Distributed parallelization of greedy Mobile Network Optimization algorithms

The Mobile Network Optimization (MNO) technologies have advanced at a tremendous pace in recent years. And the Dynamic Network Optimization (DNO) concept emerged years ago, aimed to continuously optimize the network in response to variations in network traffic and conditions. Yet, DNO development is still at its infancy, mainly hindered by a significant bottleneck of the lengthy optimization runtime. This paper identifies parallelism in greedy MNO algorithms and presents an advanced distributed parallel solution. The solution is designed, implemented and applied to real-life projects whose results yield a significant, highly scalable and nearly linear speedup up to 6.9 and 14.5 on distributed 8-core and 16-core systems respectively. Meanwhile, optimization outputs exhibit self-consistency and high precision compared to their sequential counterpart. This is a milestone in realizing the DNO. Further, the techniques may be applied to similar greedy optimization algorithm based applications.

LocLess: Do You Really Care Where Your Cloud Files Are?

Physical location of data in cloud storage is a problem that gains a lot of attention not only from the actual cloud providers but also from the end users' who lately raise many concerns regarding the privacy of their data. It is a common practice that cloud service providers create replicate users' data across multiple physical locations. However, moving data in different countries means that basically the access rights are transferred based on the local laws of the corresponding country. In other words, when a cloud service provider stores users' data in a different country then the transferred data is subject to the data protection laws of the country where the servers are located. In this paper, we propose LocLess, a protocol which is based on a symmetric searchable encryption scheme for protecting users' data from unauthorized access even if the data is transferred to different locations. The idea behind LocLess is that "Once data is placed on the cloud in an unencrypted form or encrypted with a key that is known to the cloud service provider, data privacy becomes an illusion". Hence, the proposed solution is solely based on encrypting data with a key that is only known to the data owner.