The papers in this special section focus on cognitive software defined networks and applications. Next generation networks (NGNs) are xpected to utilize internal and external sources of data through information and wireless communication techniques. Particularly, the demand for autonomic network management, orchestrations and optimization is as intense as ever, even though significant research has

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The papers in this special section focus on data-driven Internet of Things (IoT) for smart cities. Developing smart cities to better support the growing urban population is a global and complex challenge and involves interdisciplinary fields. Instead of the traditional Internet of Contents in human-to-human and human-to-machine communications, the Internet of Things with communications among massive

The papers in this special section focus on edge computing for Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT is expected to improve the quality of human lives through billions of Internet-based devices that connect the physical and digital worlds. To satisfy the computation and storage requirements of IoT, cloud computing has served as the most important computing infrastructure. However, with the explosion of

The papers in this special section focus on heterogeneous communication networks. These networks, consisting of terrestrial mobile networks, satellite networks, IoT, WiFi, and etc., is a promising technique to meet the challenges in future mobile communications. Heterogeneous network resources are expected to cooperate with each other to support more efficient data transmissions and also provide more

The papers in this special section focus on smart systems and intelligent networking that is powered with Big Data analytics. Smart systems, including Internet of Things (IoT), have emerged to address contemporary economic, societal, and environmental challenges, such as business and production automation, urban sustainability, climate change, healthcare, and globalization. They encompass different

Anomaly detection is critical in the Internet of Things (IoT) systems due to its wide applications for building smart cities, such as quality control in manufacturing, intrusion detection in system security, fault detection in system monitoring. Many existing schemes are problem specific and supervised approaches, which require domain knowledge and tremendous data labeling efforts. In this paper, we

In this paper, we conduct mathematical and numerical analyses for COVID-19. To predict the trend of COVID-19, we propose a time-dependent SIR model that tracks the transmission and recovering rate at time $t$ . Using the data provided by China authority, we show our one-day prediction errors are almost less than $3\%$ . The turning point and the total number of confirmed cases in China are predicted

Finding hot topics in scholarly fields can help researchers to keep up with the latest concepts, trends, and inventions in their field of interest. Due to the rarity of complete large-scale scholarly data, earlier studies target this problem based on manual topic extraction from a limited number of domains, with their focus solely on a single feature such as coauthorship, citation relations, and etc

This paper introduces a new pattern, called interdependent patterns consisting of genes that are closely interdependent in the information transmission process on protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. Firstly, information flow starts to broadcast from activated genes to any other genes through the shortest paths, in which information is processed, and retransmitted by the genes adhering to the

In recent times, fog computing becomes an emerging technology that can exhilarate the cloud services towards the network edge for increasing the speeds up of various Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. In this context, integrating priority-aware scheduling and data offloading allow the service providers to efficiently handle a large number of real-time IoT applications and enhance the capability

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This article presents a user spatio-temporal behavior aware cache selection framework to facilitate device-to-device multicast (D2MD) communication that minimizes the number of caches required while achieving a desired user load on the cellular network. Consequently, it alleviates the caching load on the cellular network. The optimization problem formulated to minimize the number of caches is combinatorial

In this paper, we consider cyber-physical system (CPS) with multiple remote state estimation under denial-of-service (DoS) attack in infinite time-horizon. The sensors monitor the system and send their local state estimate to remote estimators by choosing the local channels in “State 0” or “State 1”. The aim of sensors is to find policies for choosing local channel in a specific state to transmit message

The structural balance preserving problem is studied in this article for heterogeneous agents in the state-dependent cooperation-competition network. The heterogeneous agents considered are described by second-order integrator systems with different intrinsic nonlinear dynamics, and velocity damping terms, and the initial network is structurally balanced, and connected, which can be divided into two

Complex networks, formed by nodes and links contain a significant amount of crucial information that can reflect the nature of the systems. In this paper, we propose a network-structure-transmission (NST) framework based on $k$ -shell decomposition and compressed sensing for transmitting network structures and spectral properties with limited data. Specifically, we reduce the average degree and degree

The proliferation of the IoT in connected society is rapidly expanding into vertical industry sectors due to the ever-increasing ties amongst businesses and economies. As the number of IoT nodes utilized in a network increases, decentralized network infrastructure, and security provisioning mechanisms, primarily enabled by blockchain-based technologies, become more beneficial. However, blockchain-based

Communication networks are difficult to model and predict because they have become very sophisticated and dynamic. We develop a reinforcement learning routing algorithm (RL-Routing) to solve a traffic engineering (TE) problem of SDN in terms of throughput and delay. RL-Routing solves the TE problem via experience, instead of building an accurate mathematical model. We consider comprehensive network

Compact blocks, and compact block protocol are a recent addition to the Bitcoin (BTC) data propagation protocol that aims to reduce bandwidth requirements and, possibly, reduce latency as well. In this work we evaluate operation of BTC network under a mix of regular, and compact block traffic, assuming that nodes randomly leave, and re-join the network, and perform block and, optionally, transaction

This paper studies leader-following bounded consensus problem for linear multi-agent systems (MASs) with exogenous disturbances under an observer-based dynamic event-triggered scheme. To guarantee performance requirements, and avoid frequent updates of the sensors, and the controllers at the same time, two independent event-triggered schemes with dynamic threshold are proposed in sensor-to-observer

Diverse collective dynamics emerge in dynamical systems interacting on top of complex network architectures. Along this line of research, temporal network has come out to be one of the most promising network platforms to investigate. Especially, such network with spatially moving agents has been established to be capable of modelling a number of practical instances. In this paper, we examine the dynamical

Robotic multi-agent systems can efficiently handle spatially distributed tasks in dynamic environments. Problem instances of particular interest, and generality are the dynamic traveling repairman problem, and the dynamic vehicle routing problem. Operational policies for robotic fleets solving these two problems take decisions in an online setting with continuously arriving demands to optimize service

Mobile data subsidization launched by mobile network operators is a promising business model to provide economic benefits for the mobile data market and beyond. It allows content providers to partly subsidize mobile data consumption of mobile users in exchange for displaying a certain amount of advertisements. From a content provider perspective, it is of great interest to determine the optimal strategy

After disasters, network communication is highly susceptible to disruption. In this case, we may need solutions without original architectures to meet the requirements of connectivity and communication. As a research hotspot, existing studies and practices in disaster management are often costly and may have to rely on differentiated strategies to deal with actual situations. In this paper, we choose

Air traffic is operated in an air traffic network (ATN) environment. It is pertinent to improve the robustness of ATNs as they are frequently exposed to manifold uncertainties which can break down their functioning components. Existing studies improve the robustness of an ATN by either rewiring its links or adding more ones. In this paper we discover the robustness paradox phenomenon in ATNs. Specifically

In the last decades, environmental pollution has grown up to be a major problem that influences people's health. Providing accurate environmental sensing services is of great significance. To realize environmental sensing, distributed monitoring sites are used to collect comprehensive long-term environmental data. However, sparse sensory data caused by insufficient monitoring sites and their incomplete

In this paper, we consider the radio access network (RAN) slicing in heterogeneous communication systems. Typically, the infrastructure provider (InP) allocates the radio resources to the mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) as RAN slices, and then the MVNOs use the allocated resources to provide services for their users. As the RAN being heterogeneous, the users are generally with different quality

This paper focuses on the distributed adaptive fault-tolerant consensus problem for nonlinear multi-agent systems(MASs) using state-constraint impulsive protocols with time-delay. Firstly, the distributed adaptive online updating schemes based on the local communication among neighboring agents are applied to some adaptive parameters. Secondly, the impulsive control protocols are introduced to save

Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing an explosion in the data traffic due to the increase in the number of heterogeneous applications. The existing cloud computing models will not be capable to support the IoT applications that are delay-sensitive and using high bandwidth. The Edge-IoT systems represented by shared edge clouds support a wide range of IoT applications. Edge clouds provide resources

Information can propagate among Online Social Network (OSN) users at a high speed, which makes the OSNs important platforms for viral marketing. Although the viral marketing related problems in OSNs have been extensively studied in the past decade, the existing works all assume known propagation rates. In this paper, we propose a novel model, Dynamic Influence Propagation (DIP), which allows propagation

WiFi fingerprint-based indoor positioning system emerges to provide fundamental location-related service in heterogeneous communications networks. It relies on crowdsourcing technology in the collection of received signal strength (RSS) to dynamically update fingerprint database. However, this crowdsourced indoor positioning system is vulnerable to the intrusion of dishonest users (i.e., attackers)

The integration of WiFi fingerprint-based indoor positioning technology and big data analysis emerges as a new research prospect. Through the analysis of big data collected from users’ submission, we can discover many other applications of fingerprint positioning. A popular application is the check-in to point of interest (POI) for its crowd traffic evaluation according to the volume of received signal

Mobile video has become one of the most valuable services in next-generation heterogeneous networks, and users’ quality of experience (QoE) is recognized as its important performance metric. In this paper, we propose an adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithm to achieve improvement of the timevarying QoE determinants during a mobile video playback. Since watching videos will bring mobile data charges to the

In this paper, two colored substitution networks by substitution rules are introduced. In order to calculate the sum of all shortest distances, we discuss the following both cases: two nodes are in adjacent branches or non-adjacent ones. The most difficult problem is to compute the sum of all shortest distances whose nodes are in two symmetrical branches. We were very surprised to find one efficient

This paper deals with the finite-time consensus control problem for a class of nonlinear strict-feedback multi-agent systems with heterogeneous dynamics. Due to the existence of unknown nonlinear dynamics of the system, this paper adopts the excellent approximation ability of fuzzy logic systems to design the consensus control protocol. Moreover, fuzzy logic systems and adaptive method are used to

Recently, with the rapid expansion of cities, optimizing taxi driving routes for improving taxi revenue efficiency has become the core issue of taxi system. However, most current research focuses on increasing platform revenue instead of improving drivers’ revenue in a centralized dispatch taxi system just like DiDi, which results in a slower driver income growth and greater difficulties for recruiting

Community detection in networks is a fundamental data analysis task. Recently, researchers have tried to improve its performance by exploiting semantic contents and interpret the communities. However, they typically assume that communities are assortative (i.e. vertices are mostly connected to others within the group), thus they cannot find the generalized community structures, which includes assortative

The current Internet is dramatically suffering the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, in which the perpetrator maliciously makes network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting the services of a host connected to the Internet. In this paper, we investigate an Internet transmission control protocol/active queue management (TCP/AQM) router subject

In a cognitive radio-based network (CRN), secondary users (SUs) opportunistically access underutilized spectrum resources and stop utilizing these resources when licensed or primary users (PUs) reappear. However, this way of opportunistic spectrum access is susceptible to novel vulnerabilities. Recently, a new attack, off-sensing (OS), has shed light on a vulnerability in the Federal Communications

Over the past decades, prevention and mitigation against cascading failure blackouts in complex networked systems have been extensively studied. In reality, the functional and structural restoration of complex networks suffering from large-scale cascading failures may involve a sequence of repairing actions. In this paper, we propose a novel sequential recovery model that takes into consideration both

Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) provide a powerful approach to cope with the dramatic mobile traffic growth. However, the backhaul limitation is an essential challenge. This paper is motivated to study how wireless caching and full duplex (FD) relaying can address the aforementioned challenge in a two-tier HetNet. Specifically, we propose a hybrid caching model consisting of probabilistic caching

Heterogeneous networks raise the challenge on ubiquitous connections among heterogeneous devices and networking protocols. As a promising approach to meet this challenge, Information-centric networking (ICN) offers a new communication paradigm which can conceal the heterogeneity of underlying networks. However, it suffers from the problem of segmented cached chunks, which results in low throughput

According to the critical requirements of the Internet, a wide range of privacy-preserving technologies are available, e.g. proxy sites, virtual private networks, and anonymity tools. Such mechanisms are challenged by traffic-classification endeavors which are crucial for network-management tasks and have recently become a milestone in their privacy-degree assessment, both from attacker and designer

This paper considers broadcast communications or information dissemination in Fixed-Schedule Dynamic Networks (FSDNs). It shows that the notion of spanning arborescences, commonly used in static networks, is not applicable in FSDNs. This paper then introduces two new concepts on spanning arborescences: (i) ${\boldsymbol{t}}$ -arborescence – an arborescence in which all edges have contact schedules

Understanding the localization properties of eigenvectors of complex networks is important to get insight into various structural and dynamical properties of the corresponding systems. Here, we analytically develop a scheme to construct a highly localized network for a given set of networks parameters that is the number of nodes and the number of interactions. We find that the localization behavior

In the coming 5G era, more and more applications are time-delay sensitive, and the importance of low delay in fields such as telemedicine, autonomous driving and military order transmission is self-evident. However, for different application scenarios, their delay requirements are different. How to meet different Quality of service (QoS) requirements simultaneously becomes a challenge. The emergence

Multistability is a key property of dynamical systems modeling cellular regulatory networks implicated in cell fate decisions, where, different stable steady states usually represent distinct cell phenotypes. Monotone network motifs are highly represented in these regulatory networks. In this paper, we leverage the properties of monotone dynamical systems to provide theoretical results that guide the

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and fog computing are the key technologies in fifth generation (5 G) networks. In an MEC system, the data of terminal devices can be processed at the edge nodes also known as fog nodes, which can reduce the data transmission from the terminal devices to the cloud, thus reducing the latency and pressure of network traffic. Due to the huge amount of users’ data, a large number

Recent advances on hardware accelerators and edge computing are enabling substantial processing to be performed at each node (e.g., robots, sensors) of a networked system. Local processing typically enables data compression and may help mitigate measurement noise, but it is still usually slower compared to a central computer (i.e., it entails a larger computational delay). Moreover, while nodes can

In the 5th generation cellular systems, heterogeneous communication networks allow multiple base stations (BSs) to serve the users cooperatively, which can satisfy the requirement of growing data rate and optimum coverage. However, suffering from the imperfect channel state information (CSI) feedback, optimal performance may not be guaranteed for coordinated multiple point (CoMP) scenarios when certain

This paper investigates the distributed optimal state consensus problem for an electronic system with a group of circuit units. The dynamics of each unit is modeled by a Chua's circuit in the presence of disturbance generated by an external system. By means of the internal model approach and feedback control, a compensator-based continuous-time algorithm is proposed to minimize the sum of all cost

Burdened with the specialized bearing requirements brought by the deep fusion of the Internet and the economic society, the current Internet is faced with a series of great challenges including intelligence, diversification, personalization, robustness and efficiency because of some defects such as rigid structure, simple bearing structure based on IP, and disability in suppressing unknown threats

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The papers in this special section focus on the economics on modern network systems. Many modern networks are becoming increasingly heterogeneous, dynamic, and complex. The need for smart and self-organizing network designs has become a central research issue in a variety of applications and scenarios. Proper economic mechanism design will go hand-in-hand with technology advances in solving many complex

The papers in this special section focus on the network of cyber-social networks (NCSN), with particular emphasis on modeling, analysis and control. NCSN is a promising new area that has recently attracted significant interests. Its core differentiator is the tight conjoining among heterogeneous cyber-social networks or between cyber and physical networks. The focus of this special section is to address

The papers in this special section focus on network science for high confidence cyber-physical systems (CPS) Here CPS refers to the engineered systems that can seamlessly integrate the physical world with the cyber world via advanced computation and communication capabilities. To enable high-confidence CPS for achieving better benefits as well as supporting emerging applications, network science-based

The papers in this special section focus on scalability and privacy in online social network services. (OSNs) The growing popularity of OSNs and their emerging applications attracted much attention from both academia and industry during recent years. Due to their nature, social networks are considered as sources of Big Data containing large amounts of privacy-sensitive information. A social network

With the rapid development of future wireless communication, the combination of NOMA technology and millimeter-wave(mmWave) technology has become a research hotspot. The application of NOMA in mmWave heterogeneous networks can meet the diverse needs of users in different applications and scenarios in future communications. In this paper, we propose a machine learning framework to deal with the user

In this paper, we analyze resource allocation in Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) from the perspective of revenue and profit management. Current coarse-grained pricing and resource plans have not made full use of the extreme heterogeneity of computing usage levels across users in the Internet of Everything (IoE), leading to wastage. Some users would have excess un-utilized resource quota while others

In this paper, we develop the notion of entropy for uniform hypergraphs via tensor theory. We employ the probability distribution of the generalized singular values, calculated from the higher-order singular value decomposition of the Laplacian tensors, to fit into the Shannon entropy formula. We show that this tensor entropy is an extension of von Neumann entropy for graphs. In addition, we establish