Cloud computing dominates the information communication and technology landscape despite the presence of lingering security issues such as the interdependency problem. The latter is a co-residence conundrum where the attacker successfully compromises his target virtual machine by first exploiting the weakest (in terms of security) virtual machine that is hosted in the same server. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel virtual machine allocation policy that is based on the attacker's efficiency and coverage. By default, our allocation policy considers all legitimate users as attackers and then proceeds to host the users' virtual machines to the server where their efficiency and/or coverage are the smallest. Our simulation results show that our proposal performs better than the existing allocation policies that were proposed to tackle the same issue, by reducing the attacker's possibilities to zero and by using between 30 - 48% less hosts.

In search and rescue (SAR) operation, the potential of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) gathers great attention. Existing studies have made various experiments to find victims by a UAVs with a single sensor, e.g., one of an optical camera, a thermal infrared camera, and a radio wave signal. However, the experimental environments are limited to show the performance of the sensor. Since there are various SAR missions, it is difficult to choose the best sensor for all environments. Then, to enhance the UAV performance, we need to consider multiple sensors to find a victim efficiently. In the paper, we investigate optical camera and thermal infrared camera for finding a victim helpfully. In the investigation, we observed the differences between their images by distance and brightness to find a human.

In this demonstration, we show that on a device with multiple network interfaces, our proposed network selection method can select a proper interface based on measured delays and information flags with an ICMP reply packet in an edge computing (EC) environment. The methods mainly provide the following two features: the resolution of FQDN through multiinterfaces and the insertion of EC and congestion flags into an ICMP reply packet. These features enable the practical usage of multi-interfaces on a device to select a proper network interface for advanced services and applications based on EC. This paper first explains the features and the procedures of our method. Then our demonstration shows that the device can select a proper interface based on the flag information.

As a disaster is an unpredictable event, it may be tough to escape damage entirely even if evacuation drills are carried out periodically. In such a case, persons requiring evacuation assistance like aged people and disabled people are prone to be victims. For minimizing the damage, a fire department and a local government need to swiftly grasp the situation of the afflicted area in order to execute rescue operation. In this paper, to support the rescue operation, we propose a design and implementation of an Internet of Things (IoT) device to grasp the presence of persons requiring evacuation assistance. The IoT device captures Wi-Fi signal and packet from smartphones that victims have, and it then provides an estimated area for a presence of them. In the estimation of the area, we introduce three ways to select center of an area, i.e., random, average, and median selections. Through the experimental results, we showed that the average and the median selections make more accurate presence area than the random selection. Also, the system presented the visualization of the area to support the rescue operation.

We propose a method for regulating wireless access points (APs) that is based on mechanisms of biological development and evolution. The purpose of the proposed regulation is to simultaneously achieve power savings in the APs and achieve reliable connection services through the APs better, which is shown to be a trade-off relationship in this study. The regulation target is the cycle time at which each AP enters the power-off state, which is referred to as the sleep cycle time. Biological development mechanisms form bodies of a variety of shapes using different genomes as design information, and these genomes are modified evolutionarily. Similarly, in the present study, a method inspired by biological development forms a variety of the sleep cycle times of APs, and an evolutionary method modifies the parameter values of the method inspired by the biological development in order to obtain better configurations of the APs. In addition, the regulation method is able to configure APs in a distributed manner without knowing global information; the total number of APs, their locations, or their identifiers, which is actually suitable for the situation assumed in the present study, in which APs are established and removed freely by their owners and AP users freely appear. Simulation results show that the proposed method is capable of exploring the tradeoff relationship between the amount of consumed power of the APs and the reliability of connection services in terms of momentary achievement by regulating APs, but yields highly varying regulation results along time.

The paper proposes a collection method of SOS messages in a disaster area with collapsed communication service. So far, we have proposed and implemented SOSCast as a smartphone application to support rescue operations for finding immobilized victims. However, in its current implementation, we found that SOSCast limits the search coverage area and disregards some SOS messages. Moreover, the smartphone rapidly consumes battery due to the required constant communication. We propose, therefore, to implement Wi-Fi Direct (WD) in addition to Bluetooth (BT) to increase the search coverage area. Furthermore, we introduce an information-sharing cluster in order to collect SOS messages efficiently while preserving the smartphones' battery life. By implementing the proposed methods on actual smartphones for a performance evaluation, we showed that controlling the use of both WD and BT increases the probability of locating immobilized victims. Also, enabling an information-sharing cluster by immobilized victims' smartphones can send SOS messages to a mobile victim smartphone all at once, which can extend the lifetime of the smartphone's battery as compared with the previous method.

This demonstration presents SOSCast, an application that will assist the search for immobilized persons in a disaster area. When a catastrophic disaster such as an earthquake or tsunami occurs, people may be immobilized because of an injury or become trapped in buildings and debris. However, in such a situation, since conventional communication services are likely to be severely damaged, it would be difficult for immobilized persons to ask for rescue using their mobile phones. As a solution, we present SOSCast, which propagates SOS messages through direct communication between smartphones most especially inside the disaster area. By collecting these SOS messages, rescuers can estimate the locations of people who need help using the application. In this demonstration, we will show our prototype implementation of the SOSCast for SOS message processing and its map function to estimate the location of immobilized persons.

In ubiquitous Wireless LANs (WLANs), Mobile Nodes (MNs) are likely to experience many and frequent handovers between WLANs managed by different organizations/ISPs during TCP communication. Although we proposed a WLAN handover management scheme based on the number of frame retransmissions, the proposed scheme cannot adapt to multirate WLAN used in a more realistic environment. Furthermore, the handover is controlled based on only a predetermined threshold of the number of frame retransmissions, thereby degrading the performance drastically when the inappropriate threshold is employed. Therefore, in this paper, to enhance the practicality of handover scheme in a realistic environment where WLAN supports multiple data rates and automatically changes the rate in response to wireless link condition, we propose a handover management scheme adaptable to multi-rate WLANs. Our scheme exploits two sorts of information to recognize the wireless condition appropriately: (1) data rate used most frequently (DRMF) by each interface and (2) frame retransmission ratio (FRR) on each interface for some duration. The former of two criteria first enables us to estimate an area where we should start handover, and if DRMFs of two interfaces are same in the area, the latter then allows us to compare wireless condition on two interfaces precisely, thereby giving an optimal handover point. The simulation results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method, especially in the multi-rate WLAN environment.

In the near future, mobile nodes (MNs) need to automatically select an optimal interface based on communication quality in a multimodal environment, that is, multimodal communication. While the existing handover management schemes avoid the communication termination, they can not satisfy (1) seamless communication and (2) selection of an optimal wireless network based on communication quality, and thus its performance during handover is drastically decreased. In our previous work, we proposed a new handover management scheme that employs (a) cross-layer approach and (b) multiple TCP connections to satisfy (1) and (2), and showed its effectiveness through simulation experiments. However, any other existing studies have not yet proposed a handover management scheme that employs both (a) cross-layer approach by exploiting beacon messages and (b) multiple TCP connections, and demonstrated the effectiveness of them on a real system. Thus, in this paper, we describe the implementation design of our proposed scheme in detail, and then show preliminary results for the fundamental performance of the proposed prototype system in a real wireless environment.

In ubiquitous networks based on Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), mobile nodes (MNs) will experience performance degradation at the handover. To achieve seamless and efficient communication, it is necessary for the MNs to satisfy the following three requirements: (I) initiation of han- dover processes based upon quick perception of the change in the wireless link quality, (II) elimination of a communication interruption due to handover processes, (III) selection of an optimal WLAN. In this paper, we propose a unified handover management scheme for TCP communication that can satisfy all of the above three requirements. Our proposed scheme employs both a cross-layer approach for obtaining the number of frame retransmissions to satisfy (I) and (III) and multi-homing to satisfy (II). Through simulation experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed scheme can quickly and reliably perceive the deterioration of the wireless link quality and select the optimal WLAN without communication interruption due to the handover process, thereby maintaining the best TCP performance at the handover. Index Terms— Seamless Handover, Cross-Layer, Multi- Homing, Frame Retransmission, TCP

In the near future, wireless local area networks (WLANs) will overlap to provide continuous coverage over a wide area. In such ubiquitous WLANs, a mobile node (MN) freely moves between WLANs with different IP subnets during VoIP communication. In such situations, since an MN experiences several handovers, the communication quality is degraded. In previous studies, in order to solve this problem, we proposed a seamless handover scheme based on frame retransmissions and demonstrated its effectiveness through simulation experiments. However, no existing scheme has demonstrated the effectiveness of cross-layer architecture exploiting the number of frame retransmissions on a real system. In the present paper, therefore, we design and implement a handover scheme based on the number of frame retransmissions. In our implementation, we propose a cross-layer architecture using a shared memory to pass the information, i.e., the number of frame retransmissions, from MAC layer to Transport layer. Finally, we show preliminary results in a real wireless environment and evaluate the performance of the proposed prototype system in a simple topology.