Congestion controlled adaptive lightweight multicast in wireless mobile ad hoc networks
The use of contention-based MAC protocols combined with hidden terminal problems make multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks much more sensitive to load and congestion than wired networks or even wireless cellular networks. In such an environment, we argue that multicast reliability cannot be achieved solely by retransmission of lost packets as is typically done in wired networks with protocols such as SRM. We contend that in order to achieve reliable multicast delivery in such networks, besides reliability mechanisms, we must also consider jointly two components: reliability and congestion control. In this paper, we propose CALM, a congestion controlled, adaptive, lightweight multicast transport protocol and show that congestion control alone can significantly improve reliable packet delivery in ad hoc networks when compared to traditional "wired" reliable multicast protocols.

title: Distributed querying of Internet distance information

title: An interactive video delivery and caching system using video summarization
abstract: With the advance of high-speed network technologies, the availability and popularity of streaming media content over the Internet has grown rapidly in recent years. The delivery and caching of streaming media must be handled in a different fashion than that of traditional non-streaming objects such as HTML or image files, because of its distinct characteristics and user viewing patterns. We propose a novel scheme that provides users with the video summary (a number of key-frame images) before they download the file, and options for them to select the starting playback position. We introduce the content analysis service to achieve these functionalities. The video content analysis performs shot boundary detection, key-frame selection, and face detection and tracking. The results of the processing are a segmented video sequence and an XML-based meta-data describing the video content. We also design a caching system that utilizes our video abstraction and summarization technique. Our integrated video delivery and caching system combines content-aware segmentation, prefix caching, prefetching, and cooperative caching. We describe how our scheme can be applied in three proposed caching architectures.

title: On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol in Multihop Wireless Mobile Networks
abstract: An ad hoc network is a dynamically reconfigurable wireless network with no fixed infrastructure or central administration. Each host is mobile and must act as a router. Routing and multicasting protocols in ad hoc networks are faced with the challenge of delivering data to destinations through multihop routes in the presence of node movements and topology changes. This paper presents the On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP) for wireless mobile ad hoc networks. ODMRP is a mesh-based, rather than a conventional tree-based, multicast scheme and uses a forwarding group concept; only a subset of nodes forwards the multicast packets via scoped flooding. It applies on-demand procedures to dynamically build routes and maintain multicast group membership. ODMRP is well suited for ad hoc wireless networks with mobile hosts where bandwidth is limited, topology changes frequently, and power is constrained. We evaluate ODMRP performance with other multicast protocols proposed for ad hoc networks via extensive and detailed simulation.

title: Caching strategies in transcoding-enabled proxy systems for streaming media distribution networks
abstract: With the wide availability of high-speed network access, we are experiencing high quality streaming media delivery over the Internet. The emergence of ubiquitous computing enables mobile users to access the Internet with their laptops, PDAs, or even cell phones. When nomadic users connect to the network via wireless links or phone lines, high quality video transfer can be problematic due to long delay or size mismatch between the application display and the screen. Our proposed solution to this problem is to enable network proxies with the transcoding capability, and hence provide different, appropriate video quality to different network environment. The proxies in our transcoding-enabled caching (TeC) system perform transcoding as well as caching for efficient rich media delivery to heterogeneous network users. This design choice allows us to perform content adaptation at the network edges. We propose three different TeC caching strategies. We describe each algorithm and discuss its merits and shortcomings. We also study how the user access pattern affects the performance of TeC caching algorithms and compare them with other approaches. We evaluate TeC performance by conducting two types of simulation. Our first experiment uses synthesized traces while the other uses real traces derived from an enterprise media server logs. The results indicate that compared with the traditional network caches, with marginal transcoding load, TeC improves the cache effectiveness, decreases the user-perceived latency, and reduces the traffic between the proxy and the content origin server.

title: Improving aggregated channel performance through decentralized channel monitoring
abstract: Aggregating low-speed WAN links into a higher-speed logical link promises to improve data-transfer rates to collaborating communities of wireless mobile multihomed devices. Such bandwidth aggregation systems must adapt to link dynamics as the number of links and the channel conditions vary with time due to mobility, power dissipation, and channel interference. A monitoring architecture that accurately measures the link dynamics and promptly feeds this information to the system is vital to realize significant bandwidth aggregation performance gains. In this paper we present various architectural design alternatives for such a monitoring system, and evaluate them using both analysis and simulation. We show that a properly-designed monitoring system can accurately measure and quickly respond to changes in communication link performance while minimizing the control overhead.

title: Design and implementation of a multi-threaded TMN agent system
abstract: A telecommunications management network adopts the OSI manager-agent model in which an agent system plays a more important role than a manager system. Because the existing agent systems sequentially perform a CMIS operation on selected managed objects, it cannot guarantee quick response time when many managed objects are selected. We propose a multi-threaded process structure for the agent system which performs CMIS operations concurrently on managed objects. We implemented our agent system using OSIMIS-4.O TMN platform in Solaris. We measured response time to a CMIS operation to evaluate the performance of our system. Experimental results show that the performance of our system is not so good when network resources reside within the agent system, but very good when network resources reside outside the agent system.

title: Neighbor supporting ad hoc multicast routing protocol
abstract: An ad hoc network is a multi-hop wireless network formed by a collection of mobile nodes without the intervention of fixed infrastructure. Limited bandwidth and a high degree of mobility require that routing protocols for ad hoc networks be robust, simple, and energy-conserving. This paper proposes a new ad hoc multicast routing protocol called Neighbor-Supporting Multicast Protocol (NSMP). NSMP adopts a mesh structure to enhance resilience against mobility. And NSMP utilizes node locality to reduce the overhead of route failure recovery and mesh maintenance. NSMP also attempts to improve route efficiency and reduce data transmissions. Our simulation results show that NSMP delivers packets efficiently while substantially reducing control overhead in various environments.

title: A new wireless ad hoc multicast routing protocol
abstract: An ad hoc network is a multi-hop wireless network of mobile nodes without the intervention of fixed infrastructure. Limited bandwidth and mobility require that ad hoc routing protocols be robust, simple, and energy conserving. This paper proposes a new ad hoc multicast routing protocol called neighbor-supporting multicast protocol (NSMP). NSMP adopts a mesh structure to enhance resilience against mobility. And NSMP utilizes node locality to reduce the overhead of route maintenance. NSMP also attempts to improve route efficiency and reduce data transmissions. Our simulation results show that NSMP delivers packets efficiently while substantially reducing control overhead in various environments.

title: Mammogram Analysis Using Two-Dimensional Autoregressive Models: Sufficient or Not?
abstract: Two-dimensional (2–D) autoregressive (AR) models have been used as one of the methods to characterise the textures of tumours in mammograms. Previously, the 2–D AR model coefficients were estimated for the block containing the tumour and the blocks in its 3 × 3 neighbourhood. In this paper, the possibility of having the estimated set of AR model coefficients of the block containing the tumour as a unique set of AR model coefficients for the entire mammogram is looked into. Based on the information given from the MiniMammography database, the possible number of blocks of the same size of the block containing the tumour is obtained from the entire mammogram and for each block a set of AR model coefficients is estimated using a method that combines both the Yule-Walker system of equations and the Yule-Walker system of equations in the third-order statistical domain. These sets of AR model coefficients are then compared. The simulation results show that 98.6% of the time we can not find another set of AR model coefficients representing the blocks of pixels in the possible neighbourhood of the entire mammogram for the data (95 mammograms with 5 of them having two tumours) available in the MiniMammography database.

title: A PVS Approach to Verifying ORA-SS Data Models
abstract: The rapid growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in a dramatic increase in semistructured data usage. This creates a growing need for ensuring consistency of the data especially when applications or databases change the schema of semistructured data. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach to formally define and verify the ORA-SS data model for semistructured data design. A mathematical semantics for the ORA-SS notation is defined using the PVS formal language. With this semantics, it is possible to perform automated verification via the PVS theorem prover to identify the inconsistencies in designing ORA-SS data models. The verification is based on criteria for semistructured data ve rification at both schema and data instance levels.