Single Sender Research Articles

Enhancing the Secure Transmission of Data Over Optical Fiber Networks from Source to Destination

ABSTRACT The quantum key distribution (QKD) method allows for the safe creation of encryption keys between trusted entities for secure communication. The suggested system is designed to enable secure communication between multiple parties (a single sender, Alice, and multiple receivers, Bobs) connected via a public channel susceptible to interception. It enables Alice to privately share encryption keys with each Bob over dedicated quantum channels, which can then be used to decrypt messages sent over the public network. The procedure involves Alice generating optical signals with randomly assigned properties such as intensity, phase, polarization, and frequencies. Alice randomly sends either signal states carrying information or decoy states with different frequencies to the receivers (Bobs) over the quantum channels. She also sends a synchronization signal for timing alignment with the quantum signals over the optical links. At the receiving end, the synchronization pulse timestamps the incoming quantum signals. Each Bob then randomly alters the frequencies of the received quantum signals and randomly measures their phase or polarization. The key is created from the frequency, phase, or polarization information of the quantum signals, resulting in longer keys. Key management agents manage the securely QKD-generated keys to encrypt information before sending it to the intended receivers. Essentially, this framework establishes authenticated, private communication by using QKD over dedicated ultra-secure quantum links to distribute decryption keys, ensuring that only intended users can access the content. The approach is designed to ensure end-to-end secure communication across the network.

Sequential reattempt of telecloning

The task of a telecloning protocol is to send an arbitrary qubit possessed by a sender to multiple receivers. Instead of performing Bell measurement at the sender's node, if one applies unsharp measurement, we show that the shared state can further be recycled for a certain number of telecloning protocol. Specifically, in case of a single sender and two receivers, the maximum attempting number, which is defined as the maximum number of rounds used by the channel to obtain quantum advantage in the fidelity, turns out to be 3 both for optimal and nonoptimal shared states for telecloning while the maximal number reduces to 2 in case of three receivers. Although the original telecloning with quantum advantage is possible for arbitrary numbers of receivers, we report that the recycling of resources is not possible in telecloning involving a single sender and more than three receivers, thereby demonstrating a no-go theorem. We also connect the maximal achievable fidelities in each round with the bipartite entanglement content of the reduced state between the sender and one of the receivers as well as with the monogamy score of entanglement.

Multi-Designated Receiver Authentication Codes: Models and Constructions

An authentication code (A-code) is a two-party message authentication code in the information-theoretic security setting. One of the variants of A-codes is a multi-receiver authentication code (MRA-code), where there are a single sender and multiple receivers and the sender can create a single authenticator so that all receivers accepts it unless it is maliciously modified. In this paper, we introduce a multi-designated receiver authentication code (MDRA-code) with information-theoretic security as an extension of MRA-codes. The purpose of MDRA-codes is to securely transmit a message via a broadcast channel from a single sender to an arbitrary subset of multiple receivers that have been designated by the sender, and only the receivers in the subset (i.e., not all receivers) should accept the message if an adversary is absent. This paper proposes a model and security formalization of MDRA-codes, and provides constructions of MDRA-codes.

Implementation of Quality of Service-Oriented Distributed Routing Protocol using Fuzzy Logic in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a type of wireless network made up of nodes that are both wireless and mobile. This type of wireless network is a non-infrastructure network (without a central manager such as router, servers, etc.) that is hard to manage; providing the Quality of Service (QoS) is also difficult. The fuzzy logic is one of the effective methods required to achieve high QoS in MANET. We propose an Ant-colony Based Cluster-head (ABC) selection a protocol based on artificial intelligence fuzzy logic techniques in this paper. With the proposed protocol, we divide the network into clusters, then, choose a cluster head which is a node having high residual energy, the most trusted; this is achieved using Ant-colony optimization (ACO) algorithm thanks to the use of a probability function which determines the likelihood of various nodes to be selected as cluster-heads. Using the Network Simulator Version-2 (NS-2), we evaluated our Proposed Protocol with ones existing in literature; Quality of Service-Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (QoS-AODV), Bandwidth aware Multi-path Routing protocol in mobile Ad Hoc networks (BMR) and Dynamic Multi-Path Source Routing Method (MSR). We conducted various experimental evaluations varying both the number of the total mobile nodes in the network and the number of receivers from a single sender; all simulation outcomes revealed that the Proposed protocol; Quality of Service-Oriented Distributed Routing Protocol using Fuzzy Logic and clustering techniques in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (QODFL) outperformed the existing ones as compared to existing protocols, it was able to increase both the Packet Delivery Ratio by 10.5% and throughput by 6.7 % , and the End-to-End Delivery ratio by 7.7%.

Workplace gossip and the evolution of friendship relations: the role of complex contagion

Gossip is a pervasive phenomenon in organizations causing many individuals to have second-hand information about their colleagues. However, whether it is used to inform friendship choices (i.e., friendship creation, friendship maintenance, friendship discontinuation) is not that evident. This paper articulates and empirically tests a complex contagion model to explain how gossip, through its reputational effects, can affect the evolution of friendship ties. We argue that hearing gossip from more than a single sender (and about several targets) impacts receivers’ friendships with the gossip targets. Hypotheses are tested in a two-wave sociometric panel study among 148 employees in a Dutch childcare organization. Stochastic actor-oriented models reveal positive gossip favors receiver-target friendships, whereas negative gossip inhibits them. We also find evidence supporting that, for damaging relationships, negative gossip needs to originate in more than a single sender. Positive gossip about a high number of targets discourages friendships with colleagues in general, while negative gossip about many targets produces diverging trends. Overall, the study demonstrates that second-hand information influences the evolution of expressive relations. It also underscores the need to refine and extend current theorizing concerning the multiple (and potentially competing) psychological mechanisms causing some of the observed effects.

Hierarchical Network Models for Exchangeable Structured Interaction Processes

Network data often arises via a series of structured interactions among a population of constituent elements. E-mail exchanges, for example, have a single sender followed by potentially multiple receivers. Scientific articles, on the other hand, may have multiple subject areas and multiple authors. We introduce a statistical model, termed the Pitman-Yor hierarchical vertex components model (PY-HVCM), that is well suited for structured interaction data. The proposed PY-HVCM effectively models complex relational data by partial pooling of local information via a latent, shared population-level distribution. The PY-HCVM is a canonical example of hierarchical vertex components models—a subfamily of models for exchangeable structured interaction-labeled networks, that is, networks invariant to interaction relabeling. Theoretical analysis and supporting simulations provide clear model interpretation, and establish global sparsity and power law degree distribution. A computationally tractable Gibbs sampling algorithm is derived for inferring sparsity and power law properties of complex networks. We demonstrate the model on both the Enron e-mail dataset and an ArXiv dataset, showing goodness of fit of the model via posterior predictive validation.

Coded-MPMC: One-to-Many Transfer Using Multipath Multicast With Sender Coding

One-to-many transfers in a fast and efficient manner are essential to meet the growing need for duplicating, migrating, or sharing bulk data among servers in a datacenter and across geographically distributed datacenters. Some existing works utilize multiple multicast trees for a one-to-many transfer request to increase network link utilization and its transfer throughput. However, since those schemes do not fully utilize the max-flow value of transmission from a single sender to each recipient, there is room for each recipient to retrieve data more quickly. Therefore, assuming fully-controlled networks with full-duplex links, we pose a problem to find a set of multicast flows with an allocation of block-wise transmissions by which each of multiple recipients with diverse max-flow values from the sender can utilize its own max-flow value. Based on that, assuming a sender-side coding capability on file blocks, we design a schedule of block transmissions over multiple phases by which each recipient can achieve a lower-bound of its file retrieval completion time, i.e., the file size divided by its own max-flow value. This paper presents the coded Multipath Multicast (Coded-MPMC) for one-to-many transfers with heuristic procedures to find a desired set of multicast flows on which block transmissions are scheduled. Through extensive simulations on large-scale real-world network topologies and different types of randomly-generated synthetic topologies, the proposed method is shown to design a desired schedule efficiently. A preliminary implementation on OpenFlow is also reported to show the fundamental feasibility of Coded-MPMC.

Light-Activated Signaling in DNA-Encoded Sender-Receiver Architectures.

Collective decision making by living cells is facilitated by exchange of diffusible signals where sender cells release a chemical signal that is interpreted by receiver cells. A variety of nonliving artificial cell models have been developed in recent years that mimic various aspects of diffusion-based intercellular communication. However, localized secretion of diffusive signals from individual protocells, which is critical for mimicking biological sender–receiver systems, has remained challenging to control precisely. Here, we engineer light-responsive, DNA-encoded sender–receiver architectures, where protein–polymer microcapsules act as cell mimics and molecular communication occurs through diffusive DNA signals. We prepare spatial distributions of sender and receiver protocells using a microfluidic trapping array and set up a signaling gradient from a single sender cell using light, which activates surrounding receivers through DNA strand displacement. Our systematic analysis reveals how the effective signal range of a single sender is determined by various factors including the density and permeability of receivers, extracellular signal degradation, signal consumption, and catalytic regeneration. In addition, we construct a three-population configuration where two sender cells are embedded in a dense array of receivers that implement Boolean logic and investigate spatial integration of nonidentical input cues. The results offer a means for studying diffusion-based sender–receiver topologies and present a strategy to achieve the congruence of reaction-diffusion and positional information in chemical communication systems that have the potential to reconstitute collective cellular patterns.

Acquiring Bloom Filters Across Commercial RFIDs in Physical Layer

Embedding Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) into everyday objects to construct ubiquitous networks has been a long-standing goal. However, a major problem that hinders the attainment of this goal is the current inefficient reading of RFID tags. To address the issue, the research community introduces the technique of Bloom Filter (BF) to RFID systems. This work presents TagMap, a practical solution that acquires BFs across commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) RFID tags in the physical layer , enabling upper applications to boost their performance by orders of magnitude. The key idea is to treat all tags as if they were a single virtual sender, which hashes each tag into different intercepted inventories . Our approach does not require hardware nor firmware changes in commodity RFID tags - allows for rapid, zero-cost deployment in existing RFID tags. We design and implement TagMap reader with commodity device (e.g., USRP N210) platforms. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals that the overhead of TagMap is 66.22% lower than the state-of-the-art solution, with a bit error rate of 0.4%.

Private Bayesian Persuasion with Sequential Games

We study an information-structure design problem (a.k.a. a persuasion problem) with a single sender and multiple receivers with actions of a priori unknown types, independently drawn from action-specific marginal probability distributions. As in the standard Bayesian persuasion model, the sender has access to additional information regarding the action types, which she can exploit when committing to a (noisy) signaling scheme through which she sends a private signal to each receiver. The novelty of our model is in considering the much more expressive case in which the receivers interact in a sequential game with imperfect information, with utilities depending on the game outcome and the realized action types. After formalizing the notions of ex ante and ex interim persuasiveness (which differ by the time at which the receivers commit to following the sender's signaling scheme), we investigate the continuous optimization problem of computing a signaling scheme which maximizes the sender's expected revenue. We show that computing an optimal ex ante persuasive signaling scheme is NP-hard when there are three or more receivers. Instead, in contrast with previous hardness results for ex interim persuasion, we show that, for games with two receivers, an optimal ex ante persuasive signaling scheme can be computed in polynomial time thanks to the novel algorithm we propose, based on the ellipsoid method.

Multipath congestion control with network assistance

The use of multiple transport flows over distinct, if possible, paths, is a well-known technique for enhancing the performance and stability of data transfer. Multipath TCP (MPTCP), the most popular multipath transport protocol in-use, allows a single receiver to exploit multiple paths from a single sender. Nevertheless, MPTCP cannot fully exploit the potential gains of multipath connectivity, as it must fairly share resources with regular, single-path TCP, without knowing whether the available paths are distinct or share bottleneck links, due to IP’s design choices. We introduce a hybrid congestion control algorithm for multipath transport that enables higher bandwidth utilization compared to MPTCP, while remaining friendly to TCP-like flows. Our solution employs (i) Normalized Multiflow Congestion Control (NMCC), a novel end-to-end congestion control algorithm and (ii) an in-network module that exposes routing information to the end-users in order to support the greedy friendliness technique. The end-to-end NMCC is architecture-independent and can be seamlessly integrated with MPTCP. The in-network module has been implemented for the PSI Information-Centric Networking architecture, but it can also be integrated with Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Software Defined Networking (SDN). Using an actual protocol implementation deployed on our testbed, as well as on a comprehensive packet-level simulator, we obtain experimental results which demonstrate clear gains for our design in terms of throughput and friendliness to other flows.

Multidimensional Strategic Communication with Uncertain Salience

In many areas where strategic communication models are applied (e.g., lobbying by interest groups), the relevant uncertainty about the sender is not over the direction of their bias, but their priority over different issues. Within a model of multidimensional cheap talk, if the salience of different issues to the sender is unknown by the receiver, the expert may use the dimensions that are of less importance (to them) in order to achieve further manipulation of the policy-maker. The sender will do this unless he is sufficiently unbiased such that he has little conflict of interest with the receiver. This is inefficient from the policy-maker’s perspective, as she will be taking a loss (relative to babbling) from the dimensions on which she is receiving “false” information. Moreover, even with two senders, one is not able to recreate the reporting mechanism of Battaglini (2002), and instead potentially ends up with less information transmission than with a single sender. I propose a novel linear tax on lobbying along different dimensions in order to align the incentives of the receiver and sender when it comes to information acquisition and cross-dimensional manipulation.

Adaptively secure efficient broadcast encryption with constant-size secret key and ciphertext

In those broadcast application scenarios with a great quantity of receivers, e.g., the data access control system in cloud storage service, the single sender is apt to become the efficiency bottleneck of the system, because the computation and storage overhead of the sender will grow rapidly with the amount of qualified receivers. In order to overcome this problem, we first introduce the novel conception of complete binary identity tree which is adopted to manage the qualified receivers. Then we design the prune-merge algorithm to further optimize the structure of the tree and cut down the amount of receivers. The algorithm effectively reduces the computation and storage cost of the trusted authority in the system. Subsequently, in virtue of composite-order bilinear groups, we bring forward an efficient public key broadcast encryption scheme combined its application to the system of data access control in cloud storage service. Compared with the existing schemes, the lengths of system public parameters, secret key and ciphertext in our scheme are all constant. In addition, the number of secret keys in our scheme increases logarithmically with the maximum amount of receivers, while the numbers of secret keys in the existing schemes increase linearly with the maximum amount of receivers. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is proved to guarantee adaptive security under general subgroup decision assumption in the standard model. The performance analysis manifests that our scheme is feasible for those broadcast applications with fixed senders.

Entanglement-assisted private communication over quantum broadcast channels

We consider entanglement-assisted (EA) private communication over a quantum broadcast channel, in which there is a single sender and multiple receivers. We divide the receivers into two sets: the decoding set and the malicious set. The decoding set and the malicious set can either be disjoint or can have a finite intersection. For simplicity, we say that a single party Bob has access to the decoding set and another party Eve has access to the malicious set, and both Eve and Bob have access to the pre-shared entanglement with Alice. The goal of the task is for Alice to communicate classical information reliably to Bob and securely against Eve, and Bob can take advantage of pre-shared entanglement with Alice. In this framework, we establish a lower bound on the one-shot EA private capacity. When there exists a quantum channel mapping the state of the decoding set to the state of the malicious set, such a broadcast channel is said to be degraded. We establish an upper bound on the one-shot EA private capacity in terms of smoothed min- and max-entropies for such channels. In the limit of a large number of independent channel uses, we prove that the EA private capacity of a degraded quantum broadcast channel is given by a single-letter formula. Finally, we consider two specific examples of degraded broadcast channels and find their capacities. In the first example, we consider the scenario in which one part of Bob’s laboratory is compromised by Eve. We show that the capacity for this protocol is given by the conditional quantum mutual information of a quantum broadcast channel, and so we thus provide an operational interpretation to the dynamic counterpart of the conditional quantum mutual information. In the second example, Eve and Bob have access to mutually exclusive sets of outputs of a broadcast channel.

Free Side-Channel Cross-Technology Communication in Wireless Networks

Enabling direct communication between wireless technologies immediately brings significant benefits including, but not limited to, cross-technology interference mitigation and context-aware smart operation. To explore the opportunities, we propose FreeBee–a novel cross-technology communication technique for direct unicast as well as cross-technology/channel broadcast among three popular technologies of WiFi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth. The key concept of FreeBee is to modulate symbol messages by shifting the timings of periodic beacon frames already mandatory for diverse wireless standards. This keeps our design generically applicable across technologies and avoids additional bandwidth consumption (i.e., does not incur extra traffic), allowing continuous broadcast to safely reach mobile and/or duty-cycled devices. A new interval multiplexing technique is proposed to enable concurrent broadcasts from multiple senders or boost the transmission rate of a single sender. Theoretical and experimental exploration reveals that FreeBee offers a reliable symbol delivery under a second and supports mobility of 30 mph and low duty-cycle operations of under 5%.

Blind Index Coding

We introduce the blind index coding (BIC) problem, in which a single sender communicates distinct messages to multiple users over a shared channel. Each user has partial knowledge of each message as side information. However, unlike classical index coding, in BIC, the sender is uncertain of what side information is available to each user. In particular, the sender only knows the amount of bits in each user’s side information but not its content. This problem can arise naturally in caching and wireless networks. In order to blindly exploit side information in the BIC problem, we develop a hybrid coding scheme that XORs uncoded bits of a subset of messages with random combinations of bits from other messages. This scheme allows us to strike the right balance between maximizing the transmission rate to each user and minimizing the interference leakage to others. We also develop a general outer bound, which relies on a strong data processing inequality to effectively capture the senders uncertainty about the users’ side information. Additionally, we consider the case where communication takes place over a shared wireless medium, modeled by an erasure broadcast channel, and show that surprisingly, combining repetition coding with hybrid coding improves the achievable rate region and outperforms alternative strategies of coping with channel erasure and while blindly exploiting side information.

Who is this?: Identity and presence in robot-mediated communication

Because a telepresence robot is intended for use in telecommunications, conveying the presence of a remote sender is an important issue. Even though certain characteristics of robots such as identity could be effective at generating a sense of presence, this risks yielding a distortion of presence in the remote sender. Thus, in order to find effective ways to increase presence, we executed an experiment comparing a telepresence robot with high identity and a telepresence robot with low identity. The 60 participants in this study engaged in a video call with a remote sender using either a telepresence robot with high identity or a telepresence robot with low identity. The results showed that participants felt more remote sender presence when interacting with the telepresence robot with low identity than they did with the one with high identity. On the other hand, when a telepresence robot has high identity, participants felt more presence toward the robot than they did toward the one with low identity. In the second study (N=72), participants experienced two types of telepresence robots (identity level: a telepresence robot with high identity vs. a telepresence robot with low identity) with two types of remote senders (number of remote senders: single remote sender vs. multiple remote senders). The identity level of the robot and the number of remote senders affected the presence of the remote sender, telepresence, and the presence of the robot. We discuss in detail the implications for the design of telepresence robots in terms of increasing presence.

Bounds on Entanglement Distillation and Secret Key Agreement for Quantum Broadcast Channels

The squashed entanglement of a quantum channel is an additive function of quantum channels, which finds application as an upper bound on the rate at which secret key and entanglement can be generated when using a quantum channel a large number of times in addition to unlimited classical communication. This quantity has led to an upper bound of $\log((1+\eta)/(1-\eta))$ on the capacity of a pure-loss bosonic channel for such a task, where $\eta$ is the average fraction of photons that make it from the input to the output of the channel. The purpose of the present paper is to extend these results beyond the single-sender single-receiver setting to the more general case of a single sender and multiple receivers (a quantum broadcast channel). We employ multipartite generalizations of the squashed entanglement to constrain the rates at which secret key and entanglement can be generated between any subset of the users of such a channel, along the way developing several new properties of these measures. We apply our results to the case of a pure-loss broadcast channel with one sender and two receivers.

A rectangle bin packing optimization approach to the signal scheduling problem in the FlexRay static segment

As FlexRay communication protocol is extensively used in distributed real-time applications on vehicles, signal scheduling in FlexRay network becomes a critical issue to ensure the safe and efficient operation of time-critical applications. In this study, we propose a rectangle bin packing optimization approach to schedule communication signals with timing constraints into the FlexRay static segment at minimum bandwidth cost. The proposed approach, which is based on integer linear programming (ILP), supports both the slot assignment mechanisms provided by the latest version of the FlexRay specification, namely, the single sender slot multiplexing, and multiple sender slot multiplexing mechanisms. Extensive experiments on a synthetic and an automotive X-by-wire system case study demonstrate that the proposed approach has a well optimized performance.

Point Process Modelling for Directed Interaction Networks

SummaryNetwork data often take the form of repeated interactions between senders and receivers tabulated over time. A primary question to ask of such data is which traits and behaviours are predictive of interaction. To answer this question, a model is introduced for treating directed interactions as a multivariate point process: a Cox multiplicative intensity model using covariates that depend on the history of the process. Consistency and asymptotic normality are proved for the resulting partial-likelihood-based estimators under suitable regularity conditions, and an efficient fitting procedure is described. Multicast interactions—those involving a single sender but multiple receivers—are treated explicitly. The resulting inferential framework is then employed to model message sending behaviour in a corporate e-mail network. The analysis gives a precise quantification of which static shared traits and dynamic network effects are predictive of message recipient selection.