32,844 research outputs found
Phase Synchronization in Railway Timetables
Timetable construction belongs to the most important optimization problems in
public transport. Finding optimal or near-optimal timetables under the
subsidiary conditions of minimizing travel times and other criteria is a
targeted contribution to the functioning of public transport. In addition to
efficiency (given, e.g., by minimal average travel times), a significant
feature of a timetable is its robustness against delay propagation. Here we
study the balance of efficiency and robustness in long-distance railway
timetables (in particular the current long-distance railway timetable in
Germany) from the perspective of synchronization, exploiting the fact that a
major part of the trains run nearly periodically. We find that synchronization
is highest at intermediate-sized stations. We argue that this synchronization
perspective opens a new avenue towards an understanding of railway timetables
by representing them as spatio-temporal phase patterns. Robustness and
efficiency can then be viewed as properties of this phase pattern
HOG, LBP and SVM based Traffic Density Estimation at Intersection
Increased amount of vehicular traffic on roads is a significant issue. High
amount of vehicular traffic creates traffic congestion, unwanted delays,
pollution, money loss, health issues, accidents, emergency vehicle passage and
traffic violations that ends up in the decline in productivity. In peak hours,
the issues become even worse. Traditional traffic management and control
systems fail to tackle this problem. Currently, the traffic lights at
intersections aren't adaptive and have fixed time delays. There's a necessity
of an optimized and sensible control system which would enhance the efficiency
of traffic flow. Smart traffic systems perform estimation of traffic density
and create the traffic lights modification consistent with the quantity of
traffic. We tend to propose an efficient way to estimate the traffic density on
intersection using image processing and machine learning techniques in real
time. The proposed methodology takes pictures of traffic at junction to
estimate the traffic density. We use Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG),
Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) based approach for
traffic density estimation. The strategy is computationally inexpensive and can
run efficiently on raspberry pi board. Code is released at
https://github.com/DevashishPrasad/Smart-Traffic-Junction.Comment: paper accepted at IEEE PuneCon 201
On the Activity Privacy of Blockchain for IoT
Security is one of the fundamental challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT)
due to the heterogeneity and resource constraints of the IoT devices. Device
classification methods are employed to enhance the security of IoT by detecting
unregistered devices or traffic patterns. In recent years, blockchain has
received tremendous attention as a distributed trustless platform to enhance
the security of IoT. Conventional device identification methods are not
directly applicable in blockchain-based IoT as network layer packets are not
stored in the blockchain. Moreover, the transactions are broadcast and thus
have no destination IP address and contain a public key as the user identity,
and are stored permanently in blockchain which can be read by any entity in the
network. We show that device identification in blockchain introduces privacy
risks as the malicious nodes can identify users' activity pattern by analyzing
the temporal pattern of their transactions in the blockchain. We study the
likelihood of classifying IoT devices by analyzing their information stored in
the blockchain, which to the best of our knowledge, is the first work of its
kind. We use a smart home as a representative IoT scenario. First, a blockchain
is populated according to a real-world smart home traffic dataset. We then
apply machine learning algorithms on the data stored in the blockchain to
analyze the success rate of device classification, modeling both an informed
and a blind attacker. Our results demonstrate success rates over 90\% in
classifying devices. We propose three timestamp obfuscation methods, namely
combining multiple packets into a single transaction, merging ledgers of
multiple devices, and randomly delaying transactions, to reduce the success
rate in classifying devices. The proposed timestamp obfuscation methods can
reduce the classification success rates to as low as 20%
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