OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Consensus based Detection in the Presence of Data Falsification Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2015
Year: 2015

This paper considers the problem of detection in distributed networks in the presence of data falsification (Byzantine) attacks. Detection approaches considered in the paper are based on fully distributed consensus algorithms, where all of the nodes exchange information only with their neighbors in the absence of a fusion center. In such networks, we characterize the negative effect of Byzantines on the steady-state and transient detection performance of the conventional consensus based detection algorithms. To address this issue, we study the problem from the network designer's perspective. More specifically, we first propose a distributed weighted average consensus algorithm that is robust to Byzantine attacks. We show that, under reasonable assumptions, the global test statistic for detection can be computed locally at each node using our proposed consensus algorithm. We exploit the statistical distribution of the nodes' data to devise techniques for mitigating the influence of data falsifying Byzantines on the distributed detection system. Since some parameters of the statistical distribution of the nodes' data might not be known a priori, we propose learning based techniques to enable an adaptive design of the local fusion or update rules.
Towards an I/O Conformance Testing Theory for Software Product Lines based on Modal Interface Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2015
Year: 2015

We present an adaptation of input/output conformance (ioco) testing principles to families of similar implementation variants as appearing in product line engineering. Our proposed product line testing theory relies on Modal Interface Automata (MIA) as behavioral specification formalism. MIA enrich I/O-labeled transition systems with may/must modalities to distinguish mandatory from optional behavior, thus providing a semantic notion of intrinsic behavioral variability. In particular, MIA constitute a restricted, yet fully expressive subclass of I/O-labeled modal transition systems, guaranteeing desirable refinement and compositionality properties. The resulting modal-ioco relation defined on MIA is preserved under MIA refinement, which serves as variant derivation mechanism in our product line testing theory. As a result, modal-ioco is proven correct in the sense that it coincides with traditional ioco to hold for every derivable implementation variant. Based on this result, a family-based product line conformance testing framework can be established.
Towards correct-by-construction product variants of a software product line: GFML, a formal language for feature modules
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2015
Year: 2015

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a software engineering paradigm that focuses on reuse and variability. Although feature-oriented programming (FOP) can implement software product line efficiently, we still need a method to generate and prove correctness of all product variants more efficiently and automatically. In this context, we propose to manipulate feature modules which contain three kinds of artifacts: specification, code and correctness proof. We depict a methodology and a platform that help the user to automatically produce correct-by-construction product variants from the related feature modules. As a first step of this project, we begin by proposing a language, GFML, allowing the developer to write such feature modules. This language is designed so that the artifacts can be easily reused and composed. GFML files contain the different artifacts mentioned above.The idea is to compile them into FoCaLiZe, a language for specification, implementation and formal proof with some object-oriented flavor. In this paper, we define and illustrate this language. We also introduce a way to compose the feature modules on some examples.
Quantitative Analysis of Probabilistic Models of Software Product Lines with Statistical Model Checking
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2015
Year: 2015

We investigate the suitability of statistical model checking techniques for analysing quantitative properties of software product line models with probabilistic aspects. For this purpose, we enrich the feature-oriented language FLan with action rates, which specify the likelihood of exhibiting particular behaviour or of installing features at a specific moment or in a specific order. The enriched language (called PFLan) allows us to specify models of software product lines with probabilistic configurations and behaviour, e.g. by considering a PFLan semantics based on discrete-time Markov chains. The Maude implementation of PFLan is combined with the distributed statistical model checker MultiVeStA to perform quantitative analyses of a simple product line case study. The presented analyses include the likelihood of certain behaviour of interest (e.g. product malfunctioning) and the expected average cost of products.
Android based security and home automation system
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2015
Year: 2015

The smart mobile terminal operator platform Android is getting popular all over the world with its wide variety of applications and enormous use in numerous spheres of our daily life. Considering the fact of increasing demand of home security and automation, an Android based control system is presented in this paper where the proposed system can maintain the security of home main entrance and also the car door lock. Another important feature of the designed system is that it can control the overall appliances in a room. The mobile to security system or home automation system interface is established through Bluetooth. The hardware part is designed with the PIC microcontroller.
Output agreement in networks with unmatched disturbances and algebraic constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2015
Year: 2015

This paper considers a problem of output agreement in heterogeneous networks with dynamics on the nodes as well as on the edges. The control and disturbance signals entering the nodal dynamics are "unmatched" meaning that some nodes are only subject to disturbances, and are deprived of actuating signals. To further enrich our model, we accommodate (solvable) algebraic constraints in a subset of nodal dynamics. We show that appropriate dynamic feedback controllers achieve output agreement on a desired vector. We also investigate the case of an optimal steady-state control over the network. The proposed results are applied to a heterogeneous microgrid.
Quantitative Redundancy in Partial Implications
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2015
Year: 2015

We survey the different properties of an intuitive notion of redundancy, as a function of the precise semantics given to the notion of partial implication. The final version of this survey will appear in the Proceedings of the Int. Conf. Formal Concept Analysis, 2015.
Detecting Sponsored Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2015
Year: 2015

With a vast number of items, web-pages, and news to choose from, online services and the customers both benefit tremendously from personalized recommender systems. Such systems however provide great opportunities for targeted advertisements, by displaying ads alongside genuine recommendations. We consider a biased recommendation system where such ads are displayed without any tags (disguised as genuine recommendations), rendering them indistinguishable to a single user. We ask whether it is possible for a small subset of collaborating users to detect such a bias. We propose an algorithm that can detect such a bias through statistical analysis on the collaborating users' feedback. The algorithm requires only binary information indicating whether a user was satisfied with each of the recommended item or not. This makes the algorithm widely appealing to real world issues such as identification of search engine bias and pharmaceutical lobbying. We prove that the proposed algorithm detects the bias with high probability for a broad class of recommendation systems when sufficient number of users provide feedback on sufficient number of recommendations. We provide extensive simulations with real data sets and practical recommender systems, which confirm the trade offs in the theoretical guarantees.
Some New Directions for ACP Research
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2015
Year: 2015

This paper lists some new directions for research related to the Algebra of Communicating Processes (ACP). Most of these directions have been inspired by work on SubScript, an ACP based extension to the programming language Scala. SubScript applies several new ideas that build on ACP, but currently these lack formal treatment. Some of these new ideas are rather fundamental. E.g. it appears that the theory of ACP may well apply to structures of any kind of items, rather than to just processes. The aim of this list is to raise awareness of the research community about these new ideas; this could help both the research area and the programming language SubScript.
KERMAN: A Key Establishment Algorithm based on Harvesting Randomness in MANETs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2015
Year: 2015

Establishing secret common randomness between two or multiple devices in a network resides at the root of communication security. The problem is traditionally decomposed into a randomness generation stage (randomness purity is subject to employing often costly true random number generators) and a key-agreement information exchange stage, which can rely on public-key infrastructure or on key wrapping. In this paper, we propose KERMAN, an alternative key establishment algorithm for ad-hoc networks which works by harvesting randomness directly from the network routing metadata, thus achieving both pure randomness generation and (implicitly) secret-key agreement. Our algorithm relies on the route discovery phase of an ad-hoc network employing the Dynamic Source Routing protocol, is lightweight, and requires minimal communication overhead.
Robust Rate Adaptation and Proportional Fair Scheduling with Imperfect CSI
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2015
Year: 2015

In wireless fading channels, multi-user scheduling has the potential to boost the spectral efficiency by exploiting diversity gains. In this regard, proportional fair (PF) scheduling provides a solution for increasing the users' quality of experience by finding a balance between system throughput maximization and user fairness. For this purpose, precise instantaneous channel state information (CSI) needs to be available at the transmitter side to perform rate adaptation and scheduling. However, in practical setups, CSI is impaired by, e.g., channel estimation errors, quantization and feedback delays. Especially in centralized cloud based communication systems, where main parts of the lower layer processing is shifted to a central entity, high backhaul latency can cause substantial CSI imperfections, resulting in significant performance degradations. In this work robust rate adaptation as well as robust PF scheduling are presented, which account for CSI impairments. The proposed rate adaptation solution guarantees a fixed target outage probability, which is of interest for delay critical and data intensive applications, such as, video conference systems. In addition to CSI imperfections the proposed scheduler is able to account for delayed decoding acknowledgements from the receiver.
Wireless Compressive Sensing Over Fading Channels with Distributed Sparse Random Projections
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

We address the problem of recovering a sparse signal observed by a resource constrained wireless sensor network under channel fading. Sparse random matrices are exploited to reduce the communication cost in forwarding information to a fusion center. The presence of channel fading leads to inhomogeneity and non Gaussian statistics in the effective measurement matrix that relates the measurements collected at the fusion center and the sparse signal being observed. We analyze the impact of channel fading on nonuniform recovery of a given sparse signal by leveraging the properties of heavy-tailed random matrices. We quantify the additional number of measurements required to ensure reliable signal recovery in the presence of nonidentical fading channels compared to that is required with identical Gaussian channels. Our analysis provides insights into how to control the probability of sensor transmissions at each node based on the channel fading statistics in order to minimize the number of measurements collected at the fusion center for reliable sparse signal recovery. We further discuss recovery guarantees of a given sparse signal with any random projection matrix where the elements are sub-exponential with a given sub-exponential norm. Numerical results are provided to corroborate the theoretical findings.
Rate Aware Instantly Decodable Network Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

This paper addresses the problem of reducing the delivery time of data messages to cellular users using instantly decodable network coding (IDNC) with physical-layer rate awareness. While most of the existing literature on IDNC does not consider any physical layer complications and abstract the model as equally slotted time for all users, this paper proposes a cross-layer scheme that incorporates the different channel rates of the various users in the decision process of both the transmitted message combinations and the rates with which they are transmitted. The consideration of asymmetric rates for receivers reflects more practical application scenarios and introduces a new trade-off between the choice of coding combinations for various receivers and the broadcasting rate for achieving shorter completion time. The completion time minimization problem in such scenario is first shown to be intractable. The problem is, thus, approximated by reducing, at each transmission, the increase of an anticipated version of the completion time. The paper solves the problem by formulating it as a maximum weight clique problem over a newly designed rate aware IDNC (RA-IDNC) graph. The highest weight clique in the created graph being potentially not unique, the paper further suggests a multi-layer version of the proposed solution to improve the obtained results from the employed completion time approximation. Simulation results indicate that the cross-layer design largely outperforms the uncoded transmissions strategies and the classical IDNC scheme.
Optimized UAV Communication Protocol Based on Prior Locations
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper, we adopt a new communication protocol between the UAV and fixed on-ground nodes. This protocol tends to reduce communication power consumption by stopping communication if the channel is not good to communicate (i.e. far nodes, obstacles, etc.) The communication is performed using the XBee 868M standard and Libelium wapsmotes. Our designed protocol is based on a new communication model that we propose in this paper. The protocole decides wether to communicate or not after computing the channel reliability through prior RSSI measurement and nodes location data
One-Shot Mutual Covering Lemma and Marton's Inner Bound with a Common Message
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

By developing one-shot mutual covering lemmas, we derive a one-shot achievability bound for broadcast with a common message which recovers Marton's inner bound (with three auxiliary random variables) in the i.i.d.~case. The encoder employed is deterministic. Relationship between the mutual covering lemma and a new type of channel resolvability problem is discussed.
Detecting Topology Variations in Dynamical Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2015
Year: 2015

This paper considers the problem of detecting topology variations in dynamical networks. We consider a network whose behavior can be represented via a linear dynamical system. The problem of interest is then that of finding conditions under which it is possible to detect node or link disconnections from prior knowledge of the nominal network behavior and on-line measurements. The considered approach makes use of analysis tools from switching systems theory. A number of results are presented along with examples.
On the Error Performance of Systematic Polar Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

Systematic polar codes are shown to outperform non-systematic polar codes in terms of the bit-error-rate (BER) performance. However theoretically the mechanism behind the better performance of systematic polar codes is not yet clear. In this paper, we set the theoretical framework to analyze the performance of systematic polar codes. The exact evaluation of the BER of systematic polar codes conditioned on the BER of non-systematic polar codes involves in $2^{NR}$ terms where $N$ is the code block length and $R$ is the code rate, resulting in a prohibitive number of computations for large block lengths. By analyzing the polar code construction and the successive-cancellation (SC) decoding process, we use a statistical model to quantify the advantage of systematic polar codes over non-systematic polar codes, so called the systematic gain in this paper. A composite model is proposed to approximate the dominant error cases in the SC decoding process. This composite model divides the errors into independent regions and coupled regions, controlled by a coupling coefficient. Based on this model, the systematic gain can be conveniently calculated. Numerical simulations are provided in the paper showing very close approximations of the proposed model in quantifying the systematic gain.
A parametric study on window-to-floor ratio of double window glazing and its shadowing using dynamic simulation
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2015
Year: 2015

When incorrectly designed, windows can be responsible for unnecessary energy consumption in a building. This may result from its dimensions, orientation and shadowing. In a moderate climate like the Portuguese, and considering an annual thermal comfort assessment of a space, if windows are under-dimensioned or over-shadowed, they can contribute to the increase of heating needs. However, when over-dimensioned or under-shadowed, they contribute to the increase of cooling requirements. Therefore, it is important to find the optimum design that balances orientation, dimension and shadowing, contributing to minimize both the heating and cooling needs. This study presents a parametric analysis of a double glazing window in its orientation and dimension, located in the Portuguese city of Coimbra. For each window orientation and dimension, the optimum overhang depth is determined. The objective is to minimize degree-hours of thermal discomfort. Results show that overhangs are mainly a corrective mechanism to over-dimensioned openings, thus allowing that building practitioners may choose a wider range of windows dimensions.
Comparative Analysis of Cryptography Library in IoT
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2015
Year: 2015

The paper aims to do a survey along with a comparative analysis of the various cryptography libraries that are applicable in the field of Internet of Things (IoT). The first half of the paper briefly introduces the various cryptography libraries available in the field of cryptography along with a list of all the algorithms contained within the libraries. The second half of the paper deals with cryptography libraries specifically aimed for application in the field of Internet of Things. The various libraries and their performance analysis listed down in this paper are consolidated from various sources with the aim of providing a single comprehensive repository for reference to the various cryptography libraries and the comparative analysis of their features in IoT.
The Kirchhoff-Braess Paradox and Its Implications for Smart Microgrids
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2015
Year: 2015

Well known in the theory of network flows, Braess paradox states that in a congested network, it may happen that adding a new path between destinations can increase the level of congestion. In transportation networks the phenomenon results from the decisions of network participants who selfishly seek to optimize their own performance metrics. In an electric power distribution network, an analogous increase in congestion can arise as a consequence Kirchhoff's laws. Even for the simplest linear network of resistors and voltage sources, the sudden appearance of congestion due to an additional conductive line is a nonlinear phenomenon that results in a discontinuous change in the network state. It is argued that the phenomenon can occur in almost any grid in which they are loops, and with the increasing penetration of small-scale distributed generation it suggests challenges ahead in the operation of microgrids.
On skew cyclic codes over $F_q+vF_q+v^2F_q$
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

In the present paper, we study skew cyclic codes over the ring $F_{q}+vF_{q}+v^2F_{q}$, where $v^3=v,~q=p^m$ and $p$ is an odd prime. We investigate the structural properties of skew cyclic codes over $F_{q}+vF_{q}+v^2F_{q}$ using decomposition method. By defining a Gray map from $F_{q}+vF_{q}+v^2F_{q}$ to $F_{q}^3$, it has been proved that the Gray image of a skew cyclic code of length $n$ over $F_{q}+vF_{q}+v^2F_{q}$ is a skew $3$-quasi cyclic code of length $3n$ over $F_{q}$. Further, it is shown that the skew cyclic codes over $F_{q}+vF_{q}+v^2F_{q}$ are principally generated. Finally, the idempotent generators of skew cyclic codes over $F_{q}+vF_{q}+v^2F_{q}$ are also obtained.
Feasibility Preserving Constraint-Handling Strategies for Real Parameter Evolutionary Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2015
Year: 2015

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are being routinely applied for a variety of optimization tasks, and real-parameter optimization in the presence of constraints is one such important area. During constrained optimization EAs often create solutions that fall outside the feasible region; hence a viable constraint- handling strategy is needed. This paper focuses on the class of constraint-handling strategies that repair infeasible solutions by bringing them back into the search space and explicitly preserve feasibility of the solutions. Several existing constraint-handling strategies are studied, and two new single parameter constraint-handling methodologies based on parent-centric and inverse parabolic probability (IP) distribution are proposed. The existing and newly proposed constraint-handling methods are first studied with PSO, DE, GAs, and simulation results on four scalable test-problems under different location settings of the optimum are presented. The newly proposed constraint-handling methods exhibit robustness in terms of performance and also succeed on search spaces comprising up-to 500 variables while locating the optimum within an error of 10$^{-10}$. The working principle of the IP based methods is also demonstrated on (i) some generic constrained optimization problems, and (ii) a classic `Weld' problem from structural design and mechanics. The successful performance of the proposed methods clearly exhibits their efficacy as a generic constrained-handling strategy for a wide range of applications.
On the Oblivious Transfer Capacity of the Degraded Wiretapped Binary Erasure Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

We study oblivious transfer (OT) between Alice and Bob in the presence of an eavesdropper Eve over a degraded wiretapped binary erasure channel from Alice to Bob and Eve. In addition to the privacy goals of oblivious transfer between Alice and Bob, we require privacy of Alice and Bob's private data from Eve. In previous work we derived the OT capacity (in the honest-but-curious model) of the wiretapped binary independent erasure channel where the erasure processes of Bob and Eve are independent. Here we derive a lower bound on the OT capacity in the same secrecy model when the wiretapped binary erasure channel is degraded in favour of Bob.