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.

The success of peer-to-peer overlay networks depends on cooperation among participating peers. In this paper, we investigate the degree of cooperation among individual peers required to induce globally favorable properties in an overlay network. Specifically, we consider a resource pricing problem in a market-oriented overlay network where participating peers sell own resources (e.g., CPU cycles) to earn energy which represents some money or rewards in the network. In the resource pricing model presented in this paper, each peer sets the price for own resource based on the degree of cooperation; non-cooperative peers attempt to maximize their own energy gains, while cooperative peers maximize the sum of own and neighbors' energy gains. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate that the network topology is an important factor influencing the minimum degree of cooperation required to increase the network-wide global energy gain.

The aim of this study is to develop a new whole-body averaged specific absorption rate (SAR) estimation method based on the external-cylindrical field scanning technique. This technique is adopted with the goal of simplifying the dosimetry estimation of human phantoms that have different postures or sizes. An experimental scaled model system is constructed. In order to examine the validity of the proposed method for realistic human models, we discuss the pros and cons of measurements and numerical analyses based on the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. We consider the anatomical European human phantoms and plane-wave in the 2 GHz mobile phone frequency band. The measured whole-body averaged SAR results obtained by the proposed method are compared with the results of the FDTD analyses.

In Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), when a Mobile Node (MN) enters a PMIPv6 domain and attaches to an access link, the router on the access link detects attachment of the MN by the link-layer access. All elements of PMIPv6 including the router then provide network-based mobility management service for the MN. If the MN moves to another router in this PMIPv6 domain, the new router emulates attachment to the previous router by providing same network prefix to the MN. In other words, PMIPv6 provides rapid mobility management based on layer-2 attachment and transparent mobility support to the MN by emulating layer-3 attachment with respect to intra-domain roaming. However, when the MN moves to other PMIPv6 domains, although the domains also provide the network-based mobility management service, the MN should exploit the host-based mobility management protocol, i.e. Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), for the inter-domain roaming. Hence, this letter proposes the rapid and transparent inter-domain roaming mechanism controlled by the networks adopting PMIPv6.

To deal with the increasing number of mobile devices accessing the Internet and the increasing demands of mobility management, IETF has proposed Mobile IPv6 and its fast handover protocol FMIPv6. In FMIPv6, the possibility of Care-of Address (CoA) collision and the time for Return Routability (RR) procedure result in long handover delay, which makes it unsuitable for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose an improved handover scheme for FMIPv6, which reduces the handover delay by using proactive CoA acquisition, configuration and test method. In our proposal, collision-free CoA is proactively prepared, and the time for RR procedure does not contribute to the handover delay. Furthermore, we analyze our proposal's benefits and overhead tradeoff. The numerical results demonstrate that it outperforms the current schemes, such as FMIPv6 and enhanced FMIPv6, on the aspect of handover delay and packet transmission delay.

A network of sensors can be used to obtain state based data from the area in which they are deployed. To reduce costs, the data sent via intermediate sensors to a sink are often aggregated. In this letter, we introduce Self-Construction of Aggregation Tree (SCAT) scheme which uses a novel data aggregation scheme utilizing the knowledge of the mobile node and the infrastructure (static node tree) in gathering the data from the mobile node. The static nodes can construct a near- optimal aggregation tree by themselves, using the knowledge of the mobile node, which is a process similar to forming the centralized aggregation tree.

We propose a new speech enhancement method suitable for mobile devices used in the presence of various types of noise. In order to achieve high-performance speech recognition and auditory perception in mobile devices, various types of noise have to be removed under the constraints of a space-saving microphone arrangement and few computational resources. The proposed method can reduce both the directional noise and the diffuse noise under the abovementioned constraints for mobile devices by employing a square microphone array and conducting low-computational-cost processing that consists of multiple null beamforming, minimum power channel selection, and Wiener filtering. The effectiveness of the proposed method is experimentally verified in terms of speech recognition accuracy and speech quality when both the directional noise and the diffuse noise are observed simultaneously; this method reduces the number of word errors and improves the log-spectral distances as compared to conventional methods.

Mobile devices, such as cellular phones and car navigation systems, are essential to daily life. People acquire necessary information and preferred content over communication networks anywhere, anytime. However, usability issues arise from the simplicity of user interfaces themselves. Thus, a recommendation of content that is adapted to a user's preference and situation will help the user select content. In this paper, we describe a method to realize such a system using Bayesian networks. This user-adapted mobile system is based on a user model that provides recommendation of content (i.e., restaurants, shops, and music that are suitable to the user and situation) and that learns incrementally based on accumulated usage history data. However, sufficient samples are not always guaranteed, since a user model would require combined dependency among users, situations, and contents. Therefore, we propose the LK method for modeling, which complements incomplete and insufficient samples using knowledge data, and CPT incremental learning for adaptation based on a small number of samples. In order to evaluate the methods proposed, we applied them to restaurant recommendations made on car navigation systems. The evaluation results confirmed that our model based on the LK method can be expected to provide better generalization performance than that of the conventional method. Furthermore, our system would require much less operation than current car navigation systems from the beginning of use. Our evaluation results also indicate that learning a user's individual preference through CPT incremental learning would be beneficial to many users, even with only a few samples. As a result, we have developed the technology of a system that becomes more adapted to a user the more it is used.

This paper presents an agent-based system for building and operating context-aware services in public spaces, including museums. The system provides users with agents and detects the locations of users and deploys location-aware user-assistant agents at computers near the their current locations by using active RFID-tags. When a visitor moves between exhibits in a museum, this dynamically deploys his/her agent at the computers close to the exhibits by using mobile agent technology. It annotates the exhibits in his/her personalized form and navigate him/her user to the next exhibits along his/her routes. It also introduces user movement as a natural approach to interacting between users and agents. To demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of the system, we constructed location/user-aware visitor-guide services and experimented them for two weeks in a public museum.

We have developed an odor-emitting apparatus for application of odor to information technology. This apparatus consists of a chemical capsule cartridge including chemical capsules of odor ingredients and valves to control odor emission using an artificial metal muscle. In this method, multiple valves can be opened using the current for a single artificial muscle because the expansion and contraction time constant for the artificial muscles is large. We have developed a new multi-valve sequence mode that uses multiple odor capsules to increase odor strength, and we have been able to increase the strength produced by a factor of two. In addition, we evaluated the change in odor strength using a mock-up of the back seat of an automobile, and all of the ten test subjects reported sensing a stronger odor.

Lee-Lee-Kim-Jeong proposed a hybrid authentication scheme to alleviate the latent security problems of mobile multi-hop networks. In this letter, we show that the Lee-Lee-Kim-Jeong scheme is insecure against the intercept attack.

A novel routing protocol, named candidate-based routing, for mobile ad hoc networks is presented. Instead of flooding over the whole network, it improves and rebuilds routing paths among a limited number of candidate nodes, which are dynamically elected without incurring or exchanging any additional information. Experimental results show that the proposed protocol performs well in terms of overhead and improvement in route efficiency, especially in the high mobility speed environments.

This paper presents a fault-tolerance scheme based on mobile agents for the reliable mobile computing systems. Mobility of the agent is suitable to trace the mobile hosts and the intelligence of the agent makes it efficient to support the fault tolerance services. This paper presents two approaches to implement the mobile agent based fault tolerant service and their performances are evaluated and compared with other fault-tolerant schemes.

This paper presents an autonomous navigation system for a mobile robot using randomly distributed passive RFID tags. In the case of randomly distributed RFID tags, it is difficult to provide the precise location of the robot especially in the area of sparse RFID tag distribution. This, combined with the wide turning radius of the robot, can cause the robot to enter a zigzag exploration path and miss the goal. In RFID-based navigation, the key is to reduce both the number of RFID tags and the localization error for practical use in a large space. To cope with these, we utilized the Read time, which measures the reading time of each RFID tag. With this, we could estimate accurately the localization and orientation without using any external sensors or increasing the RFID tags. The average estimation errors of 7.8 cm in localization and 11 degrees in orientation were achieved with 102 RFID tags in the area of 4.2 m by 6.2 m. Our proposed method is verified with the path trajectories produced during navigation compared with conventional approaches.

This letter proposes a novel mobile sensor deployment scheme for maximizing coverage. The basic idea is to force mobile sensors to move to predetermined target points that are the optimal layout in a distributed manner using Voronoi diagram data structure. A simulation shows that the result of the proposed scheme is quite close to the optimal result and outperforms previous works.

This position paper outlines the author's view on architectural directions and key technology enablers for the future mobile Internet. It is pointed out that mobile and wireless services will dominate Internet usage in the near future, and it is therefore important to design next-generation network protocols with features suitable for efficiently serving emerging wireless scenarios and applications. Several key requirements for mobile/wireless scenarios are identified - these include new capabilities such as dynamic spectrum coordination, cross-layer support, disconnection tolerant routing, content addressing, and location awareness. Specific examples of enabling technologies which address some of these requirements are given from ongoing research projects at WINLAB. Topics covered briefly include wireless network virtualization, the cache-and-forward (CNF) protocol, geographic (GEO) protocol stack, cognitive radio protocols, and open networking testbeds.

The modulated scattering antenna array (MSAA) is composed of one normal antenna element and several modulated scattering elements (MSEs). In this paper, a 2-element MSAA is used as the receiving antenna in a 2 2 multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system. MIMO performance of MSAA with various array spacing is measured to investigate the relation between the array spacing and the MIMO performance of the MSAA experimentally in the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) indoor environment. It is found that the error vector magnitude (EVM) and the channel capacity, which reflect MIMO performance, can be affected by the array spacing. The measured results of the MSAA were compared with that of two-dipole antenna array at the same condition.

The conventional TDoA (Time Difference of Arrival)-based and RSS (Received Signal Strength)-based location schemes create large positioning errors because of the various wireless channel effects such as path loss, shadowing, and NLoS (Non-Line-of-Sight) components of the multipath channels. In this paper, we propose an improved wireless location scheme which performs a weighted combination of the TDoA and RSS location schemes to improve a detection probability in the mobile-WiMAX femto-cell environments.

Due to the distributed nature, mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are vulnerable to various attacks, resulting in distrusted communications. To achieve trusted communications, it is important to build trusted routes in routing algorithms in a self-organizing and decentralized fashion. This paper proposes a trusted routing to locate and to preserve trusted routes in MANETs. Instead of using a hard security mechanism, we employ a new dynamic trust mechanism based on multiple constraints and collaborative filtering. The dynamic trust mechanism can effectively evaluate the trust and obtain the precise trust value among nodes, and can also be integrated into existing routing protocols for MANETs, such as ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) and dynamic source routing (DSR). As an example, we present a trusted routing protocol, based on dynamic trust mechanism, by extending DSR, in which a node makes a routing decision based on the trust values on its neighboring nodes, and finally, establish a trusted route through the trust values of the nodes along the route in MANETs. The effectiveness of our approach is validated through extensive simulations.

This paper proposes a new hybrid scheme based on a given set of channels for preventing channel interference and collision in mobile networks. The proposed scheme is designed for improving system performance, focusing on enhancement of performance related to path breakage and channel interference. The objective of this scheme is to improve the performance of inter-node communication. Simulation results from this paper show that the new hybrid scheme can reduce a more control message overhead than a conventional random scheme.