Wireless mesh networks are attracting more and more attention as a promising technology for the next generation access infrastructure. QoS support is a unavoidable task given the rising popularity of multimedia applications, and also a challenging task for multi-hop wireless mesh networks. Among the numerous QoS factors, end-to-end delay is one of the most critical and important issues, especially for the real time applications. Over multi-hop wireless mesh networks, end-to-end delay of a flow is highly dependant on the number of hops as well as congestion condition of the hop nodes that the flow traverses through. In this paper, we propose QoS priority control schemes based on the end-to-end QoS delay metrics in order to increase traffic accommodation, i.e., the numbers of real-time flows which satisfy the requirements of end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio over multi-hop wireless mesh networks. The first scheme enables source and forwarding nodes to perform priority control based on the number of hops of routes. The second scheme enables nodes to perform priority control based on the congestion condition of the hop nodes, where the flow traverses through. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes is investigated with NS-2 network simulator for voice and video traffics over multi-hop wireless mesh networks. Simulation results show that the scheme greatly improves the traffic accommodation for voice and video applications in multi-hop wireless mesh networks.

Optimal static load balancing problems in open BCMP queueing networks with state-independent arrival and service rates are studied. Their examples include optimal static load balancing in distributed computer systems and static routing in communication networks. We refer to the load balancing policy of minimizing the overall mean response (or sojourn) time of a job as the overall optimal policy. We show the conditions that the solutions of the overall optimal policy satisfy and show that the policy uniquely determines the utilization of each service center, the mean delay for each class and each path class, etc., although the solution, the utilization for each class, the mean delay for all classes at each service center, etc., may not be unique. Then we give tha linear relations that characterize the set whose elements are the optimal solutions, and discuss the condition wherein the overall optimal policy has a unique solution. In parametric analysis and numerical calculation of optimal values of performance variables we must ensure whether they can be uniquely determined.

We consider the multicast routing problem for large-scale wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks where transmission requests are established by point-to-multipoint connections. To realize multicast routing in WDM optical networks, some nodes need to have light (optical) splitting capability. A node with splitting capability can forward an incoming message to more than one output link. We consider the problem of minimizing the number of split-capable nodes in the network for a given set of multicast requests. The number of wavelengths is fixed and given a priori. We propose a genetic algorithm that exploits the combination of alternative shortest paths for the given multicast requests in order to minimize the number of required split-capable nodes. This algorithm is examined for two realistic networks constructed based on the locations of major cities in Ibaraki Prefecture and those in Kanto District in Japan. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce more than 10% of split-capable nodes compared with other routing algorithms whereby the optimization for the split-capable node placement is not taken into account.

This paper proposes a Markov random field (MRF) model-based method for unsupervised segmentation of multispectral images consisting of multiple textures. To model such textured images, a hierarchical MRF is used with two layers, the first layer representing an unobservable region image and the second layer representing multiple textures which cover each region. This method uses the Expectation and Maximization (EM) method for model parameter estimation, where in order to overcome the well-noticed computational problem in the expectation step, we approximate the Baum function using mean-field-based decomposition of a posteriori probability. Given provisionally estimated parameters at each iteration in the EM method, a provisional segmentation is carried out using local a posteriori probability (LAP) of each pixel's region label, which is derived by mean-field-based decomposition of a posteriori probability of the whole region image. Experiments show that the use of LAPs is essential to perform a good image segmentation.

IEEE 802.11 DCF is an asynchronous and distributed MAC protocol which does not require the existence of a central controller for medium access coordination. This flexibility, which is due to DCF's contention-based nature, comes at the expense of the overhead associated with contention resolution. The overhead consists of frame collision time and channel idle time, which is particularly severe when channel is saturated. In this paper, we present an enhancement of DCF which aims at reducing its contention resolution overhead by equipping it with a distributed reservation mechanism. The proposed reservation mechanism enhances collision avoidance mechanism of DCF by enforcing a partially ordered medium access through an implicit agreement between neighboring nodes. Simulation results, using ns-2 network simulator, show that the added reservation scheme 1) effectively reduces DCF's overhead and improves channel utilization particularly when node density and traffic load is high, 2) significantly enhance DCF's fairness.

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks serve as a powerful complement to the terrestrial networks because of their ability to provide global coverage. In LEO satellite networks, the network is prone to congestion due to several reasons. First, the terrestrial gateways are usually located within a limited region leading to congestion of the nodes near the gateways. Second, routing algorithms that merely adopt shortest paths fail to distribute the traffic uniformly in the network. Finally, the traffic input may exceed the network capacity. Therefore, rate control and load-balancing routing are needed to alleviate network congestion. Moreover, different kinds of traffic have different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements which need to be treated appropriately. In this paper, we investigate joint rate control and load-balancing routing in LEO satellite networks to tackle the problem of network congestion while considering the QoS requirements of different traffic. The joint rate control and routing problem is formulated with the throughput and end-to-end delay requirements of the traffic taken into consideration. Two routing schemes are considered which differ in whether or not different traffic classes can be assigned different paths. For each routing scheme, the joint rate control and routing problem is formulated. A heuristic algorithm based on simulated annealing is proposed to solve the problems. Besides, a snapshot division method is proposed to increase the connectivity of the network and reduce the number of snapshots by merging the links between satellites and gateways. The simulation results show that compared with methods that perform routing and rate control separately, the proposed algorithm improves the overall throughput of the network and provides better QoS guarantees for different traffic classes.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are gaining significant momentum as a promising technology for the next-coming state-of-the-art wireless networking. Among many factors, the performance of WMNs would be largely affected by the properness of the deployed routing protocols and the efficient usage of wireless resources. Routing protocols are required to well capture WMNs' features while wireless channels should be used efficiently in order to accommodate high amount of traffics over the mesh backbone. Recently, a Tree-based Routing (TBR) protocol become a popular state-of-the-art proactive routing protocol and its tree-based broadcasting become an often used technique. Though TBR protocol is well-suited for WMNs' architecture and the skewed nature of traffic toward the root, the protocol in its current form faces issues which has to be addressed. Specifically, when some or all nodes are equipped with multiple radios, to reduce collision and co-channel interference, not only the parent-child relationship but also the sibling relationship need to be constructed by the TBR protocol in the multi-channel WMNs. In this paper, we propose a hybrid tree-based protocol for concurrent routing and channel assignment over WMNs. The protocol makes use of sibling links to mitigate the aforementioned shortcomings of TBR protocol. Moreover, in order to address high backbone traffic, the protocol integrates a receiver-based channel assignment scheme. The protocol efficiently deploys the parent-child topological relationships of nodes to enhance efficiency of broadcast transmissions over receiver-based multi-channel WMNs. Simulation results over NS-2 network simulator reveal that our proposed hybrid tree-based protocol achieves much higher performance than the utilization of the original receiver-based CA and TBR protocol.

We consider the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem for large-scale WDM optical networks where each transmission request is served by an all-optical lightpath without wavelength conversion. Two heuristic RWA algorithms are proposed in order to minimize the number of wavelengths required for a given set of connection requests. The proposed algorithms are evaluated and compared with the existing algorithms for two realistic networks constructed based on the locations of major cities in Ibaraki Prefecture and those in Kanto District in Japan.

Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology offers the capability of building wide-area networks with high speed. Reconfigurability is a key feature of a WDM network that enables the network logical topology to change dynamically in response to the changing traffic patterns. There are two important issues involved in the reconfiguration of a network logical topology. One is how to determine the new logical topology corresponding to the current topology. It needs to consider a trade-off between the performance of the new target topology and the cost of the topology transition from the current topology to the new one. The other is how to determine the transition sequence from the current topology to the new one. It needs to control the disruption to the network as less as possible during the reconfiguration process. In this paper, we focus on the latter problem and propose several heuristic algorithms that reconfigure logical topologies in wide-area wavelength-routed optical networks. Our reconfiguration algorithms attempt to control the disruption to the network as less as possible during the reconfiguration process. For this purpose, a lightpath is taken as the minimum reconfiguration unit. The proposed algorithms are evaluated by using an NFSNET-like network model with 16 nodes and 25 links. The results show that very simple algorithms provide very small computational complexity but poor performance, i.e., large network disruption, and that an efficient algorithm provides reasonable computational complexity and very good performance. More complex algorithms may improve performance somewhat further but have unrealistically large computational complexity.

We propose a distributed data management approach in this paper for a large-scale position-tracking system composed of multiple small systems based on wireless tag technologies such as RFID and Wi-Fi tags. Each of these small systems is called a domain, and a domain server manages the position data of the users belonging to its managing domain and also to the other domains but temporarily residing in its domain. The domain servers collaborate with each other to globally manage the position data, realizing the global position tracking. Several domains can be further grouped to form a larger domain, called a higher-domain, so that the whole system is constructed in a hierarchical structure. We implemented the proposed approach in an experimental environment, and conducted a performance evaluation on the proposed approach and compared it with an existing approach wherein a central server is used to manage the position data of all the users. The results showed that the position data processing load is distributed among the domain servers and the traffic for position data transmission over the backbone network can be significantly restrained.

In optical networks, wavelength converters are required to improve the efficiency of wavelength-division multiplexing. In this paper, we propose a genetic algorithm to determine the optimal locations of the nodes in the network where a given number of converters are placed. Optimality is achieved by the minimum wavelength blocking probability. Our algorithm is applied to two realistic networks constructed from the locations of major cities in Ibaraki Prefecture and from those in Kanto District in Japan and is shown to reach the nearly optimal solution in a limited number of generations. The accuracy is verified by simulation. The computational time is compared with that of an exhaustive search algorithm.

TCP is a reliable transport protocol tuned to perform well in traditional wired networks, where most packet losses are due to congestion. In wireless networks, however, packet losses result from wireless link loss in addition to congestion loss. Thus, TCP suffers a significant degradation in performance over wireless networks because it does not distinguish wireless link loss from congestion loss. To overcome this problem, the explicit wireless loss notification (EWLN) scheme is proposed to explicitly inform wireless link loss to the TCP sender. Previous work to deploy EWLN often lacked explicit specification of the interplay between EWLN and link-layer protocols, including error recovery mechanisms. In addition, many systems, being based on computation demanding the functionality of agents at a base station, were designed for the scenario where information is accessed from a mobile station through a wireless-to-wired connection. In this paper, we present an EWLN scheme that deploys the information from the MAC layer and takes into account the interplay with the error recovery mechanism at the link layer. The scheme does not require different implementations for mobile terminals and base stations and hence can support efficient TCP-based data transmission over wired-to-wireless and wireless-to-wired connections as well as ad-hoc networks.

Two-dimensional (2D) communication is a novel physical communication form that utilizes the surface as a communication medium to provide both data and power transmission service to the sensor devices placed on the surface's top. In previous works, we developed 2D communication systems that utilize separated channels for data and power transmission. Though this assignment of different channels can achieve strong network performance, the sensor devices must be equipped with two or more interfaces to simultaneously receive the power and data signals, which significantly complicates and enlarges those devices. Moreover, when a channel is used for the power supply, it not only continually monopolizes the wireless frequency resource, it is also likely to cause interference with the other signal source in the case of the input power continually being sent out above a certain level. In this paper, we develop a novel 2D communication sensor system by using a single-carrier frequency for both power and data transmission, equipped with the wireless module for the two together in a compact body. To enable a sensor node that concurrently receives energy and data communication, we propose an enhancement scheme based on the IEEE802.15.4 MAC protocol standard. Through both computer simulation and actual measurement of the output power, we evaluate the performance of power supply and data transmission over the developed 2D communication sensor system.

A current mode buck/boost DC-DC converter with automatic mode transition is presented in this paper. At heavy load, a control scheme adaptively changes operation mode between peak and valley current modes to achieve high efficiency, small output voltage ripple, and fast transient response. The switching loss is reduced by operating in pure modes, and the conduction loss is reduced by decreasing the average inductor current in transition modes. At light load, the equivalent switching frequency is decreased to reduce the switching loss. An automatic mode transition between heavy load PWM mode and light load PFM mode is achieved by introducing an average load current sensing method. The converter has been implemented with a standard 0.5,$mu$m CMOS process. The output voltage ripple is less than 10,mV in all modes, and the peak efficiency is 95%.

With the commercialization of 5G mobile phones, Android drivers are increasing rapidly to utilize a large quantity of newly emerging feature-rich hardware. Most of these drivers are developed by third-party vendors and lack proper vulnerabilities review, posing a number of new potential risks to security and privacy. However, the complexity and diversity of Android drivers make the traditional analysis methods inefficient. For example, the driver-specific argument formats make traditional syscall fuzzers difficult to generate valid inputs, the pointer-heavy code makes static analysis results incomplete, and pointer casting hides the actual type. Triggering code deep in Android drivers remains challenging. We present CoLaFUZE, a coverage-guided and layout-aware fuzzing tool for automatically generating valid inputs and exploring the driver code. CoLaFUZE employs a kernel module to capture the data copy operation and redirect it to the fuzzing engine, ensuring that the correct size of the required data is transferred to the driver. CoLaFUZE leverages dynamic analysis and symbolic execution to recover the driver interfaces and generates valid inputs for the interfaces. Furthermore, the seed mutation module of CoLaFUZE leverages coverage information to achieve better seed quality and expose bugs deep in the driver. We evaluate CoLaFUZE on 5 modern Android mobile phones from the top vendors, including Google, Xiaomi, Samsung, Sony, and Huawei. The results show that CoLaFUZE can explore more code coverage compared with the state-of-the-art fuzzer, and CoLaFUZE successfully found 11 vulnerabilities in the testing devices.

Many routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks. Among these protocols, the on-demand routing protocols are very attractive because they have low routing overhead. However, few of the existing on-demand routing protocols have considered the link heterogeneity, such as the different communication rate, different Packet Error Ratio (PER). As a result, the routes tend to have the shortest hop count and contain weak links, which usually provide low performance and are susceptible to breaks in the presence of mobility. In this paper, we analyze the existing on-demand routing protocols and propose a Link Heterogeneity Aware On-demand Routing (LHAOR) protocol, where the link quality and mobility are considered. Specifically, the Local Update (LU) is proposed and the link metric is inversely related with the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI). By using the LU method and RSSI information, the routes adapt to the topology variation and link quality changes, and reach the local optimum quickly, which contains strong links and has a small metric. Simulation and experiment results show that our LHAOR protocol achieves much higher performance than the classical on-demand routing protocols.

The development of information/communication technology has made it possible to access substantial amounts of data and retrieve information. However, it is often difficult to locate the desired information, and it becomes necessary to spend considerable time determining how to access specific available data. This paper describes a method to quantitatively evaluate the usability of large-scale information-oriented websites and the effects of improvements made to the site design. This is achieved by utilizing the Cognitive Walkthrough for the Web and website modeling using Markov chains. We further demonstrate that we can greatly improve usability through simple modification of the link structure by applying our approach to an actual informational database website with over 40,000 records.

The problem of restoring binary (black and white) images degraded by color-dependent flip-flap noises is considered. The real image is modeled by a Markov Random Field (MRF). The Iterated Conditional Modes (ICM) algorithm is adopted. It is shown that under certain conditions the ICM algorithm is insensitive to the MRF image model and noise parameters. Using this property, we propose a parameter-free restoration algorithm which does not require the estimations of the image model and noise parameters and thus can be implemented fully in parallel. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is shown through applying the algorithm to degraded hand-drawn and synthetic images.

Smallcells have recently emerged as a potential approach for local area deployments that can satisfy high data rate requirements, reduce energy consumption and enhance network coverage. In this paper, we work on maximizing the weighted sum energy efficiency (WS-EE) for densely deployed smallcell networks. Due to the combinatorial and the general fractional program nature of the resource allocation problem, WS-EE maximization is non-convex and the optimal joint resource blocks (RBs) and power allocation is NP-hard. To solve this complex problem, we propose to decompose the primal problem into two subproblems (referred as RBs allocation and power control) and solve the subproblems sequentially. For the RBs allocation subproblem given any feasible network power profile, the optimal solution can be solved by maximizing throughput locally. For the power control subproblem, we propose to solve it locally based on a new defined pricing factor. Then, a distributed power control algorithm with guaranteed convergence is designed to achieve a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) point of the primal problem. Simulation results verify the performance improvement of our proposed resource allocation scheme in terms of WS-EE. Besides, the performance evaluation shows the tradeoff between the WS-EE and the sum rate of the smallcell networks.

The elastic optical network (EON) is a promising new optical technology that uses spectrum resources much more efficiently than does traditional wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). This paper focuses on the routing, modulation level, spectrum and transceiver allocation (RMSTA) problems of the EON. In contrast to previous works that consider only the routing and spectrum allocation (RSA) or routing, modulation level and spectrum allocation (RMSA) problems, we additionally consider the transceiver allocation problem. Because transceivers can be used to regenerate signals (by connecting two transceivers back-to-back) along a transmission path, different regeneration sites on a transmission path result in different spectrum and transceiver usage. Thus, the RMSTA problem is both more complex and more challenging than are the RSA and RMSA problems. To address this problem, we first propose an integer linear programming (ILP) model whose objective is to optimize the balance between spectrum usage and transceiver usage by tuning a weighting coefficient to minimize the cost of network operations. Then, we propose a novel virtual network-based heuristic algorithm to solve the problem and present the results of experiments on representative network topologies. The results verify that, compared to previous works, the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce both resource consumption and time complexity.