arXiv subjects

Yulong Shen

Publications and source records attributed to Yulong Shen.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

COVID-19 Evolves in Human Hosts

Today, we are all threatened by an unprecedented pandemic: COVID-19. How different is it from other coronaviruses? Will it be attenuated or become more virulent? Which animals may be its original host? In this study, we collected and analyzed nearly thirty thousand publicly available complete genome sequences for COVID-19 virus from 79 different countries, the previously known flu-causing coronaviruses (HCov-229E, HCov-OC43, HCov-NL63 and HCov-HKU1) and the lethal, pathogenic viruses, SARS, MERS, Victoria, Lassa, Yamagata, Ebola, and Dengue. We found strong similarities between the current circulating COVID-19 and SARS and MERS, as well as COVID-19 in rhinolophines and pangolins. On the contrary, COVID-19 shares little similarity with the flu-causing coronaviruses and the other known viruses. Strikingly, we observed that the divergence of COVID-19 strains isolated from human hosts has steadily increased from December 2019 to May 2020, suggesting COVID-19 is actively evolving in human hosts. In this paper, we first propose a novel MLCS algorithm NP-MLCS1 for the big sequence analysis, which can calculate the common model for COVID-19 complete genome sequences to provide important information for vaccine and antibody development. Geographic and time-course analysis of the evolution trees of the human COVID-19 reveals possible evolutional paths among strains from 79 countries. This finding has important implications to the management of COVID-19 and the development of vaccines and medications.

q-bio.PE↗

arXiv2020

Target Privacy Preserving for Social Networks

In this paper, we incorporate the realistic scenario of key protection into link privacy preserving and propose the target-link privacy preserving (TPP) model: target links referred to as targets are the most important and sensitive objectives that would be intentionally attacked by adversaries, in order that need privacy protections, while other links of less privacy concerns are properly released to maintain the graph utility. The goal of TPP is to limit the target disclosure by deleting a budget limited set of alternative non-target links referred to as protectors to defend the adversarial link predictions for all targets. Traditional link privacy preserving treated all links as targets and concentrated on structural level protections in which serious link disclosure and high graph utility loss is still the bottleneck of graph releasing today, while TPP focuses on the target level protections in which key protection is implemented on a tiny fraction of critical targets to achieve better privacy protection and lower graph utility loss. Currently there is a lack of clear TPP problem definition, provable optimal or near optimal protector selection algorithms and scalable implementations on large-scale social graphs. Firstly, we introduce the TPP model and propose a dissimilarity function used for measuring the defense ability against privacy analyzing for the targets. We consider two different problems by budget assignment settings: 1) we protect all targets and to optimize the dissimilarity of all targets with a single budget; 2) besides the protections of all targets, we also care about the protection of each target by assigning a local budget to every target, considering two local protector selections. We also implement scalable implementations and experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

Data Analytics for Fog Computing by Distributed Online Learning with Asynchronous Update

Fog computing extends the cloud computing paradigm by allocating substantial portions of computations and services towards the edge of a network, and is, therefore, particularly suitable for large-scale, geo-distributed, and data-intensive applications. As the popularity of fog applications increases, there is a demand for the development of smart data analytic tools, which can process massive data streams in an efficient manner. To satisfy such requirements, we propose a system in which data streams generated from distributed sources are digested almost locally, whereas a relatively small amount of distilled information is converged to a center. The center extracts knowledge from the collected information, and shares it across all subordinates to boost their performances. Upon the proposed system, we devise a distributed machine learning algorithm using the online learning approach, which is well known for its high efficiency and innate ability to cope with streaming data. An asynchronous update strategy with rigorous theoretical support is applied to enhance the system robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is comparable with a model trained over a centralized platform in terms of the classification accuracy, whereas the efficiency and scalability of the overall system are improved.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2018

Link Selection for Secure Cooperative Networks with Buffer-Aided Relaying

This paper investigates the secure communication in a two-hop cooperative wireless network, where a buffer-aided relay is utilized to forward data from the source to destination, and a passive eavesdropper attempts to intercept data transmission from both the source and relay. Depending on the availability of instantaneous channel state information of the source, two cases of transmission mechanisms, i.e., adaptive-rate transmission and fixed-rate transmission are considered. To enhance the security of the system, novel link selection policies are proposed for both cases to select source-to-relay, relay-to-destination, or no link transmission based on the channels qualities. Closed-form expressions are derived for the end-to-end secrecy outage probability (SOP), secrecy outage capacity (SOC), and exact secrecy throughput (EST), respectively. Furthermore, we prove the condition that EST reaches its maximum, and explore how to minimize the SOP and maximize the SOC by optimizing the link selection parameters. Finally, simulations are conducted to demonstrate the validity of our theoretical performance evaluation, and extensive numerical results are provided to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed link selection polices for the secure communication in two-hop cooperative networks.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2018

Smart Contract-Based Access Control for the Internet of Things

This paper investigates a critical access control issue in the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular, we propose a smart contract-based framework, which consists of multiple access control contracts (ACCs), one judge contract (JC) and one register contract (RC), to achieve distributed and trustworthy access control for IoT systems. Each ACC provides one access control method for a subject-object pair, and implements both static access right validation based on predefined policies and dynamic access right validation by checking the behavior of the subject. The JC implements a misbehavior-judging method to facilitate the dynamic validation of the ACCs by receiving misbehavior reports from the ACCs, judging the misbehavior and returning the corresponding penalty. The RC registers the information of the access control and misbehavior-judging methods as well as their smart contracts, and also provides functions (e.g., register, update and delete) to manage these methods. To demonstrate the application of the framework, we provide a case study in an IoT system with one desktop computer, one laptop and two Raspberry Pi single-board computers, where the ACCs, JC and RC are implemented based on the Ethereum smart contract platform to achieve the access control.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2018

Mode Selection and Spectrum Partition for D2D Inband Communications: A Physical Layer Security Perspective

This paper investigates from the physical layer security (PLS) perspective the fundamental issues of mode selection and spectrum partition in cellular networks with inband device-to-device (D2D) communication. We consider a mode selection scheme allowing each D2D pair to probabilistically switch between the underlay and overlay modes, and also a spectrum partition scheme where the system spectrum is orthogonally partitioned between cellular and overlay D2D communications. We first develop a general theoretical framework to model both the secrecy outage/secrecy capacity performance of cellular users and outage/capacity performance of D2D pairs, and to conduct performance optimization to identify the optimal mode selection and spectrum partition for secrecy capacity maximization and secrecy outage probability minimization. A case study is then provided to demonstrate the application of our theoretical framework for performance modeling and optimization, and also to illustrate the impacts of mode selection and spectrum partition on the PLS performances of inband D2D communications.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Multi-Agent Q-Learning Aided Backpressure Routing Algorithm for Delay Reduction

In queueing networks, it is well known that the throughput-optimal backpressure routing algorithm results in poor delay performance for light and moderate traffic loads. To improve delay performance, state-of-the-art backpressure routing algorithm (called BPmin [1]) exploits queue length information to direct packets to less congested routes to their destinations. However, BPmin algorithm estimates route congestion based on unrealistic assumption that every node in the network knows real-time global queue length information of all other nodes. In this paper, we propose multi-agent Q-learning aided backpressure routing algorithm, where each node estimates route congestion using only local information of neighboring nodes. Our algorithm not only outperforms state-of-the-art BPmin algorithm in delay performance but also retains the following appealing features: distributed implementation, low computation complexity and throughput-optimality. Simulation results show our algorithm reduces average packet delay by 95% for light traffic loads and by 41% for moderate traffic loads when compared to state-of-the-art BPmin algorithm.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2017

On Performance Modeling for MANETs under General Limited Buffer Constraint

Understanding the real achievable performance of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) under practical network constraints is of great importance for their applications in future highly heterogeneous wireless network environments. This paper explores, for the first time, the performance modeling for MANETs under a general limited buffer constraint, where each network node maintains a limited source buffer of size $B_s$ to store its locally generated packets and also a limited shared relay buffer of size $B_r$ to store relay packets for other nodes. Based on the Queuing theory and birth-death chain theory, we first develop a general theoretical framework to fully depict the source/relay buffer occupancy process in such a MANET, which applies to any distributed MAC protocol and any mobility model that leads to the uniform distribution of nodes' locations in steady state. With the help of this framework, we then derive the exact expressions of several key network performance metrics, including achievable throughput, throughput capacity, and expected end-to-end delay. We further conduct case studies under two network scenarios and provide the corresponding theoretical/simulation results to demonstrate the application as well as the efficiency of our theoretical framework. Finally, we present extensive numerical results to illustrate the impacts of buffer constraint on the performance of a buffer-limited MANET.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Physical Layer Security-Aware Routing and Performance Tradeoffs in Ad Hoc Networks

The application of physical layer security in ad hoc networks has attracted considerable academic attention recently. However, the available studies mainly focus on the single-hop and two-hop network scenarios, and the price in terms of degradation of communication quality of service (QoS) caused by improving security is largely uninvestigated. As a step to address these issues, this paper explores the physical layer security-aware routing and performance tradeoffs in a multi-hop ad hoc network. Specifically, for any given end-to-end path we first derive its connection outage probability (COP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) in closed-form, which serve as the performance metrics of communication QoS and transmission security, respectively. Based on the closed-form expressions, we then study the security-QoS tradeoffs to minimize COP (resp. SOP) conditioned on that SOP (resp. COP) is guaranteed. With the help of analysis of a given path, we further propose the routing algorithms which can achieve the optimal performance tradeoffs for any pair of source and destination nodes in a distributed manner. Finally, simulation and numerical results are presented to validate the efficiency of our theoretical analysis, as well as to illustrate the security-QoS tradeoffs and the routing performance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Adaptive Traffic Signal Control: Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithm with Experience Replay and Target Network

Adaptive traffic signal control, which adjusts traffic signal timing according to real-time traffic, has been shown to be an effective method to reduce traffic congestion. Available works on adaptive traffic signal control make responsive traffic signal control decisions based on human-crafted features (e.g. vehicle queue length). However, human-crafted features are abstractions of raw traffic data (e.g., position and speed of vehicles), which ignore some useful traffic information and lead to suboptimal traffic signal controls. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning algorithm that automatically extracts all useful features (machine-crafted features) from raw real-time traffic data and learns the optimal policy for adaptive traffic signal control. To improve algorithm stability, we adopt experience replay and target network mechanisms. Simulation results show that our algorithm reduces vehicle delay by up to 47% and 86% when compared to another two popular traffic signal control algorithms, longest queue first algorithm and fixed time control algorithm, respectively.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2017

SF-sketch: A Two-stage Sketch for Data Streams

A sketch is a probabilistic data structure used to record frequencies of items in a multi-set. Sketches are widely used in various fields, especially those that involve processing and storing data streams. In streaming applications with high data rates, a sketch "fills up" very quickly. Thus, its contents are periodically transferred to the remote collector, which is responsible for answering queries. In this paper, we propose a new sketch, called Slim-Fat (SF) sketch, which has a significantly higher accuracy compared to prior art, a much smaller memory footprint, and at the same time achieves the same speed as the best prior sketch. The key idea behind our proposed SF-sketch is to maintain two separate sketches: a small sketch called Slim-subsketch and a large sketch called Fat-subsketch. The Slim-subsketch is periodically transferred to the remote collector for answering queries quickly and accurately. The Fat-subsketch, however, is not transferred to the remote collector because it is used only to assist the Slim-subsketch during the insertions and deletions and is not used to answer queries. We implemented and extensively evaluated SF-sketch along with several prior sketches and compared them side by side. Our experimental results show that SF-sketch outperforms the most widely used CM-sketch by up to 33.1 times in terms of accuracy. We have released the source codes of our proposed sketch as well as existing sketches at Github. The short version of this paper will appear in ICDE 2017.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2016

Friendship-based Cooperative Jamming for Secure Communication in Poisson Networks

Wireless networks with the consideration of social relationships among network nodes are highly appealing for lots of important data communication services. Ensuring the security of such networks is of great importance to facilitate their applications in supporting future social-based services with strong security guarantee. This paper explores the physical layer security-based secure communication in a finite Poisson network with social friendships among nodes, for which a social friendship-based cooperative jamming scheme is proposed. The jamming scheme consists of a Local Friendship Circle (LFC) and a Long-range Friendship Annulus (LFA), where all legitimate nodes in the LFC serve as jammers, but the legitimate nodes in the LFA are selected as jammers through three location-based policies. To understand both the security and reliability performance of the proposed jamming scheme, we first model the sum interference at any location in the network by deriving its Laplace transform under two typical path loss scenarios. With the help of the interference Laplace transform results, we then derive the exact expression for the transmission outage probability (TOP) and determine both the upper and lower bounds on the secrecy outage probability (SOP), such that the overall outage performances of the proposed jamming scheme can be depicted. Finally, we present extensive numerical results to validate the theoretical analysis of TOP and SOP and also to illustrate the impacts of the friendship-based cooperative jamming on the network performances.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2014

Capacity and Delay-Throughput Tradeoff in ICMNs with Poisson Meeting Process

Intermittently connected mobile networks (ICMNs) serve as an important network model for many critical applications. This paper focuses on a continuous ICMN model where the pair-wise meeting process between network nodes follows a homogeneous and independent Poisson process. This ICMN model is known to serve as good approximations to a class of important ICMNs with mobility models like random waypoint and random direction, so it is widely adopted in the performance study of ICMNs. This paper studies the throughput capacity and delay-throughput tradeoff in the considered ICMNs with Poisson meeting process. For the concerned ICMN, we first derive an exact expression of its throughput capacity based on the pairwise meeting rate therein and analyze the expected end-to-end packet delay under a routing algorithm that can achieve the throughput capacity. We then explore the inherent tradeoff between delay and throughput and establish a necessary condition for such tradeoff that holds under any routing algorithm in the ICMN. To illustrate the applicability of the theoretical results, case studies are further conducted for the random waypoint and random direction mobility models. Finally, simulation and numerical results are provided to verify the efficiency of our theoretical capacity/delay results and to illustrate our findings.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2013

End-to-End Delay Modeling for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: A Quasi-Birth-and-Death Approach

Understanding the fundamental end-to-end delay performance in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is of great importance for supporting Quality of Service (QoS) guaranteed applications in such networks. While upper bounds and approximations for end-to-end delay in MANETs have been developed in literature, which usually introduce significant errors in delay analysis, the modeling of exact end-to-end delay in MANETs remains a technical challenge. This is partially due to the highly dynamical behaviors of MANETs, but also due to the lack of an efficient theoretical framework to capture such dynamics. This paper demonstrates the potential application of the powerful Quasi-Birth-and-Death (QBD) theory in tackling the challenging issue of exact end-to-end delay modeling in MANETs. We first apply the QBD theory to develop an efficient theoretical framework for capturing the complex dynamics in MANETs. We then show that with the help of this framework, closed form models can be derived for the analysis of exact end-to-end delay and also per node throughput capacity in MANETs. Simulation and numerical results are further provided to illustrate the efficiency of these QBD theory-based models as well as our theoretical findings.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2013

Secrecy Transmission Capacity in Noisy Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

This paper considers the transmission of confidential messages over noisy wireless ad hoc networks, where both background noise and interference from concurrent transmitters affect the received signals. For the random networks where the legitimate nodes and the eavesdroppers are distributed as Poisson point processes, we study the secrecy transmission capacity (STC), as well as the connection outage probability and secrecy outage probability, based on the physical layer security. We first consider the basic fixed transmission distance model, and establish a theoretical model of the STC. We then extend the above results to a more realistic random distance transmission model, namely nearest receiver transmission. Finally, extensive simulation and numerical results are provided to validate the efficiency of our theoretical results and illustrate how the STC is affected by noise, connection and secrecy outage probabilities, transmitter and eavesdropper densities, and other system parameters. Remarkably, our results reveal that a proper amount of noise is helpful to the secrecy transmission capacity.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2013

On Eavesdropper-Tolerance Capability of Two-Hop Wireless Networks

Two-hop wireless network serves as the basic net-work model for the study of general wireless networks, while cooperative jamming is a promising scheme to achieve the physi-cal layer security. This paper establishes a theoretical framework for the study of eavesdropper-tolerance capability (i.e., the exact maximum number of eavesdroppers that can be tolerated) in a two-hop wireless network, where the cooperative jamming is adopted to ensure security defined by secrecy outage probability (SOP) and opportunistic relaying is adopted to guarantee relia-bility defined by transmission outage probability (TOP). For the concerned network, closed form modeling for both SOP and TOP is first conducted based on the Central Limit Theorem. With the help of SOP and TOP models and also the Stochastic Ordering Theory, the model for eavesdropper-tolerance capability analysis is then developed. Finally, extensive simulation and numerical results are provided to illustrate the efficiency of our theoretical framework as well as the eavesdropper-tolerance capability of the concerned network from adopting cooperative jamming and opportunistic relaying.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2013

Source Delay in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Source delay, the time a packet experiences in its source node, serves as a fundamental quantity for delay performance analysis in networks. However, the source delay performance in highly dynamic mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is still largely unknown by now. This paper studies the source delay in MANETs based on a general packet dispatching scheme with dispatch limit $f$ (PD-$f$ for short), where a same packet will be dispatched out up to $f$ times by its source node such that packet dispatching process can be flexibly controlled through a proper setting of $f$. We first apply the Quasi-Birth-and-Death (QBD) theory to develop a theoretical framework to capture the complex packet dispatching process in PD-$f$ MANETs. With the help of the theoretical framework, we then derive the cumulative distribution function as well as mean and variance of the source delay in such networks. Finally, extensive simulation and theoretical results are provided to validate our source delay analysis and illustrate how source delay in MANETs are related to network parameters.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2013

Generalized Secure Transmission Protocol for Flexible Load-Balance Control with Cooperative Relays in Two-Hop Wireless Networks

This work considers secure transmission protocol for flexible load-balance control in two-hop relay wireless networks without the information of both eavesdropper channels and locations. The available secure transmission protocols via relay cooperation in physical layer secrecy framework cannot provide a flexible load-balance control, which may significantly limit their application scopes. This paper extends the conventional works and proposes a general transmission protocol with considering load-balance control, in which the relay is randomly selected from the first $k$ preferable assistant relays located in the circle area with the radius $r$ and the center at the middle between source and destination (2HR-($r,k$) for short). This protocol covers the available works as special cases, like ones with the optimal relay selection ($r=\infty$, $k=1$) and with the random relay selection ($r=\infty$, $k = n$ i.e. the number of system nodes) in the case of equal path-loss, ones with relay selected from relay selection region ($r \in (0, \infty), k = 1$) in the case of distance-dependent path-loss. The theoretic analysis is further provided to determine the maximum number of eavesdroppers one network can tolerate to ensure a desired performance in terms of the secrecy outage probability and transmission outage probability. The analysis results also show the proposed protocol can balance load distributed among the relays by a proper setting of $r$ and $k$ under the premise of specified secure and reliable requirements.

cs.CR↗