The increase in data rates provided by cellular networks and the development of mobile devices capable of recording good quality videos has resulted in increased amount of user generated content. This content can be made available live as well as on-demand for the viewers. Nowadays, most of the video traffic is rate adaptive HTTP based knows as DASH. The paper focuses on utilizing the features of SVC in order to develop an optimized resource allocation scheme for transmitting multiple DASH video streams over LTE network in uplink direction. The physical resources are allocated to the video producers such that the QoE for both real and non-real time viewers is maximized. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the significance of the proposed optimization on the overall user experience.
This paper describes the user evaluation of two different strategies for guiding pedestrians. This work is based on a hands free, eyes free scenario explored by SpaceBook [1], using cheap Android phones. The first model described is a comparatively simple purely reactive model [2]. The second is using more involved techniques including prediction of future positions and scheduling [3]. The paper describes both models discussing identified problems with them. It then goes on to describe our evaluation procedure and the results of the evaluation.
App fingerprints can be used to verify whether two apps are the same, and are useful tools for malware detection because they can allow to recognize obfuscated versions of known malware. Fingerprinting an app on the base of static features is known to fail against obfuscation, as it is successful in hiding the static characteristics that reveal the malicious nature of an app. In this paper we propose a novel way to compute app fingerprints, which is based on behavioral features. The aim is to capture the semantics of the app, so that obfuscation results ineffective. The technique we introduce exploits invariants, found among pairs of metrics, collected during app execution, and produces a fingerprint consisting of the list of the correlation values of these pairs. We present an experimental evaluation carried out on a real Android device, whose obtained results support the methodology we propose, and show it can be a viable research direction to investigate further.
The fifth Generation (5G) mobile network will provide services with extreme data rate and latency demands compared to current cellular network, and provide massive capacity and connectivity to multitude of devices with diverse requirements and applications. Therefore, it is important to utilise all network resources to provide the 5G vision. In this paper, performance evaluations and impact of higher order horizontal sectorisation on next generation 5G mobile access is presented. The study has been focused on busy urban areas in high carrier frequency. Millimetre wave band has precious wide unexploited bandwidth that can be harnessed for mobile communication. The results for these scenarios show that higher-order horizontal sectorisation in millimetre wave based smallcell deployment can significantly increase the network capacity to meet the future requirement of 5G network, and provide high data rate and connectivity to huge number of devices. Moreover, beamforming can highly increase the data rate by efficiently increase signal power and suppress interference from unwanted directions.
Smart cities are promising solution for providing efficient services to the citizens with the use of Information and Communication Technologies. City automation has become essential concept for improving the quality of the citizens' lives, which gives rise to smart cities. Fog computing for Internet of Things (IoT) is considered recently an essential paradigm in smart city scenarios. In this work, we propose energy efficient Fog Servers (FSs), which delivers the information data to the mobile users (in the vehicle). We introduced the concept of energy efficiency through the judicious distribution of non-renewable or/and renewable energy to the FS, which improves outage (and dropping probability. As a first step, we optimise the locations of the FSs for IoT Information Piece Delivery (IoTPD) in a smart city vehicular environment with dropping less than 5%. Then, we maximised the energy savings by pushing dropping to a certain level (5%). To improve the dropping, the available renewable (wind) grid energy is optimally allocated to each FS. This, in turn, also reduces carbon footprint.
Increase in number of commodity devices using network connection raised the spectrum demand largely. The present static spectrum allocation policy gave birth to the so called spectrum scarcity problem. Cognitive Radio enhances the bandwidth usage through Dynamic Spectrum Access without affecting the allocated spectrum, therefore offers a feasible solution to the problem of spectrum scarcity. Enhancing the spectrum usage efficiently, cognitive radio technology allows secondary users to acquire underutilized licensed spectrum band. Smooth spectrum mobility in cognitive radio networks is extremely necessary to ensure the continuity and quality of service. This work aims to develop a dynamic horizontal handoff strategy that adopts according to the traffic pattern of PU. Proposed model keeps track of mobility patterns on certain primary spectrum and classifies these spectrum channels based on primary user's arrival on them. Handoff strategy decision is based on these classified patterns, which can be either proactive or reactive strategy. Analytical results demonstrate that proposed model optimizes channel utilization, minimize handoff delays while maximizing overall network capacity.
In this paper, we propose a new integrity assurance system in the cloud by using both hard and soft attestations. By hard attestation, we mean the usage of trusted computing to certify the machines in the cloud or to detect any tamper on the system level including boot, bios and operating system. The soft assurance mechanism is based on the analysis of the cloud provenance data which are collected by logging kernel system calls. This mechanism is data centric which means that it allows the detection of any changes to data artifacts in the cloud. The results of our integrity assurance system is communicated to the user using Cloud Trust Protocol (CTP) developed by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). Our proposed scheme is tested on an OpenStack cloud to show a proof of concept of our integrity assurance system.
Integrating learner's emotion using a playful approach is seen as one of the best mechanism to enhance learner's experience in mobile learning. Thus, the research strives to determine the emotional responses that is formed by playful elements in mobile learning applications. The Kansei Design Model was adopted in this research to assess the emotional responses of thirty subjects towards six evaluation specimens that were carefully selected. In the assessment procedure, a total of 12 emotional keywords were identified suitable to portray emotional dimension to the domain. The result revealed that the design of playful mobile learning applications could be represented through the joyful and pleasurable concept. A joyful design seems to have bright colours and fun. A pleasurable design seems to have colourful display and pictures. The result could be used as insights in designing future playful mobile learning applications, which embeds targeted emotional responses by users.
The search space allocation scheme is a very important operation done to schedule users in the resources of the control channels PDCCH and enhanced PDCCH. However, the standard scheme has many drawbacks as it allocates each user a contiguous number of candidates to blindly search for its control information. This paper reviews some of the proposed designs in literature for the search space allocation scheme and compares them to provide a thorough performance analysis. Simulation results showed some comparisons between the proposed schemes in literature and the standard scheme using three different metrics. Finally, the scattered design was proved to be of the best overall performance although some schemes have comparable performance in the blocking probability metric.
Malaysia is a melting pot that encompasses extremely diversified cultures, ethnicity, religions and languages. Tourist information in the country is commonly found in the form of printed materials as well as printed maps. This leads to issues like environmentally unfriendly, less visibility in promoting the tourism potential as well as an ineffective way to disperse information. The work attempts to provide a solution to this problem by providing a tourism mobile application that supports tourism information with assistive travel features to ease tourists by using technology that is closest to them. The project adopted the RAD in the process of design and development of the application, employing an interview approach to international tourists at the airport, observation to existing assistive tourist systems, and conducts a survey using questionnaires to potential users. The result enables the work to develop the iTourism mobile application in order to meet the demand of tourists. The results revealed that there are major suggestions relating to the need for a travel mobile application to assist tourists in finding interesting places as well as related services. This mobile application is important for Tourism Malaysia in order to enhance its performance in promoting Malaysia locally and internationally. The tourism industry can also capitalise on the advantage of this application in order to gain visitor feedback on their products or services. The application also offers tourist a secured journey, as they can recheck the information and places of interest as it is enhanced with GPS features.
In a time when prolonging the quality of life better is not just through long-established medical practices but by technology assisting humans, various projects are challenging the traditional methods of caring for a patient. In stroke, desktop virtual environments (DVEs) are being used to supplement the patient's rehabilitation. The type of rehabilitation provides another means for patients to actively participate in the rehabilitation program through motion mirroring using their television or computer screens. However, immersive virtual reality (VR) is also gaining popularity and is challenging the common DVEs in its effectivity through involving more sensory stimulation of the nervous system. The project aims to answer the questions: Would immersion of a patient in VR positively help in their rehabilitation and what are the patient's needs that has to be addressed for it to be effective? To supplement the patients in their rehabilitation program, a mobile VR application is created using VR peripherals available commercially. The basic principle is that immersion in VR will add more sensory and cognitive stimuli to the stroke patient's traditional hospital rehabilitation. Findings of the study show positive effects of including immersive VR in the rehabilitation program of post-stroke patients. In the present, little information is available on the effects of immersive VR in motor rehabilitation. The study quantifies and qualifies its use specifically in the motor rehabilitation of stroke patients.
Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of things with wireless networks for connecting things and people on a massive scale. Energy harvesting from a surrounding environment is one of the key techniques to achieve a sustainable IoT network. In an IoT environment, reliable broadcast plays an important role to distribute data to a large number of surrounding devices. Forward Error Correction (FEC) enables a receiver to detect and correct errors for a received packet. The fountain code, which is a type of FEC, is suitable for IoT environment due to its high scalability and low complexity. When the FEC is applied to a data broadcast scenario in IoT networks, fast and reliable broadcast can be achieved. In this paper, we propose a new broadcast method to utilize a moving average to estimate a packet error rate of the current frame in the environment with a large number of connected devices. This proposed scheme is desirable to achieve high data restoration probability by obtaining a proper number of output packets.
With the rapid growth of interest in media-rich user experience, content distribution networks (CDNs) gained considerable attention. Since, most of the energy is consumed by cache points (CPs) and the associated equipment, it is imperative to deploy fewer number of CPs or switch off as many as possible to save energy. This results in degraded quality of service (QoS). It is an usual dimensioning technique to optimise the number and locations of caching points (CPs) of a content distribution network (CDN), where the objective is to reduce operational energy. In this paper, we reduce non-renewable energy consumption (carbon footprint) by introducing renewable grid energy (in the form of wind energy) and adaptive CPs. Further, we propose algorithms for provisioning high number of simultaneous downloads, which reduce overall waiting time and number of dropped request of city vehicular users. The end result is substantial improvement in quality of service (QoS). The proposed CPs save 100% grid energy during the whole day while fulfilling content demand in a city vehicular environment.
Power efficiency has become one of the most important issues in mobile devices because of their limited battery size. However, many mobile applications and processors negatively accelerate power consumption of mobile devices. Previous work (e.g., CPU hotplug) may be inappropriate in mobile devices due to their slow responsiveness because it has to migrate all processes running on a CPU, which is to be turned off to save power consumption, to another CPU, thereby resulting in slow responsiveness. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism, called pseudo CPU hotplug, which efficiently guarantees fast responsiveness while reducing the power consumption of mobile devices. Our mechanism eliminates almost all overhead of operation system such as that of synchronous task migration, and leaves only architecture-dependent overhead of entering deep idle mode. Our evaluation results clearly show that pseudo CPU hotplug outperforms the traditional CPU hotplug mechanism by up to 997 times in terms of response latency. In addition, our mechanism increases the time spent in deep idle mode more than 30% compared to normal status.
Smart phones are playing a vital role in our day-today life, especially in the field of education. A student can use his personal smart phone for carrying his softcopies of his lecture notes (as storage device), for reading the lecture notes (display device), even it is a complete encyclopaedia due to the technological inventions in smart phone area. Even though smart phones have all these educational advantages, mobile phones are banned in many educational institutions as students misuse the phones during the class, by chatting with friends, playing games... This project involves research and survey to identify how usage of mobile phones at education institutions can be made under the control of authorities and how 1000s of lecture hours can be saved in a year using this device. We propose a mobile application which will help institution authorities to control the students' mobile phones and attendance will be taken by the students itself for saving the time of taking attendance. Students will be forced to run this application as their attendance will be marked through this application. This will also save the lecture time to some extend and will reduce the chances of students marking proxy attendances. Authorities can configure the list of white listed applications students can use in their phones when they are inside the campus.
The anticipated services of the 5th Generation mobile networks (5G) requires new technologies to be introduced and to be thoroughly investigated in order to assess their ability to satisfy the new 5G system requirements. The main focus of this paper is the relaxed system synchronization procedures used to meet the new 5G requirements which cannot be satisfied by strictly synchronized OFDM systems and their costly synchronization procedures The most promising technology to replace OFDM in 5G is Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC) whose performance has already been assessed in literature where the main focus was proving the enhanced performance of UFMC in presence of Carrier Frequency Offsets (CFO) and Timing Offsets (TO) arising from the reduced synchronization limitations. In this paper we address a new aspect of UFMC performance by investigating its capability to overcome the multipath fading channels' effects and to provide good and reliable performance levels without using the cyclic prefix concept introduced in OFDM to overcome these channel effects.
Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (EUTRAN) offer high uplink and downlink throughput. This enhances user experience in term of Quality-of-Service (QoS). Radio resource allocation is a complex arrangement of resources in multiuser scenario. Generally in network, radio resources are configured in pool, however resources are offered to user on the basis of "as soon as required (ASAR)". LTE in EUTRAN provides radio resource to user, with different scheduling mechanism. This definitely reduces network capacity in whole, but at the same time increases resources availability per user at particular state of time. In every cycle of resource allocation a feedback mechanism works to cater operational resource requirement. In this paper we investigate performance of different strategies of resource allocation, driven through different scheduler such as round robin, proportional fair, best channel quality indicator (CQI), max transmission point (TP) and resource fair(RF). We evaluate strategy for resource allocation under indistinguishable arrangement and conclude with comparative performance analysis and find proportional fair offers balance throughput, fairness and spectral efficiency.
Travel speed is an important parameter for measuring road traffic. Urban Traffic Information System (UTIS) was developed as a mobile detector for measuring link travel speeds in South Korea. UTIS is mainly a means of collecting enhanced roadway condition information and then broadcasting related traveler information and various alerts back to vehicles. The proposed wireless media is based on UTIS technology operating at 5.725~5.825 GHz in South Korea. Under the UTIS concept, vehicles will be equipped with an UTIS radio, a highly accurate on-board positioning system, an appropriately configured on-board computer to facilitate communications, support various applications, and provide an interface for the driver. This equipment is collectively referred to as the On-Board Equipment (OBE). Vehicles communicate with Roadside Equipment (RSE), which is linked to the specialized UTIS network. RSEs and CCTVs are positioned at major signaled intersections and along major arterial roads. However, RSEs and CCTVs incur errors caused by the lack of probe vehicles on road segments, system failures and etc. In this paper, we suggests a new model for RSE and CCTV failure detection using neural networks to provide accurate link travel speeds and traffic information to the public.
The growing need to reduce the carbon footprint and the operation expenditure (OPEX) in communication networks necessitates the deployment of wind powered base stations (BSs) and roadside units (RSUs) for vehicular communication networks in windy countries with limited solar irradiation. This system finds ready application in sparse areas like countryside and motorways that lack the supply from the national grid for economic reasons. The stringent performance requirement of vehicular communication systems owed to their critical services poses challenges to their greening efforts. In this paper, we design a robust time-division multiple access (TDMA) based MAC for an infrastructure based green vehicular network in a motorway scenario and investigate the network performance against the stringent quality of service (QoS) thresholds. We call the proposed Centralised Vehicular TDMA based MAC as CVTMAC for short. To obtain a realistic performance evaluation, we model and simulate the proposed MAC protocol with the real channel characteristics of the motorway environment fully incorporated. The off grid RSU is powered solely by an economical and easy to deploy small standalone wind energy conversion systems (SSWECS). Wind energy-based rate adaptation is deployed in the RSU to enhance the efficient utilization of available energy (considering the intermittent nature of wind energy). In this study the real vehicular traffic profiles and wind data for a specified motorway region have been utilised. Both analytic and simulation results reveal that with the introduction of small battery capacity (27 Ah), the green vehicular network is able to support QoS for data, audio and video-related applications at each hour of the day in a motorway vehicular environment.
With the current trend of embedding location services within social networks, an ever growing amount of users' spatiotemporal tracks are being collected and used to generate user profiles. Issues of personal privacy and especially those stemming from tracking user location become more important to address. In this work, it is argued that support of location privacy awareness within social networks is needed to maintain the users' trust in their services. Current practices of pre-configuring location disclosure settings have been shown to be limited, where users' sense of location privacy dynamically change with context. In this paper, location privacy awareness is considered within a composite view of place, time and social data recorded in user profiles. The paper examines the possible threats to personal privacy from exposure of this data and the design of feedback tools to allow users to control their privacy. A user study is used to examine the impact of the feedback provided on users' perception of privacy and the link between their privacy concerns and their attitude towards using the geo-social network. Findings confirm the strong need for more transparent access to and control over user location profiles, and guide the proposal of recommendations to the design of more privacy-sensitive geo-social networks.
