Effects of exposure to traffic noise on health

Traffic noise causes adverse effects on the health and quality of life of individuals and communities exposed to it, including annoyance, sleep disturbance, decreased performance at school/work, stress, hypertension, and ischemic heart disease. In Australia there are few standards or policies addressing noise in urban environments, with many discrepancies in noise level thresholds when comparing states and regions. Currently Victoria has a day-to-night threshold for noise levels well above accepted levels in Europe, and there is no standard for the late night period. A better understanding of the health impacts of noise in the Australian context is vital for informing development and implementation of policy and legislation for road traffic noise management. This paper reviews the evidence base and policies related to traffic noise in urban areas, and presents a case study of noise mapping and assessing population health impacts (eg. sleep disturbance), in Geelong,Vcitoria,Australia.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) detection by traffic pattern analysis

In this paper, we propose a behavior-based detection that can discriminate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack traffic from legitimated traffic regardless to various types of the attack packets and methods. Current DDoS attacks are carried out by attack tools, worms and botnets using different packet-transmission rates and packet forms to beat defense systems. These various attack strategies lead to defense systems requiring various detection methods in order to identify the attacks. Moreover, DDoS attacks can craft the traffics like flash crowd events and fly under the radar through the victim. We notice that DDoS attacks have features of repeatable patterns which are different from legitimate flash crowd traffics. In this paper, we propose a comparable detection methods based on the Pearson’s correlation coefficient. Our methods can extract the repeatable features from the packet arrivals in the DDoS traffics but not in flash crowd traffics. The extensive simulations were tested for the optimization of the detection methods. We then performed experiments with several datasets and our results affirm that the proposed methods can differentiate DDoS attacks from legitimate traffics.

Internet traffic classification by aggregating correlated naive bayes predictions

This paper presents a novel traffic classification scheme to improve classification performance when few training data arc available. In the proposed scheme, traffic flows are described using the discretized statistical features and flow correlation information is modeled by bag-of-flow (BoF). We solve the BoF-based traffic classification in a classifier combination framework and theoretically analyze the performance benefit. Furthermore, a new BoF-based traffic classification method is proposed to aggregate the naive Bayes (NB) predictions of the correlated flows. We also present an analysis on prediction error sensitivity of the aggregation strategies. Finally, a large number of experiments are carried out on two large-scale real-world traffic datasets to evaluate the proposed scheme. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve much better classification performance than existing state-of-the-art traffic classification methods.

Network traffic classification using correlation information

Traffic classification has wide applications in network management, from security monitoring to quality of service measurements. Recent research tends to apply machine learning techniques to flow statistical feature based classification methods. The nearest neighbor (NN)-based method has exhibited superior classification performance. It also has several important advantages, such as no requirements of training procedure, no risk of overfitting of parameters, and naturally being able to handle a huge number of classes. However, the performance of NN classifier can be severely affected if the size of training data is small. In this paper, we propose a novel nonparametric approach for traffic classification, which can improve the classification performance effectively by incorporating correlated information into the classification process. We analyze the new classification approach and its performance benefit from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. A large number of experiments are carried out on two real-world traffic data sets to validate the proposed approach. The results show the traffic classification performance can be improved significantly even under the extreme difficult circumstance of very few training samples.

Video driven traffic modelling in ParamicsTM

With urbanization and vehicle availability, there exist many traffic problems including congestion, environmental impact and safety. In order to address these problems, we propose a video driven traffic modelling system in this paper. The system can simulate real-world traffic activities in a computer, based on traffic data recorded in videos. Video processing is employed to estimate metrics such as traffic volumes. These metrics are used to update the traffic system model, which is then simulated using the Paramics™ traffic simulation platform. Video driven traffic modelling has widespread potential application in traffic systems, due to the convenience and reduced costs of model development and maintenance. Experiments are conducted in this paper to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.

An effective network traffic classification method with unknown flow detection

Traffic classification technique is an essential tool for network and system security in the complex environments such as cloud computing based environment. The state-of-the-art traffic classification methods aim to take the advantages of flow statistical features and machine learning techniques, however the classification performance is severely affected by limited supervised information and unknown applications. To achieve effective network traffic classification, we propose a new method to tackle the problem of unknown applications in the crucial situation of a small supervised training set. The proposed method possesses the superior capability of detecting unknown flows generated by unknown applications and utilizing the correlation information among real-world network traffic to boost the classification performance. A theoretical analysis is provided to confirm performance benefit of the proposed method. Moreover, the comprehensive performance evaluation conducted on two real-world network traffic datasets shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing methods in the critical network environment.

Video driven traffic modelling

We propose Video Driven Traffic Modelling (VDTM) for accurate simulation of real-world traffic behaviours with detailed information and low-cost model development and maintenance. Computer vision techniques are employed to estimate traffic parameters. These parameters are used to build and update a traffic system model. The model is simulated using the Paramics traffic simulation platform. Based on the simulation techniques, effects of traffic interventions can be evaluated in order to achieve better decision makings for traffic management authorities. In this paper, traffic parameters such as vehicle types, times of starting trips and corresponding origin-destinations are extracted from a video. A road network is manually defined according to the traffic composition in the video, and individual vehicles associated with extracted properties are modelled and simulated within the defined road network using Paramics. VDTM has widespread potential applications in supporting traffic decision-makings. To demonstrate the effectiveness, we apply it in optimizing a traffic signal control system, which adaptively adjusts green times of signals at an intersection to reduce traffic congestion.