Design intelligence of web application for internet direct consumer-to-consumer trading

An online web application called Student-Trade has been developed. It is a state-of-the-art platform for direct consumer-to-consumer trading in the Internet. The platform is targeted for direct consumer-to-consumer trading among university students. The items for trading include books, household items, electronics, housing rental, sports equipment and tutoring services. This paper is on the design intelligence of the Student-Trade web application. One objective is to help the user to decide on the selling price of his item when the item is being posted in the web application. The system integrates a hybrid neighborhood search algorithm for determining the price of sale item when it is placed for trading in the Internet. Data mining techniques are explored for efficient processing of a vast amount of information in the database tables. In addition, the trading system would also have the intelligence of recommending items or products to a potential buyer given the previous purchase patterns. The aim is to provide a pleasant trading experience for the user. © 2015 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Considerations and design on apps for elderly with mild-to-moderate dementia

Many elderly people suffer from dementia in their daily life. The symptoms of dementia include impairments in thinking, communicating and recalling things of the past. Dementia can be caused by brain damage incurred from stroke (brain infarct), injury or other diseases. Recently, research has indicated a potential rehabilitative role for touchscreen technology in dementia. Elders can use apps to aid recall in order to support activities of daily living. Memory and activity apps can be developed for people suffering from early dementia. This paper presents the current state of development in the field of cognitive tests. It has also presented the many considerations and design issues related to the development of apps for people with dementia. © 2015 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

AALLA: Attack-Aware Logical Link Assignment Cost-Minimization Model for Protecting Software-Defined Networks against DDoS Attacks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which is used in Industrial Internet of Things, uses a controller as its “network brain” located at the control plane. This uniquely distinguishes it from the traditional networking paradigms because it provides a global view of the entire network. In SDN, the controller can become a single point of failure, which may cause the whole network service to be compromised. Also, data packet transmission between controllers and switches could be impaired by natural disasters, causing hardware malfunctioning or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Thus, SDN controllers are vulnerable to both hardware and software failures. To overcome this single point of failure in SDN, this paper proposes an attack-aware logical link assignment (AALLA) mathematical model with the ultimate aim of restoring the SDN network by using logical link assignment from switches to the cluster (backup) controllers. We formulate the AALLA model in integer linear programming (ILP), which restores the disrupted SDN network availability by assigning the logical links to the cluster (backup) controllers. More precisely, given a set of switches that are managed by the controller(s), this model simultaneously determines the optimal cost for controllers, links, and switches

Virtual sensing directional hub MAC (VSDH-MAC) protocol with power control

Medium access control (MAC) protocols play a vital role in making effective use of a multiple access channel as it governs the achievable performance such as channel utilization and corresponding quality of service of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, a virtual carrier sensing directional hub (VSDH) MAC protocol incorporating realistic directional antenna patterns is proposed for directional single hub centralized WSNs. While in most instances, MAC protocols assume idealized directional antenna patterns, the proposed VSDH-MAC protocol incorporates realistic directional antenna patterns to deliver enhanced link performance. We demonstrate that the use of directional antennas with a suitable MAC protocol can provide enhanced communication range and increased throughput with reduced energy consumption at each node, compared to the case when only omnidirectional antennas are used. For the scenarios considered in this study, results show that the average transmit power of the sensor nodes can be reduced by a factor of two, and at the same time offer significantly extended lifetime

Applications of ontology in the Internet of Things: a systematic analysis

Ontology has been increasingly implemented to facilitate the Internet of Things (IoT) activities, such as tracking and information discovery, storage, information exchange, and object addressing. However, a complete understanding of using ontology in the IoT mechanism remains lacking. The main goal of this research is to recognize the use of ontology in the IoT process and investigate the services of ontology in IoT activities. A systematic literature review (SLR) is conducted using predefined protocols to analyze the literature about the usage of ontologies in IoT. The following conclusions are obtained from the SLR. (1) Primary studies (i.e., selected 115 articles) have addressed the need to use ontologies in IoT for industries and the academe, especially to minimize interoperability and integration of IoT devices. (2) About 31.30% of extant literature discussed ontology development concerning the IoT interoperability issue, while IoT privacy and integration issues are partially discussed in the literature. (3) IoT styles of modeling ontologies are diverse, whereas 35.65% of total studies adopted the OWL style. (4) The 32 articles (i.e., 27.83% of the total studies) reused IoT ontologies to handle diverse IoT methodologies. (5) A total of 45 IoT ontologies are well acknowledged, but the IoT community has widely utilized none. An in-depth analysis of different IoT ontologies suggests that the existing ontologies are beneficial in designing new IoT ontology or achieving three main requirements of the IoT field: interoperability, integration, and privacy. This SLR is finalized by identifying numerous validity threats and future directions

NFC Secure Payment and Verification Scheme with CS E-Ticket

As one of the most important techniques in IoT, NFC (Near Field Communication) is more interesting than ever. NFC is a short-range, high-frequency communication technology well suited for electronic tickets, micropayment, and access control function, which is widely used in the financial industry, traffic transport, road ban control, and other fields. However, NFC is becoming increasingly popular in the relevant field, but its secure problems, such as man-in-the-middle-attack and brute force attack, have hindered its further development. To address the security problems and specific application scenarios, we propose a NFC mobile electronic ticket secure payment and verification scheme in the paper. The proposed scheme uses a CS E-Ticket and offline session key generation and distribution technology to prevent major attacks and increase the security of NFC. As a result, the proposed scheme can not only be a good alternative to mobile e-ticket system but also be used in many NFC fields. Furthermore, compared with other existing schemes, the proposed scheme provides a higher security

On the Study of Vehicle Density in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are wireless communication networks which support cooperative driving among vehicles on the road. The specific characteristics of VANETs favor the development of attractive and challenging services and applications which rely on message exchanging among vehicles. These communication capabilities depend directly on the existence of nearby vehicles able to exchange information. Therefore, higher vehicle densities favor the communication among vehicles. However, vehicular communications are also strongly affected by the topology of the map (i.e., wireless signal could be attenuated due to the distance between the sender and receiver, and obstacles usually block signal transmission). In this paper, we study the influence of the roadmap topology and the number of vehicles when accounting for the vehicular communications capabilities, especially in urban scenarios. Additionally, we consider the use of two parameters: the SJ Ratio (SJR) and the Total Distance (TD), as the topology-related factors that better correlate with communications performance. Finally, we propose the use of a new density metric based on the number of vehicles, the complexity of the roadmap, and its maximum capacity. Hence, researchers will be able to accurately characterize the different urban scenarios and better validate their proposals related to cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems based on vehicular communications

Outage performance analysis and SWIPT optimization in energy-harvesting wireless sensor network deploying NOMA

Thanks to the benefits of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in wireless communications, we evaluate a wireless sensor network deploying NOMA (WSN-NOMA), where the destination can receive two data symbols in a whole transmission process with two time slots. In this work, two relaying protocols, so-called time-switching-based relaying WSN-NOMA (TSR WSN-NOMA) and power-splitting-based relaying WSN-NOMA (PSR WSN-NOMA) are deployed to study energy-harvesting (EH). Regarding the system performance analysis, we obtain the closed-form expressions for the exact and approximate outage probability (OP) in both protocols, and the delay-limited throughput is also evaluated. We then compare the two protocols theoretically, and two optimization problems are formulated to reduce the impact of OP and optimize the data rate. Our numerical and simulation results are provided to prove the theoretical and analytical analysis. Thanks to these results, a great performance gain can be achieved for both TSR WSN-NOMA and PSR WSN-NOMA if optimal values of TS and PS ratios are found. In addition, the optimized TSR WSN-NOMA outperforms that of PSR WSN-NOMA in terms of OP.Web of Science193art. no. 61

Energy sustainable paradigms and methods for future mobile networks: A survey

In this survey, we discuss the role of energy in the design of future mobile networks and, in particular, we advocate and elaborate on the use of energy harvesting (EH) hardware as a means to decrease the environmental footprint of 5G technology. To take full advantage of the harvested (renewable) energy, while still meeting the quality of service required by dense 5G deployments, suitable management techniques are here reviewed, highlighting the open issues that are still to be solved to provide eco-friendly and cost-effective mobile architectures. Several solutions have recently been proposed to tackle capacity, coverage and efficiency problems, including: C-RAN, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and fog computing, among others. However, these are not explicitly tailored to increase the energy efficiency of networks featuring renewable energy sources, and have the following limitations: (i) their energy savings are in many cases still insufficient and (ii) they do not consider network elements possessing energy harvesting capabilities. In this paper, we systematically review existing energy sustainable paradigms and methods to address points (i) and (ii), discussing how these can be exploited to obtain highly efficient, energy self-sufficient and high capacity networks. Several open issues have emerged from our review, ranging from the need for accurate energy, transmission and consumption models, to the lack of accurate data traffic profiles, to the use of power transfer, energy cooperation and energy trading techniques. These challenges are here discussed along with some research directions to follow for achieving sustainable 5G systems.Comment: Accepted by Elsevier Computer Communications, 21 pages, 9 figure