In Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET), transportation capability of wireless links' varies according to the size of the packets they transport. This instability, which is more acute in long links, has received little attention in the stabilizing schemes proposed so far for MANET. A lot of research has been carried out to utilize more reliable links in making end-to-end routes to avoid frequent route failures and realize higher packet delivery ratio. However, these approaches mainly consider the availability of a link over time and depend on link history which is difficult to acquire in highly dynamic systems. In this paper, we present an easy-to-implement but efficient method to find suitable end-to-end routes that are capable of transporting different sizes of the application data packets. Our scheme is stateless and does not rely on the underlying data link and physical layers. An extensive simulation shows the validity of our concept and highlights the improvement achieved by our proposal.

In future, mobile terminals may be linked in various types of local network where the whole network is moving. Mobile networks will need to provide global connectivity to such moving networks and manage their mobility. A moving network consists of mobile terminals and a mobile router, which acts as the gateway to the mobile network. To manage the mobility of the moving network, it is important to minimize the packet overhead, to optimize routing, and to reduce the volume of handoff signals over the mobile network and air interface. This paper proposes a new routing mechanism using hierarchical mobile network prefix assignment, home agent concatenation, hierarchical address management, and hierarchical re-routing. In hierarchical mobile network prefix assignment, a mobile router is assigned a mobile network prefix, which is used as a prefix when allocating the location addresses of mobile terminals in the moving network, so allowing them to be managed in a hierarchical manner. Home agent concatenation limits the number of home agents which need to be updated during handoff by enabling one home agent hold information relating to others, while hierarchical address management minimizes the volume of handoff signals by managing the location addresses of all mobile terminals in a hierarchical manner. Hierarchical re-routing introduces a local anchor router in order to localize handoff and to optimize routing. Simulation results show that our proposed routing method is better than the conventional solutions in terms of efficiency of data transmission including data transmission delay, and handoff performance.

Internet access via mobile communications networks is growing rapidly; NTT DoCoMo's Internet access service using cellular phones, known as i-mode and started in February 1999, is no exception. The i-mode service enables the user to send e-mail and access Web sites for a variety of information through simple operation of a mobile terminal equipped with a browser. As a result, the traffic to be carried by the PDC (Personal Digital Cellular)-- Packet mobile communication network, which is used to provide the i-mode service, is also increasing rapidly. To meet this growing demand, the switching systems in place are being either increased in capacity or replaced by more powerful ones. To plan this effectively, it is necessary to make an accurate evaluation of the i-mode processing capacity. We have developed a new method of evaluating processing capacity, which is based on the conventional method but takes account of the characteristics specific to the PDC-Packet network. This paper discusses the method of evaluating the processing capacity of switching systems used in the PDC-Packet mobile network.

This paper proposes two novel hidden node problem aware routing metrics for wireless local area network (WLAN) mesh networks. To select the path that is least affected by the serious hidden node problem, we propose two routing metrics, MNn and MPCP, that take into account the number of neighboring nodes (Nn) and the packet collision probability (PCP), respectively. The PCP is estimated from neighbor information that is periodically gathered as state announcement packets, which include the transmission time ratio and the neighbor list. Simulation results show that the first proposed MNn routing metric tends to be less effective as the number of WLAN nodes increases, i.e., the mesh network becomes denser. On the other hand, with an acceptable increased in the control overhead in the mesh network due to the neighbor information, the second proposed MPCP routing metric improves the number of allowable concurrent voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls and the user datagram protocol (UDP) data throughput compared to the MNn metric. The MPCP also provides better performance than the other conventional routing metrics, the hop count, and the Airtime proposed in IEEE 802.11s.

In mobile ad hoc networks, as the communications have to be achieved autonomously and via third parties, a variety of risks against stable communication and session completion can be predicted. Many researchers have been studying these issues, i.e., mobility, broadcast storm, selfish behavior on data forwarding, security, and so forth. However, availability of routes against selfish power off is still to be addressed. This paper defines a new, realistic and practical problem beyond the scope of malicious program modification, called selfish power off, and evaluates the influence of it. Here, a selfish user turns his terminal on only when it has some data to send or receive and decline to work as an intermediate user by turning its terminal power off. In addition, this paper proposes a solution, called Proactive COoperation Mechanism (PCOM) against selfish power off in order to eliminate the influence of selfish power off. In PCOM, each user holds the cooperation records of its adjacent users, and forwards only those packets that are generated by users with good cooperation records. PCOM thus prevents SUs from joining the network. Extensive simulation shows the efficiency of our proposal in maintaining network connectivity and fairness in resource consumption.

Handwritten character recognition has been increasing its importance and has been expanding its application areas such as office automation, postal service automation, automatic data entry to computers, etc. It is challenging to develop a handwritten character recognition system with high processing speed, high performance, and high portability, because there is a trade-off among them. In current technology, it is difficult to attain high performance and high processing speed at the same time with single algorithms, and therefore, we need to find an efficient way of combination of multiple algorithms. We present an engineering solution to this problem. The system is based on multi-stage strategy as a whole: The first stage is a simple, fast, and reliable recognition algorithm with low substitution-error rate, and data of high quality are recognized in this stage, whereas sloppily written or degraded data are rejected and sent out to the second stage. The second stage is composed of a sophisticated structural pattern classifier and a pattern matching classifier, and these two complementary algorithms run in parallel (multiple expert approach). We demonstrate the performance of the completed system by experiments using real data.