Bücher der Reihe SpringerBriefs in Computer Science

There are two main approaches in the theory of network error correction coding. In this SpringerBrief, the authors summarize some of the most important contributions following the classic approach, which represents messages by sequences similar to algebraic coding, and also briefly discuss the main results following the other approach, that uses the theory of rank metric codes for network error correction of representing messages by subspaces. This book starts by establishing the basic linear network error correction (LNEC) model and then characterizes two equivalent descriptions. Distances and weights are defined in order to characterize the discrepancy of these two vectors and to measure the seriousness of errors. Similar to classical error-correcting codes, the authors also apply the minimum distance decoding principle to LNEC codes at each sink node, but use distinct distances. For this decoding principle, it is shown that the minimum distance of a LNEC code at each sink node can fully characterize its error-detecting, error-correcting and erasure-error-correcting capabilities with respect to the sink node. In addition, some important and useful coding bounds in classical coding theory are generalized to linear network error correction coding, including the Hamming bound, the Gilbert-Varshamov bound and the Singleton bound. Several constructive algorithms of LNEC codes are presented, particularly for LNEC MDS codes, along with an analysis of their performance. Random linear network error correction coding is feasible for noncoherent networks with errors. Its performance is investigated by estimating upper bounds on some failure probabilities by analyzing the information transmission and error correction. Finally, the basic theory of subspace codes is introduced including the encoding and decoding principle as well as the channel model, the bounds on subspace codes, code construction and decoding algorithms.

This book is a timely report of the state-of-the-art analytical techniques in the domain of quantum algorithms related to Boolean functions. Topics covered in the book include Qubit, Deutsch-Jozsa and Walsh spectrum, Grover's algorithm, Simon's algorithm and autocorrelation spectrum.

In the last few years, there has been extensive research activity in the emerging area of Intermittently Connected Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (ICMANs). By considering the nature of intermittent connectivity in most real word mobile environments without any restrictions placedon users' behavior, ICMANs are eventually formed without any assumption with regard to the existence of a end-to-end path between two nodes wishing to communicate. It is different from the conventional Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), which have been implicitly viewed as aconnected graph with established complete paths between every pair of nodes. For the conventional MANETs, mobility of nodes is considered as a challenge and needs to be handled properly to enable seamless communication between nodes. However, to overcome intermittentconnectivity in the ICMANs context, mobility is recognized as a critical component for data communications between the nodes that may never be part of the same connected portion of the network. This comes at the cost of addition considerable delay in data forwarding, since data areoften stored and carried by the intermediate nodes waiting for the mobility to generate the next forwarding opportunity that can probably bring it close to the destination. Such incurred large delays primarily limit ICMANs to the applications, which must tolerate delays beyond traditionalforwarding delays. ICMANs belong to the family of delay tolerant networks (DTNs). However, the unique characteristics (e.g., self-organizing, random mobility and ad hoc based connection) derived from MANETs distinguish ICMANs from other typical DTNs such as interplanetarynetwork (IPN) with infrastructure-based architecture.By allowing mobile nodes to connect and disconnect based on their behaviors and wills, ICMANs enable a number of novel applications to become possible in the field of MANETs. For example, there is a growing demand for efficient architectures for deploying opportunistic contentdistribution systems over ICMANs. This is because a large number of smart handheld devices with powerful functions enable mobile users to utilize low cost wireless connectivities such as Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 for sharing and exchanging the multimedia contents anytime anywhere. Note that such phenomenal growth of content-rich services has promoted a new kind of networking where the content is delivered from its source (referred to as publisher) towards interested users (referred to as subscribers) rather than towards the pre-specified destinations.Compared to the extensive research activities relating to the routing and forwarding issues in ICMANs and even DTNs, opportunistic content distribution is just in its early stage and has not been widely addressed.With all these in mind, this book provides an in-depth discussion on the latest research efforts for opportunistic content distribution over ICMANs.

The authors survey a recent technique in computer vision called Interactive Co-segmentation, which is the task of simultaneously extracting common foreground objects from multiple related images. They survey several of the algorithms, present underlying common ideas, and give an overview of applications of object co-segmentation.

This book provides an analysis of transmission power and network performance in different wireless communication networks. It presents the latest research and techniques for power and interference control and performance modeling in wireless communication networks with different network topologies, air interfaces, and transmission techniques. While studying the power distributions and resource management, the reader will also learn basic methodology and skills for problem formulations, can ascertain the complexity for designing radio resource management strategies in modern wireless communication networks, thus keeping pace with state-of-the-art research progress in radio transmission technologies.

We make complex decisions every day, requiring trust in many different entities for different reasons. These decisions are not made by combining many isolated trust evaluations. Many interlocking factors play a role, each dynamically impacting the others.  In this brief, "trust context" is defined as the system level description of how the trust evaluation process unfolds.Networks today are part of almost all human activity, supporting and shaping it. Applications increasingly incorporate new interdependencies and new trust contexts. Social networks connect people and organizations throughout the globe in cooperative and competitive activities. Information is created and consumed at a global scale. Systems, devices, and sensors create and process data, manage physical systems, and participate in interactions with other entities, people and systems alike.  To study trust in such applications, we need a multi-disciplinary approach.  This book reviews the components of the trust context through a broad review of recent literature in many different fields of study. Common threads relevant to the trust context across many application domains are also illustrated.Illustrations in the text © 2013 Aaron Hertzmann. www.dgp.toronto.edu/~hertzman

In the treatment of chronic diseases, wireless Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) are commonly used to communicate with an outside programmer (reader). Such communication raises serious security concerns, such as the ability for hackers to gain access to a patient's medical records. This brief provides an overview of such attacks and the new security challenges, defenses, design issues, modeling and performance evaluation in wireless IMDs.  While studying the vulnerabilities of IMDs and corresponding security defenses, the reader will also learn the methodologies and tools for designing security schemes, modeling, security analysis, and performance evaluation, thus keeping pace with quickly-evolving wireless security research.

Cloud storage is an important service of cloud computing, which offers service for data owners to host their data in the cloud. This new paradigm of data hosting and data access services introduces two major security concerns. The first is the protection of data integrity. Data owners may not fully trust the cloud server and worry that data stored in the cloud could be corrupted or even removed. The second is data access control. Data owners may worry that some dishonest servers provide data access to users that are not permitted for profit gain and thus they can no longer rely on the servers for access control. To protect the data integrity in the cloud, an efficient and secure dynamic auditing protocol is introduced, which can support dynamic auditing and batch auditing. To ensure the data security in the cloud, two efficient and secure data access control schemes are introduced in this brief: ABAC for Single-authority Systems and DAC-MACS for Multi-authority Systems. While Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising technique for access control of encrypted data, the existing schemes cannot be directly applied to data access control for cloud storage systems because of the attribute revocation problem. To solve the attribute revocation problem, new Revocable CP-ABE methods are proposed in both ABAC and DAC-MACS.

This brief surveys existing techniques to address the problem of long delays and high power consumption for web browsing on smartphones, which can be due to the local computational limitation at the smartphone (e.g., running java scripts or flash objects) level. To address this issue, an architecture called Virtual-Machine based Proxy (VMP) is introduced, shifting the computing from smartphones to the VMP which may reside in the cloud. Mobile Web Browsing Using the Cloud illustrates the feasibility of deploying the proposed VMP system in 3G networks through a prototype using Xen virtual machines (in cloud) and Android Phones with ATT UMTS network. Techniques to address scalability issues, resource management techniques to optimize the performance of the VMs on the proxy side, compression techniques to further reduce the bandwidth consumption, and adaptation techniques to address poor network conditions on the smartphone are also included.

The experts of the International Working Group-Landau Network Centro Volta (IWG-LNCV) discuss aspects of cyber security and present possible methods of deterrence, defense and resilience against cyber attacks. This SpringerBrief covers state-of-the-art documentation on the deterrence power of cyber attacks and argues that nations are entering a new cyber arms race. The brief also provides a technical analysis of possible cyber attacks towards critical infrastructures in the chemical industry and chemical safety industry. The authors also propose modern analyses and a holistic approach to resilience and security of Industrial Control Systems. The combination of contextual overview and future directions in the field makes this brief a useful resource for researchers and professionals studying systems security, data security and data structures. Advanced-level students interested in data security will also find this brief a helpful guide to recent research.

This brief presents a peer-to-peer (P2P) web-hosting infrastructure (named pWeb) that can transform networked, home-entertainment devices into lightweight collaborating Web servers for persistently storing and serving multimedia and web content. The issues addressed include ensuring content availability, Plexus routing and indexing, naming schemes, web ID, collaborative web search, network architecture and content indexing. In pWeb, user-generated voluminous multimedia content is proactively uploaded to a nearby network location (preferably within the same LAN or at least, within the same ISP) and a structured P2P mechanism ensures Internet accessibility by tracking the original content and its replicas. This new paradigm of information management strives to provide low or no-cost cloud storage and entices the end users to upload voluminous multimedia content to the cloud data centers. However, it leads to difficulties in privacy, network architecture and content availability. Concise and practical, this brief examines the benefits and pitfalls of the pWeb web-hosting infrastructure. It is designed for professionals and practitioners working on P2P and web management and is also a useful resource for advanced-level students studying networks or multimedia.

This SpringerBrief discusses the rise of the smart grid from the perspective of computing and communications. It explains how current and next-generation network technology and methodologies help recognize the potential that the smart grid initiative promises.Chapters provide context on the smart grid before exploring specific challenges related to communication control and energy management. Topics include control in heterogeneous power supply, solutions for backhaul and wide area networks, home energy management systems, and technologies for smart energy management systems.Designed for researchers and professionals working on the smart grid, Communication Challenges and Solutions in the Smart Grid offers context and applications for the common issues of this developing technology. Advanced-level students interested in networking and communications engineering will also find the brief valuable.

This SpringerBrief addresses the challenges of analyzing multi-relational and noisy data by proposing several Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) methods. These methods combine the expressiveness of first-order logic and the ability of probability theory to handle uncertainty. It provides an overview of the methods and the key assumptions that allow for adaptation to different models and real world applications.The models are highly attractive due to their compactness and comprehensibility but learning their structure is computationally intensive. To combat this problem, the authors review the use of functional gradients for boosting the structure and the parameters of statistical relational models. The algorithms have been applied successfully in several SRL settings and have been adapted to several real problems from Information extraction in text to medical problems. Including both context and well-tested applications, Boosting Statistical Relational Learning from Benchmarks to Data-Driven Medicine is designed for researchers and professionals in machine learning and data mining. Computer engineers or students interested in statistics, data management, or health informatics will also find this brief a valuable resource.

This book describes the mathematical background behind discrete approaches to morphological analysis of scalar fields, with a focus on Morse theory and on the discrete theories due to Banchoff and Forman. The algorithms and data structures presented are used for terrain modeling and analysis, molecular shape analysis, and for analysis or visualization of sensor and simulation 3D data sets. It covers a variety of application domains including geography, geology, environmental sciences, medicine and biology. The authors classify the different approaches to morphological analysis which are all based on the construction of Morse or Morse-Smale decompositions. They describe algorithms for computing such decompositions for both 2D and 3D scalar fields, including those based on the discrete watershed transform. Also addressed are recent developments in the research on morphological shape analysis, such as simplification operators for Morse and Morse-Smale complexes and their multi-resolution representation. Designed for professionals and researchers involved with modeling and algorithm analysis, Morphological Modeling of Terrains and Volume Data is a valuable resource. Advanced-level students of computer science, mathematics and geography will also find the content very helpful.

This SpringerBrief explores graphical password systems and examines novel drawing-based methods in terms of security, usability, and human computer-interactions. It provides a systematic approach for recognizing, comparing, and matching sketch-based passwords in the context of modern computing systems. The book offers both a security and usability analysis of the accumulative framework used for incorporating handwriting biometrics and a human computer-interaction performance analysis. The chapters offer new perspectives and experimental results regarding model uniqueness, recognition tolerance, and the human-computer interaction. The results demonstrate that biometrics reduce the equal error rate (EER) by more than 10%, and show that people are capable of accurately reproducing a sketch-based password. Fundamentals of Sketch-based Passwords: A General Framework targets computer scientists and engineers focused on computer security, biometrics, and human factors. Advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering will find this material useful as a study guide for their classes.

The book describes the world's first successful experiment in fully automated board game design. Evolutionary methods were used to derive new rule sets within a custom game description language, and self-play trials used to estimate each derived game's potential to interest human players. The end result is a number of new and interesting games, one of which has proved popular and gone on to be commercially published.

Software similarity and classification is an emerging topic with wide applications. It is applicable to the areas of malware detection, software theft detection, plagiarism detection, and software clone detection. Extracting program features, processing those features into suitable representations, and constructing distance metrics to define similarity and dissimilarity are the key methods to identify software variants, clones, derivatives, and classes of software. Software Similarity and Classification reviews the literature of those core concepts, in addition to relevant literature in each application and demonstrates that considering these applied problems as a similarity and classification problem enables techniques to be shared between areas. Additionally, the authors present in-depth case studies using the software similarity and classification techniques developed throughout the book.

Trusting a computer for a security-sensitive task (such as checking email or banking online) requires the user to know something about the computer's state. We examine research on securely capturing a computer's state, and consider the utility of this information both for improving security on the local computer (e.g., to convince the user that her computer is not infected with malware) and for communicating a remote computer's state (e.g., to enable the user to check that a web server will adequately protect her data). Although the recent "e;Trusted Computing"e; initiative has drawn both positive and negative attention to this area, we consider the older and broader topic of bootstrapping trust in a computer. We cover issues ranging from the wide collection of secure hardware that can serve as a foundation for trust, to the usability issues that arise when trying to convey computer state information to humans. This approach unifies disparate research efforts and highlights opportunities for additional work that can guide real-world improvements in computer security.

Explosive growth in the size of spatial databases has highlighted the need for spatial data mining techniques to mine the interesting but implicit spatial patterns within these large databases. This book explores computational structure of the exact and approximate spatialautoregression (SAR) model solutions. Estimation of the parameters of the SAR model using Maximum Likelihood (ML) theory is computationally very expensive because of the need to compute the logarithm of the determinant (log-det) of a large matrix in the log-likelihood function. The second part of the book introduces theory on SAR model solutions. The third part of the book applies parallel processing techniques to the exact SAR model solutions. Parallel formulations of the SAR model parameter estimation procedure based on ML theory are probed using data parallelism with load-balancing techniques. Although this parallel implementation showed scalability up to eight processors, the exact SAR model solution still suffers from high computational complexity and memory requirements. These limitations have led the book to investigate serial and parallel approximate solutions for SAR model parameter estimation. In the fourth and fifth parts of the book, two candidate approximate-semi-sparse solutions of the SAR model based on Taylor's Series expansion and Chebyshev Polynomials are presented. Experiments show that the differences between exact and approximate SAR parameter estimates have no significant effect on the prediction accuracy. In the last part of the book, we developed a new ML based approximate SAR model solution and its variants in the next part of the thesis. The new approximate SAR model solution is called the Gauss-Lanczos approximated SAR model solution. We algebraically rank the error of the Chebyshev Polynomial approximation, Taylor's Series approximation and the Gauss-Lanczos approximation to the solution of the SAR model and its variants. In other words, we established a novel relationship between the error in the log-det term, which is the approximated term in the concentrated log-likelihood function and the error in estimating the SAR parameter for all of the approximate SAR model solutions.

Protection of enterprise networks from malicious intrusions is critical to the economy and security of our nation. This article gives an overview of the techniques and challenges for security risk analysis of enterprise networks. A standard model for security analysis will enable us to answer questions such as "e;are we more secure than yesterday"e; or "e;how does the security of one network configuration compare with another one"e;. In this article, we will present a methodology for quantitative security risk analysis that is based on the model of attack graphs and the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). Our techniques analyze all attack paths through a network, for an attacker to reach certain goal(s).

Applications that require a high degree of distribution and loosely-coupled connectivity are ubiquitous in various domains, including scientific databases, bioinformatics, and multimedia retrieval. In all these applications, data is typically voluminous and multidimensional, and support for advanced query operators is required for effective querying and efficient processing. To address this challenge, we adopt a hybrid P2P architecture and propose novel indexing and query processing algorithms. We present a scalable framework that relies on data summaries that are distributed and maintained as multidimensional routing indices. Different types of data summaries enable efficient processing of a variety of advanced query operators.

Present trends in cloud providers (CPs) capabilities have given rise to the interest in federating or collaborating clouds, thus allowing providers to revel on an increased scale and reach more than that is achievable individually. Current research efforts in this context mainly focus on building supply chain collaboration (SCC) models, in which CPs leverage cloud services from other CPs for seamless provisioning. Nevertheless, in the near future, we can expect that hundreds of CPs will compete to offer services and thousands of users will also compete to receive the services to run their complex heterogeneous applications on a cloud computing environment. In this open federation scenario, existing collaboration models (i.e. SCC) are not applicable since they are designed for static environments where a-priori agreements among the parties are needed to establish the federation. To move beyond these shortcomings, Dynamic Cloud Collaboration Platform establishes the basis for developing dynamic, advanced and efficient collaborative cloud service solutions that are scalable, high performance, and cost effective. We term the technology for inter-connection and inter-operation of CPs in open cloud federation as Dynamic Cloud Collaboration (DCC), in which various CPs (small, medium, and large) of complementary service requirements will collaborate dynamically to gain economies of scale and enlargements of their capabilities to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements of consumers. In this context, this book addresses four key issues - when to collaborate (triggering circumstances), whom to collaborate with (suitable partners), how to collaborate (architectural model), and how to demonstrate collaboration applicability (simulation study). It also provides solutions, which are effective in real environments.

At a fundamental level, service-oriented crowdsourcing applies the principles of service-oriented architecture (SOA) to the discovery, composition and selection of a scalable human workforce. Service-Oriented Crowdsourcing: Architecture, Protocols and Algorithms provides both an analysis of contemporary crowdsourcing systems, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, and a statistical description of task-based marketplaces. The book also introduces a novel mixed service-oriented computing paradigm by providing an architectural description of the Human-Provided Services (HPS) framework and the application of social principles to human coordination and delegation actions. Finally, it examines previously investigated concepts and applies them to business process management integration, including the extension of XML-based industry standards and the instantiation of flexible processes in crowdsourcing environments. Service-Oriented Crowdsourcing is intended for researchers and other academics as an in-depth guide to developing new applications based on crowdsourcing platforms and evaluating various selection and ranking algorithms. Practitioners and other industry professionals will also find this book invaluable.

Distributed Space-Time Coding (DSTC) is a cooperative relaying scheme that enables high reliability in wireless networks. This brief presents the basic concept of DSTC, its achievable performance, generalizations, code design, and differential use. Recent results on training design and channel estimation for DSTC and the performance of training-based DSTC are also discussed.

With the advancement of wireless technology, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are emerging as a promising approach to realizing "e;smart cities"e; and addressing many important transportation problems such as road safety, efficiency, and convenience. This brief provides an introduction to the large trace data set collected from thousands of taxis and buses in Shanghai, the largest metropolis in China. It also presents the challenges, design issues, performance modeling and evaluation of a wide spectrum of VANET research topics, ranging from realistic vehicular mobility models and opportunistic routing, to real-time vehicle tracking and urban sensing applications. In addition to the latest research and techniques, the reader will also learn the trace-driven methodologies and tools of performance modeling and analysis, network protocol design and optimization, and network simulation, thus keeping pace with the fast moving VANET research and development.

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication will become a key feature supported by next generation cellular networks, a topic of enormous importance to modern communication. Currently, D2D serves as an underlay to the cellular network as a means to increase spectral efficiency. Although D2D communication brings large benefits in terms of system capacity, it also causes interference as well as increased computation complexity to cellular networks as a result of spectrum sharing. Thus, efficient resource management must be performed to guarantee a target performance level of cellular communication. This brief presents the state-of-the-art research on resource management for D2D communication underlaying cellular networks. Those who work with D2D communication will use this book's information to help ensure their work is as efficient as possible. Along with the survey of existing work, this book also includes the fundamental theories, key techniques, and applications.

This brief examines resource allocation and interference management for 4G femtocells. It introduces 4G femtocells in the context of 4G mobile networks and discusses related technical challenges in resource allocation and interference management. Topics include ant colony algorithm based downlink resource allocation, intelligent scheduling and power control, uplink and downlink for two-tier networks, quality of service (QoS) constraints and the cross-tier interference constraint. The authors present algorithms to alleviate common femtocell-related problems such as subchannel power allocation. The complexity of the proposed resource allocation algorithms is analyzed, and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is verified by simulations. This concise and practical book directly addresses common problems relating to femtocells and resource management. It serves as a useful tool for researchers in the field. Advanced-level students or professionals interested in femtocells and networks will also find the content helpful.