arXiv subjects

Sahil Garg

Publications and source records attributed to Sahil Garg.

31 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Blockchain-based Lightweight Authentication Mechanism for Vehicular Fog Infrastructure

With the increasing development of advanced communication technologies, vehicles are becoming smarter and more connected. Due to the tremendous growth of various vehicular applications, a huge amount of data is generated through advanced on-board devices and is deemed critical to improve driving safety and enhance vehicular services. However, cloud based models often fall short in applications where latency and mobility are critical. In order to fully realize the potential of vehicular networks, the challenges of efficient communication and computation need to be addressed. In this direction, vehicular fog computing (VFC) has emerged which extends the concept of fog computing to conventional vehicular networks. It is a geographically distributed paradigm that has the potential to conduct time-critical and data-intensive tasks by pushing intelligence (i.e. computing resources, storage, and application services) in the vicinity of end vehicles. However secure and reliable transmission are of significant importance in highly-mobile vehicular networks in order to ensure the optimal Quality of Service (QoS). In this direction, several authentication mechanisms have been proposed in the literature but most of them are found unfit due to absence of decentralization, anonymity, and trust characteristics. Thus, an effective cross-datacenter authentication and key-exchange scheme based on blockchain and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is proposed in this paper. Here, the distributed ledger of blockchain is used for maintaining the network information while the highly secure ECC is employed for mutual authentication between vehicles and road side units (RSUs). Additionally, the proposed scheme is lightweight and scalable for the considered VFC setup. The performance evaluation results against the existing state-of-the-art reveal that the proposed scheme accomplishes enhanced security features.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

An Efficient Blockchain-based Hierarchical Authentication Mechanism for Energy Trading in V2G Environment

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) networks have emerged as a new technology in modern electric power transmission networks. It allows bi-directional flow of communication and electricity between electric vehicles (EVs) and the Smart Grid (SG), in order to provide more sophisticated energy trading. However, due to the involvement of a huge amount of trading data and the presence of untrusted entities in the visiting networks, the underlying V2G infrastructure suffers from various security and privacy challenges. Although, several solutions have been proposed in the literature to address these problems, issues like lack of mutual authentication and anonymity, incapability to protect against several attack vectors, generation of huge overhead, and dependency on centralized infrastructures make security and privacy issues even more challenging. To address the above mentioned problems, in this paper, we propose a blockchain oriented hierarchical authentication mechanism for rewarding EVs. The overall process is broadly classified into the following phases: 1) System Initialization, 2) Registration, 3) Hierarchical Mutual Authentication, and 4) Consensus; wherein blockchain's distributed ledger has been employed for transaction execution in distributed V2G environments while Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has been used for hierarchical authentication. The designed hierarchical authentication mechanism has been employed to preserve the anonymity of EVs and support mutual authentication between EVs, charging stations (CSs) and the central aggregator (CAG). Additionally, it also supports minimal communicational and computational overheads on resource constrained EVs. Further, formal security verification of the proposed scheme on widely accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool validates its safeness against different security attacks.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

An Energy-driven Network Function Virtualization for Multi-domain Software Defined Networks

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) in Software Defined Networks (SDN) emerged as a new technology for creating virtual instances for smooth execution of multiple applications. Their amalgamation provides flexible and programmable platforms to utilize the network resources for providing Quality of Service (QoS) to various applications. In SDN-enabled NFV setups, the underlying network services can be viewed as a series of virtual network functions (VNFs) and their optimal deployment on physical/virtual nodes is considered a challenging task to perform. However, SDNs have evolved from single-domain to multi-domain setups in the recent era. Thus, the complexity of the underlying VNF deployment problem in multi-domain setups has increased manifold. Moreover, the energy utilization aspect is relatively unexplored with respect to an optimal mapping of VNFs across multiple SDN domains. Hence, in this work, the VNF deployment problem in multi-domain SDN setup has been addressed with a primary emphasis on reducing the overall energy consumption for deploying the maximum number of VNFs with guaranteed QoS. The problem in hand is initially formulated as a "Multi-objective Optimization Problem" based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to obtain an optimal solution. However, the formulated ILP becomes complex to solve with an increasing number of decision variables and constraints with an increase in the size of the network. Thus, we leverage the benefits of the popular evolutionary optimization algorithms to solve the problem under consideration. In order to deduce the most appropriate evolutionary optimization algorithm to solve the considered problem, it is subjected to different variants of evolutionary algorithms on the widely used MOEA framework (an open source java framework based on multi-objective evolutionary algorithms).

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

Securing Fog-to-Things Environment Using Intrusion Detection System Based On Ensemble Learning

The growing interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications is associated with an augmented volume of security threats. In this vein, the Intrusion detection systems (IDS) have emerged as a viable solution for the detection and prevention of malicious activities. Unlike the signature-based detection approaches, machine learning-based solutions are a promising means for detecting unknown attacks. However, the machine learning models need to be accurate enough to reduce the number of false alarms. More importantly, they need to be trained and evaluated on realistic datasets such that their efficacy can be validated on real-time deployments. Many solutions proposed in the literature are reported to have high accuracy but are ineffective in real applications due to the non-representativity of the dataset used for training and evaluation of the underlying models. On the other hand, some of the existing solutions overcome these challenges but yield low accuracy which hampers their implementation for commercial tools. These solutions are majorly based on single learners and are therefore directly affected by the intrinsic limitations of each learning algorithm. The novelty of this paper is to use the most realistic dataset available for intrusion detection called NSL-KDD, and combine multiple learners to build ensemble learners that increase the accuracy of the detection. Furthermore, a deployment architecture in a fog-to-things environment that employs two levels of classifications is proposed. In such architecture, the first level performs an anomaly detection which reduces the latency of the classification substantially, while the second level, executes attack classifications, enabling precise prevention measures. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed IDS in comparison with the other state-of-the-arts on the NSL-KDD dataset.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

Managing Fog Networks using Reinforcement Learning Based Load Balancing Algorithm

The powerful paradigm of Fog computing is currently receiving major interest, as it provides the possibility to integrate virtualized servers into networks and brings cloud service closer to end devices. To support this distributed intelligent platform, Software-Defined Network (SDN) has emerged as a viable network technology in the Fog computing environment. However, uncertainties related to task demands and the different computing capacities of Fog nodes, inquire an effective load balancing algorithm. In this paper, the load balancing problem has been addressed under the constraint of achieving the minimum latency in Fog networks. To handle this problem, a reinforcement learning based decision-making process has been proposed to find the optimal offloading decision with unknown reward and transition functions. The proposed process allows Fog nodes to offload an optimal number of tasks among incoming tasks by selecting an available neighboring Fog node under their respective resource capabilities with the aim to minimize the processing time and the overall overloading probability. Compared with the traditional approaches, the proposed scheme not only simplifies the algorithmic framework without imposing any specific assumption on the network model but also guarantees convergence in polynomial time. The results show that, during average delays, the proposed reinforcement learning-based offloading method achieves significant performance improvements over the variation of service rate and traffic arrival rate. The proposed algorithm achieves 1.17%, 1.02%, and 3.21% lower overload probability relative to random, least-queue and nearest offloading selection schemes, respectively.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2018

Building Models for Biopathway Dynamics Using Intrinsic Dimensionality Analysis

An important task for many if not all the scientific domains is efficient knowledge integration, testing and codification. It is often solved with model construction in a controllable computational environment. In spite of that, the throughput of in-silico simulation-based observations become similarly intractable for thorough analysis. This is especially the case in molecular biology, which served as a subject for this study. In this project, we aimed to test some approaches developed to deal with the curse of dimensionality. Among these we found dimension reduction techniques especially appealing. They can be used to identify irrelevant variability and help to understand critical processes underlying high-dimensional datasets. Additionally, we subjected our data sets to nonlinear time series analysis, as those are well established methods for results comparison. To investigate the usefulness of dimension reduction methods, we decided to base our study on a concrete sample set. The example was taken from the domain of systems biology concerning dynamic evolution of sub-cellular signaling. Particularly, the dataset relates to the yeast pheromone pathway and is studied in-silico with a stochastic model. The model reconstructs signal propagation stimulated by a mating pheromone. In the paper, we elaborate on the reason of multidimensional analysis problem in the context of molecular signaling, and next, we introduce the model of choice, simulation details and obtained time series dynamics. A description of used methods followed by a discussion of results and their biological interpretation finalize the paper.

q-bio.MN↗

arXiv2018

Efficiently Learning Nonstationary Gaussian Processes for Real World Impact

Most real world phenomena such as sunlight distribution under a forest canopy, minerals concentration, stock valuation, exhibit nonstationary dynamics i.e. phenomenon variation changes depending on the locality. Nonstationary dynamics pose both theoretical and practical challenges to statistical machine learning algorithms that aim to accurately capture the complexities governing the evolution of such processes. Typically the nonstationary dynamics are modeled using nonstationary Gaussian Process models (NGPS) that employ local latent dynamics parameterization to correspondingly model the nonstationary real observable dynamics. Recently, an approach based on most likely induced latent dynamics representation attracted research community's attention for a while. The approach could not be employed for large scale real world applications because learning a most likely latent dynamics representation involves maximization of marginal likelihood of the observed real dynamics that becomes intractable as the number of induced latent points grows with problem size. We have established a direct relationship between informativeness of the induced latent dynamics and the marginal likelihood of the observed real dynamics. This opens up the possibility of maximizing marginal likelihood of observed real dynamics indirectly by near optimally maximizing entropy or mutual information gain on the induced latent dynamics using greedy algorithms. Therefore, for an efficient yet accurate inference, we propose to build an induced latent dynamics representation using a novel algorithm LISAL that adaptively maximizes entropy or mutual information on the induced latent dynamics and marginal likelihood of observed real dynamics in an iterative manner. The relevance of LISAL is validated using real world datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Learning Non-Stationary Space-Time Models for Environmental Monitoring

One of the primary aspects of sustainable development involves accurate understanding and modeling of environmental phenomena. Many of these phenomena exhibit variations in both space and time and it is imperative to develop a deeper understanding of techniques that can model space-time dynamics accurately. In this paper we propose NOSTILL-GP - NOn-stationary Space TIme variable Latent Length scale GP, a generic non-stationary, spatio-temporal Gaussian Process (GP) model. We present several strategies, for efficient training of our model, necessary for real-world applicability. Extensive empirical validation is performed using three real-world environmental monitoring datasets, with diverse dynamics across space and time. Results from the experiments clearly demonstrate general applicability and effectiveness of our approach for applications in environmental monitoring.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Persistent Monitoring of Stochastic Spatio-temporal Phenomena with a Small Team of Robots

This paper presents a solution for persistent monitoring of real-world stochastic phenomena, where the underlying covariance structure changes sharply across time, using a small number of mobile robot sensors. We propose an adaptive solution for the problem where stochastic real-world dynamics are modeled as a Gaussian Process (GP). The belief on the underlying covariance structure is learned from recently observed dynamics as a Gaussian Mixture (GM) in the low-dimensional hyper-parameters space of the GP and adapted across time using Sequential Monte Carlo methods. Each robot samples a belief point from the GM and locally optimizes a set of informative regions by greedy maximization of the submodular entropy function. The key contributions of this paper are threefold: adapting the belief on the covariance using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling such that particles survive even under sharp covariance changes across time; exploiting the belief to transform the problem of entropy maximization into a decentralized one; and developing an approximation algorithm to maximize entropy on a set of informative regions in the continuous space. We illustrate the application of the proposed solution through extensive simulations using an artificial dataset and multiple real datasets from fixed sensor deployments, and compare it to three competing state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2018

Adaptive Sensing for Learning Nonstationary Environment Models

Most environmental phenomena, such as wind profiles, ozone concentration and sunlight distribution under a forest canopy, exhibit nonstationary dynamics i.e. phenomenon variation change depending on the location and time of occurrence. Non-stationary dynamics pose both theoretical and practical challenges to statistical machine learning algorithms aiming to accurately capture the complexities governing the evolution of such processes. In this paper, we address the sampling aspects of the problem of learning nonstationary spatio-temporal models, and propose an efficient yet simple algorithm - LISAL. The core idea in LISAL is to learn two models using Gaussian processes (GPs) wherein the first is a nonstationary GP directly modeling the phenomenon. The second model uses a stationary GP representing a latent space corresponding to changes in dynamics, or the nonstationarity characteristics of the first model. LISAL involves adaptively sampling the latent space dynamics using information theory quantities to reduce the computational cost during the learning phase. The relevance of LISAL is extensively validated using multiple real world datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Stochastic Learning of Nonstationary Kernels for Natural Language Modeling

Natural language processing often involves computations with semantic or syntactic graphs to facilitate sophisticated reasoning based on structural relationships. While convolution kernels provide a powerful tool for comparing graph structure based on node (word) level relationships, they are difficult to customize and can be computationally expensive. We propose a generalization of convolution kernels, with a nonstationary model, for better expressibility of natural languages in supervised settings. For a scalable learning of the parameters introduced with our model, we propose a novel algorithm that leverages stochastic sampling on k-nearest neighbor graphs, along with approximations based on locality-sensitive hashing. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach on a challenging real-world (structured inference) problem of automatically extracting biological models from the text of scientific papers.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2017

Neurogenesis-Inspired Dictionary Learning: Online Model Adaption in a Changing World

In this paper, we focus on online representation learning in non-stationary environments which may require continuous adaptation of model architecture. We propose a novel online dictionary-learning (sparse-coding) framework which incorporates the addition and deletion of hidden units (dictionary elements), and is inspired by the adult neurogenesis phenomenon in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, known to be associated with improved cognitive function and adaptation to new environments. In the online learning setting, where new input instances arrive sequentially in batches, the neuronal-birth is implemented by adding new units with random initial weights (random dictionary elements); the number of new units is determined by the current performance (representation error) of the dictionary, higher error causing an increase in the birth rate. Neuronal-death is implemented by imposing l1/l2-regularization (group sparsity) on the dictionary within the block-coordinate descent optimization at each iteration of our online alternating minimization scheme, which iterates between the code and dictionary updates. Finally, hidden unit connectivity adaptation is facilitated by introducing sparsity in dictionary elements. Our empirical evaluation on several real-life datasets (images and language) as well as on synthetic data demonstrates that the proposed approach can considerably outperform the state-of-art fixed-size (nonadaptive) online sparse coding of Mairal et al. (2009) in the presence of nonstationary data. Moreover, we identify certain properties of the data (e.g., sparse inputs with nearly non-overlapping supports) and of the model (e.g., dictionary sparsity) associated with such improvements.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2015

Extracting Biomolecular Interactions Using Semantic Parsing of Biomedical Text

We advance the state of the art in biomolecular interaction extraction with three contributions: (i) We show that deep, Abstract Meaning Representations (AMR) significantly improve the accuracy of a biomolecular interaction extraction system when compared to a baseline that relies solely on surface- and syntax-based features; (ii) In contrast with previous approaches that infer relations on a sentence-by-sentence basis, we expand our framework to enable consistent predictions over sets of sentences (documents); (iii) We further modify and expand a graph kernel learning framework to enable concurrent exploitation of automatically induced AMR (semantic) and dependency structure (syntactic) representations. Our experiments show that our approach yields interaction extraction systems that are more robust in environments where there is a significant mismatch between training and test conditions.

cs.CL↗