Due to the application-specific nature of wireless sensor networks, the sensitivity to such a requirement as data reporting interval varies according to the type of application. Such considerations require an application-specific, parameter tuning paradigm allowing us to maximize energy conservation prolonging the operational network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a reporting interval adaptive, sensor control platform for energy-saving data gathering in wireless sensor networks. The ultimate goal is to extend the network lifetime by providing sensors with high adaptability to application-dependent or time-varying, reporting interval requirements. The proposed sensor control platform is based upon a two phase clustering (TPC) scheme which constructs two types of links within each cluster - namely, direct link and relay link. The direct links are used for control and time-critical, sensed data forwarding while the relay links are used only for multi-hop data reporting. Sensors opportunistically use the energy-saving relay link depending on the user reporting, interval constraint. We present factors that should be considered in deciding the total number of relay links and how sensors are scheduled for sensed data forwarding within a cluster for a given reporting interval and link quality. Simulation and implementation studies demonstrate that the proposed sensor control platform can help individual sensors save a significant amount of energy in reporting data, particularly in dense sensor networks. Such saving can be realized by the adaptability of the sensor to the reporting interval requirements.

In this paper, we study a problem that is concerning how to construct a delay-constrained multicast tree on a wireless mesh network (WMN) such that the number of serviced clients is maximized. In order to support high-quality and concurrent interference-free transmission streams, multiple radios are implemented in each mesh node in the WMNs. Instead of only orthogonal channels used for the multicast in the previous works, both orthogonal and partially overlapping channels are considered in this study. As a result, the number of links successfully allocated channels can be expected to be much larger than that of the approaches in which only orthogonal channels are considered. The number of serviced subscribers is then increased dramatically. Hence, the goal of this study is to find interference-free and delay-constrained multicast trees that can lead to the maximal number of serviced subscribers. This problem is referred as the MRDCM problem. Two heuristics, load-based greedy algorithm and load-based MCM algorithm, are developed for constructing multicast trees. Furthermore, two load-based channel assignment procedures are provided to allocate interference-free channels to the multicast trees. A set of experiments is designed to do performance, delay and efficiency comparisons for the multicast trees generated by all the approximation algorithms proposed in this study.

Internet chat programs and instant messaging services are becoming increasingly popular among Internet users. One of the crucial issues with Internet chat is how to manage the corresponding pairs of questions and answers in a sequence of conversations. Although many novel methodologies have been introduced to cope with this problem, most are poor in managing interruptions, organizing turn-taking, and conveying comprehension. The Internet environment is recently evolving into a 3D environment, but the problems with managing chat dialogues with the standard 2D text-based chat have remained. Therefore, we propose a more realistic communication model for chat agents in 3D virtual space in this paper. First, we propose a new method to measure the capacity of communication between chat agents and a novel visualization method to depict the hierarchical structure of chat dialogues. In addition, we are concerned with communication networks for virtual people (avatars) living in virtual worlds. In this paper we consider a microscopic aspect of a social network in a relatively short period of time. Our experiments show that our model is highly effective in a virtual chat environment, and the communication network based on our model greatly facilitates investigation of a very large and complicated communication network.

To provide a seamless network to customers, Internet service providers must promptly detect and control abnormal traffic. One approach is to shorten the traffic information measurement cycle. However, performance degradation is inevitable if traffic measurement servers merely shorten the cycle and measure all traffic. This paper presents a software architecture that can measure traffic more frequently without degrading performance by estimating the level of abnormal traffic. The algorithm in the architecture estimates the values of the interface group objects in MIB by using the IP group objects thereby reducing the number of measurements and the size of measured data. We evaluated this architecture on part of Internet service provider's IP network. When the traffic was measured 5 times more than before, the CPU usage and TPS of the proposed scheme was 7% and 41% less than that of the original scheme while the false positive rate and false negative rate were 3.2% and 2.7% respectively.

In this paper, we propose two schemes to reduce the complexity of fixed-complexity sphere decoder (FSD) algorithm in the ordering and tree-search stages, respectively, while achieving quasi-ML performance. In the ordering stage, we propose a QR-decomposition-based FSD signal ordering based on the zero-forcing criterion (FSD-ZF-SQRD) that requires only a few number of additional complex flops compared to the unsorted QRD. Also, the proposed ordering algorithm is extended using the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion to achieve better performance. In the tree-search stage, we introduce a threshold-based complexity reduction approach for the FSD depending on the reliability of the signal with the largest noise amplification. Numerical results show that in $8{\times}8$ MIMO system, the proposed FSD-ZF-SQRD and FSD-MMSE-SQRD only require 19.5% and 26.3% of the computational efforts required by Hassibi’s scheme, respectively. Moreover, a third threshold vector is outlined which can be used for high order modulation schemes. In $4{\times}4$ MIMO system using 16-QAM and 64-QAM, simulation results show that when the proposed threshold-based approach is employed, FSD requires only 62.86% and 53.67% of its full complexity, respectively.

Wireless tactical network (WTN) is the most important present-day technology enabling modern network centric warfare. It inherits many features from WMNs, since the WTN is based on existing wireless mesh networks (WMNs). However, it also has distinctive characteristics, such as hierarchical structures and tight QoS (Quality-of-Service) requirements. Little research has been conducted on hierarchical protocols to support various QoS in WMN. We require new protocols specifically optimized for WTNs. Control packets are generally required to find paths and reserve resources for QoS requirements, so data throughput is not degraded due to overhead. The fundamental solution is to adopt topology aggregation, in which a low tier node aggregates and simplifies the topology information and delivers it to a high tier node. The overhead from control packet exchange can be reduced greatly due to decreased information size. Although topology aggregation is effective for low overhead, it also causes the inaccuracy of topology information; thus, incurring low QoS support capability. Therefore, we need a new topology aggregation algorithm to achieve high accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new aggregation algorithm based on star topology. Noting the hierarchical characteristics in military and hierarchical networks, star topology aggregation can be used effectively. Our algorithm uses a limited number of bypasses to increase the exactness of the star topology aggregation. It adjusts topology parameters whenever it adds a bypass. Consequently, the result is highly accurate and has low computational complexity.

Demand for rich media services is rapidly increasing and, as a result, several technologies are competing to deliver rich media services to mobile, resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we explore the existing rich media technologies and analyze their key features. In addition, in order to accommodate the new requirements introduced by emerging service models, such as service convergence, these technologies must evolve from their current status. We examine how the community intends to achieve this.

Biometric discretization is a process of transforming continuous biometric features of an identity into a binary bit string. This paper mainly focuses on improving the global discretization method - a discretization method that does not base on information specific to each user in bitstring extraction, which appears to be important in applications that prioritize strong security provision and strong privacy protection. In particular, we demonstrate how the actual performance of a global discretization could further be improved by embedding a global discriminative feature selection method and a Linearly Separable Subcode-based encoding technique. In addition, we examine a number of discriminative feature selection measures that can reliably be used for such discretization. Lastly, encouraging empirical results vindicate the feasibility of our approach.

Three-dimensional (3D) video technologies are becoming increasingly popular, as it can provide users with high quality and immersive experiences. However, color inconsistency between the camera views is an urgent problem to be solved in multi-view imaging. In this paper, a perception-based color correction method for multi-view images is proposed. In the proposed method, human visual sensitivity (VS) and visual attention (VA) models are incorporated into the correction process. Firstly, the VS property is used to reduce the computational complexity by removing these visual insensitive regions. Secondly, the VA property is used to improve the perceptual quality of local VA regions by performing VA-dependent color correction. Experimental results show that compared with other color correction methods, the proposed method can greatly promote the perceptual quality of local VA regions greatly and reduce the computational complexity, and obtain higher coding performance.

Intensive computational complexity is an obstacle of enabling multiview video coding for real-time applications. In this paper, we present a fast macroblock (MB) mode selection algorithm for B frames which are based on the computational complexity analyses between the MB mode selection and reference frame selection. Three strategies are proposed to reduce the coding complexity jointly. First, the temporal correlation of MB modes between current MB and its temporal corresponding MBs is utilized to reduce computational complexity in determining the optimal MB mode. Secondly, Lagrangian cost of SKIP mode is compared with that of Inter $16{\times}16$ modes to early terminate the mode selection process. Thirdly, reference frame correlation among different Inter modes is exploited to reduce the number of reference frames. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can promote the encoding speed by 3.71~7.22 times with 0.08dB PSNR degradation and 2.03% bitrate increase on average compared with the joint multiview video model.

The main challenge in building efficient broadcast systems is to encrypt messages with short ciphertexts. In this paper, we present a new construction based on the identity. Our construction contains the desirable features, such as constant size ciphertexts and private keys, short public keys and not fixing the total number of possible users in the setup. In addition, the proposed scheme achieves the full security which is stronger than the selective-identity security. Furthermore we show that the proof of security does not rely on the random oracles. To the best our knowledge, it is the first efficient scheme that is full security and achieves constant size ciphertexts and private keys which solve the trade-off between the ciphertext size and the private key size.

In this paper, we introduce a novel Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) based message authentication scheme that takes advantage of temporal and spatial uniqueness in physical layer channel responses for each transmission pair in vehicular communication networks. The proposed scheme aims at achieving fast authentication and minimizing the packet transmission overhead without compromising the security requirements, in which most messages can be authenticated through an extreme fast physical-layer authentication mechanism. We will demonstrate that the proposed secure authentication scheme can achieve very short message delay and reduced communication overhead through extensive analysis and simulation.

This paper presents an improved XOR-based Data Hiding Scheme (XDHS) to hide a halftone image in more than two halftone stego images. The hamming weight and hamming distance is a very important parameter affecting the quality of a halftone image. For this reason, we proposed a method that involves minimizing the hamming weights and hamming distances between the stego image and cover image in $2{\times}2$-pixel grids. Moreover, our XDHS adopts a block-wise operation to improve the quality of a halftone image and stego images. Furthermore, our scheme improves security by using a block-wise operation with A-patterns and B-patterns. Our XDHS method achieves a high quality with good security compared to the prior arts. An experiment verified the superiority of our XDHS compared with previous methods.