The IEEE 802.11 compliant stations can transmit at multiple transmission rates. Selection of an appropriate transmission rate plays a significant role in determining the overall efficiency of a communication system. The technique which determines the channel state information and accordingly selects an appropriate transmission rate is called rate-adaptation protocol. The IEEE 802.11 standard does not provide standard specification for implementing a rate-adaptation protocol for its multi-rate capable wireless stations. Due to the lack of standard specification, there is a myriad of rate-adaptation protocols, proposed by industry and various research institutes. This paper surveys the existing rate-adaptation schemes, discusses various features which contribute significantly in the process of rate-adaptation, the timing constraints on such schemes, and the performance gains in terms of throughput, delay and energy efficiency; which can be gained by the use of rate-adaptation. The paper also discusses the implication of rate-adaptation schemes on the performance of overall communication and identifies existing research challenges in the design of rate-adaptation schemes.

Recently, energy-efficient cellular transmission has received considerable research attention to improve the energy efficiency of wireless communication. In this paper, we consider a cellular network consisting of one base station (BS) and multiple user terminals and explore the network coding for enhancing the energy efficiency of cellular downlink transmission from BS to users. We propose the network coded cellular transmission scheme and conduct its energy consumption analysis with target outage probability and data rate requirements in Rayleigh fading environments. Then, the energy efficiency in Bits-per-Joule is further defined and analyzed to evaluate the number of bits delivered per Joule of energy cost. Numerical results show that the network coded cellular transmission significantly outperforms the traditional cellular transmission in terms of energy efficiency, implying that given a Joule of energy cost, the network coded cellular transmission scheme can deliver more bits than the traditional cellular transmission.

The discovery of nearest neighbors, without training in advance, has many applications, such as the formation of mosaic images, image matching, image retrieval and image stitching. When the quantity of data is huge and the number of dimensions is high, the efficient identification of a nearest neighbor (NN) is very important. This study proposes a variation of the KD-tree - the arbitrary KD-tree (KDA) - which is constructed without the need to evaluate variances. Multiple KDAs can be constructed efficiently and possess independent tree structures, when the amount of data is large. Upon testing, using extended synthetic databases and real-world SIFT data, this study concludes that the KDA method increases computational efficiency and produces satisfactory accuracy, when solving NN problems.

Data compression at the transport layer could both reduce transmitted bytes over network links and increase the transmitted application data (TCP PDU) in one RTT at the same network conditions. Therefore, it is able to improve transmission efficiency on Internet, especially on the networks with limited bandwidth or long delay links. In this paper, we propose an on-the-fly TCP data compression scheme, i.e., the TCPComp, to enhance TCP performance. This scheme is primarily composed of the compression decision mechanism and the compression ratio estimation algorithm. When the application data arrives at the transport layer, the compression decision mechanism is applied to determine which data block could be compressed. The compression ratio estimation algorithm is employed to predict compression ratios of upcoming application data for determining the proper size of the next data block so as to maximize compression efficiency. Furthermore, the assessment criteria for TCP data compression scheme are systematically developed. Experimental results show that the scheme can effectively reduce transmitted TCP segments and bytes, leading to greater transmission efficiency compared with the standard TCP and other TCP compression schemes.

One of the most important scalability issues facing the current Internet is the rapidly increasing rate of BGP updates (BGP churn), to which route flap and path exploration are the two major contributors. Current countermeasures would either cause severe reachability loss or delay BGP convergence, and are becoming less attractive for the rising concern about routing convergence as the prevalence of Internet-based real time applications. Based on the observation that highly active prefixes usually repeatedly explore very few as-paths during path exploration, we propose a router-level mechanism, Path Exploration Aggregation (PEA), to scale BGP without either causing prefix unreachable or slowing routing convergence. PEA performs aggregation on the transient paths explored by a highly active prefix, and propagates the aggregated path instead to reduce the updates caused by as-path changes. Moreover, in order to avoid the use of unstable routes, PEA purposely prolongs the aggregated path via as-path prepending to make it less preferred in the perspective of downstream routers. With the BGP traces obtained from RouteViews and RIPE-RIS projects, PEA can reduce BGP updates by up to 63.1%, shorten path exploration duration by up to 53.3%, and accelerate the convergence 7.39 seconds on average per routing event.

Impossible Differential Cryptanalysis (IDC) uses impossible differentials to discard wrong subkeys for the first or the last several rounds of block ciphers. Thus, the security of a block cipher against IDC can be evaluated by impossible differentials. This paper studies impossible differentials for Rijndael-like and 3D-like ciphers, we introduce methods to find 4-round impossible differentials of Rijndael-like ciphers and 6-round impossible differentials of 3D-like ciphers. Using our methods, various new impossible differentials of Rijndael and 3D could be searched out.

Content based image retrieval has become an increasingly important research topic for its wide application. It is highly challenging when facing to large-scale database with large variance. The retrieval systems rely on a key component, the predefined or learned similarity measures over images. We note that, the similarity measures can be potential improved if the data distribution information is exploited using a more sophisticated way. In this paper, we propose a similarity measure learning approach for image retrieval. The similarity measure, so called Fisher kernel, is derived from the probabilistic distribution of images and is the function over observed data, hidden variable and model parameters, where the hidden variables encode high level information which are powerful in discrimination and are failed to be exploited in previous methods. We further propose a discriminative learning method for the similarity measure, i.e., encouraging the learned similarity to take a large value for a pair of images with the same label and to take a small value for a pair of images with distinct labels. The learned similarity measure, fully exploiting the data distribution, is well adapted to dataset and would improve the retrieval system. We evaluate the proposed method on Corel-1000, Corel5k, Caltech101 and MIRFlickr 25,000 databases. The results show the competitive performance of the proposed method.

A novel multifocus image fusion algorithm based on NSCT is proposed in this paper. In order to not only attain the image focusing properties and more visual information in the fused image, but also sensitive to the human visual perception, a local multidirection variance (LEOV) fusion rule is proposed for lowpass subband coefficient. In order to introduce more visual saliency, a modified local contrast is defined. In addition, according to the feature of distribution of highpass subband coefficients, a direction vector is proposed to constrain the modified local contrast and construct the new fusion rule for highpass subband coefficients selection The NSCT is a flexible multiscale, multidirection, and shift-invariant tool for image decomposition, which can be implemented via the atrous algorithm. The proposed fusion algorithm based on NSCT not only can prevent artifacts and erroneous from introducing into the fused image, but also can eliminate 'block effect' and 'frequency aliasing' phenomenon. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved better fusion results than wavelet-based and CT-based fusion method in contrast and clarity.

The purpose of a data leakage prevention system is to protect corporate information assets. The system monitors the packet exchanges between internal systems and the Internet, filters packets according to the data security policy defined by each company, or discretionarily deletes important data included in packets in order to prevent leakage of corporate information. However, the problem arises that the system may monitor employees' personal information, thus allowing their privacy to be violated. Therefore, it is necessary to find not only a solution for detecting leakage of significant information, but also a way to minimize the leakage of internal users' personal information. In this paper, we propose two models for representing the level of personal information disclosure during data leakage detection. One model measures only the disclosure frequencies of keywords that are defined as personal data. These frequencies are used to indicate the privacy violation level. The other model represents the context of privacy violation using a private data matrix. Each row of the matrix represents the disclosure counts for personal data keywords in a given time period, and each column represents the disclosure count of a certain keyword during the entire observation interval. Using the suggested matrix model, we can represent an abstracted context of the privacy violation situation. Experiments on the privacy violation situation to demonstrate the usability of the suggested models are also presented.

Protocol reverse engineering is useful for many security applications, including intelligent fuzzing, intrusion detection and fingerprint generation. Since manual reverse engineering is a time-consuming and tedious process, a number of automatic techniques have been proposed. However, the accuracy of these techniques is limited due to the complexity of binary instructions, and the derived formats have missed constraints that are critical for security applications. In this paper, we propose a new approach for protocol format extraction. Our approach reasons about only the evaluation behavior of a program on the input message from concolic execution, and enables field identification and constraint inference with high accuracy. Moreover, it performs binary analysis with low complexity by reducing modern instruction sets to BIL, a small, well-specified and architecture-independent language. We have implemented our approach into a system called Icefex and evaluated it over real-world implementations of DNS, eDonkey, FTP, HTTP and McAfee ePO protocols. Experimental results show that our approach is more accurate and effective at extracting protocol formats than other approaches.

In 2006, Zhang and Wang proposed a data hiding scheme based on Exploiting Modification Direction (EMD) to increase data hiding capacity. The major benefit of EMD is providing embedding capacity greater than 1 bit per pixel. Since then, many EMD-type data hiding schemes have been proposed. However, a serious disadvantage common to these approaches is that the embedded data is compromised when the embedding function is disclosed. Our proposed secure data hiding scheme remedies this disclosure shortcoming by employing an additional modulus function. The provided security analysis of our scheme demonstrates that attackers cannot get the secret information from the stegoimage even if the embedding function is made public. Furthermore, our proposed scheme also gives a simple solution to the overflow/underflow problem and maintains high embedding capacity and good stegoimage quality.