Transmission power control in wireless ad hoc networks: challenges, solutions and open issues
Recently, power control in mobile ad hoc networks has been the focus of extensive research. Its main objectives are to reduce the total energy consumed in packet delivery and/or increase network throughput by increasing the channel's spatial reuse. In this article, we give an overview of various power control approaches that have been proposed in the literature. We discuss the factors that influence the selection of the transmission power, including the important interplay between the routing (network) and the medium access control (MAC) layers. Protocols that account for such interplay are presented.

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: Distributed querying of Internet distance information

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: Current practices of leading e-government countries
abstract: IT is transforming the way governments function and valuable lessons can be learned from the pioneering e-government programs that have led the charge.

title: Blind signal separation and independent component analysis
abstract: Independent component analysis (ICA) is emerging as a new paradigm in signal processing and data analysis. ICA has been proposed as a solution to the blind source separation problem (BSS) in which sensory signals are given as mixtures of unknown source signals. Since neither the sources nor the mixing environment are known a priori there is no general analytical solution to this problem. However, since the last decade researchers have found good approximate solutions based on assumptions about the source statistics. They were able to formulate solutions or algorithms that were derived from well-known cost functions including maximum likelihood estimation, information maximization and higher-order cumulants. The ICA framework touches many theoretical research areas, and therefore receives attention in several research communities including machine learning, neural networks, statistical signal processing and Bayesian modeling. More recently, there have been numerous applications of ICA in adaptive 0ltering, speech signal processing, biomedical signal processing, computational neuroscience, image coding, text data modeling, and 0nancial data analysis. The standard ICA formulation has, in general, strong assumptions or simpli0cations such as: the number of sensors has to be equal or greater than the number of sources, there is no additive noise signal in the sensors, and the sources are modeled as random variables. However, when applying ICA to real-world problems it becomes evident that those restrictions are cumbersome and although the standard ICA algorithms give good approximate solutions, there is great need in going beyond the standard assumptions and develop new algorithms that can relax some of the assumptions. This special issue on ICA and BSS is a timely publication covering important recent 0ndings in ICA theory as well as new applications of ICA in data analysis. Leading researchers present their work to advance this 0eld beyond traditional borders and show how this 0eld can bridge disciplines and yield new methods that lead to mutual bene0ts and advances in science and engineering. This issue is composed of a review article and two parts: the 0rst part presents new theoretical 0ndings while the second part presents novel applications. Often, there is no such sharp division into these two parts since illustrative simulations support theoretical 0ndings and practical methods include algorithmic modi0cations to design and evaluate the application-speci0c methods. In “Frontiers of research in BSS=ICA”, V. David S: anchez A. formulates some of the basic concepts and problems in the areas of blind signal separation and independent component analysis. He then moves to a concise description of key methods of data preprocessing and algorithms that provide solutions to the instantaneous mixture and the

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: Requirements, Implementation and Applications of Hand-held Virtual Reality
abstract: While hand-held computing devices are capable of rendering advanced 3D graphics and processing of multimedia data, they are not designed to provide and induce sufficient sense of immersion and presence for virtual reality. In this paper, we propose minimal requirements for realizing VR on a hand-held device. Furthermore, based on the proposed requirements, we have designed and implemented a low cost hand-held VR platform by adding multimodal sensors and display components to a hand-held PC. The platform enables a motion based interface, an essential part of realizing VR on a small hand-held device, and provides outputs in three modalities, visual, aural and tactile/haptic for a reasonable sensory experience. We showcase our platform and demonstrate the possibilities of hand-hand VR through three VR applications: a typical virtual walkthrough, a 3D multimedia contents browser, and a motion based racing game. Index Terms—Virtual Reality, Computer interface human factors

title: Robust routing in wireless ad hoc networks
abstract: A wireless ad hoc network is a collection of mobile nodes with no fixed infrastructure. The absence of a central authorization facility in dynamic and distributed environments requires collaboration among nodes. When a source searches for a route to a destination, an intermediate node can reply with its cached entry. To strengthen correctness of such a routing discovery process, we propose a method in which the intermediate node requests its next hop to send a confirmation message to the source. After receiving both a route reply and confirmation message, the source determines the validity of a path according to its policy. As a result, this strategy discourages malicious nodes from intercepting packets. Simulation results show a remarkable improvement in throughput (30% higher delivery ratio and 10% less data transmission overhead) with a moderate increase of control messages.