Discovering timely information in MANETs

Timely information refers to information whose ‘most recent’ or ‘latest’ instance is most valuable. In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), multiple instances of a piece of timely information may be produced by different nodes at different points in time. The problem is to discover the ‘latest’ instance among all existing instances. Within the context of MANETs, timely information discovery is fundamentally different from the existing resource/service discovery problem whose goal is to discover either any instance or a subset of instances which satisfy a local query constraint that can be specified and evaluated using only local attributes of each individual node. In contrast, the timely information discovery problem imposes the global (timeliness) constraint which should best be evaluated when all the instances are considered to determine the latest instance. The complication of discovering timely information arises from the existence of multiple instances of the information, which are produced at different points in time by different nodes in the network, and the need to collect all these instances to decide the latest instance. For MANETs, the lack of infrastructure supports, frequent topology changes, and potential packet loss in wireless communications further challenge the problem of timely information discovery. This paper describes a self-organizing, peer-to-peer based approach, termed ALADIN, to discovering timely information in MANETs. In ALADIN, nodes that produce instances of the timely information are peers who self-organize an adaptive and distributed ‘search infrastructure’ to facilitate the discovery of the latest instance. A simulation study shows that ALADIN is scalable without incurring network-wide flooding in the case of large-scale networks and popular timely information, and yields a high chance of discovering the latest instance in the presence of mobility.     

Efficient OVSF code assignment and reassignment strategies in UMTS

This paper presents an integrated solution for code management, assignment, and reassignment problems in UMTS. We propose a new architecture for code management and, based upon this new architecture, a code assignment strategy, referred to as "crowded-group first strategy". Our system architecture and code assignment strategy represent significant improvements both in the time complexity and the maintenance complexity. Moreover, the code blocking probability of the crowded-group first strategy is competitive to that of the other strategies. In this paper, we also propose a new code reassignment strategy, called the "crowded-branch first strategy". The main objective of this reassignment strategy is to reduce reassigned call probability with low computation overhead and extend this strategy for the general case. In order to systematically analyze the performances of the code assignment strategy, we implement a simulator to analyze the code selection behavior and code blocking probability of each strategy. Moreover, we propose some new performance metrics, named "weighted code blocking", "reassigned call probability", and "ratio of actual code reassignments", in order to precisely measure the performance obtained by different strategies. From the simulation results, we show that our proposed strategies efficiently utilize the OVSF codes with low computation overhead.     

On-call processing delay in high speed networks

In future BISDN networks, significant burdens will be placed on the processing elements in the network since call routing and admission policies will be more computationally intensive than those in present day networks. Thus, the bottleneck in future networks is likely to shift from the communication links to the processing elements. The delays at these elements are influenced by their processing capacity and factors such as; routing algorithms, propagation delays, admission control functions, and network topology. The goal of this paper is to characterize the behavior of these factors on the call setup time and accepted call throughput. This behavior is examined for three sequential routing schemes and two flooding routing schemes under various network parameters and different forms of admission control. The results of our study indicate that processing capacity and the admission control function can affect the call setup time and accepted call throughput significantly while propagation delay does not affect these performance measures significantly     

Fast optimal video placement algorithms for hierarchicalvideo-on-demand systems

The multilevel hierarchical network architecture has been shown to be a scalable and cost efficient solution for large video-on-demand (VOD) systems. The predominant operation cost of a hierarchical VOD system consists of network transmission cost and video storage cost. How to minimize the operation cost under several operating constraints is an important issue. Many operating constraints, such as the storage capacity limitation at each level of servers, have made the problem intractable. We proposed several efficient heuristic video placement algorithms that can achieve near optimal operating cost. We have also proposed a time-variant arrival traffic model with arrival rate matching the statistics gathered from commercial systems     

UbiPhone: Human-Centered Ubiquitous Phone System

Emerging rich wireless networking modalities facilitate the development of new intelligent, innovative services on smart phones. The authors propose a ubiquitous phone (UbiPhone) system that demonstrates innovative context-aware human-centric phone services, which could become available on smart phones. UbiPhone's features include UbiCall, AnyCall, and an emergency contact service.     

Markov-Based OVSF Code Assignment Scheme and Call Admission Control for Wideband-CDMA Communication Systems

For the reason of the orthogonal characteristic of the Orthogonal Variable Spreading Factor (OVSF) code tree in Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) systems, code blocking increases as traffic load (i.e. Erlang load) or the required rate increases. This causes inefficient utilization of channelization codes. Hence, how to efficiently manage the resource of channelization codes of the OVSF code tree in WCDMA systems is an important issue and has been studied extensively. There are two aspects to achieve efficiency including code assignment and code reassignment. In the aspect of code assignment, an efficient code assignment scheme reduces code blocking probability significantly. In the aspect of code reassignment, code reassignment results in several drawbacks, such as large overhead of computation, high complexity of codes moving, and long call setup time for a new request call, etc. Therefore, in this paper we focus on the first aspect of how to efficiently assign the channelization codes. Additionally, most researches did not consider the analysis of tree state with dynamic traffic load and their analysis lack of systematic call admission control (CAC) mechanism. Therefore, in this paper, we first propose the Markov decision process (MDP) based analysis to assign channelization codes efficiently. Next, we extend the MDP-based approach as the call admission control mechanism to maximize the system revenue while reducing blocking probability. Furthermore, a bit string masking algorithm is proposed to reduce the time complexity of tree managing and searching for available channelization codes. Numerical results indicate that the proposed MDP approach yields the best fractional reward loss, code blocking reward loss, and code blocking ratio as compared to that of other schemes, including the random, left most, and crowded first schemes. Ben-Jye Chang received his M.S. degree in computer engineering from University of Massachusetts, Lowell, in 1991 and the Ph.D. degree in computer science and information engineering from National Chung-Cheng University, Taiwan, in 2001. He joined the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering faculty at Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan, in 2002, where he is currently an associate professor. His research interests include QoS-based networks, QoS wireless networking, resource management for wireless networks and mobile cellular networks, and performance evaluation of networks. Min-Xiou Chen received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science and information engineering from Tung Hai University and National Chung Cheng University in 1996, and 1998, respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chung Cheng University. His research interests include wireless communication, SIP, and resource management in WCDMA systems. Ren-Hung Hwang received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, in 1989 and 1993, respectively. He joined the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Chia-Yi, Taiwan, in 1993, where he is now a full professor and the Chair of the Department of Communication Engineering. His research interests include Internet QoS, peer-to-peer infrastructure design, and 3G QoS. Chun-Huan Chuang received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science and information engineering from National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan, in 2001 and 2003, respectively. His research interests include wireless communication and resource management in WCDMA systems.     

Communication framework for vehicle ad hoc network on?freeways

Providing an efficient and stable communication framework of Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is an emerging issue. Most of conventional VANET communication schemes only support short range transmission, vehicles need to relay traffic data or frequently switch to different roadside units. Such an ad hoc-based method suffers a high jitter delay and makes it difficult to develop travel and real-time multimedia services, such as traffic information dissemination and fleet management. Fortunately, existing novel wireless technologies, e.g. WiMAX mobile multi-relay (MMR), provide long transmission range and high transmission rate in mobile environments. This study presents a Safety/Vehicular Information Delivery (SVID) framework, an application-layer VANET communication protocol. A power-abundant, large size vehicle, called SIP-based relay vehicle (SRV), e.g. long distance transportation bus, plays as a relay station (RS) providing the connectivity to other small vehicles around it. To provide VANET services in SVID, this work adopts a SIP-based mechanism. The proposed scheme can provide more efficient communication than conventional VANET ad hoc mode. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a low SIP transaction time, jitter delay, frame loss rate while avoiding the broadcast storm problem.     

QoS routing granularity in MPLS networks

This study investigates how constraint-based routing decision granularity significantly affects the scalability and blocking performance of QoS routing in an MPLS network. Coarse granularity, such as per-destination, has lower storage and computational overheads but is only suitable for best effort traffic. On the other hand, fine granularity, such as per-flow, provides lower blocking probability for bandwidth requests, but requires a huge number of states and high computational cost. To achieve cost-effective scalability, this study proposes using hybrid granularity schemes. The overflowed cache of the per-pair/flow scheme adds a per-pair cache and a per-flow cache as the routing cache, and performs well in blocking probability. The per-pair/class scheme groups the flows into several paths using routing marks, thus allowing packets to be label-forwarded with a bounded cache     

Uplink access control for machine-type communications in LTE-A networks

Internet of things (IoT) has been considered as one of the most promising technologies over the next decade. One of the basic requirements of IoT is the global communication connectivity between smart objects. LTE-A has been considered as the main communication channel for connecting devices. For this reason, the machine-type communication (MTC) has been defined in the 3GPP LTE-A specification. With the rapid growth of the IoT devices, MTC in LTE-A faces many challenges. The primary design of a LTE-A network is to support the human-type communication (HTC). However, MTC and HTC have different characteristics, such as packet size, traffic arrival rate, and delay tolerance. How to accommodate a large amount of MTC traffic without affecting the grade of service of the HTC is challenging. More specifically, before accessing the LTE-A network, a random access (RA) procedure needs to be performed by a device to synchronize in the uplink of an eNB. Since the number of MTC devices is expected to be much greater than the HTC devices, without suitable access control, the success rate of the RA requests from the HTC devices can be significantly degraded. Therefore, this research aims to design an appropriate RA procedure to relieve this problem. The authors propose an Adaptive RACH Resource Allocation (ARRA) which integrates several control schemes, including a Resource Allocation scheme, an Access Class Barring scheme, and a Priority Device Setting scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed ARRA is able to achieve a higher access success rate and a lower latency for HTC devices while providing a different quality of service to different types of MTC devices.     

Convective heat transfer over a heated square porous cylinder in a channel

A numerical study is made of the unsteady flow and convection heat transfer for a heated square porous cylinder in a channel. The general Darcy–Brinkman–Forchheimer model is adopted for the porous region. The parameters studies including porosity, Darcy number, and Reynolds number on heat transfer performance have been explored in detail. The results indicate that the average local Nusselt number is augmented as the Darcy number increases. The average local Nusselt number increases as Reynolds number increases; in particular, the increase is more obvious at a higher Darcy number. In contrast, the porosity has slight influence on heat transfer.