This paper describes two way satellite system environments on geostationary orbit (GEO) and performance enhancement mechanisms which reduces round trip time (RTT) and supports real-time services. We use performance enhancing proxy (PEP) for reducing round trip time and user-level real-time scheduler for reducing deadline violation tasks. The user-level real-time scheduling method classifies priority of user process into four types and those are reflected in kernel. With these dual performance enhancement mechanisms, we can improve quality of service (QoS) of end-user who connects to the DVB-RCS system.

In an empowered Internet with end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) facilities, it is essential for content servers to minimize reserved network resources to achieve a reduction in transmission cost for the use of QoS. Resource reservation usage charging forces customers to efficiently use network resources. In this paper, we analyze a model that optimizes the total cost when semi-elastic traffic flows are delivered in a client-server scenario. The client uses the proposed analytical model to easily control its buffer occupancy and to determine at any time if it is needed to utilize resource reservation or best-effort transmission mode.

With the occurrence of new applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and multimedia conference, there is an ongoing discussion about realizing QoS in the Internet today. Because of its potential scalability in support of QoS guarantees, the Differentiated Service (DiffServ) architecture with aggregate packet scheduling has recently attracted much attention in the networking community as a feasible solution for providing Internet QoS. Thus, it is important to understand delay bound of an individual flow in the DiffServ architecture in order to provide delay-sensitive applications. In this paper, we study, via both analysis and simulation, the deterministic bound on edge-to-edge delay of a flow in a DiffServ network domain with FIFO aggregation and a class-based Latency Rate (LR) server that provides guaranteed performance with rate reservation for a traffic class. We derive edge-to-edge delay bound for a single flow as a function of allocated service rate for a traffic class, token bucket parameters adopted for flows at the network ingress, and information about joining and leaving flows. We compare the obtained delay bound with previous works using analytic results, and then conduct simulation to confirm the results. The derived bound is less than that of previous studies in all cases.

To offer location based services, service providers need to have access to Location Information (LI) regarding the users which they wish to serve; this is a potential privacy threat. We propose the use of constraints, i.e. statements limiting the use and distribution of LI, that are securely bound to the LI, as a means to reduce this threat. Constraints may themselves reveal information to any potential LI user--that is, the constraints themselves may also be a privacy threat. To address this problem we introduce the notion of a LI Preference Authority (LIPA). A LIPA is a trusted party which can examine LI constraints and make decisions about LI distribution without revealing the constraints to the entity requesting the LI. This is achieved by encrypting both the LI and the constraints with a LIPA encryption key, ensuring that the LI is only revealed at the discretion of the LIPA.

While mobile networks have been enhanced to support a variety of mobile multimedia services such as video telephony and rich data content delivery, a new challenge is being created by the remarkable development of micro-device technologies such as micro processor-chips, sensors, and RF tags. These developments suggest the rapid emergence of the ubiquitous computing environment; computers supporting human life without imposing any stress on the users. The combination of broadband global networks and ubiquitous computing environment will lead to an entirely new class of services, which we call ubiquitous networking services. This paper discusses how to create ubiquitous service environments comparing global networking approaches which are based on fixed and mobile networks. It is shown that the mobile approach is better from service applicability and reliability viewpoints. Networking architecture is proposed which expand 4G mobile cellular networks to real space via gateways on the edges of the mobile network (i.e. mobile terminals). A new set of technical requirements will emerge via this approach, which may accelerate the paradigm shift from the current mobile network architecture and even from the Internet of today.

In this paper, an adaptive resource allocation scheme for video stream based on video stream character and user mobility in wireless LAN is proposed. The proposed adaptive allocation scheme allocates the time slots according to the kind of the real-time or non real-time video stream, the required bit rate of video stream and user's mobility by each user. In the proposed system, when user requests the non real-time video stream and its dwell time is smaller than the service time of the video source, more time slots are allocated to the user. When user requests the non real-time video stream and its dwell time is larger than the service time of the source video, or when user requests the real-time video stream, minimum amount of the required time slots are allocated. The computer simulation results show that the proposed allocation scheme can achieve the better performance than the conventional allocation schemes which allocate the time slots only considering the required bit rate or user's dwell time.

In this letter, we study a hybrid Multimedia-on-Demand (MoD) system which provides broadcast, batch and interactive services. An analytical model for such an MoD system is provided. Numerical results show that with proper design, the system can provide better performance than those systems which only provide any subset of two services.

In recent years, the Internet has come to be able to be used at higher speed and more cheaply everywhere as the broadband service and the wireless LAN service have been provided by various ISPs. In such a ubiquitous environment, a demand for mobile computing environments in the intranet and easy access from remote sites has been increasing greatly as well as the Internet. To meet this requirement, we have proposed a Logical Office service, which is a kind of the mobile VLAN, and enables terminal plug and play, layer two tunneling, and ubiquitous communication. This paper newly proposes that the offer of the IP mobility to not only the movement of the terminal but also existing network services be possible the Logical Office service which we developed. As a result, it was verified to operate existing network services such as wirelesses LAN on the Logical Office service, and for newly existing network services to able to have the IP mobility.

In this paper, downlink performance of multicarrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) systems under correlated fading channels is analytically investigated. Under code hopping, a signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and bit error rate (BER) performance are derived in multi-cell environments. In addition, specific conditions to validate the commonly used Gaussian approximation of an interference plus noise distribution in MC-CDMA systems are discussed. It is proved that the approximation is adequate in case of low correlation between subcarriers and a large spreading factor (SF). The proposition is confirmed through comparison between analytical and simulation results.

We have proposed in [5] a practical blind channel identification algorithm for the white observation noise. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of the algorithm given in [5] for the colored observation noise. The proposed algorithm utilizes Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization procedure and estimates (1) the channel order, (2) the noise variance and then (3) the channel impulse response with less computational complexity compared to the conventional algorithms using eigenvalue decomposition. It can be shown through numerical examples that the algorithm proposed in [5] is quite effective in the colored noise case.

The actual sound environment system exhibits various types of linear and non-linear characteristics, and it often contains an unknown structure. Furthermore, the observations in the sound environment are often in the level-quantized form. In this paper, a method for estimating the specific signal for stochastic systems with unknown structure and the quantized observation is proposed by introducing a system model of the conditional probability type. The effectiveness of the proposed theoretical method is confirmed by applying it to the actual problem of psychological evaluation for the sound environment.

To guarantee the high reliability of video services, video servers usually adopt parity-encoding techniques in which data blocks and their associated parity blocks form a parity group. For real-time video service, all the blocks in a parity group are prefetched in order to cope with a possible disk failure, thereby incurring a buffering overhead. In this paper, we propose a new scheme called Round-level Parity Grouping (RPG) to reduce the buffer overhead while restoring VBR video streams in the presence of a faulty disk. RPG allows variable parity group sizes so that the exact amount of data is retrieved during each round. Based on RPG, we have developed a storage allocation algorithm for effective buffer management. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme reduces the buffer requirement by 20% to 25%.

A lasing charactrization of a Brillouin/erbium optical fiber laser (BEFL) is experimentally discussed. In the BEFL, an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) is incorporated into the Brillouin laser resonator to enhance small Brillouin gain, which makes the configuration of the Brillouin laser resonator easy and flexible. The experimental results show that the output power of the BEFL has a threshold against the Brillouin pump power, and above the Brillouin threshold, the output power increases linearly with the EDFA pump power. The BEFL threshold decreases with increasing the length of the optical fiber in the laser resonator used as a Brillouin gain medium. The BEFL oscillates in a stable single longitudinal mode because the bandwidth of the Brillouin gain profile is very narrow ( 30 MHz). The relative intensity noise (RIN) and the spectral lineshape were measured. The noise floor level decreases with increasing the EDFA pump power, and the full-width at half maximum of the BEFL was measured to be about 8 kHz.

The efficiency of algorithms managing data caches has a major impact on the performance of systems that utilize client-side data caching. In these systems, two versions of data can be maintained without additional overhead by exploiting the replication of data in the server's buffer and clients' caches. In this paper, we present a new cache consistency algorithm employing versions: Two Versions-Callback Locking (2V-CBL). Our experimental results indicate that 2V-CBL provides good performance, and in particular outperforms a leading cache consistency algorithm, Asynchronous Avoidance-based Cache Consistency, when some clients run only read-only transactions.

This paper describes the contours of a Dutch monitoring and research site for climate change and related atmospheric processes. The station has large benefits for atmospheric science, both in The Netherlands and internationally. It provides a platform for collaboration in this important field, and will provide the routine observations needed to assess the impact of the different atmospheric parameters on the local climate. The station fits in directly in the selected group of global monitoring networks that are currently operational or being set up to address the problems of climate. In addition, the station can play a major role in supporting worldwide satellite measurements of climate related parameters. The only way to get a global picture of the essential climate change parameters can be found in the combination of satellite measurements and ground-based stations equipped with advanced remote sensing and in situ instrumentation. Furthermore, the combined expertise of European universities and research institutes, encompassing the whole field of atmospheric research, offers a unique chance for the training of young scientists. The research site is an attractive center for international young scientists to develop and deepen their skills.

We propose an information-sharing network system, capable of forming and dynamically reconfiguring multiple information-sharing groups on the same network platform by using wavelength routing and distributed shared memory technologies. The network system comprises information-sharing terminal nodes equipped with a shared memory and a wavelength-tunable transmitter, network management terminal and an arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG). The information-sharing terminal nodes are connected to an AWG by a pair of optical fibers, forming a star-shaped topology. Information is shared among the information-sharing terminal nodes through the establishment of a logical information-sharing ring. This is accomplished by adjusting the output of the wavelength-tunable transmitter at each terminal node to an appropriate wavelength according to the wavelength-routing characteristics of the AWG wavelength router. We developed a prototype information-sharing network system, in which, as preliminary experiments, HDTV and SDTV videos were used for real-time information sharing. The dynamic reconfiguration of information-sharing groups and a simple automatic restoration technique have been successfully demonstrated. The system is applicable to distributed computer processing systems and high-capacity information-sharing applications such as high-quality videoconferences.

Among recent trends in Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning in the Internet is the Differentiated Services Architecture, termed DiffServ. The successful deployment of Diffserv to provide a premium QoS guarantees to network traffic requires an effective admission control mechanism, which needs to be scalable and relatively simple to implement. In this paper we present a QoS network framework with novel and effective measurement-based resource management and admission control mechanisms. The mechanism is based on the characteristics of measured arrival and departure traffic. Those characteristics are captured via a passive monitoring. We implement the mechanism at the edge routers of a DiffServ Domain. The admission control mechanism is only executed at the edge routers and doesn't require any signaling between inner routers. The mechanism does not depend on the underlying network topology or any specifications of the cross traffic present in the domain. Therefore the mechanism is scalable. In addition, the proposed approach does not require any traffic policing mechanism at the entrance of the network. This approach can provide the statistical QoS guarantees to a variety of service classes within a DiffServ domain. We show that the proposed framework can provide a high degree of network resource sharing among multiple traffic classes while satisfying their QoS requirements. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we perform a set of simulations on a number of bursty video traffic sources.

We demonstrated the transmission over 80 km at 10 Gb/s by using the amplifier and electroabsorption-modulator integrated laser diode. Tilt-facet antireflection window is implemented, inside of which a monitor photodiode is monolithically integrated for accurate power regulation. To better control the amplifier-input power and to reduce the feedback of the amplified spontaneous emission, an attenuator is incorporated by means of the inner-window. By amplifying the modulated signal and compensating modulator-chirp by gain-saturation in the amplifier, high power optical transmission is achieved from a device with -10 dB attenuation at total laser and amplifier currents of 200 mA.

Due to the pruning and joining of members, multicast groups are dynamic. Both the topology and the total number of links change during multicast sessions, and the multicast performance, measured in terms of the bandwidth consumption, will change accordingly. In this paper, we investigate the dynamic performance of multicast communication with homogeneous packet loss probability; indeed, we evaluate the effects of the pruning of receivers and of subnets, after which we find the optimal placements of repair servers. A new 3-phase algorithm for adapting the optimal repair server placements to the dynamic changes of network topologies is presented and analyzed.

We present and demonstrate a novel method of generating a π phase-alternated return-to-zero (RZ) signal together with pulse-amplitude equalization in a rational harmonic mode-locked fiber ring laser, by using a dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator. By adjusting the voltages applied to both arms of the modulator, amplitude-equalization and π phase shift can be achieved successfully at a 9.95 GHz repetition rate. The generated alternate-phase RZ signals show enhanced transmission performance in the single-mode fiber (SMF) links without dispersion compensation.