Low power listening (LPL) MAC protocols based on duty-cycling mechanism have been studied extensively to achieve ultra low energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Especially, recent ACK-based LPL schemes such as X-MAC employ strobe preambles and an early ACK, and show fair performances in communications and energy efficiencies. However, the state-of-the-art ACK-based LPL scheme still suffers from collision problems due to the protocol incompleteness. These collision effects are not trivial and make WSNs unstable, aggravate energy consumptions. In this paper, we propose two novel schemes; (i) ${\tau}$-duration CCA to mitigate the collision problem in ACK-based LPL MAC protocols. (ii) Short Preamble Counter (SPC) to conserve more energy by reducing unnecessary overhearing. We demonstrate the performance improvement of our scheme via a mathematical analysis and real-time experiments. Both analysis and experimental results confirm that our proposed scheme saves energy by up to 36% compared to the naive ACK-based LPL MAC protocol thanks to ${\tau}$-duration CCA and SPC.

To improve the sensing performance, cooperation among secondary users can be utilized to collect space diversity. In this paper, we focus on the optimization of cooperative spectrum sensing in which multiple cognitive users efficiently cooperate to achieve superior detection accuracy with minimum sensing error probability in multiple cross-over cognitive radio networks. The analysis focuses on two fusion strategies: soft information fusion and hard information fusion. Under soft information fusion, the optimal threshold of the energy detector is derived in both noncooperative single-user and cooperative multiuser sensing scenarios. Under hard information fusion, the optimal randomized rule and the optimal decision threshold are derived according to the rule of minimum sensing error (MSE). MSE rule shows better performance on improving the final false alarm and detection probability simultaneously. By simulations, our proposed strategy optimizes the sensing performance for each cognitive user which is randomly distributed in the multiple cross-over cognitive radio networks.

We propose a new multipath-based reliable routing protocol on MANETs, Multipath-based Reliable routing protocol with Fast-Recovery of failures (MRFR). For reliable message transmission, MRFR tries to find the most reliable path between a source and a destination considering the end-to-end packet reception reliability of the routes. The established path consists of a primary path that is used to transmit messages, and the secondary paths that are used to recover the path when detecting failures on the primary path. After establishing the path, the source transmits messages through the primary path. If a node detects a link failure during message transmission, it can recover the path locally by switching from the primary to the secondary path. By allowing the intermediate nodes to locally recover the route failure, the proposed protocol can handle the dynamic topological change of the MANETs efficiently. The simulation result using the QualNet simulator shows that the MRFR protocol performs better than other protocols in terms of the end-to-end message delivery ratio and fault-tolerance capability.

Reversible data hiding enables the embedding of messages in a host image without any loss of host content, which is proposed for image authentication that if the watermarked image is deemed authentic, we can revert it to the exact copy of the original image before the embedding occurred. In this paper, we present an improved histogram-based reversible data hiding scheme based on prediction and sorting. A rhombus prediction is employed to explore the prediction for histogram-based embedding. Sorting the prediction has a good influence on increasing the embedding capacity. Characteristics of the pixel difference are used to achieve large hiding capacity while keeping low distortion. The proposed scheme exploits a two-stage embedding strategy to solve the problem about communicating peak points. We also present a histogram shifting technique to prevent overflow and underflow. Performance comparisons with other existing reversible data hiding schemes are provided to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme.

The tree topology in multicast systems has high transmission efficiency, low latency, but poor resilience to node failures. In our work, some nodes are selected as backbone nodes to construct a tree-like core overlay. Backbone nodes are reliable enough and have strong upload capacity as well, which is helpful to overcome the shortcomings of tree topology. The core overlay is organized into a spanning tree while the whole overlay is of mesh-like topology. This paper focuses on improving the performance of the application-layer multicast overlay by optimizing the core overlay which is periodically adjusted with the proposed optimization algorithm. Our approach is to construct the overlay tree based on the out-degree weighted reliability where the reliability of a node is weighted by its upload bandwidth (out-degree). There is no illegal solution during the evolution which ensures the evolution efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed approach greatly enhances the reliability of the tree-like core overlay systems and achieves shorter delay simultaneously. Its reliability performance is better than the reliability-first algorithm and its delay is very close to that of the degree-first algorithm. The complexity of the proposed algorithm is acceptable for application. Therefore the proposed approach is efficient for the topology optimization of a real multicast overlay.

The optimal price strategy selection of two bounded rational cognitive mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) in a duopoly spectrum sharing market is investigated. The bounded rational operators dynamically compete to sell the leased spectrum to secondary users in order to maximize their profits. Meanwhile, the secondary users' heterogeneous preferences to rate and price are taken into consideration. The evolutionary game theory (EGT) is employed to model the dynamic price strategy selection of the MVNOs taking into account the response of the secondary users. The behavior dynamics and the evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) of the operators are derived via replicated dynamics. Furthermore, a reward and punishment mechanism is developed to optimize the performance of the operators. Numerical results show that the proposed evolutionary algorithm is convergent to the ESS, and the incentive mechanism increases the profits of the operators. It may provide some insight about the optimal price strategy selection for MVNOs in the next generation cognitive wireless networks.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) often employ asynchronous MAC scheduling, which allows each sensor node to wake up independently without synchronizing with its neighbor nodes. However, this asynchronous scheduling may not deal with collisions due to hidden terminals effectively. Although most of the existing asynchronous protocols exploit a random back-off technique to resolve collisions, the random back-off cannot secure a receiver from potentially repetitive collisions and may lead to a substantial increase in the packet latency. In this paper, we propose a new collision resolution algorithm called Transient Coordinator (TC) for asynchronous WSN MAC protocols. TC resolves a collision on demand by ordering senders' transmissions when a receiver detects a collision. To coordinate the transmission sequence both the receiver and the collided senders perform handshaking to collect the information and to derive a collision-free transmission sequence, which enables each sender to exclusively access the channel. According to the simulation results, our scheme can improve the average per-node throughput by up to 19.4% while it also reduces unnecessary energy consumption due to repetitive collisions by as much as 91.1% compared to the conventional asynchronous MAC protocols. This demonstrates that TC is more efficient in terms of performance, resource utilization, and energy compared to the random back-off scheme in dealing with collisions for asynchronous WSN MAC scheduling.

Localization of mobile station (MS) has now gained considerable attention. Since the hybrid measurements can help to improve the positioning accuracy, several hybrid localization methods have been proposed in the literature. However, the high performance estimator with the closed-form solution and complete performance analysis for time-of-arrival/signal strength (TOA/SS) localization technique is still an opening issue. Two TOA/SS localization algorithms with the closed-form solutions are proposed for the cases with or without uncertainty in the positions of base stations. Furthermore, performance analysis for the TOA/SS localization technique is presented. Both the theoretical variances and Cramer-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) are derived and the relationship between the cases with or without uncertainty is given. The paper also proves that the TOA/SS scheme has a lower CRLB than the TOA (or SS) scheme. Theoretical analysis and simulations show that the proposed method can reach its CRLB.

In this paper, we present a new LED (Light Emitting Diode) mood lighting system interacting with smartphones based on the generation of different light sequences. In the proposed system, one light sequence is considered to be one unit of the service contents, which is then transmitted through a network and played in an LED lighting system. To this end, we propose a novel generation scheme using a smartphone, and a decoding/playing mechanism in an LED lighting system. The lighting sequences have a fixed period divided into predefined time units. Two modes - basic and interpolation - are supported in each time unit when playing a color sequence. In the basic mode, the color is maintained for the entire time unit, whereas in the interpolation mode the color is interpolated. The sequence is decoded and played in the lighting circuit by changing the duty cycle of a PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) signal. A demonstration system of the overall proposed method was using smartphones, a server and an LED lighting system. The results from this experiment show the validity and applicability of the proposed scheme.

Compared with traditional itinerary planning, intention-oriented itinerary recommendations can provide more flexible activity planning without requiring the user's predetermined destinations and is especially helpful for those in unfamiliar environments. The rank and classification of points of interest (POI) from location-based social networks (LBSN) are used to indicate different user intentions. The mining of vehicles' physical trajectories can provide exact civil traffic information for path planning. This paper proposes a POI category-based itinerary recommendation framework combining physical trajectories with LBSN. Specifically, a Voronoi graph-based GPS trajectory analysis method is utilized to build traffic information networks, and an ant colony algorithm for multi-object optimization is implemented to locate the most appropriate itineraries. We conduct experiments on datasets from the Foursquare and GeoLife projects. A test of users' satisfaction with the recommended items is also performed. Our results show that the satisfaction level reaches an average of 80%.

A tree routing structure is often adopted for many-to-one data gathering and aggregation in sensor networks. For real-time scenarios, considering lossy wireless links, it is an important issue how to construct a maximum-lifetime data gathering tree with delay constraint. In this work, we study the problem of lifetime-preserving and delay-constrained tree construction in unreliable sensor networks. We prove that the problem is NP-complete. A greedy approximation algorithm is proposed. We use expected transmissions count (ETX) as the link quality indicator, as well as a measure of delay. Our algorithm starts from an arbitrary least ETX tree, and iteratively adjusts the hierarchy of the tree to reduce the load on bottleneck nodes by pruning and grafting its sub-tree. The complexity of the proposed algorithm is $O(N^4)$. Finally, extensive simulations are carried out to verify our approach. Simulation results show that our algorithm provides longer lifetime in various situations compared to existing data gathering schemes.

In the context of effective usage of a scarce spectrum resource, emerging wireless communication standards will demand spectrum sharing with existing systems as well as multiple access with higher spectral efficiency. We mathematically analyze the sum throughput of a spectrum sharing space-division multiple access (SDMA) system, which forms a transmit null in the direction of other coexisting systems while satisfying orthogonal beamforming constraints. For a large number of users N, the SDMA throughput scales as log N at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) ((J-1) loglog N at normal SNR), where J is the number of transmit antennas. This indicates that multiplexing gain of the spectrum sharing SDMA is $\frac{J-1}{J}$ times less than that of the non-spectrum sharing SDMA only using orthogonal beamforming, whereas no loss in multiuser diversity gain. Although the spectrum sharing SDMA always has lower throughput compared to the non-spectrum sharing SDMA in the non-coexistence scenario, it offers an intriguing opportunity to reuse spectrum already allocated to other coexisting systems.

Broadcast routing has become an important research field for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) recently. However, the packet delivery rate is generally low in existing VANET broadcast routing protocols. Therefore, the design of an appropriate broadcast protocol based on the features of VANET has become a crucial part of the development of VANET. This paper analyzes the disadvantage of existing broadcast routing protocols in VANETs, and proposes an improved algorithm (namely ODAM-C) based on the ODAM (Optimized Dissemination of Alarm Messages) protocol. The ODAM-C algorithm improves the packet delivery rate by two mechanisms based on the forwarding features of ODAM. The first distance-based mechanism reduces the possibility of packet loss by considering the angles between source nodes, forwarding nodes and receiving nodes. The second mechanism increases the redundancy of forwarding nodes to guarantee the packet success delivery ratio. We show by analysis and simulations that the proposed algorithm can improve packet delivery rate for vehicular networks compared against two widely-used existing protocols.

In this paper, we analyze the performance of an amplify-and-forward (AF) two-way relaying system, where two sources exchange information via the aid of an intermediate relay that is selected among multiple relays according to max-min criterion. We consider a practical scenario, where one source-relay link undergoes Rician fading, and the other source-relay link is subject to Rayleigh fading. To be specific, we derive a tight lower bound for the outage probability. From this lower bound, the asymptotic outage probability and average symbol error rate (SER) expressions are derived to gain insight into the system performance at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region. Furthermore, we investigate the optimal power allocation (PA) with fixed relay location (RL), optimal RL with fixed PA and joint optimization of PA and RL to minimize the outage probability and average SER. The analytical expressions are verified through Monte Carlo simulations, where the positive impact of Rician factor on the system performance is also illustrated. Simulation results also validate the effectiveness of the proposed PA and relay positioning schemes.

We present a novel approach for the simulation of color pencil effects using line integral convolution (LIC) to produce pencil drawings from images. Our key idea is to use a bilateral convolution filter to simulate the various effects of pencil strokes. Our filter resolves the drawbacks of the existing convolution-based schemes, and presents an intuitive control to mimic the properties of pencil strokes. We also present a scheme that determines stroke directions from the shapes to be drawn. Smooth tangent flows are used for the pixels close to feature lines, and partially parallel flows inside regions. The background is rendered using a flow of fixed direction. Using different styles of stroke directions increases the realism of the resulting images. This approach produces convincing pencil drawing effects from photographs.

Crowded scenes analysis is a challenging topic in computer vision field. How to detect diverse motion patterns in crowded scenarios from videos is the critical yet hard part of this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to mining motion patterns by utilizing motion information during both long-term period and short interval simultaneously. To capture long-term motions effectively, we introduce Motion History Image (MHI) representation to access to the global perspective about the crowd motion. The combination of MHI and optical flow, which is used to get instant motion information, gives rise to discriminative spatial-temporal motion features. Benefitting from the robustness and efficiency of the novel motion representation, the following motion pattern mining is implemented in a completely unsupervised way. The motion vectors are clustered hierarchically through automatic hierarchical clustering algorithm building on the basis of graphic model. This method overcomes the instability of optical flow in dealing with time continuity in crowded scenes. The results of clustering reveal the situations of motion pattern distribution in current crowded videos. To validate the performance of the proposed approach, we conduct experimental evaluations on some challenging videos including vehicles and pedestrians. The reliable detection results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

There is an intuitive connection between signcryption and key agreement. Such a connector may lead to a novel way to construct authenticated and efficient group key agreement protocols. In this paper, we present a primary approach for constructing an authenticated group key agreement protocol from signcryption. This approach introduces desired properties to group key agreement. What this means is that the signcryption gives assurance to a sender that the key is available only to the recipient, and assurance to the recipient that the key indeed comes from the sender. Following the generic construction, we instantiate a distributed two-round group key agreement protocol based on signcryption scheme given by Dent [8]. We also show that this concrete protocol is secure in the outsider unforgeability notion and the outsider confidentiality notion assuming hardness of the Gap Diffie-Hellman problem.

Group key agreement (GKA) is a cryptographic primitive allowing two or more users to negotiate a shared session key over public networks. Wu et al. recently introduced the concept of asymmetric GKA that allows a group of users to negotiate a common public key, while each user only needs to hold his/her respective private key. However, Wu et al.'s protocol can not resist active attacks, such as fabrication. To solve this problem, Zhang et al. proposed an authenticated asymmetric GKA protocol, where each user is authenticated during the negotiation process, so it can resist active attacks. Whereas, Zhang et al.'s protocol needs a partially trusted certificate authority to issue certificates, which brings a heavy certificate management burden. To eliminate such cost, Zhang et al. constructed another protocol in identity-based setting. Unfortunately, it suffers from the so-called key escrow problem. In this paper, we propose the certificateless authenticated asymmetric group key agreement protocol which does not have certificate management burden and key escrow problem. Besides, our protocol achieves known-key security, unknown key-share security, key-compromise impersonation security, and key control security. Our simulation based on the pairing-based cryptography (PBC) library shows that this protocol is efficient and practical.

Reliance on the Internet has introduced Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to various security threats. A reliable security protocol and an authentication scheme are thus required to prevent the aforementioned threats. However, an authentication scheme often demands additional cost and effort. Accordingly, a security framework for known participants in VoIP communication is proposed in this paper. The framework is known as Randomness-Optimized Self-Securing (ROSS), which performs authentication automatically throughout the session by optimizing the uniqueness and randomness of the communication itself. Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange and Salsa20 stream cipher are utilized in the framework correspondingly to secure the key agreement and the communication with low computational cost. Human intelligence supports ROSS authentication process to ensure participant authenticity and communication regularity. The results show that with marginal overhead, the proposed framework is able to secure VoIP communication by performing reliable authentication.