With its growing number of deployed devices and applications, the Internet of Things (IoT) raises significant challenges for network maintenance procedures. In this work we address a problem of active fault detection in an IoT scenario, whereby a monitor can probe a remote device in order to acquire fresh information and facilitate fault detection. However, probing could have a significant impact on the system's energy and communication resources. To this end, we utilize Age of Information as a measure of the freshness of information at the monitor and adopt a semantics-aware communication approach between the monitor and the remote device. In semantics-aware communications, the processes of generating and transmitting information are treated jointly to consider the importance of information and the purpose of communication. We formulate the problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process and show analytically that the optimal policy is of a threshold type. Finally, we use a computationally efficient stochastic approximation algorithm to approximate the optimal policy and present numerical results that exhibit the advantage of our approach compared to a conventional delay-based probing policy.
This paper presents a control framework on Lie groups by designing the control objective in its Lie algebra. Control on Lie groups is challenging due to its nonlinear nature and difficulties in system parameterization. Existing methods to design the control objective on a Lie group and then derive the gradient for controller design are non-trivial and can result in slow convergence in tracking control. We show that with a proper left-invariant metric, setting the gradient of the cost function as the tracking error in the Lie algebra leads to a quadratic Lyapunov function that enables globally exponential convergence. In the PD control case, we show that our controller can maintain an exponential convergence rate even when the initial error is approaching $\pi$ in SO(3). We also show the merit of this proposed framework in trajectory optimization. The proposed cost function enables the iterative Linear Quadratic Regulator (iLQR) to converge much faster than the Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) with a well-adopted cost function when the initial trajectory is poorly initialized on SO(3).
Emerging distributed cloud architectures, e.g., fog and mobile edge computing, are playing an increasingly important role in the efficient delivery of real-time stream-processing applications such as augmented reality, multiplayer gaming, and industrial automation. While such applications require processed streams to be shared and simultaneously consumed by multiple users/devices, existing technologies lack efficient mechanisms to deal with their inherent multicast nature, leading to unnecessary traffic redundancy and network congestion. In this paper, we establish a unified framework for distributed cloud network control with generalized (mixed-cast) traffic flows that allows optimizing the distributed execution of the required packet processing, forwarding, and replication operations. We first characterize the enlarged multicast network stability region under the new control framework (with respect to its unicast counterpart). We then design a novel queuing system that allows scheduling data packets according to their current destination sets, and leverage Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty theory to develop the first fully decentralized, throughput- and cost-optimal algorithm for multicast cloud network flow control. Numerical experiments validate analytical results and demonstrate the performance gain of the proposed design over existing cloud network control techniques.
Internet of things (IoT) connects all items to the Internet through information-sensing devices to exchange information for intelligent identification and management. Sybil attack is a famous and crippling attack in IoT. Most of the previous methods of detecting Sybil attacks in IoT mainly focus on static IoT while there are very rare methods applicable to mobile IoT. In this paper, a novel, lightweight, and distributive detection scheme based on edge computing is proposed for detecting Sybil attacks in mobile IoT. In the proposed scheme, a detection consists of two rounds. In each round, member nodes are required to send packets to edge nodes. Edge nodes calculate a possible interval of the received signal strength indication (RSSI) from the first round and check whether the RSSI from the second round is in the interval to detect Sybil attack. Extensive experimental studies are included to show that the presented approach outperforms many existing approaches in terms of true detection and false detection rates. Moreover, experimental results show that the fault tolerance design in the proposed approach greatly enhances the detection scheme.
Gaussian Process (GP) emulators are widely used to approximate complex computer model behaviour across the input space. Motivated by the problem of coupling computer models, recently progress has been made in the theory of the analysis of networks of connected GP emulators. In this paper, we combine these recent methodological advances with classical state-space models to construct a Bayesian decision support system. This approach gives a coherent probability model that produces predictions with the measure of uncertainty in terms of two first moments and enables the propagation of uncertainty from individual decision components. This methodology is used to produce a decision support tool for a UK county council considering low carbon technologies to transform its infrastructure to reach a net-zero carbon target. In particular, we demonstrate how to couple information from an energy model, a heating demand model, and gas and electricity price time-series to quantitatively assess the impact on operational costs of various policy choices and changes in the energy market.
Approximately 50% of development resources are devoted to UI development tasks [9]. Occupying a large proportion of development resources, developing icons can be a time-consuming task, because developers need to consider not only effective implementation methods but also easy-to-understand descriptions. In this paper, we present Auto-Icon+, an approach for automatically generating readable and efficient code for icons from design artifacts. According to our interviews to understand the gap between designers (icons are assembled from multiple components) and developers (icons as single images), we apply a heuristic clustering algorithm to compose the components into an icon image. We then propose an approach based on a deep learning model and computer vision methods to convert the composed icon image to fonts with descriptive labels, thereby reducing the laborious manual effort for developers and facilitating UI development. We quantitatively evaluate the quality of our method in the real world UI development environment and demonstrate that our method offers developers accurate, efficient, readable, and usable code for icon designs, in terms of saving 65.2% implementing time.
Linear mixed models (LMMs) are instrumental for regression analysis with structured dependence, such as grouped, clustered, or multilevel data. However, selection among the covariates--while accounting for this structured dependence--remains a challenge. We introduce a Bayesian decision analysis for subset selection with LMMs. Using a Mahalanobis loss function that incorporates the structured dependence, we derive optimal linear coefficients for (i) any given subset of variables and (ii) all subsets of variables that satisfy a cardinality constraint. Crucially, these estimates inherit shrinkage or regularization and uncertainty quantification from the underlying Bayesian model, and apply for any well-specified Bayesian LMM. More broadly, our decision analysis strategy deemphasizes the role of a single "best" subset, which is often unstable and limited in its information content, and instead favors a collection of near-optimal subsets. This collection is summarized by key member subsets and variable-specific importance metrics. Customized subset search and out-of-sample approximation algorithms are provided for more scalable computing. These tools are applied to simulated data and a longitudinal physical activity dataset, and demonstrate excellent prediction, estimation, and selection ability.
Automotive radar provides reliable environmental perception in all-weather conditions with affordable cost, but it hardly supplies semantic and geometry information due to the sparsity of radar detection points. With the development of automotive radar technologies in recent years, instance segmentation becomes possible by using automotive radar. Its data contain contexts such as radar cross section and micro-Doppler effects, and sometimes can provide detection when the field of view is obscured. The outcome from instance segmentation could be potentially used as the input of trackers for tracking targets. The existing methods often utilize a clustering-based classification framework, which fits the need of real-time processing but has limited performance due to minimum information provided by sparse radar detection points. In this paper, we propose an efficient method based on clustering of estimated semantic information to achieve instance segmentation for the sparse radar detection points. In addition, we show that the performance of the proposed approach can be further enhanced by incorporating the visual multi-layer perceptron. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experimental results on the popular RadarScenes dataset, achieving 89.53% mean coverage and 86.97% mean average precision with the IoU threshold of 0.5, which is superior to other approaches in the literature. More significantly, the consumed memory is around 1MB, and the inference time is less than 40ms, indicating that our proposed algorithm is storage and time efficient. These two criteria ensure the practicality of the proposed method in real-world systems.
Bluetooth technology has enabled short-range wireless communication for billions of devices. Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) variant aims at improving power consumption on battery-constrained devices. BLE-enabled devices broadcast information (e.g., as beacons) to nearby devices via advertisements. Unfortunately, such functionality can become a double-edged sword at the hands of attackers. In this paper, we primarily show how an attacker can exploit BLE advertisements to exfiltrate information from BLE-enable devices. In particular, our attack establishes a communication medium between two devices without requiring any prior authentication or pairing. We develop a proof-of-concept attack framework on the Android ecosystem and assess its performance via a thorough set of experiments. Our results indicate that such an exfiltration attack is indeed possible though with a low data rate. Nevertheless, we also demonstrate potential use cases and enhancements to our attack that can further its severeness. Finally, we discuss possible countermeasures to prevent such an attack.
The Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a cellular technology introduced by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to provide connectivity to a large number of low-cost IoT devices with strict energy consumption limitations. However, in an ultra-dense small cell network employing NB-IoT technology, inter-cell interference can be a problem, raising serious concerns regarding the performance of NB-IoT, particularly in uplink transmission. Thus, a power allocation method must be established to analyze uplink performance, control and predict inter-cell interference, and avoid excessive energy waste during transmission. Unfortunately, standard power allocation techniques become inappropriate as their computational complexity grows in an ultra-dense environment. Furthermore, the performance of NB-IoT is strongly dependent on the traffic generated by IoT devices. In order to tackle these challenges, we provide a consistent and distributed uplink power allocation solution under spatiotemporal fluctuation incorporating NB-IoT features such as the number of repetitions and the data rate, as well as the IoT device's energy budget, packet size, and traffic intensity, by leveraging stochastic geometry analysis and Mean-Field Game (MFG) theory. The effectiveness of our approach is illustrated via extensive numerical analysis, and many insightful discussions are presented.
Alerts are crucial for requesting prompt human intervention upon cloud anomalies. The quality of alerts significantly affects the cloud reliability and the cloud provider's business revenue. In practice, we observe on-call engineers being hindered from quickly locating and fixing faulty cloud services because of the vast existence of misleading, non-informative, non-actionable alerts. We call the ineffectiveness of alerts "anti-patterns of alerts". To better understand the anti-patterns of alerts and provide actionable measures to mitigate anti-patterns, in this paper, we conduct the first empirical study on the practices of mitigating anti-patterns of alerts in an industrial cloud system. We study the alert strategies and the alert processing procedure at Huawei Cloud, a leading cloud provider. Our study combines the quantitative analysis of millions of alerts in two years and a survey with eighteen experienced engineers. As a result, we summarized four individual anti-patterns and two collective anti-patterns of alerts. We also summarize four current reactions to mitigate the anti-patterns of alerts, and the general preventative guidelines for the configuration of alert strategy. Lastly, we propose to explore the automatic evaluation of the Quality of Alerts (QoA), including the indicativeness, precision, and handleability of alerts, as a future research direction that assists in the automatic detection of alerts' anti-patterns. The findings of our study are valuable for optimizing cloud monitoring systems and improving the reliability of cloud services.