Services répartis, Architectures, MOdélisation, Validation, Administration des Réseaux

This article presents a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art for vehicle ad hoc networks. We start by reviewing the possible applications that can be used in VANETs, namely, safety and user applications, and by identifying their requirements. Then, we classify the solutions proposed in the literature according to their location in the open system interconnection reference model and their relationship to safety or user applications. We analyze their advantages and shortcomings and provide our suggestions for a better approach. We also describe the different methods used to simulate and evaluate the proposed solutions. Finally, we conclude with suggestions for a general architecture that can form the basis for a practical VANET.

Recently the problem of determining the best, in the least-squares sense, rank-1 approximation to a higher-order tensor was studied and an iterative method that extends the well-known power method for matrices was proposed for its solution. This higher-order power method is also proposed for the special but important class of supersymmetric tensors, with no change. A simplified version, adapted to the special structure of the supersymmetric problem, is deemed unreliable, as its convergence is not guaranteed. The aim of this paper is to show that a symmetric version of the above method converges under assumptions of convexity (or concavity) for the functional induced by the tensor in question, assumptions that are very often satisfied in practical applications. The use of this version entails significant savings in computational complexity as compared to the unconstrained higher-order power method. Furthermore, a novel method for initializing the iterative process is developed which has been observed to yield an estimate that lies closer to the global optimum than the initialization suggested before. Moreover, its proximity to the global optimum is a priori quantifiable. In the course of the analysis, some important properties that the supersymmetry of a tensor implies for its square matrix unfolding are also studied.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted a lot of attention in the research community in recent years due to their promising applications. VANETs help improve traffic safety and efficiency. Each vehicle can exchange information to inform other vehicles about the current status of the traffic flow or a dangerous situation such as an accident. Road safety and traffic management applications require a reliable communication scheme with minimal transmission collisions, which thus increase the need for an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol. However, the design of the MAC in a vehicular network is a challenging task due to the high speed of the nodes, the frequent changes in topology, the lack of an infrastructure, and various QoS requirements. Recently, several time-division multiple-access (TDMA)-based MAC protocols have been proposed for VANETs in an attempt to ensure that all the vehicles have enough time to send safety messages without collisions and to reduce the end-to-end delay and the packet loss ratio. In this paper, we identify the reasons for using the collision-free MAC paradigm in VANETs. We then present a novel topology-based classification, and we provide an overview of TDMA-based MAC protocols that have been proposed for VANETs. We focus on the characteristics of these protocols, as well as on their benefits and limitations. Finally, we give a qualitative comparison, and we discuss some open issues that need to be tackled in future studies in order to improve the performance of TDMA-based MAC protocols for vehicle-to-vehicle communications.

Network visualization is a promising concept to diversify the future Internet architecture into separate virtual networks (VN) that can support simultaneously multiple network experiments, services and architectures over a shared substrate network. To take full advantage of this paradigm this paper addresses the challenge of assigning VNs to the underlying physical network in a distributed and efficient manner. A distributed algorithm responsible for load balancing and mapping virtual nodes and links to substrate nodes and links has been designed, implemented and evaluated. A VN mapping protocol is proposed to communicate and exchange messages between agent-based substrate nodes to achieve the mapping. Results of the implementation and a performance evaluation of the distributed VN mapping algorithm using a multi-agent approach are reported.

Recently, the European Medicines Agency approved the use of the vasopressin V2 receptor antagonist tolvaptan to slow the progression of cyst development and renal insufficiency of autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) in adult patients with chronic kidney disease stages 1-3 at initiation of treatment with evidence of rapidly progressing disease. In this paper, on behalf of the ERA-EDTA Working Groups of Inherited Kidney Disorders and European Renal Best Practice, we aim to provide guidance for making the decision as to which ADPKD patients to treat with tolvaptan. The present position statement includes a series of recommendations resulting in a hierarchical decision algorithm that encompasses a sequence of risk-factor assessments in a descending order of reliability. By examining the best-validated markers first, we aim to identify ADPKD patients who have documented rapid disease progression or are likely to have rapid disease progression. We believe that this procedure offers the best opportunity to select patients who are most likely to benefit from tolvaptan, thus improving the benefit-to-risk ratio and cost-effectiveness of this treatment. It is important to emphasize that the decision to initiate treatment requires the consideration of many factors besides eligibility, such as contraindications, potential adverse events, as well as patient motivation and lifestyle factors, and requires shared decision-making with the patient.

In modern cities, more and more vehicles, such as taxis, have been equipped with GPS devices for localization and navigation. Gathering and analyzing these large-scale real-world digital traces have provided us an unprecedented opportunity to understand the city dynamics and reveal the hidden social and economic “realities”. One innovative pervasive application is to provide correct driving strategies to taxi drivers according to time and location. In this paper, we aim to discover both efficient and inefficient passenger-finding strategies from a large-scale taxi GPS dataset, which was collected from 5350 taxis for one year in a large city of China. By representing the passenger-finding strategies in a Time-Location-Strategy feature triplet and constructing a train/test dataset containing both top- and ordinary-performance taxi features, we adopt a powerful feature selection tool, L1-Norm SVM, to select the most salient feature patterns determining the taxi performance. We find that the selected patterns can well interpret the empirical study results derived from raw data analysis and even reveal interesting hidden “facts”. Moreover, the taxi performance predictor built on the selected features can achieve a prediction accuracy of 85.3% on a new test dataset, and it also outperforms the one based on all the features, which implies that the selected features are indeed the right indicators of the passenger-finding strategies.

Trajectories obtained from Global Position System (GPS)-enabled taxis grant us an opportunity not only to extract meaningful statistics, dynamics, and behaviors about certain urban road users but also to monitor adverse and/or malicious events. In this paper, we focus on the problem of detecting anomalous routes by comparing the latter against time-dependent historically “normal” routes. We propose an online method that is able to detect anomalous trajectories “on-the-fly” and to identify which parts of the trajectory are responsible for its anomalousness. Furthermore, we perform an in-depth analysis on around 43 800 anomalous trajectories that are detected out from the trajectories of 7600 taxis for a month, revealing that most of the anomalous trips are the result of conscious decisions of greedy taxi drivers to commit fraud. We evaluate our proposed isolation-based online anomalous trajectory (iBOAT) through extensive experiments on large-scale taxi data, and it shows that iBOAT achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a remarkable performance of the area under a curve (AUC) <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\geq$</tex></formula> 0.99.

This paper presents two exact algorithms for energy efficient scheduling of virtual machines (VMs) in cloud data centers. Modeling of energy aware allocation and consolidation to minimize overall energy consumption leads us to the combination of an optimal allocation algorithm with a consolidation algorithm relying on migration of VMs at service departures. The optimal allocation algorithm is solved as a bin packing problem with a minimum power consumption objective. It is compared with an energy aware best fit algorithm. The exact migration algorithm results from a linear and integer formulation of VM migration to adapt placement when resources are released. The proposed migration is general and goes beyond the current state of the art by minimizing both the number of migrations needed for consolidation and energy consumption in a single algorithm with a set of valid inequalities and conditions. Experimental results show the benefits of combining the allocation and migration algorithms and demonstrate their ability to achieve significant energy savings while maintaining feasible convergence times when compared with the best fit heuristic.

Taxi service strategies, as the crowd intelligence of massive taxi drivers, are hidden in their historical time-stamped GPS traces. Mining GPS traces to understand the service strategies of skilled taxi drivers can benefit the drivers themselves, passengers, and city planners in a number of ways. This paper intends to uncover the efficient and inefficient taxi service strategies based on a large-scale GPS historical database of approximately 7600 taxis over one year in a city in China. First, we separate the GPS traces of individual taxi drivers and link them with the revenue generated. Second, we investigate the taxi service strategies from three perspectives, namely, passenger-searching strategies, passenger-delivery strategies, and service-region preference. Finally, we represent the taxi service strategies with a feature matrix and evaluate the correlation between service strategies and revenue, informing which strategies are efficient or inefficient. We predict the revenue of taxi drivers based on their strategies and achieve a prediction residual as less as 2.35 RMB/h, <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> which demonstrates that the extracted taxi service strategies with our proposed approach well characterize the driving behavior and performance of taxi drivers.

The Akaike (1974) information criterion (AIC) and the minimum description length (MDL) are two well-known criteria for model order selection in the additive white noise case. Our aim is to study the influence on their behavior of a large gap between the signal and the noise eigenvalues and of the noise eigenvalue dispersion. Our results are mostly qualitative and serve to explain the behavior of the AIC and the MDL in some cases of great practical importance. We show that when the noise eigenvalues are not clustered sufficiently closely, then the AIC and the MDL may lead to overmodeling by ignoring an arbitrarily large gap between the signal and the noise eigenvalues. For fixed number of data samples, overmodeling becomes more likely for increasing the dispersion of the noise eigenvalues. For fixed dispersion, overmodeling becomes more likely for increasing the number of data samples. Undermodeling may happen in the cases where the signal and the noise eigenvalues are not well separated and the noise eigenvalues are clustered sufficiently closely. We illustrate our results by using simulations from the effective channel order determination area.

With the advance of the Internet of Underwater Things, smart things are deployed under the water and form the underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs), to facilitate the discovery of vast unexplored ocean volume. A routing protocol, which is not expensive in packets forwarding and energy consumption, is fundamental for sensory data gathering and transmitting in UWSNs. To address this challenge, this paper proposes Enhanced CARP (E-CARP), which is an enhanced version of the channel-aware routing protocol (CARP) developed by S. Basagni et al., to achieve the location-free and greedy hop-by-hop packet forwarding strategy. In general, CARP does not consider the reusability of previously collected sensory data to support certain domain applications afterward, which induces data packets forwarding which may not be beneficial to applications. Besides, the PING-PONG strategy in CARP can be simplified for selecting the most appropriate relay node at each time point, when the network topology is relatively steady. These two research problems have been addressed by our E-CARP. Simulation results validate that our technique can decrease the communication cost significantly and increase the network capability to a certain extent.

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a new paradigm to collect sensing data and infer useful knowledge over a vast area for numerous monitoring applications. In urban environments, as more and more applications need to utilize multi-source sensing information, it is almost indispensable to develop a generic mechanism supporting multiple concurrent MCS task assignment. However, most existing multi-task assignment methods focus on homogeneous tasks. Due to the diverse spatiotemporal task requirements and sensing contexts, MCS tasks often differ from each other in many aspects (e.g., spatial coverage, temporal interval). To this end, in the paper, we present and formalize an important Heterogeneous Multi-Task Assignment (HMTA) problem in mobile crowdsensing systems, and try to maximize data quality and minimize total incentive budget. By leveraging the implicit spatiotemporal correlations among heterogeneous tasks, we propose a two-stage HMTA problem-solving approach to effectively handle multiple concurrent tasks in a shared resource pool. Finally, in order to improve the assignment search efficiency, a decomposition-and-combination framework is devised to accommodate large-scale problem scenario. We evaluate our approach extensively using two large-scale real-world data sets. The experimental results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach.

Computing smoothing distributions, the distributions of one or more states conditional on past, present, and future observations is a recurring problem when operating on general hidden Markov models. The aim of this paper is to provide a foundation of particle-based approximation of such distributions and to analyze, in a common unifying framework, different schemes producing such approximations. In this setting, general convergence results, including exponential deviation inequalities and central limit theorems, are established. In particular, time uniform bounds on the marginal smoothing error are obtained under appropriate mixing conditions on the transition kernel of the latent chain. In addition, we propose an algorithm approximating the joint smoothing distribution at a cost that grows only linearly with the number of particles.

Taxi GPS traces can inform us the human mobility patterns in modern cities. Instead of leveraging the costly and inaccurate human surveys about people’s mobility, we intend to explore the night bus route planning issue by using taxi GPS traces. Specifically, we propose a two-phase approach for bidirectional night bus route planning. In the first phase, we develop a process to cluster “hot” areas with dense passenger pick up/drop off and then propose effective methods to split big hot areas into clusters and identify a location in each cluster as a candidate bus stop. In the second phase, given the bus route origin, destination, candidate bus stops, and bus operation time constraints, we derive several effective rules to build the bus route graph and prune invalid stops and edges iteratively. Based on this graph, we further develop a bidirectional probability-based spreading algorithm to generate candidate bus routes automatically. We finally select the best bidirectional bus route, which expects the maximum number of passengers under the given conditions and constraints. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, extensive empirical studies are performed on a real-world taxi GPS data set, which contains more than 1.57 million night passenger delivery trips, generated by 7600 taxis in a month.

During peak hours in urban areas, unpredictable traffic congestion caused by en route events (e.g., vehicle crashes) increases drivers' travel time and, more seriously, decreases their travel time reliability. In this paper, an original and highly practical vehicle rerouting system, which is called Next Road Rerouting (NRR), is proposed to aid drivers in making the most appropriate next road choice to avoid unexpected congestions. In particular, this heuristic rerouting decision is made upon a cost function that takes into account the driver's destination and local traffic conditions. In addition, the newly designed multiagent system architecture of NRR allows the positive rerouting impacts on local traffic to be disseminated to a larger area through the natural traffic flow propagation within connected local areas. The simulation results based on both synthetic and realistic urban scenarios demonstrate that, compared with the existing solutions, NRR can achieve a lower average travel time while guaranteeing a higher travel time reliability in the face of unexpected congestion. The impacts of NRR on the travel time of both rerouted and nonrerouted vehicles are also assessed, and the corresponding results reveal its higher practicability.

This paper investigates the fee scheduling problem of electric vehicles (EVs) at the micro-grid scale. This problem contains a set of charging stations controlled by a central aggregator. One of the main stakeholders is the operator of the charging stations, who is motivated to minimize the cost incurred by the charging stations, while the other major stakeholders are vehicle owners who are mostly interested in user convenience, as they want their EVs to be fully charged as soon as possible. A biobjective optimization problem is formulated to jointly optimize two factors that correspond to these stakeholders. An online centralized scheduling algorithm is proposed and proven to provide a Pareto-optimal solution. Moreover, a novel low-complexity distributed algorithm is proposed to reduce both the transmission data rate and the computation complexity in the system. The algorithms are evaluated through simulation, and results reveal that the charging time in the proposed method is 30% less than that of the compared methods proposed in the literature. The data transmitted by the distributed algorithm is 33.25% lower than that of a centralized one. While the performance difference between the centralized and distributed algorithms is only 2%, the computation time shows a significant reduction.

Abstract With the extensive application of deep learning (DL) algorithms in recent years, e.g., for detecting Android malware or vulnerable source code, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are increasingly becoming essential in the development of cybersecurity solutions. However, sharing the same fundamental limitation with other DL application domains, such as computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP), AI-based cybersecurity solutions are incapable of justifying the results (ranging from detection and prediction to reasoning and decision-making) and making them understandable to humans. Consequently, explainable AI (XAI) has emerged as a paramount topic addressing the related challenges of making AI models explainable or interpretable to human users. It is particularly relevant in cybersecurity domain, in that XAI may allow security operators, who are overwhelmed with tens of thousands of security alerts per day (most of which are false positives), to better assess the potential threats and reduce alert fatigue. We conduct an extensive literature review on the intersection between XAI and cybersecurity. Particularly, we investigate the existing literature from two perspectives: the applications of XAI to cybersecurity (e.g., intrusion detection, malware classification), and the security of XAI (e.g., attacks on XAI pipelines, potential countermeasures). We characterize the security of XAI with several security properties that have been discussed in the literature. We also formulate open questions that are either unanswered or insufficiently addressed in the literature, and discuss future directions of research.

This paper proposes a novel task allocation framework, CrowdTasker, for mobile crowdsensing. CrowdTasker operates on top of energy-efficient Piggyback Crowdsensing (PCS) task model, and aims to maximize the coverage quality of the sensing task while satisfying the incentive budget constraint. In order to achieve this goal, CrowdTasker first predicts the call and mobility of mobile users based on their historical records. With a flexible incentive model and the prediction results, CrowdTasker then selects a set of users in each sensing cycle for PCS task participation, so that the resulting solution achieves near-maximal coverage quality without exceeding incentive budget. We evaluated CrowdTasker extensively using a large-scale real-world dataset and the results show that CrowdTasker significantly outperformed three baseline approaches by achieving 3%-60% higher coverage quality.

FOUNDATIONSLinear ModelsStochastic Processes The Covariance World Linear Processes The Multivariate Cases Numerical Examples ExercisesLinear Gaussian State Space Models Model Basics Filtering, Smoothing, and Forecasting Maximum Likelihood Estimation Smoothing Splines and the Kalman Smoother Asymptotic Distribution of the MLE Missing Data Modifications Structural Component Models State-Space Models with Correlated Errors Exercises Beyond Linear ModelsNonlinear Non-Gaussian Data Volterra Series Expansion Cumulants and Higher-Order Spectra Bilinear Models Conditionally Heteroscedastic Models Thre

The aim of this paper is to apply the recent pairwise Markov chain model, which generalizes the hidden Markov chain one, to the unsupervised restoration of hidden data. The main novelty is an original parameter estimation method that is valid in a general setting, where the form of the possibly correlated noise is not known. Several experimental results are presented in both Gaussian and generalized mixture contexts. They show the advantages of the pairwise Markov chain model with respect to the classical hidden Markov chain one for supervised and unsupervised restorations.