A communication infrastructure is an essential part to the success of the emerging smart grid. A scalable and pervasive communication infrastructure is crucial in both construction and operation of a smart grid. In this paper, we present the background and motivation of communication infrastructures in smart grid systems. We also summarize major requirements that smart grid communications must meet. From the experience of several industrial trials on smart grid with communication infrastructures, we expect that the traditional carbon fuel based power plants can cooperate with emerging distributed renewable energy such as wind, solar, etc, to reduce the carbon fuel consumption and consequent green house gas such as carbon dioxide emission. The consumers can minimize their expense on energy by adjusting their intelligent home appliance operations to avoid the peak hours and utilize the renewable energy instead. We further explore the challenges for a communication infrastructure as the part of a complex smart grid system. Since a smart grid system might have over millions of consumers and devices, the demand of its reliability and security is extremely critical. Through a communication infrastructure, a smart grid can improve power reliability and quality to eliminate electricity blackout. Security is a challenging issue since the on-going smart grid systems facing increasing vulnerabilities as more and more automation, remote monitoring/controlling and supervision entities are interconnected.

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1315&context=electricalengineeringfacpub

A Survey on Smart Grid CommunicationInfrastructures: Motivations, Requirements andChallenges

To support bursty traffic on the Internet (and especially WWW) efficiently, optical burst switching (OBS) is proposed as a way to streamline both protocols and hardware in building the future gener...

Optical burst switching (OBS) - a new paradigm for an optical Internet

Blockchain in healthcare and health sciences-A scoping review.

国際会議参加報告:2014 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory

Book review: Applied cryptography: Protocols, algorithms, and source code in C

Patients living in a digitized world can now interact with medical professionals through online services such as chat applications, video conferencing or indirectly through consulting services. These applications need to tackle several fundamental trust issues: 1. Checking and confirming that the person they are interacting with is a real person; 2. Validating that the healthcare professional has competence within the field in question; and 3. Confirming that the healthcare professional has a valid license to practice. In this paper, we present VerifyMed -- the first proof-of-concept platform, built on Ethereum, for transparently validating the authorization and competence of medical professionals using blockchain technology. Our platform models trust relationships within the healthcare industry to validate professional clinical authorization. Furthermore, it enables a healthcare professional to build a portfolio of real-life work experience and further validates the competence by storing outcome metrics reported by the patients. The extensive realistic simulations show that with our platform, an average cost for creating a smart contract for a treatment and getting it approved is around 1 USD, and the cost for evaluating a treatment is around 50 cents.

VerifyMed -- A blockchain platform for transparent trust in virtualized healthcare: Proof-of-concept

The underlying fundaments of blockchain are cryptography and cryptographic concepts that provide reliable and secure decentralized solutions. Although many recent papers study the use-cases of blockchain in different industrial areas, such as finance, health care, legal relations, IoT, information security, and consensus building systems, only few studies scrutinize the cryptographic concepts used in blockchain. To the best of our knowledge, there is no Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) that gives a complete picture of the existing cryptographic concepts which have been deployed or have the potential to be deployed in blockchain. In this paper, we thoroughly review and systematize all cryptographic concepts which are already used in blockchain. Additionally, we give a list of cryptographic concepts which have not yet been applied but have big potentials to improve the current blockchain solutions. We also include possible instantiations of these cryptographic concepts in the blockchain domain. Last but not least, we explicitly postulate 21 challenging problems that cryptographers interested in blockchain can work on.

SoK of Used Cryptography in Blockchain

Minimum-Storage Regenerating (MSR) codes have emerged as a viable alternative to Reed-Solomon (RS) codes as they minimize the repair bandwidth while they are still optimal in terms of reliability and storage overhead. Although several MSR constructions exist, so far they have not been practically implemented mainly due to the big number of I/O operations. In this paper, we analyze high-rate MDS codes that are simultaneously optimized in terms of storage, reliability, I/O operations, and repair-bandwidth for single and multiple failures of the systematic nodes. The codes were recently introduced in [1] without any specific name. Due to the resemblance between the hashtag sign # and the procedure of the code construction, we call them in this paper HashTag Erasure Codes (HTECs) . HTECs provide the lowest data-read and data-transfer, and thus the lowest repair time for an arbitrary sub-packetization level $\alpha$ , where $\alpha \leq r^{\lceil {^{k}\!/\!_{r}} \rceil }$ , among all existing MDS codes for distributed storage including MSR codes. The repair process is linear and highly parallel. Additionally, we show that HTECs are the first high-rate MDS codes that reduce the repair bandwidth for more than one failure. Practical implementations of HTECs in Hadoop release 3.0.0-alpha2 demonstrate their great potentials.

HashTag Erasure Codes: From Theory to Practice

This letter presents a novel construction of $(n,k,d=n-1)$ access-optimal regenerating codes for an arbitrary sub-packetization level $\alpha $ for exact repair of any systematic node. We refer to these codes as general sub-packetized, because we provide an algorithm for constructing codes for any $\alpha $ less than or equal to $\vphantom {^{\int ^\int }}r^{\lceil ({k}/{r}) \rceil }$ , where $({k}/{r})$ is not necessarily an integer. This leads to a flexible construction of codes for different code rates compared with existing approaches. We derive the lower and upper bounds of the repair bandwidth. The repair bandwidth depends on the code parameters and $\alpha $ . The repair process of a failed systematic node is linear and highly parallelized, which means that a set of $\lceil ({\alpha }/{r}) \rceil $ symbols is independently repaired first and used along with the accessed data from other nodes to recover the remaining symbols.

Katina Kralevska

Papers

Blockchain in healthcare and health sciences-A scoping review.

VerifyMed -- A blockchain platform for transparent trust in virtualized healthcare: Proof-of-concept

SoK of Used Cryptography in Blockchain

HashTag Erasure Codes: From Theory to Practice

General Sub-Packetized Access-Optimal Regenerating Codes