This paper presents a novel approach for robot localization using landmark maps. With recent progress in SLAM researches, it has become crucial for a robot to obtain and use large-size maps that are incrementally built by other mapper robots. Our localization approach successfully works with such incremental and large-size maps. In literature, RANSAC map-matching has been a promising approach for large-size maps. We extend the RANSAC map-matching so as to deal with incremental maps. We combine the incremental RANSAC with an incremental LSH database and develop a hybrid of the position-based and the appearance-based approaches. A series of experiments using radish dataset show promising results.

This paper considers a new reactive fast handover MIPv6 (FMIPv6) mechanism to minimize packet loss of the existing mechanism. The primary idea of the proposed reactive FMIPv6 mechanism is that the serving access router buffers packets toward the mobile node (MN) as soon as the link layer between MN and serving base station is disconnected. To implement the proposed mechanism, the router discovery message exchanged between MN and serving access router is extended. In addition, the IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover Function event service message is defined newly. Through analytic performance evaluation and experiments, the proposed reactive FMIPv6 mechanism can be shown to minimize packet loss much than the existing mechanism.

A 0.4-5.8 GHz SiGe-MMIC quadrature modulator (Q-MOD) employing a self current controlled mixer for cognitive radio is described. The self current controlled mixer consists of a Gilbert cell mixer and a self current control circuit which is composed of both a current feedback circuit and an output buffer amplifier. The self current control circuit automatically controls the mixer current according to the output power level, and improves the linearity over wide radio frequency (RF) range. Simulation results show that the proposed Q-MOD realizes 1 dB compression point (P1 dB) improvement of more than 3.0 dB compared to the conventional Q-MOD at the frequencies of 0.4, 0.8, 1.95, 5.2 and 5.8 GHz. The fabricated Q-MOD achieves P1 dB improvement of more than 2.8 dB under the same condition. It also improves the output power with error vector magnitude (EVM) of 3.0% (Pout@EVM=3.0%), and achieves the Pout improvement of more than 2.7 dB under the modulation conditions of UHF wireless system (OFDM/16QAM, 0.4 GHz), W-CDMA (HPSK/QPSK, 0.8 GHz/1.95 GHz) and wireless-LAN (OFDM/64QAM, 5.2 GHz/5.8 GHz).

The IEEE 802.16j mobile multi-hop relay (MMR) is studied to improve throughput, extend coverage, and increase capacity. Mobile relay stations attached to vehicles make arbitrary movements and have interference with other base stations or relay stations, thus lowering service functions. This study sets out to suggest an interference detection and avoidance method and evaluates its performance in order to help introduce a mobile relay station for vehicle mounting in a mobile multi-hop relay network. The proposed approach would be implemented by the addition of MAC management messages at a base or relay station instead of the change of mobile station.

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has been proposed in order to overcome the limitations of host-based mobility management in IPv6 networks. However, packet losses during doing handover are still a problem. To solve this issue, several schemes have been developed, and can be classified into two approaches: predictive and reactive handover. Both approaches commonly use bi-directional tunnel between mobile access gateways (MAGs). In predictive schemes especially, mobility support for a mobile node (MN) is triggered by simplified link signal strength. Thereafter, the MN sends handover notification to its serving MAG, and is then able to initiate packet forwarding. Therefore, if the MN moves toward an unexpected MAG that does not have any pre-established tunnel with the serving MAG, it may lead to packet losses. In this paper, we define this problem as Early Packet Forwarding (EPF). As a solution, we propose an enhanced PMIPv6 scheme using two-phase tunnel control based on the IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover (MIH).

A prototype of a novel mobile viewer system consisting of a mobile phone and a 13.1-inch 4096-color electronic paper display has been developed. The basic concept of the system, the technological study for realizing the concept, and the specifications of the prototype are described. Possible applications of the system are also proposed.

We present a decentralized VPN service that can be built over generalized mobile ad-hoc networks (Generalized MANETs), in which topologies can be represented as a time-varying directed multigraph. We address wireless ad-hoc networks and overlay ad-hoc networks as instances of Generalized MANETs. We first propose an architecture to operate on various kinds of networks through a single set of operations. Then, we design and implement a decentralized VPN service on the proposed architecture. Through the development and operation of a prototype system we implemented, we found that the proposed architecture makes the VPN service applicable to each instance of Generalized MANETs, and that the VPN service makes it possible for unmodified applications to operate on the networks.

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) have inherently dynamic topologies. Due to the distributed, multi-hop nature of these networks, random mobility of nodes not only affects the availability of radio links between particular node pairs, but also threatens the reliability of communication paths, service discovery, even quality of service of MANETs. In this paper, a novel Markov chain model is presented to predict link availability for MANETs. Based on a rough estimation of the initial distance between two nodes, the proposed approach is able to accurately estimate link availability in a random mobility environment. Furthermore, the proposed link availability estimation approach is integrated into Max-Min d-clustering heuristic. The enhanced clustering heuristic, called M4C, takes node mobility into account when it groups mobile nodes into clusters. Simulation results are given to verify the approach and the performance improvement of clustering algorithm. It also demonstrates the adaptability of M4C, and shows that M4C is able to achieve a tradeoff between the effectiveness of topology aggregation and cluster stabilities. The proposed algorithm can also be used to improve the availability and quality of services for MANETs.

Backbone network of the mobile networks, i.e. mobile backhaul networks, is an important part of mobile network system. With the decreasing size of mobile network system cells, it is considered next-generation mobile backhaul networks will form mesh topology. Most mobile backhaul networks are formed with microwave radios. To increase data rate, Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC) is used for wireless links. However, the data rate of each wireless link changes over time and leads to unexpected packet loss or traffic degradation. This paper proposes a routing scheme and methods for estimating the transmission parameters or modes of wireless links to route bandwidth guaranteed flows over mobile backhaul networks. Proposed routing scheme can reduce degradation of flows caused by unexpected changes of the data rate of wireless links. We evaluate our routing scheme when mode distribution of links follows normal, uniform and Poisson distributions. This paper shows mode estimation using mode history of link to estimate the link quality can route bandwidth guaranteed flows efficiently by choosing more stable links for the path.

Efficient mobility management is one of the most important challenges in mobile networks. Since roaming between wireless cells can cause long handoff latency and high packet loss, it can result in poor quality of services for delay-sensitive applications and for applications requiring reliable transmission. In this paper, we propose a new seamless micro-mobility management framework for Micro Mobile MPLS (called MiM-MPLS) to overcome the packet loss problem while maintaining low handoff latency. In addition, we propose a combination of MiM-MPLS and the existing MFC-Micro Mobile MPLS [3],[4](called MiM-MFC-MPLS) to further enhance the handoff performance. MiM-MPLS and MiM-MFC-MPLS provide efficient handoff mechanisms through the use of pre-established Label Switched Paths (LSPs), the L2 trigger, and local registration. The handoff mechanisms for (L2 and L3) intra handoffs and for an inter handoff in these frameworks are described in detail. The performance is analyzed in terms of the signaling cost of registration updates, handoff latency, packet loss, buffer size requirement, and delay jitter. Compared to existing handoff frameworks, the results show that the proposed MiM-MPLS and MiM-MFC-MPLS can provide no packet loss while maintaining low signaling cost of registration updates, handoff latency, and delay jitter at the cost of some buffer space. In particular, MiM-MFC-MPLS has the best handoff performance (i.e., the lowest signaling cost of registration updates, handoff latency, and delay jitter) among all the frameworks that we considered at the cost of some buffer space.

To support mobile multicasting in wireless networks, we present a new active multicasting mechanism which makes use of the state characteristic of multicast agent. In this mechanism, a multicast agent just locates the position for roaming hosts when it does not forward multicast packets. Upon reception of multicast packets, the multicast agent adjusts the service range to achieve an appropriate balance between routing efficiency and the overhead of multicast tree reconstruction. Therefore, a lot of unnecessary tree reconstructions are eliminated during the time when none multicast packet is transferred and multicast delivery path is near optimal because of the limited service range of multicast agent in the active state. To justify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme, we develop an analytical model to evaluate the signaling overhead. Our performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the system overhead and multicast routing is near optimal. The other important contribution is the novel analytical approach in evaluating the performance of mobile multicast routing protocol.

This Letter deals with the problem of non-line-of-sight (NLOS) in cellular systems devoted to location purposes. In conjugation with a variable loading technique, we present an efficient technique to make covariance shaping least squares estimator has robust capabilities against the NLOS effects. Compared with other methods, the proposed improved estimator has high accuracy under white Gaussian measurement noises and NLOS effects.

We propose a Multiple Zones-based (M-Zone) routing protocol to discover node-disjoint multiplath routing efficiently and effectively in large-scale MANETs. Compared with single path routing, multipath routing can improve robustness, load balancing and throughput of a network. However, it is very difficult to achieve node-disjoint multipath routing in large-scale MANETs. To ensure finding node-disjoint multiple paths, the M-Zone protocol divides the region between a source and a destination into multiple zones based on geographical location and each path is mapped to a distinct zone. Performance analysis shows that M-Zone has good stability, and the control complexity and storage complexity of M-Zone are lower than those of the well-known AODVM protocol. Simulation studies show that the average end-to-end delay of M-Zone is lower than that of AODVM and the routing overhead of M-Zone is less than that of AODVM.

Analysis of waiting time to deliver a message M from a source S to a destination D is deeply related to connectivity analysis, which is an important issue in fundamental studies of mobile multi-hop networks. In [1], we compared the mean waiting times of two methods to deliver M with the mean value of the minimum waiting time. The mean minimum waiting time was obtained by computer simulation because theoretical analysis of this mean is not easy, although another two methods were analyzed theoretically. In this paper, we propose an approximate method to theoretically analyze the mean minimum waiting time in a one-dimensional street network, and show that this method gives a good approximation of the mean minimum waiting time. Also, we consider shadowing and change of directions of mobile nodes at intersections as negative factors arising in two-dimensional street networks. We extend the above method to compute the mean minimum waiting time considering these factors, and discuss how the mean minimum waiting time is affected by these factors.

Input/Output (I/O) automata and the Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA) are two well-known techniques for the specification and verification of concurrent systems. Over the past few years, they have been extended to the so-called dynamic I/O automata and, respectively, Mobile TLA (MTLA) in order to be more appropriate for mobile agent systems. Dynamic I/O automata is just a mathematical model, whereas MTLA is a logic with a formally defined language. In this paper, therefore, we investigate how MTLA could be used as a formal language for the specification of dynamic I/O automata. We do this by writing an MTLA specification of a travel agent system which has been specified semi-formally in the literature on that model. In this specification, we deal with always existing agents as well as with an initially unknown number of dynamically created agents, with mobile and non-mobile agents, with I/O-automata-style communication, and with the changing communication capabilities of mobile agents. We have previously written a TLA specification of this system. This paper shows that an MTLA specification of such a system can be more elegant and faithful to the dynamic I/O automata definition because the agent existence and location can be expressed directly by using agent and location names instead of special variables as in TLA. It also shows how the reuse of names for dynamically created and destroyed agents within the dynamic I/O automata framework can be specified in MTLA.

When handover events occur during the transmission of multimedia traffic, efficient handover control procedures and radio resource allocation are necessary to maintain the same QoS of transmitted multimedia traffic because the QoS may be degraded by additional delay and information loss. In this paper we propose a new handover control method for the next generation mobile multimedia networks, in which the handover setup process is done in advance of a handover request by predicting the handover cell from mobile terminal's current position. The handover procedures for real-time sessions are performed based on the handover cell information and the resource reservation condition. The radio resources in the estimated adjacent cells should be reserved and allocated to guarantee the continuity of the real-time sessions. We conduct a simulation model that is focused on the handover failure rate and packet loss rate. The simulation results show that our proposed method provides better performance than the previous methods.

This letter proposes a busy-tone based scheme for reliable and efficient broadcasting in mobile ad hoc networks. Control packets such as RTS, CTS and ACK are ignored in the broadcast scheme, and two busy tones are used, one for channel reservation and the other for negative acknowledgement. Unlike traditional schemes for reliable broadcasting, the proposed scheme is highly efficient as it achieves both collision avoidance and fast packet loss recovery. Simulation results are presented which show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

In a cellular system, efficient power saving techniques for a mobile station (MS) are necessary because of its inherently limited battery capacity. The paging indicator (PI) transmission scheme in CDMA cellular systems is known to be an effective power saving strategy. However, in OFDM-based cellular systems, the MS has to operate FFT for PI symbol detection, resulting in a significant power consumption. In this letter, a PI transmission technique with reduced power consumption using the preamble in OFDM-based cellular systems, especially for mobile WiMAX systems, is proposed for the MS under power saving mode. Simulations indicate a 30-50% power saving from our proposed PI transmission technique, at the expense of a slight increase in paging response delay.

In order to reduce the amount of interference to neighboring cells in cellular systems, we generally use base station (BS) antennas that have sharp beam patterns in the vertical plane; however, the distribution of incoming waves at the BS affects the effective gain of the BS antennas which have directional pattern. Therefore, we have to clarify the characteristics of the distribution of the incoming waves. A recent trend is decreasing the cell radius; therefore, clarifying the distribution of the incoming waves at the BS when mobile stations (MSs) are located within 1 km from the BS is important. In this report, we evaluate the effective gains of the BS antennas, which are calculated using the measured vertical power angle profile (PAP). Moreover, we examine the application of a simple incoming wave model to the evaluation of the antenna effective gains. In the model, the average power of the incoming waves is set to the Laplacian function and each wave is changed to a lognormal distribution. The antenna effective gain calculated using the model agrees well with that calculated using the measured PAP.

Recently, the security scheme, proposed by Kempf and Koodli, has been adopted as a security standard for Fast handover for Mobile IPv6. But, it does not prevent denial of service attacks while resulting in high computation cost. More importantly, we find that it is still vulnerable to redirection attacks because it fails to secure the Unsolicited Neighbor Advertisement messages. In this paper, Kempf-Koodli's scheme is formally analyzed through BAN-logic and its weaknesses are demonstrated.