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The rapid development of mobile communication devices has brought challenges to wireless networks, where data packets are able to organize and maintain local area networks more freely without the constraints of wired devices. Scholars have developed diverse network protocols on how to ensure data transmission while maintaining its self-organizational nature. However, it is difficult for traditional network protocols to meet the needs of increasingly complex networks. In order to solve the problem that the better node set may not be selected when selecting the node set responsible for forwarding in the traditional OLSR protocol, a multi-objective optimized OLSR algorithm is proposed in this paper, which incorporating a new MPR mechanism and an improved NSGA-II algorithm. In the process of route discovery, the intermediate nodes responsible for forwarding packets are determined by the new MPR mechanism, and then the main parameters in the OLSR protocol are provided by the multi-objective optimization algorithm. Matlab was used to build a self-organizing network in this study. In addition, the conventional OLSR protocol, NSGA-II algorithm and multi-objective simulated annealing algorithm are selected to compare with the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce packet loss and end-to-end delay while obtaining better results in HV and Spacing, two multi-objective optimization result evaluation metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transport layer security (TLS) protocol is the most widely used security protocol in modern network communications. However, protocol vulnerabilities caused by the design of the network protocol or its implementation by programmers emerge one after another. Meanwhile, various versions of TLS protocol implementations exhibit different behavioral characteristics. Researchers are attempting to find the differences in protocol implementations based on differential testing, which is conducive to discovering the vulnerabilities. This paper provides a solution to find the differences more efficiently by targeting the TLS protocol handshake process. The differences of different implementations during the fuzzing process, such as code coverage and response data, are taken to guide the mutation of test cases, and the seeds are mutated based on the TLS protocol syntax. In addition, the definition of duplicate discrepancies is theoretically explored to investigate the root cause of the discrepancies and to reduce the number of duplicate cases that are caused by the same reason. Besides, the necessary conditions for excluding duplicate cases are further analyzed to develop the deduplication strategy. The proposed method is developed based on open-source tools, i.e., NEZHA and TLS-diff. Three types of widely used TLS protocol implementations, i.e., OpenSSL, BoringSSL, and LibreSSL, are taken for experimental testing. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively improve the ability to find differences between different implementations. Under the same test scale or the same time, the amount of discrepancies increases by about 20% compared to TLS-diff, indicating the effectiveness of the deduplication strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The blockchain technology introduced by bitcoin, with its decentralised peer-to-peer network and cryptographic protocols, provides a public and accessible database of bitcoin transactions that have attracted interest from both economics and network science as an example of a complex evolving monetary network. Despite the known cryptographic guarantees present in the blockchain, there exists significant evidence of inconsistencies and suspicious behavior in the chain. In this paper, we examine the prevalence and evolution of two types of anomalies occurring in coinbase transactions in blockchain mining, which we reported on in earlier research. We further develop our techniques for investigating the impact of these anomalies on the blockchain transaction network, by building networks induced by anomalous coinbase transactions at regular intervals and calculating a range of network measures, including degree correlation and assortativity, as well as inequality in terms of wealth and anomaly ratio using the Gini coefficient. We obtain time series of network measures calculated over the full transaction network and three sub-networks. Inspecting trends in these time series allows us to identify a period in time with particularly strange transaction behavior. We then perform a frequency analysis of this time period to reveal several blocks of highly anomalous transactions. Our technique represents a novel way of using network science to detect and investigate cryptographic anomalies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: VCI is a severe public health problem facing the world today. In addition to pharmacological treatment, non-invasive neuromodulation techniques have also been effective. At this stage, non-invasive neuromodulation techniques combined with pharmacological treatment are the mainstay of clinical treatment, and clinical trials are continuing to be conducted, which is becoming the direction of treatment for VCI. Therefore, we outline this systematic review and network meta-analysis protocol to evaluate and rank clinical data in future studies which can develop optimal protocols for the clinical treatment of VCI with non-invasive neuromodulation techniques in combination with drugs. Methods: The network meta-analysis will search eight databases, including PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, China Knowledge Infrastructure Library (CNKI), China Biology Medicine disc (CBM)), Wanfang Data Knowledge Service Platform and Vipshop Journal Service Platform (VIP), for a period of from the establishment of the library to January 30 2022. The quality of the studies will be evaluated using the Cochrane Review's Handbook 5.1 and the PEDro scale to assess the evidence and quality of the included randomised controlled trials. Risk of bias assessment and heterogeneity tests will be performed using the Review Manager 5.4 program, and Bayesian network meta-analysis will be performed using the Stata 16.0 and WinBUGS 1.4.3 program. Results: The results of the network meta-analysis will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Conclusions: Our study is expected to provide high quality evidence-based medical evidence for the treatment of VCI by clinicians. Trial registration: PROSPERO:CRD42022308580. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present the design of an open-source and low-cost buoy prototype for remote monitoring of water quality variables in fish farming. The designed battery-powered system periodically measures temperature, pH and dissolved oxygen, transmitting the information locally through a low-power wide-area network protocol to a gateway connected to a cloud service for data storage and visualization. We provide a novel buoy design that can be easily constructed with off-the-shelf materials, delivering a stable anchored float for the IoT device and the probes immersed in the water pond. The prototype was tested at an operating fish farm, showing promising results for a low-cost remote monitoring tool that enables automatic data acquisition and storage in fish farming scenarios. All the elements of this design, including hardware and software designs, are freely available under permissive licenses as an open-source project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biometric based authentication protocols for multi-server architectures have gained momentum in recent times due to advancements in wireless technologies and associated constraints. Lu et al. recently proposed a robust biometric based authentication with key agreement protocol for a multi-server environment using smart cards. They claimed that their protocol is efficient and resistant to prominent security attacks. The careful investigation of this paper proves that Lu et al.’s protocol does not provide user anonymity, perfect forward secrecy and is susceptible to server and user impersonation attacks, man-in-middle attacks and clock synchronization problems. In addition, this paper proposes an enhanced biometric based authentication with key-agreement protocol for multi-server architecture based on elliptic curve cryptography using smartcards. We proved that the proposed protocol achieves mutual authentication using Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic. The formal security of the proposed protocol is verified using the AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool to show that our protocol can withstand active and passive attacks. The formal and informal security analyses and performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol is robust and efficient compared to Lu et al.’s protocol and existing similar protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of things (IoT) facilitates a variety of heterogeneous devices to be enabled with network connectivity via various network architectures to gather and exchange real-time information. On the other hand, the rise of IoT creates Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) like security threats. The recent advancement of Software Defined-Internet of Things (SDIoT) architecture can provide better security solutions compared to the conventional networking approaches. Moreover, limited computing resources and heterogeneous network protocols are major challenges in the SDIoT ecosystem. Given these circumstances, it is essential to design a low-cost DDoS attack classifier. The current study aims to employ an improved feature selection (FS) technique which determines the most relevant features that can improve the detection rate and reduce the training time. At first, to overcome the data imbalance problem, Edited Nearest Neighbor-based Synthetic Minority Oversampling (SMOTE-ENN) was exploited. The study proposes SFMI, an FS method that combines Sequential Feature Selection (SFE) and Mutual Information (MI) techniques. The top k common features were extracted from the nominated features based on SFE and MI. Further, Principal component analysis (PCA) is employed to address multicollinearity issues in the dataset. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted on two benchmark datasets such as the KDDCup99, CIC IoT-2023 datasets. For classification purposes, Decision Tree, K-Nearest Neighbor, Gaussian Naive Bayes, Random Forest (RF), and Multilayer Perceptron classifiers were employed. The experimental results quantitatively demonstrate that the proposed SMOTE-ENN+SFMI+PCA with RF classifier achieves 99.97% accuracy and 99.39% precision with 10 features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development and universal application of satellite technology, an important way to expand the function of satellites is setting up inter-satellite networks to make them work together. Traditional satellite networking methods generally adopt a fixed time slot allocation method, which is not suitable for small satellite groups with low latency and high throughput requirements. In order to solve this problem, it has been proposed to apply the traditional Wifi protocol in satellite networking. As there are differences between satellite networks and terrestrial networks, it’s necessary to improve the traditional 802.11 protocol. The Media Access Control (MAC) protocol in 802.11 is improved in this paper, which mainly includes the adaptive algorithm of maximum contention window size and the growth algorithm of Contention Window (CW) size. The maximum contention window is adjusted according to the conflict state of the current network, which makes the network accommodate more satellite nodes. The CW growth algorithm improves the traditional Binary Exponential Back-off (BEB) algorithm, where the CW is designed according to the priority of the data frame or the network load. In this way, high-priority satellite accusation information will have higher reliability or tolerate greater network load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In health sector, trust is considered important because it indirectly influences the quality of health care through patient satisfaction, adherence and the continuity of its relationship with health care professionals and the promotion of accurate and timely diagnoses. One of the important requirements of TRSs in the health sector is rating secrecy, which mandates that the identification information about the service consumer should be kept secret to prevent any privacy violation. Anonymity and trust are two imperative objectives, and no significant explicit efforts have been made to achieve both of them at the same time. In this paper, we present a framework for solving the problem of reconciling trust with anonymity in the health sector. Our solution comprises Anonymous Reputation Management (ARM) protocol and Context-aware Trustworthiness Assessment (CTA) protocol. ARM protocol ensures that only those service consumers who received a service from a specific service provider provide a recommendation score anonymously with in the specified time limit. The CTA protocol computes the reputation of a user as a service provider and as a recommender. To determine the correctness of the proposed ARM protocol, formal modelling and verification are performed using High Level Petri Nets (HLPN) and Z3 Solver. Our simulation results verify the accuracy of the proposed context-aware trust assessment scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal techniques have been devoted to analyzing whether network protocol specifications violate security policies; however, these methods cannot detect vulnerabilities in the implementations of the network protocols themselves. Symbolic execution can be used to analyze the paths of the network protocol implementations, but for stateful network protocols, it is difficult to reach the deep states of the protocol. This paper proposes a novel model-guided approach to detect vulnerabilities in network protocol implementations. Our method first abstracts a finite state machine (FSM) model, then utilizes the model to guide the symbolic execution. This approach achieves high coverage of both the code and the protocol states. The proposed method is implemented and applied to test numerous real-world network protocol implementations. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method is more effective than traditional fuzzing methods such as SPIKE at detecting vulnerabilities in the deep states of network protocol implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designing a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) to achieve a high Quality of Service (QoS) (network performance and durability) is a challenging problem. We address it by focusing on the performance of the 802.15.4 communication protocol because the IEEE 802.15.4 Standard is actually considered as one of the reference technologies in WSNs. In this paper, we propose to control the sustainable use of resources (i.e., energy consumption, reliability and timely packet transmission) of a wireless sensor node equipped with photovoltaic cells by an adaptive tuning not only of the MAC (Medium Access Control) parameters but also of the sampling frequency of the node. To do this, we use one of the existing control approaches, namely the viability theory, which aims to preserve the functions and the controls of a dynamic system in a set of desirable states. So, an analytical model, describing the evolution over time of nodal resources, is derived and used by a viability algorithm for the adaptive tuning of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol. The simulation analysis shows that our solution allows ensuring indefinitely, in the absence of hardware failure, the operations (lifetime duration, reliability and timely packet transmission) of an 802.15.4 WSN and one can temporarily increase the sampling frequency of the node beyond the regular sampling one. This latter brings advantages for agricultural and environmental applications such as precision agriculture, flood or fire prevention. Main results show that our current approach enable to send more information when critical events occur without the node runs out of energy. Finally, we argue that our approach is generic and can be applied to other types of WSN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Multi-professional cooperation between healthcare providers is a key quality criterion of hospice and palliative care. While hospice and palliative care networks can support cooperation on a local level, opportunities for wider cooperation through the establishment and development of regional hospice and palliative care networks in Germany have not yet been explored systematically. Aims: The HOPAN study aims at: (1) identifying regional hospice and palliative care networks in Germany, (2) analysing these networks using an adapted quality assessment tool, and (3) proposing setting-sensitive recommendations for network development and exploring the benefits of these recommendations. Methods: HOPAN is a prospective, observational, mixed-methods study comprising three work packages (WPs). In WP1, the stock of regional hospice and palliative care networks in Germany will be identified via database, literature, and internet research. In WP2a, focus groups will be conducted to adapt an existing maturity model for healthcare networks to regional hospice and palliative care networks. In WP2b, a questionnaire will be sent to each identified regional hospice and palliative care network to gain insight into their structure and status of development. In WP2c, group discussions will be conducted to develop setting-sensitive recommendations for these networks. Finally, in WP3, these recommendations will be sent to all participating hospice and palliative care networks, and the benefits of the recommendations will be evaluated via a questionnaire. Discussion: Empirically developed setting-sensitive recommendations should enable the systematic establishment and management of regional hospice and palliative care networks in Germany, considering the specific needs and potential of each network. The study findings are expected to improve the overall development of hospice and palliative care services. Trial registration: The study was prospectively registered in the German Clinical Trials Register (Deutsches Register Klinischer Studien) (Registration N° DRKS00030629; date of registration: 02 November 2022). The study is searchable under the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform Search Portal of the World Health Organization, under the German Clinical Trials Register number. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network protocol vulnerability detection plays an important role in many domains, including protocol security analysis, application security, and network intrusion detection. In this study, by analyzing the general fuzzing method of network protocols, we propose a novel approach that combines network traffic analysis with the binary reverse engineering method. For network traffic analysis, the block-based protocol description language is introduced to construct test scripts, while the binary reverse engineering method employs the genetic algorithm with a fitness function designed to focus on code coverage. This combination leads to a substantial improvement in fuzz testing for network protocols. We build a prototype system and use it to test several real-world network protocol implementations. The experimental results show that the proposed approach detects vulnerabilities more efficiently and effectively than general fuzzing methods such as SPIKE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain is a Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) system wherein decentralized nodes execute consensus protocols to drive the agreement process on new blocks added to a distributed ledger. Generally, two-round communications among 3f+1 nodes are required to tolerate up to f faults in BFT-based consensus networks. This communication pattern corresponds to the worse-case scenario of consensus achievement, even under asynchronous network conditions. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for a network to operate under better conditions, where a consensus can be reached with a lower communication cost. Hence, with the addition of a faster optimistic path toward an agreement, the idea of dual-mode consensus has been proposed as a promising approach to enhance the performance of asynchronous BFT protocols. However, this opportunity is not completely exploited by existing dual-mode protocols as the fast path can be followed only in a nonfaulty and synchronous network. This article presents a novel dual-mode protocol consisting of fast and backup subprotocols. To create different consensus committees for fast and backup-mode operations, the network contains both active and passive nodes. A consensus can be expedited through a fast-mode operation when majority of the active nodes can communicate synchronously. Under non-ideal conditions, the backup protocol takes over the agreement process from its fast-mode counterpart without starting over the suspended round. The safety and liveness of the proposed protocol are guaranteed with lower communication costs, which balance the trade-off between protocol efficiency and availability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Several randomized controlled trials (RCT) investigated antenatal dietary supplements' effect on gestational diabetes mellitus patients' fasting plasma glucose levels, glycated hemoglobin levels, homeostasis model assessment of- insulin resistance and β-cell function, quantitative insulin sensitivity check index for glucose, high-, low-, and very-low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels, total cholesterol levels, triglyceride levels, and triglyceride to high-density lipoprotein ratio. However, an efficacy comparison across various dietary supplements and their co-supplements are unavailable for these outcomes. Therefore, a systematic review protocol is proposed here to make a network meta-analysis (NMA)-based juxtaposition across the following dietary supplements- vitamins, Myo-inositol, choline, minerals, probiotics, prebiotics, synbiotics, and omega-3 fatty acids. Materials and methods: A database search will ensue in the PubMed, Embase, and Scopus databases for RCTs testing the above, irrespective of their geographical origin. Data on population characteristics, compared interventions, and outcomes of interest will get abstracted from the studies included in the proposed review. Each of the reviewed studies will get appraised using the revised Cochrane tool. For each outcome, the comparative efficacy across interventions will be estimated in weighted or standardized mean difference using the frequentist method NMA and presented with their 95% confidence interval using league tables. By constructing network maps and comparison-adjusted funnel plots, a visual assessment of the inter-interventional relation and publication bias in each NMA model will happen, respectively. The best-ranked intervention prediction for respective outcomes will transpire using the surface under the cumulative ranking curve values. The Stata statistical software (version 16) will be used for analysis, and statistical significance will be determined at p<0.05 and 95% confidence interval. Trial registration: PROSPERO registration number:CRD42020214378. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comprehensive analysis that aims to understand the topology of real-world networks and the development of algorithms that replicate their characteristics has been significant research issues. Although the accuracy of newly developed network protocols or algorithms does not depend on the underlying topology, the performance generally depends on the topology. As a result, network practitioners have concentrated on generating representative synthetic topologies and utilize them to investigate the performance of their design in simulation or emulation environments. Network generators typically represent the Internet topology as a graph composed of point-to-point links. In this study, we discuss the implications of multi-access links on the synthetic network generation and modeling of the networks as bi-partite graphs to represent both subnetworks and routers. We then analyze the characteristics of sampled Internet topology data sets from backbone Autonomous Systems (AS) and observe that in addition to the commonly recognized power-law node degree distribution, the subnetwork size and the router interface distributions often exhibit power-law characteristics. We introduce a SubNetwork Generator (SubNetG) topology generation approach that incorporates the observed measurements to produce bipartite network topologies. In particular, generated topologies capture the 2-mode relation between the layer-2 (i.e., the subnetwork and interface distributions) and the layer-3 (i.e., the degree distribution) that is missing from the current network generators that produce 1-mode graphs. The SubNetG source code and experimental data is available at https://github.com/netml/sonet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While having high bandwidth-efficiency, the ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol suffers from high signaling overhead due to route request (RREQ) messages flooding, especially when the node density and the number of connections are increased. In order to resolve this broadcast storm problem of the AODV in a high node density mobile ad-hoc network, we propose a geographical on-demand route discovery scheme. Assuming a known location of the destination, the RREQ of the proposed routing protocol is propagated in a unicast manner by employing a novel parsing mechanism for possible duplicate RREQs. The routing overhead of the proposed routing protocol is greatly robust to the node density change. We derive the node density required for the proposed routing protocol to keep the same connectivity as the AODV under the circumstance where the nodes are uniformly distributed. In addition, we present an imaginary destination consideration method to incorporate the uncertainty of the destination’s location due to mobility. Computer simulations show that the proposed scheme enables the RREQ propagation to cover 95% of the one-hop communication area centered at the originally known location of the destination without sacrificing the unicast feature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile IP allows for location-independent routing of IP datagrams on the Internet. Mobile IP specifies how a mobile node (MN) registers with its home agent and how the home agent routes datagrams to the MN through the tunnel. Current Mobile IP protocols have difficulties meeting the stringent handover delay requirements of future wireless networks. Fast handover for Proxy Mobile IPv6 (FPMIPv6) is used to resolve handover latency and packet loss problems that occur in the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) protocol. However, while implementing the FPMIPv6 scheme in a testbed, we encounter the out-of-order packet (OoOP) problem. The cause of this problem is the existence of two paths for data transmitted from a correspondent node (CN) to an MN. Since the problem affects the quality of service (QoS) of the network and the performance of the MN, we propose a new scheme using the last packet marker and packet buffering to solve this problem in FPMIPv6. The new Mobile Access Gateway (MAG) can control and deliver the data transmitted via the old path or the new path to an MN in order, using the last packet marker to notify the end of the data delivery in the old path and the packet buffering for holding the data delivered in the new path. We implement both the proposed scheme and FPMIPv6 in a testbed as a real network environment to demonstrate the correctness, cost effectiveness, and performance of the proposed scheme. A performance evaluation reveals that the proposed scheme can handle the OoOP problem efficiently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Duplicate address detection (DAD) is an important component of the address resolution protocol (ARP) and the neighbor discovery protocol (NDP). DAD determines whether an IP address is in conflict with other nodes. In traditional DAD, the target address to be detected is broadcast through the network, which provides convenience for malicious nodes to attack. A malicious node can send a spoofing reply to prevent the address configuration of a normal node, and thus, a denial-of-service attack is launched. This study proposes a hash method to hide the target address in DAD, which prevents an attack node from launching destination attacks. If the address of a normal node is identical to the detection address, then its hash value should be the same as the “Hash_64” field in the neighboring solicitation message. Consequently, DAD can be successfully completed. This process is called DAD-h. Simulation results indicate that address configuration using DAD-h has a considerably higher success rate when under attack compared with traditional DAD. Comparative analysis shows that DAD-h does not require third-party devices and considerable computing resources; it also provides a lightweight security resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]