Showing papers in "Journal of Information Processing in 2017"

End-to-end Network Slicing for 5G Mobile Networks

Abstract: The research and development (R&D) and the standardization of the 5th Generation (5G) mobile networking technologies are proceeding at a rapid pace all around the world. In this paper, we introduce the emerging concept of network slicing that is considered one of the most significant technology challenges for 5G mobile networking infrastructure, summarize our preliminary research efforts to enable end-to-end network slicing for 5G mobile networking, and finally discuss application use cases that should drive the designs of the infrastructure of network slicing.

Virtual and Augmented Reality on the 5G Highway

Abstract: In recent years, virtual and augmented reality have begun to take advantage of the high speed capabilities of data streaming technologies and wireless networks. However, limitations like bandwidth and latency still prevent us from achieving high fidelity telepresence and collaborative virtual and augmented reality applications. Fortunately, both researchers and engineers are aware of these problems and have set out to design 5G networks to help us to move to the next generation of virtual interfaces. This paper reviews state of the art virtual and augmented reality communications technology and outlines current efforts to design an effective, ubiquitous 5G network to help to adapt to virtual application demands. We discuss application needs in domains like telepresence, education, healthcare, streaming media, and haptics, and provide guidelines and future directions for growth based on this new network infrastructure.

Routing of Carrier-vehicle Systems with Dedicated Last-stretch Delivery Vehicle and Fixed Carrier Route

Abstract: We examine a routing problem that arises when an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone, is used in the last-stretch of parcel delivery to end customers. In the scenario that we study, a delivery truck is dispatched carrying a shipment of parcels to be delivered to customers. While the truck is following a predetermined route, a drone is charged with making the last-stretch delivery of a parcel from the truck to a customer’s doorstep. Given a set of customers to be served and a set of rendezvous points where the drone can meet with the truck to pick up a parcel, we ask what the quickest way is of delivering all parcels to the end customers. We model this problem as a problem of finding a special type of a path in a graph of a special structure, and show that the graph problem is NP-hard even when all edge weights are restricted to be 1 or 2. Furthermore, we identify a special instance type that can be solved optimally in polynomial time. Finally, we propose a polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the graph problem in metric graphs, and show that its approximation ratio is bounded above by 2 in restricted metric graphs.

A Survey on the Internet-of-Things: Standards, Challenges and Future Prospects

Abstract: Technological development in communications and electronics has made the growing expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is expected to make a great impact to our society because smart devices in IoT are easily integrated into existing service. As a result, standardization of technologies to support the IoT is becoming more important to realize a smart society through different service domains. This paper presents a survey on the current state of the art of standards for IoT technologies and gives a brief introduction to related standards and recent research areas in IoT. Finally, it also proposes an idea of the future platform of scalable IoT systems. The proposed idea employs IP mobility technologies to realize inter-operability among IoT devices in different networks.

SDN-Mon: Fine-Grained Traffic Monitoring Framework in Software-Defined Networks

Abstract: Fine-grained network traffic monitoring is important for efficient network management in software-defined networking (SDN). The current SDN architecture, i.e., OpenFlow, relies on counters in the flow entries of forwarding tables for such monitoring tasks. This is not efficient nor flexible since the packet-header fields that users aim for monitoring are not always the same or overlap with those in OpenFlow match fields, which is designed for forwarding as a higher priority. This inflexibility may result in unnecessary flow entries added to switches for monitoring and controller-switch monitoring-based communication overhead, which may cause the communication channel to become a bottleneck, especially when the network includes a large number of switches. We propose SDN-Mon, a SDN-based monitoring framework that decouples monitoring from existing forwarding tables, and allows more fine-grained and flexible monitoring to serve a variety of network-management applications. SDN-Mon allows the controller to define the arbitrary sets of monitoring match fields based on the requirements of controller applications to flexibly monitor traffic. In SDN-Mon, some monitoring processes are selectively delegated to SDN switches to leverage the computing processor of the switch and avoid an unnecessary overhead in the controller-switch communication for monitoring. We implemented SDN-Mon and evaluated its performance on Lagopus switch, a high-performance software switch.

Low-dimensional Feature Vector Extraction from Motion Capture Data by Phase Plane Analysis

Abstract: This paper proposes a method to obtain a low-dimensional feature vector appropriately representing the characteristics of a given motion-capture data stream. The feature vector is derived based on the concept of phase plane analysis. A set of phase plane trajectories are obtained from the temporal variation of the state variables representing the body-segment arrangement. The information on six motion-characteristic properties is extracted from the shapes of the trajectories, and used as the components of a six-dimensional feature vector. The experimental results showed the effectiveness and limitation of the proposed method.

Automotive Attacks and Countermeasures on LIN-Bus

Abstract: This paper presents a security analysis of the Local Interconnect Network (LIN) that is used in assembly units such as seats, steering wheels, and doors in vehicles. Recently, the number of security threats to in-vehicle networks such as the Controller Area Network has increased. In contrast, there have been no reports that evaluate the security of LIN in detail. The security analysis of LIN is important because it is used in units related to seats, steering wheels, etc. and it is at risk for an attack. In this paper, we present the first evaluation on the security of LIN. We present case studies of attacks that use the characteristics of a commonly-used error handling mechanism. In the attacks, the attacker intentionally stops communication using the error handling mechanism and sends a false response in place of a valid one. We experimentally show the feasibility of the attacks using a vehicle microcontroller. Furthermore, we present countermeasures against the attacks. The results of this study show that there is vulnerability to attack when the error handling mechanism is simply designed. We believe that this study will contribute to improvements in security of in-vehicle communications.

The Evolution of Process Hiding Techniques in Malware - Current Threats and Possible Countermeasures

Abstract: Rootkits constitute a significant threat to modern computing and information systems. Since their first appearance in the early 1990’s they have steadily evolved, adapting to ever-improving security measures. The main feature rootkits have in common is the ability to hide their malicious presence and activities from the operating system and its legitimate users. In this paper we systematically analyze process hiding techniques routinely used by rootkit malware. We summarize the characteristics of different approaches and discuss their advantages and limitations. Furthermore, we assess detection and prevention techniques introduced in operating systems in response to the threat of hidden malware. The results of our assessments show that defenders still struggle to keep up with rootkit authors. At the same time we see a shift towards powerful VM-based techniques that will continue to evolve over the coming years.

Simple Folding is Really Hard

Abstract: Simple folding (folding along one line at a time) is a practical form of origami used in manufacturing such as sheet metal bending. We prove strong NP-completeness of deciding whether a crease pattern can be simply folded, both for orthogonal paper with assigned orthogonal creases and for square paper with assigned or unassigned creases at multiples of 45◦. These results settle a long standing open problem, where weak NP-hardness was established for a subset of the models considered here, leaving open the possibility of pseudopolynomial-time algorithms. We also formalize and generalize the previously proposed simple folding models, and introduce new infinite simple-fold models motivated by practical manufacturing. In the infinite models, we extend our strong NP-hardness results, as well as polynomial-time algorithms for rectangular paper with assigned or unassigned orthogonal creases (map folding). These results motivate why rectangular maps have orthogonal but not diagonal creases.

Intelligent Driving System for Safer Automobiles

Abstract: As an innovation of driver assistance technology, this research aims to develop an “Autonomous Intelligent Driving System” to prevent risk of accidents and enhance driving safety for elderly drivers in order to vitalize current aged society. The proposed system focuses on two key technologies: Risk-predictive driving intelligence model and Shared control between the driver and the assistance system. The first key technology is to embed an experienced driver model for recovering degraded performances of recognition, decision-making and operation of drivers. In the driver assistance system design, the experienced driver model contains knowledge-based “risk-prediction mechanism” to avoid accidents in risky driving situations. For instance, when passing unsignalized intersections with poor visibility, it is known that experienced drivers predict the appearance of sudden-crossing pedestrians or bicycles and then slow down the vehicle when approaching such poor visibility area and also prepare to brake in order to avoid potential collisions that might occur. The second key point is “Shared control.” This research does not aim to develop a fully-autonomous driving vehicle for them, but aims to develop an advanced driver assistance system for preventing accidents in the case that the intervention by braking or steering is needed, as well as reducing driving workload. Therefore, to realize good cooperative characteristics between the driver and the system, the shared control concept is applied to optimize the assistance level for braking and steering maneuver, minimizing the interference human driver driving maneuver. The Driving Simulator and the test vehicle are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed intelligent driving system.

The Complexity of Generalized Pipe Link Puzzles

Abstract: Pipe Link, which is a pencil-and-paper puzzle introduced by Japanese puzzle publisher Nikoli, is played on a rectangular grid of squares. We studied the computational complexity of Pipe Link, and this paper shows that the problem to decide if a given instance of Pipe Link has a solution is NP-complete by a reduction from the Hamiltonian circuit problem for a given planar graph with a degree of at most 3. Our reduction is carefully designed so that we can also prove ASP-completeness of the another-solution-problem.

FESTIVAL: design and implementation of federated interoperable smart ICT services development and testing platform

Abstract: A part of the study was carried out by the FESTIVAL project, the Commissioned Research of National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), JAPAN

Concurrent Program Logic for Relaxed Memory Consistency Models with Dependencies across Loop Iterations

Abstract: Relaxed memory consistency models specify effects of executions of statements among threads, which may or may not be reordered. Such reorderings may cross loop iterations. To the best of our knowledge, however, there exists no concurrent program logic which explicitly handles the reorderings across loop iterations. This paper provides concurrent program logic for relaxed memory consistency models that can represent, for example, total store ordering, partial store ordering, relaxed memory ordering, and acquire and release consistency. There are two novel aspects to our approach. First, we translate a concurrent program into a family of directed acyclic graphs with finite nodes and transitive edges called program graphs according to a memory consistency model that we adopt. These represent dependencies among statements which represent reorderings of not only statements but also visibility of their effects. Second, we introduce auxiliary variables that temporarily buffer the effects of write operations on shared memory, and explicitly describe the reflections of the buffered effects to shared memory. Specifically, we define a small-step operational semantics for the program graphs with the introduced auxiliary variables, then define sound and relatively complete logic to the semantics.

Unravel Programming Sessions with THRESHER: Identifying Coherent and Complete Sets of Fine-granular Source Code Changes

Abstract: Development teams bene t from version control systems, which manage shared access to code repositories and persist entire project histories for analysis or recovery. Such systems will be e cient if developers commit coherent and complete change sets. These best practices, however, are di cult to follow because multiple activities often interleave without notice and existing tools impede unraveling changes before committing them. We propose an interactive, graphical tool, calledThresher, that employs adaptable scripts to support developers to group and commit changes especially for ne-granular change tracking where numerous changes are logged even in short programming sessions. We implemented our tool in Squeak/Smalltalk and derived a foundation of scripts from ve refactoring sessions. We evaluated those scripts' precision and recall, which indicate a reduced manual e ort because developers can focus on project-speci c adjustments. Having such an interactive approach, they can easily intervene to accurately reconstruct activities and thus follow best practices.

Identity Verification of Ticket Holders at Large-scale Events Using Face Recognition

Abstract: This paper proposes a system of verifying the identity of ticket holders at large-scale events using face recognition, which is called Ticket ID System. Such a system has been required to prevent illegal resale such as ticket scalping. Since illegal resale is a critical problem for popular events in Japan, strict steps are followed for verifying individuals holding tickets at event venues by human visual inspection with ID cards. This task is time consuming for venue attendants. It is also stressful because ticket holders feel uncomfortable when being kept waiting. The problem in verifying ticket holders is how to simultaneously verify identities efficiently and prevent individuals from impersonating others at a large-scale event in which tens of thousands of people participate. Ticket ID system makes it possible to secure the identity of the purchaser and holder of a ticket by using a face-recognition system developed for tablet terminals. Ticket ID System was proven effective for preventing illegal resale by verifying 50,324 attendees at a large concert of a popular music group. The average accuracy of face recognition was 90%. The average time for identity verification was 7 seconds per person including guidance to ticket holders, which decreased identity-verification time by 30% compared to using only human visual inspection as well as reducing the psychological workload of venue attendants. Survey results obtained from the attendees showed that 94.6% felt it provided more equity in ticket purchasing than methods used before, 83% felt it provided added convenience in verification, and 93.8% felt it would effectively prevent illegal resale.

Construction of a Multilingual Annotated Corpus for Deeper Sentiment Understanding in Social Media

Abstract: The surge of social media makes it possible to understand people’s emotion in different cultures. In this paper, we construct an annotated corpus for multilingual sentiment understanding. The annotation is developed in a multilingual setting including English/Japanese/Chinese, and on a representative dataset including 4 topics (spanning 3 genres, which are product, people, and event).To deep understand expression mechanism of feeling entailed in the text, we labelled sentimental signal words and rhetoric phenomenon in addition to overall polarity. This innovative corpus can be a helpful resource for the improvement of sentiment classification, cross-cultural comparison etc.

Virtual Reality Technologies in Telecommunication Services

Abstract: Telecommunication service has been growing and progressing from telephone to high reality communication systems that are based on evolution of network and media technologies. Recognizing virtual reality (VR) as a communication tool, we provide a review of communication services and the directions they are moving in, as well as related VR technologies. The Immersive Telepresence System “Kirari!” is also introduced as the latest development example for a new telecommunication service.

Even 1 × n Edge-Matching and Jigsaw Puzzles are Really Hard

Abstract: We prove the computational intractability of rotating and placing n square tiles into a 1×n array such that adjacent tiles are compatible—either equal edge colors, as in edge-matching puzzles, or matching tab/pocket shapes, as in jigsaw puzzles. Beyond basic NP-hardness, we prove that it is NP-hard even to approximately maximize the number of placed tiles (allowing blanks), while satisfying the compatibility constraint between nonblank tiles, within a factor of 0.9999999851. (On the other hand, there is an easy 1 2 -approximation.) This is the first (correct) proof of inapproximability for edge-matching and jigsaw puzzles. Along the way, we prove NPhardness of distinguishing, for a directed graph on n nodes, between having a Hamiltonian path (length n− 1) and having at most 0.999999284(n− 1) edges that form a vertex-disjoint union of paths. We use this gap hardness and gap-preserving reductions to establish similar gap hardness for 1× n jigsaw and edge-matching puzzles.

Gesture Recognition Method Utilizing Ultrasonic Active Acoustic Sensing

Abstract: We propose a method for gesture recognition that utilizes active acoustic sensing, which transmits acoustic signals to a target, and recognizes the target’s state by analyzing the response. In this study, the user wore a contact speaker that transmitted ultrasonic sweep signals to the user’s body and a contact microphone that detected the ultrasound propagated through the body. The propagation characteristics of the ultrasound changed depending on the user’s movements. We utilized these changes to recognize the user’s gestures. One of the important novelty features of our method is that the user’s gestures can be acquired not only from the physical movement but also from the user’s internal state, such as muscle activity, since ultrasound is transmitted via both the user’s internal body and body surface. Moreover, our method is not adversely affected by audible-range sounds generated by the environment and body movements because we utilize ultrasound. We implemented a device that uses active acoustic sensing to effectively transmit/detect the ultrasound to/from the body and investigated the performance of the proposed method in 21 contexts with 10 subjects. The evaluation results confirmed that the precision and recall are 93.1% and 91.6%, respectively when we set 10% of the data as training data and the rest as testing data in the same data set. When we used the data set for training and the other data set for testing in the same day, the precision and recall are 51.6% and 51.3%, respectively.

PPFS: A Scale-out Distributed File System for Post-petascale Systems

Abstract: The convergence of high-performance computing and big data, which has become known as the field of extreme big data, is problematic in that file creation in storage systems such as distributed file systems is not optimized. That is, the large workload leads to the simultaneous creation of many files by many processes when creating checkpoints. The need to improve the file creation processes prompted us to design a scale-out distributed file system for post-petascale systems named PPFS. PPFS consists of PPMDS, a scale-out distributed metadata server, and PPOSS, a scalable distributed storage server for flash storage. High file creation performance of PPMDS was achieved by using a key-value store for metadata storage and non-blocking distributed transactions to update multiple entries simultaneously. PPOSS depends on PPOST, an object storage system that manages underlying low-level storage, such as Fusion IO ioDrive, a flash device connected through PCI express supporting OpenNVM. High file creation performance was attained by implementing the PPFS prototype using file creation optimization, termed bulk creation, to reduce the amount of communication between PPMDS and PPOSS. Moreover, to enhance the I/O performance of PPOSS when the client process and PPOSS run on the same node, PPOSS accesses the local storage device directly. The prototype implementation of PPFS with file creation optimization achieves 119,000 operations per second for file creation when using five metadata servers and 128 client processes, thereby exceeding the performance of IndexFS 2.17 times. With local access optimization, PPOSS reached its limit at a block size of 16 KiB, an improvement of 1.5 times compared to before optimization. Furthermore, this evaluation indicates that PPFS has scalability on file creation and IO performance, that is required for post-petascale systems.

Polynomial Time Algorithms for Label Size Maximization on Rotating Maps

Abstract: Map labeling is a problem of placing labels at corresponding graphical features on a map. There are two optimization problems: the label number maximization problem and the label size maximization problem. In general, both problems are NP-hard for static maps. Recently, the widespread use of several applications, such as personal mapping systems, has increased the importance of dynamic maps and the label number maximization problem for dynamic cases has been studied. In this paper, we consider the label size maximization problem for points on rotating maps. Our model is as follows. For each label, a point is chosen inside the label or on its boundary as an anchor point. Each label is placed such that the anchor point coincides with the corresponding point on the map. Furthermore, while the map fully rotates from 0 to 2π, the labels are placed horizontally according to the angle of the map. Our problem consists of finding the maximum scale factor for the labels such that the labels do not intersect, and deciding the place of the anchor points. We propose an O(n log n)-time and O(n)-space algorithm for the case where each anchor point is inside the label. Moreover, if the labels are of unit-height (or unit-width) and the anchor points are on the boundary, we also present an O(n log n)-time and O(n)-space algorithm.

Regular and Multi-regular t-bonded Systems

Abstract: The concept of t-bonded sets was briefly introduced by the second author in 1976 under the name of dconnected sets, though it has not received due consideration. This concept is a generalization of the concept of Delone (r,R)-systems. In light of the developments in the local theory for crystals that occurred since 1976 and demands in chemistry and crystallography, we believe the local theory for t-bonded sets deserves to be developed to describe materials whose atomic structures is multi-regular “microporous” point set. For a better description of such “microporous” structures it is worthwhile to take into consideration a parameter that represents atomic bonds within the matter. The overarching goal of this paper is to prove that analogous local conditions that guarantee that a Delone set is a regular (or multi-regular) system also guarantee that a t-bonded set is a regular (or multi-regular) t-bonded system.