Static Infrastructure Research Articles

Black-box backdoor attack with everyday physical objects in mobile crowdsourcing

Mobile crowdsourcing (MCS) has emerged as a promising sensing paradigm in smart cities as it reduces the need of expensive static infrastructure and facilitates efficient data collection with many volunteers. However, malicious users may contribute tampered data deliberately, compromising the model trained with them. Prior neural adversarial attacks usually rely on several major assumptions, such as requiring expert knowledge of models, manipulating the training process, or generating specific patterns for poisoning, which are not always feasible for novice volunteers.In this paper, we identify an attack paradigm that can be easily executed without prior knowledge or extra manipulation of training. As an example, we conduct a crowdsourcing task for visual landmark classification and realize attacks with everyday objects (e.g., a cola cup). Extensive experimental results show that our approach achieves high attack success rates (over 90%) with marginal poisoning rates (less than 10%). To safeguard the trained model, we propose a defense framework that harnesses the tamper resistance between multi-modal sensors to erase the infectious model, termed MUSE. Besides visual landmark identification, we also apply MUSE to two multi-modal localization tasks. Experimental results show that MUSE substantially reduces attack success rate to less than 1%.

ReLoki: A Light-Weight Relative Localization System Based on UWB Antenna Arrays.

Ultra Wide-Band (UWB) sensing has gained popularity in relative localization applications. Many localization solutions rely on using Time of Flight (ToF) sensing based on a beacon-tag system, which requires four or more beacons in the environment for 3D localization. A lesser researched option is using Angle of Arrival (AoA) readings obtained from UWB antenna pairs to perform relative localization. In this paper, we present a UWB platform called ReLoki that can be used for ranging and AoA-based relative localization in 3D. To enable AoA, ReLoki utilizes the geometry of antenna arrays. In this paper, we present a system design for localization estimates using a Regular Tetrahedral Array (RTA), Regular Orthogonal Array (ROA), and Uniform Square Array (USA). The use of a multi-antenna array enables fully onboard infrastructure-free relative localization between participating ReLoki modules. We also present studies demonstrating sub-50cm localization errors in indoor experiments, achieving performance close to current ToF-based systems, while offering the advantage of not relying on static infrastructure.

FCA-VBN: Fog computing-based authentication scheme for 5G-assisted vehicular blockchain network

Emerging technology known as intelligent transportation systems allows for seamless two-way communication between moving vehicles and stationary infrastructure. Therefore, core security services in a vehicular network consist of encrypting and trusting information packets for intra- and inter-vehicle systems. However, conventional reconciliation methods incur high communication costs and security risks, and channel imperfection causes important extraction disparities. For a 5G-enabled vehicular blockchain network, we suggested a novel fog computing-based authentication approach for the 5G-assisted vehicular blockchain network (FCA-VBN) scheme, which incorporated fog computing and secure authentication to address these issues. The FCA-VBN scheme employs a channel stage response instituted private key extraction technique for terminal key agreement. Using the blockchain’s immutability and memorability, the novelty of this paper is that it shows how the intelligent contract could be utilized to build and issue the link among the fog server and the node’s data through a transaction. When it comes to message authenticity and integrity, conditional privacy protection, and unlinkability, we demonstrated that the proposed FCA-VBN system is safe and secure. We also spoke about how resistant the method is to various assaults. Ultimately, we theoretically analyzed the suggested FCA-VBN scheme’s achievement on a wide range of metrics, such as computation and communication costs and power usage, to arrive at a comprehensive evaluation.

Driving Sustainable Development: The Power of Vehicle-Based Services in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa

Vehicle-based services such as mobile health clinics can increase spatial accessibility in rural areas. In contrast to stationary infrastructure, vehicle-based services are flexible and can be less capital-intensive to initiate service supply. In particular, rural communities across sub-Saharan Africa experience insufficient access to essential public services necessary for sustainable human development. We consider vehicles as mobile service platforms capable of temporarily transporting service staff, goods, and functions necessary for service delivery spatially closer to rural demand locations. Despite these advantages, public authorities must perform a cost–benefit analysis before allocating resources to a vehicle-based service fleet. This paper analyzes which vehicle-based services beneficially influence the Sustainable Development Goals and quantify their potential for the sub-Saharah African region. Based on a criteria-based selection method, we parse 169 target formulations and extract a set of directly influential Sustainable Development Goals. The remaining goals are the starting point for a literature review to identify existing vehicle-based service concepts addressing the targets. Our evaluation reveals that vehicle-based services can enhance about 128 (76%) of all targets and 16 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Half of these targets require the delivery of consumable goods, whereas 59 (35%) of the Sustainable Development Goal targets relate to the transportation of people, and 24 (14%) require access to a broader spectrum of functionality mounted on top of the vehicle, such as water pumps or refrigerators. In combination with publicly available data, we can identify the SDG for each African country with the greatest potential for a vehicle-based service intervention. Our approach enriches public project appraisals for systematical decision support between stationary and mobile infrastructure.

Secure Underwater Distributed Antenna Systems: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach

Dear Editor, Underwater distributed antenna systems (DAS) are stationary infrastructures consisting of multiple geographically distributed antenna elements (DAEs) which are interconnected through high-rate backbone networks [1]. Compared to centralized systems, the DAS could provide a larger coverage area and higher throughput for underwater acoustic (UWA) transmissions. In this work, exploiting the low sound speed in water, a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)-based approach is proposed to secure underwater DAS against eavesdropping at the physical layer. Specifically, the theoretical secrecy rate is firstly derived for time-slotted UWA networks (UWANs) considering the large propagation delays. Furthermore, we investigate the long-term sum secrecy rate optimization problem under the MARL framework, where each DAE learns its optimal transmission strategy online. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves higher secrecy performance compared to competing benchmark methods.

Model predictive control of stormwater basins coupled with real-time data assimilation enhances flood and pollution control under uncertainty

Smart stormwater systems equipped with real-time controls are transforming urban drainage management by enhancing the flood control and water treatment potential of previously static infrastructure. Real-time control of detention basins, for instance, has been shown to improve contaminant removal by increasing hydraulic retention times while also reducing downstream flood risk. However, to date, few studies have explored optimal real-time control strategies for achieving both water quality and flood control targets. This study advances a new model predictive control (MPC) algorithm for stormwater detention ponds that determines the outlet valve control schedule needed to maximize pollutant removal and minimize flooding using forecasts of the incoming pollutograph and hydrograph. Comparing MPC against three rule-based control strategies, MPC is found to be more effective at balancing between multiple competing control objectives such as preventing overflows, reducing peak discharges, and improving water quality. Moreover, when paired with an online data assimilation scheme based on Extended Kalman Filtering (EKF), MPC is found to be robust to uncertainty in both pollutograph forecasts and water quality measurements. By providing an integrated control strategy that optimizes both water quality and quantity goals while remaining robust to uncertainty in hydrologic and pollutant dynamics, this study paves the way for real-world smart stormwater systems that will achieve improved flood and nonpoint source pollution management.

SCENE: Reasoning About Traffic Scenes Using Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks

Understanding traffic scenes requires considering heterogeneous information about dynamic agents and the static infrastructure. In this work we propose SCENE, a methodology to encode diverse traffic scenes in heterogeneous graphs and to reason about these graphs using a heterogeneous Graph Neural Network encoder and task-specific decoders. The heterogeneous graphs, whose structures are defined by an ontology, consist of different nodes with type-specific node features and different relations with type-specific edge features. In order to exploit all the information given by these graphs, we propose to use cascaded layers of graph convolution. The result is an encoding of the scene. Task-specific decoders can be applied to predict desired attributes of the scene. Extensive evaluation on two diverse binary node classification tasks show the main strength of this methodology: despite being generic, it even manages to outperform task-specific baselines. The further application of our methodology to the task of node classification in various knowledge graphs shows its transferability to other domains.

Container Based Nomadic Vehicular Cloud Using Cell Transmission Model

Nomadic Vehicular Cloud (NVC) is envisaged in this work. The predominant aspects of NVC is, it moves along with the vehicle that initiates it and functions only with the resources of moving vehicles on the heavy traffic road without relying on any of the static infrastructure and NVC decides the initiation time of container migration using cell transmission model (CTM). Containers are used in the place of Virtual Machines (VM), as containers’ features are very apt to NVC’s dynamic environment. The specifications of 5G NR V2X PC5 interface are applied to NVC, for the feature of not relying on the network coverage. Nowadays, the peak traffic on the road and the bottlenecks due to it are inevitable, which are seen here as the benefits for VC in terms of resource availability and residual in-network time. The speed range of high-end vehicles poses the issue of dis-connectivity among VC participants, that results the container migration failure. As the entire VC participants are on the move, to maintain proximity of the containers hosted by them, estimating their movements plays a vital role. To infer the vehicle movements on the road stretch and initiate the container migration prior enough to avoid the migration failure due to vehicles dynamicity, this paper proposes to apply the CTM to the container based and 5G NR V2X enabled NVC. The simulation results show that there is a significant increase in the success rate of vehicular cloud in terms of successful container migrations.

Importance of the Static Infrastructure for Dissemination of Information within Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are a today´s hot topic, especially in the context of the development of information technologies, which can be employed in transportation. Although the scope and the technical solution of these systems may vary, they are frequently based on VANET (Vehicular ad hoc network), i.e. a communication network, which is primarily generated among the moving subjects, which form ITS. Given the highly dynamic VANET, the questions are raised as to the data transmission. This paper is aimed to make a detail analysis of the communications within VANET using the simulation model, which includes the static infrastructure of ITS and to experimentally verify the impact of this infrastructure on the dynamics of information spreading in ITS. The authors present the results obtained from a few different scenarios, which have been tested.

The Roaming Edge and its Applications

Connected sensors, e.g., cameras, LiDARs, air sensors, installed in a mobile platform (e.g., a terrestrial or aerial vehicle, or special in-person devices) can provide broad views of wide-area environments quickly and efficiently. If many vehicles incorporate such sensing systems, they together can be composed into a unique crowd-sourced platform and can gather fine-grained, diverse, and noisy information at city-scales. However, these sensors can generate large amounts of data and such data is hard to aggregate in a central server. We explore the design of a "roaming edge" - the notion that generalpurpose computing be installed in these mobile platforms, which connect over wireless paths to the static infrastructure and to the static edge nodes, to support a broad range of applications. In particular, a roaming edge node allows different sensors and data sources in-range of a mobile platform to connect to it, and supports data processing for necessary local analytics, considering both efficiency and privacy. The roaming edge, of course, does not operate in isolation and we describe a three-tier architecture that integrates it with a static edge and cloudhosted services. This paper also outlines several applications that can leverage opportunities provided by the roaming edge, and focus, briefly, on one - a real-time video query application with public safety implications.

Methodology of Research on the Demand for Development of Transport Infrastructure and Rolling Stock for Perishable Goods Transportation

In the context of globalisation of economic relationships, intensification of transportation and technological solutions, the methodology of research and development of transport infrastructure requires improvement and adaptation to dynamically changing conditions of the transportation market.The objective of the work is to formalise and to develop a methodology for studying transport infrastructure, including specialised isothermal rolling stock. The initial data on cargo turnover were processed by the methods of mathematical statistics, and the technical parameters of innovative isothermal rolling stock were substantiated using the methods of T. Saaty analytic hierarchy process, expert assessment, and update engineering design process.The article provides an analysis of the cargo turnover of perishable goods transported by railway refrigerated transport in Russia in terms of volumes, types of rolling stock, and origin. The main origin-destination cargo flows are presented by types of transportation (domestic, transit, export, import transport operations). It has been determined that key factors in development of isothermal rolling stock for transportation of perishable goods in the transport system of the country refer to transportation of meat, fish, beer, soft drinks, juices in the segment of domestic transportation. The analysis shows that there are no structural and quantitative shifts in terms of types of transportation and types of cargo.The strategy for development of vehicles for transportation of perishable goods and the methodology are presented in a block diagram, in sections: «statement of the research problem», «decision-making stages», «decision implementation methods and algorithms». It is shown that the problem includes not only development of stationary railway infrastructure and of stages in development of isothermal rolling stock, but also the need to solve organisational, technical, technological, regulatory, and legal problems, as well as tariff regulation.The issues of methodology for designing an innovative isothermal rolling stock are considered referring to possible prospects for its development and areas of operation, as well as to a set of engineering and technological solutions. The study of linear dimensions and useful section of the loading space of various types of isothermal bodies shows the advantage of wagons and swap bodies in comparison with large-capacity refrigerated containers.It is proposed to design a prototype of innovative isothermal rolling stock on the basis of a universal isothermal swap body, configured with various types of refrigerating equipment with specified technical parameters that best meet the requirements of the modern transportation market. The areas of possible use of various types of isothermal rolling stock are analysed considering long-term forecasts for development of agricultural, fishing and processing industries.

A method for risk analysis of ship collisions with stationary infrastructure using AIS data and a ship manoeuvring simulator

The study presents a methodology that uses AIS data and a ship manoeuvring simulator to simulate and analyse marine traffic schemes with regard to risks for accidents. An event identification method is presented, which is needed for the accident scenario part of the methodology. This is based on AIS data, where the Great Belt VTS area was used to verify the methodology. Three events that could result in ship-bridge allisions were modelled and simulated in the simulator: drifting ship, sharp turning ship and miss of turning point. The Monte Carlo method was used to perform large number of simulator runs, including a parameter sensitivity analysis. The probability of a ship allision against the Great Belt Bridge was calculated to be 0.007. Analysis of the ship-bridge allision cases was shown to be dominated by the event drifting ship. This event has a relatively low kinetic energy at the impact, and the expected allision energy for a 1,000-year allision corresponds to a 178 m tanker with 57,870 DWT and ship speed 14.6 knots. Finally, this study presents a mitigation analysis, which shows how the probability of allisions can be reduced by reducing the ship speed or altering the traffic separation scheme.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: A Novel Intrusion Detection System to Alleviate the Black Hole Attacks to Improve the Security and Performance of the MANET

One of the most important type of infrastructure less network is Mobile Ad-hoc network in which it does not required a static infrastructure. The interaction between the source and destination nodes which falls under different locations are possible with the help of intermediate nodes present in the network. These intermediate nodes work optimally to identify the shortest as well as feasible path to the destination node. The interaction takes place in the form of multi-hop communication. Anyway in an integrated or full environment, few nodes will not provide actual information to identify the optimal path to reach the destination node. This happens due to the greedy character of those nodes which requires the traffic in the network over the times. The nodes which provides wrong information will not forward the data packets, at the same time they drop these data packets in which this process is called as black hole attack. The black hole attack is one of the very devastating attack which severely affects the performance of the network. In this regard, a novel intrusion detection system called Alleviating the effects of Black hole through Identification and Protection (ABIP) has been proposed. The ABIP works based on the non-static threshold value of the receiver succession number where the nodes produce wrong information produces high receiver succession number. The proposed work is compared and evaluated with various existing approaches and results in better performance regarding to packet delivery and also minimizes the effects of the black hole attacks.

РОЛЬ ІНФРАСТРУКТУРИ В РОЗВИТКУ ЕКОНОМІЧНИХ СИСТЕМ

Economic systems by their nature are complex objects of study, as their development depends on a significant number of factors, conditions for the functioning of their individual components, the peculiarities of the environment in which such systems develop. An important role in the development of such systems is played by their infrastructure, which is an integral part of the functioning of any system and, thus, also affects its development. The uniqueness of the infrastructure of the economic system is that its functioning is objective, necessary, and the infrastructure itself can often be considered as a separate integrated object of study, which includes a large number of subsystems of different nature.Within the article, the role of infrastructure in the development of economic systems is examined. This was done on the basis of studying the essence of the category "infrastructure", which was implemented through a thorough analysis of existing in the scientific literature conceptual approaches to the content of this definition. Systematization of such approaches, their analysis allowed to state the importance of infrastructure for the development of economic systems and the complexity of its study. Approaches to the use of the category "infrastructure" ineconomic research were also singled out, namely: consideration of infrastructure in the context of the functioning of another economic system; consideration of infrastructure in the context of the study of certain economic processes and areas that are common to sectors of the national economy; consideration of certain types of infrastructure in the context of research of other economic systems; consideration of infrastructure within separate spatial economic systems. Consideration of the essence of the category "infrastructure" allowed to distinguish it from the definition of "infrastructure" and point out two approaches to its consideration: static (infrastructure is a set of existing infrastructure that affects the development of certain types of economicsystems) and dynamic (process) formation of conditions for the development of certain types of infrastructure within the functioning of economic systems)

Bidirectional visible light communication

Visible light communication (VLC) is a data transmission technology that uses the LED lighting infrastructure to simultaneously illuminate and communicate. The ubiquitous existence of LED lamps opened a new opportunity for addressing VLC in many indoor communication scenarios. The motivation for the presented application is the efficient management of warehouses supported by autonomous navigation robots that grab goods and deliver them at the packaging station. This functionality demands bidirectional communication between infrastructures and vehicles. We propose links for infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) to perform indoors, bidirectional communication. A bidirectional communication system between a static infrastructure and a mobile robot (I2V) is proposed. The LED lamps of the warehouse illumination system are used to lighten the space and to transmit information on position and racks’ contents. The mobile robots communicate with the infrastructure (V2I) to transmit information on the items that are being removed and carried to the packaging station. The communication among robots (V2V) provides information on the number of items intended to be collected when the vehicles are in the same lane. The proposed coding schemes are used as modulation for the ON-OFF keying method. Trichromatic white LEDs and a photodetector based on a-SiC:H/a-Si:H with selective spectral sensitivity are used at the emitter and receiver. Position information is provided by each LED lamp to the vehicle by adequate modulation of the RGB emitters. The decoding strategy is based on accurate calibration of the output signal. Different scenarios were designed and tested. Requirements related to synchronous transmission and flickering were addressed to enhance the system performance. The decoding task is discussed using a bit parity error control methodology to ensure simultaneous detection and correction of bit errors. The consequent increase of bit error rate in the VLC transmission is discussed in the I2V link.

Augmented Reality for Head and Neck Carcinoma Imaging: Description and Feasibility of an Instant Calibration, Markerless Approach

Background and Objective: Augmented reality (AR) can help to overcome current limitations in computer assisted head and neck surgery by granting “X-ray vision” to physicians. Still, the acceptance of AR in clinical applications is limited by technical and clinical challenges. We aim to demonstrate the benefit of a marker-free, instant calibration AR system for head and neck cancer imaging, which we hypothesize to be acceptable and practical for clinical use.Methods: We implemented a novel AR system for visualization of medical image data registered with the head or face of the patient prior to intervention. Our system allows the localization of head and neck carcinoma in relation to the outer anatomy. Our system does not require markers or stationary infrastructure, provides instant calibration and allows 2D and 3D multi-modal visualization for head and neck surgery planning via an AR head-mounted display. We evaluated our system in a pre-clinical user study with eleven medical experts.Results: Medical experts rated our application with a system usability scale score of 74.8 ± 15.9, which signifies above average, good usability and clinical acceptance. An average of 12.7 ± 6.6 minutes of training time was needed by physicians, before they were able to navigate the application without assistance.Conclusions: Our AR system is characterized by a slim and easy setup, short training time and high usability and acceptance. Therefore, it presents a promising, novel tool for visualizing head and neck cancer imaging and pre-surgical localization of target structures.

A Dual-Connectivity Mobility Link Service for Producer Mobility in the Named Data Networking

With the exponential growth of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure has evolved from built-in static infrastructure to a flexible structure applicable to various mobile environments. In this Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT) environment, each IoT device could operate simultaneously as a provider and consumer of information, and could provide new services through the exchange of such information. Named Data Networking (NDN), which could request data by content name rather than location (IP address), is suitable for such mobile IoT environments. However, in the current Named Data Networking (NDN) specification, producer mobility is one of the major problems in need of remedy. Previously proposed schemes for producer mobility use an anchor to hide the producer’s movement from consumers. As a result, they require a special anchor node and a signaling procedure to track the current locations of contents. A few anchorless schemes have also been proposed, but they still require mobility signaling and all NDN routers on the signaling path must understand the meaning of the signaling. We therefore propose an anchorless producer mobility scheme for the NDN. This scheme uses a dual-connectivity strategy that can be expressed as a soft handover. Whenever a producer changes its NDN Access Router (NAR), the new mobility link service located on the mobile producer’s old NDN face repairs the old link so that the connectivity with the pNAR can be maintained for a while. The old NDN face is removed after the new location information on the contents of the producer is disseminated over the NDN network by the Named-data Link State Routing Protocol (NLSR) routing protocol at the nNAR. The new mobility link service decouples connection and transaction to hide the collapse of the link. Therefore, the NDN’s mobility procedure could be simplified as the handover is defined as transaction completion as opposed to a breakdown of links. The proposed scheme prevents the routing information from being abruptly outdated due to producer mobility. Our simulation results show seamless handover when the producer changes its default access router.

A re-organizing biosurveillance framework based on fog and mobile edge computing

Biological threats are becoming a serious security issue for many countries across the world. Effective biosurveillance systems can primarily support appropriate responses to biological threats and consequently save human lives. Nevertheless, biosurveillance systems are costly to implement and hard to operate. Furthermore, they rely on static infrastructures that might not cope with the evolving dynamics of the monitored environment. In this paper, we present a reorganizing biosurveillance framework for the detection and localization of biological threats with fog and mobile edge computing support. In the proposed framework, a hierarchy of fog nodes are responsible for aggregating monitoring data within their regions and detecting potential threats. Although fog nodes are deployed on a fixed base station infrastructure, the framework provides an innovative technique for reorganizing the monitored environment structure to adapt to the evolving environmental conditions and to overcome the limitations of the static base station infrastructure. Evaluation results illustrate the ability of the framework to localize biological threats and detect infected areas. Moreover, the results show the effectiveness of the reorganization mechanisms in adjusting the environment structure to cope with the highly dynamic environment.

Integrated planning of static and dynamic charging infrastructure for electric vehicles

This paper investigates the optimal deployment of static and dynamic charging infrastructure considering the interdependency between transportation and power networks. Static infrastructure means plug-in charging stations, while the dynamic counterpart refers to electrified roads or charging lanes enabled by charging-while-driving technology. A network equilibrium model is first developed to capture the interactions among battery electric vehicles’ (BEVs) route choices, charging plans, and the prices of electricity. A mixed-integer bi-level program is then formulated to determine the deployment plan of charging infrastructure to minimize the total social cost of the coupled networks. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate travel and charging plans of BEV drivers and the competitiveness of static and dynamic charging infrastructure. The numerical results on three networks suggest that (1) for individual BEV drivers, the choice between using charging lanes and charging stations is more sensitive to parameters including value of travel time, service fee markup, and battery size, but less sensitive to the charging rates and travel demand; (2) deploying more charging lanes is favorable for transportation networks with sparser topology while more charging stations can be more preferable for those denser networks.

Handoff Schemes in Mobile Environments

Vehicular ad-hoc networks are one of the most popular applications of Ad-hoc networks, where networks are formed without any sort of physical connecting medium and can be formed whenever required. It is an area in networks that has enjoyed a considerable amount of attention for quite some time. Due to the highly mobile environment where these networks find their usability, it can be understood that there are a lot of problems with respect to maintaining the communication links between the moving vehicular nodes and the static infrastructures which act as the access points (AP) for these moving vehicular mobile nodes (MN). The coverage area of each AP is limited and as such, the connections need to be re-established time and again between the MNs and the closest accessible AP. Handoff is the process involved here, which deals with selecting the optimal APs as well as the best network available for data transmission. In this article, the authors compare various handoff methods and categorize them based on the different approaches they follow.