Due to vehicle movement and lossy wireless channels, providing a reliable and efficient multi-hop broadcast service in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is a well-known challenging problem. In this paper, we propose BR-NB (broadcast with neighbor information), a fuzzy logic based multi-hop broadcast protocol for VANETs. BR-NB achieves a low overhead by using only a subset of neighbor nodes to relay data packets. For the relay node selection, BR-NB jointly considers multiple metrics of the inter-vehicle distance, vehicle mobility and link quality by employing fuzzy logic. Since the expected coverage and vehicle mobility are inferred from the two-hop neighbor information which can be acquired from the hello message exchange, BR-NB is independent of position information. BR-NB provides a practical and portable solution for broadcast services in VANETs. We use computer simulations and real-world experiments to evaluate the performance of BR-NB.

Variable-rate linear network codes are investigated in this paper, which are referred to as linear network codes that can support a demanded range of transmission rates on a common netowrk. A new kind of linear network code, called as strict linear broadcast, is defined. Compared with general linear broadcast, it imposes more rigid constraints on the global encoding kernels, but does not require larger finite field size for construction. Then, an efficient scheme is proposed to construct variable-rate linear broadcasts based on the strict linear broadcast. Instead of construcing a fix-rate linear broadcast for each demanded transmission rate, this scheme implements variable-rate linear broadcasts with a single-rate strict linear broadcast. Every node in the network, including the source node, needs to store only one local encoding kernel. When transmission rate varies, the coding operations performed on every network node remain unchanged. Thus, small storage space and no kernel-swithching operations are required on any network code. Furthermore, by combining the strict linear broadcast with a special source-data packetization strategy, a hierarchical broadcast scheme is proposed. With this scheme, multi-rate service can be provided by a single-rate strict linear broadcast to heterogeneous receivers, even at variable transmission rate. Thus, the variable-rate linear broadcasts constructed in this paper are also applicable to the network with heterogeneous receivers.

We propose a composite DCT basis line test signal to evaluate the video quality of a DTV encoder. The proposed composite test signal contains a frame index, a calibration square wave, and 7-field basis signals. The results show that the proposed method may be useful for an in-service video quality verifier, using an ordinary oscilloscope instead of special equipment.

In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for efficient video broadcasting over WLANs using the IEEE 802.11e HCCA MAC and H.264/SVC. We rearrange the outgoing sequence of H.264/SVC NAL units according to their dimension, temporal, and quality scalability. In addition, our proposed scheme broadcasts the NAL units at various data-rates by using the link adaptation function of IEEE 802.11 PHY. Our scheme is verified using NCTUns network simulator, and is evaluated in terms of throughput, delay, and quality of experience (QoE) using structural similarity (SSIM) rather than mean square error (MSE). We employee a real video clip to increase the reliability of the simulation in which the video clip is compressed as VBR with 24 scalable layers by JSVM reference codec of the H.264/SVC. In the simulation topology, a host broadcasts the video clip to 10 wireless stations which are within 150 meters from an AP. We present performance comparisons between our proposed scheme and the scheme provided by the IEEE 802.11e HCCA standard, which is to be referred to as the simple scheme in this paper. The proposed scheme noticeably enhances in the three performance metrics. All wireless stations by the proposed scheme receive more video data than the simple scheme around 2530% within a delay bound of 1 second. The proposed scheme controls the end-to-end delay to 510% under that of the simple scheme. As for the throughput and the delay performance, the proposed scheme enhances the video quality by up to 67% compared to the simple scheme in SSIM evaluation.

Reliable broadcasting in vehicular ad-hoc networks is challenging due to their unique characteristics including intermittent connectivity and various vehicular scenarios. Applications and services in intelligent transportation systems need an efficient, fast and reliable broadcasting protocol especially for safety and emergency applications. In our previous work, we have proposed DECA, a new reliable broadcasting protocol which suits such characteristics. To address the issue of various vehicular scenarios, our protocol performs beaconing to gather local density information of 1-hop neighbors and uses such information to adapt its broadcasting decision dynamically. Specifically, before broadcasting a message, a node selects a neighbor with the highest density and adds the selected neighbor's identifier to the message. Upon receiving of a broadcast message, each node checks whether or not it is the selected neighbor. If so, it is responsible for rebroadcasting the message immediately. This mechanism can raise the data dissemination speed of our protocol so that it is as fast as simple flooding. To address the issue of intermittent connectivity, identifiers of broadcast messages are added into beacons. This helps nodes to check if there are any broadcast messages that have not yet been received. In this paper, we propose DECA with a new beaconing algorithm and a new waiting timeout calculation, so-called DECA-bewa. Our new protocol can reduce redundant retransmissions and overall overhead in high density areas. The protocol performance is evaluated on the network simulator (NS-2). Simulation results show that DECA-bewa outperforms existing protocols in terms of reliability, overhead and speed of data dissemination.

Broadcast encryption scheme with personalized messages (BEPM) is a new primitive that allows a broadcaster to encrypt both a common message and individual messages. BEPM is necessary in applications where individual messages include information related to user's privacy. Recently, Fujii et al. suggested a BEPM that is extended from a public key broadcast encryption (PKBE) scheme by Boneh, Gentry, and Waters. In this paper, we point out that 1) Conditional Access System using Fujii et al.'s BEPM should be revised in a way that decryption algorithm takes as input public key as well, and 2) performance analysis of Fujii et al.'s BEPM should be done depending on whether the public key is transmitted along with ciphertext or stored into user's device. Finally, we propose a new BEPM that is transmission-efficient, while preserving O(1) user storage cost. Our construction is based on a PKBE scheme suggested by Park, Kim, Sung, and Lee, which is also considered as being one of the best PKBE schemes.

Many broadcast encryption schemes have been proposed for conventional networks. However, those schemes are not suitable for wireless sensor networks, which have very limited resources such as communication, computation, and storage. In this paper, we propose an efficient and practical identity-based broadcast encryption scheme for sensor networks by exploiting the characteristics of sensor networks: in the deployment stage, the set of neighboring sensor nodes are determined and most communications are conducted among the neighbors due to radio power limitations of the nodes. The proposed scheme features the following achievements: (1) all of the public keys and private keys are of constant size; (2) it satisfies all the security requirements for sensor networks. The proposed scheme is optimal in the sense that it requires no pairing operation when adopting pre-computation.

Player detection is an important part in sports video analysis. Over the past few years, several learning based detection methods using various supervised two-class techniques have been presented. Although satisfactory results can be obtained, a lot of manual labor is needed to construct the training set. To overcome this drawback, this letter proposes a player detection method based on one-class SVM (OCSVM) using automatically generated training data. The proposed method is evaluated using several video clips captured from World Cup 2010, and experimental results show that our approach achieves a high detection rate while keeping the training set construction's cost low.

Recently, network coding (NC) has been popularly applied to wireless networks in order to improve scarce wireless capacity. In wireless LANs, NC can be applied to packet retransmission in which multiple packets can be simultaneously transmitted by a single transmission trial at a base station (BS). In this paper, we assume wireless LANs with QoS functionality and propose adaptive cooperation between NC and IEEE 802.11e EDCA. In EDCA, when network load is high, QoS is significantly degraded even for high priority class. To solve this, existing methods improve backoff control, and decrease packet loss caused by collision. However, this cannot prevent packet loss caused by channel fading. In the proposed cooperation between NC and EDCA, QoS of all priority classes is improved from the aspect of efficient loss recovery. Unlike NC method with no QoS control, we encounter transmission scheduling problem among an NC packet, a single lost packet and a new packet. Moreover, in the constitution of packets encoded into NC packet, packet's intrinsic priority should be considered. Therefore, we propose how to schedule the packets to be transmitted in BS, and how to constitute NC packets to be encoded. Finally, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method by extensive computer simulations.

The broadcast scheduling problem (BSP) in wireless ad-hoc networks is a well-known NP-complete combinatorial optimization problem. The BSP aims at finding a transmission schedule whose time slots are collision free in a wireless ad-hoc network with time-division multiple access (TDMA). The transmission schedule is optimized for minimizing the frame length of the node transmissions and maximizing the utilization of the shared channel. Recently, many metaheuristics can optimally solve smaller problem instances of the BSP. However, for complex problem instances, the computation of metaheuristics can be quite time and memory consuming. In this work, we propose a greedy genetic algorithm for solving the BSP with a large number of nodes. We present three heuristic genetic operators, including a greedy crossover and two greedy mutation operators, to optimize both objectives of the BSP. These heuristic genetic operators can generate good solutions. Our experiments use both benchmark data sets and randomly generated problem instances. The experimental results show that our genetic algorithm is effective in solving the BSP problem instances of large-scale networks with 2,500 nodes.

In this letter, we propose a fast dynamic slot assignment (F-DSA) protocol to reduce timeslot access delay of a newly arrived node in ad hoc networks. As there is no central coordinator, a newly arrived node needs separate negotiation with all the neighboring nodes for assigning slots to itself. Thus, it may result in network join delay and this becomes an obstacle for nodes to dynamically join and leave networks. In order to deal with this issue better, F-DSA simplifies the slot assignment process. It provides frequent opportunities to assign slots by using mini-slots to share control packets in a short time. Numerical analysis and extensive simulation show that F-DSA can significantly reduce the timeslot access delay compared with other existing slot assignment protocols. In addition, we investigate the effect of the mini-slot overhead on the performance.

This paper proposes an efficient broadcast scheme based on traffic density measurement to mitigate broadcast storms in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). In a VANET, the number of vehicles that rebroadcasts a message is closely related with the collision ratio of the message, so a well-designed broadcast scheme should consider traffic density when rebroadcasting a message. The proposed scheme introduces a traffic density measurement scheme and broadcast scheme for VANET. It is based on the slotted p-persistence scheme, but the rebroadcast procedure is enhanced and the rebroadcast probability p is controlled dynamically according to the estimated traffic density. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms existing schemes in terms of the end-to-end delay and collision ratio.

In this letter, we present a method for improving the front-to-back ratio (FBR) of a broadcast antenna. The digitalization of terrestrial TV demands more efficient channel usage due to the reduction in TV bands after the switch-over. Thus, we designed an antenna with an FBR improved over -45 dB as compared to the -20 to -25 dB FBR range of existing antennas. We show experimentally that this antenna satisfies the required performance.

As many digital terrestrial broadcasting stations have been installed and are now broadcasting, the problem of poor reception has become serious even though the receiving powers are high. Although we had developed a interference canceller for broadcast-wave relay stations, an adaptive array is desirable to be more robust against low-D/U multipath environment as a receiver for the service area. In this paper, we propose a weighting coefficient optimization algorithm for post-FFT adaptive array using the reciprocals of weighting coefficients. Numerical examples show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this letter, we propose a new 4-dimensional constellation-rotation (CR) modulation method that achieves diversity gain of 4 in Rayleigh fading channels. The proposed scheme consists of two consecutive CR operations for QAM symbols unlike the conventional 2-dimensional CR method based on only one CR operation. Computer simulation results show that the new method exhibits much better performance than the conventional one in terms of code rate and channel erasure ratio.

This paper proposes Burst Error Resilient coding (BRC) technology in mobile broadcasting network. The proposed method utilizes Scalable Video Coding (SVC) and Forward Error Correction (FEC) to overcome service outage due to burst loss in mobile network. The performance evaluation is performed by comparing PSNR of SVC and the proposed method under MBSFN simulation channel. The simulation result shows PSNR of SVC equal error protection (EEP), unequal error protection (UEP) and proposed BRC using Raptor FEC code.

Directional antennas provide numerous benefits, such as higher gains, increased transmission range, and lower interferences. In this paper, we propose a reliable broadcast protocol for directional antenna referred to as beam table-based reliable broadcast for directional antennas (BTRB). The BTRB employs (1) ACK-based scheme to provide full reliability; (2) spatio-temporal ACK combination to resolve the problems of ACK implosion and transmission delay; and (3) beam table caching to represent spatial relationship among destination nodes in the broadcast group. Performance evaluation has shown that the proposed BTRB shows full reliability and outperforms existing reliable broadcast schemes with respect to transmission delay by about 55%.

In this letter, we propose a GRid-based Indexing scheme on Multiple channels (GRIM) for processing spatial window queries in non-flat wireless spatial data broadcasting. When the clients access both popular and regular items simultaneously, GRIM provides the clients with improved access time by broadcasting popular items separately from regular ones in units of grid cells over multiple channels. Simulations show that the proposed GRIM outperforms the existing indexing scheme in terms of the access time.

The IEEE has recently released IEEE 802.15.5 standard [3] to provide multi-hop mesh functions for low-rate wireless personal area networks (WPANs). In this paper, we extensively describe a link-layer reliable broadcast protocol referred to as timer-based reliable broadcast (TRB) [3] in the IEEE 802.15.5 standard. The TRB scheme exploits (1) bitmap based implicit ACK to effectively reduce the unnecessary error control messages and (2) randomized timer for ACK transmission to substantially reduce the possibility of contentions. Performance evaluation shows that the TRB scheme achieves 100% reliability compared with other schemes with expense of slightly increased energy consumption.

Wireless broadcasting of heterogeneous XML data has become popular in many applications, where energy-efficient processing of user queries at the mobile client is a critical issue. This paper proposes a new index structure for wireless stream of heterogeneous XML data to enhance tuning time performance in processing path queries on the stream. The index called PrefixSummary stores for each location path in the XML data the address of a bucket in the stream which contains an XML node satisfying the location path and appearing first in the stream. We present algorithms to generate broadcast stream with the proposed index and to process a path query on the stream efficiently by exploiting the index. We also suggest a replication scheme of PrefixSummary within a broadcast cycle to reduce latency in query processing. By analysis and experiment we show the proposed PrefixSummary approach can reduce tuning time for processing path queries significantly while it can also achieve reasonable access time performance by means of replication of the index over the broadcast stream.