Duty-cycle MAC protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to reduce the energy consumed by idle listening, but they introduce significant end-to-end delivery latency. Several works have attempted to mitigate this latency, but they still have a problem on handling the packet loss. The quality of the wireless channel in WSNs is quite bad, so packets are frequently lost. In this letter, we present a novel duty-cycle MAC protocol, called REMAC (Retransmission-Enhanced duty-cycle MAC), which exploits both the network layer and the physical layer information. REMAC estimates the quality of the wireless channel and properly reserves the wireless channel to handle the packet loss. It can reduce the end-to-end packet delivery latency caused by the packet loss without sacrificing the energy efficiency. Simulation results show that REMAC outperforms RMAC in terms of the end-to-end packet delivery latency.

Collecting environmental sound by utilizing high-end mobile phones provides us opportunities to capture rich contextual information in real world. The gathered information can be used for various purposes, ranging from academic research to livelihood support. Furthermore, mobility of mobile phones opens a door for easily forming a dynamic sensing infrastructure, in order to gather fine-grained, but still large-scale data from both spatial and temporal perspectives. However, collecting, analyzing, storing, and sharing of sound data usually involve large energy consumption than scalar data, and like any battery-operated device, mobile phones also face the reality of energy constraints. Because people's first priorities are naturally to use mobile phones for their own purposes, there are occasions when people will not be inclined to allow their mobile phones to be used as sensing devices fearing that they will run out of batteries. Therefore, our research focuses on energy-efficient sensing, to reduce average energy consumption and to extend overall system lifetime. In this paper, we propose a node scheduling scheme for mobile nodes. By applying this scheme, optimized sensing schedules (ACTIVE/SLEEP duty cycles) will be periodically generated at each node. Following the provided schedule during sensing, energy-efficiency can be realized while original Quality of Service (i.e. coverage rate) is retained. Unlike most previous works which were based on ideal binary disk coverage model, our proposal is designed under a probabilistic disk coverage model which takes the characteristic of sound propagation into consideration. Furthermore, this is the first scheme that is adaptable to large-scale mobile sensor networks where topology dynamically changes. An accurate energy consumption model is adopted for evaluating the proposed scheme. Simulation results show that our scheme can reduce up to 48% energy consumption in an ideal environment and up to 31% energy consumption in a realistic environment. The robustness of our scheme is also verified against different type of sensing terrains and communication environments.

The distribution of streaming multicast and real time audio/video applications in the Internet has been quickly increased in the Internet. Commonly, these applications rarely use congestion control and do not fairly share provided network capacity with TCP-based applications such as HTTP, FTP and emails. Therefore, Internet communities will be threatened by the increase of non-TCP-based applications that likely cause a significant increase of traffics congestion and starvation. This paper proposes a set of mechanisms, such as providing various data rates, background traffics, and various scenarios, to act friendly with TCP when sending multicast traffics. By using 8 scenarios of simulations, we use 6 layered multicast transmissions with background traffic Pareto with the shape factor 1.5 to evaluate performance metrics such as throughput, delay/latency, jitter, TCP friendliness, packet loss ratio, and convergence time. Our study shows that non TCP traffics behave fairly and respectful of the co-existent TCP-based applications that run on shared link transmissions even with background traffic. Another result shows that the simulation has low values on throughput, vary in jitter (0-10 ms), and packet loss ratio > 3%. It was also difficult to reach convergence time quickly when involving only non TCP traffics.

Slow development in battery technology and rapid advances in ultra-capacitor design have motivated us to investigate the possibility of using capacitors as the sole energy storage for wireless sensor nodes to support ubiquitous computing. The starting point of this work is TwinStar, which uses ultra-capacitor as the only energy storage unit. To efficiently use the harvested energy, we design and implement feedback control techniques to match the activity of sensor nodes with the dynamic energy supply from environments. We conduct system evaluation by deploying sensor devices under three typical real-world settings -- indoor, outdoor, and mobile backpack under a wide range of system settings. Results indicate our feedback control can effectively utilize energy and ensure system sustainability. Nodes running feedback control have longer operational time than the ones running non-feedback control.

In this paper, the impact of chip duty factor (DF) on direct sequence (DS), time hopping (TH) and hybrid DS-TH ultra wideband (UWB) systems is investigated in realistic environments. Rake receivers are designed to perform energy capture (EC) on received UWB signals over multipath and multi-user environment in the presence of narrowband interference. It is found that by applying lower DF in the signal design, multipath resolvability can be increased and system performance can be improved. However, in contrary to the common belief, lower DF does not always contribute to performance improvement. On the other hand, it is observed that at extremely low DF, EC capability may be compromised, causing performance degradation. The optimum DF values for respective systems are determined and discussed in this paper. Additionally, the strength and tradeoff for DS, TH and DS-TH UWB systems employing varying DF are investigated and compared over multipath and multi-user environment. In a multipath environment, a selective Rake receiver with less than 10 fingers is found to be sufficient for energy capture. In a single user environment, DS-UWB system has the most superior performance, followed by DS-TH-UWB and TH-UWB systems. And in a multi-user environment, DS-TH-UWB is found to outperform the rest, followed by DS-UWB and TH-UWB systems.

In this letter, we discuss a forwarding method for maximizing network lifetime, which combines multi-hop forwarding and direct forwarding with a direct/multi-hop forwarding ratio of each sensor node. The direct forwarding ratio refers to the forwarding amount ratio of sensor nodes' own data directly towards a sink node in one packet/instance data generation rate. We tackle an optimization problem to determine the direct forwarding ratio of each sensor node, maximizing network lifetime, as well as nearly guaranteeing energy consumption balancing characteristics. The optimization problem is tackled through the Lagrange multiplier approach. We found that the direct forwarding ratio is overall inversely proportional to the increase of node index in h < i ≤ N case. Finally, we compare energy consumption and network lifetime of the proposed forwarding method with other existing forwarding methods. The numerical results show that the proposed forwarding method balances energy consumption in most of the sensor nodes, comparing with other existing forwarding methods, such as multi-hop forwarding and direct forwarding. The proposed forwarding method also maximizes network lifetime.

Time synchronization is an essential service for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, fixed-period time synchronization can not serve multiple users efficiently in terms of energy consumption. This paper proposes a lightweight precision-adaptive protocol for cluster-based multi-user networks. It consists of a basic average time synchronization algorithm and an adaptive control loop. The basic average time synchronization algorithm achieves 1 µs instantaneous synchronization error performance. It also prolongs re-synchronization period by taking the average of two specified nodes' local time to be cluster global time. The adaptive control loop realizes diverse levels of synchronization precision based on the proportional relationship between sync error and re-synchronization period. Experimental results show that the proposed precision-adaptive protocol can respond to the sync error bound change within 2 steps. It is faster than the exponential convergence of the adaptive protocols based on multiplicative iterations.

In this paper, a novel approach to speech reinforcement in a low-bit-rate speech coder under ambient noise environments is proposed. The excitation vector of ambient noise is efficiently obtained at the near-end and then combined with the excitation signal of the far-end for a suitable reinforcement gain within the G.729 CS-ACELP Annex. B framework. For this reason, this can be clearly different from previous approaches in that the present approach does not require an additional arithmetic step such as the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). Experimental results indicate that the proposed method shows better performance than or at least comparable to conventional approaches with a lower computational burden.

In-network data aggregation is one of the most important issues for achieving energy-efficiency in wireless sensor networks since sensor nodes in the surrounding region of an event may generate redundant sensed data. The redundant sensed data should be aggregated before being delivered to the sink to reduce energy consumption. Which node should be selected as a Data Aggregation Node (DAN) for achieving the best energy efficiency is a difficult issue. To address this issue, this letter proposes a scheme to select a DAN for achieving energy-efficiency in an event region. The proposed scheme uses an analytical model to select the sensor node that has the lowest total energy consumption for gathering data from sensor nodes and for forwarding aggregated data to a sink, as a DAN. Analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme is superior to other schemes.

In this paper, we propose an exact analytical technique to evaluate the average capacity of a dual-hop OFDM relay system with decode-and-forward protocol in an independent and identical distribution (i.i.d.) Rayleigh fading channel. Four schemes, (no) matching "and" or "or" (no) power allocation, will be considered. First, the probability density function (pdf) for the end-to-end power channel gain for each scheme is described. Then, based on these pdf functions, we will give the expressions of the average capacity. Monte Carlo simulation results will be shown to confirm the analytical results for both the pdf functions and average capacities.

Energy efficiency is one of the most important attributes in sensor network protocols. In sensor nodes, communication related activities consume the major share of battery energy. Therefore, judicious choice of transmit power and frame size are very important to maximize the energy efficiency and hence the lifetime of nodes. While there have been a few recent studies on transmit power control implementation in sensor nodes, no report has thoroughly investigated transmit power control and the effect of its interplay with frame size on nodal energy saving. In this paper, we report our implementation of automatic transmit power control in wireless sensor nodes based on open loop parameters -- namely, link layer frame size, and close loop parameters -- namely, number of consecutive positive acknowledgments and receive signal strength. Our extensive indoor and outdoor experimental results show that, for low to moderate transmission distances, transmit power control has the energy saving benefit, and the larger the frame size the more the energy saving. At a higher transmission distance or at a more error-prone communication scenario, transmit power control as well as a large frame size are detrimental to energy saving performance. The results from this study could be useful in deciding power control strategies and optimum frame length.

In this paper, we propose a novel filtering method for processing continuous skyline queries in wireless sensor network environments. The existing filtering methods on such environments use filters that are based on router paths. However, these methods do not have a major effect on reducing data for sensor nodes to transmit to the base station, because the filters are applied to not the whole area but a partial area. Therefore, we propose a novel and efficient method to dramatically reduce the data transmissions of sensors through applying an effective filter with low costs to all sensor nodes. The proposed effective filter is generated by using characteristics such as the data locality and the clustering of sensors. An extensive performance study verifies the merits of our new method.

In delay tolerant networks, energy efficient forwarding algorithms are significant to enhance the performance of message transmission probability. In this paper, we focus on the problem of optimal probabilistic epidemic forwarding with energy constraint. By introducing a continuous time model, we obtain the optimal static and dynamic policies for multi-messages forwarding. Extensive numerical results show that the optimal dynamic policy achieves higher transmission probability than the optimal static policy while the number of messages decreases the average transmission probability.

Detecting emergency situation is very important to a surveillance system for people like elderly live alone. A vision-based emergency response system with a paramedic mobile robot is presented in this paper. The proposed system is consisted of a vision-based emergency detection system and a mobile robot as a paramedic. A vision-based emergency detection system detects emergency by tracking people and detecting their actions from image sequences acquired by single surveillance camera. In order to recognize human actions, interest regions are segmented from the background using blob extraction method and tracked continuously using generic model. Then a MHI (Motion History Image) for a tracked person is constructed by silhouette information of region blobs and model actions. Emergency situation is finally detected by applying these information to neural network. When an emergency is detected, a mobile robot can help to diagnose the status of the person in the situation. To send the mobile robot to the proper position, we implement mobile robot navigation algorithm based on the distance between the person and a mobile robot. We validate our system by showing emergency detection rate and emergency response demonstration using the mobile robot.

In this letter, a derivative constraint minimum output energy (MOE) receiver is proposed the offers enhanced robustness against carrier frequency offset (CFO). A theoretical analysis of the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is presented to confirm its efficacy. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed receiver basically offers the same performance as an optimal receiver with no CFO present.

Hypergraphs drawn in the subset standard are useful to represent group relationships using topographic characteristics such as intersection, exclusion and enclosing. However, they present cluttering when dealing with a moderately high number of nodes (more than 20) and large hyperedges (connecting more than 10 nodes, with three or more overlapping nodes). At this complexity level, a study of the visual encoding of hypergraphs is required in order to reduce cluttering and increase the understanding of larger sets. Here we present a graph model and a visual design that help in the visualization of group relationships represented by hypergraphs. This is done by the use of superimposed visualization layers with different abstraction levels and the help of interaction and navigation through the display.

In this letter, a new exact expression of the ergodic channel capacity for a Rician fading channel is provided that is written in terms of exponential integral and incomplete gamma function. Also, a good approximation of the Rician fading channel capacity is derived from the exact expression and its accuracy is numerically verified.

In modern sensor networks, key management is essential to transmit data from sensors to the sink securely. That is, sensors are likely to be compromised by attackers, and a key management scheme should renew the keys for communication as frequently as possible. In clustered sensor networks, CHs (Cluster Heads) tend to become targets of compromise attack because they collect data from sensors and deliver the aggregated data to the sink. However, existing key renewal schemes do not change the CH role nodes, and thus they are vulnerable to the compromise of CHs. Our scheme is called DIRECT (DynamIc key REnewal using Cluster head elecTion) because it materializes the dynamic key renewals through secure CH elections. In the scheme, the network is divided into sectors to separate CH elections in each sector from other sectors. Then, sensors establish pairwise keys with other sensors in their sector for intra-sector communication. Every CH election round, all sensors securely elect a CH in their sector by defeating the malicious actions of attackers. Therefore, the probability that a compromised node is elected as a CH decreases significantly. The simulation results show that our approach significantly improves the integrity of data, energy efficiency, and network longevity.

In this paper, we develop asymptotic analysis and simulation models to better understand the characteristics of performance and energy consumption in a multi-core processor design in which dynamic voltage scaling is used. Our asymptotic model is derived using Amdahl's law, Rent's rule and power equations to derive the optimum number of cores and their voltage levels. Our model can predict the possible impact of different multi-core processor configurations on the performance and energy consumption for given workload characteristics (e.g. available parallelism) and process technology parameters (e.g. ratios of dynamic and static energies to total energy). Through the asymptotic analysis and optimization based on the models, we can observe an asymptotic relationship between design parameters such as "the number of cores," "core size" and "voltage scaling strategies" of a multi-core architecture with regards to performance and energy consumption at an initial phase of the design.

A multiple-input switched-capacitor DC-DC converter which can realize long battery runtime is proposed in this letter. Unlike conventional converters for a back-lighting application, the proposed converter drives some LEDs by converting energy from solar cells. Furthermore, the proposed converter can charge a lithium battery when an output load is light. The validity of circuit design is confirmed by theoretical analyses, simulations, and experiments.