SCM: Secure and accountable TLS certificate management

In classical public‐key infrastructure (PKI), the certificate authorities (CAs) are fully trusted, and the security of the PKI relies on the trustworthiness of the CAs. However, recent failures and compromises of CAs showed that if a CA is corrupted, fake certificates may be issued, and the security of clients will be at risk. As emerging solutions, blockchain‐ and log‐based PKI proposals potentially solved the shortcomings of the PKI, in particular, eliminating the weakest link security and providing a rapid remedy to CAs' problems. Nevertheless, log‐based PKIs are still exposed to split‐world attacks if the attacker is capable of presenting two distinct signed versions of the log to the targeted victim(s), while the blockchain‐based PKIs have scaling and high‐cost issues to be overcome. To address these problems, this paper presents a secure and accountable transport layer security (TLS) certificate management (SCM), which is a next‐generation PKI framework. It combines the two emerging architectures, introducing novel mechanisms, and makes CAs and log servers accountable to domain owners. In SCM, CA‐signed domain certificates are stored in log servers, while the management of CAs and log servers is handed over to a group of domain owners, which is conducted on the blockchain platform. Different from existing blockchain‐based PKI proposals, SCM decreases the storage cost of blockchain from several hundreds of GB to only hundreds of megabytes. Finally, we analyze the security and performance of SCM and compare SCM with previous blockchain‐ and log‐based PKI schemes.     

EETP-MAC: energy efficient traffic prioritization for medium access control in wireless body area networks

Wireless body area network (WBAN) has witnessed significant attentions in the healthcare domain using biomedical sensor-based monitoring of heterogeneous nature of vital signs of a patient’s body. The design of frequency band, MAC superframe structure, and slots allocation to the heterogeneous nature of the patient’s packets have become the challenging problems in WBAN due to the diverse QoS requirements. In this context, this paper proposes an Energy Efficient Traffic Prioritization for Medium Access Control (EETP-MAC) protocol, which provides sufficient slots with higher bandwidth and guard bands to avoid channels interference causing longer delay. Specifically, the design of EETP-MAC is broadly divided in to four folds. Firstly, patient data traffic prioritization is presented with broad categorization including Non-Constrained Data (NCD), Delay-Constrained Data (DCD), Reliability-Constrained Data (RCD) and Critical Data (CD). Secondly, a modified superframe structure design is proposed for effectively handling the traffic prioritization. Thirdly, threshold based slot allocation technique is developed to reduce contention by effectively quantifying criticality on patient data. Forth, an energy efficient frame design is presented focusing on beacon interval, superframe duration, and packet size and inactive period. Simulations are performed to comparatively evaluate the performance of the proposed EETP-MAC with the state-of-the-art MAC protocols. The comparative evaluation attests the benefit of EETP-MAC in terms of efficient slot allocation resulting in lower delay and energy consumption.

     

Filter-Bank Modulation Based Signal Design and Transmission Techniques for Intensity Modulated MIMO Visible Light Communication Systems

Wireless Personal Communications - Current research in wireless communication undoubtedly points towards the tremendous advantages of using visible light as a spectrum for significantly boosting...     

BSLPSDN: Base station location privacy via software-defined networking (SDN) in wireless sensor networks

Base station's location privacy in a wireless sensor network (WSN) is critical for information security and operational availability of the network. A key part of securing the base station from potential compromise is to secure the information about its physical location. This paper proposes a technique called base station location privacy via software-defined networking (SDN) in wireless sensor networks (BSLPSDN). The inspiration comes from the architecture of SDN, where the control plane is separated from the data plane, and where control plane decides the policy for the data plane. BSLPSDN uses three categories of nodes, namely, a main controller to instruct the overall operations, a dedicated node to buffer and forward data, and lastly, a common node to sense and forward the packet. We employ three kinds of nodes to collaborate and achieve stealth for the base station and thus protecting it against the traffic-analysis attacks. Different traits of the WSN including energy status and traffic density can actively be monitored by BSLPSDN, which positively affects the energy goals, expected life of the network, load on common nodes, and the possibility of creating diversion in the wake of an attack on the base station. We incorporated multiple experiments to analyze and evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm. We use single controller with multiple sensor nodes and multiple controllers with multiple sensor nodes to show the level of anonymity of BS. Experiments show that providing BS anonymity via multiple controllers is the best method both in terms of energy and privacy.     

A Mathematical Study for Laminar Boundary‐Layer Flow,Heat, and Mass Transfer of a Jeffrey Non‐Newtonian Fluid Past a Vertical Porous Plate

In this article, we investigate the nonlinear steady‐state boundary‐layer flow, heat and mass transfer of an incompressible Jeffrey non‐Newtonian fluid past a vertical porous plate. The transformed conservation equations are solved numerically subject to physically appropriate boundary conditions using a versatile, implicit finite‐difference technique. The numerical code is validated with previous studies. The influence of a number of emerging non‐dimensional parameters, namely, Deborah number (De), Prandtl number (Pr), ratio of relaxation to retardation times (λ), Schmidt number (Sc), and dimensionless tangential coordinate (ξ) on velocity, temperature, and concentration evolution in the boundary layer regime are examined in detail. Furthermore, the effects of these parameters on surface heat transfer rate, mass transfer rate, and local skin friction are also investigated. It is found that the velocity is reduced with increasing Deborah number whereas temperature and concentration are enhanced. Increasing λ enhances the velocity but reduces the temperature and concentration. The heat transfer rate and mass transfer rates are found to be depressed with increasing Deborah number, De, and enhanced with increasing λ. Local skin friction is found to be decreased with a rise in Deborah number whereas it is elevated with increasing λ. And an increasing Schmidt number decreases the velocity and concentration but increases temperature. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Heat Trans Asian Res; Published online in Wiley Online Library ( wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/htj ). DOI 10.1002/htj.21111     

A modified rain attenuation prediction model for tropical V‐band satellite earth link

Radio wave propagation plays a very important part in the design and eventually dictates performance of space communication systems. Over time, the requirements of satellite communication have grown extensively where higher capacity communications systems are needed. Escalating demands of microwave and millimetre wave communications are causing frequency spectrum congestion. Hence, existing and future satellite system operators are planning to employ frequency bands well above 10 GHz. The challenge in operating at such high frequencies for communication purposes is that there exists stronger electromagnetic interaction between the radio signals and atmospheric hydrometeors. Such instances will degrade the performance of such high frequency satellite communication systems. The development of a revised model for a better‐improved rain fade prediction of signal propagations in tropical region is considered very important. Researchers and engineers can employ the model to accurately plan the future high frequencies satellite services. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Experimental Study of RF-excited Diffusion Cooled Off-axis Unstable Resonator with High Frequency Modulation in a Waveguide CO2 Laser

The experimental study of the laser beam parameters of the pulse repetitive RF-excited diffusion cooled waveguide CO2 laser are presented. The measurements are carried out for the pumping pulse duration of 100 μs and pulse repetitive rates 5 - 14 kHz. The average power density delivered to the active medium is 76 W/cm^3. Three types of the pulses, namely the square, the sine and the triangular ones have been applied at the input as pumping pulses and their effects on the output power and the delay time have been studied. The output power of the radiation versus input power, pressure of the laser gas mixture and modulation frequency has been investigated. The results indicate that the output peak power for the three types of pulses increases with increase of the pressure of the laser gas mixture and with the input power where as it decreases with the repetition frequency. The delay time of the output pulse decreases with the increase of the repetition frequency and input power, where as it increases with the increase of the pressure of the laser gas mixture. The behavior of the output power and the delay time with duty cycle for square pulse has also been investigated.     

啤酒酵母和乳酸菌发酵棕榈粕渣饲料制备工艺的响应面优化

通过单因素实验和响应面法对啤酒酵母和乳酸菌发酵棕榈粕渣饲料制备工艺进行研究。结果表明:基料制备最佳发酵条件为发酵时间5 d、棕榈仁渣目数70目、菌料比1∶103、发酵温度30℃、含水量36%,该条件下基料中总菌落数为7.20×10~(10)个/g;发酵产物最佳发酵条件为发酵温度30℃、棕榈果渣与空果串配比1∶2、棕榈果渣及空果粉碎长度4 cm、配料比1∶10(基料与棕榈果渣和空果串质量比)、含水量35%、发酵时间36 d,该条件下发酵产物营养成分OD值为0.966。对发酵饲料主要成分进行分析,其粗蛋白、粗脂肪、粗纤维、粗灰分、钙、磷、含水量分别为7.20%、7.61%、26.20%、5.20%、0.38%、0.26%、16.20%,总菌落数为9.0×10~7个/g。该发酵方法工艺简单,具有良好的工业化生产前景。     

Path diversification for future internet end-to-end resilience and survivability

Path Diversification is a new mechanism that can be used to select multiple paths between a given ingress and egress node pair using a quantified diversity measure to achieve maximum flow reliability. The path diversification mechanism is targeted at the end-to-end layer, but can be applied at any level for which a path discovery service is available. Path diversification also takes into account service requirements for low-latency or maximal reliability in selecting appropriate paths. Using this mechanism will allow future internetworking architectures to exploit naturally rich physical topologies to a far greater extent than is possible with shortest-path routing or equal-cost load balancing. We describe the path diversity metric and its application at various aggregation levels, and apply the path diversification process to 13 real-world network graphs as well as 4 synthetic topologies to asses the gain in flow reliability. Based on the analysis of flow reliability across a range of networks, we then extend our path diversity metric to create a composite compensated total graph diversity metric that is representative of a particular topology’s survivability with respect to distributed simultaneous link and node failures. We tune the accuracy of this metric having simulated the performance of each topology under a range of failure severities, and present the results. The topologies used are from national-scale backbone networks with a variety of characteristics, which we characterize using standard graph-theoretic metrics. The end result is a compensated total graph diversity metric that accurately predicts the survivability of a given network topology.     

Interconnecting networks with optimized service provisioning

Telecommunication Systems - A recent trend of peering at geo-diversified Internet exchange points (IXPs) has empowered decades-old proposal of inter-networking and opened up new avenues of business...