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A correct balance of nutrient intake is very important, particularly in infants. When the body is deprived of essential nutrients, it can lead to serious disease and organ deterioration which can cause serious health issues in adulthood. Automated monitoring of the nutritional content of food provided to infants, not only at home but also in daycare facilities, is essential for their healthy development. To address this challenge, this paper presents a new Internet of Things (IoT)-based fully automated nutrition monitoring system, called Smart-Log, to advance the state-of-art in smart healthcare. For the realization of Smart-Log, a novel 5-layer perceptron neural network and a Bayesian network-based accurate meal prediction algorithm are presented in this paper. Smart-Log is prototyped as a consumer electronics product which consists of WiFi enabled sensors for food nutrition quantification, and a smart phone application that collects nutritional facts of the food ingredients. The Smart-Log prototype uses an open IoT platform for data analytics and storage. Experimental results consisting of 8172 food items for 1000 meals show that the prediction accuracy of Smart-Log is 98.6%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents low-cost compressors for video display systems, which compress video data to reduce the size of the frame memory in a display panel in a television or a smartphone. The hardware solution exploits the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and 1-D set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) to support the raster-scan processing order in a display system and meet the fixed target compression ratio (CR). However, the compression efficiency and hardware cost often increase in proportion to the block size and thus, designing a compressor with low cost but high fidelity is challenging. This paper proposes a generic partitioned SPIHT algorithm, which achieves a low-cost design for mobile devices by allowing various sizes of partitioned sub-blocks. By taking advantage of DWT decomposition properties, the proposed algorithm partitions a coding block into sub-blocks, each of which can be processed independently. The independent coding operations among multiple sub-blocks allow the size of the hardware buffer to be decreased, by storing the temporary results only for an individual sub-block. However, the proposed sub-block coding slightly decreases the compression efficiency when each sub-block is compressed with the same target CR. To reduce the drop-off in the compression efficiency, the boundary-pixel handling in DWT is exploited and the proposed partitioned SPIHT method adjusts the target CR for each sub-block depending on the potential quality loss. When compared with the previous 1-D design, experimental results show that the hardware gate count and internal memory are reduced by 59.34% and 75%, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed boundary handling and bit-allocation schemes mitigate the PSNR degradation due to the sub-block coding by 1.11 dB. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This index covers all technical items?papers, correspondence, reviews, etc.?that appeared in this periodical during 2017, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in 2017. Other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains an entry for each paper. The entry includes the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and inclusive pagination. The Subject Index contains entries describing the item under all appropriate subject headings, plus the first author?s name, the publication abbreviation, month, and year, and inclusive pages. Subject cross-references are included to assist in finding items of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a widely used wireless communication technology. In terms of mobile RFID tags, the relative position between the tags and the reader changes, and consumers can obtain product-related information in tags by using readers. Anti-collision is an important scheme for readers to identify RFID tags. Tag estimation is at the core of the efficient anti-collision process, especially when tags move. In this paper, we propose a Mobile tags Identification Procedure model (MTIP), and establish a feasible mobile tags estimation model based on MTIP. In the mobile tags estimation model, we use superposition principle of Poisson process to solve the tag estimation problem. Based on these models, a new anti-collision algorithm specifically for the mobile RFID tags is proposed. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms classical Q algorithm of the Electronic Product Code Class-1 Generation-2 system (EPC-C1G2) and the recent Symbolic Single Resolution Blocking (SSRB) algorithm in terms of success-rate and achieves similar efficiency for static RFID system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authentication protocol plays an important role in the short-range wireless communications for the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. Due to the shared nature of wireless communication networks, there are several kinds of security vulnerabilities. Recently, a pseudonym-based NFC protocol (PBNFCP) has been proposed to withstand the security pitfalls found in the existing conditional privacy preserving security protocol (CPPNFC). However, this paper further analyzes PBNFCP and shows that it still fails to prevent the claimed security properties, such as impersonation attacks against an adversary, who is a malicious registered user having a valid pseudonym and corresponding private key. In order to overcome these security drawbacks, this paper proposes a secure and efficient authentication protocol (SEAP) for NFC applications using lifetime-based pseudonyms. The proposed SEAP is simulated for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool. The simulation results show that SEAP is secure. The rigorous security and performance analysis shows that the proposed SEAP is secure and efficient as compared to the related existing authentication protocols for NFC applications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper demonstrates the implementation of indoor Bluetooth communication multi-hop networks. Since the performance of such networks determines the range of applications that they can support, the performance of Bluetooth wireless multi-hop networks is a common topic of interest. Communication network models are widely used to estimate the performance of networks in many different aspects. This paper focuses on one of the aspects, i.e., the time performance of the data transportation network of a Bluetooth multi-hop home network, and provides a novel empirical model for latency in multi-hop networks with asynchronous links when links are active. The model offers a sharp estimation of the latency added with every hop in the communication such that electronics product designers and network managers can effectively run time-constrained applications in this type of network. The model is based on the results from experiments carried out on a real test bed. The test bed includes Bluetooth nodes and proprietary middleware at the HCI (Host Controller Interface) level of communication. The experimental results show that the time performance worsens with an increasing number of hops in the communication and additionally provide evidence of the quadratic dependence on the number of hops exhibited by the latency 1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays there is a pervasive utilization of consumer-electronics mobile devices with powerful multimedia capabilities. The suitable management of their power consumption is critical in order to meet the user expectations in terms of battery lifetime. But the reduction of the dynamic-power component of the consumption may sometimes impair the quality of multimedia experience (QoE), which is not always acceptable. This paper proposes a closed-loop control system that can monitor the QoE in the form of the slack time of video decoding tasks and act on the CPU frequency to regulate it. Some results are presented in comparison with dynamic Linux governors which show a suitable behavior in guaranteeing enough QoE, even with power savings of almost 5% and low overhead. This enables its use as an assistant part of dynamic-power savers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet-connected consumer electronics marketed as smart devices (also known as Internet-of-Things devices) usually lack essential security protection mechanisms. This puts user privacy and security in great danger. One of the essential steps to compromise vulnerable devices is locating them through horizontal port scans. In this paper, we focus on the problem of detecting horizontal port scans in home networks. We propose a software-defined networking (SDN)-based firewall platform that is capable of detecting horizontal port scans. Current SDN implementations (e.g., OpenFlow) do not provide access to packet-level information, which is essential for network security applications, due to performance limitations. Our platform uses FleXight, our proposed new information channel between SDN controller and data path elements to access packet-level information. FleXight uses per-flow sampling and dynamical sampling rate adjustments to provide the necessary information to the controller while keeping the overhead very low. We evaluate our solution on a large real-world packet trace from an ISP and show that our system can identify all attackers and 99% of susceptible victims with only 0.75% network overhead. We also present a detailed usability analysis of our system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nowadays, near field communication (NFC) has been widely used in electronic payment, ticketing, and many other areas. NFC security standard requires the use of public key infrastructure (PKI) to implement mutual authentication and session keys negotiation in order to ensure communication security. In traditional PKI-based schemes, every user uses a fixed public/private key pair to implement authentication and key agreement. An attacker can create a profile based on user’s public key to track and compromise the user’s privacy. Recently, He et al. and Odelu et al. successively proposed pseudonym-based authentication key and agreement protocols for NFC after Eun et al.’s protocol (2013), which is first claimed to provide conditional privacy for NFC. They respectively claimed that their scheme can satisfy the security requirements. In this paper, first, we prove that their protocols still have security flaws, including the confusion of the user’s identity and the random identity. Then, we propose a pseudonym-based secure authentication protocol (PSAP) for NFC applications, which is effective in lifetime and includes time synchronization-based method and nonce-based method. In our scheme, trusted service manager issues pseudonyms but does not need to maintain verification tables and it could reveal the user’s identity of internal attackers. Furthermore, security and performance analysis proves that PSAP can provide traceability and more secure features with a little more cost. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes the design and implementation of a smart recommendation system used to discover and suggest to consumers the ?best? mobile services in the emerging ubiquitous consumer wireless world (UCWW). The cloud-based system builds up and dynamically manages personal profiles of consumers with big data processing techniques. A consumer identity module (CIM), based on the Java Card technology, supports a third-party authentication, authorization and accounting procedure (3P-AAA), and provides a trusted execution environment for corresponding mobile applications running on the consumer?s mobile device. A distributed data management platform (DMP), built with the Hadoop, Storm, and Kafka technologies, provides an efficient computing environment for real-time data scheduling and message processing in the cloud. With this distributed architecture, the system is able to turn mobile services? activities of consumers into actionable analytic datasets and recommend the ?best? mobile services applicable to each particular consumer under the ?always best connected and best served? (ABC&S) paradigm. A number of novel software solutions, both on the consumer and cloud side, are presented. An approach towards running this service recommendation system in a distributed way and high throughput capacity is elaborated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes systematic code design methods for constructing efficient spectrum shaping codes with the maximum runlength limited constraint k, which are widely used in data storage systems for digital consumer electronics products. Through shaping the spectrum of the input user data sequence, the codes can effectively circumvent the interaction between the data signal and servo signal in high-density data storage systems. In particular, we first propose novel methods to design high-rate k constrained codes in the non-return-to-zero (NRZ) format, which can not only facilitate timing recovery of the storage system, but also avoid error propagation during decoding and reduce the system complexity. We further propose to combine the Guided Scrambling (GS) technique with the k constrained code design methods to construct highly efficient spectrum shaping k constrained codes. Simulation results demonstrate that the designed codes can achieve significant spectrum shaping effect with only around 1% code rate loss and reasonable computational complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Panel-level photovoltaic (PV) monitoring localizes abnormal PV panels, enables easy repair, and helps maintain the performance of the PV system. Panel-level PV monitoring system needs to be low-cost so that it can be widely deployed. Synchronization of monitoring time between PV panels is also needed to compare them under the same conditions. Simple fault detection scheme is needed to decide which PV panel is abnormal. For low-cost modules, this paper proposes a low-cost power line communication (PLC) module to monitor four PV panels simultaneously. It can reduce the cost of monitoring modules down to nearly one fourth according to the cost analysis. For time synchronization, a measurement and query scheme is proposed. At the measurement phase, the states of PV panels are measured simultaneously; at the query phase, the measured data are transferred one by one. For fault detection, the mean voltage of PV panels and voltage drop threshold are used. Voltages below the mean by the threshold are considered as abnormal. The proposed system was tested in the real field; it found and localized an abnormal PV panel. The proposed scheme is expected to widely spread the panel-level PV monitoring and help maintain the PV system performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, two Future Video Coding (FVC) reconfigurable intra prediction hardware are proposed. They are the first FVC intra prediction hardware in the literature. The first hardware implements multiplications with constants using adders and shifters instead of using multipliers. Therefore, it can be used in ASIC implementations of FVC encoders. The second hardware implements multiplications with constants using DSP blocks in FPGA. Therefore, it can be used in FPGA implementations of FVC encoders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In spite of the significant advancements in wireless connectivity, the static form of the network infrastructure cannot guarantee an uninterrupted operation of the ever-growing wireless consumer electronics in emergency situations such as natural disasters. In such occasions, employing flexible aerial nodes can tackle this issue by recovering the communication rapidly, when the need for connectivity is of utmost importance. In this paper, we study the use of aerial nodes for communication recovery after a communication breakdown. We provide an analytical model of the recovery probability that demonstrates the capabilities of such networks. In the performance evaluation, we show the effects of the altitude and the distance between the aerial nodes on the recovery probability and verify them with simulations. Moreover, we introduce our testbed and preliminary experimental work that shows promising results for aerial networks. Finally, we discuss useful insights for the network design and present some open issues that exist in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a maximum likelihood (ML) unequal error protection (UEP) video streaming technique is proposed for WirelessMAN-Advanced systems that are equipped with multiple antennas. The assumed video compression method is H.264/AVC which is a commercially successful technique. ML signal detection is optimal in terms of packet error performance for multiple antenna systems. However, common wisdom is that the optimal ML detection cannot be used for an implementation of UEP which is important for video streaming. In this paper, it is shown that UEP can be implemented using the optimal ML detection. With the aid of computer simulations, the proposed ML-UEP technique is shown to improve video quality significantly compared to a recently proposed UEP technique that is based on the suboptimal signal detection QR-LRL. The PSNR improvement by the proposed method comes at the cost of increased computational complexity in the physical layer 1. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Noise reduction is an important problem in hands-free speech capture. This paper discusses the use of a remote wireless microphone to aid the reduction of practical non-stationary noise signals. Such a microphone can be placed close to a noise source to provide a reliable estimate of the undesired signal, which can be used by a noise reduction algorithm. The signal from the remote microphone, however, needs to be wirelessly transmitted to the primary device where the noise reduction is performed. As the remote and primary microphones are located on separate devices, their signals need not be synchronously sampled. Moreover, wireless transmission of data is power-intensive, requiring techniques to reduce the transmission bit-rate. This paper discusses transmission of the time domain signal and frequency domain parameters, analyzes their respective trade-offs between performance and robustness to synchronization errors, and presents methods to reduce the transmission bit-rate.1 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a flexible low-cost wireless system specifically designed to acquire fitness metrics both from surface electromyographic (sEMG) and electrocardiographic (ECG) signals. The system, that can be easily extended to capture and process many other biological signals as well as the motion-related body signals, consists of several ultralight wireless sensing nodes that acquire, amplify, digitize, and transmit the biological or mechanical signals to one or more base stations through a 2.4 GHz radio link using a custom-made communication protocol designed on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer. The number of wireless nodes the base stations can handle depends on the type of signal being acquired. Each base station is connected through an USB link to a control PC running a user interface software for viewing, recording, and analyzing the data. The system for acquiring signals from wearable nodes in combination with a smartphone application provides a complete platform for monitoring fitness metrics extracted from the signals. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The demand on performance of wireless networks is constantly increasing. To date, conventional sub 6 gigahertz (GHz) bands were able to keep up with the requirements through continuous spectral efficiency improvements. Consequently, advancing this area further became exceptionally costly. Therefore, despite the industry resistance towards changing the already established communications spectrum and unavailability of sufficient number of suitable frequency bands for typical communication purposes, carrier frequency, hence operation bandwidth, increase method is chosen as an alternative. In this paper, the first spectrum chosen for utilization, the 60 GHz band, is surveyed. Detailed explanations of the standards and their processes are provided, in addition to the characteristics of the channel and 60 GHz technologies, devices and consumer applications. As its initial standards are already complete and widespread communications usage expected to start in 2016, the 60 GHz band is a genuine candidate for the next generation of mass market wireless communication systems,sup>1. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents the technology for fast code synchronization or reprogramming method during the testing and debugging phases in the development of consumer devices. The increasing number of features in cellular phones, car navigation systems, and other consumer devices has made it difficult to release bug-free devices. Software for these types of consumer devices has to be developed and tested using a cross-platform simulator. However, many cases have to be considered while using the target devices during testing, making several debugging phases and software update releases inevitable. These processes have to be performed iteratively. Therefore, the time required for the binary code to download to the target devices should be small. In this paper, we propose a fast synchronization or reprogramming algorithm for these types of consumer devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the topology of a multimedia tourism service that targets mobile devices equipped with broadband and either multicast or broadcast access capabilities. Multicast / Broadcast access is used to handle the delivery of multimedia data to many simultaneous users in the service area. The solution adopted is based on existing standards for mobile TV services, but introducing features that enable the provision of generic multimedia services on top of mobile hybrid broadband and broadcast networks. Furthermore, this paper shows how to use standardized interfaces originally defined for interactive mobile TV broadcasting to build personalized mobile multimedia services that do not deal with TV contents or are not necessarily coupled to a mobile TV service bundle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practical applications of wireless sensor networks require the sensor devices to be high in computation ability, low in power consumption, small in size, as well as competitive in cost. In addition, there are other particular attributes which require special consideration in sensor device design. These include, for example, the capabilities in protecting the embedded program from foreign intrusion and supporting efficient air-programming, which are very common requirements in many large-scale applications. In this paper, we describe the system architecture and design methodology of an ASCI-based sensor network device to meet those attributes for a class of applications. Compared with existing works, the unique features of the sensor device include: (1) a module- based extensible processor and co-processor cooperation architecture is designed with application-specific components to accelerate the signal collection, processing, and networking via hardware-software co-design to balance computation efficiency and design flexibility; (2) a program protection mechanism is developed based on unresemble coder algorithm to protect the program data from being read out by system intruders so as to improve the security of the sensor device; (3) an air- programming component is proposed to enable an efficient remote programming which is a very common requirement in network deployment and maintenance. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of the prototype sensor device based on a general configurable FPGA platform for developing next-generation sensor devices. Initial results of the first version of prototype chip will also be introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper mainly deals with the statistical processing methods in wireless filed strength prediction process after sampling data are collected. The conventional standard for data collection and statistical processing in the prediction of wireless filed strength is Lee's criteria. It utilizes linear averaging to process sampling data, as many other related papers discussed. However, the accuracy of such first order moment estimation is low, especially under serious Rayleigh fading channels. As regards to the defects of the method, we propose four novel statistical processing methods to process the collected data for wireless field strength. Computer simulations and corresponding analysis verify its much better prediction results with small estimation variances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel architecture designed for low power consumption, in which low computational complexity and reliability have also been important design constraints. It is suitable for sensor-actuator systems, is based on IEEE 802.15.4 and constitutes a more lightweight alternative than Zigbee. We provide a vision of how we have solved some problems that are out of the scope of IEEE 802.15.4 like addressing scheme, topology control, multi-hop synchronization, tasks scheduling, application data model, and other points related to software and hardware considered to extend the battery life. We have designed a centralized method for scheduling the beacon transmission time. Unlike the distributed one used by Zigbee, our method avoids beacon overlapping in any case and does not require the publication of information in the beacon payload. The proposed addressing scheme also does not require the publication of the depth of coordinators. Both methods allow us to implement efficient algorithms, reduce the memory used to store the network tables, and shorten the beacon payload, what entails a significant energy saving. These solutions together with others presented in this paper allow us to reach a battery life longer than 31 months for sensors and 42 months for actuators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software Communication Architecture (SCA) provides a framework for developing Software Defined Radios (SDR). Theoretically, SCA compliant SDRs are supposed to have the capability of self-configuring and switching from one wireless protocol to any other. However, conventional SDRs running standard upper layer protocol stack fail to switch wireless protocols on the fly retaining all the connections and incur large delay. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for wireless protocol switching that is free from these problems. We base our approach on dual or multiple antennas operable by SDR software. The main contribution of this paper is the Hot Swapping Middleware (HSM) that ensures seamless switching between wireless protocols without affecting the application performance. HSM manages IP addressing issues transparently and ensures in order delivery of data packets without loss. Our proposal is free from any requirement of infrastructure support, light weight and easily SCA component upgradeable. Simulation, results show that our proposal improves the total data transfer of applications in an SDR by more than 25%. We also have developed a proof-of-concept prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controlling the electric appliances is the essential technique in the home automation, and wireless communication between the residence gateway and electric appliances is one of the most important parts in the home network system. In these days, most of the electric appliances are controlled by infrared remote controllers. However, it is very difficult to connect most of the electric appliances to a home network, since the communication protocols are different. In this paper, we propose an integrated remote controller to control electric appliances in the home network with no extra attachment of communication device to the appliances using ZigBee protocol and infrared remote controller technology. The integrated remote controller system for home automation is composed of integrated remote controller, ZigBee to infrared converter, and ZigBee power adapter. ZigBee power adapter is introduced for some appliances which do not have even infrared remote device to be connected in home network. This paper presents a prototype of the proposed system and shows a scheme for the implementation. It provides high flexibility for the users to configure and manage a home network in order to control electric appliances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose and analyze efficient frame synchronization and frequency offset compensation scheme with ternary sequences for an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system in Rayleigh fading channels. In order to enhance performance on frame synchronization and frequency offset compensation, we add a ternary sequence to OFDM signals in the time domain. The performance is evaluated in terms of correlation characteristics and r.m.s frequency error. From the simulation results, it is confirmed that the proposed scheme achieve improved performance compared with the existing schemes. The results of the paper can find its applications to design of synchronization block of OFDM scheme for wireless multimedia communication services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, visible light communication (VLC) technology has been gaining attention in both academia and industry. This is driven by the progress of white light emitting diode (LED) technology for solid-state lighting (SSL) and the potential of simultaneously using such LEDs for illumination and indoor wireless data transmission. This paper provides an overview about the technology and describes the physical layer implementation of a VLC system based on a modified version of the classical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation technique. Besides, the paper presents a hardware prototype for short-range broadcasting using a white LED lamp. The OFDM system runs on DSP development boards. Off-the-shelf 9 LEDs and a single photodiode (PD) are utilized to build the analog front ends. The prototype allows investigating the influence of the electrical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), constellation order, and channel coding on the bit-error performance. Theoretical and experimental results on optical path loss show close match. In this context, the influence of the LED beam angle on the horizontal coverage is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents intelligent Communication protocols for universal access in a proposed Vehicular Networking Device. The device can communicate on multiple frequency bands using different MAC and PHY Interfaces. The device cannot use existing routing protocols as they are limited and work in relation with a unique MAC and PHY Interface. This paper presents the communication protocols and vehicular device that extends the routing protocols to work as a Cognitive layer over multiple MAC and PHY Interface for optimum connectivity, seamless switching and Quality of Service parameters. The device is tested with three extended routing protocols AOD V-MI, GOLSR-MI and SORP. The device incorporates integrated multi telecommunication technologies like GSM, Satellite, VHF, UHF, HF, Broadband Wireless and wired links. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the business model and Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution are proposed for the home TV based on Scalable Video Coding and convergent networks. In this environment, the TV program is broadcasted via Digital Video Broadcasting for Handheld Terminals (DVB-H) to mobile phones, the access right is transmitted by Global System for Mobile communication (GSM/GPRS) channel, and the TV program can also be transmitted from mobile phones to home TV through WiFi. The typical application scenario is that the TV program with low quality (base layer) in the mobile phone can be enriched by enhancement information and shown on home TV. The business model is presented to pay for the enhancement information, and the DRM solution is proposed for solving the copyright issues in the convergence between the DVB-H broadcasting, GSM/GPRS and home network. Since few work has been done to solve this problem, the work proposed in this paper is expected to attract more researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an information fusion based smart home control system. The proposed control framework includes an internet access and information acquisition module, in-house networking services with bluetooth wireless connectivity, an information fusion based controller using fuzzy logic and fuzzy neural network, and embedded computational units in home appliances. It integrates information from multiple sources to control home appliances to create the smart home environment. The detailed description of the proposed system, from design to implementation, is given in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new fast forward error correction (FEC) allocation algorithm for unequal error protection (UEP) of video transmission over wireless channels is proposed in this paper. First, an UEP scheme, which takes into consideration the non-uniformly distributed importance of frames in a group of pictures (GOP) and macroblocks in a video frame, is proposed. An enhanced video error propagation model, namely expected number of macroblocks error propagation (ENMEP) is also proposed in this paper to measure the amount of error propagation caused by transmission errors. Finally, by making use of our proposed ENMEP error propagation model, a fast FEC allocation algorithm for our proposed UEP scheme is also proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms the previous UEP scheme and the classical equal error protection (EEP) scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an application of Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology, consisting on the injection of pulsed UWB signals on Community Antenna Television (CATV) installations. This approach offers the cable installers the possibility for a wide range of new data and multimedia channels on existing CA TV installations, with a minimum cost and without altering the transmission of the traditional radio and television channels. The goal of this study has been to estimate the signal levels for which no harmful interference exists for the currently deployed services. Simulations and practical experiments were undertaken, and are presented and discussed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an ejJicient discrete-time bandpass sigma-delta (.ZA) modulator and digital in-phase /quadrature (I/Q) demodulator for multistandard wireless applications. The proposed bandpass IA modulator provides higher speed using advanced switched-capacitor resonators which are faster than the conventional ones. The test chip has been implemented in a 0.18 jim CMOS process and occupied with the active chip area of 0.16 mm2. The power consumption of the fabricated chip is 2.34 mWwith a 1.8 Vsupply voltage. The measured peak signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) are 34 dBfor 1.536 MHz (T-DMB), 26 dB for 5 MHz (UMTS), and 20 dB for 10MHz (WiBro) bandwidths, respectively. This paper also covers the simple and robust digital I/Q demodulator which has been realized using a field programmable gate array (FPGA) for digital signal processing'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a movement-aware vertical (MA V) handover algorithm between WLAN and Mobile WiMAX for seamless ubiquitous access. An MA V handover algorithm is proposed in this paper to exploit movement pattern for avoiding unnecessary handovers in the integrated WLAN and Mobile WiMAX networks. If a mobile station (MS) `s velocity is high and its movement pattern is irregular, unnecessary handovers likely occur more frequently. Therefore, the MS velocity and moving pattern are important factors for the handover decision procedure. To avoid unnecessary handovers, the MA V handover algorithm adjusts the dwell time adaptively and predicts the residual time in the cell of target base station (BS). Consequently, the adaptive dwell timer of MA V handover algorithm allows an MS a better connection as long as possible. Our simulation results show that the reduction of unnecessary handovers by leads to sign significant throughput improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present the ubiquitous services system that provides multimedia services, surveillance services and remote control services. This ubiquitous services system keeps the service session based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and supports the uniform interface for connecting the selected service to a suitable device by the operation of a general touch event. The service session of the ubiquitous services system is preserved even though an end-user moves from one computing environment to others. For getting the connected ubiquitous services, all that he has to do is to carry a small mobile pad, such as PDA or Cellular phone, which shows a list of devices that he can use as I/O devices of the on-going service session. He does not have to re-setup the session. When he clicks and selects the proper device among the devices listed on the pad, the session is immediately migrated to the selected device. In this paper, we describe the design of ubiquitous services system based on SIP and X.10 that supports both the user mobility and service session preservation in the ubiquitous wired/wireless network environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The key features for modulation classification must be selected. In this paper, we proposed the novel key feature, Occupied Bandwidth, which has robust properties of sensitive with modulation types and insensitive with SNR variation. In this paper, the numerical simulations of the five types of modulation classifiers are performed, and the prototype modulation classifier implemented as part of reconfigurable software radio evaluated using field trials. The numerical simulations for classifying both analog and digital modulation types using the same seven features including the proposed a novel feature are performed. Existing technology is able to classify reliably (accuracy > = 90%) only at SNR above 10dB when a large range of modulation types including both digital and analog is being considered. The simulation result indicated that all five classifiers showed performance enhancement over the 95% of correct classification at the SNR of 10dB. Especially, it was shown that minimum distance classifier and support vector classifier can achieve the probability of correct classification of 96.2% and 98.3% at the SNR of 5dB, respectively. These good results for signals with low SNR (below 10dB) came from the large effects of robust properties of a novel feature. The prototype of modulation classifier was implemented with one of decision tree classifiers, because of the requirement of fast processing in reconfigurable software radio. With the result of field trials, we confirmed that the performance in the prototype of modulation classifier was agreed with the numerical simulation result of decision tree classifier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IEEE 802.15.4 is an emerging standard specifically designed for low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPAN) with a focus on enabling the wireless sensor networks. It attempts to provide a low data rate, low power, and low cost wireless networking on the device-level communication. In this paper, we have established a realistic environment for the preliminary performance evaluation of the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless networks. Several sets of practical experiments are conducted to study its various features, including the effects of 1) the direct and indirect data transmissions, 2) CSMA-CA mechanism, 3) data payload size, and 4) beacon-enabled mode. The data throughput, delivery ratio, and received signal strength indication (RSSI) are investigated as the performance metrics. The results show that IEEE 802.15.4 has better performance in non-beacon mode. Some issues that could degrade the network performance are also discussed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been many papers concerning about the Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) reduction and High Power Amplifier (HPA) linearization techniques for wireless OFDM communication systems. Few papers, however, make deep analysis on the relation between these two techniques. Based on Saleh's memoryless Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier (TWTA) model, computer simulations and analysis in this paper demonstrates that, especially when the HPA is working near or in the saturation region, a predistorter will cease to be in effect. In such cases, PAPR reduction techniques may be resorted to help to improve the Adjacent Channel Interference (ACI), BER performances and HPA efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews various schemes for Smart Acoustic Volume Controllers(SVCs) for consumer electronics such as Televisions, Car Stereo systems, CD Players, AM/FM Radio, Telephones, Mobile Phones etc. There are several instances of applications of smart volume controllers in consumer electronic devices. In car stereo systems, the volume level automatically dips when the system detects the telephone ringing. The mobile with smart volume controller provides an improved speech quality even in the presence of high background noises levels. The smart volume controller for television will even out any variations in volume levels from one channel to another and program to program, thus delivering an improvement in perceived quality to the consumer. The smart volume controllers can be personalized to suit the individual's hearing requirements. This paper also reviews several soft computing techniques for smart volume control such as fuzzy logic control, neural control, neuro-fuzzy control etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless ad-hoc Networks are a key technology for the set up of home AV distribution system and the services supported to the consumer. Broad market penetration of such networks leads to high densities of active transmission links. The paper describes related problems and a solution approach based on the physical layer of the IEEE 802.11 standard The concept of cooperative nodes introduced in the paper might be helpful to set up self organizing networks with high spectral efficiency for consumer homes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the advances in wireless communication and electronics have accelerated to develop many wireless network solutions to replace existing wired networks. A wireless network solution can support mobility and flexibility of nodes in a network. Especially in sensor networks, it has many advantages to replace cables with wireless logical links. On the other hand, Bluetooth is generally considered as a promising short-range wireless technology because of its inexpensive cost, low power and small size, and thus Bluetooth has been gaining increasing interest from various industries. For the above reasons, we adopt Bluetooth technology for a wireless sensor network which is designed for security systems. Since Bluetooth will continue to be a feature found in many devices, it is worthwhile to investigate its use in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we describe a Bluetooth wireless sensor network for security systems, which includes the implementation issues about system architecture, power management, self- configuration of network, and routing. We think that the methods or algorithms described in this paper can be easily applied to other embedded Bluetooth applications for wireless networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video over wireless communication (VoW) has a lot of potential applications in home and office environment. The emergence of two new technologies, namely Bluetooth and MPEG-4, will prove useful in implementing VoW Video transmission over wireless channel can be made possible by transmitting MPEG-4 bit streams over Bluetooth channels. This paper presents the implementation details of MPEG-4 coded video transmission over Bluetooth (MPEG4BT) via Host Controller Interface (HCI) A detailed set of testing scenarios and results obtained after actual video transmission are presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel cooperative transmission and reception scheme in Visible Light Communications (VLC) is proposed and evaluated. This new scheme provides improvements and reliability in large indoor scenarios, such as corridors, laboratories, shops or conference rooms, where the coverage needs to be obtained by using different access points when VLC is used. The main idea behind the proposal is a simple cooperative transmission scheme where the receiver terminal will obtain the signal from different access points at the same time. This proposal outperforms traditional VLC schemes, especially in Non-Line-of-Sight reception where around 3 dB of gain, with respect to traditional schemes, can be obtained for unoptimized parameters, and larger than 3 dB could easily be achieved. The cooperation is studied in terms of the percentage of light coming from the main access point and a parameter called sidelobes? amplitude level. The performance is evaluated according to the location within the atto-cell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While energy consumption is widely considered the primary challenge of wireless networked devices, energy harvesting emerges as a promising way of powering the Internet of Things (IoT). In the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer of the communication stack, energy harvesting introduces spatial and temporal uncertainty in the availability of energy. In this context, this paper focuses on the design and implementation of the MAC layer of wireless embedded systems that are powered by energy harvesting; providing novel protocol features and practical experiences to designers of consumer electronics who opt for tailoring their own protocol solutions instead of using the standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wearable wireless devices and ubiquitous computing are expected to grow significantly in the coming years. Standard inputs such as a mouse and keyboard are not well suited for such mobile systems and gestures are seen as an effective alternative to these classic input styles. This paper examines gesture recognition algorithms that use an inertial sensor worn on the forearm. The recognition algorithms use the sensor's quaternion orientation in either a Hidden Markov Model or Markov Chain based approach. A set of six gestures were selected to fit within the context of an active video game. Despite the fact that the Hidden Markov Model is one of the most commonly used methods for gesture recognition, the experiments showed that the Markov Chain based algorithms outperformed the Hidden Markov Model. The Markov Chain algorithm obtained an average accuracy of 95%, while also having a much faster computation time, making it better suited for real time applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Near Field Communication (NFC) has been used for short range communications in a number of applications for consumer electronics devices. Specifically, NFC has been used in electronic payment systems. To ensure secure communications, security protocols for various NFC applications have been proposed. Recently, a conditional privacy preserving security protocol was introduced. However this paper demonstrates that the protocol is vulnerable to two impersonations attacks and then proposes a new secure pseudonym-based NFC protocol that eliminates vulnerabilities of the previous security protocol. Security and performance analysis results confirm that the proposed protocol could solve security problems of the previously introduced NFC security protocol with a marginal computational cost increase1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless networks provide a convenient means of seamless roaming services using portable consumer electronics communication devices (e.g., mobile devices, MDs), but ensuring robust security in wireless roaming is still challenging. However, to prevent wireless roaming services joining from malicious users/MDs, a secure and robust authentication model is highly desirable that can ensure adequate security. This paper exploits the concept of a delegation system and introduces a delegation-based robust authentication model for protecting wireless roaming services from unauthorized user ? by means of portable communication devices (MDs). To perform robust authentication, the proposed scheme utilizes the biometric and defends roaming services from popular attacks and frauds. Security analysis is provided to guarantee that the proposed model provides unlinkability, and resists to denial-of-service and man-in-the middle attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a cognitive radio system (CRS) that complies with the maximum allowable transmit power and emission limits of TV band devices (TVBDs). The CRS consists of a TVBD that uses the existing Wi-Fi module and two Wi-Fi modules operating in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. Design methods are proposed for a radio frequency (RF) module, a digital signal processing (DSP) module, and a circuit for transmit-receive mode switching in the TV band device (TVBD). The performance of the implemented TVBD is investigated in both wired and wireless environments. The measured data rates of the implemented TVBD at the application layer are approximately 60 % of the theoretical data rates at the physical layer in the Wi-Fi system. The service coverage of a TVBD network is also measured according to several modulation and coding schemes (MCSs) of the TVBD for a single spatial stream. The coverage measurements of a TVBD network are conducted in both a suburban area, Jeju Island, and a nearly open area, Incheon, South Korea. The results show that the service coverage of a mobile network in TV white space (TVWS) can be enlarged by more than 2 km in the suburban area and by more than 8 km in the nearly open area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A loss of subchannel orthogonality due to time variant multipath channels in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems leads to interchannel interference (ICI) which increases the error floor in proportion to the Doppler frequency. This paper proposes a simple precoding and detection scheme which can compensate for the effect of ICI in multipath fading channel. In this scheme, the data symbols modulated in frequency domain are divided into several groups, and the precoding is performed by inserting several redundancy carriers at both sides of each data group. Then the simplified ICI cancelation can be achieved at the receiver through inverse fast Fourier transform(IFFT) of grouped data symbols followed by traditional detection method, such as minimum mean-square error (MMSE) and zero forcing (ZF). The proposed scheme has the robust performance and low complexity. More important it does not require any channel state information. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme keeps good performance in high speed scenario even when the vehicle velocity is over 500km/h. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a new Scalable Video Codec (SVC)-based hybrid adaptive video streaming scheme, named HAVS, for mobile devices in wireless environments. The proposed approach takes two existing video streaming technologies, viz., progressive download and adaptive streaming, and switches them in a hybrid manner. To this end, HAVS employs the H.264/SVC encoding scheme, where each video chunk is encoded into one base layer and several enhancement layers. Since clients request the base layer every time a video is streamed, HAVS performs progressive download for the base layer and adaptive streaming for the enhancement layers. Through wireless test-bed experiments, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme can be easily implemented on mobile devices without any server-side modification. This scheme effectively prevents video freeze thereby providing better quality video streaming than the existing non-hybrid streaming technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]