Expanding the Horizons of Wireless Sensing

All interactions of objects, humans, and machines with the physical world are via contact forces. For instance, objects placed on a table exert their gravitational forces, and the contact interactions via our hands/feet are guided by the sense of contact force felt by our skin. Thus, the ability to sense the contact forces can allow us to measure all these ubiquitous interactions, enabling a myriad of applications. Furthermore, force sensors are a critical requirement for safer surgeries, which require measuring complex contact forces experienced as a surgical instrument interacts with the surrounding tissues during the surgical procedure. However, with currently available discrete point-force sensors, which require a battery to sense the forces and communicate the readings wirelessly, these ubiquitous sensing and surgical sensing applications are not practical. This motivates the development of new force sensors that can sense, and communicate wirelessly without consuming significant power to enable a battery-free design. In this magazine article, we present WiForce, a low-power wireless force sensor utilizing a joint sensing-communication paradigm. That is, instead of having separate sensing and communication blocks, WiForce directly transduces the force measurements onto variations in wireless signals reflecting WiForce from the sensor. This novel trans-duction mechanism also allows WiForce to generalize easily to a length continuum, where we can detect as well as localize forces acting on the continuum. We fabricate and test our sensor prototype in different scenarios, including testing beneath a tissue phantom, and obtain sub-N sensing and sub-mm localizing accuracies (0.34 N and 0.6 mm, respectively).

Distributed Edge Computing with Blockchain Technology to Enable Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency V2X Communications

Vehicular communication is a promising technology that has been announced as a main use-case of the fifth-generation cellular system (5G). Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) is the vehicular communication paradigm that enables the communications and interactions between vehicles and other network entities, e.g., road-side units (RSUs). This promising technology faces many challenges related to reliability, availability and security of the exchanged data. To this end, this work aims to solve the scientific problem of building a vehicular network architecture for reliable delivery of correct and uncompromised data within the V2X concept to improve the safety of road users, using blockchain technology and mobile edge computing (MEC). The proposed work provides a formalized mathematical model of the system, taking into account the interconnection of objects and V2X information channels and an energy-efficient offloading algorithm to manage traffic offloading to the MEC server. The main applications of the blockchain and MEC technology in the developed system are discussed. Furthermore, the developed system, with the introduced sub-systems and algorithms, was evaluated over a reliable environment, for different simulation scenarios, and the obtained results are discussed.

Multiple Facets of Plant-Microbiome Associations in Unlocking the Communication Paradigm through Extracellular Vesicles. s

: Communication among different species across kingdoms occurs through a chain of regulatory molecules that are transferred around cellular boundaries. These molecules are also crucial for defense, virulence and pathogenesis. In the past, the transport of proteins in long distance communication was observed, but in the present era, the discovery of extracellular vesicles (EVs) has changed our understanding of molecular communication. EVs are not only involved in cell signaling and immunity, but also can transfer information by sRNAs, forming a basis for interactions among a wide variety of organisms. Despite extensive research on EVs in other areas, their role in communication between plants and the plant microbiome has been lacking. EVs are potentially involved in protein trafficking along with transport of lipids and nucleic acids. Interactions between hosts and their microbiomes may also be mediated by EVs, which can be involved in stress responses, immune surveillance and defense, virulence and signaling along with many metabolic activities within plant microbiomes. In this review, we have focused on recent information about the role of EVs and the molecules they transport between hosts and microbes. The connection between biofilms and the generation of EVs is also considered. These findings enhance our knowledge about plant-microbiome interactions in terms of immunity and virulence and challenge the conventional viewpoint of inter-kingdom signaling.

Securing Publisher–Subscriber Smart Grid Infrastructure

The security of communication protocols in the smart grid system is a crucial concern. An adversary can exploit the lack of confidentiality and authentication mechanism to cause damaging consequences. In the substation automation systems that rely on multicast communication between various intelligent electronic devices, the lack of security features in the standard IEC61850 and IEC62351 can invite attackers to manipulate the integrity of the employed publisher–subscriber communication paradigm to their advantage. Consequently, many researchers have introduced various approaches offering authenticity and confidentiality. However, such schemes and methods for the aforesaid standards have computational limitations in compliance with the stringent timing requirements of specific applications in the smart grid. In this paper, we propose an approach that can fully secure the publisher–subscriber communication against confidentiality attacks. In this direction, we develop a demo tool to validate the performance of our proposed security approach for potential factors such as timing requirements and the size of the messages. Finally, we evaluate our scheme considering the requirements of the GOOSE, SMV, and MMS protocols in the substation automation systems.

Intelligent Stretch Optimization in Information Centric Networking-Based Tactile Internet Applications

The fifth-generation (5G) mobile network services are currently being made available for different use case scenarios like enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable and low latency communication, and massive machine-type communication. The ever-increasing data requests from the users have shifted the communication paradigm to be based on the type of the requested data content or the so-called information-centric networking (ICN). The ICN primarily aims to enhance the performance of the network infrastructure in terms of the stretch to opt for the best routing path. Reduction in stretch merely reduces the end-to-end (E2E) latency to ensure the requirements of the 5G-enabled tactile internet (TI) services. The foremost challenge tackled by the ICN-based system is to minimize the stretch while selecting an optimal routing path. Therefore, in this work, a reinforcement learning-based intelligent stretch optimization (ISO) strategy has been proposed to reduce stretch and obtain an optimal routing path in ICN-based systems for the realization of 5G-enabled TI services. A Q-learning algorithm is utilized to explore and exploit the different routing paths within the ICN infrastructure. The problem is designed as a Markov decision process and solved with the help of the Q-learning algorithm. The simulation results indicate that the proposed strategy finds the optimal routing path for the delay-sensitive haptic-driven services of 5G-enabled TI based upon their stretch profile over ICN, such as the augmented reality /virtual reality applications. Moreover, we compare and evaluate the simulation results of propsoed ISO strategy with random routing strategy and history aware routing protocol (HARP). The proposed ISO strategy reduces 33.33% and 33.69% delay as compared to random routing and HARP, respectively. Thus, the proposed strategy suggests an optimal routing path with lesser stretch to minimize the E2E latency.

Securing SDN-Based IoT Group Communication

IoT group communication allows users to control multiple IoT devices simultaneously. A convenient method for implementing this communication paradigm is by leveraging software-defined networking (SDN) and allowing IoT endpoints to “advertise” the resources that can be accessed through group communication. In this paper, we propose a solution for securing this process by preventing IoT endpoints from advertising “fake” resources. We consider group communication using the constrained application protocol (CoAP), and we leverage Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description (TD) to enable resources’ advertisement. In order to achieve our goal, we are using linked-data proofs. Additionally, we evaluate the application of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for hiding certain properties of a WoT-TD file.

Defining the elements of the communication paradigm in higher education under the influence of social media: Literature review

Although social media provide many opportunities to improve teaching processes, and today’s students do not know the world without them, there is still a trend of non-adaptation of new technologies in higher education institutions. The existing communication paradigm of social media is multidimensional, and thus complex and covers a wide theoretical and practical area. The main objective of this paper, based on the literature overview, is the conceptual foundation of social media and their main characteristics; to determine general elements of the existing communication paradigm in higher education under the influence of social media, and to identify gaps which can serve as an impetus for future research aimed at a holistic approach to changing the communication paradigm in higher education under the influence of social media.

Local language and cultural conflict in Flores Island Society. A Critical Linguistics Study on Cross Cultural Communication in the Middle of Cultural Conflict in Flores Island Society

Flores Island is one of the diverse place despite its small size as the part of Indonesian East Archipelago and Lesser Sunda Island. We all know that regional language or local language is an intellectual and cultural property. Local language lives and develops in an area or community. There are many regional languages accustomed to be used as a means of communication. The use of local language with its different meanings in a region or community that is no longer homogeneous can be a trigger to cultural conflict. The causes of conflict among residents or cultural believers are assimilation and mixing of heterogeneous local language-speaking communities. This study aims at revealing the existence of cultural conflicts as a result of the meaning differences of local languagesused by the people on Flores Island. This study uses a critical linguistics approach with a cross-cultural communication paradigm.