Recent Issues - 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.

Download

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
Download

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
Download

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
Download

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
Download

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
Download

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
Download

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
Download

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
Download

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
Download

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
Download

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
Download

CALL FOR PAPERS

ICC 2023 / IEEE International Conference on Communications
IEEE ICC 2023, Roma, Italy

IEEE HPSR 2023 / IEEE International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing
IEEE HPSR 2023, Albuquerque, NM, USA

IECON 2023 / 49th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society
IECON IEEE IES 2023, Singapore

ADDITIONAL

Guidelines for our Authors

free

2022. 3^rd Issue

Volume XIV, Number 3

Table of contents

Full issue (10,4 MB)

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.

Download

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
Download

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.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.3.2
Download

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
Download

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
Download

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
Download

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
Download

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
Download

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
Download

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.

Reference
DOI: 10.36244/ICJ.2022.3.9
Download

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
Download