Due to multiple hops, mobility and time-varying channel, supporting delay sensitive real-time traffic in wireless local area network-based (WLAN) mesh networks is a challenging task. In particular for real-time traffic subject to medium access control (MAC) layer control overhead, such as preamble, carrier sense waiting time and the random backoff period, the performance of real-time flows will be degraded greatly. In order to support real-time traffic, an efficient adaptive packet scheduling (APS) scheme is proposed, which aims to improve the system performance by guaranteeing inter-class, intra-class service differentiation and adaptively adjusting the packet length. APS classifies incoming packets by the IEEE 802.11e access class and then queued into a suitable buffer queue. APS employs strict priority service discipline for resource allocation among different service classes to achieve inter-class fairness. By estimating the received signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) per bit and current link condition, APS is able to calculate the optimized packet length with bi-dimensional markov MAC model to improve system performance. To achieve the fairness of intra-class, APS also takes maximum tolerable packet delay, transmission requests, and average allocation transmission into consideration to allocate transmission opportunity to the corresponding traffic. Detailed simulation results and comparison with IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) scheme show that the proposed APS scheme is able to effectively provide inter-class and intra-class differentiate services and improve QoS for real-time traffic in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, packet loss rate and fairness.

This paper investigates the capacity rate problems for a joint decode-and-forward (JDF) based two-way relaying with network coding. We first characterize the achievable rate region for a conventional three-node network scenario along with the calculation of the corresponding maximal sum-rate. Then, for the goal of maximizing the system sum-rate, opportunistic relay selection is examined for multi-relay networks. As a result, a novel strategy for the implementation of relay selection is proposed, which depends on the instantaneous channel state and allows a single best relay to help the two-way information exchange. The JDF scheme and the scheme using relay selection are analyzed in terms of outage probability, after which the corresponding exact expressions are developed over Rayleigh fading channels. For the purpose of comparison, outage probabilities of the amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme and those of the scheme using relay selection are also derived. Finally, simulation experiments are done and performance comparisons are conducted. The results verify that the proposed strategy is an appropriate method for the implementation of relay selection and can achieve significant performance gains in terms of outage probability regardless of the symmetry or asymmetry of the channels. Compared with the AF scheme and the scheme using relay selection, the conventional JDF scheme and that using relay selection perform well at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).

With increasing the using of wireless technologies in essential fields such as the medical application, this paper proposes different scenarios for the transmission of images over wireless networks. The paper uses the IEEE ZigBee 802.15.4 for applying the proposed schemes. It is a Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN). This paper presents a novel chaotic interleaving scheme against error bursts. Also, the paper studies the proposed interleaver with the convolutional code with different constraint lengths (K). A comparison study between the standard scheme and proposed schemes for image transmission over a correlated fading channel is presented. The simulation results show the superiority of the proposed chaotic interleaving scheme over the traditional schemes. Also, the chaotic interleaver packet-by-packet basis gives a high quality image with (K=3) and reduces the need for the complex encoder with K=7.

Task placement and scheduling are traditionally studied in following aspects: resource utilization, application throughput, application execution latency and starvation, and recently, the studies are more on application scalability and application performance. A methodology for task placement and scheduling centered on tasks based on virtual machines is studied in this paper to improve the performances of systems and dynamic adaptability in applications development and deployment oriented parallel computing. For parallel applications with no real-time constraints, we describe a thought of feature model and make a formal description for four layers of task placement and scheduling. To place the tasks to different layers of virtual computing systems, we take the performances of four layers as the goal function in the model of task placement and scheduling. Furthermore, we take the personal preference, the application scalability for a designer in his (her) development and deployment, as the constraint of this model. The workflow of task placement and scheduling based on virtual machines has been discussed. Then, an algorithm TPVM is designed to work out the optimal scheme of the model, and an algorithm TEVM completes the execution of tasks in four layers. The experiments have been performed to validate the effectiveness of time estimated method and the feasibility and rationality of algorithms. It is seen from the experiments that our algorithms are better than other four algorithms in performance. The results show that the methodology presented in this paper has guiding significance to improve the efficiency of virtual computing systems.

In this paper, the outage performance of multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems exploiting joint spatial and multiuser diversities is investigated for Rayleigh fading channels with outdated feedback. First, we derive closed-form exact outage probabilities for the joint diversity schemes that combine user scheduling with different spatial diversity techniques, including: 1) transmit maximum-ratio combining (TMRC); 2) transmit antenna selection (TAS); and 3) orthogonal space-time block coding (OSTBC). Then the asymptotic outage probabilities are analyzed to gain more insights into the effect of feedback delay. It is observed that with outdated feedback, the asymptotic diversity order of the multiuser OSTBC (M-OSTBC) scheme is equal to the number of transmit antennas at the base station, while that of the multiuser TMRC (M-TMRC) and the multiuser TAS (M-TAS) schemes reduce to one. Further by comparing the asymptotic outage probabilities, it is found that the M-TMRC scheme outperforms the M-TAS scheme, and the M-OSTBC scheme can perform best in the outage regime of practical interest when the feedback delay is large. Theoretical analysis is verified by simulation results.

Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission / reception is being studied in Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) for future evolution of the $3^{rd}$ Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) LTE. Support of soft handover is essential for improving the performance of cell edge users. CoMP provides a natural framework for enabling soft handover in the LTE system. This paper evaluates the soft handover gain in LTE-A downlink. Mathematical analysis of signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) gain and the handover margins for soft handover and hard handover are derived. CoMP system model is developed and an inter-cell and intra-cell interference model is derived, taking into account the pathloss, shadowing, cell loading, and traffic activity. Reference signal received power (RSRP) is used to define the triggers and the measurements for soft handover. Our results indicate that parameter choices such as handover margin and the CoMP set size impact CoMP performance gain.

Several metrics have been reported in the literature to assess stereo image quality, mostly based on visual attention or human visual sensitivity based distortion prediction with the help of disparity information, which do not consider the combined aspects of human visual processing. In this paper, visual attention and depth assisted stereo image quality assessment model (VAD-SIQAM) is devised that consists of three main components, i.e., stereo attention predictor (SAP), depth variation (DV), and stereo distortion predictor (SDP). Visual attention is modeled based on entropy and inverse contrast to detect regions or objects of interest/attention. Depth variation is fused into the attention probability to account for the amount of changed depth in distorted stereo images. Finally, the stereo distortion predictor is designed by integrating distortion probability, which is based on low-level human visual system (HVS), responses into actual attention probabilities. The results show that regions of attention are detected among the visually significant distortions in the stereo image pair. Drawbacks of human visual sensitivity based picture quality metrics are alleviated by integrating visual attention and depth information. We also show that positive correlation with ground-truth attention and depth maps are increased by up to 0.949 and 0.936 in terms of the Pearson and the Spearman correlation coefficients, respectively.

This paper considers the object tracking problem in three dimensional (3-D) space when the azimuth and elevation of the object are available from the passive acoustic sensor. The particle filtering technique can be directly applied to estimate the 3-D object location, but we propose to decompose the 3-D particle filter into the three planes' particle filters, which are individually designed for the 2-D bearings-only tracking problems. 2-D bearing information is derived from the azimuth and elevation of the object to be used for the 2-D particle filter. Two estimates of three planes' particle filters are selected based on the characterization of the acoustic sensor operation in a noisy environment. The Cramer-Rao Lower Bound of the proposed 2-D particle filter-based algorithm is derived and compared against the algorithm that is based on the direct 3-D particle filter.

Privacy is one of the most important and difficult research issues in ubiquitous computing. It is qualitative rather than quantitative. Privacy preserving mainly relies on policy based rules of the system, and users cannot adjust their privacy disclosure rules dynamically based on their wishes. To make users understand and control their privacy measurement, we present a scheme to quantize the personal privacy. We aim to configure the person's privacy based on the numerical privacy level which can be dynamically adjusted. Instead of using the traditional simple rule engine, we implement this scheme in a complex way. In addition, we design the scenario to explain the implementation of our scheme. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to assess personal privacy numerically to achieve precision privacy computing. The privacy measurement and disclosure model will be refined in the future work.

The importance of secure communication between only legitimate group members in ad hoc networks has been growing in recent years. Due to the ad hoc nature the scalability on dynamic membership change is a major concern. However, the previous models require at least O(log n) communication cost for key update per each membership change, which imposes a heavy burden on the devices. In this paper we present a scalable model that supports communication-efficient membership change in ad hoc networks by exclusionary keys and RSA functions. The multicast cost for key update is extremely low, that is O(1) , and one-to-one communications occur mostly in neighboring devices.

We show that two protocols for RFID mutual authentication in pervasive computing environments, recently proposed by Kang et al, are vulnerable to several attacks. First, we show these protocols do not preserve the privacy of users' location. Once a tag is authenticated successfully, we show several scenarios where legitimate or illegitimate readers can trace the location of that tag without any further information about the tag's identifier or initial private key. Second, since the communication between readers and the database takes place over an insecure communication channel and in the plaintext form, we show scenarios where a compromised tag can gain access to confidential information that the tag is not supposed get access to. Finally, we show that these protocols are also vulnerable to the replay and denial-of-service attacks. While some of these attacks are due to simple flaws and can be easily fixed, others are more fundamental and are due to relaxing widely accepted assumptions in the literature. We examine this issue, apply countermeasures, and re-evaluate the protocols overhead after taking these countermeasures into account and compare them to other work in the literature.