Smart Green Communication Protocols Based on Several-Fold Messages Extracted from Common Sequential Patterns in UAVs

[EN] Green communications can be crucial for saving energy in UAVs and enhancing their autonomy. The current work proposes to extract common sequential patterns of communications to gather each common pattern into a single several- fold message with a high-level compression. Since the messages of a pattern are elapsed from each other in time, the current approach performs a machine learning approach for estimating the elapsed times using off-line training. The learned predictive model is applied by each UAV during flight when receiving a several-fold compressed message. We have explored neural networks, linear regression and correlation analyses among others. The current approach has been tested in the domain of surveillance. In specific-purpose fleets of UAVs, the number of transmissions was reduced by 13.9 percent.This work was mainly done during the stay of the first author at the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown (now called Technological University Dublin), with the support from the "Universidad de Zaragoza," " Fundacion Bancaria Ibercaja," and "Fundacion CAI" in the "Programa Ibercaja-CAI de Estancias de Investigacion" with reference IT1/18. This work also acknowledges the research project "Construccion de un framework para agilizar el desarrollo de aplicaciones moviles en el ambito de la salud" funded by the University of Zaragoza and the Foundation Ibercaja with grant reference JIUZ-2017-TEC-03. We also acknowledge "CITIES: Ciudades inteligentes totalmente integrales, eficientes y sotenibles" (ref. 518RT0558) funded by CYTED ("Programa Iberoamericano de Ciencia y Tecnologia para el Desarrollo") and "Diseno colaborativo para la promocion del bienestar en ciudades inteligentes inclusivas" (TIN2017-88327-R) funded by the Spanish Council of Science, Innovation and Universities from the Spanish Government. This work has been partially supported by the "Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad" in the "Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnica de Excelencia, Subprograma Estatal de Generacin de Conocimiento" within the project under Grant TIN2017-84802-C2-1-P.García-Magariño, I.; Gray, G.; Lacuesta Gilaberte, R.; Lloret, J. (2020). Smart Green Communication Protocols Based on Several-Fold Messages Extracted from Common Sequential Patterns in UAVs. IEEE Network. 34(3):249-255. https://doi.org/10.1109/MNET.001.190041724925534

Smart Green Communication Protocols Based on Several-Fold Messages Extracted from Common Sequential Patterns in UAVs

Green communications can be crucial for saving energy in UAVs and enhancing their autonomy. The current work proposes to extract common sequential patterns of communications to gather each common pattern into a single several- fold message with a high-level compression. Since the messages of a pattern are elapsed from each other in time, the current approach performs a machine learning approach for estimating the elapsed times using off-line training. The learned predictive model is applied by each UAV during flight when receiving a several-fold compressed message. We have explored neural networks, linear regression and correlation analyses among others. The current approach has been tested in the domain of surveillance. In specific-purpose fleets of UAVs, the number of transmissions was reduced by 13.9 percent

Geospatial Information Research: State of the Art, Case Studies and Future Perspectives

Geospatial information science (GI science) is concerned with the development and application of geodetic and information science methods for modeling, acquiring, sharing, managing, exploring, analyzing, synthesizing, visualizing, and evaluating data on spatio-temporal phenomena related to the Earth. As an interdisciplinary scientific discipline, it focuses on developing and adapting information technologies to understand processes on the Earth and human-place interactions, to detect and predict trends and patterns in the observed data, and to support decision making. The authors – members of DGK, the Geoinformatics division, as part of the Committee on Geodesy of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, representing geodetic research and university teaching in Germany – have prepared this paper as a means to point out future research questions and directions in geospatial information science. For the different facets of geospatial information science, the state of art is presented and underlined with mostly own case studies. The paper thus illustrates which contributions the German GI community makes and which research perspectives arise in geospatial information science. The paper further demonstrates that GI science, with its expertise in data acquisition and interpretation, information modeling and management, integration, decision support, visualization, and dissemination, can help solve many of the grand challenges facing society today and in the future

Management system for Unmanned Aircraft Systems teams

This thesis investigates new schemes to improve the operability of heterogeneous Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) teams through the exploitation of inter-vehicular communications. Releasing ground links from unnecessary data exchanges saves resources (power, bandwidth, etc) and alleviates the inherent scalability problem resulting from the increase in the number of UAS to be controlled simultaneously. In first place, a framework to classify UAS according to their level of autonomy is presented along with efficient methodologies to assess the autonomy level of either individual or multiple UAS. An architecture based on an aerial Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is proposed for the management of the data exchange among all the vehicles in the team. A performance evaluation of the two most relevant MANET approaches for path discovery (namely, reactive and proactive) has been carried out by means of simulation of two well-known routing protocols: Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV). Several network configurations are generated to emulate different possible contingencies that might occur in real UAS team operations. Network topology evolution, vehicle flight dynamics and data traffic patterns are considered as input parameters to the simulation model. The analysis of the system behaviour for each possible network configuration is used to evaluate the appropriateness of both approaches in different mission scenarios. Alternative network solutions based on Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) for situations of intermittent connectivity and network partitioning are outlined. Finally, an assessment of the simulation results is presented along with a discussion about further research challenges

Applications

Volume 3 describes how resource-aware machine learning methods and techniques are used to successfully solve real-world problems. The book provides numerous specific application examples: in health and medicine for risk modelling, diagnosis, and treatment selection for diseases in electronics, steel production and milling for quality control during manufacturing processes in traffic, logistics for smart cities and for mobile communications

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-Enabled Wireless Communications and Networking

The emerging massive density of human-held and machine-type nodes implies larger traffic deviatiolns in the future than we are facing today. In the future, the network will be characterized by a high degree of flexibility, allowing it to adapt smoothly, autonomously, and efficiently to the quickly changing traffic demands both in time and space. This flexibility cannot be achieved when the network’s infrastructure remains static. To this end, the topic of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have enabled wireless communications, and networking has received increased attention. As mentioned above, the network must serve a massive density of nodes that can be either human-held (user devices) or machine-type nodes (sensors). If we wish to properly serve these nodes and optimize their data, a proper wireless connection is fundamental. This can be achieved by using UAV-enabled communication and networks. This Special Issue addresses the many existing issues that still exist to allow UAV-enabled wireless communications and networking to be properly rolled out

Applications

Volume 3 describes how resource-aware machine learning methods and techniques are used to successfully solve real-world problems. The book provides numerous specific application examples: in health and medicine for risk modelling, diagnosis, and treatment selection for diseases in electronics, steel production and milling for quality control during manufacturing processes in traffic, logistics for smart cities and for mobile communications

Twitter Bots’ Detection with Benford’s Law and Machine Learning

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have grown exponentially in terms of active users and have now become an influential factor in the formation of public opinions. For this reason, the use of bots and botnets for spreading misinformation on OSNs has become a widespread concern. Identifying bots and botnets on Twitter can require complex statistical methods to score a profile based on multiple features. Benford’s Law, or the Law of Anomalous Numbers, states that, in any naturally occurring sequence of numbers, the First Significant Leading Digit (FSLD) frequency follows a particular pattern such that they are unevenly distributed and reducing. This principle can be applied to the first-degree egocentric network of a Twitter profile to assess its conformity to such law and, thus, classify it as a bot profile or normal profile. This paper focuses on leveraging Benford’s Law in combination with various Machine Learning (ML) classifiers to identify bot profiles on Twitter. In addition, a comparison with other statistical methods is produced to confirm our classification results

A Blockchain-Based Retribution Mechanism for Collaborative Intrusion Detection

Collaborative intrusion detection approach uses the shared detection signature between the collaborative participants to facilitate coordinated defense. In the context of collaborative intrusion detection system (CIDS), however, there is no research focusing on the efficiency of the shared detection signature. The inefficient detection signature costs not only the IDS resource but also the process of the peer-to-peer (P2P) network. In this paper, we therefore propose a blockchain-based retribution mechanism, which aims to incentivize the participants to contribute to verifying the efficiency of the detection signature in terms of certain distributed consensus. We implement a prototype using Ethereum blockchain, which instantiates a token-based retribution mechanism and a smart contract-enabled voting-based distributed consensus. We conduct a number of experiments built on the prototype, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Word Embeddings for Fake Malware Generation

Signature and anomaly-based techniques are the fundamental methods to detect malware. However, in recent years this type of threat has advanced to become more complex and sophisticated, making these techniques less effective. For this reason, researchers have resorted to state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to combat the threat of information security. Nevertheless, despite the integration of the machine learning models, there is still a shortage of data in training that prevents these models from performing at their peak. In the past, generative models have been found to be highly effective at generating image-like data that are similar to the actual data distribution. In this paper, we leverage the knowledge of generative modeling on opcode sequences and aim to generate malware samples by taking advantage of the contextualized embeddings from BERT. We obtained promising results when differentiating between real and generated samples. We observe that generated malware has such similar characteristics to actual malware that the classifiers are having difficulty in distinguishing between the two, in which the classifiers falsely identify the generated malware as actual malware almost of the time