With the increasing adoption of cloud computing for data storage, assuring data service reliability, in terms of data correctness and availability, has been outstanding. While redundancy can be added into the data for reliability, the problem becomes challenging in the “pay-as-you-use” cloud paradigm where we always want to efficiently resolve it for both corruption detection and data repair. Prior distributed storage systems based on erasure codes or network coding techniques have either high decoding computational cost for data users, or too much burden of data repair and being online for data owners. In this paper, we design a secure cloud storage service which addresses the reliability issue with near-optimal overall performance. By allowing a third party to perform the public integrity verification, data owners are significantly released from the onerous work of periodically checking data integrity. To completely free the data owner from the burden of being online after data outsourcing, this paper proposes an exact repair solution so that no metadata needs to be generated on the fly for repaired data. The performance analysis and experimental results show that our designed service has comparable storage and communication cost, but much less computational cost during data retrieval than erasure codes-based storage solutions. It introduces less storage cost, much faster data retrieval, and comparable communication cost comparing to network coding-based distributed storage systems.

This paper presents a theoretical study of the throughput of mobile content distribution (MCD) in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Since VANET is well-known for its fast-changing topology and adverse wireless channel environments, various protocols have been proposed in the literature to enhance the performance of MCD in a vehicular environment, using packet-level network coding (PLNC) and symbol-level network coding (SLNC). However, there still lacks a fundamental understanding of the limits of MCD protocols using network coding in VANETs. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model to compute the achievable throughput of cooperative MCD in VANETs using SLNC. By considering a one-dimensional road topology with an access point (AP) as the content source, the expected achievable throughput for a vehicle at a certain distance from the AP is derived, for both using PLNC and SLNC. Our proposed model is unique since it captures the effects of multiple practical factors, including vehicle distribution and mobility pattern, channel fading and packet collisions. Through numerical results, we provide insights on optimized design choices for network coding-based cooperative MCD systems in VANETs.

The fundamental challenges of providing live multimedia streaming (LMS) services in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) come from achieving stable and high streaming rate (smooth playback) for all the interested vehicles while using minimal bandwidth resources, especially under the highly dynamic topology of VANETs and the lossy nature of vehicular wireless communications. Packet level network coding (PLNC) technique has been widely accepted as an effective approach to improve the network performance during the last decade. More recent symbol-level network coding (SLNC) could further improve the efficiency of bandwidth utilization by exploiting both wireless symbol-level diversity and the benefits of network coding. In this paper, we introduce CodePlay, a new LMS scheme in VANETs that fully takes advantage of SLNC through a coordinated local push mechanism. Streaming contents are actively disseminated from dedicated sources to interested vehicles via local coordination of distributively selected relays, each of which will ensure smooth playback for vehicles nearby. Extensive simulations show that simply replacing the SLNC with PLNC technique in previous LMS schemes can not provide satisfiable user experience, and special scheme design based on the unique characteristics of SLNC proposed in CodePlay is necessary for future LMS applications in VANET.

In the emerging cloud computing paradigm, data owners become increasingly motivated to outsource their complex data management systems from local sites to the commercial public cloud for great flexibility and economic savings. For the consideration of users' privacy, sensitive data have to be encrypted before outsourcing, which makes effective data utilization a very challenging task. In this paper, for the first time, we define and solve the problem of privacy-preserving query over encrypted graph-structured data in cloud computing (PPGQ), and establish a set of strict privacy requirements for such a secure cloud data utilization system to become a reality. Our work utilizes the principle of "filtering-and-verification". We prebuild a feature-based index to provide feature-related information about each encrypted data graph, and then choose the efficient inner product as the pruning tool to carry out the filtering procedure. To meet the challenge of supporting graph query without privacy breaches, we propose a secure inner product computation technique, and then improve it to achieve various privacy requirements under the known-background threat model.

Driven by both safety concerns and commercial interests, one of the key services offered by vehicular networks is popular content distribution (PCD). The fundamental challenges to achieve high speed content downloading come from the highly dynamic topology of vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) and the lossy nature of the vehicular wireless communications. In this paper, we introduce CodeOn, a novel push-based PCD scheme where contents are actively broadcasted to vehicles from road side access points and further distributed among vehicles using a cooperative VANET. In CodeOn, we employ a recent technique, symbol level network coding (SLNC) to combat the lossy wireless transmissions. Through exploiting symbol level diversity, SLNC is robust to transmission errors and encourages more aggressive concurrent transmissions. In order to fully enjoy the benefits of SLNC, we propose a suite of techniques to maximize the downloading rate, including a prioritized and localized relay selection mechanism where the selection criteria is based on the usefulness of vehicles' possessed contents, and a lightweight medium access protocol that naturally exploits the abundant concurrent transmission opportunities. We also propose additional mechanisms to reduce the protocol overhead without sacrificing the performance. Extensive simulation results show that, under a wide range of scenarios, CodeOn significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art PCD scheme based on network coding.

Live multimedia streaming (LMS) services are important in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) for their capability of providing comprehensive and user-friendly information. The fundamental challenges come from achieving stable and high streaming rate (smooth playback) for all the interested vehicles while using minimal bandwidth resources, especially under the highly dynamic topology of VANETs and the lossy nature of vehicular wireless communications. A recent technique, symbol-level network coding (SLNC), has been shown to be an effective approach to improve the efficiency of bandwidth utilization, by exploiting both wireless symbol-level diversity and the benefits of network coding. In this paper, we introduce CodePlay, a new LMS scheme in VANETs that fully takes advantage of SLNC through a coordinated local push mechanism. Streaming contents are actively disseminated from dedicated sources to interested vehicles via local coordination of distributively selected relays, each of which will ensure smooth playback for vehicles nearby. CodePlay is designed to simultaneously improve the performance of LMS service in terms of streaming rate, service delivery delay and bandwidth efficiency. We use extensive simulations to show that CodePlay is potentially suitable for future LMS applications in VANET.

Two major factors that limit the throughput in multi-hop wireless networks are the unreliability of wireless transmissions and co-channel interference. One promising technique that combats lossy wireless transmissions is opportunistic routing (OR). OR involves multiple forwarding candidates to relay packets by taking advantage of the broadcast nature and spacial diversity of the wireless medium. Furthermore, recent advances in multi-radio multi-channel transmission technology allows more concurrent transmissions in the network, and shows the potential of substantially improving the system capacity. However, the performance of OR in multi-radio multi-channel systems is still unknown, and the methodology of studying the performance of traditional routing (TR) can not be directly applied to OR. In this paper, we present our research on computing an end-to-end throughput bound of OR in multi-radio multi-channel systems. We formulate the capacity of OR as a linear programming (LP) problem which jointly solves the radio-channel assignment and transmission scheduling. Leveraging our analytical model, we gain the following insights into OR: 1) OR can achieve better performance than TR under different radio/channel configurations, however, in particular scenarios, TR is more preferable than OR; 2) OR can achieve comparable or even better performance than TR by using less radio resource; 3) for OR, the throughput gained from increasing the number of potential forwarding candidates becomes marginal.

Two major factors that limit the throughput in multi-hop wireless networks are the co-channel interference and unreliability of wireless transmissions. Multi-radio multi-channel technology and opportunistic routing (OR) have shown their promise to significantly improve the network capacity by combating these two limits. It raises an interesting problem on the tradeoff between multiplexing and spatial diversity when integrating these two techniques for throughput optimization. It is unknown what the capacity of the network could be when nodes have multiple radios and OR capability. In this paper, we present our study on optimizing an end-to-end throughput of the multi-radio multi-channel network when OR is available. First, we formulate the end-to-end throughput bound as a linear programming (LP) problem which jointly solves the radio-channel assignment, transmission scheduling, and forwarding candidate selection. Second, we propose an LP approach and a heuristic algorithm to find a feasible scheduling of opportunistic forwarding priorities to achieve the capacity. Simulations show that the heuristic algorithm achieves desirable performance under various number of forwarding candidates. Leveraging our analytical model, we find that 1) OR can achieve better performance than traditional routing (TR) under different radio/channel configurations, however, in particular scenario (e.g. bottleneck links exist between the sender and relays), TR is preferable; 2) OR can achieve comparable or better performance than TR by using less radio resource.

Broadcast is an important primitive in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Applications like network-wide software update require reliable reception of the content with low-latency and high scalability (i.e., utilizing little bandwidth resource). In reality, the link layer broadcast transmission in WMNs is unreliable, which makes these goals hard to be attained at the same time. In this paper, we consider one-to-all broadcast scenarios and put forward R-Code, a reliable and efficient broadcast protocol based on intra-flow network coding. The key idea is to construct a minimum spanning tree as a backbone whose link weight is the expected number of transmissions on that link. The broadcast overhead and delay are simultaneously reduced by enabling the non-leaf nodes in the tree to move to the next batch of file segments as early as possible, while ensuring their downstream nodes reliably receive and correctly decode all the packets in the current batch. Opportunistic overhearing is utilized to further reduce the number of transmissions. Extensive simulation results show that our scheme always achieves 100% packet delivery ratio (PDR), while enjoying less broadcast overhead and much shorter delay than AdapCode, 14% and 50%, respectively.

Abstract—Opportunistic Routing (OR) has been considered as one promising technique to overcome the unreliability of the wireless medium by collaborating multiple neighboring re-ceivers/candidates for packet forwarding. A key challenge in OR is how to efficiently coordinate the multiple candidates and ensure only one of them to forward the packet. In this paper, we investigate the existing candidate coordination schemes and propose a“fast slotted acknowledgment ” (FSA) to further improve the performance of OR by using single ACK with the help of channel sensing technique. The simulation results show that FSA can reduce the average end-to-end time delay of OR protocols by up to 50 % compared with state-of-the-art coordination schemes in light traffic scenarios and can increase the average end-to-end throughput by up to 20 % in heavy traffic scenarios. I.