Development and Integration of Sub-hourly Rainfall–Runoff Modeling Capability Within a Watershed Model

Increasing urbanization changes runoff patterns to be flashy and instantaneous with decreased base flow. A model with the ability to simulate sub-daily rainfall–runoff processes and continuous simulation capability is required to realistically capture the long-term flow and water quality trends in watersheds that are experiencing urbanization. Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) has been widely used in hydrologic and nonpoint sources modeling. However, its subdaily modeling capability is limited to hourly flow simulation. This paper presents the development and testing of a sub-hourly rainfall–runoff model in SWAT. SWAT algorithms for infiltration, surface runoff, flow routing, impoundments, and lagging of surface runoff have been modified to allow flow simulations with a sub-hourly time interval as small as one minute. Evapotranspiration, soil water contents, base flow, and lateral flow are estimated on a daily basis and distributed equally for each time step. The sub-hourly routines were tested on a 1.9 km² watershed (70% undeveloped) near Lost Creek in Austin Texas USA. Sensitivity analysis shows that channel flow parameters are more sensitive in sub-hourly simulations (Δt = 15 min) while base flow parameters are more important in daily simulations (Δt = 1 day). A case study shows that the sub-hourly SWAT model reasonably reproduces stream flow hydrograph under multiple storm events. Calibrated stream flow for 1 year period with 15 min simulation (R ² = 0.93) shows better performance compared to daily simulation for the same period (R ² = 0.72). A statistical analysis shows that the improvement in the model performance with sub-hourly time interval is mostly due to the improvement in predicting high flows. The sub-hourly version of SWAT is a promising tool for hydrology and non-point source pollution assessment studies, although more development on water quality modeling is still needed.     

Differential space time block codes using nonconstant modulus constellations

We propose differential space time block codes (STBC) using nonconstant modulus constellations, e.g., quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), which cannot be utilized in the conventional differential STBC. Since QAM constellations have a larger minimum distance compared with the phase shift keying (PSK), the proposed method has the advantage of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain compared with conventional differential STBC. The QAM signals are encoded in a manner similar to that of the conventional differential STBC. To decode nonconstant modulus signals, the received signals are normalized by the channel power estimated forgoing training symbols and then decoded with a conventional QAM decoder. Assuming the knowledge of the channel power at the receiver, the symbol error rate (SER) bound of the proposed method under independent Rayleigh fading assumption is derived, which shows better SER performance than the conventional differential STBC. When the transmission rate is more than 3 bits/channel use in time-varying channels, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method with the channel power estimation outperforms the conventional differential STBC. Specifically, the posed method using the channel power estimation obtains a 7.3 dB SNR gain at a transmission rate of 6 bits/channel use in slow fading channels. Although the performance gap between the proposed method and the conventional one decreases as the Doppler frequency increases, the proposed method still exhibits lower SER than the conventional one, provided the estimation interval L is chosen carefully.     

Dynamic Frame Dropping for Bandwidth Control in MPEG Streaming System

In a network environment where the available bandwidth changes dynamically, it is desirable for a streaming system to control the media quality in an adaptive way according to the dynamics of underlying network resource. This paper presents the implementation of a real-time MPEG filtering system which uses the concept of dynamic frame-drop. The filtering system drops video frames in a controlled way and reconstructs a valid MPEG system stream in real-time. The system consists of a sequence of filtering modules and each module is carefully designed to maintain the synchronization characteristics of real-time streaming. A special effort is given to the correct implementation of video and audio synchronization after frame-drop. The experiments show that the implemented system produces a valid MPEG system stream after filtering as well as the media bandwidth of a filtered stream is dynamically controlled by a given frame-drop policy.     

Constructing a video server with tertiary storage: Practice and experience

Handling a tertiary storage device, such as an optical disk library, in the framework of a disk-based stream service model, requires a sophisticated streaming model for the server, and it should consider the device-specific performance characteristics of tertiary storage. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a video server which uses tertiary storage as a source of media archiving. We have carefully designed the streaming mechanism for a server whose key functionalities include stream scheduling, disk caching and admission control. The stream scheduling model incorporates the tertiary media staging into a disk-based scheduling process, and also enhances the utilization of tertiary device bandwidth. The disk caching mechanism manages the limited capacity of the hard disk efficiently to guarantee the availability of media segments on the hard disk. The admission controller provides an adequate mechanism which decides upon the admission of a new request based on the current resource availability of the server. The proposed system has been implemented on a general-purpose operating system and it is fully operational. The design principles of the server are validated with real experiments, and the performance characteristics are analyzed. The results guide us on how servers with tertiary storage should be deployed effectively in a real environment. RID="*" ID="*" e-mail: hjcha@cs.yonsei.ac.kr     

NetCube: a comprehensive network traffic analysis model based on multidimensional OLAP data cube

Network traffic monitoring and analysis are essential for effective network operation and resource management. In particular, multidimensional analysis for long‐term traffic data is necessary for comprehensive understanding of the traffic trend and effective quality‐of‐service provision considering the extremely dynamic behavior of the current Internet, where various types of traffic occur from high‐speed network links and greatly increasing number of applications. However, only limited analysis results are provided, as the existing network traffic analysis tools and systems are developed and deployed focusing on their own specialized analysis purposes. Consequently, it is difficult to understand the network comprehensively and deeply, which increases the necessity for multilateral analysis of long‐term traffic data. In this paper, we propose a novel traffic analysis model for large volumes of Internet traffic accumulated over a long period of time. The NetCube, the proposed network traffic analysis model using online analytical processing (OLAP) on a multidimensional data cube, provides an easy and fast way to construct a multidimensional traffic analysis system for comprehensive and detailed analysis of long‐term traffic data by utilizing simple OLAP operations and powerful data‐mining techniques on various abstraction levels of traffic data to complete the analysis purpose. We validate the feasibility and applicability of the proposed NetCube traffic analysis model by implementing a traffic analysis system and applying it to our campus network. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Diffusion Wave Model for Simulating Storm-Water Runoff on Highway Pavement Surfaces at Superelevation Transition

On a curved section of highway, the cross slope of the road is often designed to be superelevated to balance the centrifugal force and gravity applied on vehicles. The accumulation of storm-water runoff (sheet flow) near superelevation transitions may significantly increase due to the extended flow path and converging flow lines. A two-dimensional finite-volume-based diffusion wave model is developed to simulate the sheet flow on these geometrically complex surfaces. Both Dirichlet- and Neumann-type boundary conditions are developed for open boundaries based on kinematic wave theory. Results show that the distribution of sheet flow is closely related to the cross slope, longitudinal slope, rainfall intensity, and the width of the road. The analysis of sheet flow characteristics on superelevation transition areas suggests that the optimal longitudinal slope in the range of 0.3–0.4% minimizes the depth of storm-water runoff on the road surface.     

Performance Evaluation of Multiple Transmit Antenna Non-Coherent Detection Schemes in Fast Fading Channels

For the fast fading channels, e.g., fast mobile channels,non-coherent detection scheme is promising because the receiverdoes not require to measure the channel information, which resultsin reducing transmission overhead. In this paper, we compare thebit error rate of two non-coherent encoding/decoding schemes formultiple transmit antennas under fast fading environments when thenumber of antenna varies from two to three. The first approach isa unitary space-time modulation (USTM) that aims to achieve thenon-coherent channel capacity. The second one is a differentialspace-time block code (DSTBC), which projects information symbolsto a number of orthogonal bases that consist of the previouslysent symbols. We exhibit the fact that the block length of bothschemes affects the performance significantly rather thanencoding/decoding methods when the channel varies fast. Inaddition, we present some problems of the DSTBC sending thecomplex symbols with more than two transmit antennas. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.