Energy consumption of wireless access networks is in permanent increase, which necessitates development of more energy-efficient network management approaches. Such management schemes must result with adaptation of network energy consumption in accordance with daily variations in user activity. In this paper, we consider possible energy savings of wireless local area networks (WLANs) through development of a few integer linear programming (ILP) models. Effectiveness of ILP models providing energy-efficient management of network resources have been tested on several WLAN instances of different sizes. To cope with the problem of high computational time characteristic for some ILP models, we further develop several heuristic algorithms that are based on greedy methods and local search. Although heuristics obtains somewhat higher results of energy consumption in comparison with the ones of corresponding ILP models, heuristic algorithms ensures minimization of network energy consumption in an amount of time that is acceptable for practical implementations. This confirms that network management algorithms will play a significant role in practical realization of future energy-efficient network management systems.

Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) with decision fusion is considered as a key technology for tackling the challenges caused by fading/shadowing effects and noise uncertainty in spectrum sensing in cognitive radio. However, most existing solutions assume an error-free decision transmission, which is obviously not the case in realistic scenarios. This paper extends the general decision-fusion-based CSS scheme by considering the fading/shadowing effects and noise corruption in the common control channels. With this more practical model, the fusion centre first estimates the local decisions using a binary minimum error probability detector, and then combines them to get the final result. Theoretical analysis and simulation of this CSS scheme are performed over typical channels, which suggest some performance deterioration compared with the pure case that assumes an error-free decision transmission. Furthermore, the fusion strategy optimization in the proposed cooperation model is also investigated using the Bayesian criteria. The numerical results show that the total error rate of noisy CSS is higher than that of the pure case, and the optimal values of fusion parameter in the counting rule under both cases decrease as the local detection threshold increases.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consist of a large amount of sensor nodes distributed in a certain region. Due to the limited battery power of a sensor node, lots of energy-efficient schemes have been studied. Clustering is primarily used for energy efficiency purpose. However, clustering in WSNs faces several unattained issues, such as ensuring connectivity and scheduling inter-cluster transmissions. In this paper, we propose a location-based spiral clustering (LBSC) algorithm for improving connectivity and avoiding inter-cluster collisions. It also provides reliable location aware routing paths from all cluster heads to a sink node during cluster formation. Proposed algorithm can simultaneously make clusters in four spiral directions from the center of sensor field by using the location information and residual energy level of neighbor sensor nodes. Three logical addresses are used for categorizing the clusters into four global groups and scheduling the intra- and inter-cluster transmission time for each cluster. We evaluated the performance with simulations and compared it with other algorithms.

This paper proposes a TDMA-based multichannel medium access control (MAC) protocol for QoS provisioning in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) that enables nodes to transmit their packets in distributed channels. The IEEE 802.11 standard supports multichannel operation at the physical (PHY) layer but its MAC protocol is designed only for a single channel. The single channel MAC protocol does not work well in multichannel environment because of the multichannel hidden terminal problem. Our proposed protocol enables nodes to utilize multiple channels by switching channels dynamically, thus increasing network throughput. Although each node of this protocol is equipped with only a single transceiver but it solves the multichannel hidden terminal problem using temporal synchronization. The proposed energy efficient multichannel MAC (EM-MAC) protocol takes the advantage of both multiple channels and TDMA, and achieves aggressive power savings by allowing nodes that are not involved in communications to go into power saving "sleep mode". We consider the problem of providing QoS guarantee to nodes as well as to maintain the most efficient use of scarce bandwidth resources. Our scheme improves network throughput and lifetime significantly, especially when the network is highly congested. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme successfully exploits multiple channels and significantly improves network performance by providing QoS guarantee in MANETs.

In multi-user wireless communication systems, adaptive modulation and scheduling are promising techniques for increasing the system throughput. However, a mass of wireless recourse will be occupied and spectrum efficiency will be decreased to feedback channel quality indication (CQI) of all users in every subcarrier or chunk for adaptive orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Thus numerous limited feedback schemes are proposed to reduce the system overhead. The recently proposed compressive sensing (CS) theory provides a new framework to jointly measure and compress signals that allows less sampling and storage resources than traditional approaches based on Nyquist sampling. In this paper, we proposed two novel CQI feedback schemes based on general CS and subspace CS, respectively, both of which could be used in a wireless OFDM system. The feedback rate with subspace CS is greatly decreased by exploiting the subspace information of the underlying signal. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed methods, with the same feedback rate, the throughputs with subspace CS outperform the discrete cosine transform (DCT) based method which is usually employed, and the throughputs with general CS outperform DCT when the feedback rate is larger than 0.13 bits/subcarrier.

Wi-Fi-enabled portable devices have recently been introduced into the consumer electronics market. These devices download or upload content, from or to a host machine, such as a personal computer, a laptop, a home gateway, or a media server. This paper investigates the fairness among multiple Wi-Fi-enabled portable devices in a home network when they are simultaneously communicated with the host machine. First, we present that, a simple IEEE 802.11-based home network suffers from unfairness, and the fairness is exaggerated by the wireless link errors. This unfairness is due to the asymmetric response of the TCP to data-packet loss and to acknowledgment-packet loss, and the wireless link errors that occur in the proximity of any node; the errors affect other wireless devices through the interaction at the interface queue of the home gateway. We propose a QoS-provisioning framework in order to achieve per-device fairness and service differentiation. For this purpose, we introduce the medium access price, which denotes an aggregate value of network-wide traffic load, per-device link usage, and per-device link error rate. We implemented the proposed framework in the ns-2 simulator, and carried out a simulation study to evaluate its performance with respect to fairness, service differentiation, loss and delay. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method enforces the per-device fairness, regardless of the number of devices present and regardless of the level of wireless link errors; furthermore it achieves high link utilization with only a small amount of frame losses.

Recently, multicast routing protocols become increasingly important aspect in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), as they effectively manage group communications. Meanwhile, multimedia and real-time applications are becoming essential need for users of MANET. Thus it is necessary to design efficient and effective Quality of Service (QoS) multicast routing strategies. In this paper, we address the scalability problem of multicast routing protocols to support QoS over MANETs. In particular, we introduce a Position-Based QoS Multicast Routing Protocol (PBQMRP). Basically, the protocol based on dividing the network area into virtual hexagonal cells. Then, the location information is exploited to perform efficient and scalable route discovery. In comparison with other existing QoS multicast routing protocols, PBQMRP incurs less control packets by eliminating network flooding behavior. Through simulation, the efficiency and scalability of PBQMRP are evaluated and compared with the well-known On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP). Simulation results justify that our protocol has better performance, less control overhead and higher scalability.

We present a texture-based hatching technique for color images and video. Whereas existing approaches produce monochrome hatching effects in considering of triangular mesh models by applying strokes of uniform size, our scheme produces color hatching effects from photographs and video using strokes with a range of sizes. We use a Delaunay triangulation to create a mesh of triangles with sizes that reflect the structure of an input image. At each vertex of this triangulation, the flow of the image is analyzed and a hatching texture is then created with the same alignment, based on real pencil strokes. This texture is given a modified version of a color sampled from the image, and then it is used to fill all the triangles adjoining the vertex. The three hatching textures that accumulate in each triangle are averaged and the result of this process across all the triangles forms the output image. We can also add a paper texture effect and enhance feature lines in the image. Our algorithm can also be applied to video. The results are visually pleasing hatching effects similar to those seen in color pencil drawings and oil paintings.

In video-based recognition systems, stationary cameras are used to monitor an area of interest. These systems focus on a segmentation of the foreground in the video stream and the recognition of the events occurring in that area. The usual approach to discriminating the foreground from the video sequence is background subtraction. This paper presents a novel background subtraction method based on a probabilistic approach. We represent the posterior probability of the foreground based on the current image and all past images and derive an updated method. Furthermore, we present an efficient fusion method for the color and edge information in order to overcome the difficulties of existing background subtraction methods that use only color information. The suggested method is applied to synthetic data and real video streams, and its robust performance is demonstrated through experimentation.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are rapidly emerging because of their potential applications available in military and civilian environments. Due to unattended and hostile deployment environments, shared wireless links, and inherent resource constraints, providing high level security services is challenging in WSNs. In this paper, we revisit various security attack models and analyze them by using a well-known standard notation, Unified Modeling Language (UML). We provide a set of UML collaboration diagram and sequence diagrams of attack models witnessed in different network layers: physical, data/link, network, and transport. The proposed UML-based analysis not only can facilitate understanding of attack strategies, but can also provide a deep insight into designing/developing countermeasures in WSNs.

Group key agreement protocols derive a shared secret key for a group of users to ensure data confidentiality or/and integrity among the users in the subsequent communications. In this paper, we inspect two group key agreement schemes which have been proposed by Shi et al. and Zheng et al. in 2005 and 2007 respectively. Although both schemes were claimed to be secure in a heuristic way, we reveal several flaws using the Bellare-Rogaway security model extended to multi-party setting by Bresson et al. These flaws are found to be originated from inappropriate selection of key derivation function, inadvertent exclusion of partners' identities from the protocol specification and insufficient consideration in preserving known temporary information security and key freshness properties. Furthermore, we suggest and discuss proper countermeasures to address such flaws.

In the context of additive noise steganography model, we propose a method to detect least significant bit (LSB) matching steganography in grayscale images. Images are decomposed into detail sub-bands with local linear transform (LLT) masks which are sensitive to embedding. Novel normalized characteristic function features weighted by a bank of band-pass filters are extracted from the detail sub-bands. A suboptimal feature set is searched by using a threshold selection algorithm. Extensive experiments are performed on four diverse uncompressed image databases. In comparison with other well-known feature sets, the proposed feature set performs the best under most circumstances.

Reversible watermarking is an open problem in information hiding field, with embedding the encoded bit '1' or '0' into some sensitive images, such as the law enforcement, medical records and military images. The technique can retrieve the original image without distortion, after the embedded message has been extracted. Histogram-based scheme is a remarkable breakthrough in reversible watermarking schemes, in terms of high embedding capacity and low distortion. This scheme is lack of capacity control due to the requirement for embedding large-scale data, because the largest hidden capacity is decided by the amount of pixels with the peak point. In this paper, we propose a reversible watermarking scheme to enlarge the number of pixels with the peak point as large as possible. This algorithm is based on an adaptive edge-guided interpolation, furthermore, hides messages by interpolation-error, i.e. the difference between the original and interpolated image value. Simulation results compared with other state-of-the-art reversible watermarking schemes in this paper demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm.