IEEE total quality management

The IEEE staff organization has undertaken a major quality initiative that has required a major staff learning and training program followed by pilot quality initiatives in a number of major areas. We begin with the quality principles that provide the foundation for the initiatives and then move to describe the initiatives and their effects on members, employees, suppliers, and the technical communities served by the IEEE. The quality principles upon which the initiatives are based are few and unambiguous: the customer comes first; all work is part of a process; suppliers are an integral part of our business; quality happens through people; prevention is achieved through planning; and quality improvement never ends. We use these quality principles to guide the management of all parts of the IEEE in order to meet the needs of our members, other customers, employees, suppliers, and the technical communities we serve     

A Scientometric Study of the Perceived Quality of Business and Technical Communication Journals

In this paper we present, from an academic perspective, the perceived quality ratings of business and technical communication journals. Through a survey of academic experts, we asked respondents to rate the top overall journals, business communication journals, technical communication journals, and the top journals from a technology perspective. In addition, we asked respondents to list the journals that they read most frequently. We analyzed the results by breaking down the rankings into world regions and academic departments. The top-three overall journals for all regions are Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Business Communication, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. Importantly, differences by world region and academic department type were found in all these rankings. These results can support researchers worldwide by helping them target their publishing efforts to journals that have the best fit with their business and technical communication discipline, world region, and academic home.     

Enhancement of the Publication Process for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

The success of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications has been incredible since its inception in 2001. The journal now receives 1600 plus submissions per year and has become one of the most downloaded journals within IEEE Xplore. However, we should not stop there, and our goal is to continuously enhance the journal and build on its current success.     

The path to becoming an IEEE Communications Society conference [The President's Page]

Each year the IEEE sponsors a wide variety of technical conferences around the world through its organizational units, particularly the 38 societies. The Communications Society (ComSoc) is the second largest IEEE society and sponsors approximately 85 events (conferences and workshops) either by direct involvement or by co-sponsorship. Conferences represent a substantial proportion of our efforts as a society. The 25 ComSoc conferences that we call portfolio events bring the society prestige, advance communications research and practice, and account for roughly half of our revenue each year. Frequently, some papers from those conferences become very popular IEEE digital library downloads. This column goes behind the scenes to describe what our society does to support those conferences of interest to our members.     

Finance: The business side of ComSoc [President's Page]

The 40,000-member IEEE Communications Society offers valuable products and services through a highly effective team of unpaid volunteers and paid staff. Associated with realizing these products and services in ComSoc -- a $17M "organization" -- are significant expenses that are balanced with incoming revenue. In addition, dues, advertising sales and other sources are used to defray costs associated with "serving the members." In other words, our "business" is to "serve the members." This month's President's Page is shared with the ComSoc volunteer Treasurer, Stan Moyer, and paid staff Meetings, Finance, and Administration department head, Bruce Worthman. Stan and Bruce will provide an overview of the Society's "business" side which is essential for our "technical" society to continue providing you with the high value you expect.     

Who's ahead in hi-tech?

Responses of 150 IEEE members to a telephone survey sponsored by Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a Japanese counterpart to The Wall Street Journal, are reported. The interviews were conducted by the Gallup Organization Incorporated. The respondents-50 each from government, industrial, and academic facilities-answered more than two dozen questions, some of which were suggested by the IEEE, regarding the relative position of the US and Japan. The survey showed, among other findings, that US engineers believe the US holds a technological edge over Japan in many areas. The majority also believe that the US lead will continue into the next century and that the Japanese should not be credited with being technological innovators since they have been using basic technology developed in other countries     

A perspective on the IEEE landscape: recent changes and future directions [the president's page]

In summary, it is paramount that Societies work together to assure that the management of products and services is satisfactory to them, that decisions made at the corporate level enable them to be financially viable, and that their volunteers continue to be motivated. There is an urgent need for more volunteers who are willing to devote their time to work in partnership with those of other S/Cs to guarantee that IEEE?s overall Technical Activities unit operates successfully from both professional and business perspectives, thus allowing the overall IEEE organization to continue to provide outstanding services to its members, the profession and to humanity.     

Forensic applications of signal processing

The IEEE Code of Ethics [1] states, " ... its members agree ... to be honest and realistic in stating claims or estimates based on available data; ... to improve the understanding of technology, its appropriate application, and potential consequences; ... to maintain and improve our technical competence and to undertake technological tasks for others only if qualified by training or experience, or after full disclosure of pertinent limitations." A professional engineer is a practicing scientist. In all our professional endeavors, we are bound by basic scientific principles and must use scientific methods.     

Does the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol work well in multihop wireless adhoc networks?

The IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is the standard for wireless LANs; it is widely used in testbeds and simulations for wireless multihop ad hoc networks. However, this protocol was not designed for multihop networks. Although it can support some ad hoc network architecture, it is not intended to support the wireless mobile ad hoc network, in which multihop connectivity is one of the most prominent features. In this article we focus on the following question: can the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol function well in multihop networks? By presenting several serious problems encountered in an IEEE 802.11-based multihop network and revealing the in-depth cause of these problems, we conclude that the current version of this wireless LAN protocol does not function well in multihop ad hoc networks. We thus doubt whether the WaveLAN-based system is workable as a mobile ad hoc testbed     

A literature citation study of science-technology coupling in electronics

By tracing the citations made by authors in the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices to the Physical Review and other scientific journals, a record of information flows from science to technology was obtained. Evaluation of this record revealed the importance of a group of industrial scientists who serve as an intellectual bridge between the scientific and technological sectors. It was found that the scientific papers cited in the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices tend to be considerably older than the techological papers cited therein. Moreover, the median age of the Physical Review papers cited has been increasing over time, from about five years during the late 1950's to more than ten years during 1971-1975. The number of Physical Review papers cited per year by authors of Transactions papers on solid-state technology has been growing somewhat over the past two decades, but the percentage of the citations which are to the Physical Review and other scientific journals has fallen. This suggests that the magnitude of science-technoloy coupling has been increasing, but at a rate slower than the overall growth of the solid-state components field.     

The Origin of the Journal, the Council, and the Conference of Solid-State Circuits

This journal, our much loved and greatly respected "red rag", will be a mere 18 years old this year of the IEEE Centennial--only a youth in the history of electronics and electronic applications. Nonetheless, it has become a most important journal for electronic workers of many types. Its origins and its growth are a very good indication of the vitality and growth of the IEEE itself and how it has identified the needs of its members and has adapted both organizationally and with new institutions to meet new needs.     

Topics in ad hoc and sensor networks [guest editorial]

The Series on Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks of IEEE Communications Magazine started an interesting debate on research methodologies and approaches in the April 2007 issue. Theoretical research and simulation studies are fundamental for understanding the behavior of phenomena, and their relevance is even higher in such areas as wireless and mobile networking, where experimentation is not easy to realize. However, there is a need to conduct these studies in a very solid convincing way. In the past issue we discussed the importance of considering realistic scenarios, since otherwise the results may lead to conclusions that will not be confirmed in real experiments. In this issue we continue this discussion by presenting other related aspects, such as the role of information theory and simulation, as well as the introduction of novel approaches such as knowledge exploitation to coordinate mobile and wireless networks.     

A novel statistical and distributed CAC algorithm for IEEE 802.11 based single and multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks

In this paper, we propose a statistical Call Admission Control (CAC) schemes for single and multi-hop IEEE 802.11 based wireless ad hoc networks. Unlike most papers which consider average end-to-end delay, our algorithm guarantees statistical delay that would be more efficient for real time multimedia applications. We use Effective Bandwidth/Effective Capacity theory to compute delay bound stochastically in each hop. The proposed distributed CAC algorithm is suitable for ad hoc networks. Also, with a few changes, it has been implemented in the AODV routing protocol. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed CAC algorithm works efficiently in both single and multi-hop networks. Moreover, we investigated our algorithm with aggregated traffic and the result shows that the algorithm performed accurately under that condition.     

Quality assurance of voice over WLANs (VoWLANs) with differentiated services

Several technical issues make commercial and large voice over wireless local area network (VoWLAN) services difficult to provide. The most challenging issue when voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services are ran over IEEE 802.11-based WLANs is the bandwidth inefficiency due to the considerable overhead associated with WLAN packet transmission. In this work, we propose a session-based quality-of-service management architecture (SQoSMA) to overcome the low number of VoIP calls in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs and the negative effect of new call addition when the WLAN reaches its capacity. The SQoSMA combines data and control planes to detect VoWLAN QoS degradations and performs either an adaptive audio codec switching or a call stopping to fix VoWLAN issues in a differentiated services manner. In addition, our solution deals with user sessions information, by considering user priority (from its agreement) to guarantee a certain level of its multimedia applications. Performance evaluation using a real test-bed shows that call codec change and call stopping techniques can easily assure high-priority calls with acceptable call blocking probability.     

Assessing the IEEE 802.11e QoS effectiveness in multi-hop indoor scenarios

The IEEE 802.11e technology is receiving much interest due to the enhancements offered to wireless local area networks in terms of QoS. Other application fields for this technology are wireless ad hoc networks, wireless mesh networks, and vehicular ad hoc networks. In the literature, most of the research works available focusing on the IEEE 802.11e technology offer simulation results alone, being hard to find empirical results of implementations that prove its effectiveness in realistic scenarios. Additionally, we consider that studies of IEEE 802.11e based on simulation platforms have not been thoroughly validated using real-life results. In this work we analyze the performance of the IEEE 802.11e technology in real multi-hop ad hoc networks. With this purpose we first we devise a set of experiments where we compare the results obtained on a small testbed to those from the ns-2 simulation platform. A significant consistency in terms of overall trends is found, although remarkable differences can be appreciated in terms of both delay and throughput results. Afterward we proceed with a full deployment of IEEE 802.11e enabled stations throughout the floor of an university building, performing several experiments using both static and dynamic routing. Experimental results show that QoS can be reasonably sustained for both voice and video traffic in multi-hop ad hoc networks, although dynamic routing protocols can hinder performance by provoking frequent on-off connectivity problems.     

Interference mitigation in wireless sensor networks using dual heterogeneous radios

Scalability is one of the most important features that future wireless sensor networks (WSNs) should provide, and clustering is widely considered as a viable approach for high scalability. In the cluster-based architecture, the cluster heads play a key role in relaying messages between the sensor nodes and the sink. While the cluster heads are involved in both intra-cluster and inter-cluster communication, the latter typically requires transmission over much longer distance than the former. In this paper, we consider a scenario in which each cluster head is equipped with dual radios: IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 for intra-cluster and inter-cluster communication, respectively. IEEE 802.11 links between the cluster heads and the sink provide a high capacity backbone for large-scale WSNs. IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 share a lot of similarities including CSMA/CA MAC. Their operating spectrum also overlaps at the 2.4 GHz ISM band, and this may cause interference. We first experimentally measure how severe the interference can be, when two radios are concurrently used in a WSN. We, then, propose an interference mitigation solution which relies on adaptive aggregation of packets and adaptive transmission scheduling. Through prototyping and experimental evaluation, we show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the interferences between the two types of radios.     

实施LED显示屏标准化，提高生产效率

LED技术的发展促进了应用的不断拓展，应用需求的增长刺激了产业的扩张。为了满足应用需求，LED企业除了解决技术问题外，还需要针对种类繁多、应用广泛的LED及其各类应用产品解决标准化问题。     

基于ITIL框架的面向视听新媒体运行维护指标体系研究

视听新媒体运行维护指标体系作为视听新媒体系统的重要组成和支撑部分,对于提高视听新媒体运行维护管理水平具有重要意义。在当前条件下应不断完善。本文参考ITIL的成熟实践经验,结合视听新媒体的技术特性,系统论述了构建该体系的背景、思路、主要内容、注意事项,希望能给相关运维团队提供技术建议。     

Computing the Types of the Relationships Between Autonomous Systems

We investigate the problem of computing the types of the relationships between Internet Autonomous Systems. We refer to the model introduced by Gao [IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 9(6):733-645, 2001] and Subramanian (IEEE Infocom, 2002) that bases the discovery of such relationships on the analysis of the AS paths extracted from the BGP routing tables. We characterize the time complexity of the above problem, showing both NP-completeness results and efficient algorithms for solving specific cases. Motivated by the hardness of the general problem, we propose approximation algorithms and heuristics based on a novel paradigm and show their effectiveness against publicly available data sets. The experiments provide evidence that our algorithms perform significantly better than state-of-the-art heuristics     

For emitters & electronics the temperature is rising

Welcome to our penultimate issue for 1996. We have a varied collection of features this time along with a continuation of the more familiar. Amongst these we devote special attention to IC processing in celebration of one of the most popular Autumn meetings, the IEEE GaAs IC Symposium. However, we also take a look at optoelectronics and other materials. We bring news of the next step towards the room temperature blue laser from Nichia and Toshiba then report from several key meetings, including IPRM96 and MBE-IX.