This paper proposes a protocol verification tool where protocols are described in an extended Petri net and Horn clauses. The extended net model contributes to reduce state space in verification with hierarchical description. The model also includes timed and colored net. Horn clause enables protocol designers to grasp a protocol by the declarative semantics. They can describe non critical but mandatory portion of a protocol like error processing or abortion with Horn clauses. Protocols are verified through simulation. Protocol verification includes two methods, all-in-one and hierarchical methods. By the all-in-one method all description is translated into Prolong clause and simulated exhaustively, whereas by the hierarchical verification, simulation begins with the lowest layer and deduces sufficient conditions that give liveness and safeness of the net model. Then the layer is replaced by a simpler net model that is incorporated into the higher layer. The scheme is applied to an illustrative example of the Alternating Bit protocol to discuss its effectiveness.

A number of mobile hosts might be densely staying in an area caused by traffic congestions. The greater part of the mobile hosts will require commonly useful data, such as traffic information, parking information and other driving related information in such environment. Simultaneous data transmission broadcasts using a common link are regarded as a suitable means to distribute this location-dependent information. However, there is no guarantee that mobile hosts can finish receiving the information completely within a limited time. In this paper, we propose a data retransmission method for communications between a base station and mobile hosts and a data recovery processing method for use between base stations. The data retransmission method called "TOA" (The Order of Arrival) schedules retransmission data specified in the first NACK request received after retransmission processing. We have proposed "Advanced" Join system in which a base station makes consolidated join requests to a multicast group on behalf of mobile hosts. Applying the TOA method to resending in the Advanced Join system, data-receiving efficiency is higher than with the simple Advanced Join system and the absolute number of completed mobile host data reception is higher. Using the TOA method, even with the base station disposition rate of 50% the number of completed reception is higher than with the Advanced Join system at 80%. The proposed reliable multicasting system to the DSRC-based ITS network can realize an efficient base station arrangement in the ITS network infrastructure and contribute to the deployment of a superior ITS.

Today, pedestrian navigation systems for mobile phones use 2-dimensional maps as a navigation media in general. But 3-dimensional maps or scenery images are easier to understand for users than 2-dimensional maps. To use 3-dimensional maps or scenery guidance, the measuring accuracy of user position is essential to understand guidance images. In this paper, we will present a pedestrian navigation system using real scenery photographs as a navigation media, and based on experiments we will report the evaluation result of influence of positioning accuracy on the understandability of navigation. It is shown that 3 meters or less error of positioning is tolerable for pedestrian navigation systems using scenery images.

It has been proposed that the collaborative working environments have been created by the computing assistance for human behaviors with the instructions of related information and items. The purpose of this study is to propose the collaboration mechanism and the environments constrained by the roles. The basic principle at issue in this studies is that all members should behave autonomously, and behave collaboratively with understanding the surrounding environments. We have already presented the Distributed Collaborative Computing architecture called Noah that has the concept of field with tupple space. On this mechanism, we designed the role-based cooperative work environments on the collaboration and coordination mechanism. We applied this mechanism to the typical models in the industrial system's domain.

In this paper, we propose the architecture of BALANCE (Better Adaptive Load-balancing through Acquiring kNowledge of Characteristic of an Environment) in which users can submit their jobs without acquiring either a status of an environment or characteristics of jobs and servers even in a widely connected heterogeneous network. The architecture of BALANCE includes three types of information bases and two types of daemons. Information bases, namely job, resource, and environment information base, manage the knowledge of job characteristics, available resources for CPUs, and status of the environment, respectively, as a proxy for users. The dispatching daemon selects an adequate server for each job using knowledge stored in the information bases. A service daemon executes each job. On completing each job, a service daemon gets a statistic of the job and returns it to the dispatching daemon where the job came from so that the statistic will be available at the next dispatching time. BALANCE enables an environment (1) to balance the load, (2) to share software functions as well as hardware facilities, and (3) to learn a user's job characteristics. We have implemented a prototype with more than 50 heterogeneous UNIX workstations connected by different networks. Two simple experiments on this prototype are presented. These experiments show a load balancing scheme that takes the characteristics of each job into account.

This paper presents the application of the object-oriented concept in the development of the software for OSI Application layer protocols. In the development of communication system, it is important to implement those protocols with high maintainability and high extensibility to correspond various requirements from user applications. Therefore, high modularity is required in the software for them. We interpret the modularity as three independencies-independency between protocols, independency between protocol procedure and protocol data, and independency between activated invocations. To this end, we designed a software structure model for OSI Application layer protocols using the object-oriented concept. According to this model, we developed software for several OSI Application layer protocols such as FTAM (File Transfer Access and Management) , TP (Transaction Processing) etc. using our own original object-oriented language. We confirmed that this model engaged high maintainability and high extensibility to accommodate those protocols and improved the modularity of the software.

During TCP/IP communications, MobileIP routing optimization functions causes out-of-order TCP packet sequences. To solve this problem, we propose a dynamic delayed ACK control scheme in which the wireless link-state management part notifies the upper TCP/IP layer of base-station hand-over, and at this time the TCP/IP layer sends dynamic delayed ACKs in response by using two-level-timer (i.e., hard-timer and soft-timer) processing. Simulation results confirm that applying dynamic delayed ACK control to MobileIP networks improves average throughput.

This paper describes a reduction algorithm for SW method which generates test sequences for communication systems. SW method is based upon the Finite State Machine (FSM). SW method uses a set of characterizing sequences and a state transition checking approach. This paper concentrates the characteristics of the SW sequences, and proposes the new derivation algorithm of characterizing sequences. Furthermore, Chinese Postman Tour and Extended Chinese Postman Tour is proposed to reduce redundancy of the SW sequences. This paper also presents an evaluation of this method in terms of an upper bound of the sequence length and generated test sequence length. The evaluation shows that the algorithm dramatically reduces the sequence length of the original method.

The rapid growth of mobile systems and the exponential spread of the Internet have requested technologies for efficient and seamless delivery of IP data to mobile users. However, the Mobile Internet Protocol and the IETF Mobile IPv6 proposal are not scalable and capable of handling real time applications. The Mobile Internet Protocol employs mobility agents to support Internet-wide mobility, and mobile node employs the concept of care-of address to communicate with its correspondent node when it changes its point of attachment to the Internet. This paper proposes a new addressing scheme for mobile node based on IPv6. The concept of Mobile Internet is introduced, which is a logical subnet of IPv6 Internet and supports IP layer mobility. Mobile Internet is geographically overlaid on the Internet. It has a fixed subnet prefix, and each mobile node in it is only identified by its home IP address, regardless of its current location. Some new kinds of mobility agents (LRPC, LRPS/FLR) are defined. The proposed scheme is considered as a long-term solution for the Internet with mobile computers, several defects in the current Mobile IP protocol are solved.

We describe a control scheme for wireless-link layers and the TCP/IP layers in which wireless link states, such as signal strength and transmission rate, are transparent to the upper network layers and govern the behavior of the upper layers. Monitoring and notifying functions for wireless link states are incorporated into mobile hosts, and prefetching functions for the mobility agent lists are added to the present MobileIP functionalities of the network layers. In addition, we give the mobile hosts functions for controlling the TCP advertised windows in the transport layers and give the base-stations buffering functions to deal with the variable signal strength of the wireless links. A simulation (using ns-2) of this control scheme shows that mobile agent can be switched at the network layers soon after base-station hand-over and that errors in packet routing, packet loss and communication throughput reduction can be avoided. Moreover, communications can be interrupted without having to shrink the size of the congestion windows of the TCP senders, which improves overall throughput.

A multicast (point-to-multipoint) protocol of a satellite broadcast channel by a source and many destinations is presented and its performance characteristics are analyzed. We propose a new time-domain multicast scheme for packet satellite channels, retransmission via collisions protocol (called RVCP). RVCP is classified to the automatic repeat request (ARQ) of the multi-selective-repeat scheme and does not require individual channels for each receiving station to request for broadcast packets that have been received incorrectly. Our analytical models show that RVCP performs considerably better than the other protocols, particularly in the situation that packet error rate is less than 10-4 or there are a large number of destinations. It is an excellent characteristic of RVCP that the equipment of the source station need not increase in proportion to the number of destinations, too. And since RVCP is a relatively simple protocol, it is easy to be implemented.

In this paper we describe a multicast routing algorithm, which builds upon mobile multicast agents of an ad-hoc network. Mobile multicast agents (MMAs) form a virtual backbone of an ad-hoc network and they provide multicast tree discovery, multicast tree maintenance and datagram delivery. First, we construct a cluster-spine hierarchy structure for an ad-hoc network. Second, we propose a multicast routing algorithm, which is inspired by Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol. The results show that the MMA multicast algorithm can simplify the multicast tree discovery, reduce control overhead of the network, and increase the total network throughput, in comparison with general AODV multicast operation. We also overcome the deficiency of CBRP multicast routing, which places much burden on cluster heads.

A program slice is a set of program statements that directly or indirectly contribute to the values assumed by a set of variables at some program execution point. A few slicing algorithms have proposed to far but none of them are considered from the viewpoint of program modification. In this paper, we define a variable dependence graph (VDG) and show a new slicing algorithm on VDG. We also compare the time complexity of the algorithm with that of other existing algorithms and discuss the suitableness of our algorithm for program modification. As the result of this, we argue our algorithm is suitable for embedding debugging systems.

In this paper, we present a distributed RAID style video server that addresses the problem of increasing video stream supplying capability in VOD systems. Distibuted RAID Stylemeans extending the RAID method usually applied to disks to the servers, so as to achieve improvements in performance and reliability. The great advantage of this architecture is that the linear performance improvement can be achieved by adding inexpensive servers of a diffusion model. We have implemented the RAID0 style and RAID4 style systems. A number of new features such as the array configuration method or the striping buffer are applied to them. A precise performance evaluation was made in a near practical environment, with more than 40 video streams. We tested the system, in both normal and degraded mode (server failure) and by checking frame drop rates as well as observing picture quality. An evaluation by simulation was also conducted. The results of the above evaluations agreed well with the calculation value, to confirm the feasibility of this architecture.

Time-critical-communication, which should guarantee a time limit of a communication service is getting important in multimedia and factory automation fields. This paper proposes an IP-based protocol, Network Protocol with Performance (NPP) to provide the advanced best-effort service which takes a time constraint into account for real-time applications on the Internet. NPP uses the packet-scheduling function to make an effort to guarantee time constraints. Packet-scheduling algorithm chooses a packet in a NPP queue by a precedent level and a time constraint of each packet. We also discuss an application of NPP to multimedia communication system, and investigate performance of NPP by simulation.

The computers are connected with each other by the network as a result of the progress of technology in the field of the computer and network, and then all of the data to be processed are transferred quickly and at the real-time through the computer network. However the user can use the computer system at any time, the user must go to the location of the computer system to use the computer resources. The necessities for using the computer system occur anywhere and anytime in spite of the location of the computer system. For this requirement the mobile computing environment (MCE) is expected strongly. In this paper we introduce the model of MCE and discuss the need of the user authentication at entering and logging-in the network in MCE only with a user ID. We propose the method of a user ID assignment from which a server ID can be decided by a simple logical operation. Also, we propose a protocol for a user authentication in MCE and discuss the robustness of security against the various attacking on the route.

The optimistic consistency scheme has been established with respect to data consistency and availability in distributed systems. The nomadic data consistency model using version vectors to support data versioning for data synchronization and concurrent conflict detection is suitable for an optimistic replication system that supports large-scale wireless networks. This paper describes the architecture and its data consistency model using data versioning and its access domain control targeted for nomadic data sharing systems, such as collaborative works using database and messaging, and the data transfer optimizations of the model. We evaluate our data versioning scheme comparing with a traditional data versioning and the data transfer optimization by estimation and measurement assuming a mobile worker's job. We generate arithmetic formulas for data transfer estimation using the optimizing techniques and apply them to large-scale data sharing configurations in which collaboration groups are dynamically formed and data is exchanged in each group. The data versioning with an access domain increases flexibility in data sharing configurations, such as mobile collaboration systems and client/server type mobile systems. We confirmed that the combination of the general optimizations and the access domain configurations based on our data consistency model is applicable for large-scale mobile data sharing systems.

In this paper, we propose a timing constrained database system which accesses a database at a host computer via a mobile support server with a wireless portable computer running in mobile computing environments, so that we can provide seamless database access between a communication cell and the host computer even if the user of the portable computer moves from one communication cell to another. Then, we also provide some new kind of database cache algorihm, such as all-cell-cache, neighbour-cell-cache, 1-cell-skip-cache, 2-cell-skip-cache and 3-cell-skip-cache methods, each of which manages the data downloading and uploading among the host database and some cell databases at the mobile support servers so as to minimize the database access fault probability when the user moves from one communication cell to another. And, we show the averaged database access time and the averaged database cache hit ratio which are computed by simulating each of the above database cache algorithms with random variables generation method. Finally, we conclude that each above cache alogorithm is advantageous to the database in mobile computineg einvironments.

The third generation cellular system will provide high bandwidth data service and multimedia applications are proposed on the high-speed data link. On the other hand, cellular handsets are getting equipped with a short-range radio communication device that is mainly targeted to connect cellular handsets to computers. In this paper, we propose a percolating data delivery mechanism for a cellular-ad hoc integrated network utilizing multicast/broadcast communication, which is endorsed by data synchronization, and single-hop ad hoc networks for information shower/exchange services. The mechanism lessens data traffic in both the cellular and the ad hoc network for data delivery and tolerates unexpected disconnection in the ad hoc network. The mechanism also compensates data delivery in areas out of the cellular service. Our implementation of the data delivery mechanism utilizes Bluetooth for an ad hoc network configuration, and delivers data in the cellular network to the Bluetooth ad hoc network via the data synchronization mechanism. We evaluate communication traffic and delivery time on the prototype system and discuss about the efficiency of the mechanism.