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An opportunistic network is a wireless ad hoc network that has frequently intermittent connectivity due to nodes’ mobility. These spare, unpredictable networks aim to solve the prolonged delay paths by a store-carry-forward scheme. It is difficult to determine the appropriate nodes to forward the messages since there are few opportunistic contacts. The nodes might decide based on the obtained data of the network as a guide to reach a destination. The aforementioned technique is not helpful in case the rate of change in the network topology is higher than the rate of data gathering due to usage restrictions and uncertain available information/knowledge of the future contacts. In this paper, to cope with the challenges imposed by the un-deterministic environment, a risk assessment strategy is considered to evaluate the short and long-term impact of each decision to find the optimal node/paths. This routing scheme can take advantage of the unanticipated connection to make the routing more flexible in short time and with less buffer usage. Our proposed risk assessment algorithms that are based on MALP are mixed with the knowledge about buffer management and network capacity. The prioritized messages to be disseminated as well as better decision to take a risk are the main contributions of this paper. Moreover, the self-adaptive threshold, distributed PID controller, is considered to tackle different threshold levels for each node individually. Numerical results prove that the proposed method drastically increases the delivery ratio and also minimizes the risk of exceeding resource consumption and packet loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A cooperative wireless-powered communication network protocol is proposed, in which user far away from a hybrid access point (H-AP) is capable of harvesting wireless powers by overhearing the uplink signals of users that are relatively nearer to the H-AP, in addition to downlink signal broadcast by the H-AP. In this setting, time allocations for the downlink transmission of the H-AP and the uplink transmission for the users are jointly optimized for two different purposes. First, the weighted sum-rate maximization problem is solved for a given total transmission time. Then, the total transmission time is minimized under a minimum rate constraint, and an efficient algorithm is also presented to solve the optimal solution by a line search strategy. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed schemes significantly increase the far user's rate, which in turn improves user fairness and transmission delay. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are mobile networks, which are automatically outspread on a geographically limited region, without requiring any preexisting infrastructure. Mostly, nodes are both self-governed and self-organized without requiring a central monitoring. Because of their distributed characteristic, MANETs are vulnerable to a particular routing misbehavior, called wormhole attack. In wormhole attack, one attacker node tunnels packet from its position to the other attacker nodes. Such wormhole attack results in a fake route with fewer hop count. If source node selects this fictitious route, attacker nodes have the options of delivering the packets or dropping them. For this reason, this paper proposes an improvement over AODV routing protocol to design a wormhole-immune routing protocol. The proposed protocol called defending against wormhole attack (DAWA) employs fuzzy logic system and artificial immune system to defend against wormhole attacks. DAWA is evaluated through extensive simulations in the NS-2 environment. The results show that DAWA outperforms other existing solutions in terms of false negative ratio, false positive ratio, detection ratio, packet delivery ratio, packets loss ratio and packets drop ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three factors have been often shown to significantly affect the reliability of real-time transmission in wireless local area networks-transmission rate, power, and packet size. We analyze these factors and determine the optimal combination of factors subject to time constraints that yields the most reliable transmission of real-time data. We propose a cross-layer framework to jointly design the routing and MAC protocol combined with our optimization approach. The approach under a non-real-time routing protocol that produces a path metric is compared with a real-time routing protocol. Additionally, the real-time routing protocol enhances a guaranteed rate with our approach. Our experiments reveal that real-time performance in terms of miss ratio and throughput is significantly increased in lossy link and heavy traffic environments. Miss ratio and average throughput are improved by up to 30% over a state-of-the art routing protocol and 35% over a MAC protocol, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid increase of space applications, the amount of information to be transmitted between spacecrafts and ground stations increases exponentially and space–sky–ground Transport Control Protocol (TCP) network is highly demanded. However, the traditional TCP cannot be directly applied to space data communication. This article deeply studies the TCP/Network Coding (NC), which can effectively improve terrestrial wireless communication system throughput. Combined with characteristics of Space Communication Protocol Specification-Transport Protocol (SCPS-TP) and advantages of terrestrial TCP/NC, an improved protocol referred to as SCPS-TP/NC, is proposed for space data communication. This article provides detailed process of protocol design, mathematical modelling and throughput analysis of the proposed SCPS-TP/NC. Finally, we implement the SCPS-TP/NC protocol and evaluate its performance by Network Simulator (Version 2). Simulation results show that SCPS-TP/NC can effectively increase the end-to-end system throughput, reduce the packet loss rate, shorten the transmission delay and improve the Quality of Service (QoS) of space data communication to a certain degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transmission of system-critical control information plays a key role in efficient management of limited wireless network resources and successful reception of payload data information. This paper uses an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) architecture to investigate the detection performance of a time-domain approach used to detect deterministic control signalling information. It considers a type of control information chosen from a finite set of information, which is known at both transmitting and receiving wireless terminals. Unlike the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation method, which is often used, the time-domain detection technique requires no channel estimation and no pilots as it uses a form of time-domain correlation as the means of detection. Results show that when compared with the ML method, the time-domain approach improves detection performance even in the presence of synchronisation error caused by carrier frequency offset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buffer sizing is an important network configuration parameter that impacts the quality of service characteristics of data traffic. With falling memory costs and the fallacy that "more is better," network devices are being overprovisioned with large buffers. This may increase queueing delays experienced by a packet and subsequently impact stability of core protocols such as TCP. The problem has been studied extensively for wired networks. However, there is little work addressing the unique challenges of wireless environments such as time-varying channel capacity, variable packet inter-service time, and packet aggregation, among others. In this article we discuss these challenges, classify the current state-of-the-art solutions, discuss their limitations, and provide directions for future research in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Liu, Y.; Xu, Y.; Zhang, K., and Feng, Y., 2019. Hardware design of marine buoy data communication terminal based on the 1st generation Beidou navigation positioning system. In: Guido-Aldana, P.A. and Mulahasan, S. (eds.), Advances in Water Resources and Exploration. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 93, pp. 639–645. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Aiming at the actual situation of marine buoy data monitoring and the problems of poor anti-interference performance, low fault tolerance coefficient and high energy consumption in current communication system, the hardware design of marine buoy data communication terminal based on the 1st generation Beidou navigation positioning system is proposed. Based on the marine buoy system, the overall structure of communication terminal is designed. The main components of the hardware are Beidou communication module and wireless network communication module, and the auxiliary parts are antenna and power supply module. The long-distance part uses the inherent data transmission mode of Beidou navigation system to communicate, while the short-range part uses the radio network communication protocol to complete the data transmission. There are two UART interfaces in the hardware, one is connected with the auxiliary cabin, which is responsible for receiving the related data of the auxiliary cabin, including azimuth, attitude and pressure sensing, and the other UART interface is connected with the Beidou communication module, which is responsible for receiving positioning and navigation data and transmitting remote data. The experimental results show that the design has high signal-to-noise ratio, strong fault-tolerant performance, high positioning accuracy and communication success rate, low energy consumption and perfect performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) performs poorly over wireless networks. Some research indicates that the TCP congestion control mechanism may cause burstiness in the traffic flow. Numerous TCP segments are delivered simultaneously, while an acknowledgement of a retransmission is successfully received. Burstiness leads to a highly contentious network, which markedly increases the probability of packet loss on wireless networks. TCP pacing is a possible solutions for TCP burstiness on multi-hop networks. In this algorithm, TCP segment transmissions are distributed over the whole Round Trip Time. Most pacing protocols attempt to insert a delay interval into the TCP transmissions. However, there is a similar pacing algorithm in IEEE802.11, known as the contention window mechanism. In this paper, we first measure and analyze the way that the contention window size affects TCP throughput in different scenarios. We propose a cross-layer TCP pacing protocol by contention control in the MAC layer, called TCP Contention Control (TCP-CC). It adjusts the lower bound of the contention window in order to optimize the overall TCP throughput in both one-hop and multi-hop topology. Finally, comparative simulations are conducted in order to verify the improvements of our protocol on both TCP Reno and TCP Vegas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IP-enabled sensors can be globally addressable by any Internet-connected entity, and therefore, their protection presents different challenges than that of traditional sensors, as they are subject to any potential attacker in the Internet. For this reason, specific security protocols must be developed to address the security requirements of IP-enabled sensors. An interesting approach to achieve this aim is the Ladon security protocol, which allows resource-deprived devices to efficiently implement end-to-end authentication, authorisation and key establishment mechanisms. However, in so limited environments such as sensor networks, not only efficient protocols must be defined, but they must also be optimally parameterised. This paper constitutes a step forward in this direction. First, a state transition model of the Ladon protocol is presented to analytically describe its behaviour. Then, this model is used to select the most effective parameterisation of the protocol in terms of message retransmissions and execution of cryptographic operations. The obtained results show that the selected parameterisation allows maximising the probability of a successful secure session establishment, while keeping the overhead introduced by the protocol low. Additionally, the performance comparison carried out shows that Ladon outperforms alternative approaches to achieve the same objective in terms of message transmission and reception operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks, mWSNs, have attracted a lot of attention recently. This is because sink mobility can greatly alleviate the hotspot issue in WSNs and further prolong the network lifetime. However, sink mobility also causes unexpected changes in network topology and data routing paths, which can largely affect the routing performance in such networks. Design of efficient routing protocols for mWSNs has been a critical issue, and much work has been carried out in this aspect. In this article, we first classify existing protocols based on different design criteria and then present a survey of the state-of-the-art routing protocols in this area. We illustrate how each of the protocols works, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we point out some future directions for efficient routing in mWSNs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider an erasure multi-way relay channel (EMWRC) in which several users share their data through a relay over erasure links. Assuming no feedback channel between the users and the relay, we first identify the challenges for designing a data sharing scheme over an EMWRC. Then, to overcome these challenges, we propose practical low-latency and low-complexity data sharing schemes based on fountain coding. Later, we introduce the notion of end-to-end erasure rate (EEER) and analytically derive it for the proposed schemes. EEER is then used to calculate the achievable rate and transmission overhead of the proposed schemes. Using EEER and computer simulations, the achievable rates and transmission overhead of our proposed schemes are compared with the ones of one-way relaying. This comparison implies that when the number of users and the channel erasure rates are not large, our proposed schemes outperform one-way relaying. We also find an upper bound on the achievable rates of EMWRC and observe that depending on the number of users and channel erasure rates, our proposed solutions can perform very close to this bound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Security protocols operating over wireless channels can incur significant communication costs (e.g., energy, delay), especially under adversarial attacks unique to the wireless environment such as signal jamming, fake signal transmission, etc. Since wireless devices are resource constrained, it is important to optimize security protocols for wireless environments by taking into account their communication costs. Towards this goal, we first present a novel application of a signal-flow-based approach to analyze the communication costs of security protocols in the presence of adversaries. Our approach models a protocol run as a dynamic probabilistic system and then utilizes Linear System theory to evaluate the moment generating function of the end-to-end cost. Applying this technique to the problem of secret key exchange over a wireless channel, we quantify the efficiency of existing families of key exchange cryptographic protocols, showing, for example, that an ID-based approach can offer an almost 10-fold improvement in energy consumption when compared to a traditional PKI-based protocol. We then present a new key exchange protocol that combines traditional cryptographic methods with physical-layer techniques, including the use of “ephemeral” spreading codes, cooperative jamming, and role-switching. Utilizing signal flow analysis, we demonstrate that this new protocol offers performance advantages over traditional designs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We study the capacity scaling laws for the cognitive network that consists of the primary hybrid network (PhN) and secondary ad hoc network (SaN). PhN is further comprised of an ad hoc network and a base station-based (BS-based) network. SaN and PhN are overlapping in the same deployment region, operate on the same spectrum, but are independent with each other in terms of communication requirements. The primary users (PUs), i.e., the ad hoc nodes in PhN, have the priority to access the spectrum. The secondary users (SUs), i.e., the ad hoc nodes in SaN, are equipped with cognitive radios, and have the functionalities to sense the idle spectrum and obtain the necessary information of primary nodes in PhN. We assume that PhN adopts one out of three classical types of strategies, i.e., pure ad hoc strategy, BS-based strategy, and hybrid strategy. We aim to directly derive multicast capacity for SaN to unify the unicast and broadcast capacities under two basic principles: 1) The throughput for PhN cannot be undermined in order sense due to the presence of SaN. 2) The protocol adopted by PhN does not alter in the interest of SaN, anyway. Depending on which type of strategy is adopted in PhN, we design the optimal-throughput strategy for SaN. We show that there exists a threshold of the density of SUs according to the density of PUs beyond which it can be proven that: 1) when PhN adopts the pure ad hoc strategy or hybrid strategy, SaN can achieve the multicast capacity of the same order as it is stand-alone; 2) when PhN adopts the BS-based strategy, SaN can asymptotically achieve the multicast capacity of the same order as if PhN were absent, if some specific conditions in terms of relations among the numbers of SUs, PUs, the destinations of each multicast session in SaN, and BSs in PhN hold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ground plane of a handset device plays an important role in the radiation process. As a consequence, through a ground plane modification, it is possible to obtain a multiband performance while keeping small antenna dimensions. Numerical simulation using Method of Moments has been used to understand the effect of the slots and a prototype has been built to validate the solution. The proposal consists in a multiband planar monopole handset antenna featuring a small area of 13 mm × 11 mm with a slotted ground plane operating in multiple communication standards (GSM850, GSM900, DCS, PCS, UMTS, LTE2300, WiMAX, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi). Thanks to the presence of the slots, the bandwidth and efficiency results have been significantly improved. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 55:173-180, 2013; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.27232 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The throughput performance of cooperative repetition and parallel coding in incremental decode-and-forward is investigated. Four transmission methods are considered: parallel coding with and without distributed space-time coding (PC-ST and PC, respectively); and repetition coding with and without Chase combining at the destination (RC and SC, respectively). The analysis is based on the mutual information seen at the receiver for each scheme. Exact expressions for the outage probability and throughput for all methods are derived. Both ad-hoc and infra-structured relaying scenarios are investigated. Results show that SC can perform very close to RC, PC and PC-ST in terms of throughput, specially in the case of infra-structured relaying or adequate power and rate allocation. The conclusion is that SC would be a better option in practice, since it requires a simpler receiver than PC-ST, PC, and RC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperative communication could enhance the performance of wireless communications by allowing nodes to cooperate with each other to provide spatial diversity gain. In cooperative communications, rational helper selection is an important issue to obtain good cooperative gain at destinations. There are many works on this topic; however, most of them are based on hop-by-hop model and few works investigate how to select helpers for the nodes in a multi-hop path to optimize the end-to-end performance. The helper selection for one node could affect the helper selection for other nodes on the same route and in turn affect end-to-end performance. In other words, the traditional hop-by-hop helper selection methods could not lead to optimal performance in multi-hop environments. To solve this, this paper firstly defines a novel cooperation mode, named segment cooperation, and deduces the capacity and outage probability of cooperation segment. Then new performance metrics, end-to-end capacity and end-to-end outage probability, are defined to measure the end-to-end performance of multi-hop route. Finally, a segment cooperation method is proposed to maximize these metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the authors consider the benefits of mobile terminals (MTs) with different access points (APs) for uplink and downlink transmission to conserve MTs' energy. In traditional cellular networks, an MT is typically associated with a single AP. However, as wireless networks evolve, heterogeneous and/or overlay deployment scenario become viable and an MT can be associated with different APs for uplink and downlink transmission. The authors call this 'dual APs association'. The authors show that allowing dual APs association provides a significant gain on the uplink system capacity and/or the uplink transmit power savings. As a specific example of the use of dual APs, the authors focus on relay networks and show that considering the relay cost further increases the benefits of this approach. Based on extensive simulations using IEEE 802.16m relay network Evaluation Methodology, the authors demonstrate that dual APs can improve the uplink harmonic capacity by 350% or reduce the uplink transmit power by 7 dB. The authors note, however, that there exists a signalling cost in implementing dual APs association, which needs be overcome to achieve these substantial performance improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities worldwide have planned and implemented large-scale wireless mesh network (WMN) deployments. These mesh deployments are expected to provide broadband mobile access to the Internet at a low cost to the user. This paper considers the fairness problem affecting nodes in multihop WMNs. Many existing approaches to coping with the fairness problem are unsuitable because they necessitate modifications to the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol or node queueing operations. Such modifications require a change in hardware/firmware at every node in the WMN. Thus, these approaches are less favorable from the points of view of interoperability and cost. Without modifying the lower layer protocols, this study identifies TCP parameters that impact throughput fairness and proposes an adjustment to these parameters to reduce frame collisions and to improve throughput fairness. Using simple mathematical formulations and ns2 simulations, this study shows that the frame transmissions from each node can be effectively controlled by properly controlling the delayed ACK timer and by using a suitable advertised window. The proposed method, in addition to fairness, requires fewer buffer resources than other methods. Moreover, it is not sensitive to the carrier sense range. It is also simple and easy to deploy. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nodes in a wireless ad hoc network act as routers in a self-configuring network without infrastructure. An application running on the nodes in the ad hoc network may require that intermediate nodes act as routers, receiving and forwarding data packets to other nodes to overcome the limitations of noise, router congestion and limited transmission power. In existing routing protocols, the 'self-configuring' aspects of network construction have generally been limited to the construction of routes that minimize the number of intermediate nodes on a route while ignoring the effects that the resulting traffic has on the overall communication capacity of the network. This paper presents a context-aware routing metric that factors the effects of environmental noise and router congestion into a single time-based metric, and further presents a new cross-layer routing protocol, called Warp-5 (Wireless Adaptive Routing Protocol, Version 5), that uses the new metric to make better routing decisions in heterogeneous network systems. Simulation results for Warp-5 are presented and compared to the existing, well-known AODV ( Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector) routing protocol and the reinforcement-learning based routing protocol, Q-routing. The results show Warp-5 to be superior to shortest path routing protocols and Q-routing for preventing router congestion and packet loss due to noise. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper reports a feasibility analysis of the use of a hybrid control network based on the Common Industrial Protocol (CIP). For this feasibility analysis, the message service time between DeviceNet and the wireless devices is investigated. The feasibility of hybrid control networks is analyzed using a mathematical analysis and experimental tests. The experimental results show the feasibility of the hybrid control networks in terms of the polling/COS service time and the average end-to-end delays. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In many wireless sensor network applications, nodes are mobile, while many protocols proposed for these networks assume a static network. Thus, it is important to evaluate if a traditional protocol designed for a static network can tolerate different levels of mobility. This paper provides an analytic model to investigate the effect of mobility on a well-known cluster-based protocol, LEACH. The model evaluates data loss after construction of the clusters due to node mobility, which can be used to estimate a proper update interval to balance the energy and data loss ratio. Thus, the results can help the network designer to adjust the topology update interval given a value of acceptable data loss threshold. A practical approach to increase the mobility tolerance of the protocol is applying a buffer zone to the transmission ranges of the nodes. The model is extended in order to consider the effect of buffer zone. To validate the analytic evaluations, extensive simulations are conducted and correctness of the evaluations is tightly verified. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The cognitive cooperative system with coexisting scenario of multiple primary users and one secondary capable of relaying is considered in this study. The primary users transmit packets in orthogonal subchannels. According to the cognitive principle, the secondary activity cannot interfere with the primary performance. Therefore in this study, the secondary user makes use of the spectrum when sensed idle. Based on the proposed media access control (MAC) protocol, the authors derive the stable throughput and delay slots expressions of each primary user with secondary relaying. They also achieve the stable network constraints of relaying probability ℇ, the feasible range of primary arrival rates and the maximum allowed secondary transmitting power which is to make a tradeoff between the stable throughput of the primary and secondary user. Simulation results show that secondary relaying can increase the primary and secondary throughput and also reduce the delay slots when designing an appropriate ℇ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless self-organizing networks (WSONs) have attracted considerable attention from the network research community; however, the key for their success is the rigorous validation of the properties of the network protocols. Applications of risk or those demanding precision (like alert-based systems) require a rigorous and reliable validation of deployed network protocols. While the main goal is to ensure the reliability of the protocols, validation techniques also allow the establishment of their correctness regarding the related protocols' requirements. Nevertheless, even if different communities have carried out intensive research activities on the validation domain, WSONs still raise new issues for and challenging constraints to these communities. We thus, advocate the use of complementary techniques coming from different research communities to efficiently address the validation of WSON protocols. The goal of this tutorial is to present a comprehensive review of the literature on protocol engineering techniques and to discuss difficulties imposed by the characteristics of WSONs on the protocol engineering community. Following the formal and nonformal classification of techniques, we provide a discussion about components and similarities of existing protocol validation approaches. We also investigate how to take advantage of such similarities to obtain complementary techniques and outline new challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a secure message transmission (SMT) scenario, a sender wants to send a message in a private and reliable way to a receiver. Sender and receiver are connected by n wires, t of which can be controlled by an adaptive adversary with unlimited computational resources. In Eurocrypt 2008, Garay and Ostrovsky considered an SMT scenario where sender and receiver have access to a public discussion channel and showed that secure and reliable communication is possible when n \geq t+1. In this paper, we will show that a secure protocol requires at least three rounds of communication and two rounds invocation of the public channel and hence give a complete answer to the open question raised by Garay and Ostrovsky. We also describe a round optimal protocol that has constant transmission rate over the public channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop an analytical energy efficiency model using dual switched branch diversity receiver in wireless sensor networks in fading environments. To adapt energy efficiency of sensor node to channel variations, the optimal packet length at the data link layer is considered. Within this model, the energy efficiency can be effectively improved for switch-and-stay combiner (SSC) receiver with optimal switching threshold. Moreover, to improve energy efficiency, we use error control of Bose-Chaudhuri-Hochquengh (BCH) coding for SSC-BPSK receiver node compared to one of non-diversity NCFSK receiver of sensor node. The results show that the BCH code for channel coding can improve the energy efficiency significantly for long link distance and various values of high energy consumptions over Rayleigh fading channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High data rate wireless technologies are now becoming a reality, and have spurred the development of new applications that were previously hindered by the lack of capacity. In particular, it is now possible to stream high definition movies from a laptop to a sound system and flat screen television seamlessly. One of the key enablers of such applications is the IEEE 802.15.3 medium access control (MAC) protocol, which is designed to support bandwidth intensive applications in wireless personal area networks (WPANs). A key observation is that a significant number of multi-media applications rely on the transmission control protocol (TCP). Unfortunately, little works have conducted a thorough performance study of TCP over the IEEE 802.15.3 MAC. Moreover, the IEEE 802.15.3 specification does not specify any strategies for allocating time slots. This paper therefore contributes to the current state-of-the-art in the following manners. From our extensive analytical and simulation studies, we reveal the impacts of different channel time allocation methods and acknowledgment policies on the performance of TCP, with particular attention on round trip time, congestion window growth, and packet recovery. We then present the following guidance to application developers: (1) channel time allocations (CTAs) should be distributed evenly over the superframe and have durations determined by TCP’s maximum congestion window, (2) CTA positioning has no impact on TCP’s performance, and (3) the specified delayed acknowledgment policy needs to be augmented with an adaptive algorithm that adjusts its burst size dynamically to varying bit error rate (BER). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent advances in wireless client devices and the crucial role of multimedia communications in our society have motivated relevant standardization efforts, such as the IP multimedia subsystem, to support session control, mobility, and interoperability in all-IP next-generation networks. IMS has already driven the design of commercial mobile multimedia, but exhibits limited support for service continuity during handoffs. In particular, it omits advanced techniques to reduce/eliminate handoff delays, especially during vertical handoffs (i.e., change of the wireless technology employed by a client to access the wired Internet, e.g., from UMTS to WiFi). We propose an original solution for session continuity based on the primary design guideline of cleanly and effectively separating the signaling plane (for session reconfiguration via SIP) from the media delivery plane (data transmission and related handoff management operations). Our optimized handoff management techniques exploit terminal-based decentralized predictions to minimize service-level handoff delays. Different from other recent related work, our proposal fully complies with the standard IMS infrastructure and works at the application level. The reported experimental results point out that our solution, available as an open source tool for the IMS community, reduces playout interruption times relevantly by introducing a limited and scalable signaling overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the exponential growth of the internet, wireless networks such as satellite networks are becoming increasingly popular. The characteristics of satellite networks such as long latency, large delay-bandwidth product, high bit error rate over satellite links and variable round trip time, severely degrade TCP/IP performance. At the conjunction of the satellite link and the fixed link, the basestation, the difference in capacity between the satellite link and the fixed link causes the basestation to experience congestion losses that adversely impact TCP performance. We propose a technique that substantially reduces the congestion at the base station and enforces fairness among the TCP connections that are sharing the satellite link. The technique does not require any change in the TCP sender or the receiver. The stability of our algorithm is analytically proven and its performance is evaluated using ns-2 simulations. Preliminary results yield almost a null congestion loss rate, a 60% decrease in average queue length, and more than 30% increase in the throughput. Fairness is well enforced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the number of powerful mobile devices with wireless connections rapidly increases, the demand for mobile services and database data in mobile settings has increased. This has given rise to a need for engineering database architectures that are suitable for such dynamic environments and also has given rise to the challenges of the service discovery techniques for MANET and has created opportunities for many new mobile applications. The most important thing is to allow mobile users to exchange data and use each other's services. Therefore, there are needs for data communication protocol and service discovery protocol. These are great challenges for MANET. The goal of this paper is to provide basic roles of MANET (allowing mobile users to exchange data and use each other's services), and get over the need for data communication protocol and service discovery protocol. In this paper we propose a framework which combines a data communication protocol that supports all three modes of MANET data communication and allows mobile applications to view these separate non-identical databases as one integrated database with a service discovery protocol that is directory-based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor networks are mainly designed for environment surveillance, wherein wireless sensor nodes cooperate to get their job done. Generally, wireless sensors are battery powered; therefore, it is crucial for them to efficiently use their battery resources. Most of the existing power-saving protocols achieve power savings by periodically putting sensor nodes to sleep. Such a regular sleep/awake mechanism fails to adjust a sensor node's sleep duration based on its traffic load, thus causing either lower power efficiency or higher latency. Furthermore, sensors may be deployed in hostile environments and may thus unexpectedly fail. Most power-saving protocols do not promptly react to such link breakage, resulting in long transmission delays. In this paper, we propose a quorum-basedmedium access control (QMAC) protocol that enables sensor nodes to sleep longer under light loads. Since traffic flows toward the sink node in wireless sensor networks, a new concept, i.e., the next-hop group, is also proposed to reduce transmission latency. Simulation results verify that the proposed QMAC saves more energy and keeps the transmission latency low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing work has shown that random coding across multicast sessions can significantly reduce system delay. However, such a scheme requires the strong assumption that each source has priori information of other sources' messages. The broadcasting nature of radio propagation can provide an opportunity to realize collaboration across sessions without causing much system overhead. In this paper, we propose the application of network coding to multisource-multidestination (MSMD) scenarios and provide formal analysis for the improvement of system delay. In particular, two types of analytical results have been developed, with one based on the outage probability and the other based on the use of practical convolutional codes. Monte Carlo simulation results have also been provided to demonstrate the delay performance of the proposed network-coded protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IEEE802.11 access protocol uses CSMA/CA in its Medium Access control layer as the main access function, which carries several deficiencies. In these networks, as the number of active stations increases, delay and throughput degrade severely. As far as throughput and service delay are vital elements in Quality of Service (QoS) determination, such degradation could lead to intolerable situations and reduce the efficiency of WLANs. Networks (WLANs). Studies proved this problemarises due to constant initial backoff windows size (CWmin), which is an important parameter in determination of network behavior. In this paper, we introduce a new method to tune this parameter adaptively according to changes in channel load. In this method, we do tune this parameter after every transmission using a feedback from transmission channel. Later it will be proven that applying this method in MAC layer enhances network stability; delay trend in all traffic classes exhibits a considerable reduction when compared with simple Enhanced Distributed Coordination Access (EDCA) scenarios. Also throughput exhibits a salient improvement in level. In other word, QoS improves. Especially, with the aid of this method, delay variations in all decrease considerably and more smoothen delay trends are achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method to improve the reliability of data transmission between two terminals without using multiple antennas is cooperative communication, where spatial diversity is introduced by the presence of a relay terminal. The Quantize and Forward (QF) protocol is suitable to implement in resource constraint relays, because of its low complexity. In prior studies of the QF protocol, all channel parameters are assumed to be perfectly known at the destination, while in reality these need to be estimated. This paper proposes a novel quantization scheme, in which the relay compensates for the rotation caused by the source-relay channel, before quantizing the phase of the received M-PSK data symbols. In doing so, channel estimation at the destination is greatly simplified, without significantly increasing the complexity of the relay terminals. Further, the destination applies the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm to improve the estimates of the source-destination and relay-destination channels. The resulting performance is shown to be close to that of a system with known channel parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a novel channel model to be used for simulating indoor wireless propagation environments. An extensive measurement campaign was carried out to assess the performance of different transport protocols over 802.11 links. This enabled us to better adjust our approach, which is based on an autoregressive filter. One of the main advantages of this proposal lies in its ability to reflect the "bursty" behavior which characterizes indoor wireless scenarios, having a great impact on the behavior of upper layer protocols. We compare this channel model, integrated within the Network Simulator (ns-2) platform, with other traditional approaches, showing that it is able to better reflect the real behavior which was empirically assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several wireless network coding schemes apply either inter-flow traffic or intra-flow traffic, but not both. This paper proposes a novel batched network coding scheme to deal with both inter-flow and intra-flow traffics, which attempts to combine the advantages of both network coding approaches. Based on the idea in the well-known network coding scheme COPE, our batched network coding scheme allows each node to make use of intra-flow network coding technique to improve the transmission reliability in a lossy environment, consequently obtaining higher throughput. Moreover, we also utilize the multiple-path transmitting scheme to further increase the throughput of wireless networks with low link delivery probability. Finally, using a simplified network topology model, we show theoretically that our proposed scheme outperforms COPE significantly, particularly when the link quality is low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel framework for the cross-layer analysis and design of wireless networks combining adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) at the physical layer with an automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol at the data-link layer. Most previous works rely on first-order amplitude-based finite-state Markov chains (AFSMCs) to model the physical layer. It is shown that these models present several deficiencies that could compromise the design of higher layer protocols. Thus, a physical-layer first-order 2-D Markov model using both the amplitude and the rate of change of the fading envelope is presented. Based on this multidimensional physical-layer Markov model, the quality-of-service (QoS) performance at the data-link layer is investigated through the use of two different approaches. The first one relies on an analytical framework based on a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) that jointly describes the statistical behavior of the arrival process, the queueing system, and the physical layer. The second one is based on the effective-bandwidth and effective-capacity theories. Both the DTMC-based and the effective-bandwidth/capacity-based approaches are analyzed and compared in combination with our proposed physical-layer first-order 2-D Markov model in a cross-layer design aiming to satisfy the required average packet loss `probability constraint by maximizing the average throughput of the system. Numerical results show that our proposed framework represents a significant improvement over previous models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, we present a two-stage forward error correction (FEC) scheme with an enhanced link-layer protocol especially for multimedia data transmission over wireless LANs. At the application layer, packet-level FEC (stage-one) is added across packets to correct packet losses due to congestion and route disruption. Bit-level FEC (stage-two) is then added to both application packets and stage-one FEC packets to recover bit errors from the link layer. Then at the link layer, header-CRC/FEC is used to enhance protection and to cooperate with the two-stage FEC scheme. The proposed scheme thus provides joint protection across the protocol stack. We explore both its bandwidth efficiency and video performance for the highly efficient and scalable MC-EZBC video codec using the network simulator ns-2. Our results show that the proposed scheme can effectively increase application-layer throughput, reduce both end-to-end transmission delay and application bandwidth fluctuation, and significantly improve video performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), an emerging internet application, provides more flexibility and interactivity for users because of its embedded return channel. Wireless 802.11 networks, used as the last hop of IPTV networks, would add another dimension of mobility, which is of great value for hot spot deployment and is increasingly required for in-home content distribution. However, a wireless channel may suffer from multi-path fading and interference, which may cause random and burst packet loss and impact users' quality of experience of an IPTV program. We report the design, implementation and evaluation of Merged Hybrid Adaptive FEC and ARQ (MHARQ) system for IPTV multicast over wireless LANs. In MHARQ, an IPTV cache server is introduced to improve the reliability for the last hop wireless distribution. MHARQ combines the advantages of receiver-driven staggered FEC and hybrid ARQ schemes to compensate the large dynamic range of WLAN channels and to achieve high reliability, scalability and wireless bandwidth efficiency for IPTV multicast. We also address backward compatible FEC encoding and decoding, audio and video synchronization issues in practical system implementation. Using the ORBIT radio grid test bed, we have investigated the performance of the proposed MHARQ system with various numbers of users per AP and different numbers of APs per IPTV cache server. It is demonstrated via real system implementation on ORBIT that MHARQ improves wireless bandwidth efficiency and scalability for reliable IPTV multicast, compared with existing reliable multicast schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce and outline the concept of channel code-division multiple access using a design example based on the recently proposed multilevel-structured (MLS) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. We succeeded in making the memory requirements of the multiuser transceiver to become practically independent of the total number of users supported by the system, as well as ascertain that each user benefits from the same level of protection. Finally, we will demonstrate that despite their beneficial compact structure, the proposed MLS LDPC codes do not suffer from any bit-error-ratio or block-error-ratio performance degradation, when compared to an otherwise identical benchmarker scheme using significantly more complex LDI'C codes having pseudorandom parity-check matrices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nodes forward data on behalf of each other in mobile ad hoc networks. In a civilian application, nodes are assumed to be selfish and rational, i.e., they pursue their own self-interest. Hence, the ability to accurately measure traffic forwarding is critical to ensure proper network operation. These measurements are also often used to credit nodes based on their level of participation, or to detect loss. Past solutions employ neighbor monitoring and reporting on traffic forwarding of nodes. These methods are not applicable in civilian networks in which neighbor nodes lack the desire or ability to perform the monitoring function. Such environments occur frequently in which neighbor hosts are resource constrained, or in networks where directional antennas are used and reliable eavesdropping is difficult or impossible. In this article, we propose a protocol that uses nodes on the data path to securely produce packet-forwarding reports. Reporting nodes are chosen randomly and secretly so that malicious nodes cannot modify their behavior based upon the monitoring point. The integrity and authenticity of reports are preserved through the use of secure link layer acknowledgments and monitoring reports. The robustness of the reporting mechanism is strengthened by forwarding the report to multiple destinations (source and destination). We explore the security, cost, and accuracy of our protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile IP is a network layer protocol for handling mobility of hosts in the Internet. However, mobile IP handoff causes degradation of TCP performance. Hence, there is a need for improving performance of TCP over mobile IP in wireless mobile networks. We propose an approach which handles losses due to both wireless link errors and host mobility. To handle losses due to host mobility, a method for seamless handoff is proposed. Empirical results show that the scheme provides substantial improvement of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ad hoc networks, wireless nodes rely on each other to transmit data over multi-hops by forwarding packets. A selfish node may decide not to forward packets for other nodes to save its own resource but still use the network to send and receive data. Such a selfish behavior can degrade network performance significantly. Most existing work took observation, reputation and token based mechanisms. However observation based mechanism suffers from mobility and collusion; reputation and token based mechanisms suffer from system complexity and efficiency. In this paper, we propose One More Hop (OMH) protocol which suppresses selfish behavior from a totally new angle. Basing on the fact that the selfish but rational nodes still want to receive and send packets, if a node can not determine whether a packet is destined for it or not, it can not drop the packet. With modified routing protocol and cryptographic techniques, OMH achieves this design target. It is robust and efficient. The simulation shows that OMH works well under different network situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interference is a serious problem in wireless communications. In a wireless network, the signal sent by a terminal will be received by all its neighboring nodes. If a neighbor (except the destinations) is receiving data from some other terminals at the same time, the signals will collide, and the useful signal will be destroyed, which may result in transmission failure. Previous solutions to this problem focused on the avoidance of signal collisions through careful medium access control (MAC) and/or scheduling. However, this needs some sophisticated protocols and may waste system resources such as bandwidth. In this paper, we shall put forward some practical schemes to recover the useful signal from the collided signals for different types of wireless channels; thus, the throughput and network efficiency can greatly be increased. The proposed schemes are based on the network coding technique and performed on the physical layer. One feature of our schemes is that neither strict synchronization nor power control is needed among the different terminals; thus, it is very fit for distributed networks. Simulation results will show that the bit error rate (BER) of the recovered signal by our developed schemes is almost the same as that of the signal with no collision, which proves their efficiency in eliminating the interference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates distributed cooperative medium access control protocol design for multihop wireless networks. Cooperative communication has been proposed recently as an effective way to mitigate channel impairments. With cooperation, single-antenna mobile terminals in a multi-user environment share antennas from other mobiles to generate a virtual multiple-antenna system that achieves more reliable communication with a higher diversity gain. However, more mobiles conscribed for one communication inevitably induces complex medium access interactions, especially in multihop wireless ad hoc networks. To improve the network throughput and diversity gain simultaneously, we investigate the issues and challenges in designing an efficient MAC scheme for such networks. Furthermore, based on the IEEE 802.11 DCF, a cross-layer designed cooperative MAC protocol is proposed. The MAC scheme adapts to the channel condition and payload length. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies demonstrated that dynamic spectrum access can improve spectrum utilization significantly by allowing secondary unlicensed users to dynamically share the spectrum that is not used by the primary licensed users. Cognitive radio was proposed to promote the spectrum utilization by opportunistically exploiting the existence of spectrum "holes." Meanwhile, cooperative relay technology is regarded widely as a key technology for increasing transmission diversity gain in various types of wireless networks, including cognitive radio networks. In this article, we first give a brief overview of the envisioned applications of: cooperative relay technology to CRNs, cooperative transmission of primary traffic by secondary users, cooperative transmission between secondary nodes to improve spatial diversity, and cooperative relay between secondary nodes to improve spectrum diversity. As the latter is a new direction, in this article we focus on this scenario and investigate a simple wireless network, where a spectrum-rich node is selected as the relay node to improve the performance between the source and the destination. With the introduction of cooperative relay, many unique problems should be considered, especially the issue for relay selection and spectrum allocation. To demonstrate the feasibility and performance of cooperative relay for cognitive radio, a new MAC protocol was proposed and implemented in a universal software radio peripheral-based testbed. Experimental results show that the throughput of the whole system is greatly increased by exploiting the benefit of cooperative relay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common communications convergence scenario which is being adopted in personal communications relates to the combination of wireless and cellular networks by the use of multimode terminals. Since most of the wireless networks were initially dimensioned only for data communications, this paper shows how voice over wireless LAN dimensioning could be addressed under the optimal network throughput and the perspective of voice quality, using a simple approach. The maximum number of simultaneous users resulting from throughput is limited by the collisions taking place in the shared medium with the statistical contention protocol. The voice quality is conditioned by the delay and the packet loss in the contention protocol. Both approaches are analyzed within the scope of the voice codecs commonly used in voice over wireless LANs, to conclude that voice dimensioning based on network throughput and voice quality show complementary results. Additionally the use of low rate codecs in voice over wireless LANs is advantageous for the network performance point of view but may produce poor voice quality results. Mid range codecs like G729 could represent a trade-off for quality throughput. For these reasons, voice quality and wireless network throughput have to be taken into account in the network admission control, design and deployment to ensure a satisfactory user experience. The impact of handoff interval of wireless convergent networks on the conversation quality need also be assessed for a proper network design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clustering provides an effective method for prolonging the lifetime of a wireless sensor network. Current clustering algorithms usually utilize two techniques; selecting cluster heads with more residual energy, and rotating cluster heads periodically to distribute the energy consumption among nodes in each cluster and extend the network lifetime. However, they rarely consider the hot spot problem in multihop sensor networks. When cluster heads cooperate with each other to forward their data to the base station, the cluster heads closer to the base station are burdened with heavier relay traffic and tend to die much faster, leaving areas of the network uncovered and causing network partitions. To mitigate the hot spot problem, we propose an Unequal Cluster-based Routing (UCR) protocol. It groups the nodes into clusters of unequal sizes. Cluster heads closer to the base station have smaller cluster sizes than those farther from the base station, thus they can preserve some energy for the inter-cluster data forwarding. A greedy geographic and energy-aware routing protocol is designed for the inter-cluster communication, which considers the tradeoff between the energy cost of relay paths and the residual energy of relay nodes. Simulation results show that UCR mitigates the hot spot problem and achieves an obvious improvement on the network lifetime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address two issues of contemporary interest in the area of enhancing the performance of ad hoc networks, where the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) is the adopted medium-access control (MAC). We investigate the effects that transmission power control and tuning carrier sensing (CS) threshold have on network throughput, and we study the inter- play between them. To accomplish this, we develop a realistic analytical model that characterizes the transmission activities that are governed by the IEEE 802.11 DCF in a single-channel power-aware multihop wireless network. We observe that selecting a smaller CS threshold will severely impact the spatial reuse, whereas a larger CS threshold will yield excessive interference among concurrent transmissions. Accordingly, we discovered that performing power control has either a minor or negligible effect in both situations, respectively. Furthermore, when the CS threshold is selected appropriately, power control shows its effectiveness in reducing collisions and, hence, improving system performance. Finally, using our model, we demonstrate the potential adverse impacts of request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) control packets on the network capacity and compare its performance with the two-way basic access method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the binary-distributed hypothesis testing problem, where a wireless sensor network (WSN) is used to determine the true state of nature. We propose a novel signaling scheme where signature vectors (SVs) are used to transmit censored sensor decisions to the fusion center (FC). In particular, the length of the SVs is chosen to be smaller than the number of sensors, resulting in nonorthogonal sensor channels and allowing a desirable tradeoff between bandwidth and power efficiency in WSNs. We consider deterministic SVs that are assumed to be known to the FC and random SVs that are unknown to the FC. For both cases, the optimum noncoherent fusion rules are derived, assuming independent Ricean fading sensor-FC channels. Since the complexity of these optimum fusion rules is prohibitively large, even for WSNs of moderate size, we also consider a low-complexity suboptimum energy-based fusion rule and show that it is equivalent to the optimum fusion rules under certain conditions. Furthermore, we calculate the system probabilities of detection and false alarm for the energy-based fusion rule for both deterministic and random SVs. Numerical and simulation results show that with the proposed nonorthogonal signaling scheme, significant improvements in bandwidth efficiency are possible at the expense of only a small loss in power efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]