ALBERT

Description: The following is included in this newsletter: IEEE Young Professionals, Lahore Section Win World Class Award "Hall of Fame 2015"; Distinguished Lecturer Tour of Nei Kato in China, May 2015; Distinguished Lecturer Tour of Tom Hou to Beijing and Nanjing, China; European Wireless 2015 in Budapest; Novel In-Band Full-Duplex Communication Prototype for 5G Systems, Finland, May 2015

Description: Wireless vehicular networks offer the promise of connectivity to vehicles that could provide a myriad of safety and driving-enhancing services to drivers and passengers. With wireless technology available in each car, it is expected that huge amounts of information will be exchanged between vehicles or between vehicles and roadside infrastructure. Due to defective sensors, software viruses, or even malicious intent, legitimate vehicles might inject untrustworthy information into the network. Besides relying on the public key infrastructure, this article proposes a social network approach to study trustworthy information sharing in a vehicular network. We first cover recent research progress in measuring direct trust and modeling indirect trust in online social networks, and then discuss how to apply them to vehicular social networks despite several pressing research challenges.

Description: Presents the front cover for this issue of the publication.

Description: The mobile crowdsourcing network (MCN) is a promising network architecture that applies the principles of crowdsourcing to perform tasks with human involvement and powerful mobile devices. However, it also raises some critical security and privacy issues that impede the application of MCNs. In this article, in order to better understand these critical security and privacy challenges, we first propose a general architecture for a mobile crowdsourcing network comprising both crowdsourcing sensing and crowdsourcing computing. After that, we set forth several critical security and privacy challenges that essentially capture the characteristics of MCNs. We also formulate some research problems leading to possible research directions. We expect this work will bring more attention to further investigation on security and privacy solutions for mobile crowdsourcing networks.

Description: Presents the ComSoc conference calendar of events.

Description: Energy harvesting technologies have gained widespread attention for their perpetual energy supply for sensor nodes. However, the energy resources are still insufficient while the harvesting module is added on the node. To prolong the network lifetime and meet the demand of a green wireless network, a dynamic gradient-aware hierarchical packet forwarding mechanism is designed. According to the relative positions of nodes, gradient-aware clusters are established. Consequently, considering the energy conversion efficiency and relative distance, cluster heads are selected reasonably. Furthermore, by exploiting the available energy and the number of cluster members, packets can be forwarded to the sink in an energy-efficient manner. Results show that the network lifetime can be noticeably improved.

Description: Recently, there has been substantial research interest in the subject of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) due to its cross-disciplinary appeal and its wide-ranging application potential, which motivates this overview. More explicitly, we provide a brief survey of the state of the art and introduce several practical transceiver architectures that may facilitate its implementation. Moreover, the most important link-level as well as system-level design aspects are elaborated on, along with a variety of potential solutions and research ideas. We envision that the dual interpretation of RF signals creates new opportunities as well as challenges requiring substantial research, innovation and engineering efforts.

Description: The emerging trends of 2014 have continued to dominate the developments in the first half of 2015: 1. The packet optical transport system (P-OTS) concept supports the service provider goal to build a common network infrastructure by integrating Ethernet, IP/MPLS, and DWDM 2. There has been intensifying focus and attention on network functions virtualization (NFV) and softwaredefined networking (SDN) to provide service providers with the tools for more effective operation and management of communications networks in general, and optical communications networks in particular.

Description: In June 2015, the ComSoc Board of Governors approved a revision of ComSoc Constitution. The IEEE approved the revision in July 2015, and ComSoc Membership approval is currently pending.

Description: Presents the President's message for this issue of the publication.

Description: As cloud-assisted WBSNs have become increasingly popular in healthcare applications, security and privacy threats deserve much more attention. In this article, focusing on data privacy and data completeness issues, we propose a VPAA scheme for cloud-assisted WBSNs. Through both simulation and prototype implementation, we confirm that VPAA is energy-efficient and effective in protecting data privacy and completeness.

Description: We review several node architectures for optical slot switching ring networks, which can be used in metropolitan or datacenter applications, and compare them for their networking aspects. The dimensioning, quality of service, latency, and protection issues are discussed for the different approaches. The main devices, i.e. fast wavelength-tunable laser, burst-mode coherent receiver (which is required to enable high data rate transmission at 100 Gb/s and above), and a slot blocker for improved wavelength usage efficiency are described, and available technologies for each key building block are reviewed.

Description: Data center interconnection with elastic optical networks is a promising scenario to meet the high burstiness and high-bandwidth requirements of services. Many data center services require lower delay and higher availability with end-to-end guaranteed QoS, which involves both application and transport network resources. However, in the current mode of operation, the control of elastic optical networks and data centers is separately deployed. Enabling even limited interworking among these separated control systems requires the adoption of complex and inelastic interfaces among the various networks, and this solution is not efficient enough to provide the required QoS. In this article, we present a novel cross stratum optimization (CSO) architecture in elastic data center optical interconnection. The proposed architecture can allow global optimization and control across elastic optical transport network and data center application stratum heterogeneous resources to meet the QoS requirement with the objective of optical as a service (OaaS). The functional modules of CSO architecture, including the core elements of application and transport controllers, are described in detail. The cooperation procedure in CSO-based service provisioning and cross stratum service resilience modes is investigated. The overall feasibility and efficiency of the proposed architecture is also experimentally demonstrated on our OaaS testbed with four OpenFlow-enabled elastic optical nodes, and compared to MFA, ALB, and CSO-DGLB service provisioning schemes in terms of path setup/release/adjustment latency, blocking probability, and resource occupation rate. Numerical results are given and analyzed based on the testbed. Some future discussion and exploration issues are presented in the conclusion.

Description: Unlike most general wireless users enjoying broadband access to the Internet and so on, a number of mission-critical applications such as PPDR are using narrowband systems that are only capable of transmitting voice and low-rate data. Broadband wireless networks with greater reliability are increasingly demanded by these applications including the emerging Smart Grid. With this vision, the IEEE 802.16 Working Group completed two standard amendments recently, IEEE Std 802.16n-2013 and IEEE Std 802.16.1a-2013. 802.16 network reliability is significantly increased by technical developments dealing with failures of network infrastructure stations, radio path and backhaul connectivity, and so on. This article serves to analyze the envisaged typical use cases of greater reliable broadband wireless networks, outline the main technical developments of the two standards, and introduce a recently developed practical system for PPDR applications in Japan.

Description: The continuously increasing consumption of power to access the Internet has been a major concern for network operators and equipment vendors. Passive optical network (PON) systems are widely seen as the future of broadband access. In 2010, ITU-T standardized a protocol-based PON energy efficiency mechanism that is comprised of two main modes, the doze mode and the cyclic sleep mode, which promise to save significant amounts of energy. However, the use of these two standardized alternative modes requires extra signaling and wastes energy. In this article we present the watchful sleep mode, a new mode that unifies the doze and cyclic sleep modes into a single power management mode. The new mode eliminates the extra control signaling and maximizes the amount of energy saved by keeping only the necessary hardware ON. Recently, the watchful sleep mode has been included in the ITU-T G.984 (G-PON) and ITUT G.987 (XG-PON) recommendations. It is expected to be operated as the only power management mode in future PON systems.

Description: Over the last decade, energy harvesting has emerged as a promising approach to enable self-sufficient and self-sustaining operation for devices in energy-constrained networks by scavenging energy from the ambient environment to power up devices.

Description: The city of Trento, the educational, scientific, financial and political centre of Northern Italy, served as the ideal launching point for the first IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Summer School. With a population of more than 100,000 residing in this noted university city, Trento is recognized throughout the country for its high quality of life, prosperous business opportunities, advanced research centers and renowned international cultural institutions. It also boasts a rich heritage of cultural and social lifestyles; enriched international conferences, meetings and exhibitions; traditional costume festivals and market fares; historical events; and global festivals highlighted with theatre, music and dance.

Description: Energy harvesting technology has become a promising solution to enhance the energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions in future wireless systems. In future wireless systems, most of the data throughput will come from delay-sensitive applications. To ensure a good experience for an end user, we target the optimization of the delay performance of an EH wireless system with finite energy storage. As such, it is necessary to adapt the resource allocation to the channel fading information, data queue length, and energy queue length information. The channel fading information provides the channel quality, the data queue length information provides the dynamic urgency of the transmitted data flows, and the energy queue length information provides the information on how much available energy is left in the energy buffer. Such a problem is quite challenging because it belongs to an infinite dimensional stochastic optimization. In this article, we review the existing works on the resource allocation problem in EH wireless systems. We also propose a low-complexity delay-sensitive resource control scheme and discuss valuable design insights.

Description: The concept of energy harvesting cooperative networks is an emerging technology that has very high potential for a large variety of applications. However, energy transfer capability may lead to unprecedented security challenges. In this article, we study energy security issues and the solutions in energy harvesting networks. We first identify typical energy related attacks and then propose defense solutions against these attacks. We also carry out security analysis and performance analysis to evaluate our proposed solutions. Simulation results have shown that the proposed defense solutions are effective and efficient.

Description: Information-centric networking (ICN) is an emerging networking paradigm that places content identifiers rather than host identifiers at the core of the mechanisms and protocols used to deliver content to end users. Such a paradigm allows routers enhanced with content-awareness to play a direct role in the routing and resolution of content requests from users, without any knowledge of the specific locations of hosted content. However, to facilitate good network traffic engineering and satisfactory user QoS, content routers need to exchange advanced network knowledge to assist them with their resolution decisions. In order to maintain the location-independency tenet of ICNs, such knowledge (known as context information) needs to be independent of the locations of servers. To this end, we propose CAINE — Context-Aware Information-centric Network Ecosystem — which enables context-based operations to be intrinsically supported by the underlying ICN routing and resolution functions. Our approach has been designed to maintain the location-independence philosophy of ICNs by associating context information directly to content rather than to the physical entities such as servers and network elements in the content ecosystem, while ensuring scalability. Through simulation, we show that based on such location-independent context information, CAINE is able to facilitate traffic engineering in the network, while not posing a significant control signalling burden on the network.

Description: The growing popularity of cloud and multimedia services is dramatically increasing the traffic volume that each data center needs to handle. This is driving the demand for highly scalable, flexible, and energy-efficient networks inside data centers, in particular for the edge tier, which requires a large number of interconnects and consumes the dominant part of the overall power. Optical fiber communication is widely recognized as the highest energy- and cost-efficient technique to offer ultra-large capacity for telecommunication networks. It has also been considered as a promising transmission technology for future data center applications. Taking into account the characteristics of the traffic generated by the servers, such as locality, multicast, dynamicity, and burstiness, the emphasis of the research on data center networks has to be put on architectures that leverage optical transport to the greatest possible extent. However, no feasible solution based on optical switching is available so far for handling the data center traffic at the edge tier. Therefore, apart from conventional optical switching, we investigate a completely different paradigm, passive optical interconnects, and aim to explore the possibility for optical interconnects at the top of the rack. In this article, we present three major types of passive optical interconnects and carry out a performance assessment with respect to the ability to host data center traffic, scalability, optical power budget, complexity of the required interface, cost, and energy consumption. Our results have verified that the investigated passive optical interconnects can achieve a significant reduction of power consumption and maintain cost at a similar level compared to its electronic counterpart. Furthermore, several research directions on passive optical interconnects have been pointed out for future green data centers.

Description: Space information networks were proposed to broaden the observation area and realize continuous information acquisition using satellites and high altitude platform stations. Space information networks are able to enhance detection and transmission capabilities compared to the current single Earth observation satellite. Although lots of technical work has been done concerning the space network architecture and protocols, the security issues have not been investigated well. In this article, we focus on the security problems in space information networks from four perspectives, that is, secure handoff, secure transmission control, key management, and secure routing. Existing works, together with their challenges and open problems, are discussed, and our proposed scheme is introduced. Overall, this article aims to help readers understand the motivation, problem formulation, and solutions regarding security issues on space information networks.

Description: This article addresses the use of REMs to support interference management optimization in heterogeneous networks composed of cells of different sizes and including both cellular and non-cellular (e.g. WiFi) technologies. After presenting a general architecture for including REM databases in different network entities, the article analyzes the achievable benefits in relation to specific interference management techniques, including a discussion on practical considerations such as information exchange requirements, REM ownership, and security aspects. Finally, several research directions derived from the proposed framework are identified.

Description: Presents the index of advertisers in this issue of the publication.

Description: Knowledge of end-to-end network distances is essential to many service-oriented applications such as distributed content delivery and overlay network multicast, in which the clients have the flexibility to select their servers from among a set of available ones based on network distance. However, due to the high cost of global measurements in large-scale networks, it is infeasible to actively probe end-to-end network distances for all pairs. In order to address this issue, network distance prediction has been proposed by measuring a few pairs and then predicting the other ones without direct measurements, or splicing the path segments between each pair via observation. It is considered important to improve network performance, and enables service- oriented applications over large-scale networks. In this article, we first illustrate the basic ideas behind network distance prediction, and then categorize the current research work based on different criteria. We illustrate how different protocols work, and discuss their merits and drawbacks. Finally, we summarize our findings, and point out potential issues and future directions for further research.

Description: The advanced fifth generation (5G) infrastructure is expected to become the ???nervous system??? of the digital society, digital economy, and silver economy. New service paradigms such as ???immersive experience??? and ???anything as a service??? (XaaS) everywhere are envisioned as among the primary drivers for global adoption and market uptake of new 5G technology components. Above all, 5G networks will support mission-critical machine communications and massive machine type of traffic. As a result, the key performance metrics that 5G is expected to improve are in terms of, but not limited to, latency, reliability, capacity, and spectrum and network agility. This calls for a complete rethinking of all functional domains, including access stratum (AS), non-access stratum (NAS), and transport network layer (TNL), in terms of protocols and procedures. New emerging technologies, such as software defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), mobile edge computing (MEC), and high-performance computing (HPC), provide momentum for new design principles toward software (service) defined 5G networks, targeting a software defined air interface (SDAI) for available bands (spectrum); sliced "networks on demand" for multiple industries, especially for vertical markets (new architecture); and flexibility and spectral efficiency for mobile broadband and machine type communications (new air interface).

Description: In this article, we present a real-time full duplex radio system for 5G wireless networks. Full duplex radios are capable of opening new possibilities in contexts of high traffic demand where there are limited radio resources. A critical issue, however, in implementing full duplex radios in real wireless environments is being able to cancel self-interference. To overcome the selfinterference challenge, we prototype our design on a software-defined radio platform. This design combines a dual-polarization antenna-based analog part with a digital self-interference canceler that operates in real time. Prototype test results confirm that the proposed full duplex system achieves about 1.9 times higher throughput than a half duplex system. This article concludes with a discussion of implementation challenges that remain for researchers seeking the most viable solution for full duplex communications.

Description: The Internet of Things (IoT) is the result of many different enabling technologies such as embedded systems, wireless sensor networks, cloud computing, big-data, etc., which are used to gather, process, infer, and transmit data. Combining all these technologies requires a research effort to address all the challenges of these technologies, especially for sensing and delivering information from the physical world to cloud-hosted services. In this article we outline the most important issues related to standardization efforts, mobility of objects, networking and gateway access, and QoS support. In particular, we describe a novel IoT network architecture that integrates software defined networking (SDN) and data distribution service (DDS) middleware. The proposed architecture will improve service delivery of IoT systems and will bring flexibility to the network.

Description: As one of the fastest growing technologies, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications are expected to provide ubiquitous connectivity. M2M devices can be used for a wide range of emerging applications that have various communications requirements. While M2M communications have been developed for many years, major challenges still remain with their efficient implementation from the perspective of low energy consumption and wide coverage. To address these challenges, low power wide area (LPWA) technology is investigated as one of the potential candidate solutions. In this article, we first introduce some typical LPWA M2M application scenarios. Given their requirements, we highlight key techniques and standards that are explicitly designed for LPWA M2M communications. Finally, we present an LPWA prototype system to evaluate its performance and demonstrate its potential in bridging a technological gap for future Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications.

Description: The introduction of smart electricity meters with cellular radio interfaces has placed an additional load on wireless cellular networks. Currently, these meters are designed for low duty cycle billing and occasional system check, which generates low-rate sporadic traffic. As the number of distributed energy resources increases, household power will become more variable and thus unpredictable from the viewpoint of the distribution system operator (DSO). Therefore, it is expected that in the near future there will be an increase in the number of wide area measurement system (WAMS) devices with phasor measurement unit (PMU)-like capabilities in the distribution grid, thus allowing utilities to monitor the low voltage grid quality while providing information required for tighter grid control. From a communication standpoint, the traffic profile will change drastically toward higher data volumes and higher rates per device. In this paper we characterize the current traffic generated by smart electricity meters, and we discuss the potential traffic requirements resulting from the introduction of enhanced smart meters, i.e. meters with PMUlike capabilities. Our study shows how GSM/ GPRS and LTE cellular system performance behaves with current generation and next generation smart meter traffic, where it is clearly seen that the PMU data will seriously challenge these wireless systems. We conclude by highlighting the possible solutions for upgrading the cellular standards, in order to cope with the upcoming smart metering traffic.

Description: The ongoing paradigm shift from classical centralized wireless technologies toward distributed large-scale networks such as the Internet of Things has introduced new security challenges that cannot be fully handled via traditional cryptgraphic means. In such emerging wireless environments, devices have limited capabilities and are not controlled by a central control center; thus, the implementation of computationally expensive cryptographic techniques can be challenging. Motivated by these considerations, substantial recent research has been investigating the use of the physical layer as a means to develop low-complexity and effective wireless security mechanisms. Such techniques are grouped under the umbrella of physical layer security . These techniques range from information-theoretic security, which exploits channel advantages to thwart eavesdropping, to physical layer fingerprinting techniques that exploit physical layer features for device identification. In this context, providing state-of-the-art tutorials on the various approaches to physical layer security is of considerable interest. This Feature Topic gathers together such tutorial-style and overview articles that provide an in-depth overview of the broad spectrum of security opportunities brought forward by physical layer security.

Description: Including: (1) IEEE ComSoc Iraq Chapter Activities Continue Despite the Severity of the Situation Inside Iraq (2) Effectiveness of ComSoc DLT Program and Workshops in New Zealand (3) Tutorial Sessions on Quantum and Optical Wireless Communications and Exhibition at IEEE TENCON 2014, Bangkok, Thailand

Description: Physical layer key generation that exploits reciprocity and randomness of wireless fading channels has attracted considerable research attention in recent years. Although theoretical study has shown its potential to generate information- theoretic secure keys, great challenges remain when transforming the theory into practice. This article provides an overview of the physical layer key generation process and discusses its practical challenges. Different passive and active attacks are analyzed and evaluated through numerical study. A new key generation scheme using random probing signals, and combining user generated randomness and channel randomness, is introduced as a countermeasure against active attacks. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme achieves higher security strength than existing schemes using constant probing signals under active attacks. Future research topics on physical layer key generation are discussed.

Description: There has recently been significant interest in applying the principles of information-theoretical security and signal processing to secure physical layer systems. Although the community has made progress in understanding how the physical layer can support confidentiality and authentication, it is important to realize that there are many important issues that must be addressed if physical layer security is ever to be adopted by real and practical security systems. In this article, I briefly review several different flavors of physical layer security (at least for wireless systems), and then identify aspects (a.k.a. weaknesses) where the foundation for physical layer security needs to be strengthened. I then highlight that the opportunities for applying physical layer security to real systems will be quite rich if the community can overcome these challenges. In the course of the article, I note new directions for the community to investigate, with the objective of keeping physical layer security research targeted at having a practical impact on real systems.

Description: This month???s President???s Page is devoted to the IEEE Green Information and Communications Technology (ICT) initiative. By its very nature, Green ICT is a theme, not only of interest but also offering numerous opportunities, for virtually every IEEE Society and Council. Through this initiative, ComSoc seeks an IEEE-wide outreach to achieve even greater recognition for IEEE???s mission of advancing technology for humanity.

Description: Wireless energy harvesting (WEH) is becoming one of the key techniques in energy harvesting in wireless networks. On the other hand, interference alignment (IA) is a promising solution for interference management in wireless networks. Although plenty of effort has been conducted on WEH and IA, these two important areas have been addressed separately in most of the existing literature. In this article we provide an overview of WEH in IA networks, and present a unified framework to jointly study WEH and IA. To simultaneously optimize both information transmission (IT) and WEH performance in IA networks, we propose a power splitting optimization (PSO) algorithm. In addition, we study the power allocation problem in the proposed PSO algorithm. Simulation results are presented to compare the performance of the proposed schemes for WEH in IA networks. Some interesting research challenges are also presented for the WEH in IA networks.

Description: The advancements in microwave power transfer (MPT) over recent decades have enabled wireless power transfer over long distances. The latest breakthroughs in wireless communication ??? massive MIMO, small cells, and millimeterwave communication ??? make wireless networks suitable platforms for implementing MPT. This can lead to the elimination of the ???last wires??? connecting mobile devices to the grid for recharging, thereby tackling a huge long-standing ICT challenge. Furthermore, the seamless integration between MPT and wireless communication opens up a new area called wirelessly powered communications (WPC) where many new research directions arise, such as simultaneous information and power transfer, WPC network architectures, and techniques for safe and efficient WPC. This article provides an introduction to WPC by describing the key features of WPC, shedding light on a set of frequently asked questions, and identifying the key design issues and discussing possible solutions.

Description: Cooperative relaying has been recognized as a promising technique to exploit spatial diversity gain using simple hardware, but it may barely fall in the class of green communications because extra power is consumed for information relaying. Recent advances in energy harvesting devices have paved the way for self-sustainable relays that power themselves by replenishing ambient energy without wires. This article examines the current progress of EH relays with special emphasis on wireless power transfer through RF signals that carry both information and energy at the same time. In this context, information relaying and EH are two tightly coupled processes, and practical constraints of EH devices pose new challenges to self-sustainable relays. This article addresses these issues and points out future research directions.

Description: In mobile communications, two potentially ground-breaking ideas have emerged in recent years: massive MIMO antenna technology, which delivers enormous information rates, and wireless energy transfer (WET), which makes remote charging of mobile users possible. This article realizes the huge potential of combining the two for high wireless information transfer (WIT) and WET. In particular, to maximize the synergy, the distributed version of massive MIMO (known as massive distributed antenna system, MDAS) is advocated to go with the joint wireless information and energy transfer (JWIET) system capable of both WIT and WET. We present the opportunities in MDAS-JWIET, and discuss research trends in MDAS with several architectures involving WET and WIT.

Description: In this article, we cover eco-friendly cellular networks, discussing the benefits that ambient energy harvesting offers in terms of energy consumption and profit. We advocate for future networks where energy harvesting will be massively employed to power network elements; even further, communication networks will seamlessly blend with future power grids. This vision entails the fact that future base stations may trade some of the excess energy they harvest so as to make a profit and provide ancillary services to the electricity grid. We start by discussing recent developments in the energy harvesting field, and then deliberate on the way future energy markets are expected to evolve and the new fundamental trade-offs that arise when energy can be traded. Performance estimates are given throughout to support our arguments, and open research issues in this emerging field are discussed.

Description: Coding has long been fundamental to communication systems, even as far back as the advent of telegraphy in the 1840s: Samuel F. B. Morse created the Morse code as a means of efficiently encoding and transmitting messages in the English language. Channel coding has advanced considerably since the inauguration of information theory by Claude Shannon in 1948, followed by the seminal work by Richard Hamming on practical error correcting codes in 1949. Many crucial algorithms utilized in radio communications today, including convolutional and block codes, the Viterbi algorithm, BCH and Reed- Solomon codes, soft decoding, and so on, date back to the 1960s. Much of the interest in channel coding was driven by space research, to solve the formidable problem of communicating with space probes millions or even billions of kilometers from Earth.

Description: OFDM has been regarded as a promising candidate for use in cognitive radio systems with dynamic spectrum reuse capability. However, conventional OFDM has significant OOBE, which can cause severe interference to systems operating in adjacent frequency bands. In addition to conventional techniques such as spectral shaping filtering, guard band insertion, and time domain windowing, new OOBE reduction techniques, including cancellation carrier and spectral precoding, have been proposed in recent years. This article reviews various OOBE reduction techniques and proposes a generalized lowcomplexity OOBE reduction framework for discrete Fourier transform precoded OFDM. With the allocation of explicit frequency domain cancellation subcarriers and data domain cancellation symbols, the proposed framework enables various configurations to achieve significant OOBE reduction with low implementation complexity, and provides flexibility in balancing OOBE reduction and other performance metrics such as peak-to-average power ratio.

Description: Presents the front cover to the supplemental issue of this publication.

Description: The importance of standards to the work and careers of communications practitioners is the basis of this publication. It is a platform for presenting and discussing standards-related topics in the areas of communications, networking, research, and related disciplines.

Description: Presents summaries of new communications standards.

Description: The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging computing concept that describes a structure in which everyday physical objects, each provided with unique identifiers, are connected to the Internet without requiring human interaction. Long-term and self-sustainable operation are key components for realization of such a complex network, and entail energy-aware devices that are potentially capable of harvesting their required energy from ambient sources. Among different energy harvesting methods, such as vibration, light, and thermal energy extraction, wireless energy harvesting (WEH) has proven to be one of the most promising solutions by virtue of its simplicity, ease of implementation, and availability. In this article, we present an overview of enabling technologies for efficient WEH, analyze the lifetime of WEH-enabled IoT devices, and briefly study the future trends in the design of efficient WEH systems and research challenges that lie ahead.

Description: In order to deal with the challenges and opportunities presented by the mobile Internet, this paper proposes a new Internet-oriented mobile network architecture, dubbed i-Net, for fifth generation (5G) mobile communication systems. Based on direct communications established between the base stations (BSs), i-Net can implement local data routing for mobile data traffic, which adapts to increased service localization for the mobile Internet. We first present the network architecture and main technical features, i.e., inter-connection, integration, and intelligence. Then the key techniques are discussed to show their potential in improving the network efficiency of i-Net. Field trials for inter-BS direct communications to implement cooperative multipoint oPeration (CoMP) in i-Net are carried out to demonstrate the feasibility of i-Net. It is expected that i-Net can provide a good quality of experience for end users through the efficient integration of the multi-BS, multi-band, and multi-radio-access-technology (RAT) radio resources in 5G.

Description: Small cell networks have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years due to their potential to meet the exponential growth of mobile data traffic, and the increasing demand for better quality of service and user experience in mobile applications. Nevertheless, wide deployment of small cell networks has not happened yet because of the complexity in the network planning and optimization, as well as the high expenditure involved in deployment and operation. In particular, it is difficult to provide grid power supply to all the small cell base stations in a cost-effective way. Moreover, a dense deployment of small cell base stations, which is needed to meet the capacity and coverage of next generation wireless networks, will increase operators??? electricity bills and lead to significant carbon emission. Thus, it is crucial to exploit offgrid and green energy sources to power small cell networks, for which energy harvesting technology is a viable solution. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive study of energy harvesting small cell networks, and investigate important aspects, including a feasibility analysis, network deployment, and network operation issues. The advantages as well as unique challenges of energy harvesting small cell networks are highlighted, together with potential solutions and effective design methodologies.

Description: Presents upcoming conference events pertaining to the Communications Society.

Description: Authentication is a fundamental requirement for secure communications. In this article, we describe a general framework for fingerprint embedding at the physical layer in order to provide message authentication that is secure and bandwidth-efficient. Rather than depending on channel or device characteristics that are outside of our control, deliberate fingerprint embedding for message authentication enables control over performance trade-offs by design. Furthermore, low-power fingerprint designs enhance security by making the authentication tags less accessible to adversaries. We define metrics for communications and authentication performance, and discuss the trade-offs in system design. Results from our wireless software-defined radio experiments validate the theory and demonstrate the low complexity, practicality, and enhanced security of the approach.

Description: Today???s mobile customers desire to remain connected anywhere, at any time, and using any device. This phenomenon has encouraged mobile network operators to build complex network architectures by incorporating new features and extensions, which are harder to manage and operate. In this article we propose a novel and simplified architecture for mobile networks. The proposed architecture, which we call CSDN (Cellular SDN), leverages software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV). SDN abstracts the network and separates the control plane from the data plane; NFV decouples logical network functions from the underlying hardware, for dynamic resource orchestration. Furthermore, we argue that dynamic resource orchestration and optimal control need real-time context data analyses to make intelligent decisions. Thus, in the proposed architecture we exploit the capability of the mobile edge networks to gather information related to the network as well as the users. This information can be used to optimize network utilization and application performance, and to enhance the user experience. In addition, the gathered data can be shared with third party service providers, enabling the realization of innovative services.

Description: In this 15th issue of the Automotive Networking and Applications Series, we are pleased to present two papers that address security vulnerabilities of connected vehicle streams in cooperative driving and web access for passengers of public transit systems in the presence of intermittently connected networks.

Description: We live in a world in which there is a great disparity between the lives of the rich and the poor. Information and communication technology (ICT) offers promise in bridging this digital divide through its focus on connecting human capacity with computing and informational content. It is well known that Internet access has the capability of fostering development and growth by enabling access to information, education, and opportunities. Unfortunately, the availability of Internet in worldwide terms is limited, with an estimated 4 billion people - an estimated 60 percent of the human population - lacking Internet access. People in rural areas are particularly hard hit since socio-economic factors preclude the provisioning of Internet access and mobile telephony in these sparsely populated low-income areas.

Description: Beyond traditional telecom providers, citizens and organizations pool their own resources and coordinate in order to build local network infrastructures to address the digital divide in many parts of the world. These crowdsourced network infrastructures can be self-organized and shared by a community for the collective benefit of its members. Several of these networks have developed open, free, and neutral agreements, and are governed as a common-pool resource: community networks. These are built using a variety of commodity wireless hardware (e.g., Wi-Fi long-range point-to-point links, Wi-Fi and GSM access points, and mesh networks), sometimes optical fiber links, heterogeneous nodes, routing protocols, and applications. A group of researchers, developers, and community networks developed the Community-Lab testbed, and for the last five years have worked together to overcome obstacles, improve the technologies, tools, and operational models being used, as well as model best practices for more effective and sustainable community networks. This article presents the challenges for experimentation, the testbeds built, results, lessons learned, and the impact of that work to place wireless community networks as one sustainable way toward an Internet accessible to all.

Description: Recent years have witnessed a massive penetration of cellular systems in developing countries. However, isolated rural areas (sparsely inhabited by low-income population) have been disregarded because classical access and backhaul technologies do not ensure the return on investment. This article presents innovative techno- economical solutions to provide these areas with cellular voice and data services. We first analyze the general characteristics of isolated rural communities, and based on this information, low-cost solutions are designed for both access (using 3G access points) and backhaul networks (using non-carrier grade equipment as WiFi for long distances or WiMAX in non-licensed bands). Subsequently, a study of population- dependent income vs. costs is presented, and a new business model is proposed involving mobile network operators, rural operators, and infrastructure providers. In order to test these solutions, we have built two demonstration platforms in the Peruvian jungle that have allowed validation of the technical feasibility of the solution, verifying the business model assumptions and the scalability of the initiative.

Description: It is a measure of the importance and profundity of Marvin Kenneth Simon's contributions to communication theory that a tribute to his life and work is of current research relevance in spite of the continually accelerating rate of evolution in this area. Marv, as the entire community affectionately knew him, was one of the most prolific and influential communications researchers of his generation. Moreover, he laid the foundation for many of the techniques used in communication systems today. Marv's tragic death on September 23, 2007 continues to engender pangs not only of sadness at the passing of a great friend to many in our community, but also of regret that he is no longer with us to help resolve the many challenges facing communication systems today.

Description: The mobile Internet that will be enabled by LTE-Advanced Pro and the way in which we interact with it will change significantly within the next few years. From a usage point of view, it is anticipated that by 2020, each person, globally speaking, will consume on average as much as 5 GB of data each month, in addition to the traffic generated by 20-30 billion connected things. More significantly, not only will the mobile network be significantly faster, but even more applications will become possible. The video experience will be improved globally; mobile virtual reality will be available; networked vehicles and perhaps self-driving cars will roam our streets; the Internet of Things will enrich and make our lives more productive; and a mobile cloud will allow access to our data anytime, anywhere.

Description: Despite improvements and expansion of cellular coverage in developing regions, a substantial qualitative divide remains. Maps that display the presence or absence of cellular coverage mask critical differences in infrastructure performance and client load. In order to illuminate challenges faced by users of such mobile networks, we collect and analyze GSM network measurements at the local scale. We discover higher network congestion in developing regions as well as performance differences between available carriers in each location. Based on our findings, we propose an app, called SmartCell, that informs and empowers users in near real time to seek out improved mobile connectivity.

Description: One of the major impediments to providing broadband connectivity in semi-urban and rural India is the lack of robust and affordable backhaul. Fiber connectivity in terms of backhaul that is being planned (or provided) by the Government of India would reach only up to the rural offices (called Gram Panchayat) in Indian villages. In this exposition, we articulate how TV white space can address the challenge in providing broadband connectivity to a billion plus population within India. The villages can form local Wi-Fi clusters. The problem of connecting the Wi-Fi clusters to the optical fiber points can be addressed using a TV white space based backhaul (middle mile) network. The amount of TV white space present in India is very large when compared to the developed world. Therefore, we discuss a backhaul architecture for rural India that utilizes TV white spaces. We also present results from our TV white space testbed that support the effectiveness of backhaul by using TV white spaces. Our testbed provides a broadband access network to rural populations in seven villages. The testbed is deployed over an area of 25 km 2 , and extends seamless broadband connectivity from optical fiber locations or Internet gateways to remote (difficult to connect) rural regions. We also discuss standards and TV white space regulations, which are pertinent to the backhaul architecture mentioned above.

Description: An emerging scenario to be considered for further evolution of Long-Term Evolution and beyond is a multi-carrier ultra-dense network (MC-UDN). Advanced carrier aggregation (ACA) techniques, such as carrier switching, lightweight carriers, opportunistic transmissions, and adaptive resource optimization schemes, provide important means for the MC-UDN to allocate carrier-level resources properly and efficiently according to traffic load, channel, and interference conditions across the network. In this article, the general background, motivations, high-level design, and performance benefits of ACA techniques for the MC-UDN are described.

Description: A new procedure for contesting the validity of patents was instituted under the American Invents Act (AIA) of 2011. In the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board can conduct a proceeding for the review on the validity of a patent instituted by a party other than the patent owner. The proceeding is called an inter partes review proceeding. [1] While it may be considered a review, nevertheless it is a trial before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board and is litigation focused on the patent validity issues.

Description: In the three previous issues of this magazine, we described the three new technology areas in which the Communications Society (ComSoc) is playing a leading role. This President's message illustrates ComSoc's standards activities in relation to these emerging technology initiatives. To address the standards' aspects of the initiatives, we invited Dr. Alexander Gelman, ComSoc's Director of Standardization Programs Development, to write this article.

Description: This article presents an overview of recent 3GPP developments in the area of traffic steering that are shaping the road toward the approaching 5G systems. Due to the increasing availability of RAN features addressing mobile data delivery over a variety of spectrum access techniques, a new traffic steering design is required for the evolving LTE-Advanced Pro standard. LTE evolution toward 5G brings an opportunity to introduce a native and unified approach to the coordination of radio access mechanisms in multi-radio access technology networks for efficient data delivery in mobile networks. This leads to a design of a unified traffic steering framework, aiming at the orchestration of traffic steering related features for optimal radio resource utilization. Load-based radio access network coordination is presented and accompanied by illustrative examples to visualize how the multitude of LTE-Advanced Pro features can be handled in a holistic manner. Based on the proposed solution, potential evolution directions of mobile networks are discussed as an initial step toward the standardization of 5G.

Description: IEEE Members Voice and Raise the Importance of Science, Engineering and Technology at The Capital By Fawzi Behmann, Vice Chair, ComSoc NA and Chair ComSoc/ SP/CS Central Texas Austin Chapters; Community Development Opportunity Through IEEE ComSoc Workshops in New Zealand Nurul I Sarkar, Chair of the IEEE Joint NZ North, South and Central ComSoc Chapter; 17th Congress of Spain IEEE Student Branches: Promoting Engineering and Research to the Next Generation of Scientists By Oscar M Bonastre, Chair of Technical Activities, IEEE Spain Section; Technical Colloquium Conducted by the ComSoc Chapter of Hyderabad Section By N.Venkatesh, Chair, ComSoc/SPS Joint Chapter, IEEE Hyderabad Section; XII International Siberian Conference on Control and Communications (SIBCON-2016) By Oleg Stukach, Tomsk ComSoc Chapter Vice-Chair, Russia

Description: Recent advances in mobile and wireless technology have affected many areas of our lives, including the way we communicate, and how we interact and collaborate. Along with this, we have also witnessed a rapid increase in the mobility of people, thanks to faster transportation methods, simplified connections, and shorter commute times. These developments mean that studying the technological impact of mobile ad hoc and sensor networking now also requires studying aspects of social and human mobility. Mobile and wireless networking now involves people with networked sensors, mobile devices, and sensing context. The performance of each system then also depends on how people interact with these systems.

Description: Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) enables collective data harvesting actions by coordinating citizens willing to contribute data collected via their sensor-rich smartphones that represent sources of valuable sensing information in urban environments nowadays. One of the biggest challenges in a real long-running MCS system lies in the capacity not only to attract new volunteers, but also, and most importantly, to leverage existing social ties between volunteers to keep them involved to build long-lasting MCS communities. In addition, the advent of high-performing devices and ad hoc communication technologies can help to further amplify the effect of sensing actions in proximity of the volunteer devices. This article originally describes how to exploit these socio-technical networking aspects to increase the performance of MCS campaigns in the ParticipAct living laboratory, an ongoing MCS real-world experiment that involved about 170 students of the University of Bologna for more than two years. The article also reports some significant experimental results to quantify the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

Description: Modern cellular networks in traditional frequency bands are notoriously interference-limited, especially in urban areas, where base stations are deployed in close proximity to one another. The latest releases of LTE incorporate features for coordinating downlink transmissions as an efficient means of managing interference. Recent field trial results and theoretical studies of the performance of JT CoMP schemes revealed, however, that their gains are not as high as initially expected, despite the large coordination overhead. These schemes are known to be very sensitive to defects in synchronization or information exchange between coordinating base stations as well as uncoordinated interference. In this article, we review recent advanced CB schemes as alternatives, requiring less overhead than JT CoMP while achieving good performance in realistic conditions. By stipulating that in certain LTE scenarios of increasing interest, uncoordinated interference constitutes a major factor in the performance of CoMP techniques at large, we hereby assess the resilience of the stateof- the-art CB to uncoordinated interference. We also describe how these techniques can leverage the latest specifications of current cellular networks, and how they may perform when we consider standardized feedback and coordination. This allows us to identify some key road blocks and research directions to address as LTE evolves toward the future of mobile communications.

Description: The concepts of wisdom of crowd and collective intelligence have been utilized by mobile application developers to achieve large-scale distributed computation, known as crowd computing. The profitability of this method heavily depends on users' social interactions and their willingness to share resources. Thus, different crowd computing applications need to adopt mechanisms that motivate peers to collaborate and defray the costs of participating ones who share their resources. In this article, we propose OPENRP, a novel, lightweight, and scalable system middleware that provides a unified interface to crowd computing and opportunistic networking applications. When an application wants to perform a device-to-device task, it delegates the task to the middleware, which takes care of choosing the best peers with whom to collaborate and sending the task to these peers. OPENRP evaluates and updates the reputation of participating peers based on their mutual opportunistic interactions. To show the benefits of the middleware, we simulated the behavior of two representative crowdsourcing applications: message forwarding and task offloading. Through extensive simulations on real human mobility traces, we show that the traffic generated by the applications is lower compared to two benchmark strategies. As a consequence, we show that when using our middleware, the energy consumed by the nodes is reduced. Finally, we show that when dividing the nodes into selfish and altruistic, the reputation scores of the altruistic peers increase with time, while those of the selfish ones decrease.

Description: This article reviews technology and business enablers for future flexible use concepts of the UHF broadcasting spectrum (470-790 MHz) by digital terrestrial TV and MBB. Flexible use of the UHF band aims to increase the efficiency of spectrum use in delivering fast-growing and converging mobile broadband, media, and TV content to meet changing consumer needs. Enabling technical factors are presented, and potential services are compared in order to identify similarities and differences in possible business model designs and scaling factors for developing successfully deployable services and regulatory concepts. The results indicate that several services meet basic requirements to scale, leveraging key existing assets and capabilities of LTE technologies and the business ecosystem while extending current business models beyond connectivity. Regulation and standardization forums can utilize the developed use case and service scenarios in analyzing the future of UHF spectrum and LTE broadcasting evolution. Furthermore, the flexible use concept has the potential to transform the business ecosystem around both BC and MBB by introducing new convergence opportunities for LTE's development toward 5G.

Description: The extremely pervasive nature of mobile technologies, together with the user's need to continuously interact with her personal devices and to be always connected, strengthen the user-centric approach to design and develop new communication and computing solutions. Nowadays users not only represent the final utilizers of the technology, but they actively contribute to its evolution by assuming different roles: they act as humans, by sharing contents and experiences through social networks, and as virtual sensors, by moving freely in the environment with their sensing devices. Smart cities represent an important reference scenario for the active participation of users through mobile technologies. It involves multiple application domains and defines different levels of user engagement. Participatory sensing, opportunistic sensing, and mobile social networks (MSNs) currently represent some of the most promising people-centric paradigms. In addition, their integration can further improve the user involvement through new services and applications. In this article we present SmartCitizen app, an MSN application designed in the framework of a smart city project to stimulate the active participation of citizens in generating and sharing useful contents related to the quality of life in their city. The app has been developed on top of a context- and social-aware middleware platform (CAMEO) able to integrate the main features of people-centric computing paradigms, lightening the app developer's effort. Existing middleware platforms generally focus on a single people-centric paradigm, exporting a limited set of features to mobile applications. CAMEO overcomes these limitations and, through Smart- Citizen, we highlight the advantages of implementing this type of mobile application in a smart city scenario. Experimental results shown in this article can also represent the technical guidelines for the development of heterogeneous people-centric mobile applications embracing di- ferent application domains.

Description: Non-orthogonal transmission, although not entirely new to the wireless industry, is gaining more attention due to its promised throughput gain and unique capability to support a large number of simultaneous transmissions within limited resources. In this article, several key techniques for non-orthogonal transmission are discussed. The downlink technique is featured by MUST, which is being specified in 3GPP for mobile broadband services. In the uplink, grantfree schemes such as multi-user shared access and sparse code multiple access, are promising in supporting massive machine-type communication services. The multi-antenna aspect is also addressed in the context of MUST, showing that MIMO technology and non-orthogonal transmission can be used jointly to provide combined gain.

Description: Provides a notice of upcoming conference events of interest to practitioners and researchers.

Description: Crowdsourcing relies on the contributions of a large number of workers to accomplish spatial tasks, and it has drawn more attention in recent years. Many crowdsourcing tasks are completed online due to its convenience and efficiency. However, sometimes this traditional method may not work due to special requirements involving actual physical locations. Thus, a new paradigm of data collection, called spatial crowdsourcing, has emerged in the past few years. Spatial crowdsourcing consists of location-specific tasks that require people to physically be at specific locations to complete them. In this article we discuss unique challenges of spatial crowdsourcing, provide a comprehensive view of this new paradigm by introducing the taxonomy, and give future directions.

Description: End-user applications are provisioned in cloud settings using PaaS. Portability is key to the success of end-user application providers because it helps avoid vendor lock-in. It makes the components deployment of the same end-user application across multiple PaaS possible. It also enables them to move end-user applications from PaaS to PaaS with minimal adaptation efforts. This survey discusses and evaluates the approaches proposed so far within the standardization bodies, research projects, and academia for enabling end-user applications portability in PaaS. It also identifies the trajectory of research on the topic. An illustrative use case is described in order to identify evaluation requirements, and then the state of the art is reviewed in light of the requirements. The identified research directions are related to application executables, deployment descriptors, and operations, and a comprehensive set of management operations in the PaaS.

Description: In this article, we investigate the challenges in designing a communication network robust against earthquake-induced disasters. Due to the heterogeneity of local geology conditions, an earthquake may cause different devastating effects on network links at different locations. Therefore, the aim of this research was to develop a network design method that, based on actual seismic hazard information, finds appropriate geographical routes for network links under a cost constraint to maximize the robustness of the network. We carried out experiments on local as well as nationwide networks considering many possible earthquake scenarios in Japan. The results suggest that the shortest route is often the optimal route, and, in some cases, long detour routes can significantly reduce the average endto- end disconnection probability compared to the shortest route solutions. This gives a network operator guidelines to design a network that is resilient against earthquake disasters at the lowest possible cost.

Description: This is the 21st issue of the Network and Service Management series, which is typically published twice a year, in January and July. The Series provides articles on the latest developments in this well established discipline, highlighting recent research achievements and providing insight into both theoretical and practical issues related to the evolution of the discipline from different perspectives. The Series provides a forum for the publication of both academic and industrial research, addressing the state of the art, theory, and practice in network and service management.

Description: CoAP is a lightweight RESTful application layer protocol devised for the IoT. Operating on top of UDP, CoAP must handle congestion control by itself. The core CoAP specification defines a basic congestion control mechanism, but it is not capable of adapting to network conditions. However, IoT scenarios exhibit significant resource constraints, which pose new challenges on the design of congestion control mechanisms. In this article we present CoCoA, an advanced congestion control mechanism for CoAP being standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force CoRE working group. CoCoA introduces a novel round-trip time estimation technique, together with a variable backoff factor and aging mechanisms in order to provide dynamic and controlled retransmission timeout adaptation suitable for the peculiarities of IoT communications. We conduct a comparative performance analysis of CoCoA and a variety of alternative algorithms including state-of-the-art mechanisms developed for TCP. The study is based on experiments carried out in real testbeds. Results show that, in contrast to the alternative methods considered, CoCoA consistently outperforms the default CoAP congestion control mechanism in all evaluated scenarios.

Description: The ambitious goals set for 5G wireless networks, which are expected to be introduced around 2020, require dramatic changes in the design of different layers for next generation communications systems. Massive MIMO systems, filter bank multi-carrier modulation, relaying technologies, and millimeter-wave communications have been considered as some of the strong candidates for the physical layer design of 5G networks. In this article, we shed light on the potential and implementation of IM techniques for MIMO and multi-carrier communications systems, which are expected to be two of the key technologies for 5G systems. Specifically, we focus on two promising applications of IM: spatial modulation and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing with IM, and discuss the recent advances and future research directions in IM technologies toward spectrum- and energy-efficient 5G wireless networks.

Description: With the blossoming of network functions virtualization and software-defined networks, networks are becoming more and more agile with features like resilience, programmability, and open interfaces, which help operators to launch a network or service with more flexibility and shorter time to market. Recently, the concept of network slicing has been proposed to facilitate the building of a dedicated and customized logical network with virtualized resources. In this article, we introduce the concept of hierarchical NSaaS, helping operators to offer customized end-to-end cellular networks as a service. Moreover, the service orchestration and service level agreement mapping for quality assurance are introduced to illustrate the architecture of service management across different levels of service models. Finally, we illustrate the process of network slicing as a service within operators by typical examples. With network slicing as a service, we believe that the supporting system will transform itself to a production system by merging the operation and business domains, and enabling operators to build network slices for vertical industries more agilely.

Description: Sensing cost and data quality are two primary concerns in mobile crowdsensing. In this article, we propose a new crowdsensing paradigm, sparse mobile crowdsensing, which leverages the spatial and temporal correlation among the data sensed in different sub-areas to significantly reduce the required number of sensing tasks allocated, thus lowering overall sensing cost (e.g., smartphone energy consumption and incentives) while ensuring data quality. Sparse mobile crowdsensing applications intelligently select only a small portion of the target area for sensing while inferring the data of the remaining unsensed area with high accuracy. We discuss the fundamental research challenges in sparse mobile crowdsensing, and design a general framework with potential solutions to the challenges. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, a sparse mobile crowdsensing prototype for temperature and traffic monitoring is implemented and evaluated. With several future research directions identified in sparse mobile crowdsensing, we expect that more research interests will be stimulated in this novel crowdsensing paradigm.

Description: Presents the front cover for this issue of the magazine.

Description: The IEEE Standards Association is primarily known for its extensive set of published standards, for example 802.3 Ethernet, and the process used to bring together experts from around the world to contribute to standards development. But there are occasions where industry wants to discuss technology trends and options without an immediate plan to produce a standard.

Description: Single Sign On (SSO) protocols are today integrated in millions of web services so end users can authenticate to a third-party identity provider (IdP) to access multiple services. IdPs normally provide integration tools that hide almost all implementation details and allow developers to implement SSO in minutes. Such integration tools along with cumbersome protocol specifications result in developers without a clear view of the underlying SSO protocol. This article presents a conceptual characterization of web SSO protocols through their assertions and their features that help preserve the privacy of the user resources involved in SSO.

Description: Provides a notice of upcoming conference events of interest to practitioners and researchers.

Description: The broad connection of devices to the Internet, known as the IoT or M2M, requires lowcost power-efficient global connectivity services. New physical layer solutions, MAC procedures, and network architectures are needed to evolve the current LTE cellular systems to meet the demands of IoT services. Several steps have been taken under the 3GPP to accomplish these objectives and are included in the upcoming 3GPP LTE standards release (3GPP Release 13). In this tutorial article, we present an overview of several features included in 3GPP to accommodate the needs of M2M communications, including changes in the physical layer such as enhanced machine type communications, and new MAC and higher-layer procedures provided by extended discontinuous reception. We also briefly discuss the narrowband IoT, which is in the development stage with a target completion date of June 2016.

Description: Presents the front cover for this issue of the publication.

Description: Presents key events and topics in the global communications industry.

Description: The evolution of wireless communication from 4G toward 5G is driven by application demands and business models envisioned for 2020 and beyond. This requires network support for novel use cases in addition to classical mobile broadband services. Wireless factory automation is an application area with highly demanding communication requirements. We classify these requirements and identify the opportunities for the current LTE air interface for factory automation applications. Moreover, we give an outlook on the relevant design considerations to be addressed by 5G communication systems.

Description: With centralized processing, cooperative radio, real-time cloud computing, and clean infrastructure, C-RAN is a "future-proof" solution to sustain the mobile data explosion in future wireless networks. The technology holds great potential in enhancing LTE with the necessary capability to accommodate the unprecedented traffic volume that today's wireless cellular system is facing. However, the high density of RRHs in C-RANs leads to severe scalability issues in terms of computational and implementation complexities. This article discusses the challenges and recent developments in the technologies that potentially address the scalability issues of C-RANs. In particular, we focus on the collaborative signal processing, resource management, and green architecture of C-RAN systems. This article is a humble attempt to draw the attention of the research community to the following important question: how to leverage the revolutionary architecture of C-RAN to attain unprecedented system capacity at an affordable cost and complexity.

Description: Wireless communication has become a key technology for competitiveness of next generation vehicles. Recently, the 3GPP has initiated standardization activities for LTE-based V2X services composed of vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle- to-pedestrian, and vehicle-to-infrastructure/network. The goal of these 3GPP activities is to enhance LTE systems to enable vehicles to communicate with other vehicles, pedestrians, and infrastructure in order to exchange messages for aiding in road safety, controlling traffic flow, and providing various traffic notifications. In this article, we provide an overview of the service flow and requirements of the V2X services LTE systems are targeting. This article also discusses the scenarios suitable for operating LTE-based V2X services, and addresses the main challenges of high mobility and densely populated vehicle environments in designing technical solutions to fulfill the requirements of V2X services. Leveraging the spectral-efficient air interface, the cost-effective network deployment, and the versatile nature of supporting different communication types, LTE systems along with proper enhancements can be the key enabler of V2X services.

Description: Nature is Earth's most amazing invention machine for solving problems and adapting to significant environmental changes. Its ability to address complex, large-scale problems with robust, adaptable, and efficient solutions results from many years of selection, genetic drift, and mutations. Thus, it is not surprising that inventors and researchers often look to natural systems for inspiration and methods to solve problems in human-created artificial environments. This has resulted in the development of evolutionary algorithms including genetic algorithms and swarm algorithms, and of classifier and pattern detection algorithms, such as neural networks, for addressing hard computational problems.

Description: Social insect colonies have survived over evolutionary time in part due to the success of their collaborative methods: using local information and distributed decision making algorithms to detect and exploit critical resources in their environment. These methods have the unusual and useful ability to detect anomalies rapidly, with very little memory, and using only very local information. Our research investigates the potential for a self-organizing anomaly detection system inspired by those observed naturally in colonies of honey bees. We provide a summary of findings from a recently presented algorithm for a nonparametric, fully distributed coordination framework that translates the biological success of these methods into analogous operations for use in cyber defense and discuss the features that inspired this translation. We explore the impacts on detection performance of the defined range of distributed communication for each node and of involving only a small percentage of total nodes in the network in the distributed detection communication. We evaluate our algorithm using a software-based testing implementation, and demonstrate up to 20 percent improvement in detection capability over parallel isolated anomaly detectors.

Description: The evolution of communication technology and the proliferation of electronic devices have rendered adversaries powerful means for targeted attacks via all sorts of accessible resources. In particular, due to the intrinsic interdependence and ubiquitous connectivity of modern communication systems, adversaries can devise malware that propagates through intermediate hosts to approach the target, to which we refer as transmissive attacks. Inspired by biology, the transmission pattern of such an attack in the digital space much resembles the spread of an epidemic in real life. This article describes transmissive attacks, summarizes the utility of epidemic models in communication systems, and draws connections between transmissive attacks and epidemic models. Simulations, experiments, and ongoing research challenges on transmissive attacks are also addressed.

Description: The chirp signal is one of the first bio-inspired signals commonly used in RF applications where the term chirp is a reference to the chirping sound made by birds. It has since been recognized that birds communicate through such chirping sounds to attract other birds of the same species, to transmit an alarm for specific threats, and so on. However, birds of a different species, or sometime even birds in a different social group within a species, are unable to connect a specific meaning to certain calls - they will simply hear a bird chirping. Inspired by such, this article provides a tutorial on a novel RF steganography scheme to conceal digital communication in linear chirp radar signals. We first provide a review of the linear chirp signal and existing communication systems using chirp waveforms. Next we discuss how to implement the RF steganography and hide digitally modulated communication information inside a linear chirp radar signal to prevent an enemy from detecting the existence of such hidden information. A new modulation called reduced phase shift keying is employed to make the modulated chirp waveform almost identical to the unmodulated chirp signal. Furthermore, variable symbol durations are employed to eliminate cyclostationary features that might otherwise be exploited by an enemy to detect the existence of the hidden information.

Description: This theme is strongly reflected in the four articles we have selected for this edition of the Consumer Communications and Networking series. The theme includes the enhancement of network features as well as network extensions to cover an even larger area and to reach more people. Articles in this edition cover network topics including flow updates in software defined networks, interconnecting ISP content delivery networks, providing connectivity to rural communities, and supporting consumer services on industrial deterministic networks. More specifically, the first article in this edition, by Yujie Liu et al., focuses on the resource trade-off of flow updates in software defined networks. It discusses how dynamic rule updates affect traffic flow and what additional resources are required to handle the flow update. The article provides both qualitative analysis and quantitative simulation results of the trade-off between bandwidth and flow table size.

Description: In software-defined networks, packet forwarding is performed by installing rules on the switches' flow tables. After the rules are installed, the controller needs to dynamically update the rules during runtime for a variety of reasons including traffic engineering, policy changes, network maintenance, and so on. A single forwarding policy update often consists of rule modifications on multiple switches simultaneously. Since the update process requires moving flows to different paths in a consistent and correct manner, multiple steps are usually involved. Thus, additional resources are needed to handle the flow update to ensure correctness and performance, such as extra bandwidth and flow table entries. In this work, we analyze different existing mechanisms of flow update from their resource utilization perspectives. Specifically, we study the impact of bandwidth and flow table size on the performance of flow update, and their interactions. We provide both qualitative analysis of the tradeoff between these two kinds of resources, and the quantitative simulation results of this trade-off under different realistic network topologies. Our observation is important to the problems related to flow update, based on which we further illustrate its usefulness with three applications.

Description: Prior work has shown that a biologically inspired approach can solve some of the fundamental transportation problems in urban areas. As one instance of this approach, it was shown that vehicles equipped with dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) radios can manage traffic in urban areas in a completely self-organized manner similar to self-organizing biological systems (e.g., ants, birds, and fish). This scheme is known as virtual traffic lights, and its success is enabled by the design of local rules which allow vehicles approaching an intersection to resolve the ensuing conflict in a seamless and self-organized manner without the need for any infrastructure. One important safety issue in urban traffic is how to manage the presence of emergency vehicles such as ambulances and fire trucks. In this article, it is shown that by designing a different set of local rules, one can give priority to emergency vehicles at every intersection, thus expediting their response times.

Description: As the number of electronic components in the car increases, the requirement for the higher data transmission scheme among them is on the sharp rise. The control area network (CAN) has been widely adopted to support the in-car communications needs but the data rate is far below what other schemes such as Ethernet and optical fibers can offer. A new scheme for enhancing the speed of CANs has been proposed, where a carrier modulated signal is introduced on top of the existing CAN signal, whereby the data rate can be enhanced over 100 Mb/s. The proposed scheme is compatible with the existing CAN network and accordingly enables seamless upgrade of the existing network to support high-speed demand using CAN protocol.

Description: Our society is undergoing an unprecedented transformation as more and more devices are being interconnected over the wide area network. This will profoundly change our productivity and human interaction. The Internet of Things (IoT) has been one of the most successful growth segments in cellular-based applications in recent years, with an annual growth rate in the range of 30 percent. It is anticipated that the ratio of connected things to people will rise sharply over the next 5-10 years, to around 7:1 or even higher, which means that there would be 50 billion or even more connected things. The GSM Association believes the number could grow to 24 billion by 2020 [1], while Gartner forecasts that number to be 35 billion [2]. Applications include smart building, smart metering, smart city, ehealth, smart environment, consumer electronics, and telematics/vehicle to everything (V2X). Consequently, this part of the Feature Topic will focus on technologies for Long Term Evolution (LTE) that will enhance the support of IoT.

Description: The quality of a mobile channel is severely affected by obstructions such as tall buildings, mountains, and foliage, which in turn limit the performance of wireless communication systems. A transmitted signal propagates toward a receiver generally following standard electromagnetic reflection, diffraction, and scattering mechanisms, which attenuate the strength of the signal, such attenuation being commonly known as propagation loss. There are a number of propagation models with which many of you may be familiar, such as COST 231, Longley-Rice, Okumura, and Hata, to name a few; these have been developed to predict path loss for variable separation distances on the order of hundreds to thousands of meters between transmitters and receivers, and are known as largescale propagation models. Such models are extensively used in estimating the coverage areas of cellular base stations. Besides the large-scale propagation models, there is a family of small-scale models (also known as fading models) that characterize the signal strength variations for much smaller separation distances, on the order of a few wavelengths to a few tens of meters between transmitters and receivers.