Wireless multicast is considered as an effective transmission mode for the future mobile social contact services supported by Long Time Evolution (LTE). Though wireless multicast has an excellent resource efficiency, its performance suffers deterioration from the channel condition and wireless resource availability. Cognitive Radio (CR) and Device to Device (D2D) are two solutions to provide potential resource. However, resource allocation for cognitive wireless multicast based on D2D is still a great challenge for LTE social networks. In this paper, a joint sub-carriers and power allocation model based on D2D for general cognitive radio multicast (CR-D2D-MC) is proposed for Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) LTE systems. By opportunistically accessing the licensed spectrum, the maximized capacity for multiple cognitive multicast groups is achieved with the condition of the general scenario of imperfect spectrum sensing, the constrains of interference to primary users (PUs) and an upper-bound power of secondary users (SUs) acting as multicast source nodes. Furthermore, the fairness for multicast groups or unicast terminals is guaranteed by setting a lower-bound number of the subcarriers allocated to cognitive multicast groups. Lagrange duality algorithm is adopted to obtain the optimal solution to the proposed CR-D2D-MC model. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm improves the performance of cognitive multicast groups and achieves a good balance between capacity and fairness.

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is an emerging short-range wireless communication network with sensor nodes located on, in or around the human body for healthcare, entertainment and ubiquitous computing. In WBANs, energy is severely constrained which is the prime consideration in the medium access control (MAC) protocol design. In this paper, we propose a novel MAC protocol named Energy-efficient Relay MAC with dynamic Power Control (ERPC-MAC) to save energy consumption. Without relying on the additional devices, ERPC-MAC employs relaying nodes to provide relay service for nodes which consume energy fast. Accordingly the superframe adjustment is performed and then the network topology can be smoothly switched from single-hop to multi-hop. Moreover, for further energy saving and reliability improvement, the dynamic power control is introduced to adjust the power level whenever a node transmits its packets to the coordinator or the relaying node. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first effort to integrate relay, topology adjustment and power control to improve the network performance in a WBAN. Comprehensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance. The results show that the ERPC-MAC is more superior to the existing standard and significantly prolongs the network lifetime.

Ubiquitous interaction in a pervasive environment is the main attribute of smart spaces. Pervasive systems are weaving themselves in our daily life, making it possible to collect user information invisibly, in an unobtrusive manner by known and even unknown parties. Huge number of interactions between users and pervasive devices necessitate a comprehensive trust model which unifies different trust factors like context, recommendation, and history to calculate the trust level of each party precisely. Trusted computing enables effective solutions to verify the trustworthiness of computing platforms. In this paper, we elaborate Unified Trust Model (UTM) which calculates entity's trustworthiness based on history, recommendation, context and platform integrity measurement, and formally use these factors in trustworthiness calculation. We evaluate UTM behaviour by simulating in different scenario experiments using a Trust and Reputation Models Simulator for Wireless Sensor Networks. We show that UTM offers responsive behaviour and can be used effectively in the low interaction environments.

Over recent years, enormous amounts of research in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been conducted, due to its multifarious applications such as in environmental monitoring, object tracking, disaster management, manufacturing, monitoring and control. In some of WSN applications dependent the energy-efficient and link reliability are demanded. Hence, this paper presents a routing protocol that considers these two criteria. We propose a new mechanism called Reliable Routing Scheme for Energy-Balanced (RRSEB) to reduce the packets dropped during the data communications. It is based on Swarm Intelligence (SI) using the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) method. The RRSEB is a self-adaptive method to ensure the high routing reliability in WSNs, if the failures occur due to the movement of the sensor nodes or sensor node's energy depletion. This is done by introducing a new method to create alternative paths together with the data routing obtained during the path discovery stage. The goal of this operation is to update and offer new routing information in order to construct the multiple paths resulting in an increased reliability of the sensor network. From the simulation, we have seen that the proposed method shows better results in terms of packet delivery ratio and energy efficiency.

In-network caching is a key component of information-centric networking (ICN) for reducing content download time, network traffic, and server workload. Data center network (DCN) is an ideal candidate for applying the ICN design principles. In this paper, we have evaluated the effectiveness of caching placement and replacement in DCN with butterfly-topology. We also suggest a new cache placement policy based on the number of routing nodes (i.e., hop counts) through which travels the content. With a probability inversely proportional to the hop counts, the caching placement policy makes each routing node to cache content chunks. Simulation results lead us to conclude (i) cache placement policy is more effective for cache performance than cache replacement, (ii) the suggested cache placement policy has better caching performance for butterfly-type DCNs than the traditional caching placement policies such as ALWASYS and FIX(P), and (iii) high cache hit ratio does not always imply low average hop counts.

In RFID systems, one important issue is how to effectively address tag collision, which occurs when multiple tags reply simultaneously to a reader, so that all the tags are correctly identified. However, most existing anti-collision protocols assume isotropic collisions where a reader cannot detect any of the tags from the collided signals. In practice, this assumption turns out to be too pessimistic since the capture effect may take place, in which the reader considers the strongest signal as a successful transmission and the others as interference. In this case, the reader disregards the other collided tags, and in turn, fails to read the tag(s) with weaker signal(s). In this paper, we propose a capture effect-aware anti-collision protocol, called Multi-Round Collision Tree (MRCT) protocol, which efficiently identifies the tags in real RFID environments. MRCT deals with the capture effect as well as channel error by employing a multi-round based identification algorithm. We also analyze the performance of MRCT in terms of the number of slots required for identifying all tags. The simulation results show that MRCT significantly outperforms the existing protocol especially in a practical environment where the capture effect occurs.

The demand for multimedia streaming services is increasing rapidly. To meet this demand, there has been much research and many practical developments for providing multimedia services. A push-to-talk (PTT) service is one of the multimedia streaming services that have been deployed not only over IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) but also in peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks. The benefit of PTT has been demonstrated in the literature. However, the need for using PTT service in communication can be arbitrary among users, regardless what kind of PTT services they use. This demand does not support current PTT systems, so an expansion of PTT services still be limited. Moreover, the combination of PTT services in IMS and P2P networks will help operators to provide more scalable PTT services. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a model to support PTT service interworking between IMS and P2P overlay networks. We also introduced our system design and some interworking service scenarios. We confirmed our architecture through implementation and testing.

The increase in the number of music files in smart phone and MP3 player makes it difficult to find the music files which people want. So, Query-by-Singing/Humming (QbSH) systems have been developed to retrieve music from a user's humming or singing without having to know detailed information about the title or singer of song. Most previous researches on QbSH have been conducted using musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) files as reference songs. However, the production of MIDI files is a time-consuming process. In addition, more and more music files are newly published with the development of music market. Consequently, the method of using the more common MPEG-1 audio layer 3 (MP3) files for reference songs is considered as an alternative. However, there is little previous research on QbSH with MP3 files because an MP3 file has a different waveform due to background music and multiple (polyphonic) melodies compared to the humming/singing query. To overcome these problems, we propose a new QbSH method using MP3 files on mobile device. This research is novel in four ways. First, this is the first research on QbSH using MP3 files as reference songs. Second, the start and end positions on the MP3 file to be matched are estimated by using multi-layered perceptron (MLP) prior to performing the matching with humming/singing query file. Third, for more accurate results, four MLPs are used, which produce the start and end positions for dynamic time warping (DTW) matching algorithm, and those for chroma-based DTW algorithm, respectively. Fourth, two matching scores by the DTW and chroma-based DTW algorithms are combined by using PRODUCT rule, through which a higher matching accuracy is obtained. Experimental results with AFA MP3 database show that the accuracy (Top 1 accuracy of 98%, with an MRR of 0.989) of the proposed method is much higher than that of other methods. We also showed the effectiveness of the proposed system on consumer mobile device.

The key issue of block-based multi-focus image fusion is to determine the size of the sub-block because different sizes of the sub-block will lead to different fusion effects. To solve this problem, this paper presents a novel genetic algorithm (GA) based multi-focus image fusion method, in which the block size can be automatically found. In our method, the Sum-modified-Laplacian (SML) is selected as an evaluation criterion to measure the clarity of the image sub-block, and the edge information retention is employed to calculate the fitness of each individual. Then, through the selection, crossover and mutation procedures of the GA, we can obtain the optimal solution for the sub-block, which is finally used to fuse the images. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the traditional methods, including the average, gradient pyramid, discrete wavelet transform (DWT), shift invariant DWT (SIDWT) and two existing GA-based methods in terms of both the visual subjective evaluation and the objective evaluation.

An affine invariant descriptor is proposed, which is able to well represent the affine covariant regions. Estimating main orientation is still problematic in many existing method, such as SIFT (scale invariant feature transform) and SURF (speeded up robust features). Instead of aligning the estimated main orientation, in this paper ellipse orientation is directly used. According to ellipse orientation, affine covariant regions are firstly divided into 4 sub-regions with equal angles. Since affine covariant regions are divided from the ellipse orientation, the divided sub-regions are rotation invariant regardless the rotation, if any, of ellipse. Meanwhile, the affine covariant regions are normalized into a circular region. In the end, the gradients of pixels in the circular region are calculated and the partition-based descriptor is created by using the gradients. Compared with the existing descriptors including MROGH, SIFT, GLOH, PCA-SIFT and spin images, the proposed descriptor demonstrates superior performance according to extensive experiments.

Human face gender recognition requires fast image processing with high accuracy. Existing face gender recognition methods used traditional local features and machine learning methods have shortcomings of low accuracy or slow speed. In this paper, a new framework for face gender recognition to reach fast face gender recognition is proposed, which is based on Local Ternary Pattern (LTP) and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM). LTP is a generalization of Local Binary Pattern (LBP) that is in the presence of monotonic illumination variations on a face image, and has high discriminative power for texture classification. It is also more discriminate and less sensitive to noise in uniform regions. On the other hand, ELM is a new learning algorithm for generalizing single hidden layer feed forward networks without tuning parameters. The main advantages of ELM are the less stringent optimization constraints, faster operations, easy implementation, and usually improved generalization performance. The experimental results on public databases show that, in comparisons with existing algorithms, the proposed method has higher precision and better generalization performance at extremely fast learning speed.

Black and gray hole attack is one kind of routing disturbing attacks and can bring great damage to the network. As a result, an efficient algorithm to detect black and gray attack is important. This paper demonstrate an adaptive approach to detecting black and gray hole attacks in ad hoc network based on a cross layer design. In network layer, we proposed a path-based method to overhear the next hop's action. This scheme does not send out extra control packets and saves the system resources of the detecting node. In MAC layer, a collision rate reporting system is established to estimate dynamic detecting threshold so as to lower the false positive rate under high network overload. We choose DSR protocol to test our algorithm and ns-2 as our simulation tool. Our experiment result verifies our theory: the average detection rate is above 90% and the false positive rate is below 10%. Moreover, the adaptive threshold strategy contributes to decrease the false positive rate.

Current group key agreement protocols, which are often tree-based, have unnecessary delays that are caused when members with low-performance computer systems join a group key computation process. These delays are caused by the computations necessary to balance a key tree after membership changes. An alternate approach to group key generation that reduces delays is the dynamic prioritizing mechanism of queue-based group key generation. We propose an efficient group key agreement protocol and present the results of performance evaluation tests of this protocol. The queue-based approach that we propose is scalable and requires less computational overhead than conventional tree-based protocols.