ZBP: A Zone-Based Broadcasting Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been widely used in motoring and collecting interests of environment information. Packet flooding or broadcasting is an essential function for establishing a communication path from sink node to a region of sensor nodes. However, flooding operation consumes power and bandwidth resources and raises the packet collision and contention problems, which reduce the success rate of packet transmissions and consume energy. This article proposes an efficient broadcasting protocol to reduce the number of sensor nodes that forward the query request, hence improves the packet delivery rate and saves bandwidth and power consumptions. Sensor node that received the query request will dynamically transfers the coordinate system according to the zone-ID of source node and determines whether it would forward the request or not in a distributed manner. Compared with the CBM and traditional flooding operation, experimental results show that the proposed zone-based broadcasting protocol decreases the bandwidth and power consumptions, reduces the packet collisions, and achieves high success rate of packet broadcasting.Chih-Yung Chang received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Central University, Taiwan, in 1995. He joined the faculty of the Department of Computer and Information Science at Aletheia University, Taiwan, as an Assistant Professor in 1997. He was the Chair of the Department of Computer and Information Science, Aletheia University, from August 2000 to July 2002. He is currently an Associate Professor of Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at Tamkang University, Taiwan. Dr. Chang served as an Associate Guest Editor of Journal of Internet Technology (JIT), Special Issue on “Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks” (2004) and a member of Editorial Board of Tamsui Oxford Journal of Mathematical Sciences (2001–2005). He was an Area Chair of IEEE AINA′2005, Vice Chair of IEEE WisCom2005, Track Chair (Learning Technology in Education Track) of IEEE ITRE′2005, Program Co-Chair of MNSA′2005, Workshop Co-Chair of INA′2005, MSEAT′2003, MSEAT′2004, Publication Chair of MSEAT′2005, and the Program Committee Member of ICPP′2004, USW′2005, WASN′2005, and the 11th Mobile Computing Workshop. Dr. Chang is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and IEICE society. His current research interests include wireless sensor networks, mobile learning, Bluetooth radio systems, Ad Hoc wireless networks, and mobile computing.Kuei-Ping Shih received the B.S. degree in Mathematics from Fu-Jen Catholic University, Taiwan, Republic of China, in June 1991 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Central University, Taiwan, Republic of China, in June 1998. After two years of military obligation, he joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, Taiwan, Republic of China, as an assistant professor in 2000. Dr. Shih served as a Program Area Chair in the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA), 2005, and as a Technical Track Chair in the IEEE International Conference on Information Technology: Research and Education (ITRE), 2005. Dr. Shih’s current research interests include wireless networks, sensor networks, mobile computing, and network protocols design.Dr. Shih is a member of the IEEE Computer and Communication Societies and Phi Tau Phi Scholastic Honor Society.Shih-Chieh Lee received the B.S. degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering from Tamkang University, Taiwan, in 1997. Since 2003 he has been a Ph.D. Students in Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University. His research interests are wireless sensor networks, Ad Hoc wireless networks, and mobile/wireless computing.     

A Credit-Based On-Demand QoS Routing Protocol Over Bluetooth WPANs

The quality-of-service (QoS) communication that supports mobile applications to guarantee bandwidth utilization is an important issue for Bluetooth wireless personal area networks (WPANs). In this paper, we address the problem of on-demand QoS routing with interpiconet scheduling in Bluetooth WPANs. A credit-based QoS (CQ) routing protocol is developed which considers different Bluetooth packet types, because different types of Bluetooth packets have different bandwidth utilization levels. This work improves the bandwidth utilization of Bluetooth scatternets by providing a new interpiconet scheduling scheme. This paper mainly proposes a centralized algorithm to improve the bandwidth utilization for the on-demand QoS routing protocol. The centralized algorithm incurs the scalability problem. To alleviate the scalability problem, a distributed algorithm is also investigated in this work. The performance analysis illustrates that our credit-based QoS routing protocol achieves enhanced performance compared to existing QoS routing protocols.This work was supported by the National Science Council of the Republic of China under grant nos. NSC-92-2213-E-194-022 and NSC-93-2213-E-194-028. Yuh-Shyan Chen received the B.S. degree in computer science from Tamkang University, Taiwan, Republic of China, in June 1988 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Information Engineering from the National Central University, Taiwan, Republic of China, in June 1991 and January 1996, respectively. He joined the faculty of Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at Chung-Hua University, Taiwan, Republic of China, as an associate professor in February 1996. He joined the Department of Statistic, National Taipei University in August 2000, and joined the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chung Cheng University in August 2002. Dr. Chen served as Co-Editors-in-Chief of International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing (IJAHUC), Editorial Board Member of Telecommunication System Journal, International Journal of Internet Protocol Technology (IJIPT) and The Journal of Information, Technology and Society (JITAS). He also served as Guest Editor of Telecommunication Systems, special issue on “Wireless Sensor Networks” (2004), and Guest Editor of Journal of Internet Technology, special issue on “Wireless Internet Applications and Systems” (2002) and special issue on “Wireless Ad Hoc Network and Sensor Networks” (2004). He was a Vice Co-Chair, Wireless IP Symposium of WirelressCOM2005, USA (2005) and a Workshop Co-Chair of the 2001 Mobile Computing Workshop, Taiwan. Dr. Chen also served as IASTED Technical Committee on Telecommunications for 2002–2005, WSEAS International Scientific Committee Member (from 2004), Program Committee Member of IEEE ICPP'2003, IEEE ICDCS'2004, IEEE ICPADS'2001, ICCCN'2001–2005, MSN'2005, IASTED CCN'2002–2005, IASTED CSA'2004–2005, IASTED NCS'2005, and MSEAT'2003–2005. His paper wins the 2001 IEEE 15th ICOIN-15 Best Paper Award. Dr. Chen was a recipient of the 2005 Young Scholar Research Award given by National Chung Cheng University to four young faculty members, 2005. His recent research topics include mobile ad-hoc network, wireless sensor network, mobile learning system, and 4G system. Dr. Chen is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, IEICE Society, and Phi Tau Phi Society. Keng-Shau Liu received the M.S. degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan, Republic of China, in July 2004. His research includes wireless LAN, Bluetooth, and mobile learning.     

High Performance Wireless Switch Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

All mobile stations (STAs) in IEEE 802.11 infrastructure wireless local area networks (IWLAN) are coordinated by an access point (AP). Within the 2.4 GHz unlicensed industry, science, and medicine (ISM) band defined in the IEEE 802.11 2.4 GHz physical layer (PHY) specifications, three channels are available for concurrently transferring data packets at the coverage area of an AP. In most of small/medium enterprises or home environments, an AP with one selected channel is sufficient for covering whole service area, but this implies that the radio resources for the remaining two channels are wasted. In order to overcome the drawback, we propose a new and simple media access control (MAC) protocol, named wireless switch protocol (WSP), for increasing the throughput of IEEE 802.11 IWLAN network to support high quality multimedia traffic. This is achieved by allowing any pair of STAs in IWLAN to exchange data packets in one of other idle channels after their handshake with each other in the common channel controlled by AP. Simulation results show that the total network throughput of WSP depends on the time taken by channel switching, and on the ‘Intranet’ and ‘Internet’ traffic distribution, where the Intranet and Internet mean data transmission between STAs in IWLAN and between the STA and wired host, respectively. When all data packets are Intranet traffic and the traffic load is heavy, the ratio of Goodput for the proposed WSP to that of IEEE 802.11 standard approximates 400%. In the worse case of all Internet traffic, the proposed WSP still obtains the similar throughput as that of IEEE 802.11 standard.Jenhui Chen was born on October 12, 1971 in Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China. He received the Bachelor’s and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering (CSIE) from Tamkang University in 1998 and 2003, respectively. In the Spring of 2003, he joined the faculty of Computer Science and Information Engineering Department at Chang Gung University and served as the Assistant Professor. He occupies the supervisor of Network Department in the Information Center, Chang Gung University. Dr. Chen once served the reviewer of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, ACM/Kluwer Mobile Networks and Applications (MONET), and Journal of Information Science and Engineering. His main research interests include design, analysis, and implementation of communication and network protocols, wireless networks, milibots, and artificial intelligence. He is a member of ACM and IEEE.Ai-Chun Pang was born in Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C., in 1973. She received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in 1996, 1998 and 2002, respectively. She joined the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University (NTU), Taipei, Taiwan, as an Assistant Professor in 2002. Her research interests include design and analysis of personal communications services network, mobile computing, voice over IP, and performance modeling.Shiann-Tsong Sheu received his B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from National Chung Hsing University in 1990, and obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from National Tsing Hua University in May of 1995. From 1995 to 2002, he was an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tamkang University. Since Feb. 2002, he has become a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tamkang University. Dr. Sheu received the outstanding young researcher award by the IEEE Communication Society Asia Pacific Board in 2002. His research interests include next-generation wireless communication, WDM networks and intelligent control algorithms.Hsueh-Wen Tseng received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Tamkang University, Taipei country, Taiwan, in 2001 and M.S. degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, in 2003. He is currently pursuing the Ph. D. degree at the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. His research interests include design, analysis and implementation of network protocols and wireless communications.     

An On-Demand Routing Protocol with Backtracking for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is characterized by multi-hop wireless links and frequent node mobility. Communication between non-neighboring nodes requires a multi-hop routing protocol to establish a route. But, the route often breaks due to mobility. The source must rediscover a new route for delivering the data packets. This wastes the resources that are limited in MANET. In this paper, a new on-demand routing protocol is proposed, named on-demand routing protocol with backtracking (ORB), for multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks. We use the multiple routes and cache data technique to reduce the rediscovery times and overhead. After executing the route discovery phase, we find out a set of nodes, named checkpoint, which has the multiple routes to the destination. When a checkpoint node receives a data packet, it caches this data packet in its buffer within a specific time period. When a node detects a broken route during the data packets delivery or receives an error packet, it will either recover the broken route or reply the error packet to the source. If a node can not forward the data packet to the next node, it replies an error packet to the source. This packet is backtracking to search a checkpoint to redeliver the data packet to the destination along other alternate routes. The main advantage of ORB is to reduce the flooding search times, maybe just delay and cost while a route has broken. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can increase the performance of delivery but reduce the overhead efficiently comparing with that of AODV based routing protocols. Hua-Wen Tsai received the B.S. degree in Information Management from Chang Jung Christian University, Taiwan, in June 1998 and the M.B.A. degree in Business and Operations Management from Chang Jung Christian University, Taiwan, in June 2001. Since September 2001, he has been working towards the Ph.D. degree and currently is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. His research interests include wireless communication, ad hoc networks, and sensor networks. Tzung-Shi Chen received the B.S. degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering from Tamkang University, Taiwan, in June 1989 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Central University, Taiwan, in June 1994. He joined the faculty of the Department of Information Management, Chung Jung University, Tainan, Taiwan, as an Associate Professor in June 1996. Since November 2002, he has become a Full Professor at the Department of Information Management, Chung Jung University, Tainan, Taiwan. He was a visiting scholar at the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, from June to September 2001. He was the chairman of the Department of Information Management at Chung Jung University from August 2000 to July 2003. Since August 2004, he has become a Full Professor at the Department of Information and Learning Technology, National University of Tainan, Tainan, Taiwan. Currently, he is the chairman of the Department of Information and Learning Technology, National University of Tainan. He co-received the best paper award of 2001 IEEE ICOIN-15. His current research interests include mobile computing and wireless networks, mobile learning, data mining, and pervasive computing. Dr. Chen is a member of the IEEE Computer Society. Chih-Ping Chu received the B.S. degree in agricultural chemistry from National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan, the M.S. degree in computer science from the University of California, Riverside, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Louisiana State University. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering of National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. His current research interests include parallel computing, parallel processing, component-based software development, and internet computing.     

The Coverage Problem in a Wireless Sensor Network

One of the fundamental issues in sensor networks is the coverage problem, which reflects how well a sensor network is monitored or tracked by sensors. In this paper, we formulate this problem as a decision problem, whose goal is to determine whether every point in the service area of the sensor network is covered by at least k sensors, where k is a given parameter. The sensing ranges of sensors can be unit disks or non-unit disks. We present polynomial-time algorithms, in terms of the number of sensors, that can be easily translated to distributed protocols. The result is a generalization of some earlier results where only k = 1 is assumed. Applications of the result include determining insufficiently covered areas in a sensor network, enhancing fault-tolerant capability in hostile regions, and conserving energies of redundant sensors in a randomly deployed network. Our solutions can be easily translated to distributed protocols to solve the coverage problem.A preliminary version of this paper has appeared in the Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications, 2003, San Diego, CA, USA. Chi-Fu Huang received his B.S. and M.S. degrees both in Computer Science and Information Engineering from the Feng-Chia University and the National Central University in 1999 and 2001, respectively. He obtained his Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering from the National Chiao-Tung University in September of 2004. He is currently a Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan. His research interests include wireless communication and mobile computing, especially in ad hoc and sensor networks. Yu-Chee Tseng received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the National Taiwan University and the National Tsing-Hua University in 1985 and 1987, respectively. He worked for the D-LINK Inc. as an engineer in 1990. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the Ohio State University in January of 1994. He was an Associate Professor at the Chung-Hua University (1994–1996) and at the National Central University (1996–1999), and a Full Professor at the National Central University (1999–2000). Since 2000, he has been a Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan. Dr. Tseng served as a Program Chair in the Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing Workshop, 2000 and 2001, as a Vice Program Chair in the Int’l Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2004, as a Vice Program Chair in the IEEE Int’l Conf. on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS), 2004, as an Associate Editor for The Computer Journal, as a Guest Editor for ACM Wireless Networks special issue on “Advances in Mobile and Wireless Systems”, as a Guest Editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers special on “Wireless Internet”, as a Guest Editor for Journal of Internet Technology special issue on “Wireless Internet: Applications and Systems”, as a Guest Editor for Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing special issue on “Research in Ad Hoc Networking, Smart Sensing, and Pervasive Computing”, as an Editor for Journal of Information Science and Engineering, as a Guest Editor for Telecommunication Systems special issue on “Wireless Sensor Networks”, and as a Guest Editor for Journal of Information Science and Engineering special issue on “Mobile Computing”. He is a two-time recipient of the Outstanding Research Award, National Science Council, ROC, in 2001–2002 and 2003–2005, and a recipient of the Best Paper Award in Int’l Conf. on Parallel Processing, 2003. Several of his papers have been chosen as Selected/Distinguished Papers in international conferences. He has guided students to participate in several national programming contests and received several awards. His research interests include mobile computing, wireless communication, network security, and parallel and distributed computing. Dr. Tseng is a member of ACM and a Senior Member of IEEE.This revised version was published online in August 2005 with a corrected cover date.     

Scheduling for time-division based shared channel allocation for UMTS

The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) adopts the WCDMA technology as the radio access interface to provide variable transmission rate services. There are four classes of connections identified in UMTS, which are the conversational, streaming, interactive, and background connections. To efficiently utilize radio bandwidth, the shared channel approach is proposed to deliver the packets for the interactive and background connections. This paper proposes a “Shared-Channel Assignment and Scheduling” (SCAS) algorithm to periodically allocate shared channels to serve interactive and background connections. We conduct formal mathematical proofs and simulation experiments to investigate the performance of the SCAS algorithm. We formally prove that with SCAS, a shared channel can be fully utilized (i.e., the utilization of a shared channel can be up to 100%) to serve the interactive connections. Our analysis indicates that compared with the previously proposed shared channel allocation and scheduling algorithms, there are less computation and communication overheads introduced in the SCAS algorithm. The results of the simulation experiments indicate that it is preferred to set up the Transmission Time Interval (TTI; that is, the unit of time interval for shared channel allocation) smaller to optimize the performance of the SCAS algorithm, including the shared channel utilization and the average waiting time of a connection before getting transmission service. A preliminary version [11] of this work has been accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference 2004. This paper is an extension of the proposed algorithm, and simulation and analysis are conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Chai-Hien Gan was born in Malaysia in 1971. He received his BS degree in computer science from Tamkang University in 1994, Taipei County, Taiwan, and both his MS. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science and information engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, in 1996 and 2005, respectively. Since March 2005, he has been a Research Assistant Professor in Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University, R.O.C. His current research interests include wireless mesh networks, mobile computing, personal communications services, and wireless Internet. Phone Lin received his BSCSIE degree and Ph.D. degree from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, R.O.C. in 1996 and 2001, respectively. From August 2001 to July 2004, he was an Assistant Professor in Department of CSIE and Graduate Institute of Graduate of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University, R.O.C. Since August 2004, he has been an Associate Professor in Department of CSIE and Graduate Institute Graduate of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University, R.O.C. His current research interests include personal communications services, wireless Internet, and performance modeling. Dr. Lin is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, Editor for IEEE Wireless Communications special issue on Mobility and Resource Management and a Guest Editor for ACM/Springer MONET special issue on Wireless Broad Access. He is also an Associate Editorial Member for the WCMC Journal. P. Lin’s email and website addresses are plin@csie.ntu.edu.tw and http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~plin, respectively. Nei-Chiung Perng is presently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University. He received his Bachelor and Master degrees in the Department of Computer and Information Science, National Chiao Tung University in 1999 and 2001, respectively. His research interests include real-time systems and scheduling algorithms. Tei-Wei Kuo received B.S.E. degree in computer science and information engineering from National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1986. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer sciences from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990 and 1994, respectively. He is currently a Professor and the Chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering of the National Taiwan University, Taiwan, ROC. He was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering of the National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan, ROC, from August 1994 to July 2000. Dr. Kuo is a senior member of the IEEE computer society. His research interest includes embedded systems, real-time process scheduling, real-time operating systems, and real-time databases. He has over 100 technical papers published or been accepted in international journals and conferences and has a book “Real-Time Database Systems: Architecture and Techniques” published by Kluwer Academic Publishers (ISBN 0-7923-7218-2, USA). He is the Program Co-Chair of IEEE 7th Real-Time Technology and Applications Symposium, 2001, and an associate editor of the Journal of Real-Time Systems since 1998. He is an executive committee member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems in 2005 and the steering committee chair of IEEE RTCSA’05. Dr. Kuo has consulted for government and industry on problems in various real-time and embedded systems designs. Dr. Kuo received several research awards in Taiwan, including the Distinguished Research Award from the ROC National Science Council in 2003 and the Young Scholar Research Award from Academia Sinica, Taiwan, ROC, in 2001. Ching-Chi Hsu was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1949. He received his BS degree in physics from National Tsing Hwa. University in 1971, Hsishu, Taiwan, and both his MS. and Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering from EE department of National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, in 1975 and 1982, respectively. In 1977, he joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Taiwan University and became an associate professor in 1982. During the years between 1987 and 2002, he was first engaged as a professor and became the chairman of the department. During his tenure in National Taiwan University, Dr. Hsu was a visiting scholar of Computer Science Department, Stanford University from 1984 to 1985. After serving in National Taiwan University for over 25 years, Dr. Hsu had left and was promoted as the president of Kai Nan University in 2002. Starting from February 2004, Dr. Hsu has been the executive vice president of the Institute for Information Industry in which he is mainly in charge of accelerating the growth of information industry in the whole nation. His research interests include distributed processing of data and knowledge, mobile computing and wireless networks.     

Cross-layer optimization for end-to-end rate allocation in multi-radio wireless mesh networks

In this paper, we study rate allocation for a set of end-to-end communication sessions in multi-radio wireless mesh networks. We propose cross-layer schemes to solve the joint rate allocation, routing, scheduling, power control and channel assignment problems with the goals of maximizing network throughput and achieving certain fairness. Fairness is addressed using both a simplified max-min fairness model and the well-known proportional fairness model. Our schemes can also offer performance upper bounds such as an upper bound on the maximum throughput. Numerical results show that our proportional fair rate allocation scheme achieves a good tradeoff between throughput and fairness. Jian Tang is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Montana State University. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University in 2006. His research interest is in the area of wireless networking and mobile computing. He has served on the technical program committees of multiple international conferences, including ICC, Globecom, IPCCC and QShine. He will also serve as a publicity co-chair of International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Communication Systems (Autonomics’2007). Guoliang Xue is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 1991 and has held previous positions at the Army High Performance Computing Research Center and the University of Vermont. His research interests include efficient algorithms for optimization problems in networking, with applications to fault tolerance, robustness, and privacy issues in networks ranging from WDM optical networks to wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. He has published over 150 papers in these areas. His research has been continuously supported by federal agencies including NSF and ARO. He is the recipient of an NSF Research Initiation Award in 1994 and an NSF-ITR Award in 2003. He is an Associate Editor of Computer Networks (COMNET), the IEEE Network Magazine, and Journal of Global Optimization. He has served on the executive/program committees of many IEEE conferences, including INFOCOM, SECON, IWQOS, ICC, GLOBECOM and QShine. He is the General Chair of IEEE IPCCC’2005, a TPC co-Chair of IPCCC’2003, HPSR’2004, IEEE Globecom’2006 Symposium on Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, IEEE ICC’2007 Symposium on Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, and QShine’2007. He is a senior member of IEEE. Weiyi Zhang received the M.E. degree in 1999 from Southeast University, China. Currently he is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University. His research interests include reliable communication in networking, protection and restoration in WDM networks, and QoS provisioning in communication networks.     

Scheduling Sleeping Nodes in High Density Cluster-based Sensor Networks

In order to conserve battery power in very dense sensor networks, some sensor nodes may be put into the sleep state while other sensor nodes remain active for the sensing and communication tasks. In this paper, we study the node sleep scheduling problem in the context of clustered sensor networks. We propose and analyze the Linear Distance-based Scheduling (LDS) technique for sleeping in each cluster. The LDS scheme selects a sensor node to sleep with higher probability when it is farther away from the cluster head. We analyze the energy consumption, the sensing coverage property, and the network lifetime of the proposed LDS scheme. The performance of the LDS scheme is compared with that of the conventional Randomized Scheduling (RS) scheme. It is shown that the LDS scheme yields more energy savings while maintaining a similar sensing coverage as the RS scheme for sensor clusters. Therefore, the LDS scheme results in a longer network lifetime than the RS scheme. Jing Deng received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, P. R. China, in 1994 and 1997, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 2002. Dr. Deng is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Orleans. From 2002 to 2004, he visited the CASE center and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY as a research assistant professor, supported by the Syracuse University Prototypical Research in Information Assurance (SUPRIA) program. He was a teaching assistant from 1998 to 1999 and a research assistant from 1999 to 2002 in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. His interests include mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, wireless network security, energy efficient wireless networks, and information assurance. Wendi B. Heinzelman is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester. She received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1995 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1997 and 2000 respectively. Her current research interests lie in the areas of wireless communications and networking, mobile computing, and multimedia communication. Dr. Heinzelman received the NSF Career award in 2005 for her work on cross-layer optimizations for wireless sensor networks, and she received the ONR Young Investigator award in 2005 for her research on balancing resource utilization in wireless sensor networks. Dr. Heinzelman was co-chair of the 1st Workshop on Broadband Advanced Sensor Networks (BaseNets '04), and she is a member of Sigma Xi, the IEEE, and the ACM. Yunghsiang S. Han was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on April 24, 1962. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 1984 and 1986, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from the School of Computer and Information Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, in 1993. From 1986 to 1988 he was a lecturer at Ming-Hsin Engineering College, Hsinchu, Taiwan. He was a teaching assistant from 1989 to 1992 and from 1992 to 1993 a research associate in the School of Computer and Information Science, Syracuse University. From 1993 to 1997 he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Hua Fan College of Humanities and Technology, Taipei Hsien, Taiwan. From 1997 to 2004 he was with the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Chi Nan University, Nantou, Taiwan. He was promoted to Full Professor in 1998. From June to October 2001 he was a visiting scholar in the Department of Electrical Engineering at University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI, and from September 2002 to January 2004 he was the SUPRIA visiting research scholar in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and CASE center at Syracuse University, NY. He is now with the Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering at National Taipei University, Taipei, Taiwan. His research interests are in wireless networks, security, and error-control coding. Dr. Han is a winner of 1994 Syracuse University Doctoral Prize. Pramod K. Varshney was born in Allahabad, India on July 1, 1952. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering and computer science (with highest honors), and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1972, 1974, and 1976 respectively. Since 1976 he has been with Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY where he is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Research Director of the New York State Center for Advanced Technology in Computer Applications and Software Engineering. His current research interests are in distributed sensor networks and data fusion, detection and estimation theory, wireless communications, intelligent systems, signal and image processing, and remote sensing he has published extensively. He is the author of Distributed Detection and Data Fusion, published by Springer-Verlag in 1997 and has co-edited two other books. Dr. Varshney is a member of Tau Beta Pi and is the recipient of the 1981 ASEE Dow Outstanding Young Faculty Award. He was elected to the grade of Fellow of the IEEE in 1997 for his contributions in the area of distributed detection and data fusion. In 2000, he received the Third Millennium Medal from the IEEE and Chancellor's Citation for exceptional academic achievement at Syracuse University. He serves as a distinguished lecturer for the AES society of the IEEE. He is on the editorial board Information Fusion. He was the President of International Society of Information Fusion during 2001.     

Energy-Efficient Data Caching and Prefetching for Mobile Devices Based on Utility

In mobile computing environments, vital resources like battery power and wireless channel bandwidth impose significant challenges in ubiquitous information access. In this paper, we propose a novel energy and bandwidth efficient data caching mechanism, called GreedyDual Least Utility (GD-LU), that enhances dynamic data availability while maintaining consistency. The proposed utility-based caching mechanism considers several characteristics of mobile distributed systems, such as connection-disconnection, mobility handoff, data update and user request patterns to achieve significant energy savings in mobile devices. We develop an analytical model for energy consumption of mobile devices in a dynamic data environment. Based on the utility function derived from the analytical model, we propose algorithms for cache replacement and passive prefetching of data objects. Our comprehensive simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed caching mechanism achieves more than 10% energy saving and near-optimal performance tradeoff between access latency and energy consumption. Huaping Shen received his M.S. and B.S. degrees in computer science from Fudan University, China, in 2001 and 1998, respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. His research interests include data management in mobile networks, mobile computing, peer-to-peer networks, and pervasive computing. Mohan Kumar is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. His current research interests are in pervasive computing, wireless networks and mobility, active networks, mobile agents, and distributed computing. Recently, he has developed or co-developed algorithms for active-network based routing and multicasting in wireless networks and caching prefetching in mobile distributed computing. He has published over 90 articles in refereed journals and conference proceedings and supervised Masters and doctoral theses in the areas of pervasive computing, caching/prefetching, active networks, wireless networks and mobility, and scheduling in distributed systems. Kumar is on the editorial board of The Computer Journal and he has guest edited special issues of several leading international journals including MONET and WINET issues and the IEEE Transactions on Computers. He is a co-founder of the IEEE International Conference on pervasive computing and communications (PerCom)—served as the program chair for PerCom 2003, and is the vice general chair for PerCom 2004. He has also served in the technical program committees of numerous international conferences/workshops. He is a senior member of the IEEE. Mohan Kumar obtained his PhD (1992) and MTech (1985) degrees from the Indian Institute of Science and the BE (1982) from Bangalore University in India. Prior to joining The University of Texas at Arlington in 2001, he held faculty positions at the Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia (1992–2000), The Indian Institute of Science (1986-1992), and Bangalore University (1985–1986). Dr. Sajal K. Das is currently a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and also the Founding Director of the Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking (CReWMaN) at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). Prior to 1999, he was a professor of Computer Science at the University of North Texas (UNT), Denton where he founded the Center for Research in Wireless Computing (CReW) in 1997, and also served as the Director of the Center for Research in Parallel and Distributed Computing (CRPDC) during 1995–97. Dr. Das is a recipient of the UNT Student Association’s Honor Professor Award in 1991 and 1997 for best teaching and scholarly research; UNT’s Developing Scholars Award in 1996 for outstanding research; UTA’s Outstanding Faculty Research Award in Computer Science in 2001 and 2003; and the UTA College of Engineering Research Excellence Award in 2003. An internationally-known computer scientist, he has visited numerous universities, research organizations, government and industry labs worldwide for collaborative research and invited seminar talks. He is also frequently invited as a keynote speaker at international conferences and symposia.Dr. Das’ current research interests include resource and mobility management in wireless networks, mobile and pervasive computing, wireless multimedia and QoS provisioning, sensor networks, mobile internet architectures and protocols, parallel processing, grid computing, performance modeling and simulation. He has published over 250 research papers in these areas, directed numerous industry and government funded projects, and holds four US patents in wireless mobile networks. He received the Best Paper Awards in the 5th Annual ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom’99), 16th International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN-16), 3rd ACM International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWiM 2000), and 11th ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS’97). Dr. Das serves on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, ACM/Kluwer Wireless Networks, Parallel Processing Letters, Journal of Parallel Algorithms and Applications. He served as General Chair of IEEE PerCom 2004, MASCOTS’02 ACM WoWMoM 2000-02; General Vice Chair of IEEE PerCom 2003, ACM MobiCom-2000 and IEEE HiPC 2000-01; Program Chair of IWDC 2002, WoWMoM 1998-99; TPC Vice Chair of ICPADS 2002; and as TPC member of numerous IEEE and ACM conferences. He is Vice Chair of the IEEE TCPP and TCCC Executive Committees and on the Advisory Boards of several cutting-edge companies.Dr. Sajal K. Das received B.S. degree in 1983 from Calcutta University, M.S. degree in 1984 from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and Ph.D. degree in 1988 from the University of Central Florida, Orlando, all in Computer Science. Zhijun Wang received the M.S degree in Electrical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 2001. He is working toward the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Arlington. His current research interests include data management in mobile networks and peer-to-peer networks, mobile computing and networking processors.This revised version was published online in August 2005 with a corrected cover date.     

UbiqMuseum: A Bluetooth and Java Based Context-Aware System for Ubiquitous Computing

This paper evaluates the use of Bluetooth and Java based technologies in ubiquitous computing environments. Ubiquitous computing strongly depends on leveraging appropriate contextual information to users, according to their preferences and the environment in which they reside. We present UbiqMuseum – an experimental context-aware application that provides context-aware information to museum visitors. UbiqMuseum combines the productivity of Java with the universal connectivity provided by Bluetooth wireless technology. We describe the overall architecture and discuss the implementation steps taken to create our Bluetooth and Java based context-aware application. We demonstrate practicality of building a context-aware system by using UbiqMuseum as a proof of concept that integrates a combination of Bluetooth, WLAN and Ethernet LAN technologies. Finally we run some experiments in a small testbed to evaluate the performance and system behaviour. We evaluate the impact on throughput with varying packet size, coding types and device separation distance sending both images and text. We also present our findings in term of inquiry delay with respect to distance. Numerical results show that Bluetooth offers a relatively steady throughput up to 10 m while the inquiry delay does not increase significantly with distance. Juan-Carlos Cano is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) in Spain. He earned an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in computer science from the UPV in 1994 and 2002 respectively. Between 1995–1997 he worked as a programming analyst at IBM's manufacturing division in Valencia. His current research interests include power aware routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks and pervasive computing. You can contact him at jucano@disca.upv.es. Pietro Manzoni received the MS degree in computer science from the “Universitá degli Studi" of Milan, Italy, in 1989, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy, in 1995. He is an associate professor of computer science at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. His research activity is related to wireless networks protocol design, modeling, and implementation. He is member of the IEEE. C.-K. Toh is currently a Professor and Chair in Communication Networks at Queen Mary University of London, UK. He is also the Director of the UK Ad Hoc Wireless Consortium and Director of the Queen Mary/Fudan Joint Research Lab in Mobile Networking and Ubiquitous Computing. Concurrently, he is also an Honorary Professor with the University of Hong Kong and an Adjunct Professor at Fudan University, Shanghai. Previously, he was the Director of Research with TRW Tactical Systems in California, USA (now Northrop Grumman Corporation) and was responsible for DARPA and Army programs in communications and networking. He had also worked for Hughes Research, ALR, HP, and was a professor at GeorgiaTech and University of California, Irvine. CK is the recipient of the 2005 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Technical Medal Award, for “pioneering contributions to communication protocols in ad hoc mobile wireless networks." He is the author of “Wireless ATM & Ad Hoc Networks" (Kluwer Press, 1996) and “Ad Hoc Mobile Wireless Networks" (Prentice Hall Engineering Title Best Seller, 2001–2003). He is a recipient of the ACM Recognition of Service Award, for co-founding ACM MobiHoc Conference. He is a co-recipient of the Korean Science & Engineering Foundation Best Journal paper Award for his work on ad hoc TCP. CK was formerly the Chairman of IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Computer Communications and Chairman of IEEE Subcommittee on Ad Hoc Mobile Wireless Networks. He was an IEEE Expert/Distinguished Lecturer and had served as a Steering Committee Member for IEEE WCNC Conference and IEEE Transaction on Mobile Computing. He was a member of IEEE Communications Society Meetings & Conferences Board. CK was an editor for IEEE Networks, IEEE JSAC, IEEE transactions on Wireless Communications, Journal on Communication Networks, and IEEE Distributed Systems. He is a Fellow of four societies: British Computer Society, the IEE, the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers and the New Zealand Computer Society. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Cambridge University, England, and his executive education from Harvard.     

Finding multi-constrained feasible paths by using depth-first search

An extended depth-first-search (EDFS) algorithm is proposed to solve the multi-constrained path (MCP) problem in Quality-of-Service (QoS) routing, which is NP-Complete when the number of independent routing constraints is more than one. EDFS solves the general k-constrained MCP problem with pseudo-polynomial time complexity O(m ² · EN + N ²), where m is the maximum number of non-dominated paths maintained for each destination, E and N are the number of links and nodes of a graph, respectively. This is achieved by deducing potential feasible paths from knowledge of previous explorations, without re-exploring finished nodes and their descendants in the process of the DFS search. One unique property of EDFS is that the tighter the constraints are, the better the performance it can achieve, w.r.t. both time complexity and routing success ratio. This is valuable to highly dynamic environment such as wireless ad hoc networks in which network topology and link state keep changing, and real-time or multimedia applications that have stringent service requirements. EDFS is an independent feasible path searching algorithm and decoupled from the underlying routing protocol, and as such can work together with either proactive or on-demand ad hoc routing protocols as long as they can provide sufficient network state information to each source node. Analysis and extensive simulation are conducted to study the performance of EDFS in finding feasible paths that satisfy multiple QoS constraints. The main results show that EDFS is insensitive to the number of constraints, and outperforms other popular MCP algorithms when the routing constraints are tight or moderate. The performance of EDFS is comparable with that of the other algorithms when the constraints are loose. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant CNS-0435522, by the UCOP CLC under grant SC-05-33 and by the Baskin Chair of Computer Engineering at University of California, Santa Cruz. Zhenjiang Li received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electronic engineering from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei, China, in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Since 2001, he has been a PhD student in the computer communication research group (CCRG) of the computer engineering department, University of California, Santa Cruz, U.S.A. His research interests include secure routing, constrained path selection, routing optimization and quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning in computer networks. He is a student member of the IEEE. J. J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, Mexico in 1977, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, in 1980 and 1983, respectively. He holds the Jack Baskin Chair of Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and is a Principal Scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Prior to joining UCSC in 1993, he was a Center Director at SRI International (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. He has been a Visiting Professor at Sun Laboratories and a Principal of Protocol Design at Nokia. Dr. Garcia-Luna-Aceves has published a book, more than 300 papers, and nine U.S. patents. He has directed 22 Ph.D. theses and 19 M.S. theses since he joined UCSC in 1993. He has been the General Chair of the IEEE SECON 2005 Conference; Program Co-Chair of ACM MobiHoc 2002 and ACM Mobicom 2000; Chair of the ACM SIG Multimedia; General Chair of ACM Multimedia ’93 and ACM SIGCOMM ’88; and Program Chair of IEEE MULTIMEDIA ’92, ACM SIGCOMM ’87, and ACM SIGCOMM ’86. He has served in the IEEE Internet Technology Award Committee, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal Committee, and the National Research Council Panel on Digitization and Communications Science of the Army Research Laboratory Technical Assessment Board. He has been on the editorial boards of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, the Multimedia Systems Journal, and the Journal of High Speed Networks. He received the SRI International Exceptional-Achievement Award in 1985 and 1989, and is a fellow of the IEEE.     

QoS-driven asynchronous uplink subchannel allocation algorithms for space-time OFDM-CDMA systems in wireless networks

In order to support the diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for differentiated data applications in broadband wireless networks, advanced techniques such as space-time coding (STC) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are implemented at the physical layer. However, the employment of such techniques evidently affects the subchannel-allocation algorithms at the medium access control (MAC) layer. In this paper, we propose the QoS-driven cross-layer subchannel-allocation algorithms for data transmissions over asynchronous uplink space-time OFDM-CDMA wireless networks. We mainly focus on QoS requirements of maximizing the best-effort throughput and proportional bandwidth fairness, while minimizing the upper-bound of scheduling delay. Our extensive simulations show that the proposed infrastructure and algorithms can achieve high bandwidth fairness and system throughput while reducing scheduling delay over wireless networks. Xi Zhang (S’89-SM’98) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Xidian University, Xi’an, China, the M.S. degree from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, all in electrical engineering and computer science, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science (Electrical Engineering—Systems) from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. He is currently an Assistant Professor and the Founding Director of the Networking and Information Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA. He was an Assistant Professor and the Founding Director of the Division of Computer Systems Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Beijing Information Technology Engineering Institute, Beijing, China, from 1984 to 1989. He was a Research Fellow with the School of Electrical Engineering, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, James Cook University, Queensland, Australia, under a Fellowship from the Chinese National Commission of Education. He worked as a Summer Intern with the Networks and Distributed Systems Research Department, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hills, NJ, and with AT&T Laboratories Research, Florham Park, NJ, in 1997. He has published more than 80 technical papers. His current research interests focus on the areas of wireless networks and communications, mobile computing, cross-layer designs and optimizations for QoS guarantees over mobile wireless networks, wireless sensor and Ad Hoc networks, wireless and wireline network security, network protocols design and modeling for QoS guarantees over multicast (and unicast) wireless (and wireline) networks, statistical communications theory, random signal processing, and distributed computer-control systems. Dr. Zhang received the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2004 for his research in the areas of mobile wireless and multicast networking and systems. He is currently serving as an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, an Associated Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, and and Associated Editor for the IEEE Communications Letters, and is also currently serving as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine for the Special Issues of “Next Generation of CDMA vs. OFDMA for 4G Wireless Applications”. He has served or is serving as the Panelist on the U.S. National Science Foundation Research-Proposal Review Panel in 2004, the WiFi-Hotspots/WLAN and QoS Panelist at the IEEE QShine 2004, as the Symposium Chair for the IEEE International Cross-Layer Designs and Protocols Symposium within the IEEE International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC) 2006, the Technical Program Committee Co-Chair for the IEEE IWCMC 2006, the Poster Chair for the IEEE QShine 2006, the Publicity Co-Chair for the IEEE WirelessCom 2005, and as the Technical Program Committee members for IEEE GLOBECOM, IEEE ICC, IEEE WCNC, IEEE VTC, IEEE QShine, IEEE WoWMoM, IEEE WirelessCom, and IEEE EIT. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Jia Tang (S’03) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China, in 2001. He is currently a Research Assistant working towards the Ph.D. degree in the Networking and Information Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA. His research interests include mobile wireless communications and networks, with emphasis on cross-layer design and optimizations, wireless quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for mobile multimedia networks, wireless diversity techniques, and wireless resource allocation. Mr. Tang received the Fouraker Graduate Research Fellowship Award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University in 2005.     

Energy-Efficient, Collision-Free Medium Access Control for Wireless Sensor Networks

The traffic-adaptive medium access protocol (TRAMA) is introduced for energy-efficient collision-free channel access in wireless sensor networks. TRAMA reduces energy consumption by ensuring that unicast and broadcast transmissions incur no collisions, and by allowing nodes to assume a low-power, idle state whenever they are not transmitting or receiving. TRAMA assumes that time is slotted and uses a distributed election scheme based on information about traffic at each node to determine which node can transmit at a particular time slot. Using traffic information, TRAMA avoids assigning time slots to nodes with no traffic to send, and also allows nodes to determine when they can switch off to idle mode and not listen to the channel. TRAMA is shown to be fair and correct, in that no idle node is an intended receiver and no receiver suffers collisions. An analytical model to quantify the performance of TRAMA is presented and the results are verified by simulation. The performance of TRAMA is evaluated through extensive simulations using both synthetic- as well as sensor-network scenarios. The results indicate that TRAMA outperforms contention-based protocols (CSMA, 802.11 and S-MAC) and also static scheduled-access protocols (NAMA) with significant energy savings. This work was supported in part by the NSF-NGI grant number ANI-9813724 and by the Jack Baskin Chair of Computer Engineering at UCSC. Venkatesh Rajendran received the B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the Anna University in 2001, and M.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in 2003. He is currently working towards his Ph.D at UCSC. He is a graduate student researcher at the Inter-networking Research Lab (INRG). His research interests are in wireless communication system design, energy-aware media access control protocols for wireless ad hoc networks, smart sensor networks, reliable multi-casting, wireless multi-carrier communications, digital signal processing, adaptive modulation, and smart antenna systems. Katia Obraczka received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Southern California (USC). She is an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before joining UCSC, she held a research scientist position at USC's Information Sciences Institute and a research faculty appointment at USC's Computer Science Department. Her research interests include computer networks, more specifically, network protocol design and evaluation in wire-line as well as wireless (in particular, multi-hop ad hoc) networks, distributed systems, and Internet information systems. J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, in 1980 and 1983, respectively. He is the Baskin Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Dr. Garcia-Luna-Aceves directs the Computer Communication Research Group (CCRG), which is part of the Information Technologies Institute of the Baskin School of Engineering at UCSC. He has been a Visiting Professor at Sun Laboratories and a consultant on protocol design for Nokia. Prior to joining UCSC in 1993, he was a Center Director at SRI International (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. Dr. Garcia-Luna-Aceves has published a book and more than 250 refereed papers and three U.S patents, and has directed more than 18 Ph.D. theses at UCSC. He has been Program Co-Chair of ACM MobiHoc 2002 and ACM Mobicom 2000; Chair of the ACM SIG Multimedia; General Chair of ACM Multimedia '93 and ACM SIGCOMM '88; and Program Chair of IEEE MULTIMEDIA '92, ACM SIGCOMM '87, and ACM SIGCOMM '86. He has served in the IEEE Internet Technology Award Committee, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal Committee, and the National Research Council Panel on Digitization and Communications Science of the Army Research Laboratory Technical Assessment Board. HE has been on the editorial boards of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, the Multimedia Systems Journal, and the Journal of High Speed Networks. He received the SRI International Exceptional-Achievement Award in 1985 and 1989, and is a senior member of the IEEE.     

Smooth handoff with enhanced packet buffering-and-forwarding in wireless/mobile networks

Packet buffering-and-forwarding is a simple mechanism and has been widely used to provide seamless handoffs in many wireless/mobile networks. However, some undesirable side effects of this mechanism, if not managed appropriately, can easily diminish its effectiveness in providing seamless inter-cell transitions during a handoff. We first examine these side effects and show how inappropriate buffer management by a mobility agent could affect the TCP performance. The throughput of TCP is then studied with special emphasis on the effects of a handoff. We then propose a Last-Come-First-Drop (LCFD) buffer management policy (to be employed by mobility agents) and post-handoff acknowledgement suppression (to be used by mobile nodes) to improvement the TCP performance. Our enhancements are backward compatible and suitable for the gradual/incremental deployment. By deriving an analytical model and conducting numerical analysis, we show that our scheme can improve the TCP throughput up to 30%. Finally, we conduct the ns-2-based simulation to confirm these numerical results, and demonstrate the applicability of the analytic model for predicting TCP throughput in other handoff schemes. Chun-Ting Chou is currently a senior member research staff in Philips Research North America, Briarcliff Manor, New York. He received both the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 1995 and 1997, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2004. He is actively involved in standardization of WiMedia Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) Wireless PANs, IEEE 802.15.3c high-speed wireless PANs and IEEE 802.15.5 meshed Wireless PANs. His current research interests include quality of service (QoS), MAC protocols for UWB Wireless PANs, 60-GHz wireless PANs using directional antennas, meshed wireless LANs and PANs, and spectrum agile and cooperative communication. Kang G. Shin is the Kevin and Nancy O’Connor Professor of Computer Science and Founding Director of the Real-Time Computing Laboratory in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. His current research focuses on QoS-sensitive networking and computing as well as on embedded real-time OS, middleware and applications, all with emphasis on timeliness and dependability. He has supervised the completion of 54 PhD theses, and authored/coauthored around 630 technical papers and numerous book chapters in the areas of distributed real-time computing and control, computer networking, fault-tolerant computing, and intelligent manufacturing. He has co-authored (jointly with C. M. Krishna) a textbook “Real-Time Systems,” McGraw Hill, 1997. He has received a number of best paper awards, including the IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize Paper Award in 2003, the Best Paper Award from the IWQoS’03 in 2003, and an Outstanding IEEE Transactions of Automatic Control Paper Award in 1987. He has also coauthored papers with his students which received the Best Student Paper Awards from the 1996 IEEE Real-Time Technology and Application Symposium, and the 2000 UNSENIX Technical Conference. He has also received several institutional awards, including the Research Excellence Award in 1989, Outstanding Achievement Award in 1999, Service Excellence Award in 2000, Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in 2001, and Stephen Attwood Award in 2004 from The University of Michigan; a Distinguished Alumni Award of the College of Engineering, Seoul National University in 2002; and 2003 IEEE RTC Technical Achievement Award. He received the B.S. degree in Electronics Engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea in 1970, and both the M.S. and Ph.D degrees in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York in 1976 and 1978, respectively. From 1978 to 1982 he was on the faculty of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. He has held visiting positions at the U.S. Airforce Flight Dynamics Laboratory, AT &T Bell Laboratories, Computer Science Division within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and HP Research Laboratories. He also chaired the Computer Science and Engineering Division, EECS Department, The University of Michigan for three years beginning January 1991. He is Fellow of IEEE and ACM, and member of the Korean Academy of Engineering, is serving as the General Chair for the 3rd ACM/USENIX International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys’05), was the General Chair of the 2000 IEEE Real-Time Technology and Applications Symposium, the Program Chair of the 1986 IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS), the General Chair of the 1987 RTSS, the Guest Editor of the 1987 August special issue of IEEE Transactions on Computers on Real-Time Systems, a Program Co-Chair for the 1992 International Conference on Parallel Processing, and served numerous technical program committees. He also chaired the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems during 1991--93, was a Distinguished Visitor of the Computer Society of the IEEE, an Editor of IEEE Trans. on Parallel and Distributed Computing, and an Area Editor ofInternational Journal of Time-Critical Computing Systems,Computer Networks, and ACM Transactions on Embedded Systems.     

A Development Environment for OSA-Based Applications over the Interworked WLAN and Cellular Networks

In this paper, we propose an OSA-based development environment for interworking WLAN and 3G cellular networks. The main goal of our work is to establish and create an environment that can serve as a demonstration of a working network for OSA-based application developers while featuring mobile services over the interworked LAN and 3G cellular networks. The proposed simulating environment has (i) a location update scheme that is used to obtain mobile users' locations and status information over the interworked WLAN and cellular networks, (ii) an instant message gateway (IMG) simulator that is developed to send and receive generic messages over the interworked WLAN and cellular networks, and (iii) a mapping of Parlay APIs onto SIP signaling messages for multiparty call applications over the interworked WLAN and cellular networks. An illustrated OSA-based application that utilizes the corresponding system functions and modules is developed and verified using the proposed simulating environment. Chung-Ming Huang received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University on 1984/6, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer and Information Science from The Ohio State University on 1987/12 and 1991/6 respectively. He is currently a professor in Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, R.O.C. He is the director of The Promotion Center for Network Applications and Services, Innovative Communication Education Project, Ministry of Education, Taiwan, R.O.C. His research interests include broadband Internet and applications, wireless and mobile network protocols, ubiquitous computing and communications, and multimedia streaming. Tz-Heng Hsu received the B.S. degree from Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Feng Chia University on 1996/6, and the M.S. degree and Ph.D from Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University on 1998/7 and 2005/7, Taiwan, R.O.C. He is currently a assistant professor in Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Southern Taiwan University of Technology. His research interests are wireless and mobile network protocols, applications over interworked WLAN and cellular networks and communications, and multimedia streaming. Chih-Wen Chao received the B.S. degree from Department of Engineering Science, National Cheng Kung University on 2003/6, and the M.S. degree from Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University on 2005/7, Taiwan, R.O.C. His research interests are OSA-based applications and distributed multimedia systems.     

Location-aware routing protocol with dynamic adaptation of request zone for mobile ad hoc networks

One possibility direction to assist routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is to use geographical location information provided by positioning devices such as global positioning systems (GPS). Instead of searching the route in the entire network blindly, position-based routing protocol uses the location information of mobile nodes to confine the route searching space into a smaller estimated range. The smaller route searching space to be searched, the less routing overhead and broadcast storm problem will occur. In this paper, we proposed a location-based routing protocol called LARDAR. There are three important characteristics be used in our protocol to improve the performance. Firstly, we use the location information of destination node to predict a smaller triangle or rectangle request zone that covers the position of destination in the past. The smaller route discovery space reduces the traffic of route request and the probability of collision. Secondly, in order to adapt the precision of the estimated request zone, and reduce the searching range, we applied a dynamic adaptation of request zone technique to trigger intermediate nodes using the location information of destination node to redefine a more precise request zone. Finally, an increasing-exclusive search approach is used to redo route discovery by a progressive increasing search angle basis when route discovery failed. This progressive increased request zone and exclusive search method is helpful to reduce routing overhead. It guarantees that the areas of route rediscovery will never exceed twice the entire network. Simulation results show that LARDAR has lower routing cost and collision than other protocols. Tzay-Farn Shih was with Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University. Tzay-Farn Shih received the B.S. degree in Information Management from Chinese Culture University, Taiwan, in 1992, the M.S. degree in Computer Science Engineering from Tatung University, Taiwan, in 1996, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University, Taiwan, in 2006. He is presently an assistant professor of Computer Science and Information Engineering at Chaoyang University of Technology, where he initially joined in August 2006. He is currently an overseas member of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE). His current research interests include computer simulation, computer networks routing protocol, wireless networks, Mobile Ad Hoc networks and sensor networks. Hsu-Chun Yen was born in Taiwan, Republic of China, on May 29, 1958. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, Taiwan, in 1980, the M.S. degree in computer engineering from National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan, in 1982, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin, U.S.A., in 1986. He is presently a Professor of Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University, where he initially joined in August 1990. From August 1986 to July 1990, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, U.S.A. His current research interests include Petri net theory, formal methods, design and analysis of algorithms, and complexity theory. Dr. Yen is an editor of International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science (IJFCS, World Scientific Publisher).     

A Relay-Based MAC Protocol for Multi-Rate and Multi-Range Infrastructure Wireless LANs

Auto rate adaptation mechanisms have been proposed to improve the throughput in wireless local area networks with IEEE 802.11a/b/g standards that can support multiple data rate at the physical layer. However, even with the capability of transmitting multi-packets with multi-rate IEEE 802.11 PHY, a mobile host near the fringe of the Access-Point's (AP's) transmission range still needs to adopt a low-level modulation to cope with the lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), Thus, it can not obtain a data rate as high as that of a host near AP in most cases. According to the characteristics of modulation schemes, the highest data rate between a pair of mobile hosts will be inversely proportional with the transmission distance. Considering these factors, we here demonstrate a Relay-Based Adaptive Auto Rate (RAAR) protocol that can find a suitable relay node for data transmission between transmitter and receiver, and can dynamically adjust its modulation scheme to achieve the maximal throughput of a node according to the transmission distance and the channel condition. The basic concept is that the best modulation schemes are adaptively used by a wireless station to transmit an uplink data frame, according to the path loss condition between the station itself and a relay node, and that between the relay node and AP, thus delivering data at a higher overall data rate. Evaluation results show that this scheme provides significant throughput improvement for nodes located at the fringe of the AP's transmission range, thus remarkably improving overall system performance. Jain-Shing Liu was born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1970. He received the Ph.D. degree in Department of Computer and Information Science, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. He is currently with the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Information Management, Providence University, Taichung, Taiwan 433, ROC. His research interests include wireless communication protocol design, performance analysis and modeling, personal communication networks, and distributed simulation. Dr. Liu is a member of IEEE and IEICE. Chunhung Richard Lin was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, in 1987 and 1989, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1996. Dr. Lin joined National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan in 1996. Since August 2000, he has been with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. His research interests include the design and control of personal communication networks, protocol design and implementation for differentiated/integrated services in mobile wireless networks, mobile Internet, distributed simulation, and embedded operating system design and implementation. His email address is: lin@cse.nsysu.edu.tw. Dr. Lin is an ACM member. He received the 2001 Junior Professor Research Award from National Sun Yat-Sen University and the 2000 Investigative Research Award from the Pan Wen Yuan Foundation, Taiwan, ROC.     

Proportional Service Differentiation in Wireless LANs Using Spacing-based Channel Occupancy Regulation

In this paper, we propose Spacing-based Channel Occupancy Regulation (SCORE) MAC protocol for wireless LANs that provides proportional service differentiation in terms of normalized throughput. As shown by our system model and simulation study, SCORE provides consistent, scalable and adjustable proportional differentiation for any network size, any service class distribution, any node data rate and any packet size. Compared to state-of-the-art prioritized service differentiation schemes like Enhanced Distributed Coordination Function (EDCF), SCORE can quantitatively control the channel sharing between different service classes. Moreover, SCORE obtains significant performance improvements in terms of higher network throughput, higher transmission efficiency, lower medium access delay and lower delay jitter. Dr. Qi Xue is now a senior systems engineer with Qualcomm Inc. since Feb. 2005. Qi Xue is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He received his M.S. degree in Electrical and Information Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 2000. His research interests include protocol design and performance analysis in wireless networks. Weibo Gong received his Ph.D degree from Harvard University in 1987, and have been with the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst since then. He is also an adjunct professor in the Dept. of Computer Science at the same campus. His major research interests include control and systems methods in communication networks, network security, and network modeling and analysis. He is a receipient of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control’s George Axelby Outstanding paper award, an IEEE Fellow, and the Program Committee Chair for the 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. Aura Ganz received her B.Sc, M.Sc and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from the Technion in Israel. She is currently an associate professor and Director of the Multimedia Networks Laboratory at the ECE Department, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has experience in topics related to all strata of networking technology, from work related to topics in the network infrastructure development to advanced user-space application development for mobile clients. The research results are validated by a combination of analytical, simulation and prototyping tools. She has published a book “Multimedia Wireless Networks: Technologies, Standards and QoS” (Prentice Hall) and authored over one hundred and fifty peer reviewed publications. Dr. Ganz is a senior member of IEEE     

Concurrent Error Detection in a Polynomial Basis Multiplier over GF(2 m )

Eliminating cryptographic computation errors is vital for preventing attacks. A simple approach is to verify the correctness of the cipher before outputting it. The multiplication is the most significant arithmetic operation among the cryptographic computations. Hence, a multiplier with concurrent error detection ability is urgently necessary to avert attacks. Employing the re-computing shifted operand concept, this study presents a semi-systolic array polynomial basis multiplier with concurrent error detection with minimal area overhead. Moreover, the proposed multiplier requires only two extra clock cycles while traditional multipliers using XOR trees consume at least extra XOR gate delays in GF(2^m) fields. Chiou-Yng Lee received the Bachelor’s degree (1986) in medical engineering and the M.S. degree in electronic engineering (1992), both from the Chung Yuan university, Taiwan, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Chang Gung University, Taiwan, in 2001. From 1988 to now, he was a research associate with Chunghwa Telecommunication Laboratory in Taiwan. He joined the department of project planning. He taught those related field courses at Ching-Yun Technology University. He is currently as an assistant professor of Department of Computer Information and Network Engineering in Lunghwa University of Science and Technology. His research interests include computations in finite fields, error-control coding, signal processing, and digital transmission system. Besides, he is a member of the IEEE and the IEEE Computer society. He is also an honor member of Phi Tao Phi in 2001. Che Wun Chiou received his B.S. degree in Electronic Engineering from Chung Yuan Christian University in 1982, the M.S. degree and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from National Cheng Kung University in 1984 and 1989, respectively. From 1990 to 2000, he was with the Chung Shan Institute of Science and Technology in Taiwan. He joined the Department of Electronic Engineering and the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Ching Yun University in 2000 and 2005, respectively. He is currently as Dean of Division of Continuing Education in Ching Yun University. His current research interests include fault-tolerant computing, computer arithmetic, parallel processing, and cryptography. Jim-Min Lin was born on March 5, 1963 in Taipei, Taiwan. He received the B.S. degree in Engineering Science and the M.S. and the Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering, all from National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, in 1985, 1987, and 1992, respectively. Since February 1993, he has been an Associate Professor at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung City, Taiwan. He is currently as Professor at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University. His research interests include Operating Systems, Software Integration/Reuse, Embedded Systems, Software Agent Technology, and Testable Design.     

Update Propagation Algorithms for Supporting Disconnected Write in Mobile Wireless Systems with Data Broadcasting Capability

We develop and analyze algorithms for propagating updates by mobile hosts in wireless client–server environments that support disconnected write operations, with the goal of minimizing the tuning time for update propagation to the server. These algorithms allow a mobile host to update cached data objects while disconnected and propagate the updates to the server upon reconnection for conflict resolutions. We investigate two algorithms applicable to mobile systems in which invalidation reports/data can be broadcast to mobile hosts periodically. We show that there exists an optimal broadcasting period under which the tuning time is minimized for update propagations. We perform a comparative analysis between these two update propagation algorithms that rely on broadcasting data and an algorithm that does not, and identify conditions under which an algorithm should be applied to reduce the total tuning time for update propagation by the mobile user to save the valuable battery power and avoid high communication cost. For real-time applications, we address the tradeoff between tuning time and access time with the goal to select the best update propagation algorithm that can minimize the tuning time while satisfying the imposed real-time deadline constraint. The analysis result is applicable to file/data objects that mobile users may need to modify while on the move. Ing-Ray Chen received the BS degree from the National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, and the MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Houston. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. His research interests include mobile computing, pervasive computing, multimedia, distributed systems, real-time intelligent systems, and reliability and performance analysis. Dr. Chen has served on the program committee of numerous conferences, including as program chair for 29th IEEE Annual International Computer Software and Application Conference in 2005, 14th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence in 2002, and 3rd IEEE Symposium on Application-Specific Systems and Software Engineering Technology in 2000. Dr. Chen currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, The Computer Journal, and International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools. He is a member of the IEEE/CS and ACM. Ngoc Anh Phan received her Bachelor of Science degree from Moscow Technical University of Communication and Computer Science in 1997, and a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in 1999. She is currently a Ph.D student at Virginia Tech and a Senior Software Engineer at America Online Inc. Her research interests include wireless communications, data management, sensor networks, fault tolerance, and mobile computing. I-Ling Yen received her BS degree from Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, and her MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Houston. She is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Yen's research interests are in distributed systems, fault-tolerant computing, self-stabilization algorithms, and security. She has served as program co-chair for the 1997 IEEE High Assurance Systems Engineering Workshop, the 1999 IEEE Symposium on Application-Specific Systems and Software Engineering Technology, and the 1999 Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Software and Applications Conference. Dr. Yen is a member of the IEEE/CS.