Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) demands new security and privacy enhancing technologies for the new information and communication environments where a huge number of computers interact with each other in a distributed and ad hoc manner to access various resources and services. This paper surveys emerging security and privacy enhancing technologies, focusing on access control in ubiquitous computing environments because this is the underlying core technology to enforce security and privacy policies. We classify access control technologies into three types associated with the three access control phases of prevention, avoidance, and detection, and provide an overview of ubiquitous computing-oriented technologies and solutions, ranging from security and privacy models and policies to the enforcement of policies and system implementation.

Domain Name System--DNS is a key service of the Internet. Without DNS, we cannot use any useful Internet applications. At the beginning of the Internet, email or file transfer applications were provided. DNS provides key service to them--resource discovery. Nowadays, there are broad range of software making use of DNS as basis of their application. In this paper, we explain the evolution of DNS, how DNS works and recent activities including operational issues. Then, we describe EPC network which make use of RFID to bridge real world and the Internet, and how DNS helps to organize EPC network.

A distributed authentication platform (DAP) architecture is described that addresses the problems of fast user authentication and secure data transmission in large-scale ubiquitous networks. The user space is divided into domains, each containing an agent engine (AE), to enable rapid response to authentication requests. Dedicated channels are used for quick synchronization of the AE databases. Also described is a user-information-based model with QoS-ensured end-to-end secure-path setup. In this model, the user specifies the QoS requirement at the terminal, and the AE analyzes the information embedded in the control packet and initiates the signaling sequence to set up the path. This model is highly suitable for emerging peer-to-peer services, such as ensured-delivery e-mail, account information exchange, PDA file backup, and fixed-time data delivery. Evaluation of the AE performance demonstrated that the localization of authentication requests by using domains is an effective way of reducing the authentication processing time in a large-scale ubiquitous network. Simulated secure-path setup using three workstations demonstrated that a secure route satisfying such user specifications as priority, encryption, and bandwidth can be set up within 4.02 ms, much faster than with previous approaches.

By deploying hundreds or thousands of microsensors and organizing a network of them, one can monitor and obtain information of environments or objects for use by users, applications, or systems. Since sensor nodes are usually powered by batteries, an energy-efficient data gathering scheme is needed to prolong the lifetime of the sensor network. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for data gathering where sensor information periodically propagates from the edge of a sensor network to a base station as the propagation forms a concentric circle. Since it is unrealistic to assume any type of centralized control in a sensor network whose nodes are deployed in an uncontrolled way, a sensor node independently determines the cycle and the timing at which it emits sensor information in synchrony by observing the radio signals emitted by sensor nodes in its vicinity. For this purpose, we adopt a pulse-coupled oscillator model based on biological mutual synchronization such as that used by flashing fireflies, chirping crickets, and pacemaker cells. We conducted simulation experiments, and verified that our scheme could gather sensor information in a fully-distributed, self-organizing, robust, adaptive, scalable, and energy-efficient manner.

Limited energy is a big challenge for large scale wireless sensor networks (WSN). Previous research works show that modulation scaling is an efficient technique to reduce energy consumption. However, the impacts of using modulation scaling on packet delivery latency and loss are not considered, which may have adverse effects on the application qualities. In this paper, we study this problem and propose control schemes to minimize energy consumption while ensuring application qualities. We first analyze the relationships of modulation scaling and energy consumption, end-to-end delivery latency and packet loss ratio. With the analytical model, we develop a centralized control scheme to adaptively adjust the modulation levels, in order to minimize energy consumption and ensure the application qualities. To improve the scalability of the centralized control scheme, we also propose a distributed control scheme. In this scheme, the sink will send the differences between the required and measured application qualities to the sensors. The sensors will update their modulation levels with the local information and feedback from the sink. Experimental results show the effectiveness of energy saving and QoS guarantee of the control schemes. The control schemes can adapt efficiently to the time-varying requirements on application qualities.

In this paper, we present Scalable Data Collection (SDC) protocol, a tree-based protocol for collecting data over multi-hop, wireless sensor networks. The design of the protocol aims to satisfy the requirements of sensor networks that every sensor transmits sensed data to a sink node periodically or spontaneously. The sink nodes construct the tree by broadcasting a HELLO packet to discover the child nodes. The sensor receiving this packet decides an appropriate parent to which it will attach, it then broadcasts the HELLO packet to discover its child nodes. Based on this process, the tree is quickly created without flooding of any routing packets. SDC avoids periodic updating of routing information but the tree will be reconstructed upon node failures or adding of new nodes. The states required on each sensor are constant and independent of network size, thereby SDC scales better than the existing protocols. Moreover, each sensor can make forwarding decisions regardless of the knowledge on geographical information. We evaluate the performance of SDC by using the ns-2 simulator and comparing with Directed Diffusion, DSR, AODV, and OLSR. The simulation results demonstrate that SDC achieves much higher delivery ratio and lower delay as well as scalability in various scenarios.

A flooding algorithm is an indispensable and fundamental network control mechanism for achieving some tasks, such notifying all nodes of some information, transferring data with high reliability, getting some information from all nodes, or to reserve a route by flooding the messages in the network. In particular, the flooding algorithm is greatly effective in the heterogeneous and dynamic network environment such as so-called ubiquitous networks, whose topology is indefinite or changes dynamically and whose nodal function may be simple and less intelligent. Actually, it is applied to grasp the network topology in a sensor network or an ad-hoc network, or to retrieve content information by mobile agent systems. A flooding algorithm has the advantages of robustness and optimality by parallel processing of messages. However, the flooding mechanism has a fundamental disadvantages: it causes the message congestion in the network, and eventually increases the processing time until the flooding control is finished. In this paper, we propose and evaluate methods for producing a more efficient flooding algorithm by adopting the growth processes of primitive creatures, such as molds or microbes.

Communications in locally structured wireless networks, such as ad hoc networks, will play an important role for network services and applications in the ubiquitous networking environments of the future. Most of the time, however, mobile networks are used in much the same way as fixed networks: most of the time, mobile terminals merely access information which is stored in the backbone network. Applications based on the local exchange of information gathered or generated by mobile terminals will open up many novel possibilities. A new online storage system named CAOSS facilitates such exchange and constitutes a building block for various new applications. CAOSS is a server-less system that provides high availability of data in mobile and wireless network environments. We describe CAOSS and its application in a mobile video-information-sharing system named GT. Thanks to the good performance of CAOSS, the GT system gives users a convenient and easy way to share and accumulate video data in a wireless environment. We confirm that CAOSS has strong enough performance to deal with large volumes of video data.

We present a world model for location-aware and user-aware services in ubiquitous computing environments. It can be dynamically organized like a tree based on geographical containment, such as in a user-room-floor-building hierarchy and each node in the tree can be constructed as an executable software component. The model is unique to existing approaches because it enables location-aware services to be managed without databases, can be managed by multiple computers, and provides a unified view of the locations of not only physical entities and spaces, including users and objects, but also computing devices and services. A prototype implementation of this approach was constructed on a Java-based mobile agent system. This paper presents the rationale, design, implementation, and applications of the prototype system.

In ubiquitous computing, or ubiquitous network environment, many sensors and devices are embedded in the environment. Moreover, information appliances and smart space technologies allow users to enjoy high computational power, which also gives freedom and extrication from traditional computing style that often caused users' inconvenience and restriction of their demands and needs. However, due to the characteristics of ubiquitous computing, application's high adaptability to the changes of environments is required. To achieve this high adaptability of applications, we introduce a design approach of "snapshot-based application." The snapshot-based application can store its status as a snapshot. By utilizing the snapshot, an application can be recreated as it is in the status of the snapshot. In this paper, we propose an application framework named "u-Snap," which realizes snapshot-based applications. We have exemplified the effectiveness of this framework with implementation of "u-Photo," which utilize a snapshot of an application as contextual information that is embedded in a photo image.

Topology of a network greatly affects the network performance. Depending on the purpose of a network, a specific topology may perform much better than any other topologies. Since the ad hoc networks are formed for a specific purpose, determining, and constructing the network topology based on the application requirements will enhance system performance. This paper proposes Bluetooth scatternet forming protocol in which the network topology is determined by three parameters. The parameters affecting the topology are the number of maximum slaves in a piconet, the number of maximum piconets that a gateway Bluetooth device can service, and the number of loops needed in the formed scatternet. These parameters can be read from a script file prior to the network formation. This process of reading the important parameters from the file would give users freedom in determining the network topology. The proposed protocol also includes a role negotiation process to accommodate different capabilities of the participating devices. The negotiation process of the protocol allows the resource-limited nodes to participate in the network. Different types of scatternet topologies like star, mesh, ring and line can be formed by specifying the parameters. This paper also discusses theoretical information necessary for calculating network topologies in detail. The protocol is verified with help of simulations, and implementations using commercially available Bluetooth devices. The detailed results are also presented in this paper.

An event-driven sensor network composed of a large number of sensor nodes has been widely studied. A sensor node sends packets to a sink when the node detects an event. For the sink to receive packets it fails to acquire, the sink must send re-transmission requests to the sensor node. To send the requests to the sensor node using unicast, the network address of the sensor node is required to distinguish the sensor node from others. Since it is difficult to allocate the address manually to a number of nodes, a reasonable option is to use existing address autoconfiguration methods. However, the methods waste the limited energy of the sensor nodes due to using a number of control messages to allocate a permanent address to every node. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient address autoconfiguration method for the event-driven sensor network. The proposed method allocates a temporary address only to a sensor node which detects an event, on an on-demand basis. By performing simulation studies, we evaluated the proposed method and compared it with one of the existing methods based on the number of control messages for the address allocation. The results show that the number of control messages of the proposed method is small compared to that of the existing method. We also evaluated the process time overhead of the proposed method using the implemented system. Although the proposed method has little extra overhead, the results show the processing time is short enough for practical use.

This paper proposes a channel allocation principle that prevents TCP throughput degradation in multihop transmissions in a mesh network based on the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) MAC protocol. We first address the relationship between the network topology of wireless nodes and the TCP throughput degradation based on computer simulations. The channel allocation principle is discussed in terms of resolution into a coloring problem based on throughput degradation. The number of required channels for the proposed channel allocation principle is evaluated and it is shown that two channels are sufficient for more than 96% simulated multihop patterns. The proposed channel allocation principle is extendable to generic mesh networks. We also clarify the number of required channels for mesh networks. The simulation results show that three channels are sufficient for more than 98% patterns in the generic mesh networks when the number of nodes is less than 10.

In order to apply the mobile multimedia communication to the road information system, a seamless handover scheme is needed. Therefore, we present a novel micro-mobility scheme based on explicit multicast (Xcast) in this article. In our proposal, the mobile traffic of its forward direction is sent to the potential access routers of a mobile node (MN) by including IP addresses of the access routers explicitly in the IP headers. As for 802.11 wireless LAN, because it is difficult to know the potential ARs of a mobile node, a new trigger, called as the Candidate AR Trigger (CAT), is introduced to get this information from the link layer. The handover mechanism of our proposed scheme is depicted in detail and the merits of this scheme are also discussed. Finally, by using a combination of performance evaluation and simulation, we argue that our architecture is capable of providing seamless handover while introducing limited network overhead.

Energy-efficient operations are essential to prolonging the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. Clustering sensor nodes is one approach that can reduce energy consumption by aggregating data, controlling transmission power levels, and putting redundant sensor nodes to sleep. To distribute the role of a cluster head, clustering approaches should be based on efficient cluster configuration schemes. Therefore, low overhead in the cluster configuration process is one of the key constraints for energy-efficient clustering. In this paper, we present an autonomous clustering approach using a coverage estimation-based self-pruning algorithm. Our strategy for clustering is to allow the best candidate node within its own cluster range to declare itself as a cluster head and to dominate the other nodes in the range. This same self-declaration strategy is also used in the active sensor election process. As a result, the proposed scheme can minimize clustering overheads by obviating both the requirements of collecting neighbor information beforehand and the iterative negotiating steps of electing cluster heads. The proposed scheme allows any type of sensor network application, including spatial query execution or periodic environment monitoring, to operate in an energy-efficient manner.

We investigate the effects of the performance of sensor networks on network availability and in turn evaluate the impact of protocols and network configuration on these effects. The typical wireless sensor network of the future consists of a large number of micro-sized sensors that are equipped with batteries of limited capacity. In such a network, energy consumption is one of the most important issues. Several representative protocols that are applied in ring and linear network configurations are analyzed, and explicit formulae for network availability are derived for each of them. Numerical values derived by using these formulae yielded the surprising result that backup routes do not always improve network availability. This is because the loads imposed by the backup routes on network segments that do not include dead sensor nodes reduce sensor-node lifetimes in these segments.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) enables everyday objects to be identified, tracked, and recorded. The RFID tags are must be extremely simple and of low cost to be suitable for large scale application. An efficient RFID anti-collision mechanism must have low access latency and low power consumption. This paper investigates how to recognize multiple RFID tags within the reader's interrogation ranges without knowing the number of tags in advance by using framed ALOHA. To optimize power consumption and overall tag read time, a combinatory model was proposed to analyze both passive and active tags with consideration on capture effect over wireless fading channels. By using the model, the parameters on tag set estimation and frame size update were presented. Simulations were conducted to verify the analysis. In addition, we come up with a proposal to combat capture effect in deterministic anti-collision algorithms.

This paper proposes a new ad hoc routing protocol using route redundancy as one of route selection criteria. It is important to provide redundancy for the route from source to destination in mobile ad hoc networks that are susceptible to failure. Route redundancy implies the relative possibility that redundant paths will exist on a route to be built up. Our proposal aims to establish a route that contains more redundant paths toward a destination node by involving intermediate nodes with relatively more adjacent nodes in a possible route. Our approach can localize the effects of route failures, and reduce control traffic overhead and route reconfiguration time by enhancing the reachability to the destination node without source-initiated route rediscoveries at route failures. We show the route setup procedure considering link redundancy and the route reconfiguration procedures employing redundant path information at the intermediate nodes. Further, this paper presents a new route maintenance protocol. Most of existing ad hoc routing protocols re-initiate a route query procedure when a destination node moves away and a route failure occurs. However, our scheme makes the destination node find a neighbor node that knows the way to the source node and establish a partial route to the neighbor node. If the destination node can find any and connect to it, the route will be recovered. This produces less control overhead than a source-initiated route discovery. We show the performance of our routing schemes through simulations using the Network Simulator 2 (ns-2).

A game-theoretic analysis is applied to the evaluation of capacity and stability of a wireless ad hoc network in which each source node independently chooses a route to the destination node so as to enhance throughput. First, the throughput of individual multihop transmission with rate adaptation is evaluated. Observations from this evaluation indicate that the optimal number of hops in terms of the achievable end-to-end throughput depends on the received signal-to-noise ratio. Next, the decentralized adaptive route selection problem in which each source node competes for resources over arbitrary topologies is defined as a game. Numerical results reveal that in some cases this game has no Nash equilibria; i.e., each rational source node cannot determine a unique route. The occurrence of such cases depends on both the transmit power and spatial arrangement of the nodes. Then, the obtained network throughput under the equilibrium conditions is compared to the capacity under centralized scheduling. Numerical results reveal that when the transmit power is low, decentralized adaptive route selection may attain throughput near the capacity.

In this paper, we propose an efficient route discovery scheme for mobile ad hoc networks called Hop-Wise Limited broadcast (HoWL). Since nodes do not identify the location of other nodes, some of the routing protocols proposed for mobile ad hoc networks use network-wide broadcasts to discover a route. In contrast, HoWL limits the area of a route discovery by predicting the current location of the destination node using history of hop counts of previously used routes. We also introduce Characterized Environmental Indicators (CEI) which characterize environments for networks of mobile nodes. Specifically, environments can be characterized by three indicators: node density, average hop count of utilized routes, and frequency of link failure. We have implemented HoWL as an extension to DSR on GloMoSim network simulator. Quantitative and qualitative performance comparisons were evaluated between HoWL and its related work, Expanding Ring Search (RING) and LAR. The simulations show that HoWL performs best when low communication overhead is desired where up to 20% decrease over RING and three-fold decrease over LAR in the overhead were demonstrated. Thus, HoWL is most effective in overhead sensitive environments such as battery-limited sensor networks.

In a ubiquitous computing environment, people are surrounded by hundreds of mobile or embedded computers each of which may be used to support one or more user applications due to limitations in their individual computational capabilities. We need an approach to coordinating heterogeneous computers that acts as a virtual computer around a mobile and ubiquitous computing environment and supports various applications beyond the capabilities of single computers. This paper presents a framework for building and aggregating distributed applications from one or more mobile components that can be dynamically deployed at mobile or stationary computers during the execution of the application. Since the approach involves mobile-transparent communications between components and component relocation semantics, it enables a federation of components to adapt its structure and deployment on multiple computers whose computational resources, such as input and output devices, can satisfy the requirement of the components in a self-organized manner. This paper also describes a prototype implementation of the approach and its application.

In this paper, we propose an advanced location-based service that we call a direction-based service, which utilizes both the position and direction of a user. The direction-based service enables a user to point to an object of interest for command or investigation. We also describe the design, implementation and evaluations of a direction-based service system named Azim. With this system, the direction of the user can be obtained by a magnetic-based direction sensor. The sensor is also used for azimuth-based position estimation, in which a user's position is estimated by having the user point to and measure azimuths of several markers or objects whose positions are already known. Because this approach does not require any other accurate position sensors or positive beacons, it can be deployed cost-effectively. Also, because the measurements are naturally associated with some degree of error, the position is calculated as a probability distribution. The calculation considers the error of direction measurement and the pre-obtained field information such as obstacles and magnetic field disturbance, which enables robust position measurements even in geomagnetically disturbed environments. For wide-area use, the system also utilizes a wireless LAN to obtain rough position information by identifying base stations. We have implemented a prototype system for the proposed method and some applications for the direction-based services. Furthermore, we have conducted experiments both indoors and outdoors, and exemplified that positioning accuracy by the proposed method is precise enough for a direction-based service.

This paper presents a novel decoding algorithm for turbo codes, in which the likelihood values for redundant parts are updated in order for those values to become more reliable. A criterion for updating the redundant likelihood values is proposed, which is based on the comparisons of the channel values with the re-generated values by the soft-input and soft-output encoders. It is shown that the proposed method can improve the error correcting capabilities, i.e., the improvement of BER/BLER performance and the achievable BER limit.

The problem of estimating code timings in DS-CDMA systems with multiple antennas is considered in the presence of multipath time-varying fading channels and near-far environments. We present an efficient algorithm for an approximate maximum likelihood approach of jointly estimating the multipath timings of a desired user for DS-CDMA systems that consist of multiple antennas either uncorrelated or fully correlated in space. The procedures of the algorithm to estimate code-timings are developed in order to better exploit the time-varying characteristics of the fading process. In the multipath fading channels, the solution of the proposed algorithms is based on successively optimizing the criterion for increasing numbers of multipath delays. It is shown via simulation results that the modified approaches of the approximate maximum likelihood algorithm much more improve its acquisition performance in the time-varying fading channels. It is seen that the acquisition performance of multiple antennas based acquisition scheme is much better than that of a single antenna based timing estimator in the presence of multipath fading channels and the near-far problem. Furthermore, it is observed that the proposed algorithms outperform the correlator and MUSIC estimator in the multiuser environments with near-far situation on time-varying Rayleigh fading channels.

To avoid over-engineered and expensive systems, it is important that the design takes account of variations in optical fiber characteristics due to the presence of many fiber pieces and splices in optical fiber networks. We present a design method for optical fiber networks that employ distributed Raman amplification (DRA), that considers variations in both optical losses at signal and pump wavelengths, Raman gain characteristics and splice losses. Our method can be applied to the design of both newly developed systems and installed systems. We show design examples based on our method and reveal the practicability of our method.

In this paper, we investigate packet loss and system dimensioning of feedback (FB) type wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical routers under asynchronous and variable packet length self-similar traffic. We first study the packet loss performance for two different types of WDM optical routers under asynchronous and variable packet length self-similar traffic. Based on simulation results, we demonstrate that a 1616 FB type WDM optical router employing more than 4 re-circulated ports without using void filling (VF) algorithm has better performance. We then present the system dimensioning issues of FB type WDM optical routers, by showing the performance of FB type WDM optical routers as a function of the number of re-circulated ports, buffer depth, re-circulation limit, basic delay unit in the fiber delay line optical buffers and traffic characteristics. The sensitivity of the mutual effects of the above parameters on packet loss is investigated in details. Based on our results, we conclude that the FB type WDM optical routers must be dimensioned with the appropriate number of re-circulated ports, re-circulation limits, buffer depth, and optimal basic delay unit in the fiber delay line optical buffers under relevant traffic characteristics to achieve high switching performance.

Current literature on input buffer management reveals that, in representative ATM networks under highly bursty traffic conditions, the fuzzy thresholding approach yields lower cell loss rate at the cost of lower throughput. Also, under less bursty traffic, the traditional fixed thresholding approach achieves higher throughput at the expense of higher cell loss rate. The integration of these two properties into practice is termed adaptive dynamic buffer management (ADBM) approach for input buffers and its assessment is the objective of this paper. The argument is that, given that the traffic conditions are constantly changing, to achieve efficiency during actual operation, the network control must dynamically switch, at every ATM switch, under the call processor's control, between the two input buffer management techniques, dictated by the nature of the traffic at the inputs of the corresponding switch. The need to involve the call processor marks the first effort in the literature to dynamically configure input buffer management architectures at the switch fabric level under higher level call processor control. It stems from the fact that the switch fabric operates very fast and cannot engage in complex decision making without incurring stiff penalty. To achieve this goal, the network control needs knowledge of the burstiness of the traffic at the inputs of every ATM switch. The difficulties with this need are two-fold. First, it is not always easy to obtain the traffic model and model parameters for a specific user's call. Second, even where the traffic model and the model parameters are known for a specific user's call, this knowledge is valid only at the source switch where the user interfaces with the network. At all other switches in the network, the cells of the traffic in question interact asynchronously with the cells from other traffic sources and are subject to statistical multiplexing. Thus, to obtain the exact nature of the composite traffic at the inputs of any ATM switch, is a challenge. Conceivably, one may determine the burstiness by counting the number of cells incurred at the inputs of an ATM switch over a defined time interval. The challenge posed by this proposition lies in the very definition of burstiness in that the time interval must approach, in the limit, zero or the resolution of time in the network. To address this challenge, first, a 15-node representative ATM network is modeled in an asynchronous, distributed simulator and, second, simulated on a network of workstations under realistic traffic stimuli. Third, burstiness indices are measured for the synthetic, stochastic traffic at the inputs of every ATM switch as a function of the progress of simulation for different choices of time interval values, ranging from 20,000 timesteps down to 1,000 timesteps. A timestep equals 2.73 µs. Results reveal that consistent burstiness indices are obtained for interval choices between 1,000 and 5,000 timesteps and that a burstiness index of 25, measured at 3,000 timestep interval, constitutes a reasonable and practical threshold value that distinguishes highly bursty traffic that warrants the use of the fuzzy thresholding approach from less bursty traffic that can benefit from the fixed thresholding scheme. A comparative performance analysis of ADBM yields the following. For pure fixed and pure fuzzy thresholding schemes, the throughputs are at 73.88% and 71.53% while the cell drop rates are at 4.31% and 2.44%,respectively. For the ADBM approach, where the input buffer management alternates at each individual ATM switch between the fixed and fuzzy schemes, governed by measured burstiness index threshold of 25 for a 3,000 timestep interval, the throughput is 74.77%, which is higher than even the pure fixed scheme while the cell drop rate is 2.21% that is lower than that of the pure fuzzy scheme. In essence, ADBM successfully integrates the best characteristics of the fuzzy and fixed thresholding schemes.

For future generation mobile networks, we expect that the mobile devices like PDAs, note PCs or any VoIP-enabled communicators will have the feature of being always switched on, ready for service, constantly reachable by the wireless Internet. In addition to high access speed, attractive real-time contents or other expected spectacular features of the future wireless Internet environment, the mobile terminals has to be very much energy-aware to enable literal untethered movement of the user. Mechanisms for network activities like maintaining location information and wireless system discovery, which require regular network access, should be energy-efficient and resource-efficient in general. Cellular systems employ the notion of passive connectivity to reduce the power consumption of idle mobile hosts. In IP based Multi-service User Terminal (MUT) that may have multiple wireless interfaces for receiving various classes of services from the network, there should be an efficient addressing of the energy consumption issue. To devise an energy-efficient scheme for simultaneous or single operation of the wireless interfaces attached to such terminals we should have comprehensive understanding of the power consumption of the devices/modules in various operational states. This paper investigates the power consumption pattern or behavior of some selected wireless interfaces that are good candidates for being part of the future of the multi-service user terminals. We propose a simple model for predicting energy consumption in a terminal attributed to the wireless network interfaces. We measured the actual consumption pattern to estimate the parameters of the model.

Recently, wideband speech communication using 7 kHz-wideband speech coding, as described in ITU-T Recommendations G.722, G.722.1, and G.722.2, has become increasingly necessary for use in advanced IP telephony using PCs, since, for this application, hands-free communication using separate microphones and loudspeakers is indispensable, and in this situation wideband speech is particularly helpful in enhancing the naturalness of communication. An objective quality measurement methodology for wideband-speech coding has been studied, its essential components being an objective quality measure and an input test signal. This paper describes Wideband-PESQ conforming to the draft Annex to ITU-T Recommendation P.862, "Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ)," as the objective quality measure, by evaluating the consistency between the subjectively evaluated MOS (Mean Opinion Score) and objectively estimated MOS. This paper also describes the verification of artificial voice conforming to Recommendation P.50 "Artificial Voices," as the input test signal for such measurements, by evaluating the consistency between the objectively estimated MOS using a real voice and that obtained using an artificial voice.

This paper proposes the hierarchical cloud-router network (HCRN) to overcome the scalability limit in a multi-layer generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) network. We define a group of nodes as a virtual node, called the cloud-router (CR). A CR consists of several nodes or lower-level CRs. A CR is modeled as a multiple switching capability (SC) node when it includes more than one kind of SC, which is fiber SC, lambda SC, time-division multiplexing (TDM) SC, packet SC, even if there are no actual multiple switching capability nodes in the CR. The CR advertises its abstracted CR internal structure, which is abstracted link state information inside the CR. A large-scale, multi-layer network can then achieve scalability by advertising the CR internal structure throughout the whole network. In this scheme, the ends of a link connecting two CRs are defined as interfaces of the CRs. We adopt the CR internal cost scheme between CR interfaces to abstract the network. This CR internal cost is advertised outside the CR via the interfaces. Our performance evaluation has shown that HCRN can handle a larger number of nodes than a normal GMPLS network. It can also bear more frequent network topology changes than a normal GMPLS network.

Live streaming media are delay sensitive and have limited allowable delays. Current conventional multicast protocols do not have a loss retransmission mechanism. Even though several reliable multicast protocols with retransmission mechanisms have been proposed, the long delay and high packet loss rate make them inefficient for live streaming. This paper proposes a multicast protocol focusing on the allowable delay called the QoS Multicast for Live Streaming (QMLS) protocol. QMLS routers are placed along the multicast tree to detect and retransmit lost packets. We propose a method that enables data recovery to be done immediately after lost packets are detected by the QMLS router and a method that reduces the unnecessary packets sent to end receivers. This paper discusses the mathematical analysis of the proposed protocol and compares it with other multicast protocols. The results reveal that our protocol is more effective in live streaming. Finally, we do a simulation to evaluate its performance and study the effect of consecutive losses. The simulation reveals that consecutive losses can slightly increase losses with our protocol.

We propose receiver authentication and group key delivery protocol (AKDP) to realize secure multicast communication. AKDP provides three principal functions: 1) group key delivery for data confidentiality, 2) receiver access control to cope with denial of service and 3) receiver authentication for user accounting. AKDP has a negotiation function to choose and offer only those functions required by the situation. We evaluate the feasibility of AKDP by developing a prototype system and show that total communication time is acceptable (i.e. 406 ms). We also show that the negotiation function of AKDP reduces total communication time because unnecessary functions can be skipped. We demonstrate that the negotiation function reduces the total communication time by 52% if user accounting is not executed. We also find that the scalability of group control and key server is not insignificant if multiple receivers access it simultaneously; however, we also propose a secure multicast architecture that can accommodate multiple servers and so guarantee scalability.

Existing reliable multicast protocols are designed to perform well in wired networking environments. However, in mobile networking environments, these reliable mobile multicast protocols are not optimal as they do not take into account the limitations of power (energy), storage capacity, processing power, impairments of wireless communication channels, and the frequent changes of location and the resulting loss of network connectivity. This paper analyses four hybrid reliable multicast schemes, namely NAK-based schemes, ACK-based schemes, ACK-based schemes with FEC (Forward Error Correction), and NAK-based schemes with FEC that are suitable for mobile networking environments and quantifies their performance. These four schemes differ from the generic sender-initiated and receiver-initiated reliable multicast protocols in that they rely on a mixture of multicasting and unicasting for providing reliability. This analysis is used to show that NAK-based schemes with FEC is best suited for reliable multicasting in mobile environments as they provide excellent performance in terms of average wireless channel utilization and average processing time, independently of the number of MHs.

Use of directional antenna in the context of ad hoc wireless networks can largely reduce radio interference, thereby improving the utilization of wireless medium. Our major contribution in this paper is to devise a MAC protocol that exploits the advantages of directional antenna in ad hoc networks for improved system performance. In this paper, we have illustrated a MAC protocol for ad hoc networks using directional antenna with the objective of effective utilization of the shared wireless medium. In order to implement effective MAC protocol in this context, a node should know how to set its transmission direction to transmit a packet to its neighbors and to avoid transmission in other directions where data communications are already in progress. In this paper, we are proposing a receiver-centric approach for location tracking and MAC protocol, so that, nodes become aware of its neighborhood and also the direction of the nodes for communicating directionally. A node develops its location-awareness from these neighborhood-awareness and direction-awareness. In this context, researchers usually assume that the gain of directional antennas is equal to the gain of corresponding omni-directional antenna. However, for a given amount of input power, the range R with directional antenna will be much larger than that using omni-directional antenna. In this paper, we also propose a two level transmit power control mechanism in order to approximately equalize the transmission range R of an antenna operating at omni-directional and directional mode. This will not only improve medium utilization but also help to conserve the power of the transmitting node during directional transmission. Our proposed directional MAC protocol can be effective in both ITS (Intelligent Transportation System), which we simulate in String and Parallel Topology, and in any community network, which we simulate in Random Topology. The performance evaluation on QualNet network simulator clearly indicates the efficiency of our protocol.

Recently, in order to improve high speed data transmission and spectral efficiency in wireless communication systems, the combination of OFDM and space-time coding is being actively studied. In order to maximize the system efficiency, the problem of co-channel interference must be solved. One technique to overcome the co-channel interference and to increase the system capacity is to use adaptive antennas. Conventional beamforming techniques for single antenna cannot be applied directly to STBC-OFDM systems, because the signals transmitted from the two transmit antennas are superposed at the receive antenna and the interference between signals of the two transmit antennas occurs. In this paper, we present the MMSE beamforming technique using training sequence for STBC-OFDM systems in reverse link and evaluate the performance by using various parameters such as the number of training blocks, cluster sizes and angle spreads in Two-ray, TU and HT channels. From the simulation results, we show the best cluster sizes and the number of training blocks corresponding to these cluster sizes.

Joint frequency-domain equalization (FDE) and antenna diversity combining is applied to the reception of multi-rate DS-CDMA signals to achieve the frequency diversity effect while suppressing inter-path interference (IPI) resulting from the asynchronism of different propagation paths. At a receiver, fast Fourier transform (FFT) is applied for FDE and then inverse FFT (IFFT) is used to obtain a frequency-domain equalized DS-CDMA chip sequence for the succeeding despreading operation. An arbitrary spreading factor SF can be used for the given value of FFT window size; an extreme case is the nonspread SC system with SF=1. This property allows a flexible design of multi-rate DS-CDMA systems. Three types of FDE are considered; minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalization, maximal-ratio combining (MRC) equalization and zero-forcing (ZF) equalization. Matched filter bound analysis for achievable BER performance is presented. The improvement in the BER performance in a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel is evaluated by computer simulation. First, we consider the single-user case and compare the BER performances achievable with MMSE, MRC and ZF equalizations. How the fading rate and the spreading factor affect the BER performance is also evaluated. Furthermore, the BER performance comparison between FDE and rake combining is presented for various values of SF and also performance comparison between DS-CDMA and SC signal transmissions, both using FDE, is presented. Finally, we extend our evaluation to the multi-user case. Both downlink and uplink are considered and how the BER performances of downlink and uplink differ is discussed.

Broadband fixed wireless access (BFWA) systems with multi-hop mesh topologies have attracted considerable attention as a promising technology for next generation, high quality, high capacity, and high density access infrastructures. The primary advantages of mesh network topologies are an improvement of availability in connectivity between pairs of nodes by means of diversity routes. This paper discusses wireless node architecture that enables the integrated control of route diversity and traffic engineering together with the control of wireless links whose quality and performance could be affected by radio propagation conditions. Taking into account the functional requirements for multi-hop mesh BFWA networks, such as adaptive link configuration with multiple channels, distributed network management, and traffic engineering in mesh networks, the entity called network control unit (NCU) is designed and developed on a common UNIX based server computer. Implemented functions and their performance are demonstrated using the experimental environments with wired networks.

The phase noise has a significant effect on the M-ary PSK transmission signal, furthermore the higher-order modulation signal can not be recovered in the presence of phase noise. It is important to define exactly what is required in terms of phase noise within a particular system and to avoid expensive over-specification. Based on the analysis of allowable signal-to-noise ratio for phase reference and required phase error variance for M-ary PSK systems relative to a degradation loss objective, the general phase noise allocation method for M-ary PSK satellite communication systems has been proposed in this paper. The phase noise allocation using the proposed method is adopted for M-ary PSK multi-mode satellite communication systems. Using the oscillator phase noise model and the phase noise model of a frequency synthesizer, the required phase noise spectrum distributions are carried out and the validities of the allocated phase noise spectrums are verified by the system simulation.

A waveguide crossed-slot linear array with a matching element is accurately analyzed and designed by the method of moments using numerical-eigenmode basis functions developed by the authors. The rounded ends of crossed-slots are accurately modeled in the analysis. The initial values of the slot parameters determined by a model with assumption of periodicity of field are modified and refined by the full-wave finite-array analysis for uniform excitation and small axial ratio. As an example, an 8-element linear array is designed at 11.85 GHz, which radiates a circularly polarized wave at a beam-tilting angle of 50 degrees. The radiation pattern, the frequency characteristics of the reflection and the axial ratio are compared between the analysis and the measurement and they agree very well. The calculated and measured axial ratio at the beam direction are 0.1 dB and 1.7 dB, respectively. This method provides a basic and powerful design tool for slotted waveguide arrays.

This paper addresses a simple, and yet effective approach to the design of block adaptive beamformers via parallel projection method (PPM), which is an extension of the classic projection onto convex set (POCS) method to inconsistent sets scenarios. The proposed approach begins with the construction of the convex constraint sets which the weight vector of the adaptive beamformer lies in. The convex sets are judiciously chosen to force the weights to possess some desirable properties or to meet some prescribed rules. Based on the minimum variance criterion and a fixed gain at the look direction, two constraint sets including the minimum variance constraint set and the gain constraint set are considered. For every input block of data, the weights of the proposed beamformer can then be determined by iteratively projecting the weight vector onto these convex sets until it converges. Furnished simulations show that the proposed beamformer provides superior performance compared with previous works in various scenarios but yet in general with lower computational overhead.

This paper describes a polarimetric feature extraction method from urban areas using the POLSAR (Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar) data. The scattering characteristic of urban areas is different from that of natural distributed areas. The main point of difference is polarimetric correlation coefficient, because urban areas do not satisfy property of azimuth symmetry, S_hh = S_hv = 0. The decomposition technique based on azimuth symmetry can not be applied to urban areas. We propose a new model fit suitable for urban areas. The proposed model fit consists of odd-bounce, even-bounce and cross scattering models. These scattering models can represent the polarimetric backscatter from urban areas, and satisfy S_hh 0 and S_hv 0. In addition, the combination with the proposed model fit and the three component scattering model suited for natural distributed areas is examined. It is possible to apply the combined technique to POLSAR data which includes both urban areas and natural distributed areas. The combined technique is used for feature extraction of actual X-band POLSAR data acquired by Pi-SAR. It is shown that the proposed model fit is useful to extract polarimetric features from urban areas.

Digital signature is by far one of the most important cryptographic techniques used in the e-government and e-commerce applications. It provides authentication of senders or receivers and offers non-repudiation of transmission (senders cannot deny their digital signature in the signed documents and the document cannot be altered in transmission without being detected). This paper presents our implementation results of digital signature algorithms on IC cards by using byte-unit modular arithmetic algorithm method. We evaluated the performance of well-known ESIGN and RSA digital signature algorithms on the dedicated IC card chips and showed that ESIGN is more efficient than RSA.

A new automatic-threshold-control (ATC) system for the amplitude-shift-keying (ASK) transceivers without using automatic gain control (AGC) was developed. When signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in a transmission system fluctuates, the new system optimizes the threshold by statistic processing. In this paper, the schematic block diagram, the theory of statistical processing, and the performance estimated by numerical simulations are shown. The simulations show that under ideal conditions, the system can control the threshold voltage in a broad SNR region (wider than 20 dB). Delay of response and trapping in real situation can occur, but, the problems can be avoided by waveform shaping. It is thus concluded that the new ATC system can be applied to ASK transceivers.

This letter describes the polarization mode dispersion (PMD) characteristic of optical fiber ribbons inserted tightly into helical slots. We investigate the mechanism of the birefringence induced in the optical fiber ribbons by lateral stress resulting from tension and bending in the helical slots. We discuss methods for the design of low PMD cables with reduced birefringence by considering coating materials and tensile strain control.

Current centralized restoration schemes are unsuitable for the increase of scale and complexity of networks. A novel distributed network partition scheme is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, a large-scale network can be partitioned into some wheellike sub-networks with nuclear nodes. In wheellike sub-networks, ring links and spoke links could provide reciprocal safeguard. Based on such structure, different distributed restoration schemes can be combined for failure restoration. The proposed partition approach has been implemented through computer simulation, and it was tested on practical national-scale optical networks. The simulation result shows that this scheme is practicable and effectual.

A directly modulated AM-VSB CATV erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA)-repeated system that uses push-pull modulated distributed feedback (DFB) laser diodes and half-split-band technique is proposed and demonstrated. Push-pull modulation scheme enhances the frequency response of the laser diode, and thus improves the overall performance of the fiber optical CATV systems. Good performances of carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR), composite second order (CSO), and composite triple beat (CTB) were achieved for the full channel band over a 100-km single-mode fiber (SMF) transport.

In this letter, we show that some stream authentication schemes using hash chaining are highly vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks. An adversary can disrupt all receivers of group by making use of modifying a few packets in those schemes.

This paper proposes a new effective data transfer method for IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs by integrating priority control and multirate mechanism. The IEEE 802.11 PHY layer supports a multirate mechanism with dynamic rate switching and an appropriate data rate is selected in transmitting a frame. However, the multirate mechanism is used with the CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance) protocol, low rate transmissions need much longer time than high rate transmissions to finish sending a frame. As a result, the system capacity is decreased. The proposed method assumes the same number of priority levels as the data rates, and a data rate is associated to a priority level. Priority of a transmission goes up with the used data rate. For this purpose, we have modified the CSMA/CA protocol to support prioritized transmission. By selecting the appropriate priority depending on the data rate and giving more transmission opportunities for high rate transmission, the system capacity is increased. The effect of the proposed mechanism is confirmed by computer simulations.

In this paper an analog-digital signal processing scheme for multichannel signal reception with low-IF receivers is proposed and its performance is investigated. In the low-IF receivers, the signal in the mirror frequency causes interference to the desired signal. In the proposed analog-digital signal processing scheme, the interference signal is extracted with the analog filter and the interference to the desired signal is reconstructed by LMS algorithm.

This paper proposes an adaptive channel estimation scheme, which uses different moving average length and pilot gain for different mobile environments. It is based on MSE method and extensive simulations under various environments for WCDMA physical layer. The scheme applies a computationally efficient and easily implemented pilot filter on WCDMA forward channel. For different mobile channel environments, the optimal combination of moving average length and pilot gain for low SNR is achieved. The simulation results illustrate that the adaptive scheme can achieve much lower BER compared with two other adaptive schemes, especially when the speed of mobile user is high. And the BER performance of the proposed scheme is insensible to the mobile speed.

In this letter, we propose the SNR estimator for multipath fading channels. We employ the least squares estimator for estimating the channel and estimate the SNR using the estimated noise variance. The SNR estimation can be used to adapt the demodulation algorithm to enhance its performance, as well as to provide the channel quality information. Simulation results show the performance of SNR estimator.

The next generation mobile communication system is required to support wideband wireless data links when terminals are moving at very high speed. In such case, accurate channel estimation is more crucial in this case. This paper presents a downlink channel estimation scheme for Multi-Input and Multi-Output (MIMO) MC-CDMA system by introducing uncorrelated and continuous pilot symbol sequence for every transmit antenna in code domain. Compared with conventional pilot aided estimation methods which insert pilots symbols in time domain, frequency domain or both of them, the proposed method can obtain more accurate channel impulse response matrix estimation in fast fading environments with much lower computation complexity and less resources exhausted. At last, we analyzed the BER performances of the scheme under a typical fast fading environment-VB and AWGN.

This letter proposes a vertical Bell Labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) coded direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) scheme in the frequency-selective fading environment and its blind channel identification algorithm. By exploiting an ESPRIT-like method and the singular value decomposition, the channels identification results are closed-form solutions. Moreover, the proposed scheme employs the precoding in the transmitter to eliminate the constraint of more receive antennas than transmit ones, required by most conventional V-BLAST codec schemes. Computer simulation results demonstrate the validity of this proposed scheme.

We propose an efficient method for updating the inverse of the signature waveform cross-correlations (SWC) matrix when the number of users in the synchronous direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS/CDMA) system changes. It is shown that the computational complexity of the proposed method is O(n²) in which n represents the number of active users in the system.

This letter presents a method to simulate a phase-included UWB channel impulse responses for a given indoor channel. In this method we decompose a UWB pulse into a finite number of spectral components. This enables the received signal to be determined by the sum of the convolutions between each spectral component and a corresponding frequency-dependent UWB channel impulse response. The ray-tracing algorithm is applied to calculate the amplitude and the phase of each frequency-dependent channel impulse response. Based on the calculated results, we finally show the simulation of the UWB channel impulse response.

We propose an aperture coupling E-bend with step structure as a robust post-wall waveguide interface to an external standard waveguide in which the posts are separated from the aperture. A 61.25 GHz model transformer gives 11.4% bandwidth for the reflection below -25 dB by using a 1.2 mm-height dielectric substrate. We have compared the mechanical tolerances of both the conventional straight structure and the proposed step structure. The step structure is more robust against mechanical errors than the conventional one. Another advantage is that the accuracy of the analysis model for the post-wall to metal-wall replacement is enhanced for the step structure.

A hybrid beamformer composed of a direction-of-arrival (DOA) based scheme and maximal ratio combining (MRC) is proposed to overcome the degradation caused by inaccurate channel estimation due to insufficient pilot power, which happens in conventional single-input, multiple-output (SIMO) Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) reverse link. The proposed scheme can provide more accurate channel estimation and interference reduction at the expense of diversity gain in the spatially correlated SIMO channel. As a result, the hybrid scheme outperforms conventional MRC beamformers for six or more antennas in the channel environment, in which the angle-of-spread (AOS) is within 30.

Electromagnetic noise radiated from microwave ovens may cause serious interference problems in wireless systems using the 2.4-GHz band. Since oven noise waveforms show strong dependence on the frequency selectivity of the receiver filters, the effect of band limitation on the interfering oven noise is an important issue for evaluating or comparing the performance degradation of wireless systems subject to interference. To understand these effects, theoretical and experimental investigations of the waveform, peak amplitude, and pulse width of band-limited oven noise are carried out. It is found that the peak amplitude of the received noise changes with the bandwidth in a way very similar to the case of a simple RF tone-burst input. The pulse width of the received noise also changes with the receiver bandwidth but takes a minimum value at a certain receiver bandwidth, which is an essential feature of band-limited microwave oven noise. In addition, an appropriate resolution bandwidth is determined for using a spectrum analyzer to obtain accurate oven noise parameters.

Ryu et al.'s recent paper proposed a multiple target angle-tracking algorithm without data association. This algorithm, however, shows degraded performance on evasive maneuvering targets, because the estimated signal subspace is degraded in the algorithm. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm where, VFF-PASTd (Variable Forgetting Factor PASTd) algorithm is applied to the Ryu's algorithm to effectively handle the evasive target tracking with better time-varying signal subspace.