Study of a Dynamic Cooperative Trading Queue Routing Control Scheme for Freeways and Facilities with Parallel Queues

This article explores the coalitional stability of a new cooperative control policy for freeways and parallel queuing facilities with multiple servers. Based on predicted future delays per queue or lane, a VOT-heterogeneous population of agents can agree to switch lanes or queues and transfer payments to each other in order to minimize the total cost of the incoming platoon. The strategic interaction is captured by an n-level Stackelberg model with coalitions, while the cooperative structure is formulated as a partition function game (PFG). The stability concept explored is the strong-core for PFGs which we found appropiate given the nature of the problem. This concept ensures that the efficient allocation is individually rational and coalitionally stable. We analyze this control mechanism for two settings: a static vertical queue and a dynamic horizontal queue. For the former, we first characterize the properties of the underlying cooperative game. Our simulation results suggest that the setting is always strong-core stable. For the latter, we propose a new relaxation program for the strong-core concept. Our simulation results on a freeway bottleneck with constant outflow using Newell's car-following model show the imputations to be generally strong-core stable and the coalitional instabilities to remain small with regard to users' costs.Comment: 3 figures. Presented at Annual Meeting Transportation Research Board 2018, Washington DC. Proof of conjecture 1 pendin

Security in networks of unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance with an agent-based approach inspired by the principles of blockchain

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can support surveillance even in areas without network infrastructure. However, UAV networks raise security challenges because of its dynamic topology. This paper proposes a technique for maintaining security in UAV networks in the context of surveillance, by corroborating information about events from different sources. In this way, UAV networks can conform peer-to-peer information inspired by the principles of blockchain, and detect compromised UAVs based on trust policies. The proposed technique uses a secure asymmetric encryption with a pre-shared list of official UAVs. Using this technique, the wrong information can be detected when an official UAV is physically hijacked. The novel agent based simulator ABS-SecurityUAV is used to validate the proposed approach. In our experiments, around 90% of UAVs were able to corroborate information about a person walking in a controlled area, while none of the UAVs corroborated fake information coming from a hijacked UAV

Green communication for tracking heart rate with smartbands

The trend of using wearables for healthcare is steeply increasing nowadays, and, consequently, in the market, there are several gadgets that measure several body features. In addition, the mixed use between smartphones and wearables has motivated research like the current one. The main goal of this work is to reduce the amount of times that a certain smartband (SB) measures the heart rate (HR) in order to save energy in communications without significantly reducing the utility of the application. This work has used an SB Sony 2 for measuring heart rate, Fit API for storing data and Android for managing data. The current approach has been assessed with data from HR sensors collected for more than three months. Once all HR measures were collected, then the current approach detected hourly ranges whose heart rate were higher than normal. The hourly ranges allowed for estimating the time periods of weeks that the user could be at potential risk for measuring frequently in these (60 times per hour) ranges. Out of these ranges, the measurement frequency was lower (six times per hour). If SB measures an unusual heart rate, the app warns the user so they are aware of the risk and can act accordingly. We analyzed two cases and we conclude that energy consumption was reduced in 83.57% in communications when using training of several weeks. In addition, a prediction per day was made using data of 20 users. On average, tests obtained 63.04% of accuracy in this experimentation using the training over the data of one day for each user

Pairing-based authentication protocol for V2G networks in smart grid

[EN] Vehicle to Grid (V2G) network is a very important component for Smart Grid (SG), as it offers new services that help the optimization of both supply and demand of energy in the SG network and provide mobile distributed capacity of battery storage for minimizing the dependency of non-renewable energy sources. However, the privacy and anonymity of users¿ identity, confidentiality of the transmitted data and location of the Electric Vehicle (EV) must be guaranteed. This article proposes a pairing-based authentication protocol that guarantees confidentiality of communications, protects the identities of EV users and prevents attackers from tracking the vehicle. Results from computing and communications performance analyses were better in comparison to other protocols, thus overcoming signaling congestion and reducing bandwidth consumption. The protocol protects EVs from various known attacks and its formal security analysis revealed it achieves the security goals.Roman, LFA.; Gondim, PRL.; Lloret, J. (2019). Pairing-based authentication protocol for V2G networks in smart grid. Ad Hoc Networks. 90:1-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2018.08.0151169

EmotIoT: an IoT system to improve users’ wellbeing

IoT provides applications and possibilities to improve people’s daily lives and business environments. However, most of these technologies have not been exploited in the field of emotions. With the amount of data that can be collected through IoT, emotions could be detected and anticipated. Since the study of related works indicates a lack of methodological approaches in designing IoT systems from the perspective of emotions and smart adaption rules, we introduce a methodology that can help design IoT systems quickly in this scenario, where the detection of users is valuable. In order to test the methodology presented, we apply the proposed stages to design an IoT smart recommender system named EmotIoT. The system allows anticipating and predicting future users’ emotions using parameters collected from IoT devices. It recommends new activities for the user in order to obtain a final state. Test results validate our recommender system as it has obtained more than 80% accuracy in predicting future user emotions

Influencing Factors in Autotransplantation of Teeth with Open Apex: A Review of the Literature

Dental autotransplantation is the process by which a tooth located in its natural socket is extracted and relocated to another socket in which the tooth is missing or has been extracted due to various reasons such as trauma, extensive caries or periapical pathology, among other reasons. This proposed technique offers a more conservative alternative for patients in comparison with prosthetic or implant techniques, especially in young patients where implants are contraindicated until their maxillary bone system’s growth ends. Thus, the objective of this review was to present a qualitative synthesis of the risk factors that influence the results of open apex dental autotransplantation in humans. After confirming that there are various factors that influence dental autotransplantation, it was concluded that the extra-alveolar time of the donor tooth and the periodontal damage of the root of the donor tooth are the factors of greatest interest in the literature, both closely linked to the use of 3D replication of the transplanted toot

Improved trilateration for indoor localization: Neural network and centroid-based approach

[EN] Location awareness is the key to success to many location-based services applications such as indoor navigation, elderly tracking, emergency management, and so on. Trilateration-based localization using received signal strength measurements is widely used in wireless sensor network-based localization and tracking systems due to its simplicity and low computational cost. However, localization accuracy obtained with the trilateration technique is generally very poor because of fluctuating nature of received signal strength measurements. The reason behind such notorious behavior of received signal strength is dynamicity in target motion and surrounding environment. In addition, the significant localization error is induced during each iteration step during trilateration, which gets propagated in the next iterations. To address this problem, this article presents an improved trilateration-based architecture named Trilateration Centroid Generalized Regression Neural Network. The proposed Trilateration Centroid Generalized Regression Neural Network-based localization algorithm inherits the simplicity and efficiency of three concepts namely trilateration, centroid, and Generalized Regression Neural Network. The extensive simulation results indicate that the proposed Trilateration Centroid Generalized Regression Neural Network algorithm demonstrates superior localization performance as compared to trilateration, and Generalized Regression Neural Network algorithm.Jondhale, SR.; Jondhale, AS.; Deshpande, PS.; Lloret, J. (2021). Improved trilateration for indoor localization: Neural network and centroid-based approach. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks (Online). 17(11):1-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/15501477211053997114171

SDN-DMM for intelligent mobility management in heterogeneous mobile IP networks

[EN] Mobility management applied to the traditional architecture of the Internet has become a great challenge because of the exponential growth in the number of devices that can connect to the network. This article proposes a Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-based architecture, called SDN-DMM (SDN-Distributed Mobility Management), that deals with the distributed mode of mobility management in heterogeneous access networks in a simplified and efficient way, ensuring mainly the continuity of IP sessions. Intent-based mobility management with an IP mapping schema for mobile node identification offers optimized routing without tunneling techniques, hence, an efficient use of the network infrastructure. The simplified mobility control API reduces both signaling and handover latency costs and provides a better scalability and performance in comparison with traditional and SDN-based DMM approaches. An analytical evaluation of such costs demonstrated the better performance of SDN-DMM, and a proof of concept of the proposal was implemented in a real environment.CAPES (Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior) - Brasil; Secretaria de Estado de Investigacion, Desarrollo e Innovacion, Grant/Award Number: TIN2017-84802-C2-1-P; "Convocatoria 2017 - Proyectos I+D+I Programa Estatal de Investigacion, Desarrollo e Innovacion, convocatoria excelencia", Grant/Award Number: TIN2017-84802-C2-1-P; FAP-DF ("Fundacao de Apoio a Pesquisa do Distrito Federal")-BrazilTorres Cordova, R.; Gondim, PRL.; Llerena, YP.; Lloret, J. (2019). SDN-DMM for intelligent mobility management in heterogeneous mobile IP networks. International Journal of Communication Systems. 32(17):1-31. https://doi.org/10.1002/dac.4140131321

An automated model for the assessment of QoE of adaptive video streaming over wireless networks

[EN] Nowadays, heterogeneous devices are widely utilizing Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to transfer the data. Furthermore, HTTP adaptive video streaming (HAS) technology transmits the video data over wired and wireless networks. In adaptive technology services, a client's application receives a streaming video through the adaptation of its quality to the network condition. However, such a technology has increased the demand for Quality of Experience (QoE) in terms of prediction and assessment. It can also cause a challenging behavior regarding subjective and objective QoE evaluations of HTTP adaptive video over time since each Quality of Service (QoS) parameter affects the QoE of end-users separately. This paper introduces a methodology design for the evaluation of subjective QoE in adaptive video streaming over wireless networks. Besides, some parameters are considered such as video characteristics, segment length, initial delay, switch strategy, stalls, as well as QoS parameters. The experiment's evaluation demonstrated that objective metrics can be mapped to the most significant subjective parameters for user's experience. The automated model could function to demonstrate the importance of correlation for network behaviors' parameters. Consequently, it directly influences the satisfaction of the end-user's perceptual quality. In comparison with other recent related works, the model provided a positive Pearson Correlation value. Simulated results give a better performance between objective Structural Similarity (SSIM) and subjective Mean Opinion Score (MOS) evaluation metrics for all video test samples.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 Generacion de Conocimiento" within the Project under Grant TIN2017-84802-C2-1-P. This study has been partially done in the computer science departments at the (University of Sulaimani and Halabja).Taha, M.; Ali, A.; Lloret, J.; Gondim, PRL.; Canovas, A. (2021). An automated model for the assessment of QoE of adaptive video streaming over wireless networks. Multimedia Tools and Applications. 80(17):26833-26854. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-10934-92683326854801

Secret sharing-based authentication and key agreement protocol for machine-type communications

[EN] One of the main challenges for the development of the Internet of Things is the authentication of large numbers of devices/sensors, commonly served by massive machine-type communications, which jointly with long-term evolution has been considered one of the main foundations for the continued growth of Internet of Things connectivity and an important issue to be treated in the development of 5G networks. This article describes some protocols for the group-based authentication of devices/sensors in Internet of Things and presents a new group authentication protocol based on Shamir's secret and Lagrange interpolation formula. The new protocol protects privacy, avoids unauthorized access to information, and assists in the prevention of attacks, as replay, distributed denial of service, and man-in-the-middle. A security analysis and comparisons among the 3GPP evolved packet system authentication and key agreement standard protocol and other recent group authentication protocols were performed toward proving the efficiency of the proposed protocol. The comparisons regard security properties and computational and communication costs. The safety of the protocol was formally verified through simulations conducted by automated validation of internet security protocols and applications.Lopes, APG.; Hilgert, LO.; Gondim, PRL.; Lloret, J. (2019). Secret sharing-based authentication and key agreement protocol for machine-type communications. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks (Online). 15(4):1-21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1550147719841003S12115