2022_4 - Infocommunications

2022. 4^th Issue

Volume XIV, Number

MESSAGE FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Pal Varga
Recent advances on high performance computing, mobile networking, and security
We have reached the end of this turbulent year of 2022. In terms of scientific achievements, it was a successful one for our community: the journal never received so many – close to 150 – individual submissions within a calendar year before. This is certainly due to three factors. The first reason is, of course, the continuously and visibly improving journal metrics. Second, the two calls for special issue papers: on Internet of Digital & Cognitive Realities and on Tech-Augmented Legal Environment. Third, the activities of the Editorial Board, which helped a lot in attracting great papers. As the Infocommunications Journal is listed in the Web of Science: Emerging Sources Citation Index, we became eligible for an official Impact Factor calculated by Clarivate, already for the year 2022 – the actual value will be announced in June 2023. We are very positive that this value will be very attractive, and its announcement in June provides our Journal even better visibility than we have now.

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Our reviewers in 2022

PAPERS FROM OPEN CALL

Hasanain Alabbas, and Árpád Huszák
New Gateway Selection Algorithm Based on Multi-Objective Integer Programming and Reinforcement Learning
Connecting vehicles to the infrastructure and benefiting from the services provided by the network is one of the main objectives to increase safety and provide well-being for passengers. Providing such services requires finding suitable gateways to connect the source vehicles to the infrastructure. The major feature of using gateways is to decrease the load of the network infrastructure resources so that each gateway is responsible for a group of vehicles. Unfortunately, the implementation of this goal is facing many challenges, including the highly dynamic topology of VANETs, which causes network instability, and the deployment of applications with high bandwidth demand that can cause network congestion, particularly in urban areas with a high-density vehicle. This work introduces a novel gateway selection algorithm for vehicular networks in urban areas, consisting of two phases. The first phase identifies the best gateways among the deployed vehicles using multi-objective integer programming. While in the second phase, reinforcement learning is employed to select a suitable gateway for any vehicular node in need to access the VANET infrastructure. The proposed model is evaluated and compared to other existing solutions. The obtained results show the efficiency of the proposed system in identifying and selecting the gateways.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.4.1
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György Wersényi
Evaluation of the HoloLens for Medical Applications Using 5G-connected Mobile Devices
The updated range of models of smart glasses has expanded the availability of augmented reality (AR) technology in a way that opens them up to several applications. The first prototypes have been replaced by new models and vendors offer off-the-shelf solutions. E-health and medical applications have been in focus from the start. Furthermore, the roll-out of 5G technology would enable almost real-time, high-speed and low-latency communication, which would expand the potential uses and ideas. This paper gives a short overview of the current state, focusing on medical applications using smart glasses. The HoloLens glasses were evaluated regarding latency and data rates by using WiFi and the 5G campus network of the university. Results show that the HoloLens may be used in education, training and teleassistance; however, assisting latency-sensitive tasks that require a reliable network connection, ergonomic design, and privacy issues still remain a problem.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.4.2
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Edson Ramiro Lucas Filho, Lambros Odysseos, Yang Lun, Fu Kebo, and Herodotos Herodotou
DITIS: A Distributed Tiered Storage Simulator
This paper presents DITIS, a simulator for distributed and tiered file-based storage systems. In particular, DITIS can model a distributed storage system with up to three levels of storage tiers and up to three additional levels of caches. Each tier and cache can be configured with different number and type of storage media devices (e.g., HDD, SSD, NVRAM, DRAM), each with their own performance characteristics. The simulator utilizes the provided characteristics in fine-grained performance cost models (which are distinct for each device type) in order to compute the duration time of each I/O request processed on each tier. At the same time, DITIS simulates the overall flow of requests through the different layers and storage nodes of the system using numerous pluggable policies that control every aspect of execution, ranging from request routing and data redundancy to cache and tiering strategies. For performing the simulation, DITIS adapts an extended version of the Actor Model, during which key components of the system exchange asynchronous messages with each other, much like a real distributed multi-threaded system. The ability to simulate the execution of a workload in such an accurate and realistic way brings multiple benefits for its users, since DITIS can be used to better understand the behavior of the underlying file system as well as evaluate different storage setups and policies.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.4.3
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Adrian Khelili, Sophie Robert, and Soraya Zertal
FiLiP: A File Lifecycle-based Profiler for hierarchical storage
The increasing gap between computing speed and storage latency leads to possible I/O bottlenecks on massively parallel computers. To mitigate this issue, hierarchical storage provides multi-tiered configurations where each tier has its own physical characteristics and associated performance. Selecting the most appropriate file placement policy on this multi-tiered storage is difficult and there is to our knowledge no tool that systematically provides statistics and metrics for optimal file policy selection. In this paper, we present FiLiP (File Lifecycle Profiler), a software which provides statistics and metrics for a better understanding of file access by applications and the consequences on file movements across hierarchical storage. After the description of FiLiP’s main features and architecture, we highlight the usefulness of our tool using three I/O intensive simulation HPC applications: NEMO, S3DIO and NAMD and a three-tiered burst buffer.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.4.4
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Arockia David Roy Kulandai, and Thomas Schwarz
Saving Bit-flips through Smart Overwrites in NVRAM
New generations of non-volatile random access memories will combine the best features of memory (access times, byte addressability) with the best features of storage (non-volatility, low costs per byte). Some, like PCM, have a limited endurance. All will only consume energy when accessed, but writes will use much more energy than reads. These characteristics put a cost on flipping bits in memory. Bit-flip aware data structures lower the number of bits flipped by not resetting fields to zero to indicate a deleted record but by using bit-maps. If given a choice of where to over-write data, they will select the location which results in a lower number of bit-flips. We calculate the expected bit-flip savings of this strategy and derive a rule to determine the number of the possible candidate locations.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.4.5
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Kotha Venugopalachary, Deepak Mishra, and Ravikant Saini
Exact Outage Analysis for Non-regenerative Secure Cooperation Against Double-tap Eavesdropping
This paper presents the secrecy performance analysis of an amplify-and-forward relay-assisted cooperative communication system in the presence of a passive external eavesdropper. In contrast to existing works that assume high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) approximations, we have investigated exact and secrecy outage probabilities. Furthermore, we consider a more challenging scenario where the source may not be reachable to the intended user directly. But the eavesdropper can tap both the source link and the relay link. First of all, the outage probability is analyzed at the intended user as well as the eavesdropper. Next, defining the secrecy rate for the amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying system, the expression of the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and the secrecy intercept probability (SIP) have been derived, respectively. Noticing the complexity involved in the integration of SOP and SIP expressions, the closed-form expressions have been derived for asymptotic cases. Finally, the exact and asymptotic analysis has been verified by performing Monte-Carlo simulations. It is observed that the relay position should be closer to the source compared to the eavesdropper to achieve improved SOP.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.4.6
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Amus Chee Yuen Goay, Deepak Mishra, and Aruna Seneviratne
BER-Aware Backscattering Design for Energy Maximization at RFID Passive Tag
The radio frequency identification (RFID) passive tag is wireless communication device with high energy sustainability, such that it uses the incident radio frequency (RF) signal to backscatter its information. This paper investigates the output load power maximization with optimal load impedances selection in the backscatter communication (BackCom) network. The considered BackCom system comprises a reader broadcasting an unmodulated carrier to the passive tag in the downlink. The tag backscatters its information signal to the reader with binary amplitude-shift keying (BASK) modulation in the uplink. We formulated an average output load power maximization problem by jointly optimizing the reflection coefficients while satisfying the minimum bit error rate (BER) requirement and tag sensitivity constraint. To simplify the problem, we transform the BER constraint to the modulation index constraint and reduce the 4 variables problem to 2 variables convex optimization problem. Using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions, we design an algorithm to obtain the closed-form expression for the global optimal reflection coefficients that maximize the output load power. The simulation results provide insight into the impact of the information bit probability, tag sensitivity constraint, and BER on the achievable average load power. An overall gain of around 16% signifies the utility of our proposed design.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.4.7
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Anna Strzoda, Rafal Marjasz, and Krzysztof Grochla
LoRa Positioning in Verification of Location Data’s Credibility
The LoRa is a novel radio communication technology providing low power and a high range of data transmission. The LoRa transmission may be used for a low-cost localization to estimate the network nodes’ location. Some recent research showed that the location could be found with reasonable accuracy, with median error as low as tens of meters. Still, such results are achieved in a controlled environment with low interferences. We first evaluate the LoRa localization using an extensive data set of a telemetric network of a few thousand devices. We show that although the direct positioning based on trilateration provides limited accuracy, the measurement of LoRa transmission may be successfully used to evaluate the credibility of location information. The information about which gateways received the data and the RSSI measurements allow us to verify if the potential coordinates of a location are accurate. We propose a metric for location verification and estimate its credibility on a sample of measurements from the LoRa telemetry network.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.4.8
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Artur Poplawski, and Szymon Szott
Using Dynamic Programming to Optimize Cellular Networks Modeled as Graphical Games
Cellular networks are often modeled using game theory, with base stations as players contending for a shared resource (the radio channel). Alternatively, if base stations are considered as nodes joined by edges (which represent significant interference), we obtain a graph structure. A game represented in this way is called a graphical game. We explore this representation by decomposing the network graph through tree decomposition and apply dynamic programming to find the optimum welfare, i.e., a resource allocation strategy profile most effective from the point of view of the overall network performance. We verify our approach through simulations and discuss the possibility of implementing this solution in a distributed manner.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.4.9
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Mehmet Ufuk Caglayan
Review of Some Recent European Cybersecurity Research and Innovation Projects
This paper reviews research from several EU Projects that have addressed cybersecurity using techniques based on Machine Learning, including the security of Mobile Networks and the Internet of Things (IoT). These research projects have considered IoT Gateways and their design, security and performance, the security of digital health systems that are interconnected across Europe to provide health services to pople who travel through the EU, and related issues of the energy consumption and sustainability in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and their cybersecurity. The methods used in much of these research projects are based on Machine Learning both for attack detection and dynamic attack mitigation, as well as performance analysis and measurement techniques based on applied probability models.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.4.10
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Rixuan Qiu, Xue Xue, Mingliang Chen, Jinkun Zheng, Sitong Jing, and Yuancheng Li
A Fine-grained Dynamic Access Control Method for Power IoT Based on Kformer
The existing static ABAC(Attribute-Based Access Control) model cannot fully meet the increasingly complex, dynamic and scalable demands of the power grid. At the same time, its versatility and flexibility bring high costs. Additionally, the increasing complexity of organizational systems and the need for federated access to their resources make implementing and managing access control more challenging. This paper proposes a fine-grained dynamic access control method based on Kformer to automate authorization management tasks. We use Kformer, which filters and integrates external knowledge through feed-forward layers in Transformer. Then, we use BERT(Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer) to perform feature extraction on the input fused text, extract the implied attribute-authority relationship from the log records and external documents, and finally, perform sequence modeling on the extracted attribute features and input the obtained results. The final authorization result is obtained by classification through the softmax function in the final fully connected layer. The authorization management of the user’s request to the object is dynamically completed. Finally, using the access data of the grid information system to evaluate the method proposed by us, the experimental results show that the model can continuously monitor the access behavior of users inside the grid information system, change the access rights of entities and adjust the policy in real-time, and carry out dynamic access authorization. At the same time, the accuracy of the generated access control policy can reach 87.73%.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.4.11
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