On-demand diversity wireless relay networks

There has been much recent attention on using wireless relay networks to forward data from mobile nodes to a base station. This network architecture is motivated by performance improvements obtained by leveraging the highest quality links to a base station for data transfer. With the advent of agile radios it is possible to improve the performance of relay networks through intelligent frequency assignments. First, it is beneficial if the links of the relay network are orthogonal with respect to each other so that simultaneous transmission on all links is possible. Second, diversity can be added to hops in the relay network to reduce error rates. In this paper we present algorithms for forming such relay networks dynamically. The formation algorithms support intelligent frequency assignments and diversity setup. Our results show that algorithms that order the sequence in which nodes join a relay network carefully, achieve the highest amount of diversity and hence best performance. This research is supported in part by NSF grant CNS-0508114. JaeSheung Shin received the B.S. and M.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from DongGuk University, Korea, in 1991 and 1993, respectively. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He is a research assistant at the Networking and Security Research Center (NSRC). Prior to joining Pennsylvania State University, he was with Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Korea, since 1993. He worked on development of 2G and 3G wireless cellular core network elements. His research interests include mobility management and signaling for wireless cellular and routing and resource allocation for multi-radio multi-hop wireless cellular networks. Kyounghwan Lee received the B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from University of Seoul, Seoul, Korea, in 2000, and the M.S. degree in Information and Communication Engineering from Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Gwangju, Korea, in 2002. He is currently a Ph.D candidate at the Electrical Engineering department at the Pennsylvania State University and a research assistant at the Wireless Communications and Networking Laboratory (WCAN@PSU). His research interests include wireless communication theory and relay networks. E-mail: kxl251@psu.edu Aylin Yener received the B.S. degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, and in Physics, from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 1991, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rutgers University, NJ, in 1994 and 2000, respectively. During her Ph.D. studies, she was with Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University, NJ. Between fall 2000 and fall 2001, she was with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Lehigh University, PA, where she was a P.C. Rossin assistant professor. Currently, she is with the Electrical Engineering department at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, as an assistant professor. Dr. Yener is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2003. She is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Dr. Yener’s research interests include performance enhancement of multiuser systems, wireless communication theory and wireless networking. Thomas F. La Porta received his B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. degrees from The Cooper Union, New York, NY, and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York, NY. He joined the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Penn State in 2002 as a Full Professor. He is the Director of the Networking Research Center at Penn State. Prior to joining Penn State, Dr. La Porta was with Bell Laboratories since 1986. He was the Director of the Mobile Networking Research Department in Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. He is an IEEE Fellow and Bell Labs Fellow. Dr. La Porta was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. He has published over 50 technical papers and holds 25 patents.     

An efficient and flexible MPLS signaling framework for mobile networks

Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) has gained momentum in recent years as an effective tool to provide Quality of Service (QoS) in a variety of networks. This has in turn created active interest in the area of recovery in MPLS based networks. A number of recovery schemes for MPLS domains have been proposed in recent years. However, the current schemes lack support for recovery in dynamic network topologies. In this paper, a new flexible signaling protocol for LSP rerouting in dynamic network environments is introduced. The signaling protocol recovers from node and link failures reactively, taking a local approach to LSP reestablishment. The performance of the signaling protocol is evaluated through simulations. Results indicate that the protocol can effectively and efficiently handle rerouting in dynamic networks with a low protocol signaling overhead as compared to contemporary MPLS rerouting protocols. This would enable the MPLS based IP-QoS support mechanisms to extend to dynamic network topologies. A preliminary version of this work was presented at the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Paris. Ramprasad Nagarajan has received his B.E. degree in Electronics and Telecommunications from Pune University, India in 1999. He received his M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Ohio State University, Columbus, OH in 2004. Currently, he is a Wireless Network Engineer in Nortel Networks, specializing in the area of network architecture and design of wireless packet core networks. Ramprasad’s current research interests include the study of wireless network evolution trends, next generation wireless networks, network capacity planning, performance analysis, and optimization. He is a member of the IEEE. Eylem Ekici has received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 1997 and 1998, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, in 2002. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. Dr. Ekici’s current research interests include wireless sensor networks, vehicular communication systems, next generation wireless systems, and space-based networks, with a focus on routing and medium access control protocols, resource management, and analysis of network architectures and protocols. He also conducts research on interfacing of dissimilar networks.     

Scheduling Sleeping Nodes in High Density Cluster-based Sensor Networks

In order to conserve battery power in very dense sensor networks, some sensor nodes may be put into the sleep state while other sensor nodes remain active for the sensing and communication tasks. In this paper, we study the node sleep scheduling problem in the context of clustered sensor networks. We propose and analyze the Linear Distance-based Scheduling (LDS) technique for sleeping in each cluster. The LDS scheme selects a sensor node to sleep with higher probability when it is farther away from the cluster head. We analyze the energy consumption, the sensing coverage property, and the network lifetime of the proposed LDS scheme. The performance of the LDS scheme is compared with that of the conventional Randomized Scheduling (RS) scheme. It is shown that the LDS scheme yields more energy savings while maintaining a similar sensing coverage as the RS scheme for sensor clusters. Therefore, the LDS scheme results in a longer network lifetime than the RS scheme. Jing Deng received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, P. R. China, in 1994 and 1997, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 2002. Dr. Deng is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Orleans. From 2002 to 2004, he visited the CASE center and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY as a research assistant professor, supported by the Syracuse University Prototypical Research in Information Assurance (SUPRIA) program. He was a teaching assistant from 1998 to 1999 and a research assistant from 1999 to 2002 in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. His interests include mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, wireless network security, energy efficient wireless networks, and information assurance. Wendi B. Heinzelman is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester. She received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1995 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1997 and 2000 respectively. Her current research interests lie in the areas of wireless communications and networking, mobile computing, and multimedia communication. Dr. Heinzelman received the NSF Career award in 2005 for her work on cross-layer optimizations for wireless sensor networks, and she received the ONR Young Investigator award in 2005 for her research on balancing resource utilization in wireless sensor networks. Dr. Heinzelman was co-chair of the 1st Workshop on Broadband Advanced Sensor Networks (BaseNets '04), and she is a member of Sigma Xi, the IEEE, and the ACM. Yunghsiang S. Han was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on April 24, 1962. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 1984 and 1986, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from the School of Computer and Information Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, in 1993. From 1986 to 1988 he was a lecturer at Ming-Hsin Engineering College, Hsinchu, Taiwan. He was a teaching assistant from 1989 to 1992 and from 1992 to 1993 a research associate in the School of Computer and Information Science, Syracuse University. From 1993 to 1997 he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Hua Fan College of Humanities and Technology, Taipei Hsien, Taiwan. From 1997 to 2004 he was with the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Chi Nan University, Nantou, Taiwan. He was promoted to Full Professor in 1998. From June to October 2001 he was a visiting scholar in the Department of Electrical Engineering at University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI, and from September 2002 to January 2004 he was the SUPRIA visiting research scholar in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and CASE center at Syracuse University, NY. He is now with the Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering at National Taipei University, Taipei, Taiwan. His research interests are in wireless networks, security, and error-control coding. Dr. Han is a winner of 1994 Syracuse University Doctoral Prize. Pramod K. Varshney was born in Allahabad, India on July 1, 1952. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering and computer science (with highest honors), and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1972, 1974, and 1976 respectively. Since 1976 he has been with Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY where he is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Research Director of the New York State Center for Advanced Technology in Computer Applications and Software Engineering. His current research interests are in distributed sensor networks and data fusion, detection and estimation theory, wireless communications, intelligent systems, signal and image processing, and remote sensing he has published extensively. He is the author of Distributed Detection and Data Fusion, published by Springer-Verlag in 1997 and has co-edited two other books. Dr. Varshney is a member of Tau Beta Pi and is the recipient of the 1981 ASEE Dow Outstanding Young Faculty Award. He was elected to the grade of Fellow of the IEEE in 1997 for his contributions in the area of distributed detection and data fusion. In 2000, he received the Third Millennium Medal from the IEEE and Chancellor's Citation for exceptional academic achievement at Syracuse University. He serves as a distinguished lecturer for the AES society of the IEEE. He is on the editorial board Information Fusion. He was the President of International Society of Information Fusion during 2001.     

Dropping Rate Reduction in Hybrid WLAN/Cellular Systems by Mobile Ad Hoc Relaying

Future mobile handsets will often be multi-mode, containing both wireless LAN (WLAN) and cellular air interfaces. When such a device is within a WLAN it can be served by the WLAN resources. As it moves out of the WLAN coverage area, it has to be served by the cellular system. Therefore, handoffs are necessary between the WLAN and the cellular system. In loosely coupled WLAN/Cellular systems the system administrator of the WLAN is different from the cellular one. Therefore, in these situations, reducing the dropping probability based on classical methods, such as using some reserved guard channels, is difficult. In this paper, we propose to use ad hoc relaying during the vertical handoff process in a hybrid WLAN/Cellular system. The method that we propose in this paper improves the dropping probability regardless of the number of reserved channels. Therefore, this method could be employed in loosely coupled hybrid systems. Both analytical reasoning and simulation results support the effectiveness of the proposed method. Pejman Khadivi received the BS and MS degrees in computer engineering (Hardware and Computer Systems Architecture) in 1998 and 2000, respectively from Isfahan University of Technology, where he is currently working toward his Ph.D. During the 2003/2004 academic year, he was a Visiting Researcher with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, McMaster University, ON, Canada. Different aspects of computer architecture and networking are Mr. Khadivi’s research interests specially, adhoc networks, QoS routing and seamless handoff in hybrid mobile networks. Shadrokh Samavi received the B.S. degrees in industrial technology and electrical engineering from the California State University, Fresno, in 1980 and 1982, respectively, the M.S. degree from the University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, in 1985, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, in 1989. In 1995, he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran, where he was an Associative Professor. During the 2002/2003 academic year, he was a Visiting Professor with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada. His current research interests are implementation and optimization of image-processing algorithms and area-performance tradeoffs in computational circuits. Dr. Samavi is a Registered Professional Engineer (P.E.), USA, and is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, and the National Association of Industrial Technologists (NAIT). Hossein Saidi received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering (Electronics and communication Eng.) from Isfahan University of Technology (IUT), in 1986 and 1989, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Washington University in St. Louis, MO. in 1994.From 1994 to 1995, he was a research associates at Washington Univ. St. Louis, and in 1995 he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering of IUT, where he is an Associate Professor. His Research interest includes ATM, high speed networking, QoS guarantees, routing, algorithms and information theory. Terence D. Todd received the B.A.Sc, M.A.Sc and Ph.D degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. While at Waterloo he spent 3 years as a Research Associate with the Computer Communications Networks Group (CCNG). He is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.Professor Todd spent 1991 on research leave in the Distributed Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. He also spent 1998 on research leave at The Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England. While at ORL he worked on the piconet project which was an early embedded wireless network testbed.Dr. Todd’s research interests include metropolitan/local area networks, wireless communications and the performance analysis of computer communication networks and systems. He currently holds the NSERC/RIM/CITO Industrial Research Chair on Pico-Cellular Wireless Internet Access Networks. Dr. Todd is a Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario and a member of the IEEE. Dongmei Zhao received the Ph.D degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in June 2002. Since July 2002 she has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada where she is an assistant professor. Dr. Zhao’s research interests include modeling and performance analysis, quality-of-service provisioning, access control and admission control in wireless cellular networks and integrated cellular and ad hoc networks. Dr. Zhao is a member of the IEEE.     

A Hybrid Error Recovery scheme for Scalable Video Transmission over 3G Cellular Broadcast Networks

The cdma2000 1xEV-DO mobile communication system provides broadcast and multicast services (BCMCS) to meet an increasing demand for multimedia data services. But the servicing of video streams over a BCMCS network faces a challenge from the unreliable and error-prone nature of the radio channel. BCMCS uses Reed-Solomon coding integrated with the MAC protocol for error recovery. We show that this is not effective for mobiles moving at the edge of service area, where the channel condition is bad, resulting in significantly lower video quality. To improve the playback quality of an MPEG-4 FGS (fine granularity scalability) video stream, we propose a hybrid error recovery scheme incorporating a packet scheduler, which uses slots saved by reducing the Reed-Solomon coding overhead. Packets to be retransmitted are prioritized by a utility function which reduces the packet error-rate in the application layer within a fixed retransmission budget by considering of the map of the error control block at each mobile node. Our error recovery scheme also uses the characteristics of MPEG-4 FGS to improve the video quality even for a slow-moving mobile which is experiencing a high error-rate in the physical channel because of error bursts. Kyungtae Kang received B.S. (1999) and M.S. (2001) degrees in computer engineering from Seoul National University, Korea. He received Ph.D. degree in Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Seoul National University, Korea in 2007. He is a member of IEEE and IEICE. His research interests include packet scheduling, error control, QoS provision, and energy minimization issues in nextgeneration wireless/mobile networks. In particular, he is researching the performance and energy requirements of 3G cellular broadcast services such as BCMCS and MBMS. Yongwoo Cho received the Premedical Degree from the College of Medicine, University of Ulsan, in 1997, a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Korea National Open University in 2004, while he was an military service, and an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Seoul National University in 2006. He has worked as a researcher in Dooin Corp. and as a general manager in Bluecord Technology, Inc. His primary interests include multimedia systems, digital broadcasting, next-generation wireless/mobile networks, error control, real-time computing, and low-power design. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Seoul National University. Heonshik Shin received the B.S. degree in applied physics from Seoul National University, Korea, in 1973. Since he received Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1985, he has actively involved himself in researches of various topics, ranging from real-time computing and distributed computing to mobile systems and software. He is currently a professor of School of Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University.     

A secure incentive protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

The proper functioning of mobile ad hoc networks depends on the hypothesis that each individual node is ready to forward packets for others. This common assumption, however, might be undermined by the existence of selfish users who are reluctant to act as packet relays in order to save their own resources. Such non-cooperative behavior would cause the sharp degradation of network throughput. To address this problem, we propose a credit-based Secure Incentive Protocol (SIP) to stimulate cooperation among mobile nodes with individual interests. SIP can be implemented in a fully distributed way and does not require any pre-deployed infrastructure. In addition, SIP is immune to a wide range of attacks and is of low communication overhead by using a Bloom filter. Detailed simulation studies have confirmed the efficacy and efficiency of SIP. This work was supported in part by the U.S. Office of Naval Research under Young Investigator Award N000140210464 and under grant N000140210554. Yanchao Zhang received the B.E. degree in Computer Communications from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China, in July 1999, and the M.E. degree in Computer Applications from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in April 2002. Since September 2002, he has been working towards the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA. His research interests are network and distributed system security, wireless networking, and mobile computing, with emphasis on mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, wireless mesh networks, and heterogeneous wired/wireless networks. Wenjing Lou is an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She obtained her Ph.D degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Florida in 2003. She received the M.A.Sc degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 1998, the M.E degree and the B.E degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, in 1996 and 1993 respectively. From Dec 1997 to Jul 1999, she worked as a Research Engineer in Network Technology Research Center, Nanyang Technological University. Her current research interests are in the areas of ad hoc and sensor networks, with emphases on network security and routing issues. Wei Liu received his B.E. and M.E. in Electrical and Information Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 1998 and 2001. In August 2005, he received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Florida. Currently, he is a senior technical member with Scalable Network Technologies. His research interest includes cross-layer design, and communication protocols for mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks and cellular networks. Yuguang Fang received a Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in January 1994 and a Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in May 1997. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology from July 1998 to May 2000. He then joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Florida in May 2000 as an assistant professor, got an early promotion to an associate professor with tenure in August 2003 and a professor in August 2005. He has published over 150 papers in refereed professional journals and conferences. He received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award in 2001 and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2002. He has served on many editorial boards of technical journals including IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and ACM Wireless Networks. He is a senior member of the IEEE.     

Analysis and Optimization of the Energy Efficiency in the 802.11 DCF

This paper introduces an analytical model to investigate the energy efficiency of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordinated function (DCF). This model not only accounts for the number of contending nodes, the contention window, but also the packet size, and the channel condition. Based on this model, we identify the tradeoff in choosing optimum parameters to optimize the energy efficiency of DCF in the error-prone environment. The effects of contention window and packet size on the energy efficiency are examined and compared for both DCF basic scheme and DCF with four-way handshaking. The maximum energy efficiency can be obtained by combining both the optimal packet size and optimal contention window. To validate our analysis, we have done extensive simulations in ns-2, and simulation results seem to match well with the presented analytical results. The Ohio Board of Regents Doctoral Enhancements Funds and the National Science Foundation under Grant CCR 0113361 have supported this work. Xiaodong Wang received his B.S. degree in communication engineering from Beijing Information Technical Institute of China in 1995, and his M.S. degree in electric engineering from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics of China in 1998. He joined China Telecom in 1998 where he worked on communication protocols for telecommunication. From June 2000 to July 2002, he worked on GSM base station software development at Bell-labs China, Beijing, China. Currently he is a Ph.D. student in Computer Engineering at University of Cincinnati. His research activities include wireless MAC protocols, energy saving for wireless sensor networks. He is a student member of the IEEE. Jun Yin received the BS degree in automatic control from Dalian Railway Institute of China in 1997, and the MS degree in flight control from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics of China in 2001. Since 2001 she has been a Ph.D. student in the OBR Research Center for Distributed and Mobile Computing at the University of Cincinnati. Her research interests include performance evaluation of 802.11 MAC protocol, wireless ad hoc networks and sensor networks. She is a student member of the IEEE. Dharma P.Agrawal IEEE Fellow, 1987; ACM Fellow, 1998; AAAS Fellow, 2003 Dr. Agrawal is the Ohio Board of Regents Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science, University of Cincinnati, OH. He has been a faculty member at Wayne State University, (1977–1982) and North Carolina State University (1982–1998). He has been a consultant to the General Dynamics Land Systems Division, Battelle, Inc., and the U. S. Army. He has held visiting appointment at AIRMICS, Atlanta, GA, and the AT&T Advanced Communications Laboratory, Whippany, NJ. He has published a number of papers in the areas of Parallel System Architecture, Multi computer Networks, Routing Techniques, Parallelism Detection and Scheduling Techniques, Reliability of Real-Time Distributed Systems, Modeling of C-MOS Circuits, and Computer Arithmetic. His recent research interest includes energy efficient routing, information retrieval, and secured communication in ad hoc and sensor networks, effective handoff handling and multicasting in integrated wireless networks, interference analysis in piconets and routing in scatternet, use of smart directional antennas (multibeam) for enhanced QoS, Scheduling of periodic real-time applications and automatic load balancing in heterogeneous workstation environment. He has four approved patents and three patent filings in the area of wireless cellular networks.     

Performance Simulation of a Microwave Micro-Electromechanical System Shunt Switch Using Chatoyant

In this paper we demonstrate the capabilities of our mixed-signal, multi-domain system level simulation tool, Chatoyant, to model and simulate an RF MEMS shunt switch. We verify our mechanical simulations and analysis by comparison to results from commercial simulation packages, ANSYS and CoventorWare. We show that our modeling accuracy and simulation speed are comparable to these commercial tools for specific analysis. We conclude by showing the unique capabilities of a system tool based on a modular hierarchal approach that allows one to model not only the individual components of the system but also the subtle interactions resulting in specific system behaviors.Michael Bails received his B.A. in Economics from the University of Vermont in 1995 and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2002 (cum laude). He worked as an undergraduate researcher in optical MEMS for Benchmark Photonics, a Pittsburgh-based start-up company from 2001 to 2002. Mr. Bails is currently pursuing his M.S. in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a recipient of the Rath Fellowship. His interests are in MEMS modeling with an emphasis on statistical process variations. Mr. Bails is a student member of IEEE.José A. Martínez is an Electrical Engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his MS from the University of Pittsburgh (2000) in Electrical Engineering. He received the BS (magna cum laude) in Electrical Engineering from the Universidad de Oriente (UDO), Venezuela, in 1993. Mr. Martínez was granted the José Feliz Rivas’ medal for high academic achievement by the Venezuelan government (1993), and scholarships by the Venezuelan Fundayacucho Society (1993) and CONICIT-UDO (1994) institution. Since 1997 he has been working in the Optoelectronic computing group at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include behavioral simulation, reduction order techniques, modeling of MEMs and OMEMs, CAD, VLSI and computer architecture. Mr. Martínez is a member of IEEE/LEOS, and OSA.Steven P. Levitan is the John A. Jurenko Professor of Computer Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received the B.S. degree from Case Western Reserve University in 1972. From 1972 to 1977 he worked for Xylogic Systems designing hardware for computerized text processing systems. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. During that time he also worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, and Viewlogic Systems, as a consultant in HDL simulation and synthesis. He was an Assistant Professor from 1984 to 1986 in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts. In 1987, Dr. Levitan joined the Electrical Engineering faculty at the University of Pittsburgh where he holds a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science. He is Past Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA). He was awarded the ACM/SIGDA Distinguished Service Award for over a decade of service to ACM/SIGDA and the EDA Industry in 2002. He is on the technical advisory board for The Technology Collaborative. He is a senior member of the IEEE/Computer Society and a member of the Optical Society of America, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the International Society for Optical Engineering. He is a member of the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference Executive Committee.Jason Boles received the B.S. degree in computer engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, in 2001, where he is currently pursuing the M.S. degree in electrical engineering. His research interests include hardware acceleration techniques for simulation, system level modeling, computer-aided design (CAD), as well as systems-on-chip design and verification. Mr. Boles is a student member of IEEE.Ilya V. Avdeev is currently with ANSYS, Inc (Canonsburg, PA). He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees both in mechanical engineering from St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University (Russia) in 1997 and 1999 respectively. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2003. His dissertation was on modeling strongly-coupled MEMS. He has been an inaugural John Swanson Doctoral Fellow and was awarded numerous scholarships and personal grants during his undergraduate and graduate studies. His research interests include mathematical modeling of coupled-field effects, new finite element techniques and methods, design and simulation of MEMS/NEMS, and acoustics. He is a member of ASME and IEEE.Michael R. Lovell is the Associate Dean for Research and an Associate Professor of Industrial and Mechanical Engineering in the School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Lovell received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 1994 from the University of Pittsburgh. He joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at Pittsburgh in January of 2000 after three years of service as an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky and four years of service as a senior development engineer at ANSYS Inc. Professor Lovell is a W. K. Whiteford Endowed Faculty Fellow, has served as the Executive Director of the Swanson Center for Product Innovation since May of 2000, and has been the Director of the Swanson Institute for Technical Excellence since September of 2002. Among his accomplishments, Professor Lovell is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award (1997), the SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award (1999), and won the FAG Outstanding International Publication on Bearings (1998). Dr. Lovell’s primary research interests are in the areas of tribology, advanced computation, and micro and nano systems.Donald M. Chiarulli, Professor of Computer Science. Dr. Chiarulli received his BS degree (Physics, 1976) from Louisiana State University, MSc (Computer Science, 1979) from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and PhD (Computer Science, 1986) from Louisiana State University. He was an Instructor/Research Associate at LSU from 1979 to 1986, and has been at the University of Pittsburgh since 1986. Dr. Chiarulli’s research interests are in photonic and optoelectronic computing systems architecture. Dr Chiarulli’s research has been recognized with Best Paper Awards at the International Conference on Neural Networks (ICNN-98) and the Design Automation Conference (DAC-00). He is also the co-inventor on three patents relating to computing systems and optoelectronics. He has served on the technical program committees of numerous conferences for both research and education issues. Dr. Chiarulli serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Systems and is a member of the IEEE. SPIE, and OSA.     

VHDL Implementation of the Fast Wavelet Transform

In this paper, a VHDL implementation of a decomposition unit based on Mallat's fast Wavelet Transform, which utilizes a two-channel subband coder, is described. The units were simulated, synthesized, and optimized using Mentor^? design tools. The final design was verified with VHDL test benches and Matlab image processing tools. Results of the decomposition for color images validate the design. Utilizing a clock frequency of 25 MHz, a time period of 45 ms was estimated for the decomposition process of a 640 × 480 color image, which makes it feasible for real time video compression. The size of the layout was found to be within 2.5 × 2.5 mm, which suggests a 40 pin-package tiny frame. Paul Salama received the B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering (First Class Honors) from the University of Khartoum in 1991, and the M.S.E.E. and the Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University in 1993 and 1999, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). His research interests include image and video compression, image processing, Transmission of compressed Video, Ill posed problems, and medical imaging. Dr. Salama is a member of SPIE, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu. Maher E. Rizkalla received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio in 1985. From Jan. 1985 to Sep. 1986, he was a Visiting Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL while being a Visiting Assistant Professor at Purdue University Calumet. Since 1986 he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), where he is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests include solid-state electronics, VLSI design as applied to DSP, electromagnetics, and engineering education. He has published over 100 papers in these areas. He received the outstanding teaching awards in the ECE Department and in the School five times and was the Professor of the Year at Purdue Calumet in 1986. He is the recipient of one NSF grant, and two FIPSE grants, and is COPI of a number of industrial and equipment grants. Dr. Rizkalla is a Senior Member, IEEE, and a Professional Engineer (PE) registered in the State of Indiana. Michael Eckbauer received the M.S.E.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) in December 2002. He is currently with GE Medical Systems in Waukesha, Wisconsin.     

Mobile multi-layered IPsec

To achieve high throughput in wireless networks, smart forwarding and processing of packets in access routers is critical for overcoming the effects of the wireless links. However, these services cannot be provided if data sessions are protected using end-to-end encryption as with IPsec, because the information needed by these algorithms resides inside the portion of the packet that is encrypted, and can therefore not be used by the access routers. A previously proposed protocol, called Multi-layered IPsec (ML-IPsec) modifies IPsec in a way so that certain portions of the datagram may be exposed to intermediate network elements, enabling these elements to provide performance enhancements. In this paper we extend ML-IPsec to deal with mobility and make it suitable for wireless networks. We define and implement an efficient key distribution protocol to enable fast ML-IPsec session initialization, and two mobility protocols that are compatible with Mobile IP and maintain ML-IPsec sessions. Our measurements show that, depending on the mobility protocol chosen, integrated Mobile IP/ML-IPsec handoffs result in a pause of 53–100 milliseconds, of which only 28–75 milliseconds may be attributed to ML-IPsec. Further, we provide detailed discussion and performance measurements of our MML-IPsec implementation. We find the resulting protocol, when coupled with SNOOP, greatly increases throughput over scenarios using standard TCP over IPsec (165% on average). By profiling the MML-IPsec implementation, we determine the bottleneck to be sending packets over the wireless link. In addition, we propose and implement an extension to MML-IPsec, called dynamic MML-IPsec, in which a flow may switch between plaintext, IPsec and MML-IPsec. Using dynamic MML-IPsec, we can balance the tradeoff between performance and security. Heesook Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. She received her B.S. degree in Computer Science and Statistics and M.S. degree in Computer Science from the Chungnam National University, Korea, in 1990 and 1992 respectively. She was a senior research staff in Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in Korea before she enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the Pennsylvania State University in August 2002. Her research interests lie in security and privacy in distributed systems and wireless mobile networks, focusing on designing algorithms and conducting system research. Hui Song is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He received the M.E. degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, China in 2000. His research interests are in the areas of network and system security, wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks, and mobile computing. He was a recipient of the research assistant award of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University in 2005. Guohong Cao received his BS degree from Xian Jiaotong University, Xian, China. He received the MS degree and Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Ohio State University in 1997 and 1999 respectively. Since then, he has been with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research interests are wireless networks and mobile computing. He has published over one hundred papers in the areas of sensor networks, wireless network security, data dissemination, resource management, and distributed fault-tolerant computing. He is an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, a guest editor of special issue on heterogeneous wireless networks in ACM/Kluwer Mobile Networking and Applications, and has served on the program committee of many conferences. He was a recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2001. Thomas F. La Porta received his B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. degrees from The Cooper Union, New York, NY, and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York, NY. He joined the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Penn State in 2002 as a Full Professor. He is the Director of the Networking and Security Research Center at Penn State. Prior to joining Penn State, Dr. La Porta was with Bell Laboratories since 1986. He was the Director of the Mobile Networking Research Department in Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies where he led various projects in wireless and mobile networking. He is a Bell Labs Fellow. Dr. La Porta was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Personal Communications Magazine. He is currently the Director of Magazines for the IEEE Communications Society and is a member of the Communications Society Board of Governors. He has published over 50 technical papers and holds 28 patents. His research interests include mobility management, signaling and control for wireless networks, mobile data systems, and protocol design.     

Performance of Multilayered Video Encoding and Delivery over Lossy Channels Using a Joint Source-Channel Coding Approach

In this paper, the performance of selected error-control schemes based on forward error-control (FEC) coding for H.263+ video transmission over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel is studied. Joint source and channel coding (JSCC) techniques that employ single-layer and 2-layer H.263+ coding in conjunction with unequal error protection (UEP) to combat channel errors are quantitatively compared. Results indicate that with appropriate joint source and channel coding, tailored to the respective layers, FEC-based error control in combination with 2-layer video coding techniques can lead to more acceptable quality for wireless video delivery in the presence of channel impairments. Yong Pei is currently a tenure-track assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department, Wright State University, Dayton, OH. Previously he was a visiting assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL. He received his B.S. degree in electrical power engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, in 1996, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, in 1999 and 2002, respectively. His research interests include information theory, wireless communication systems and networks, and image/video compression and communications. He is a member of IEEE and ACM. James W. Modestino (S′67- M′73- SM′81- F′87) was born in Boston, MA, on April 27, 1940. He received the B.S. degree from Northeastern University, Boston, MA, in 1962, and the M.S. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, in 1964, both in electrical engineering. He also received the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, in 1968 and 1969, respectively. He has held a number of industrial positions, including positions with RCA Communications Systems Division, Camden, NJ; General Electronic Laboratories, Cambridge, MA; AVCO Systems Division, Wilmington, MA; GTE Laboratories, Waltham, MA; and MIT Lincoln Laboratories, Lexington, MA. From 1970 to 1972, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Northeastern University. In 1972, he joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, where until leaving in 2002 he was an Institute Professor in the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering Department and Director of the Center for Image Processing Research. He has been responsible for teaching and research in the communication, information and signal processing systems area. His specific research interests include communication in fading dispersive channels; detection, estimation and filtering in impulsive or burst noise environments; digital signal, image and video processing; and multimedia communication systems and networks. In 2002 he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, as the Victor E. Clarke Endowed Scholar, Professor and Chair. He has held visiting positions with the University of California at San Diego, LaJolla, CA (1981–1982); GE Research and Development Center, Schenectady, NY (1988–1989); and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (1995–1996). Dr. Modestino is a past member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Group. He is a past Associate Editor and Book Review Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY. In 1984, he was co-recipient of the Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award from the IEEE Communications Society and in 2000 he was co-recipient of the best paper award at the International Packet Video Conference.     

SOLONet: Sub-optimal location-aided overlay network for MANETs

Overlay networks have made it easy to implement multicast functionality in MANETs. Their flexibility to adapt to different environments has helped in their steady growth. Overlay multicast trees that are built using location information account for node mobility and have a low latency. However, the performance gains of such trees are offset by the overhead involved in distributing and maintaining precise location information. As the degree of (location) accuracy increases, the performance improves but the overhead required to store and broadcast this information also increases. In this paper, we present SOLONet, a design to build a sub-optimal location aided overlay multicast tree, where location updates of each member node are event based. Unlike several other approaches, SOLONet doesn’t require every packet to carry location information or each node maintain location information of every other node or carrying out expensive location broadcast for each node. Our simulation results indicate that SOLONet is scalable and its sub-optimal tree performs very similar to an overlay tree built by using precise location information. SOLONet strikes a good balance between the advantages of using location information (for building efficient overlay multicast trees) versus the cost of maintaining and distributing location information of every member nodes. Abhishek Patil received his BE degree in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering from University of Mumbai (India) in 1999 and an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Michigan State University in 2002. He finished his PhD in 2005 from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University. He is a research engineer at Kiyon, Inc. located in San Diego, California. His research interests include wireless mesh networks, UWB, mobile ad hoc networks, application layer multicast, location-aware computing, RFIDs, and pervasive computing. Yunhao Liu received his BS degree in Automation Department from Tsinghua University, China, in 1995, and an MA degree in Beijing Foreign Studies University, China, in 1997, and an MS and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University in 2003 and 2004, respectively. He is now an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include wireless sensor networks, peer-to-peer and grid computing, pervasive computing, and network security. He is a senior member of the IEEE Computer Society. Li Xiao received the BS and MS degrees in computer science from Northwestern Polytechnic University, China, and the PhD degree in computer science from the College of William and Mary in 2002. She is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Michigan State University. Her research interests are in the areas of distributed and Internet systems, overlay systems and applications, and sensor networks. She is a member of the ACM, the IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, and IEEE Women in Engineering. Abdol-Hossein Esfahanian received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and the M.S. degree in Computer, Information, and Control Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1975 and 1977 respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Northwestern University in 1983. He was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Michigan State University from September 1983 to May 1990. Since June 1990, he has been an Associate Professor with the same department, and from August 1994 to May 2004, he was the Graduate Program Director. He was awarded ‘The 1998 Withrow Exceptional Service Award’, and ‘The 2005 Withrow Teaching Excellence Award’. Dr. Esfahanian has published articles in journals such as IEEE Transactions, NETWORKS, Discrete Applied Mathematic, Graph Theory, and Parallel and Distributed Computing. He was an Associate Editor of NETWORKS, from 1996 to 1999. He has been conducting research in applied graph theory, computer communications, and fault-tolerant computing. Lionel M. Ni earned his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University in 1980. He is Chair Professor and Head of Computer Science and Engineering Department of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include wireless sensor networks, parallel architectures, distributed systems, high-speed networks, and pervasive computing. A fellow of IEEE, Dr. Ni has chaired many professional conferences and has received a number of awards for authoring outstanding papers.     

A Routing Protocol for Hierarchical LEO/MEO Satellite IP Networks

The rapid growth of Internet-based applications pushes broadband satellite networks to carry on IP traffic. In previously proposed connectionless routing schemes in satellite networks, the metrics used to calculate the paths do not reflect the total delay a packet may experience. In this paper, a new Satellite Grouping and Routing Protocol (SGRP) is developed. In each snapshot period, SGRP divides Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites into groups according to the footprint area of the Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites. Based on the delay reports sent by LEO satellites, MEO satellite managers compute the minimum-delay paths for their LEO members. Since the signaling traffic is physically separated from the data traffic, link congestion does not affect the responsiveness of delay reporting and routing table calculation. The snapshot and group formation methods as well as fast reacting mechanisms to address link congestion and satellite failures are described in detail. The performance of SGRP is evaluated through simulations and analysis.Eylem Ekici was with the Broadband & Wireless Networking Laboratory, School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology when this work was performed. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant ANI-0087762.Chao Chen received the BE and ME degrees from Deparment of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China in 1998 and 2001, respectively. She is currently working toward her Ph.D. degree in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA. She is a graduate research assistant in the Broadband and Wireless Networking Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her current research interests include satellite and space networks, as well as wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. E-mail: cchen@ece.gatech.eduEylem Ekici has received his BS and MS degrees in Computer Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 1997 and 1998, respectively. He received his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, in 2002. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. Dr. Ekici’s research interests include wireless sensor networks, space-based networks, and next generation wireless networks, with a focus on modeling, multiaccess control, routing and multicasting protocols, and resource management. E-mail: ekici@ece.osu.edu     

UHF RF Front-End Circuits in 0.35-μm Silicon on Insulator (SOI) CMOS

In this work, design and measurement results of UHF RF frontend circuits to be used in low-IF and subsampling receiver architectures are presented. We report on three low noise amplifiers (LNA) (i) single-ended (ii) differential (iii) high-gain differential and a double-balanced mixer all implemented in 0.35-μ m SOI (Silicon on Insulator) CMOS technology of Honeywell. These circuits are considered as candidate low-power building blocks to be used in the two fully-integrated receiver chips targeted for deep space communications. Characteristics of square spiral inductors with high quality (Q) factors (as high as 10.8) in SOI CMOS are reported. Single-ended and fully-differential LNA's provide gains of 17.5 dB and 18.74 dB at 435 MHz, respectively. Noise figure of the single-ended LNA is 2.91 dB while the differential LNA's noise figure is 3.25 dB. These results were obtained for the power dissipations of 12.5 mW and 16.5 mW from a 2.5-V supply for the single-ended and differential LNA's, respectively. High-gain low-power differential LNA provides a small-signal gain of 45.6 dB with a noise figure of 2.4 dB at 435 MHz. Total power dissipation of the high gain LNA is 28 mW from a 3.3-V supply. The double-balanced mixer provides a conversion gain of 5.5 dB with a noise figure of 13 dB at 2 MHz IF. The power dissipation of the mixer is 11.5 mW from a 2.5-V supply. The measured responses and the power dissipations of the building blocks meet the requirements of the communications system. The die areas occupied by the single-ended LNA, differential LNA, high-gain LNA and the mixer are 0.6 mm × 1.4 mm, 1 mm × 1.4 mm, 1.4 mm × 1.2 mm and 0.6 mm × 0.9 mm, respectively. Ertan Zencir received the B.Sc. and M.S. degrees in electrical and electronics engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY in 1995, 1997, and 2003, respectively. He joined the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as an Assistant Professor in August 2004. 2003). His current research focuses on RFIC and transceiver design for wireless communications. Douglas Te-Hsin Huang was born in Chia-yi Taiwan. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan Ocean University, Kee-lung, Taiwan in 1993, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, in 2001 and 2003, respectively. In 2004, he joined Skyworks Solutions Inc., where he is currently an RFIC Design Engineer. His research deals mainly with low-power, infrastructure, analog RFIC, and microwave integrated circuit designs. Besides microwave and semiconductor engineering, Dr. Huang has broad interest in art, music, and philosophy. Ahmet Tekin received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2002 and MS degree in Electrical engineering form North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC. He is currently working towards his PhD degree at University of California, Santa Cruz, CA. He was a Research Assistant at RF Microelectronic Laboratory, North Carolina A&T State University, from 2002 to 2004. He worked on the design of low power UHF transceiver circuits for space applications. He is currently a Research Assistant at Bio-mimetic Microelectronic Systems Laboratory, University of California at Santa Cruz, working on implantable very low power UHF frequency transceiver for a body sensor network. Numan S. Dogan received the B.Sc. degree from Karadeniz Technical University, Trabzon, Turkey, in 1975, the M.Sc. degree from Polytechnic University, New York, in 1979, and the PhD degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1986, all in electrical engineering. Since 1998, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, North Carolina, where he is an Associate Professor. He was a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, in 1998, and General Electric Corporate Research and Development Laboratory, Schenectady, New York, in 1999. His earlier research interests included microwave and millimeter-wave solid-state devices and circuits, high-temperature electronics, and silicon micromachining. His recent research interests include RF CMOS Integrated Circuits and low-power Medical Implant Communication Systems (MICS) transceivers. Currently he serves as the Chair of the IEEE Central North Carolina Section. In April 2004, he organized “a walking robot competition” for High School Students. He enjoys hiking to Alpine Lakes in the Pacific Northwest and fishing. Ercument Arvas (M'85–SM'89) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from METU, Ankara, Turkey, in 1976 and 1979, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, in 1983, all in Electrical Engineering. Between 1984 and fall of 1987, he was with the Electrical Engineering Department of Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York. He joined the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of Syracuse University in 1987, where he is currently a Professor. His research interests include numerical electromagnetics, antennas, and microwave circuits and devices.     

Analysis of Dataflow Programs with Interval-limited Data-rates

In this paper, we consider the problem of analyzing dataflow programs with the property that actor production and consumption rates are not constant and fixed, but limited by intervals. Such interval ranges may result from uncertainty in the specification of an actor or as a design freedom of the model. Major questions such as consistencyand buffer memory requirementsfor single-processor scheduleswill be analyzed here for such specifications for the first time. Also, metamodeling formulations of interval limited dataflow are discussed, with special emphasis on the application to cyclo-static dataflow modeling. Jürgen Teich received his masters degree (Dipl.-Ing.) in 1989 from the University of Kaiserslautern (with honours). From 1989 to 1993, he was PhD student at the University of Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany from where he received his PhD degree (summa cum laude). His PhD thesis entitled ‘A Compiler for Application-Specific Processor Arrays‘summarizes his work on techniques for mapping computation intensive algorithms onto dedicated VLSI processor arrays. In 1994, Dr. Teich joined the DSP design group of Prof. E. A. Lee and D.G. Messerschmitt in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at UC Berkeley where he was working in the Ptolemy project (PostDoc). From 1995 to 1998, he held a position at Institute of Computer Engineering and Communications Networks Laboratory (TIK) at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, finishing his Habilitation entitled ‘Synthesis and Optimization of Digital Hardware Software Systems’ in 1996. From 1998 to 2002, he was full professor in the Electrical Engineering and Information Technology department of the University of Paderborn, holding a chair in Computer Engineering. Since 2003, he is appointed full professor in the Computer Science Institute of the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg holding a chair in Hardware-Software-Co-Design. Dr. Teich has been a member of multiple program committees of well-known conferences and workshops. He is member of the IEEE and author of a textbook on Co-Design edited by Springer in 1997.His research interests are massive parallelism, embedded systems, Co-Design, and computer architecture. Since 2004, Prof. Teich is also an elected reviewer for the German Science Foundation (DFG) for the area of Computer Architecture and Embedded Systems. Prof. Teich is involved in many interdisciplinary national basic research projects as well as industrial projects. He is supervising 19 PhD students currently. Shuvra S. Bhattacharyyais an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also an affiliate associate professor in the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Bhattacharyya is coauthor or coeditor of four books and the author or coauthor of more than 100 refereed technical articles. His research interests include VLSI signal processing, embedded software, and hardware/software co-design. He received the B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Bhattacharyya has held industrial positions as a Researcher at the Hitachi America Semiconductor Research Laboratory (San Jose, California), and as a Compiler Developer at Kuck & Associates (Champaign, Illinois).     

Dynamically anchored conferencing handoff for dual-mode cellular/WLAN handsets

In this paper we consider vertical handoff for enterprise-based dual-mode (DM) cellular/WLAN handsets. When the handset roams out of WLAN coverage, the DM's cellular interface is used to maintain the call by anchoring it through an enterprise PSTN gateway/PBX. Soft handoff can be achieved in this case if the gateway supports basic conference bridging, since a new leg of the call can be established to the conference bridge while the existing media stream path is active. Unfortunately this requires that all intra-enterprise calls be routed through the gateway when the call is established. In this paper we consider a SIP based architecture to perform conferenced dual-mode handoff and propose a much more scalable mechanism for short-delay environments, whereby active calls are handed off into the conference bridge prior to the initiation of the vertical handoff. Results are presented which are taken from a dual-mode handset testbed, from analytic models, and from simulations which characterize the scalability of the proposed mechanism. Mohammed Smadi received the B.Eng and Mgmt and M.A.Sc degrees in Computer Engineering from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Mohammed received an NSERC doctoral award in 2005 and is currently a Ph.D. student at the Wireless Networking Group at McMaster University. Terence D. Todd received the B.A.Sc, M.A.Sc and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. While at Waterloo he spent 3 years as a Research Associate with the Computer Communications Networks Group (CCNG). He is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Professor Todd spent 1991 on research leave in the Distributed Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. He also spent 1998 on research leave at The Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England. While at ORL he worked on the piconet project which was an early embedded wireless network testbed. Dr. Todd’s research interests include metropolitan/local area networks, wireless communications and the performance analysis of computer communication networks and systems. He is a past Editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and currently holds the NSERC/RIM/CITO Chair on Pico-Cellular Wireless Internet Access Networks. Dr. Todd is a Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario and a member of the IEEE. Vytas Kezys was born in Hamilton, Canada in 1957. He received the B.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from McMaster University, Canada, in 1979. From 1979 to 1998, Mr. Kezys was involved in radar and communications research as Principal Research Engineer at the Communications Research Laboratory, McMaster University. While at McMaster, his research activities included array signal processing for low-angle tracking radar, radar signal processing, and smart antennas for wireless communications. Mr. Kezys was founder and President of TalariCom Inc., a start-up company that developed cost effective smart antenna technologies for broadband wireless access applications. Currently, Mr. Kezys is Director of Advanced Products at Research in Motion in Waterloo, Canada. Vahid S. Azhari received his B.S. and M.S. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, IUST and University of Tehran, Iran, in 2000 and 2003 respectively. His M.S. research focused on designing scheduling algorithms for switch fabrics. He also worked for two years for the Iranian Telecommunication Research Centre on developing software for SDH switches. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree at the Wireless Networking Laboratory, McMaster University, Canada. His main area of research includes handoff management in integrated wireless networks, WLAN deployment techniques, and wireless mesh networks. Dongmei Zhao received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in June 2002. Since July 2002 she has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada where she is an assistant professor. Dr. Zhao’s research interests include modeling and performance analysis, quality-of-service provisioning, access control and admission control in wireless cellular networks and integrated cellular and ad hoc networks. Dr. Zhao is a member of the IEEE.     

Alternate Testing of RF Transceivers Using Optimized Test Stimulus for Accurate Prediction of System Specifications

In the recent past, with the emergence of System-on-Chip (SoC), focus has shifted towards testing system specifications rather than device or module specifications. While the problem of test accessibility for test stimulus application and response capture for such high-speed systems remains a challenge to the test engineers, new test strategies are needed which can address the problem in a practical manner. In this paper, the problem of testing the transmitter and the receiver subsystems of a RF transceiver for system level specification is addressed. Instead of using different conventional test stimuli for testing each of the system level specifications of RF subsystems, a specially crafted test stimulus is used for testing all the specifications from the response of the subsystem-under-test. A new simulation approach has also been developed to perform fast behavioral simulations in frequency domain for the system-under-test. In the test method, frequency domain test response spectra are captured and non-linear regression models are constructed to map the spectral measurements onto the specifications of interest. In the presented simulation results, the test stimuli have been validated using netlist level simulation of the subsystem-under-test and specifications have been predicted within an error of ±3% of the actual value.Soumendu Bhattacharya was born in Calcutta, India, in 1978. He received his Bachelors degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, in 2000. In 2002, he received the M.S.E.E. degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA. He is currently working toward his Ph.D. degree. In the summer of 2001, he worked as a summer intern in National Semiconductor, Santa Clara, CA, USA. His research interests are in the area of test generation for mixed-signal and RF circuits and systems and design-for-test.Achintya Halder received the B.S. degree in electronics and electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1998. He worked as an IC design engineer with Texas Instruments until 2000. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student and a research assistant with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. His research area is analog/RF and mixed signal testing.Ganesh P. Srinivasan received the B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the National Institute of Technology and Science, University of Madras, Chennai (Madras), India, in 2002. He received the M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, in 2004 and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA. His research interests include low cost testing approaches for analog/RF and mixed-signal circuits, and improving performance of low cost testers for enabling high quality tests.Abhijit Chatterjee received the Bachelor of Technology degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, in 1981, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from University of Illinois at Chicago in 1983 and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990. Until December 1992, he was a Research Staff Member at the General Electric Research and Development Center in Schenectady, NY. His work has been cited by the Wall Street Journal and presented on a Japanese network TV program called High Tech Shower International. He is a collaborating partner in NASAs New Millennium Project. Dr. Abhijit Chatterjee is also the author of one U.S. patent and has over one hundred publications in referenced journals and conferences.     

Towards Designing a Trusted Routing Solution in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Designing a trusted and secure routing solution in an untrustworthy scenario is always a challenging problem. Lack of physical security and low trust levels among nodes in an ad hoc network demands a secure end-to-end route free of any malicious entity. This is particularly challenging when malicious nodes collude with one another to disrupt the network operation. In this paper we have designed a secure routing solution to find an end-to-end route free of malicious nodes with collaborative effort from the neighbors. We have also extended the solution to secure the network against colluding malicious nodes, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first such solution proposed. We have also proposed a framework for computing and distributing trusts that can be used with out trusted routing protocol. Our proposed framework is unique and different from the other schemes in that it tries to analyze the psychology of the attacker and quantifies the behavior in the computational model. Extensive simulation has been carried out to evaluate the design of our protocol. Partially funded by Department of Defense Award No. H98230-04-C-0460, Department of Transportation Project No. FL-26-7102-00 and National Science Foundation Grant Nos. ANI-0123950 and CCR-0196557. Tirthankar Ghosh is a PhD candidate in the Telecommunications and Information Technology Institute at Florida International University. His area of research is routing security and trust computation in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. He received his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Jadavpur University, India and Masters in Computer Engineering from Florida International University. Dr. Niki Pissinou received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, her M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California at Riverside, and her B.S.I.S.E. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from The Ohio State University. She is currently a tenured professor and the director of the Telecommunication & Information Technology Institute at FIU. Previously Dr. Pissinou was a tenured faculty at the Center for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she was also the director of the Telecommunication & Information & Technology Laboratory partially funded by NASA, and the co-director of the NOMAD: A Wireless and Nomadic Laboratory partially funded by NSF, and the Advanced Network Laboratory. Dr. Pissinou is active in the fields computer networks, information technology and distributed systems. Dr. Kami (Sam) Makki has earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Queensland in Brisbane Australia, his Masters degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia, and his Bachelor and Masters Degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Tehran Iran. Before joining the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Toledo he has held a number of academic positions and research appointments at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Royal Melbourne Institution of Technology in Melbourne and at The University of Queensland in Brisbane Australia. He is an active researcher in the fields of distributed systems, databases, mobile and wireless communications, and has more than 30 publications in peerreviewed journals and international proceedings. He has served as a chair and technical program committee member and reviewer for a number of IEEE and ACM sponsored technical conferences and has received a number of achievement awards.