Dynamic attribute based vehicle authentication

Modern vehicles are proficient in establishing a spontaneous connection over a wireless radio channel, synchronizing actions and information. Security infrastructure is most important in such a sensitive scope of vehicle communication for coordinating actions and avoiding accidents on the road. One of the first security issues that need to be established is authentication via IEEE 1609.2 security infrastructure. According to our preliminary work, vehicle owners are bound to preprocess a certificate from the certificate authority. The certificate carries vehicle static attributes (e.g., licence number, brand and color) certified together with the vehicle public key in a monolithic manner. Nevertheless, a malicious vehicle might clone the static attributes to impersonate a specific vehicle. Therefore, in this paper we consider a resource expensive attack scenario involving multiple malicious vehicles with identical visual static attributes. Apparently, dynamic attributes (e.g., location and direction) can uniquely define a vehicle and can be utilized to resolve the true identity of the vehicle. However, unlike static attributes, dynamic attributes cannot be signed by a trusted authority beforehand. We propose an approach to verify the coupling between non-certified dynamic attributes and certified static attributes on an auxiliary communication channel, for example, a modulated laser beam. Furthermore, we illustrate that the proposed approach can be used to facilitate the usage of existing authentication protocols such as NAXOS, in the new scope of ad-hoc vehicle networks. We use BAN logic to verify the security claims of the protocol against the passive and active interception.     

Study of Non-lubricated Wear of the Al–Si Alloy Composite Reinforced with Different Ratios of Coarse and Fine Size Zircon Sand Particles at Different Ambient Temperatures

In the present work, a detailed study of ceramic reinforcement of different size ranges in the matrix of LM13 alloy on the friction and wear behavior has been carried out. For this purpose, LM13/Zr composite containing 10 wt% zircon sand particles of different size ranges using stir casting process has been developed. Zircon sand particles were incorporated in two ways: firstly as single size reinforcement and secondly dual size reinforcement. Durability of the composites was tested by finding the wear rate of the composite against the steel disk by pin-on-disk method. Addition of zircon sand particles in the LM13 alloy improves the hardness of the composite as well as wear resistance. Wear rate of the developed composites was tested under different test conditions by varying the applied load and ambient temperatures. Wear rate of the composite changes significantly at different ambient temperatures. SEM analysis of the worn surfaces was done to know the operative wear mechanism.     

On minimizing end-to-end delay with optimal traffic partitioning

Multipath transport provides higher usable bandwidth for a session. It has also been shown to provide load balancing and error resilience for end-to-end multimedia sessions. Two key issues in the use of multiple paths are 1) how to minimize the end-to-end delay, which now includes the delay along the paths and the resequencing delay at the receiver, and 2) how to select paths. This paper presents an analytical framework for the optimal partitioning of real-time multimedia traffic that minimizes the total end-to-end delay. Specifically, it formulates optimal traffic partitioning as a constrained optimization problem using deterministic network calculus and derives its closed-form solution. Compared with previous work, the proposed scheme is simpler to implement and enforce. This analysis also greatly simplifies the solution to the path selection problem as compared to previous efforts. Analytical results show that for a given flow and a set of paths, a minimal subset can be chosen to achieve the minimum end-to-end delay with O(N) time, where N is the number of available paths. The selected path set is optimal in the sense that adding any rejected path to the set will only increase the end-to-end delay.     

MRTP: a multiflow real-time transport protocol for ad hoc networks

Real-time multimedia transport has stringent quality of service requirements, which are generally not supported by current network architectures. In emerging mobile ad hoc networks, frequent topology changes and link failures cause severe packet losses, which degrade the quality of received media. However, in such mesh networks, there usually exist multiple paths between any source and destination nodes. Such path diversity has been demonstrated to be effective in combating congestion and link failures for improved media quality. In this paper, we present a new protocol to facilitate multipath transport of real-time multimedia data. The proposed protocol, the multiflow real-time transport protocol (MRTP), provides a convenient vehicle for real-time applications to partition and transmit data using multiple flows. We demonstrate through analysis that data partitioning, which is an essential function of MRTP, can effectively reduce the short-range dependence of multimedia data, thus improving its queueing performance in underlying networks. Furthermore, we show that a few flows are sufficient for MRTP to exploit most of the benefits of multipath transport. Finally, we present a comprehensive simulation study on the performance of MRTP under a mobile ad hoc network. We show that with one additional path, MRTP outperformed single-flow RTP by a significant margin.     

CoopMAC: A Cooperative MAC for Wireless LANs

Due to the broadcast nature of wireless signals, a wireless transmission intended for a particular destination station can be overheard by other neighboring stations. A focus of recent research activities in cooperative communications is to achieve spatial diversity gains by requiring these neighboring stations to retransmit the overheard information to the final destination. In this paper we demonstrate that such cooperation among stations in a wireless LAN (WLAN) can achieve both higher throughput and lower interference. We present the design for a medium access control protocol called CoopMAC, in which high data rate stations assist low data rate stations in their transmission by forwarding their traffic. In our proposed protocol, using the overheard transmissions, each low data rate node maintains a table, called a CoopTable, of potential helper nodes that can assist in its transmissions. During transmission, each low data rate node selects either direct transmission or transmission through a helper node in order to minimize the total transmission time. Using analysis, simulation and testbed experimentation, we quantify the increase in the total network throughput, and the reduction in delay, if such cooperative transmissions are utilized. The CoopMAC protocol is simple and backward compatible with the legacy 802.11 system. In this paper, we also demonstrate a reduction in the signal-to-interference ratio in a dense deployment of 802.11 access points, which in some cases is a more important consequence of cooperation     

On expiration-based hierarchical caching systems

Caching is an important means to scale up the growth of the Internet. Weak consistency is a major approach used in Web caching and has been deployed in various forms. The paper investigates some fundamental properties and performance issues associated with an expiration-based caching system. We focus on a hierarchical caching system based on the time-to-live expiration mechanism and present a basic model for such system. By analyzing the intrinsic timing behavior of the basic model, we derive important performance metrics from the perspectives of the caching system and end users, respectively. Based on the results for the basic model, we introduce threshold-based and randomization-based techniques to enhance and generalize the basic model further. Our results offer some important insights into a hierarchical caching system based on the weak consistency paradigm.     

A New SiF–Dipropargyl Glycerol Scaffold as a Versatile Prosthetic Group to Design Dimeric Radioligands: Synthesis of the [18F]BMPPSiF Tracer to Image Serotonin Receptors

A novel SiX–dipropargyl glycerol scaffold (X: H, F, or ¹⁸F) was developed as a versatile prosthetic group that provides technical advantages for the preparation of dimeric radioligands based on silicon fluoride acceptor pre‐ or post‐labeling with fluorine‐18. Rapid conjugation with the prosthetic group takes place in microwave‐assisted click conjugation under mild conditions. Thus, a bivalent homodimeric SiX–dipropargyl glycerol derivatized radioligand, [¹⁸F]BMPPSiF, with enhanced affinity was developed by using click conjugation. High uptake of the radioligand was demonstrated in 5‐HT_1A receptor‐rich regions in the brain with positron emission tomography. Molecular docking studies (rigid protein–flexible ligand) of BMPPSiF and known antagonists (WAY‐100635, MPPF, and MefWAY) with monomeric, dimeric, and multimeric 5‐HT_1A receptor models were performed, with the highest G score obtained for docked BMPPSiF: ?6.766 as compared with all three antagonists on the monomeric model. Multimeric induced‐fit docking was also performed to visualize the comparable mode of binding under in vivo conditions, and a notably improved G score of ?8.455 was observed for BMPPSiF. These data directly correlate the high binding potential of BMPPSiF with the bivalent binding mode obtained in the biological studies. The present study warrants wide application of the SiX–dipropargyl glycerol prosthetic group in the development of ligands for imaging with enhanced affinity markers for specific targeting based on peptides, nucleosides, and lipids.     

Applying wavelet transforms with arithmetic coding to radiologicalimage compression

Radiological archives need the images to be compressed at a moderate compression ratio between 10:1 to 20:1 while retaining good diagnostic quality. We have developed a compression algorithm based on discrete wavelet transforms (DWTs) and arithmetic coding (AC) that satisfies those requirements. This new method is superior to the previously developed full frame discrete cosine transform (FFDCT) method, as well as the industrial standard developed by the joint photographic expert group (JPEG). Since DWT is localized in both spatial and scale domains, the error due to quantization of coefficients does not propagate throughout the reconstructed picture as in FFDCT. Because it is a global transformation, it does not suffer the limitation of block transform methods such as JPEG. The severity of the error as measured by the normalized mean square error (NMSE) and maximum difference technique increases very slowly with compression ratio compared to the FFDCT. Normalized nearest neighbor difference (NNND), which is a measure of blockiness, stays approximately constant, while JPEG NNND increases rapidly with compression ratio. Furthermore, DWT has an efficient finite response filter FlR implementation that can be put in parallel hardware. DWT also offers total flexibility in the image format; the size of the image does not have to be a power of two as in the case of FFDCT