Digital Communications and Networking Commons^™

Parallel Computation In Communication And Signal Processing, Amean Al_Safi, Bradley Bazuin, Liqaa Alhafadhi

Amean S Al_Safi

The powerful computation of GPU has increased the computation speed up of many systems. This paper summarize some of the most important work in the field of communication and signal processing using GPU

Diversified Users' Satisfaction With Advanced Mobile Phone Features, Chen Ling, Wonil Hwang, Gavriel Salvendy

Dr. Chen Ling

Mobile phones are widely used all over the world, and with their increasing number of value-added features, they are becoming far more than a mere mobile voice communication device. Rather, they provide a powerful platform for accessing information universally. This paper reports a study which scrutinized users’ preference levels with five new mobile phone design features facilitating universal information access through mobile phones: camera, colour screen, voice-activated dialing, Internet browsing, and wireless connectivity (e.g. Bluetooth, infrared, etc.). The survey study involved college students and investigated the degree to which each of the above features impacts the users’ overall satisfaction and …

Effect Of Glance Duration On Perceived Complexity And Segmentation Of User Interfaces, Yifei Dong, Chen Ling, Lesheng Hua

Dr. Chen Ling

Computer users who handle complex tasks like air traffic control (ATC) need to quickly detect updated information from multiple displays of graphical user interface. The objectives of this study are to investigate how much computer users can segment GUI display into distinctive objects within very short glances and whether human perceives complexity differently after different durations of exposure. Subjects in this empirical study were presented with 20 screenshots of web pages and software interfaces for different short durations (100ms, 500ms, 1000ms) and were asked to recall the visual objects and rate the complexity of the images. The results indicate that …

Crowdsourced Earthquake Early Warning, Sarah Minson, Benjamin Brooks, Craig Glennie, Jessica Murray, John Langbein, Susan Owen, Thomas Heaton, Robert Iannucci, Darren Hauser

Robert A Iannucci

Earthquake early warning (EEW) can reduce harm to people and infrastructure from earthquakes and tsunamis, but it has not been implemented in most high earthquake-risk regions because of prohibitive cost. Common consumer devices such as smartphones contain low-cost versions of the sensors used in EEW. Although less accurate than scientific-grade instruments, these sensors are globally ubiquitous. Through controlled tests of consumer devices, simulation of an Mw (moment magnitude) 7 earthquake on California’s Hayward fault, and real data from the Mw 9 Tohoku-oki earthquake, we demonstrate that EEW could be achieved via crowdsourcing.

Supporting Teacher Orchestration In Ubiquitous Learning Environments: A Study In Primary Education, Juan Muñoz Cristóbal, Ivan Jorrín Abellán, Juan Asensio Perez, Alejandra Martínez Monés, Luis Prieto, Yannis Dimitriadis

Ivan M. Jorrín Abellán

During the last decades, educational contexts have transformed into complex technological and social ecologies, with mobile devices expanding the scope of education beyond the traditional classroom, creating so-called Ubiquitous Learning Environments (ULEs). However, these new technological opportunities entail an additional burden for teachers, who need to manage and coordinate the resources involved in such complex educational scenarios in a process known as “orchestration”. This paper presents the evaluation of the orchestration support provided by GLUEPS-AR, a system aimed to help teachers in the coordination of across-spaces learning situations carried out in ULEs. The evaluation, following an interpretive research perspective, relied …

Coming Down To Earth: Helping Teachers Use 3d Virtual Worlds In Across-Spaces Learning Situations, Juan Muñoz Cristóbal, Luis Prieto, Juan Asensio Pérez, Alejandra Martínez Monés, Ivan Jorrín Abellán, Yannis Dimitriadis

Ivan M. Jorrín Abellán

Different approaches have explored how to provide seamless learning across multiple ICT-enabled physical and virtual spaces, including three-dimensional virtual worlds (3DVW). However, these approaches present limitations that may reduce their acceptance in authentic educational practice: The difficulties of authoring and sharing teacher-created designs across different 3DVW platforms, or the lack of integration of 3DVWs with existing technologies in the classroom ecosystem (e.g., widespread web-based learning platforms such as Moodle, or mobile augmented reality applications). Focusing on a specific kind of 3DVW (virtual globes, such as Google Earth, used like 3DVWs), we propose a system that enables teachers to deploy across-spaces …

Wikis For Group Work: Encouraging Transparency, Benchmarking And Feedback, Amir Abdekhodaee, Dini Kourosh, Farnaz Modarres, Anne-Marie Chase, Bella Ross

Dr Anne-Marie Chase

Proactive Service Migration For Long-Running Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Systems, Wenbing Zhao, H. Zhang

Wenbing Zhao

A proactive recovery scheme based on service migration for long-running Byzantine fault-tolerant systems is described. Proactive recovery is an essential method for ensuring the long-term reliability of fault-tolerant systems that are under continuous threats from malicious adversaries. The primary benefit of our proactive recovery scheme is a reduced vulnerability window under normal operation. This is achieved in two ways. First, the time-consuming reboot step is removed from the critical path of proactive recovery. Second, the response time and the service migration latency are continuously profiled and an optimal service migration interval is dynamically determined during runtime based on the observed …

Information And Communication Technologies (Icts) And Climate Change Adaptation In Latin America And The Caribbean: A Framework For Action, Hallie Eakin, Pedro Wightman, David Hsu, Vladimir Gil, Eduardo Fuentes-Contreras, Megan Cox, Tracy-Ann Hyman, Carlos Pacas, Fernando Borras, Diego Barrido, Daniel Kammen

David Hsu

Despite ongoing interest in deploying Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for sustainable development, their use in climate change adaptation remains under-studied. Based on the integration of adaptation theory and the existing literature on the use of ICTs in development, we present an analytical model for conceptualizing the contribution of existing ICTs to adaptation, and a framework for evaluating ICT success. We apply the framework to four case studies of ICTs in use for early warning systems and managing extreme events in LAC countries. We propose that existing ICTs can support adaptation through enabling access to critical information for decision-making, coordinating …

Network Self-Organization In The Internet Of Things, Arjun Athreya, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

The Internet of Things is a paradigm that allows the interaction of ubiquitous devices through a network to achieve common goals. This paradigm like any man-made infrastructure is subject to disasters, outages and other adversarial conditions. Under these situations provisioned communications fail, rendering this paradigm with little or no use. Hence, network self-organization among these devices is needed to allow for communication resilience. This paper presents a survey of related work in the area of self-organization and discusses future research opportunities and challenges for self-organization in the Internet of Things. We begin this paper with a system perspective of the …

Asia: Accelerated Secure In-Network Aggregation In Vehicular Sensing Networks, Xiao Wang, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) can potentially become a sensing platform. In-network aggregation, a fundamental primitive for querying sensory data, has been shown to reduce overall communication overhead at large. To secure data aggregation in VANETs, existing schemes mainly rely on digital signatures. However, generating and verifying such signatures can cause high computational overhead. More importantly, time-consuming verifications lead to the vulnerability to signature flooding attacks in which a receiver cannot timely verify all messages before their respective deadlines. In this paper, we propose ASIA as an Accelerated Secure In-network Aggregation strategy that can accelerate message verifications and significantly reduce computational …

Unlocin: Unauthorized Location Inference On Smartphones Without Being Caught, Le Nguyen, Yuan Tian, Sungho Cho, Wookjong Kwak, Sanjay Parab, Yu Seung Kim, Patrick Tague, Joy Zhang

Patrick Tague

Location privacy has become one of the critical issues in the smartphone era. Since users carry their phones everywhere and all the time, leaking users’ location information can have dangerous implications. In this paper, we leverage the idea that Wi-Fi parameters not considered to be “sensitive” in the Android platform can be exploited to learn users’ location. Though the idea of using Wi-Fi information to breach location privacy is not new, we extend the basic idea and show that clever attackers can do so without being detected by current malware detection techniques. To achieve this goal, we develop the Unauthorized …

How To Jam Without Getting Caught: Analysis And Empirical Study Of Stealthy Periodic Jamming, Bruce Debruhl, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Despite the widespread commercial use of spread spectrum technology, advanced algorithms and modern hardware capabilities still allows efficient denial-of-service attacks against wireless communication systems using jamming. Much of the recent work on jamming mitigation has focused on how to adjust the transmitter-receiver system once a jamming attack has been detected. However, characterizing the detectability of certain classes of jamming attacks remains a largely unstudied problem. We aim to narrow this gap by analyzing the effect of a class of periodic jamming attacks on the attack detection metrics of packet delivery ratio (PDR) and received signal strength (RSS). We show that …

Stochastic Optimization Of Flow-Jamming Attacks In Multichannel Wireless Networks, Yu Seung Kim, Bruce Debruhl, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

An attacker can launch an efficient jamming attack to deny service to flows in wireless networks by using cross-layer knowledge of the target network. For example, flow-jamming defined in existing work incorporates network layer information into the conventional jamming attack to maximize its attack efficiency. In this paper, we redefine a discrete optimization model of flow-jamming in multichannel wireless networks and provide metrics to evaluate the attack efficiency. We then propose the use of stochastic optimization techniques for flow-jamming attacks by using three stochastic search algorithms: iterative improvement, simulated annealing, and genetic algorithm. By integrating the algorithms into a simulation …

Adaptive Wireless Communications: Mimo Channels And Networks, Daniel Bliss, Siddhartan Govindasamy

Siddhartan Govindasamy

Adopting a balanced mix of theory, algorithms and practical design issues, this comprehensive volume explores cutting-edge applications in adaptive wireless communications and the implications these techniques have for future wireless network performance. Presenting practical concerns in the context of different strands from information theory, parameter estimation theory, array processing and wireless communication, the authors present a complete picture of the field. Topics covered include advanced multiple-antenna adaptive processing, ad hoc networking, MIMO, MAC protocols, space-time coding, cellular networks and cognitive radio, with the significance and effects of both internal and external interference a recurrent theme throughout. A broad, self-contained technical …

Selfish Manipulation Of Cooperative Cellular Communications Via Channel Fabrication, Shrikant Adhikarla, Min Suk Kang, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

In today’s cellular networks, user equipment (UE) have suffered from low spectral efficiency at cell-edge region due to high interference from adjacent base stations (BSs), which share the same spectral radio resources. In the recently proposed cooperative cellular networks, geographically separated multiple BSs cooperate on transmission in order to improve the UE’s signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) at cell-edge region. The service provider of the system dynamically assigns the cluster of BSs to achieve higher SINR for the UE while optimizing the use of system radio resources. Although it is the service provider that makes the clustering decision for the UE, the service …

Self-Organization Of A Mesh Hierarchy For Smart Grid Monitoring In Outage Scenarios, Arjun Athreya, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Current hierarchical communication infrastructure in the smart grid is not robust for data collection from smart meters during outages. In this work, we propose a self-organizing multi-channel wireless communication framework to aid in data collection for smart grid health monitoring. We propose a two-stage bootstrapping process in which nodes first self-organize into local mesh clusters by flattening the provisioned hierarchy and then interconnect to provide mesh connectivity from the outage region to functioning regions of the grid. We propose to construct this mesh-of-meshes hierarchy using a cross-layer strategy that jointly considers medium access limitations and the asymmetric traffic flow that …

Casting A Wider Net, Lynn Stein

Lynn Andrea Stein

This article is a book review of Mung Chiang's book Networked Life: 20 Questions and Answers. In this text intended for both classroom and online learning, Chiang uses questions about our online lives to explore the technology and computer science behind the Internet, wireless, and Web industries.

The Wireless Control Network: Monitoring For Malicious Behavior, Shreyas Sundaram, Miroslav Pajic, Christoforos Hadjicostis, Rahul Mangharam, George Pappas

Rahul Mangharam

We consider the problem of stabilizing a plant with a network of resource constrained wireless nodes. In a companion paper, we developed a protocol where each node repeatedly transmits a linear combination of the values in its neighborhood. For certain topologies, we showed that these linear combinations can be designed so that the closed loop system is stable (i.e., the wireless network itself acts as a controller for the plant). In this paper, we design a Intrusion Detection System (IDS) for this control scheme, which observes the transmissions of certain nodes in the network and uses that information to (a) …

Stir-Ing The Wireless Medium With Self-Tuned, Inference-Based, Real-Time Jamming, Bruce Debruhl, Yu Seung Kim, Zachary Weinberg, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Jamming, broadcasting to intentionally interfere with wireless reception, has long been a problem for wireless systems. Recent research demonstrates numerous advances in jamming techniques that increase attack efficiency or reduce the probability an attack will be detected by choosing attack parameters based on a system’s configuration. In this work, we extend the attacker’s capabilities by modifying the attack parameters in response to the observed performance of the target system, effectively creating a feedback loop in our attack model. This framework allows for more intricate attack models that are tuned online allowing for closer to optimal attacks against legitimate systems. To …

All Your Jammers Belong To Us - Localization Of Wireless Sensors Under Jamming Attack, Yu Seung Kim, Frank Mokaya, Eric Chen, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Accurately determining locations of nodes in mobile wireless network is crucial for a myriad of applications. Unfortunately, most localization techniques are vulnerable to jamming attacks where the adversary attempts to disrupt communication between legitimate nodes in the network. In this paper, we propose an approach to localize a wireless node by using jamming attack as the advantage of the network. Our localization technique is divided into two steps. First, we discover the location of the jammer using power adaptation techniques. Then, we use these properties to extrapolate the locations of jammed nodes. We design a localization protocol using this technique, …

S-Span: Secure Smart Posters In Android Using Nfc (Demo), Jason Wu, Lin Qi, Nishant Kumar, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Smart posters are a promising new use case for NFC-enabled mobile devices, but to date there has been a general lack of security mechanisms for NFC smart posters. We present S-SPAN - a secure smart poster system consisting of three parts: an administrative web interface for managing posters, a backend server for storing and serving data, as well as an Android application for end-users. S-SPAN enforces confidentiality and integrity of smart poster data as well as authentication/authorization of administrators and end-users, thus ensuring that only authorized users can access the content.

Living With Boisterous Neighbors: Studying The Interaction Of Adaptive Jamming And Anti-Jamming, Bruce Debruhl, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Jamming has long been a problem in wireless communications, but with recent advances in adaptive jamming, adaptive anti-jamming, and other advanced physical layer security techniques, it is hard to understand whether we can keep the jammer at bay. In this work, we consider this problem and introduce a game-theoretic framework which gives us a tool to analyze the complex adaptive jamming and anti-jamming space. To illustrate the strengths and weaknesses in intelligent jamming and anti-jamming techniques, we present a straightforward two-player instance and analyze a number of possible jamming and anti-jamming techniques.

Digital Content Preservation Across Domain Verticals, Soha Maad, Borislav Dimitrov

Borislav D Dimitrov

The authors present a novel approach to develop scalable systems and services for preserving digital content generated from various application domains. The aim is to deliver an integrative scalable approach for digital content preservation across domain verticals. This would involve consolidating approaches for modeling document workflow, preserving the integrity of heterogeneous data, and developing robust and scalable tools for digital preservation ensuring interoperability across domains verticals. The authors consider various application domains including: healthcare, public, business and finance, media and performing art, and education. The authors focus on specific case studies of digital content preservation across the considered domain verticals. …

Jamming-Resistant Distributed Path Selection On Wireless Mesh Networks (Demo), Yu Seung Kim, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Wireless mesh network is an emerging network architecture which have been actively standardized for the last few years. Because of its flexible network architecture, wireless mesh network can provide alternative paths even when some of wireless links are broken by node failures or intended attacks. Among various types of mesh network, we focus on the most recent mesh standard, IEEE 802.11s and its resiliency to jamming attack. In the demo, we show jamming effects on wireless mesh network and the performance of the hybrid wireless mesh protocol (HWMP) defined in IEEE 802.11s and our proposed distributed path selection protocol.

A Toolbox To Explore The Interaction Of Adaptive Jamming And Anti-Jamming (Demo), Bruce Debruhl, Yu Seung Kim, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Jamming has long been a problem in wireless communications. Recently, adaptive jamming and anti-jamming techniques have been proposed which aim to use feedback to better perform their task. For an anti-jamming receiver this means detecting jamming and adapting its protocol appropriately. For a jammer this means using feedback from the legitimate system to design a high-impact, low-power, hard-to-detect attack. In this work we introduce a toolbox to allow users to tests the performance of adaptive jamming and anti-jamming on the USRP2 radio platform. These test provide an important function by letting developers understand how well new protocols work against evolving …

Mitigation Of Periodic Jamming In A Spread Spectrum System By Adaptive Filter Selection, Bruce Debruhl, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Jamming has long been a problem in wireless communication systems. Traditionally, defense techniques have looked to raise the cost of mounting an equally effective jamming attack. One technique to raise the cost of jamming is direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) which spreads data over a wider bandwidth and has built-in error correction. To work around this, attackers have developed intelligent jamming techniques to minimize the cost of mounting attacks on these systems. To lower the cost of attacking a DSSS system, an attacker can use periodic jamming which alternates between an attacking and sleeping state. Previously, a digital filter has …

Shortmac: Efficient Data-Plane Fault Localization, Xin Zhang, Zongwei Zhou, Hsu-Chun Hsiao, Tiffany Kim, Adrian Perrig, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

The rising demand for high-quality online services requires reliable packet delivery at the network layer. Dataplane fault localization is recognized as a promising means to this end, since it enables a source node to localize faulty links, find a fault-free path, and enforce contractual obligations among network nodes. Existing fault localization protocols cannot achieve a practical tradeoff between security and efficiency and they require unacceptably long detection delays, and require monitored flows to be impractically long-lived. In this paper, we propose an efficient fault localization protocol called ShortMAC, which leverages probabilistic packet authentication and achieves 100 – 10000 times lower …

Survivable Smart Grid Communication: Smart-Meters Meshes To The Rescue, Arjun Athreya, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Smart grids are critical cyber-physical infrastructures in the world now. Since these infrastructures are prone to large scale outages due to disasters or faults, a resilient and survivable communication architecture is desired. In this work, we propose a resilient and survivable hierarchical communication architecture for the smart grid that mirrors the hierarchy of the existing power grid. Post-disaster resilience in grid communication is achieved through the grid flattening process. This process involves smart-meters and other disaster surviving elements of higher system levels of the grid forming a wireless mesh network. The flattened network of grid elements with one-hop communication links …

Digital Filter Design For Jamming Mitigation In 802.15.4 Communication, Bruce Debruhl, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Jamming attackers can dramatically increase attack efficiency and stealth by randomly or periodically cycling the jamming transmission on and off, attacks respectively known as random and periodic jamming. In this paper, we analyze the impact of such attacks on the IEEE 802.15.4 communication protocol, commonly used in wireless sensor networking applications, and show that the cycling behavior introduces a narrow spectral component into the received signal. We propose the inclusion of a digital filter at the receiver side to effectively eliminate this spectral component, and we discuss the benefits involved in this filter design. We evaluate the impacts of random …