In this paper, we consider precoder design for wireless data aggregation in sensor networks. The precoder optimization problem can be formulated as minimization of mean squared error under transmit power and block diagonal constraints. We include statistical correlation of data into the optimization problem, which is appeared in typical applications but is ignored in conventional designing methods. We propose precoder optimization algorithms based on projected gradient descent with projection onto the constraint sets. The proposed method can achieve better performance than the conventional methods that do not incorporate data correlation, especially when data are highly correlated. We also extend the proposed approach to the context of over-the-air computation.

Multi-signatures have seen renewed interest due to their application to blockchains, e.g., BIP 340 (one of the Bitcoin improvement proposals), which has triggered the proposals of several new schemes with improved efficiency. However, many previous works have a “loose” security reduction (a large gap between the difficulty of the security assumption and breaking the scheme) or depend on strong idealized assumptions such as the algebraic group model (AGM). This makes the achieved level of security uncertain when instantiated in groups typically used in practice, and it becomes unclear for developers how secure a given scheme is for a given choice of security parameters. Thus, this leads to the question “what kind of schemes can we construct that achieves tight security based on standard assumptions?”. In this paper, we show a simple two-round tightly-secure pairing-based multi-signature scheme based on the computation Diffie-Hellman problem in the random oracle model. This proposal is the first two-round multi-signature scheme that achieves tight security based on a computational assumption and supports key aggregation. Furthermore, our scheme reduce the signature bit size by 19% compared with the shortest existing tightly-secure DDH-based multi-signature scheme. Moreover, we implemented our scheme in C++ and confirmed that it is efficient in practice; to complete the verification takes less than 1[ms] with a total (computational) signing time of 13[ms] for under 100 signers. The source code of the implementation is published as OSS.

The demand for low-latency transmission of large-capacity video, such as 4K and 8K, is increasing for various applications such as live-broadcast program production, sports viewing, and medical care. In the broadcast industry, low-latency video transmission is required in remote production, an emerging workflow for outside broadcasting. For ideal remote production, long-distance transmission of uncompressed 8K60p video signals, ultra-low latency less than 16.7 ms, and PTP synchronization through network are required; however, no existing video-transmission system fully satisfy these requirements. We focused on optical transport technologies capable of long-distance and large-capacity communication, which were previously used only in telecommunication-carrier networks. To fully utilize optical transport technologies, we propose the first-ever video-transmission system architecture capable of sending and receiving uncompressed 8K video directly through large-capacity optical paths. A transmission timing control in seamless protection switching is also proposed to improve the tolerance to network impairment. As a means of implementation, we focused on whitebox transponder, an emerging type of optical transponder with a disaggregation configuration. The disaggregation configuration enables flexible configuration changes, additional implementations, and cost reduction by separating various functions of optical transponders and controlling them with a standardized interface. We implemented the ultra-low-latency video-transmission system utilizing whitebox transponder Galileo. We developed a hardware plug-in unit for video transmission (VideoPIU), and software to control the VideoPIU. In the video-transmission experiments with 120-km optical fiber, we confirmed that it was capable of transmitting uncompressed 8K60p video stably in 1.3 ms latency and highly accurate PTP synchronization through the optical network, which was required in the ideal remote production. In addition, the application to immersive sports viewing is also presented. Consequently, excellent potential to support the unprecedented applications is demonstrated.

Aiming at the problem of spatial focus regions distribution dispersion and dislocation in feature pyramid networks and insufficient feature dependency acquisition in both spatial and channel dimensions, this paper proposes a spatial-temporal aggregated shuffle attention for video instance segmentation (STASA-VIS). First, an mixed subsampling (MS) module to embed activating features from the low-level target area of feature pyramid into the high-level is designed, so as to aggregate spatial information on target area. Taking advantage of the coherent information in video frames, STASA-VIS uses the first ones of every 5 video frames as the key-frames and then propagates the keyframe feature maps of the pyramid layers forward in the time domain, and fuses with the non-keyframe mixed subsampled features to achieve time-domain consistent feature aggregation. Finally, STASA-VIS embeds shuffle attention in the backbone to capture the pixel-level pairwise relationship and dimensional dependencies among the channels and reduce the computation. Experimental results show that the segmentation accuracy of STASA-VIS reaches 41.2%, and the test speed reaches 34FPS, which is better than the state-of-the-art one stage video instance segmentation (VIS) methods in accuracy and achieves real-time segmentation.

Salient ship detection plays an important role in ensuring the safety of maritime transportation and navigation. However, due to the influence of waves, special weather, and illumination on the sea, existing saliency methods are still unable to achieve effective ship detection in a complex marine environment. To solve the problem, this paper proposed a novel saliency method based on an attention nested U-Structure (AU2Net). First, to make up for the shortcomings of the U-shaped structure, the pyramid pooling module (PPM) and global guidance paths (GGPs) are designed to guide the restoration of feature information. Then, the attention modules are added to the nested U-shaped structure to further refine the target characteristics. Ultimately, multi-level features and global context features are integrated through the feature aggregation module (FAM) to improve the ability to locate targets. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method could have at most 36.75% improvement in F-measure (Favg) compared to the other state-of-the-art methods.

In this paper, an automatic retransmission request (ARQ) scheme for IEEE 802.11ac is presented, which can solve the problem of severe packet loss and greatly improve the performance in error-prone environments. The proposed solution only requires to be deployed on the sender and is compatible with the 802.11 protocol. The algorithm utilizes the basic strategy of sliding retransmission and then adds the method of copying frames. The media access control (MAC) protocol data unit (MPDU) lost in the transmission and the newly added data frame brought by the sliding window change are replicated. The scheme retransmits the duplicated aggregated packet and further improves the throughput by increasing the probability of successful transmission of sub-frames. Besides, we also establish a mathematical model to analyze the performance of the proposed scheme. We introduce the concept of average aggregated sub-frames and express the sliding retransmission strategy as the aggregated transmission of average aggregated sub-frames, thereby simplifying the model and effectively analyzing the theoretical throughput of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results of Network simulator 3 (NS-3) simulation results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed algorithm is better than the traditional sliding retransmission ARQ algorithm in error-prone channels with a higher physical layer rate.

The spread of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the generation of large amounts of data, requiring massive communication, computing, and storage resources. Cloud computing plays an important role in realizing most IoT applications classified as massive machine type communication and cyber-physical control applications in vertical domains. To handle the increasing amount of IoT data, it is important to reduce the traffic concentrated in the cloud by distributing the computing and storage resources to the network edge side and to suppress the latency of the IoT applications. In this paper, we first present a recent literature review on fog/edge computing and data aggregation as representative traffic reduction technologies for efficiently utilizing communication, computing, and storage resources in IoT systems, and then focus on data aggregation control minimizing the latency in an IoT gateway. We then present a unified modeling for statistical and nonstatistical data aggregation and analyze its latency. We analytically derive the Laplace-Stieltjes transform and average of the stationary distribution of the latency and approximate the average latency; we subsequently apply it to an adaptive aggregation number control for the time-variant data arrival. The transient traffic characteristics, that is, the absorption of traffic fluctuations realizing a stable optimal latency, were clarified through a simulation with a time-variant Poisson input and non-Poisson inputs, such as a Beta input, which is a typical IoT traffic model.

A conventional data center that consists of monolithic-servers is confronted with limitations including lack of operational flexibility, low resource utilization, low maintainability, etc. Resource disaggregation is a promising solution to address the above issues. We propose a concept of disaggregated cloud data center architecture called Flow-in-Cloud (FiC) that enables an existing cluster computer system to expand an accelerator pool through a high-speed network. FlowOS-RM manages the entire pool resources, and deploys a user job on a dynamically constructed slice according to a user request. This slice consists of compute nodes and accelerators where each accelerator is attached to the corresponding compute node. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of FiC in a proof of concept experiment running a distributed deep learning application on the prototype system. The result successfully warrants the applicability of the proposed system.

Data aggregation trees in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being used for gathering data for various purposes. Especially for the trees within buildings or civil structures, the total amount of energy consumption in a tree must be reduced to save energy. Therefore, the minimum energy-cost aggregation tree (MECAT) and MECAT with relay nodes (MECAT_RN) problems are being discussed to reduce energy consumption in data aggregation trees in WSNs. This paper proposes the tree node switching algorithm (TNSA) that improves on the previous algorithms for the MECAT and MECAT_RN problems in terms of energy efficiency. TNSA repeatedly switches nodes in a tree to reduce the number of packets sent in the tree. Packets are reduced by improving the accommodation efficiency of each packet, in which multiple sensor reports are accommodated. As a result of applying TNSA to MECATs and MECAT-RNs, energy consumption can be reduced significantly with a small burden.

In this paper, we consider the design problem of an unknown-input observer for distributed network systems under the existence of communication delays. In the proposed method, each node estimates all states and calculates inputs from its own estimate. It is assumed that the controller of each node is given by an observer-based controller. When calculating each node, the input values of the other nodes cannot be utilized. Therefore, each node calculates alternative inputs instead of the unknown inputs of the other nodes. The alternative inputs are generated by own estimate based on the feedback controller of the other nodes given by the assumption. Each node utilizes these values instead of the unknown inputs when calculating the estimation and delay compensation. The stability of the estimation error of the proposed observer is proven by a Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional. The stability condition is given by a linear matrix inequality (LMI). Finally, the result of a numerical simulation is shown to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Sensor-data gathering using multi-hop connections in a wireless sensor network is being widely used, and a tree topology for data gathering is considered promising because it eases data aggregation. Therefore, many sensor-tree-creation algorithms have been proposed. The sensors in a tree, however, generally run on batteries, so long tree lifetime is one of the most important factors in collecting sensor data from a tree over a long period. It has been proven that creating the longest-lifetime tree is a non-deterministic-polynomial complete problem; thus, all previously proposed sensor-tree-creation algorithms are heuristic. To evaluate a heuristic algorithm, the time complexity of the algorithm is very important, as well as the quantitative evaluation of the lifetimes of the created trees and algorithm speed. This paper proposes an algorithm called assured switching with accurate graph optimization (ASAGAO) that can create a sensor tree with a much longer lifetime much faster than other sensor-tree-creation algorithms. In addition, it has much smaller time complexity.

Many studies have revealed that the performance of software-based Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) is insufficient for mission-critical networks. Scaling-out approaches, such as auto-scaling of VNFs, could handle a huge amount of traffic; however, the exponential traffic growth confronts us the limitations of both expandability of physical resources and complexity of their management. In this paper, we propose a fast datapath processing method called Packet Aggregation Flow (PA-Flow) that is based on hop-by-hop packet aggregation for more efficient Service Function Chaining (SFC). PA-Flow extends a notion of existing intra-node packet aggregation toward network-wide packet aggregation, and we introduce following three novel features. First, packet I/O overheads at intermediate network devices including NFV-nodes are mitigated by reduction of packet amount. Second, aggregated packets are further aggregated as going through the service chain in a hop-by-hop manner. Finally, next-hop aware packet aggregation is realized using OpenFlow-based flow tables. PA-Flow is designed to be available with various VNF forms (e.g. VM/container/baremetal-based) and virtual I/O technologies (e.g. vhost-user/SR-IOV), and its implementation does not bring noticeable delay for aggregation. We conducted two evaluations: (i) a baseline evaluation for understanding fundamental performance characteristics of PA-Flow (ii) a simulation-based SFC evaluation for proving PA-Flow's effect in a realistic environment. The results showed that throughput of short packet forwarding was improved by 4 times. Moreover, the total number of packets was reduced by 93% in a large-scale SFC.

A passively mobile system is an abstract notion of mobile ad-hoc networks. It is a collection of agents with computing devices. Agents move in a region, but the algorithm cannot control their physical behavior (i.e., how they move). The population protocol model is one of the promising models in which the computation proceeds by the pairwise communication between two agents. The communicating agents update their states by a specified transition function (algorithm). In this paper, we consider a general form of the aggregation problem with a base station. The base station is a special agent having the computational power more powerful than others. In the aggregation problem, the base station has to sum up for inputs distributed to other agents. We propose an algorithm that solves the aggregation problem in sub-linear parallel time using a relatively small number of states per agent. More precisely, our algorithm solves the aggregation problem with input domain X in O(√n log2 n) parallel time and O(|X|2) states per agent (except for the base station) with high probability.

In this letter, a novel frame aggregation scheduler is proposed to solve the head-of-line blocking problem for real-time user datagram protocol (UDP) traffic in error-prone and aggregation-enabled wireless local area networks (WLANs). The key to the proposed scheduler is to break the restriction of in-order delivery over the WLAN. The simulation results show that the proposed scheduler can achieve high UDP goodput and low delay compared to the conventional scheduler.

Among the five carrier aggregation (CA) deployment scenarios, the most preferred scenario is Scenario 1, which maximizes CA gain by fully overlapping a primary cell (PCell) and one or more secondary cells (SCells). It is possible since the same frequency band is used between component carriers (CCs) so nearly the same coverage is expected. However, Scenario 1 cannot guarantee high throughput in multi-radio access technology carrier aggregation (multi-RAT CA) which is actively being researched. Different carrier frequency characteristics in multi-RAT CA makes it hard to accurately match different frequency ranges. If the ranges of PCell and SCell differ, high throughput may not be obtained despite the CA operation. We found a coverage mismatch of approximately 37% between the PCell and SCell in the deployed network and realized a reduced CA gain in those areas. In this paper, we propose a novel PCell change approach named “PCell frequency switching (PFS)” to guarantee high throughput against cell coverage mismatch in multi-RAT CA deployment scenario 1. The experiment results show that the throughput increased by 9.7% on average and especially by 80.9% around the cell edge area when PFS is applied instead of the legacy CA handover operation.

This paper proposes a distributed delay-compensated observer for a wireless sensor network with delay. Each node of the sensor network aggregates data from the other nodes and sends the aggregated data to the neighbor nodes. In this communication, each node also compensates communication delays among the neighbor nodes. Therefore, all of the nodes can synchronize their sensor measurements using scalable and local communication in real-time. All of the nodes estimate the state variables of a system simultaneously. The observer in each node is similar to the delay-compensated observer with multi-sensor delays proposed by Watanabe et al. Convergence rates for the proposed observer can be arbitrarily designed regardless of the communication delays. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a numerical simulation.

Recent works on enhancing the comfort and convenience of vehicles have revealed the advantage of various wireless sensor nodes for information collection. For the highly required reliability in vehicles, Reliable Wireless Communication based on Substitute Forwarding (RWCSF) has been proposed. It ensures that 99.999% of communications can finish within 20ms, which is the quality of communication equivalent to wired links. However, the performance was evaluated in very limited situations, where two or more communications never occurred simultaneously and no noise was present. In this paper, we enhance RWCSF to achieve the target communication quality even if two or more communications occur simultaneously. In addition, we evaluate the enhanced method in various types of vehicles that create internal noise.

In terms of spatial online aggregation, traditional stand-alone serial methods gradually become limited. Although parallel computing is widely studied nowadays, there scarcely has research conducted on the index-based parallel online aggregation methods, specifically for spatial data. In this letter, a parallel multilevel indexing method is proposed to accelerate spatial online aggregation analyses, which contains two steps. In the first step, a parallel aR tree index is built to accelerate aggregate query locally. In the second step, a multilevel sampling data pyramid structure is built based on the parallel aR tree index, which contribute to the concurrent returned query results with certain confidence degree. Experimental and analytical results verify that the methods are capable of handling billion-scale data.

Data aggregation, which is the process of summarizing a large amount of data, is an effective method for saving limited communication resources, such as radio frequency and sensor-node energy. Packet aggregation in wireless LAN and sensed-data aggregation in wireless sensor networks are typical examples. We propose and analyze two queueing models of fundamental statistical data aggregation schemes: constant interval and constant aggregation number. We represent each aggregation scheme by a tandem queueing network model with a gate at the aggregation process and a single server queue at a transmission process. We analytically derive the stationary distribution and Laplace-Stieltjes transform of the system time for each aggregation and transmission process and of the total system time. We then numerically evaluate the stationary mean system time characteristics and clarify that each model has an optimal aggregation parameter (i.e., an optimal aggregation interval or optimal aggregation number), that minimizes the mean total system time. In addition, we derive the explicit optimal aggregation parameter for a D/M/1 transmission model with each aggregation scheme and clarify that it provides accurate approximation of that of each aggregation model. The optimal aggregation interval was determined by the transmission rate alone, while the optimal aggregation number was determined by the arrival and transmission rates alone with explicitly derived proportional constants. These results can provide a theoretical basis and a guideline for designing aggregation devices, such as IoT gateways.

An important problem in mathematics and data science, given two or more metric spaces, is obtaining a metric of the product space by aggregating the source metrics using a multivariate function. In 1981, Borsík and Doboš solved the problem, and much progress has subsequently been made in generalizations of the problem. The triangle inequality is a key property for a bivariate function to be a metric. In the metric aggregation, requesting the triangle inequality of the resulting metric imposes the subadditivity on the aggregating function. However, in some applications, such as the image matching, a relaxed notion of the triangle inequality is useful and this relaxation may enlarge the scope of the aggregators to include some natural superadditive functions such as the harmonic mean. This paper examines the aggregation of two semimetrics (i.e. metrics with a relaxed triangle inequality) by the harmonic mean is studied and shows that such aggregation weakly preserves the relaxed triangle inequalities. As an application, the paper presents an alternative simple proof of the relaxed triangle inequality satisfied by the robust Jaccard-Tanimoto set dissimilarity, which was originally shown by Gragera and Suppakitpaisarn in 2016.