Deterioration of sewer pipes is one of very important problems in Japan. Sewer inspections have been carried out mainly by visual check or wired remote robots with a camera. However, such inspection schemes involve high labor and/or monetary cost. Sewer inspection with boat-type video cameras or unwired robots takes a long time to check the result of the inspection because video data are obtained after the equipment is retrieved from the pipe. To realize low cost, safe and quick inspection of sewer pipes, we have proposed a sewer inspection system using drifting wireless sensor nodes. Water, soil, and the narrow space in the pipe make the long-range and high throughput wireless radio communication difficult. Therefore, we have to identify suitable radio frequency and antenna configuration based on wireless communication characteristics in sewer pipes. If the frequency is higher, the Fresnel zone, the needed space for the line of sight is small, but the path loss in free space is large. On the other hand, if the frequency is lower, the size of the Fresnel zone is large, but the path loss in free space is small. We conducted wireless communication experiments using 920MHz, 2.4GHz, and 5GHz band off-the-shelf devices in an experimental underground pipe. The measurement results show that the wireless communication range of 5GHz (IEEE 802.11a) is over 8m in a 200mm-diameter pipe and is longer than 920MHz (ARIB STD-T108), 2.4GHz (IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.15.4) band at their maximum transmission power. In addition, we confirmed that devices that use IEEE 802.11a and 54Mbps bit rate can transmit about 43MB data while they are in the communication range of an AP and drift at 1m/s in a 200mm-diameter pipe, and it is bigger than one of devices that use other bit rate.

The rapid growth of mobile systems and the exponential spread of the Internet have requested technologies for efficient and seamless delivery of IP data to mobile users. However, the Mobile Internet Protocol and the IETF Mobile IPv6 proposal are not scalable and capable of handling real time applications. The Mobile Internet Protocol employs mobility agents to support Internet-wide mobility, and mobile node employs the concept of care-of address to communicate with its correspondent node when it changes its point of attachment to the Internet. This paper proposes a new addressing scheme for mobile node based on IPv6. The concept of Mobile Internet is introduced, which is a logical subnet of IPv6 Internet and supports IP layer mobility. Mobile Internet is geographically overlaid on the Internet. It has a fixed subnet prefix, and each mobile node in it is only identified by its home IP address, regardless of its current location. Some new kinds of mobility agents (LRPC, LRPS/FLR) are defined. The proposed scheme is considered as a long-term solution for the Internet with mobile computers, several defects in the current Mobile IP protocol are solved.

In this paper we describe a multicast routing algorithm, which builds upon mobile multicast agents of an ad-hoc network. Mobile multicast agents (MMAs) form a virtual backbone of an ad-hoc network and they provide multicast tree discovery, multicast tree maintenance and datagram delivery. First, we construct a cluster-spine hierarchy structure for an ad-hoc network. Second, we propose a multicast routing algorithm, which is inspired by Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol. The results show that the MMA multicast algorithm can simplify the multicast tree discovery, reduce control overhead of the network, and increase the total network throughput, in comparison with general AODV multicast operation. We also overcome the deficiency of CBRP multicast routing, which places much burden on cluster heads.

In this paper,a protocol-based modeling and simulation method of performance evaluation for heavy traffic and transient LAN is proposed. In the method a node on a LAN is modeled as a set of detailed communication protocol models. By parallel and event driven processing of the models, high accuracy and high time-resolution of evaluation of LAN behaviors can be obtained at multi-layer protocols. The LANs at computer education sites have highly loaded peaks, and it is very hard to design large scale educational LANs. Proposed method can be used to evaluate such cases of heavy traffic and transient LAN.