2022_3 - Infocommunications

2022. 3^rd Issue

Volume XIV, Number 3

MESSAGE FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Pal Varga
Selected ICT topics from quantum communications to personalized speech synthesis
INFOCOMMUNICATIONS Journal covers a broad area of the scientific and engineering spectrum. The current issue is a demonstrative example of this, where topics of quantum communications, software defined networking, software defined radio, blockchain-supported decentralized authentication, IPv6 transition technologies (and their implementation benchmarking), personalized text-to-speech, interference of nationwide deployments for ICT technologies, the traveling salesman problem or microservice-based engineering process optimization of industrial IoT fields get presented together.

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PAPERS FROM OPEN CALL

Daryus Chandra, Panagiotis Botsinis, Dimitrios Alanis, Zunaira Babar, Soon-Xin Ng and Lajos Hanzo
On the Road to Quantum Communications
Moore’s Law has prevailed since 1965, predicting that the integration density of chips will be doubled approximately every 18 months or so, which has resulted in nanoscale in- tegration associated with 7 nm technologies at the time of writing. At this scale however we are about to enter the transitory range between classical and quantum physics. Based on the brilliant proposition by Feynman a new breed of information bearers was born, where the quantum bits are mapped for example to the spin of an electron. As a benefit, the alluring properties of the nano-scale quantum world have opened up a whole spate of opportunities in signal processing and communications, as discussed in this easy-reading discourse requiring no background in quantum physics.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.3.1
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Suadad S. Mahdi and Alharith A. Abdullah
Enhanced Security of Software-defined Network and Network Slice Through Hybrid Quantum Key Distribution Protocol
Software-defined networking (SDN) has revolutionized the world of technology as networks have become more flexible, dynamic and programmable. The ability to conduct network slicing in 5G networks is one of the most crucial features of SDN implementation. Although network programming provides new security solutions of traditional networks, SDN and network slicing also have security issues, an important one being the weaknesses related to openflow channel between the data plane and controller as the network can be attacked via the openflow channel and exploit communications with the control plane. Our work proposes a solution to provide adequate security for openflow messages through using a hybrid key consisting of classical and quantum key distribution protocols to provide double security depending on the computational complexity and physical properties of quantum. To achieve this goal, the hybrid key used with transport layer security protocol to provide confidentiality, integrity and quantum authentication to secure openflow channel. We experimentally based on the SDN-testbed and network slicing to show the workflow of exchanging quantum and classical keys between the control plane and data plane and our results showed the effectiveness of the hybrid key to enhance the security of the transport layer security protocol. Thereby achieving adequate security for openflow channel against classical and quantum computer attacks.

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DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.3.2
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Dimitrie C. Popescu and Rolland Vida
A Primer on Software Defined Radios
The commercial success of cellular phone systems during the late 1980s and early 1990 years heralded the wireless revolution that became apparent at the turn of the 21st century and has led the modern society to a highly interconnected world where ubiquitous connectivity and mobility are enabled by powerful wireless terminals. Software defined radio (SDR) technology has played a major role in accelerating the pace at which wireless capabilities have advanced, in particular over the past 15 years, and SDRs are now at the core of modern wireless communication systems. In this paper we give an overview of SDRs that includes a discussion of drivers and technologies that have contributed to their continuous advancement, and presents the theory needed to understand the architecture and operation of current SDRs. We also review the choices for SDR platforms and the programming options that are currently available for SDR research, development, and teaching, and present case studies illustrating SDR use. Our hope is that the paper will be useful as a reference to wireless researchers and developers working in the industry or in academic settings on further advancing and refining the capabilities of wireless systems.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.3.3
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Hafida Khalfaoui, Abderrazak Farchane and Said Safi
Decentralized Authentication Mechanism for Mobile Ad hoc Networks
Covid 19 has dramatically changed people’s lives around the world. It has shut down schools, companies and workplaces, forcing individuals to stay at home and comply to quarantine orders. Thus, individuals have resorted to the Internet as a means for communicating and sharing information in different domains. Unfortunately, some communities are still unserved by commercial service providers. Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET) can be used to fill this gap. One of the core issues in MANET is the authentication of the participating nodes. This mechanism is a fundamental requirement for implementing access control to network resources by confirming a user’s identity. In recent years, security experts worldwide proposed distributed authentication for MANET due to the lack of a central authority to register and authenticate nodes. In this article, decentralized authentication based on the technology of fog computing and the concept of the blockchain is proposed. The evaluation of this mechanism satisfies the diverse security requirements and strongly protects the networks from attacks.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.3.4
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Omar D’yab
A Comprehensive Survey on the Most Important IPv4aaS IPv6 Transition Technologies, their Implementations and Performance Analysis
As the central public IPv4 address pool has already been exhausted, the deployment of IPv6 has become inevitable. However, the users still require IPv4 Internet access due to some IPv4-only applications. The IPv4aaS (IPv4-as-a-Service) IPv6 transition technologies facilitate that ISPs provide IPv4 service to their customers while using only IPv6 in their access and core networks. This paper discusses the widely used IPv4aaS IPv6 transition technologies in ISP/enterprise networks; we explain their operations, advantages, properties and consider their performances. There are currently many IPv6 transition technologies, nevertheless, in this paper, the five most prominent IPv4aaS IPv6 transition technologies are discussed, namely 464XLAT, Dual-Stack Lite, Lightweight 4over6, MAP-E, and MAP-T. Moreover, the deployment and implementations of these technologies are being analysed and inspected. This paper also overviews the benchmarking methodology for IPv6 transition technologies and surveys several papers that investigated metrics and tools utilized in analysing the performance of different IPv6 transition technologies.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.3.5
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Ahmed Al-hamadani, and Gábor Lencse
Towards Implementing a Software Tester for Benchmarking MAP-T Devices
Several IPv6 transition technologies have been designed and developed over the past few years to accelerate the full adoption of the IPv6 address pool. To make things more organized, the Benchmarking Working Group of IETF has standardized a comprehensive benchmarking methodology for these technologies in its RFC 8219. The Mapping of Address and Port using Translation (MAP-T) is one of the most important transition technologies that belong to the double translation category in RFC 8219. This paper aims at presenting our progress towards implementing the world’s first RFC 8219 compliant Tester for the MAP-T devices, more specifically, the MAP-T Customer Edge (CE) and the MAP-T Border Relay (BR). As part of the work of this paper, we presented a typical design for the Tester, followed by a discussion about the operational requirements, the scope of measurements, and some design considerations. Then, we installed a testbed for one of the MAP-T implementations, called Jool, and showed the results of the testbed. And finally, we ended up with a brief description of the MAP-T test program and its configuration parameters in case of testing the BR device.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.3.6
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Ali Raheem Mandeel, Mohammed Salah Al-Radhi, and Tamás Gábor Csapó
Speaker Adaptation Experiments with Limited Data for End-to-End Text-To-Speech Synthesis using Tacotron2
Speech synthesis has the aim of generating humanlike speech from text. Nowadays, with end-to-end systems, highly natural synthesized speech can be achieved if a large enough dataset is available from the target speaker. However, often it would be necessary to adapt to a target speaker for whom only a few training samples are available. Limited data speaker adaptation might be a difficult problem due to the overly few training samples. Issues might appear with a limited speaker dataset, such as the irregular allocation of linguistic tokens (i.e., some speech sounds are left out from the synthesized speech). To build lightweight systems, measuring the number of minimum data samples and training epochs is crucial to acquire a reasonable quality. We conducted detailed experiments with four target speakers for adaptive speaker text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis to show the performance of the end-to-end Tacotron2 model and the WaveGlow neural vocoder with an English dataset at several training data samples and training lengths. According to our investigation of objective and subjective evaluations, the Tacotron2 model exhibits good performance in terms of speech quality and similarity for unseen target speakers at 100 sentences of data (pair of text and audio) with a relatively low training time.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.3.7
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Hussein Taha, Péter Vári, and Szilvia Nagy
On the Challenges of Mutual Interference between Cable Television Networks and Mobile Fixed Communication Networks in the Digital Dividend Bands
Recently, the issue of monitoring and repairing leakage from cable television networks have re-emerged, particularly after the International Telecommunication Union released a part of the ultra-high frequency spectrum to mobile broadband services. The newly allocated spectrum, known as the digital dividend bands, was traditionally used throughout Europe for digital TV broadcasting. The emerging problem is the mutual interference between the new frequency spectrum utilized by the Mobile/Fixed Communication Networks and the band used by cable TV providers to offer their services. This article is a brief overview and a starting point for extensive research in this area. We started with a simple description of the cable television system and mobile/fixed communication networks focusing on the aspects associated with ingress and egress interference issues. We also discussed the approaches for detecting and measuring mutual interference and reviewed the relevant literature. This article is concluded with some proposed measures for reducing or mitigating mutual interference.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.3.8
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Ali Jawad Ibada, Boldizsár Tüű-Szabó, and László T. Kóczy
Effect of the initial population construction on the DBMEA algorithm searching for the optimal solution of the traveling salesman problem
There are many factors that affect the performance of the evolutionary and memetic algorithms. One of these factors is the proper selection of the initial population, as it represents a very important criterion contributing to the convergence speed. Selecting a conveniently preprocessed initial population definitely increases the convergence speed and thus accelerates the probability of steering the search towards better regions in the search space, hence, avoiding premature convergence towards a local optimum. In this paper, we propose a new method for generating the initial individual candidate solution called Circle Group Heuristic (CGH) for Discrete Bacterial Memetic Evolutionary Algorithm (DBMEA), which is built with aid of a simple Genetic Algorithm (GA). CGH has been tested for several benchmark reference data of the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). The practical results show that CGH gives better tours compared with other well-known heuristic tour construction methods.

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DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.3.9
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Germar Schneider, Paul Patolla, Matthias Fehr, Dirk Reichelt, Feryel Zoghlami, and Jerker Delsing
Micro Service based Sensor Integration Efficiency and Feasibility in the Semiconductor Industry
The semiconductor industry is strongly increasing the production capacities and the product portfolio for a wide range of applications that are needed in the worldwide supply chains e.g. the automotive, computer and security industry. The complex manufacturing processes require more automation, dig- italisation and IoT frameworks, especially for highly automated semiconductor manufacturing plants. Over the last years, this industry spent much effort to control highly sensitive materials in production by product monitoring using advanced process control by various sensors in production. Nevertheless, until today, sensor integration, especially for such sensors that are not supported by the equipment vendors, is time-consuming and complicated. This article aims to use a micro-service-based approach by Eclipse Arrowhead as an open-source microservice architecture and implementation platform [1]. This architecture is an easy and powerful framework that can be used for multiple sensor applications to control the manufacturing material flow in a modern semiconductor plant with a high product mix. The article describes how the engineering process was designed, the architecture of the use case and the main benefits in the operational business are shown.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.3.10
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