In this paper, an extended best linear unbiased estimator (EBLUE) based on a periodic training sequence is proposed and investigated for frequency offset estimation in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The structure of EBLUE is general and flexible so it adapts to different complexity constraints, and is attractive in practical implementation. Performance analysis and design strategy of EBLUE are provided to realize the best tradeoff between performance and complexity. Moreover, closed-form results of both weight and performance make EBLUE even more attractive in practical implementation. Both the performance and complexity of EBLUE are compared with other proposals and the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) to demonstrate the merit of EBLUE.

Access control has been an important security issue in information systems. Multilevel hierarchical information access widely exists in present-day government, military, and business applications. Extending access control design to work in a hierarchical environment is natural and necessary but rarely addressed so far in the literature. In this paper, a dynamic group-oriented cryptographic scheme to access a multilevel data hierarchy is proposed. In the proposed scheme, a trusted central authority is in charge of the administrative activities among the organization hierarchy. At the beginning, each user class submits its associated information and a cryptographic key of its preference to the central authority. Next the central authority generates a public information for each class according to their location in the organization hierarchy. The cryptographic key held by each class can be used directly as an encryption key to encipher data. These keys need not be modified when adding/deleting a class to/from the system. Compare with other existing schemes, ours has the advantages of flexibility in choosing user preferred cryptographic keys, cryptographic keys not exceeding a fixed length, reduced storage space in publishing pubic information, and protection from conspiracy attack.

Although in recent years, considerable efforts have been exerted on treating the congestion control problems of ABR services in the ATM networks, the focus has been so far mostly on unicast applications. The inclusion of the emerging multicast services in the design of congestion control schemes is still at its infancy. The generic rate-based closed-loop congestion control scheme proposed by the ATM Forum for ABR services suffers from large delay-bandwidth product. VS/VD behavior is therefore proposed by the Forum as an supplement. In this paper, two VS/VD behavior congestion control schemes for multicast ABR services in the ATM networks are examined : forward explicit congestion notification (FECN) and backward explicit congestion notification (BECN). Their performances are analyzed and compared. We further observe that both VS/VD schemes alleviate the problem of consolidation noise and consolidation delay of the RM cells returning from the downstream nodes. The alleviation of consolidation noise and consolidation delay is a major concern of most present researches. Simulation results are also given to support the validity of our analysis and claims.

In this paper, we analyze the individual sojourn delay experienced by cells from each virtual channel (VC) passing through an ATM switch port. Traffic from each VC is described by a four-parameter Markov-Modulated Bernoulli process (MMBP). A switch port is assumed to receive traffic from a group of heterogeneous MMBPs and the queueing behavior is modelled by a H-MMBPs/D/1/ queue. Two service disciplines are considered: FIFO and priority. Closed-form formulas of overall as well as individual sojourn delays for both service disciplines are obtained. Although approximation is inevitable in our analysis, the accuracy is good when compare with computer simulations. As a result we provide an efficient tool to estimate cell delay for each individual VC before it is established. Our result can be applied to network resource decision or control problems such as call admission control and routing.

In this paper, a new traffic shaping mechanism for ATM networks, the RC Shaper, is proposed and studied. The objective of a shaping mechanism is, to smoothen the traffic by reducing the burstiness. Using the analogies between the RC low pass filter and the proposed shaper, performance measures such as burstiness reduction factor and cell mean waiting time of the shaper can be obtained. In this current exploratory stage of study, the shaper is used to shape the well-known Markov Modulated Poisson Process. Behaviour of the shaper is established through examining the burstiness reduction achieved by the device. Another performance measure obtained for the shaper is the cell mean waiting time. Difference in shaping each connection individually and a group of connections collectively is also observed. From our results, it seems better to shape VCs within a virtual path `aggregately' instead of shaping each of these VCs individually. Comparison with fixed-rate shaper is reported and difference in multiplexing shaped and unshaped cell streams is also observed.

A quality-of-service based link control scheme to counteract correlated channel errors for wireless multimedia communications is proposed in this paper. Both the medium access (MAC) and data link control (DLC) layers are treated. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using both analysis and simulation. The delay and jitter behaviors are examined for both the constant bit rate (CBR) traffic and variable bit rate (VBR) traffic. The throughput performance is also obtained for the available bit rate (ABR) traffic. Through numerical experiments, the proposed scheme is demonstrated to be not only robust against channel impairments but also capable of providing the desired QoS for wireless multimedia communications.

This article proposes a channel estimation method for the downlink channels of a WCDMA system in a high-speed railroad setting. High mobility may cause conventional symbol-level channel estimation to yield severe errors because in conventional methods channel state has to maintain constant within one to several symbol durations. However, in high mobility environment, this assumption may not hold. Errors are particularly more dangerous when using very high spreading factors. In order to counteract the adverse effect of high mobility on channel estimation, we shorten the observation window to that of an N-chip block so that channel conditions or characteristics remain approximately unchanged. We consider channel estimation prior to dispreading the received signal. In other words, channel estimation is done at the chip level rather than the conventional symbol level. The least squares (LS) criterion is employed to acquire channel characteristics for each block of N pilot chips, and the linear interpolation method is used to determine the channel characteristics for each data chip. The LS-based estimator is selected due to its simplicity since it does not need to know channel or noise statistics. An LS-based estimator at the chip level has the further advantage that it is robust against interpath interference (IPI). The uncoded bit error rate (BER) performance of a RAKE receiver using different channel estimation schemes is evaluated and compared through simulations. The proposed scheme is found to be suitable for a high-speed railroad setting.

In mobile computing environments, a problem may exist between loss recovery mechanisms employed by the TCP (transmission control protocol) and RLP (radio link protocol). It is because that local retransmissions performed by the RLP could interfere with the TCP end-to-end error recovery when there are long and correlated packet losses due to bursty channel errors. That is, a spurious timeout would occur at the transport layer. In this paper, a new method is proposed to effectively suppress the occurrence of TCP spurious timeouts. In this new method a small number of ACKs (acknowledgements) is buffered at the base station prior to the emergence of every bad state period in the wireless channel, and these ACKs are henceforth released by the base station one at a time to reset the TCP sender's retransmission timer. Comprehensive comparisons between the proposed method and a baseline method are conducted through simulations to show that the improvement in throughput performance can be as large as 22%.

In this paper, algorithms for resource allocation in an ATM node that serves heterogeneous traffic sources subject to varying Quality of Service (QoS) requirements are proposed. The node can be either a switch port or a multiplexer. Each connection is first individually treated as logical queue. Quick and efficient algorithms allocating service rate and buffer space to each connection based on traffic characteristics and QoS requirement are developed. In order to improve link and buffer utilization, the aggregate traffic is next replaced by an appropriately parameterized new traffic source that still preserves the key characteristics of the aggregate traffic. The most stringest QoS requirement among all connections is selected to be the QoS target of the new traffic source to assure that QoS of each individual connection is satisfied. Resource allocation for the aggregate traffic is determined based on the traffic parameters and QoS target of the new source. Each individually determined service rate and buffer space can be used in cell transmission scheduling and selective cell discarding. In other words, resource allocation together with two related side problems: cell transmission and cell discarding, are treated in this paper in an integrated and efficient manner. The resource allocation algorithms proposed in this paper can also be used to support Call Admission Control (CAC) in ATM networks.

The effect of transceiver impairments (consisting of frequency offset, phase noise and doubly-selective channel) is a key factor for determining performance of an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system since the transceiver impairments trigger intercarrier interference (ICI). These impairments are well known and have been investigated separately in the past. However, these impairments usually arise concurrently and should be jointly considered from the perspectives of both receiver design and system evaluation. In this research, impact of these impairments on an OFDM system is jointly analyzed and the result degenerates to the special case where only a specific impairment is present. A mitigation method aided by segment-by-segment time-domain interpolation (STI) is then proposed following the analysis. STI is general, and its weights can be specified according to the interpolation method and system requirements. Computer simulation is used to validate the analysis and to compare the performance of the proposed method with those of other proposals.

Recently we have studied the performance of the VS/VD behavior for two binary feedback congestion control schemes, FECN and BECN, when they are applied to multicast ABR services. It is shown that the VS/VD schemes alleviate the problems of consolidation noise and consolidation delay, which are two major design issues in multicast congestion control. To complement, we further explore the VS/VD behavior for the explicit rate feedback control scheme in this letter. Through an efficient rate estimation method, it is again observed that VS/VD behavior performs better than the traditional end-to-end schemes.

This paper investigates the performance of an integrated voice and data transmission protocol that can be used in mobile communication networks, e.g. mobile cellular and LEOGEO satellite networks. Voice and data are concentrated at place such as base station in a cellular network. Time sensitive voices are supported by the concentrator in the manner of TDMA. Loss sensitive data are collected, stored, and transmitted using idle TDMA slots. Data users transmit data to the concentration point using ALOHA protocol. Characterization of data arrivals to the concentrator is done by the method of moment matching. The emphasis of this study is on the data performance in terms of packet loss rate, average buffer occupancy, and mean packet waiting time. It is demonstrated through numerical examples that a buffer of reasonable size is good enough to offer satisfactory performance. The analysis is also validated by computer simulations.

A systematic method for connection-wise end-to-end delay analysis in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks is proposed. This method consists of the followings: (i) per-stream nodal analysis; (ii) output processes characterization; and (iii) moment matching scheme. Following our previous work, we employ H-MMPPs/Slotted D/1 to model ATM queues. Each virtual connection (VC) in ATM networks can be regarded as a tandem configuration of such queues. In [1], the per-stream analytical results for such an H-MMPPs/Slotted D/1 queue have been provided. In this paper, not only the composite output process is exactly characterized, but also the component in an output process that corresponds to a specific traffic stream is approximated via a decomposition scheme. A moment matching scheme to emulate the per-stream output process as a two-state MMPP is further proposed. Through moment matching, we can then approximate the connection-wise end-to-end delay by recursively performing the nodal performance analysis. The connection-wise end-to-end delay is crucial to network resource decision or control problems such as call admission control (CAC) and routing.