of Things has enabled to combine the intercommunication and interconnection between seamless networks. Cloud computing provides backend solutions and one among the most prominent technologies for the users, still cannot be solved all the problems such as latency of real time applications. However, a new computing paradigm comes in to the picture. Many of the researchers focused on this exemplar known as Fog/Edge computing, which has been planned to the extension of cloud services. Fog provides the services to the edge of the networks, which makes communication, computation and storage for end users through fog devices and for servers like controllers. We analyze the study, which aims to augment low bandwidth, latency along with the privacy and security. The major problem in the Fog computing is security due to the limited resources. In this paper, we investigated the protection issues and confrontation of Fog and also provide countermeasures on security for different attacks. We focused the future security directions and challenges to address in fog networks.

USA: Faster update for SDN-based internet of things sensory environments

Internet of Things (IoT) require ubiquitous and seamless network connectivity. Meanwhile, it also asks for effective service management, data transmission and analysis. Towards this end, software defined networks (SDN) technology is introduced as a key solution to enable IoT network management. When IoT requires an efficient forwarding policy reconfiguration as the response to the alteration of system requirement (e.g., network environment or user demand), SDN is able to adjust the configurations easily to meet its demand. Previous research efforts tried to complete the reconfiguration as quickly as possible, since the update speed is critical to the performance of network management. However, update time can be further reduced. In this paper, we propose a novel update mechanism, which is referred to as rule co-existence update. It is able to enlarge the solution space and obtain more individual solutions, without any negative effect to the packet headers or throughput of flows. Then, we propose a scheme called USA (i.e., Update Speed Accelerator), as a novel algorithm for network updates based on the above-mentioned rule co-existence, that accelerates the update of forwarding policy with spare rule space on current network switches for general IoT environments. Based on the obtained suboptimal greedy solution, USA shows a novel way for rule co-existence to accelerate the update of forwarding policies. It also proposes a simplified algorithm to ensure the forwarding correctness during the update process. Extensive simulation results show that USA can clearly reduce the update time for nearly half of policies in our experiments with few rule space overhead, which is less than 8% of all policies, and maximum update time is less than previous works when spare rule space is limited.

A Seamless Network Database Migration Tool for Insititutions in Zambia

The objective of the research was to efficiently manage migration process between different Database Management Systems (DBMS) by automating the database migration process. The automation of the database migration process involved database cloning between different platforms, exchange of data between data center and different clients running non-identical DBMS and backing up the database in flexible format, such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML). This approach involved development of a “Database Migration Tool”. The tool was developed on a windows platform using Java Eclipse™ with four non-identical dummy Relational Databases (Microsoft Access, MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle). The tool was run in a controlled environment over the network and databases were successfully migrated from source to targeted destination option specified. The developed tool is more efficient, timely, as well as highly cost effective.

LiteVisor: A Network Hypervisor to Support Flow Aggregation and Seamless Network Reconfiguration for VM Migration in Virtualized Software-Defined Networks

Network virtualization based on software-defined networking (SDN) has become a necessary technology to provide various services in cloud datacenters. Although many network hypervisors have been proposed to support SDN-based network virtualization, their forwarding techniques excessively consume the limited ternary contents addressable memory of OpenFlow-enabled switches. Moreover, they do not consider network reconfiguration after virtual machine migration. In this paper, we propose LiteVisor, that resolves the two problems mentioned above. It develops the Locator, Identifier, and Tenant sEparating (LITE) scheme. The LITE-based forwarding enables flow aggregation that reduces switch memory consumption. In addition, LiteVisor provides seamless network reconfiguration that does not require tenant controllers to be aware of virtual machine migration based on LITE. We evaluate LiteVisor in terms of the number of flow table entries and network reconfiguration time and compare it with OpenVirteX that is an open-source network hypervisor. The results show that the number of flow rules decreases by up to eight times compared with OpenVirteX in a fat-tree topology. We also demonstrate the seamless network reconfiguration of LiteVisor in the experiments and present the results of the reconfiguration time by the topology size and packet sending interval of hosts.

Towards System Implementation and Data Analysis for Crowdsensing Based Outdoor RSS Maps

With the explosive usage of smart mobile devices, sustainable access to wireless networks (e.g., Wi-Fi) has become a pervasive demand. Most mobile users expect seamless network connection with low cost. Indeed, this can be achieved by using an accurate received signal strength (RSS) map of wireless access points. While existing methods are either costly or unscalable, the recently emerged mobile crowdsensing (MCS) paradigm is a promising technique for building RSS maps. MCS applications leverage pervasive mobile devices to collaboratively collect data. However, the heterogeneity of devices and the mobility of users could cause inherent noises and blank spots in collected data set. In this paper, we study how to: 1) tame the sensing noises from heterogenous mobile devices and 2) construct accurate and complete RSS maps with random mobility of crowdsensing participants. First, we build a mobile crowdsensing system called $i$ Map to collect RSS measurements with heterogeneous mobile devices. Second, through observing experimental results, we build statistical models of sensing noises and derive different parameters for each kind of mobile device. Third, we present the signal transmission model with measurement error model, and we propose a novel signal recovery scheme to construct accurate and complete RSS maps. The evaluation results show that the proposed method can achieve 90% and 95% recovery rate in geographic coordinate system and polar coordinate system, respectively.

Energy-Efficient Optimal Power Allocation in Integrated Wireless Sensor and Cognitive Satellite Terrestrial Networks.

This paper proposes novel satellite-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which integrate the WSN with the cognitive satellite terrestrial network. Having the ability to provide seamless network access and alleviate the spectrum scarcity, cognitive satellite terrestrial networks are considered as a promising candidate for future wireless networks with emerging requirements of ubiquitous broadband applications and increasing demand for spectral resources. With the emerging environmental and energy cost concerns in communication systems, explicit concerns on energy efficient resource allocation in satellite networks have also recently received considerable attention. In this regard, this paper proposes energy-efficient optimal power allocation schemes in the cognitive satellite terrestrial networks for non-real-time and real-time applications, respectively, which maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the cognitive satellite user while guaranteeing the interference at the primary terrestrial user below an acceptable level. Specifically, average interference power (AIP) constraint is employed to protect the communication quality of the primary terrestrial user while average transmit power (ATP) or peak transmit power (PTP) constraint is adopted to regulate the transmit power of the satellite user. Since the energy-efficient power allocation optimization problem belongs to the nonlinear concave fractional programming problem, we solve it by combining Dinkelbach’s method with Lagrange duality method. Simulation results demonstrate that the fading severity of the terrestrial interference link is favorable to the satellite user who can achieve EE gain under the ATP constraint comparing to the PTP constraint.

Design and implementation of UPnP-based energy gateway for demand side management in smart grid

Abstract Legacy electrical grids are urged to evolve towards smart grids, the smarter power delivery system that relies heavily on ICT. Numerous smart grids applications are expected to be developed for efficient management and utilization of electricity at the demand side such as home automation, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), dynamic energy pricing, efficient load management, etc. For easing and boosting the development of new demand side services, the concept of Home Energy Gateway (HEG) has recently been proposed in literature. It involves communication with the utility as well as with devices at the consumer sites. The literature still lacks a comprehensive HEG design that could provide all essential features such as zero-configuration, auto-discovery, seamless plug & play communication, interoperability and integration, customers privacy and communication security. This paper addresses the HEG challenges in an effective way through the design of suitable communication frameworks and a security mechanism for enabling strong protection against cyber attacks. The proposed system effectively copes with the interoperability and integration issues between plethora of heterogeneous devices at the consumer sites. The devices in proposed system inherit plug & play features and support zero-configuration and seamless networking. Further, the proposed system design is technology-agnostic and flexible enough to be adopted for the implementation of any specific demand side service. This paper also evaluates the proposed system in real-networking environment and presents performance metrics.

An efficient authentication and key agreement scheme with user anonymity for roaming service in smart city

Smart city improves quality of life for urban residents by using multiple information and communication technologies. As the network infrastructure of smart city, GLObal MObility NETwork (GLOMONET) can offer seamless network connection service for mobile subscribers. Whereas, because of the opening characteristics of wireless channel and various attacks, security becomes a vital issue in GLOMONET. Recently, Karuppiah and Saravanan proposed an enhanced user authentication for roaming service in GLOMONET. Unfortunately, their scheme lacks the features of session key update and perfect forward secrecy, and the session key can be revealed by home agent. Besides, their scheme faces clock synchronization problem and efficiency problem. In order to provide secure authentication service, a novel ECC (elliptic curve cryptosystem)- based user authentication scheme for roaming service in smart city is proposed in this manuscript. The security features of the proposed scheme are formally evaluated by using provable security method under random oracle model and also present informal analysis. In addition, comparative analysis is given among our scheme and relevant protocols. The results of comparative analysis illustrate that the proposed protocol provides robust and efficient for roaming service in smart city.

Enabling intent to configure scientific networks for high performance demands

Globally distributed scientific experiments involve movement of massive data volumes and many collaborators performing distributed data analysis. With complex workloads and heterogeneous resources, each user may desire certain behavior characteristics for their network paths. In this paper, we present the iNDIRA tool, which interacts with SDN north-bound interfaces to enable intent-based networking. It provides reliable, simple, and technology-agnostic communication between users and networks. Focusing particularly on science applications, iNDIRA uses natural language processing to construct semantic RDF graphs to understand, interact, and create the required network services. The technical challenges addressed by iNDIRA are: (1) development of a high-level descriptive language to query network-application requirements, (2) provides keyword identification and condition checking based on user profiles and topology details, (3) allows user negotiation based on the current network state, and (4) integrates network provisioning and service tools used by the application. iNDIRA is implemented on the ESnet network, where it interacts with OpenNSA (aka the NSI client) and Globus data transfer tools, to build complex cross-domain network paths for heterogeneous science applications, and perform secure data transfer. We argue that iNDIRA’s approach presents users with an alternative approach to interact and communicate their network demands, allowing seamless network service integration.

A novel optimized vertical handover framework for seamless networking integration in cyber-enabled systems

Seamless integration of wireless networks for secure mobile applications has increased interest in the research area of mobile cyber-enabled systems. Multi-objective handover needs to compensate the different quality of services provided by the wireless technologies. Notably, the recent works select only the performance perspective on the network to suffice user requirements. In mobile cyber-enabled systems, the security policies are essential while providing the ubiquitous connectivity. In this paper, a novel Optimized Vertical Handover (OVH) framework is proposed to optimize and secure the handover process and reduce the handover execution time significantly. This framework integrates IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover (MIH) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) for seamless link establishment and agile network path reconfiguration. In the handover process, the network selection process is divided into two stages, such as pre-filtering and handover network selection. The pre-filtering eliminates the candidates with incompatible security capabilities using coarse and fine-grained methods. The network selection process utilizes the advantages of Manhattan and Chebyshev distance functions to feature the static and dynamic attributes during the handover. Among multiple factors, the OVH applies for compensation according to the network and mobile node states and improves the efficiency of the handover decision. Compared with the original VIKOR, the proposed OVH algorithm reduces the time complexity significantly through the periodic evaluation of dynamic attributes. Finally, the simulation results highlight that the OVH framework significantly reduces the handover delay and execution time.

Energy saving through intelligent coordination among daily used fixed and mobile devices

Network end-user devices such as laptops and desktop PCs are often left powered ON 24/7 while they remain idle most of the time. The main reason behind this is maintaining network connectivity for remote access, VoIP, instant messaging and other Internet-based applications. The Network Connectivity Proxy (NCP) emerged as a quite promising strategy for significantly reducing network energy waste by allowing devices to sleep without losing their presence over Internet. It impersonates presence of devices during their sleeping periods at all layers of TCP/IP stack. The NCP can successfully proxy basic networking protocols (e.g., ARP, PING, DHCP, etc.) but faces challenges in proxying TCP sessions and proprietary closed-source applications with encrypted packets.To overcome the limitations of NCP concept, this paper proposes a new strategy for reducing network energy waste through intelligent coordination among a user's devices (e.g., smartphone, laptop, desktop PC, etc.). In the proposed system, a user's daily used devices autonomously and seamlessly communicate with a centralized control server that decides which user device will maintain presence of applications at a given instant. To allow devices to sleep and wake them up whenever necessary, the proposed system also uses a light-weight Home Gateway Proxy (HGP) with very basic set of practically realizable features. The communication framework for HGP is designed to achieve auto-discovery, seamless networking and communication features. This paper also practically evaluates the proposed system and estimates energy saving for fixed as well as mobile network devices.

Examining the Interactions between DG Units and Voltage Regulating Devices for Effective Voltage Control in Distribution Systems

Voltage regulation by means of coordinated voltage control is one of the challenging aspects in an active distribution system operation. Integration of distributed generation (DG), which can also be operated in Volt/VAr control mode, may introduce adverse effects including control interactions, operational conflicts, steady-state voltage variations, and oscillations. Therefore, examining and analyzing the phenomenon (both steady state and dynamic) of the control interactions among multiple Volt/VAr support DG units and voltage regulating devices such as tap changers and capacitor banks would be essential for effective voltage control in active distribution systems. In this paper, the interactions among DG units and voltage regulating devices are identified using their simultaneous and nonsimultaneous responses through time-domain simulations. For this task, an analytical technique is proposed and small signal modeling studies have been conducted. The proposed methodology could be beneficial to distribution network planners and operators to ensure seamless network operation from voltage control perspective with increasing penetration of DG units.

An Efficient DSR Protocol to Detect Blackhole Attacks in WMN Using Cross Layer Approach

Constructing an efficient and secured Wireless Mesh Network is a challenging issue due to its physical channel vulnerability and dynamic change of topology. In this network, attacks on network layer have vital significance since they may lead to disabling of larger scale network services. Secured Routing Protocol plays a major role in providing seamless network services. A Modified DSR protocol is proposed in this paper to overcome the blackhole attacks by detecting malicious nodes in the network. The proposed work computes the trust level of the path in the network layer by calculating the capability of the links. The link forwarding capability of the links is calculated at the link layer and node forwarding capability is calculated at network layer based on the behavior of the nodes. The nodes operate in the promiscuous mode to detect the misbehaving nodes. The performance of the modified DSR protocol is compared with DSR protocol and the simulation results show that the throughput and packet delivery ratio for the proposed work is better than DSR even in the presence of malicious nodes with minimal network overhead.

무중단 네트워킹 서비스 제공을 위한 서비스 중 소프트웨어 업그레이드 기술 설계 및 구현

무중단 네트워킹 서비스 제공을 위한 서비스 중 소프트웨어 업그레이드 기술 설계 및 구현

Space, War, and Deterrence: A Strategy for India

ABSTRACTIndia must accept and deal with the reality that conflicts and wars in today’s world will be driven by the increasing interdependence between conventional, nuclear, and space war. The role of space-based command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) assets, complemented by other ground- and space-based space situational awareness (SSA) components, is critical for deciding on the new national strategy for waging war and for the deterrence of war. Increasingly, the U.S.-China space dynamic determines the evolution of the global space order. To translate these challenges into an operational capability, India requires, at a minimum, a four-fold increase in capability to launch satellites into various orbits every year. The integration of C4ISR and SSA capabilities into a seamless network that facilitates real-time action is the key organizational and institutional component of the new strategy. More than the technology initiatives, the implementation of this strategy necessitates a clear aspiration on the part of India that it does have an important role to play on the global stage, and that it will carry out the organizational and institutional reforms for defending its national interests and national security.

Static Node Center Opportunistic Coverage and Hexagonal Deployment in Hybrid Crowd Sensing

Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) is widely used in large-scale complex social sensing tasks even though it cannot offer reliable sensing quality yet due to the mobility restrictions. In order to solve the inadequate sensing opportunities provided by an MCS system, we focus on building a Hybrid Crowd Sensing (HCS) network by organizing both static and uncontrolled mobile nodes. We use the static node central opportunistic coverage to measure the sensing quality of HCS by analyzing the different features of coverage in the three regions and forming definitions. Our proposed approach can enable the static nodes to be deployed in the traditional hexagonal lattice, and mobile nodes to be located by smaller hexagonal lattices. Moreover, the analysis results demonstrate that the hexagonal lattice is more economical in both the number of mobile nodes needed by the seamless coverage SSA and network connectivity with the square grid. Finally, we make further analysis of the stream successful transmission probability, and find out that there are many complex influence factors of the static node central opportunistic coverage, such as the size of the time window T, the relative position of the start location and the end location, the number of mobile nodes participates stream transmission, mobile strategy of mobile nodes, opportunistic delegation mechanism, opportunistic routing mechanism, and so on. We modelize the lower limitation of it by a discrete Markov chain, and the simulation results show both the feasibility and rationality of using the static node central opportunistic coverage as the sensing quality metric.