Energy-Aware Interoperability of Manet and 4g Ran Routing

The requirements for telecommunication at 2012 are estimated to be on such demanding level that the 3G technologies will not be sufficient. It is unlikely that the 3G Radio Access Network (RAN) would scale up i.e., Fourth Generation (4G) RAN will need to be developed. The requirements for 4G are demanding and the level of uncertainty is high. The novel ad hoc networking technologies could provide flexible solutions for the 4G RAN and extend the operator radio coverage. Combining these differing communication technologies provides insight for the 4G RAN design. This paper analyses the Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) requirements against the 4G requirements in terms of energy conservation. We find that there is mismatch between these two sets of requirements. Nevertheless, we demonstrate how these two approaches could co-exist in a mutually beneficial way. Finally, we propose interoperability requirements for MANET and 4G routing from the perspective of energy conservation. Harri Paloheimo is a researcher in Networking Technologies Laboratory at Nokia Research Center, Helsinki. In addition, he is a post graduate student in Telecommunications Software and Multimedia Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Helsinki University of Technology. He received M.Sc. degree majoring in space technology from Department of Electrical and Communications Engineering, Helsinki University of Technology in 2000. He currently works on next generation wireless networks with special interest in hybrid and relay networking solutions. Sudhir Dixit is currently a Nokia Research Fellow and works on next generation wireless networks. From 1996 to 2003 he was a Senior Research Manager, focusing on IP/ATM, wireless, content networks, and optical networks. Prior to that he worked at NYNEX Science & Technology (now Verizon), GTE (now Verizon), Codex Motorola, Wang, Harris, and STL (now Nortel Europe Labs). He has published or presented over 150 papers, published three books, and holds 14 patents. He is on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Communications Magazine, Springer's Wireless Personal Communications Journal, and KIC's Journal of Communications and Networks. He received a B.E. degree from MANIT, Bhopal, India, an M.E. degree from BITS, Pilani, India, a Ph.D. degree from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, and an M.B.A. degree from Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne. He is a Fellow of IEE (UK) and IETE (India). He represents Nokia on the Steering Board of the Wireless World Research Forum, and is also Vice Chair of the SIG on Self-Organization of Wireless World Systems. Dr.Tech. Antti Ylä-Jääski is a Professor of Telecommunications Software, Telecommunications Software and Multimedia Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Helsinki University of Technology. He is also a Research Fellow in Network Technologies Laboratory, Nokia Research Center, Helsinki. Prof Dr.Tech. Antti Ylä-Jääski received his PhD in ETH Zuerich 1993. Antti has worked with Nokia 1994–2004 in several research management positions with focus on future Internet technologies, mobile networks, applications, services, service management and service architectures. He has published about 30 articles and he holds several approved patents. Antti's current research interests include mobile networking, heterogeneous network environments, services, service architectures, service management and security issues.     

Convergence Transforms Internet

This paper discusses digital convergence from mobile device perspective. Convergence is viewed as a combination of device, radio, network and services convergence. Device convergence means that mobile devices become much more than a phone, they turn into a mobile computers. In radio convergence several standards are competing but wireless broadband is the end result and modem develops into a multiradio. From network convergence point of view different access technologies offer seamless connectivity and hide the network from end user with best possible performance. With service convergence mobile devices become true nodes of internet when devices are capable to act both as a client and a server. Device, radio, network and service convergence is resulting into a new use of internet. Tero Ojanperä is Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of Nokia. Nokia is the world leader in mobile communications, expanding mobility into new areas such as imaging, games, entertainment, media and enterprises. Tero Ojanperä is responsible for corporate strategy and development, research, venturing, intellectual property rights, business infrastructure, quality and business improvement services. Tero has played a defining role in the research and development work of Nokia's business groups since joining the company in 1990. Throughout his career he has consistently shown an ability to balance the strong elements of his scientific background with Nokia's broader business strategies. Before being appointed to his current role, he headed Nokia Research Center (NRC) during 2002–2004. He is a highly respected industry commentator and author of the book “WCDMA for Third Generation Mobile Communications” (1998) and its second edition “WCDMA: Towards IP Mobility and Mobile Internet” (2001).He holds a master's of science degree from the University of Oulu, Finland and a PhD degree from Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.     

Dynamic utility and price based radio resource management for rate adaptive traffic

This paper explores analytical Radio Resource Management models where the relationship between users and services is mapped through utility functions. Compared to other applications of these models to networking, we focus in particular on specific aspects of multimedia systems with adaptive traffic, and propose a novel framework for describing and investigating dynamic allocation of resources in wireless networks. In doing so, we also consider economic aspects, such as the financial needs of the provider and the users’ reaction to prices. As an example of how our analytical tool can be used, in this paper we compare different classes of RRM strategies, e.g., Best Effort vs. Guaranteed Performance, for which we explore the relationships between Radio Resource Allocation, pricing, provider’s revenue, network capacity and users’ satisfaction. Finally, we present a discussion about Economic Admission Control, which can be applied in Best Effort scenarios to further improve the performance. Part of this work has been presented at the conference ACM/IEEE MSWiM 2004, Venice (Italy). Leonardo Badia received a Laurea degree (with honors) in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in information engineering from the University of Ferrara, Italy, in 2000 and 2004, respectively. He was a Research Fellow at the University of Ferrara from 2001 to 2006. During these years, he also had collaborations with the University of Padova, Italy, and Wireless@KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. In 2006, he joined the “Institutions Markets Technologies” (IMT) Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy, where he is currently a Research Fellow. His research interests include wireless ad hoc and mesh networks, analysis of transmission protocols, optimization tools and economic models applied to radio resource management. Michele Zorzi received a Laurea degree and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Padova in 1990 and 1994, respectively. During academic year 1992–1993, he was on leave at UCSD, attending graduate courses and doing research on multiple access in mobile radio networks. In 1993 he joined the faculty of the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. After spending three years with the Center for Wireless Communications at UCSD, in 1998 he joined the School of Engineering of the University of Ferrara, Italy, where he became a professor in 2000. Since November 2003 he has been on the faculty at the Information Engineering Department of the University of Padova. His present research interests include performance evaluation in mobile communications systems, random access in mobile radio networks, ad hoc and sensor networks, energy constrained communications protocols, and broadband wireless access. He was Editor-In-Chief of IEEE Wireless Communications, 2003–2005, and currently serves on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Wiley’s Journal of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, and ACM/URSI/Kluwer Journal of Wireless Networks, and on the Steering Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. He has also been a Guest Editor of special issues in IEEE Personal Communications (Energy Management in Personal Communications Systems) and IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (Multimedia Network Radios).     

Minimum energy transmission scheduling subject to deadline constraints

We consider the problem of transmission scheduling of data over a wireless fading channel with hard deadline constraints. Our system consists of N users, each with a fixed amount of data that must be served by a common deadline. Given that, for each user, the channel fade state determines the throughput per unit of energy expended, our objective is to minimize the overall expected energy consumption while satisfying the deadline constraint. We consider both a linear and a strictly convex rate-power curve and obtain optimal solutions, based on dynamic programming (DP), and tractable approximate heuristics in both cases. For the special non-fading channel case with convex rate-power curve, an optimal solution is obtained based on the Shortest Path formulation. In the case of a linear rate-power curve, our DP solution has a nice “threshold” form; while for the convex rate-power curve we are able to obtain a heuristic algorithm with comparable performance with that of the optimal scheduling scheme. Alessandro Tarello received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Communication Engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy, in 2002 and 2006 respectively. He currently holds a Postdoctoral position at Politecnico di Torino. He visited the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 2004 and 2005. During Summer 2005 he also visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, USA. He received the best student paper award at the Third International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad-Hoc and Wireless Networks (WiOPT’05). His research interests are in the fields of stochastic and fluid models for performance evaluation of packet networks and optimization techniques for wireless and ad-hoc networks. Jun Sun received his B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from University of Florida in 1997 and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. His research interest is on communication networks with emphasis on satellite and wireless networks. Murtaza Zafer received his B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, India, in 2001 and his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), MA, USA, in 2003. Currently, he is pursuing his doctoral studies at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He spent the summer of 2004 at the Mathematical Sciences Research center, Bell Laboratories and the summer of 2003 at Qualcomm, Inc. His research interests lie in queueing theory, information theory, control and optimization theory and its applications to wireless communication networks. He is the co-recipient of the best Student Paper award at WiOpt, 2005. He also received the Siemens (India) and Philips (India) award for academic excellence. Eytan Modiano received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Connecticut at Storrs in 1986 and his M.S. and PhD degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. He was a Naval Research Laboratory Fellow between 1987 and 1992 and a National Research Council Post Doctoral Fellow during 1992–1993. Between 1993 and 1999 he was with MIT Lincoln Laboratory where he was the project leader for MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) project. Since 1999 he has been on the faculty at MIT; where he is presently an Associate Professor. His research is on communication networks and protocols with emphasis on satellite, wireless, and optical networks. He is currently an Associate Editor for Communication Networks for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and for The International Journal of Satellite Communications. He had served as a guest editor for IEEE JSAC special issue on WDM network architectures; the Computer Networks Journal special issue on Broadband Internet Access; the Journal of Communications and Networks special issue on Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks; and for IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology special issue on Optical Networks. He is the Technical Program co-chair for Wiopt 2006, IEEE Infocom 2007, and ACM MobiHoc 2007.     

Scalable Multiple Channel Scheduling with Optimal Utility in Wireless Local Area Networks

This paper studies scheduling algorithms for an infra-structure based wireless local area network with multiple simultaneous transmission channels. A reservation-based medium access control protocol is assumed where the base station (BS) allocates transmission slots to the system mobile stations based on their requests. Each station is assumed to have a tunable transmitter and tunable receiver. For this network architecture, the scheduling algorithms can be classified into two categories: contiguous and non-contiguous, depending on whether slots are allocated contiguously to the mobile stations. The main objective of the scheduling algorithms is to achieve high channel utility while having low time complexity. In this paper, we propose three scheduling algorithms termed contiguous sorted sequential allocation (CSSA), non-contiguous round robin allocation (NCRRA) and non-contiguous sorted round robin allocation (NCSRRA). Among these, CSSA schedules each station in contiguous mode, while other two algorithms, NCRRA and NCSRRA, schedule stations in non-contiguous mode. Through extensive analysis and simulation, the results demonstrate that the CSSA with only slightly increased complexity can achieve much higher channel utility when compared to the existing contiguous scheduling algorithms. The NCRRA and NCSRRA on the other hand, results in significantly lower complexity, while still achieving the optimal channel utility compared to existing non-contiguous scheduling algorithms. Chonggang Wang received a B.Sc. (honors) degree from Northwestern Polytechnic University, Xi'an, China, in 1996, and M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in communication and information system from University of Electrical Science and Technology in China, Chengdu, China, and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in 1999 and 2002, respectively. From September 2002 to November 2003 he has been with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, where he is an associate researcher in the Department of Computer Science. He is now a post-doctoral research fellow in University of Arkansas, Arkansas. His current research interests are in wireless networks with QoS guarantee, sensor networks, peer-to-peer and overlay networks. Bo Li received the B.S. (summa cum laude) and M.S. degrees in the Computer Science from Tsinghua University, Beijing, P. R. China, in 1987 and 1989, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in the Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1993. Between 1994 and 1996, he worked on high performance routers and ATM switches in IBM Networking System Division, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Since January 1996, he has been with Computer Science Department, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he is an associated professor and co-director for the ATM/IP cooperate research center, a government sponsored research center. Since 1999, he has also held an adjunct researcher position at the Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), Beijing, China. His current research interests include wireless mobile networking supporting multimedia, video multicast and all optical networks using WDM, in which he has published over 150 technical papers in referred journals and conference proceedings. He has been an editor or a guest editor for 16 journals, and involved in the organization of about 40 conferences. He was the Co-TPC Chair for IEEE Infocom'2004. He is a member of ACM and a senior member of IEEE. Krishna M. Sivalingam (ACM ‘93) is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of CSEE at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Previously, he was with the School of EECS at Washington State University, Pullman from 1997 until 2002; and with the University of North Carolina Greensboro from 1994 until 1997. He has also conducted research at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, and at AT&T Labs in Whippany, NJ. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1990 and 1994 respectively; and his B.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 1988 from Anna University, Chennai (Madras), India. While at SUNY Buffalo, he was a Presidential Fellow from 1988 to 1991. His research interests include wireless networks, optical wavelength division multiplexed networks, and performance evaluation. He holds three patents in wireless networks and has published several research articles including more than twenty-five journal publications. He has published an edited book on Wireless Sensor Networks in 2004 and on optical networks in 2000 and in 2004. He is a member of the Editorial Board for ACM Wireless Networks Journal, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and KICS Journal of Computer Networks. He has served as a Guest Co-Editor for special issues of ACM MONET on “Wireless Sensor Networks” in 2003 and 2004 and an issue of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications on optical WDM networks (2000). He is co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Networks 2000 held in Singapore. His work has been supported by several sources including AFOSR, NSF, Cisco, Intel and Laboratory for Telecommunication Sciences. He is a member of the Editorial Board for ACM Wireless Networks Journal, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and KICS Journal of Computer Networks. He is serving as Technical Program Co-Chair for the First IEEE Conference on Sensor Communications and Networking to be held in Santa Clara, CA in 2004. He has served as General Co-Chair for SPIE Opticomm 2003 (Dallas, TX) and for ACM Intl. Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications (WSNA) 2003 held on conjunction with ACM MobiCom 2003 at San Diego, CA. He served as Technical Program Co-Chair of SPIE/IEEE/ACM OptiComm conference at Boston, MA in July 2002; and as Workshop Co-Chair for WSNA 2002 held in conjunction with ACM MobiCom 2002 at Atlanta, GA in Sep 2002. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of ACM. Kazem Sohraby received the BS, MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and the MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadephia. He is a Professor of the Electrical Engineering Department, College of Engineering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Prior to that, he was with Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ. His areas of interest include computer networking, signaling, switching, performance analysis, and traffic theory. He has over 20 applications and granted patents on computer protocols, wireless and optical systems, circuit and packet switching, and on optical Internet. He has several publications, including a book on The Performance and Control of Computer Communications Networks (Boston, MA: 1995). Dr Sohraby is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society, and serves as its President's representative on the Committee on Communications and Information Policy (CCIP). He served on the Education Committee of the IEEE Communications Society, is on the Editorial Boards of several publications, and served as Reviewer and Panelist with the National Science Foundation, the US Army and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.     

A stochastic control approach for scheduling multimedia transmissions over a polled multiaccess fading channel

We develop scheduling strategies for carrying multimedia traffic over a polled multiple access wireless network with fading. We consider a slotted system with three classes of traffic (voice, streaming media and file transfers). A Markov model is used for the fading and also for modeling voice packet arrivals and streaming arrivals. The performance objectives are a loss probability for voice, mean network delay for streaming media, and time average throughput for file transfers. A central scheduler (e.g., the access point in a single cell IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN)) is assumed to be able to keep track of all the available state information and make the scheduling decision in each slot (e.g., as would be the case for PCF mode operation of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN). The problem is modeled as a constrained Markov decision problem. By using constraint relaxations (a linear relaxation and Whittle type relaxations) an index based policy is obtained. For the file transfers the decision problem turns out to be one with partial state information. Numerical comparisons are provided with the performance obtained from some simple policies. This work was supported by a research grant from Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd. Munish Goyal obtained his Masters and PhD degree in telecommunications from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India and the B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India. Currently, he is a postdoctoral research fellow at the ARC Center of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems, University of Melbourne, Australia. His research interests include modelling, analysis and control problems arising in stochastic systems especially telecommunication systems. Anurag Kumar obtained his B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and the PhD degree from Cornell University, both in Electrical Engineering. He was then with Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, N.J., for over 6 years. Since 1988 he has been with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, in the Dept. of Electrical Communication Engineering, where he is now a Professor, and is also the Chairman of the department. From 1988 to 2003 he was the Coordinator at IISc of the Education and Research Network Project (ERNET), India’s first wide-area packet switching network. His area of research is communication networking, specifically, modeling, analysis, control and optimisation problems arising in communication networks and distributed systems. Recently his research has focused primarily on wireless networking. He has been elected Fellow of the IEEE, and the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), both from 2006, and has been a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) since 1998. He is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Networking, and of IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. He is a coauthor of the advanced text-book “Communication Networking: An Analytical Approach,” by Kumar, Majunath and Kuri, published by Morgan-Kaufman/Elsevier. Vinod Sharma received his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi in 1978 and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. He worked in Northeastern University and University of California at Los Angeles before joining Indian Instutute of Science in 1988 where currently he is a Professor. He has held visiting positions at INRS Montreal, Helsinki University of Technology, Tokyo University of Science, Institute Mittag-Leffler and INRIA, Sophia Antipolis. His current interests are in Communication Networks, Wireless Communications and Queueing Theory.     

On the Use of Multiple Hops in Next Generation Wireless Systems

Traditional cellular networks provide a centralized wireless networking paradigm within the wireless domain with the help of fixed infrastructure nodes such as Base Stations (BSs). On the other hand, Ad hoc wireless networks provide a fully distributed wireless networking scheme with no dependency on fixed infrastructure nodes. Recent studies show that the use of multihop wireless relaying in the presence of infrastructure based nodes improves system capacity of wireless networks. In this paper, we consider three recent wireless network architectures that combine the multihop relaying with infrastructure support – namely Integrated Cellular and Ad hoc Relaying (iCAR) system, Hybrid Wireless Network (HWN) architecture, and Multihop Cellular Networks (MCNs), for a detailed qualitative and quantitative performance evaluation. MCNs use multihop relaying by the Mobile Stations (MSs) controlled by the BS. iCAR uses fixed Ad hoc Relay Stations (ARSs) placed at the boundaries to relay excess traffic from a hot cell to cooler neighbor cells. HWN dynamically switches its mode of operation between a centralized Cellular mode and a distributed Ad hoc mode based on the throughput achieved. An interesting observation derived from these studies is that, none of these architectures is superior to the rest, rather each one performs better in certain conditions. MCN is found to be performing better than the other two architectures in terms of throughput, under normal traffic conditions. At very high node densities, the variable power control employed in HWN architecture is found to be having a superior impact on the throughput. The mobility of relay stations significantly influences the call dropping probability and control overhead of the system and hence at high mobility iCAR which uses fixed ARSs is found to be performing better. This work was supported by Infosys Technologies Ltd., Bangalore, India and the Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi, India. B. S. Manoj received his Ph.D degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, in July 2004. He has worked as a Senior Engineer with Banyan Networks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India from 1998 to 2000 where his primary responsibility included design and development of protocols for real-time traffic support in data networks. He had been an Infosys doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, India. He is a recipient of the Indian Science Congress Association Young Scientist Award for the Year 2003. Since the beginning of 2005, he has been a post doctoral researcher in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego. His current research interests include ad hoc wireless networks, next generation wireless architectures, and wireless sensor networks. K. Jayanth Kumar obtained his B.Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 2002 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. He is currently working towards the Ph.D degree in the department of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Christo Frank D obtained his B.Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 2002 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree in the department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His current research interests include wireless networks, distributed systems, and operating systems. C. Siva Ram Murthy received the B.Tech. degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Regional Engineering College (now National Institute of Technology), Warangal, India, in 1982, the M.Tech. degree in Computer Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India, in 1984, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, in 1988. He joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT, Madras, as a Lecturer in September 1988, and became an Assistant Professor in August 1989 and an Associate Professor in May 1995. He has been a Professor with the same department since September 2000. He has held visiting positions at the German National Research Centre for Information Technology (GMD), Bonn, Germany, the University of Stuttgart, Germany, the University of Freiburg, Germany, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland, and the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. He has to his credit over 120 research papers in international journals and over 100 international conference publications. He is the co-author of the textbooks Parallel Computers: Architecture and Programming, (Prentice-Hall of India, New Delhi, India), New Parallel Algorithms for Direct Solution of Linear Equations, (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, USA), Resource Management in Real-time Systems and Networks, (MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA), WDM Optical Networks: Concepts, Design, and Algorithms, (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, USA), and Ad Hoc Wireless Networks: Architectures and Protocols, (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, USA). His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, real-time systems, lightwave networks, and wireless networks. Dr.Murthy is a recipient of the Sheshgiri Kaikini Medal for the Best Ph.D. Thesis from the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) Medal for Young Scientists, and Dr. Vikram Sarabhai Research Award for his scientific contributions and achievements in the fields of Electronics, Informatics, Telematics & Automation. He is a co-recipient of Best Paper Awards from the 1st Inter Research Institute Student Seminar (IRISS) in Computer Science, the 5th IEEE International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Real-Time Systems (WPDRTS), and the 6th and 11th International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC). He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.     

Statistically assisted routing algorithms (SARA) for hop count based forwarding in wireless sensor networks

The main goal of this paper is to provide routing–table-free online algorithms for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to select cost (e.g., node residual energies) and delay efficient paths. As basic information to drive the routing process, both node costs and hop count distances are considered. Particular emphasis is given to greedy routing schemes, due to their suitability for resource constrained and highly dynamic networks. For what concerns greedy forwarding, we present the Statistically Assisted Routing Algorithm (SARA), where forwarding decisions are driven by statistical information on the costs of the nodes within coverage and in the second order neighborhood. By analysis, we prove that an optimal online policy exists, we derive its form and we exploit it as the core of SARA. Besides greedy techniques, sub–optimal algorithms where node costs can be partially propagated through the network are also presented. These techniques are based on real time learning LRTA algorithms which, through an initial exploratory phase, converge to quasi globally optimal paths. All the proposed schemes are then compared by simulation against globally optimal solutions, discussing the involved trade–offs and possible performance gains. The results show that the exploitation of second order cost information in SARA substantially increases the goodness of the selected paths with respect to fully localized greedy routing. Finally, the path quality can be further increased by LRTA schemes, whose convergence can be considerably enhanced by properly setting real time search parameters. However, these solutions fail in highly dynamic scenarios as they are unable to adapt the search process to time varying costs. Michele Rossi was born in Ferrara, Italy on October 30th, 1974. He received the Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering (with honors) and the Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering from the University of Ferrara in 2000 and 2004, respectively. Since 2000 he has been a Research Fellow at the Department of Engineering of the University of Ferrara. During 2003 he was on leave at the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where he did research on wireless sensor networks. In November 2005 he joined the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova, Italy, where he is currently an Assistant Professor. Michele Rossi is currently part of the EU funded Ambient Networks and eSENSE projects. His research interests include: TCP/IP protocols over wireless networks, performance analysis of link layer retransmission techniques, routing and access selection in heterogeneous wireless networks and MAC/routing algorithms for wireless sensor networks. Michele Zorzi was born in Venice, Italy, in 1966. He received the Laurea degree and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 1990 and 1994, respectively. During the Academic Year 1992/93, he was on leave at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), attending graduate courses and doing research on multiple access in mobile radio networks. In 1993, he joined the faculty of the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. After spending three years with the Center for Wireless Communications at UCSD, in 1998 he joined the School of Engineering of the University of Ferrara, Italy, and in 2003 joined the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova, Italy, where he is currently a Professor. His present research interests include performance evaluation in mobile communications systems, random access in mobile radio networks, ad hoc and sensor networks, and energy constrained communications protocols. Dr. Zorzi from 2003 to 2005 was the Editor-In-Chief of the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, and currently serves on the Editorial Boards of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, the Wiley Journal of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing and the ACM/URSI/Kluwer Journal of Wireless Networks. He was also guest editor for special issues in the IEEE Personal Communications Magazine (Energy Management in Personal Communications Systems) and the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (Multi-media Network Radios). Ramesh R. Rao was born in Sindri, India, where he completed his undergraduate work at the Regional Engineering College of the University of Madras in Tiruchirapalli, obtaining a BE (Honors) degree in Electronics and Communications in 1980. He completed his graduate work at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland where he received his M.S. and Ph.D. Professor Rao is currently a Professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) at the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1984. Professor Rao is the former director of UCSD’s Center for Wireless Communications (CWC), and currently serves as the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technologies, and as the Director of the San Diego Division of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)²]. As Director of the San Diego Division of Cal-(IT)², he leads several interdisciplinary and collaborative projects. His research interests include architectures, protocols and performance analysis of computer and communication networks, and he has published extensively on these topics. Since 1984, Professor Rao has authored over 100 technical papers, contributed book chapters, conducted a number of short courses and delivered invited talks and plenary lectures. He is currently supervising both masters and doctoral students.     

A rendezvous reservation protocol for energy constrained wireless infrastructure networks

This paper considers a low power wireless infrastructure network that uses multi-hop communications to provide end user connectivity. A generalized Rendezvous Reservation Protocol (RRP) is proposed which permits multi-hop infrastructure nodes to adapt their power consumption in a dynamic fashion. When nodes have a long-term association, power consumption can be reduced by having them periodically rendezvous for the purpose of exchanging data packets. In order to support certain applications, the system invokes a connection set up process to establish the end-to-end path and selects node rendezvous rates along the intermediate nodes to meet the application’s quality of service (QoS) needs. Thus, the design challenge is to dynamically determine rendezvous intervals based on incoming applications’ QoS needs, while conserving battery power. In this paper, we present the basic RRP mechanism and an enhanced mechanism called Rendezvous Reservation Protocol with Battery Management (RRP-BM) that incorporates node battery level information. The performance of the system is studied using discrete-event simulation based experiments for different network topologies. The chief metrics considered are average power consumption and system lifetime (that is to be maximized). The QoS metrics specified are packet latency and end-to-end setup latency. It is shown that the use of the RRP-BM can increase the lifetime up to 48% as compared to basic RRP by efficiently reducing the energy consumption. This work was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Communications and Information Technology Ontario (CITO). Part of the research was supported by Air Force Office of Scientific Research grants F-49620-97-1-0471 and F-49620-99-1-0125; Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences, Adelphi, Maryland; and Intel Corporation. The authors may be reached via e-mail at todd@mcmaster. ca, krishna@umbc. edu. The basic RRP mechanism was presented at the IASTED International Conference on Wireless and Optical Communications, Banff, Canada, July 2002. Subalakshmi Venugopal received her Bachelors in Computer Science from R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore, India and her M.S. degree in Computer Science from Washington State University. She interned as a student researcher at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Ms. Venugopal is currently employed with Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, WA and is part of the “Kids and Education Group”. Her research interests include low power wireless ad hoc networks. Zhengwei (Wesley) Chen received the M.E. in Electrical & Computer Engineering Dept from McMaster University in Canada in 2002. He joined Motorola Inc. as a CDMA2000 system engineer in 2000. In 2002, he joined UTStarcom as a manager of the Global Service Solution Department. He is currently in charge of R&D for Advanced Services related to the TVoIP and Softswitch products. Terry Todd received the B.A.Sc, M.A.Sc and Ph.D degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. While at Waterloo he also spent 3 years as a Research Associate with the Computer Communications Networks Group (CCNG). During that time he worked on the Waterloo Experimental Local Area Network, which was an early local area network testbed. In 1991 Dr. Todd was on research leave in the Distributed Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. He also spent 1998 as a visiting researcher at The Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory (ORL) in Cambridge, England. While at ORL he worked on the piconet project, which was an embedded low power wireless network testbed. Dr. Todd is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. At McMaster he has been the Principal Investigator on a number of major research projects in the optical and wireless networking areas. He currently directs a large group working on wireless mesh networks and wireless VoIP. Professor Todd holds the NSERC/RIM/CITO Chair on Pico-Cellular Wireless Internet Access Networks. Dr. Todd’s research interests include metropolitan/local area networks, wireless communications and the performance analysis of computer communication networks and systems. Professor Todd is a Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario. Krishna M. Sivalingam is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of CSEE at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Previously, he was with the School of EECS at Washington State University, Pullman from 1997 until 2002; and with the University of North Carolina Greensboro from 1994 until 1997. He has also conducted research at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, and at AT&T Labs in Whippany, NJ. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1994 and 1990 respectively; and his B.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 1988 from Anna University, Chennai (Madras), India. While at SUNY Buffalo, he was a Presidential Fellow from 1988 to 1991. His research interests include wireless networks, optical wavelength division multiplexed networks, and performance evaluation. He holds three patents in wireless networks and has published several research articles including more than thirty journal publications. He has published an edited book on Wireless Sensor Networks in 2004 and edited books on optical WDM networks in 2000 and 2004. He served as a Guest Co-Editor for special issues of the ACM MONET journal on “Wireless Sensor Networks” in 2003 and 2004; and an issue of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications on optical WDM networks (2000). He is co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Networks 2000 held in Singapore. His work has been supported by several sources including AFOSR, NSF, Cisco, Intel and Laboratory for Telecommunication Sciences. He is a member of the Editorial Board for ACM Wireless Networks Journal, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Ad Hoc and Sensor Wireless Networks Journal, and KICS Journal of Computer Networks. He serves as Steering Committee Co-Chair for IEEE/CreateNet International Conference on Broadband Networks (BroadNets) that was created in 2004. He is currently serving as General Co-Vice-Chair for the Second Annual International Mobiquitous conference to be held in San Diego in 2005 and as General Co-Chair for the First IEEE/CreateNet International Conference on Security and Privacy for Emerging Areas in Communication Networks (SecureComm) to be held in Athens, Greece in Sep. 2005. He served as Technical Program Co-Chair for the First IEEE Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON) held at Santa Clara, CA in 2004; as General Co-Chair for SPIE Opticomm 2003 (Dallas, TX) and for ACM Intl. Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications (WSNA) 2003 held in conjunction with ACM MobiCom 2003 at San Diego, CA; as Technical Program Co-Chair of SPIE/IEEE/ACM OptiComm conference at Boston, MA in July 2002; and as Workshop Co-Chair for WSNA 2002 held in conjunction with ACM MobiCom 2002 at Atlanta, GA in Sep 2002. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of ACM.     

Finding Minimum Energy Disjoint Paths in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

We develop algorithms for finding minimum energy disjoint paths in an all-wireless network, for both the node and link-disjoint cases. Our major results include a novel polynomial time algorithm that optimally solves the minimum energy 2 link-disjoint paths problem, as well as a polynomial time algorithm for the minimum energy k node-disjoint paths problem. In addition, we present efficient heuristic algorithms for both problems. Our results show that link-disjoint paths consume substantially less energy than node-disjoint paths. We also found that the incremental energy of additional link-disjoint paths is decreasing. This finding is somewhat surprising due to the fact that in general networks additional paths are typically longer than the shortest path. However, in a wireless network, additional paths can be obtained at lower energy due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. Finally, we discuss issues regarding distributed implementation and present distributed versions of the optimal centralized algorithms presented in the paper.Anand Srinivas is currently a PhD candidate in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. He recieved his Masters of Science in EECS from MIT in 2004, and his Bachelors of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2001. In 2004 he also received a Masters of Science in Aerospace Engineering from MIT. His current research interests include reliability and energy-efficiency in wireless ad-hoc networks, routing and network optimization, graph theory, and the design of efficient algorithms. E-mail: anand3@mit.eduEytan Modiano received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Connecticut at Storrs in 1986 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. He was a Naval Research Laboratory Fellow between 1987 and 1992 and a National Research Council Post Doctoral Fellow during 1992–1993 while he was conducting research on security and performance issues in distributed network protocols.Between 1993 and 1999 he was with the Communications Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory where he designed communication protocols for satellite, wireless, and optical networks and was the project leader for MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) project. He joined the MIT faculty in 1999, where he is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). His research is on communication networks and protocols with emphasis on satellite, wireless, and optical networks.He is currently an Associate Editor for Communication Networks for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and for The International Journal of Satellite Communications. He had served as a guest editor for IEEE JSAC special issue on WDM network architectures; the Computer Networks Journal special issue on Broadband Internet Access; the Journal of Communications and Networks special issue on Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks; and for IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology special issue on Optical Networks. He is the Technical Program co-chair for Wiopt 2006 and vice- chair for Infocom 2007. E-mail: modiano@mit.edu     

IrBurst Modelling and Performance Analysis in the Presence of Transmission Errors

IrBurst is a session/presentation layer protocol dedicated for high speed large volume information transfer over IrDA links. The protocol is developed by IrDA in order to complement the existing protocol OBEX which is best suited for small files. This paper presents a mathematical model for IrBurst over the IrDA protocol stacks taking into account the presence of bit errors and multiple simultaneously applications. The performance of IrBurst is examined considering TinyTP buffer sizes and the number of IrBurst application connections as parameters. The contribution of this work is to develop a mathematical model for IrBurst, investigate the compatibility of IrBurst to low layer protocols, as well as providing suitable design guidelines for IrDA devices for high performance of IrBurst. Pi Huang received the B.Sc. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from University of Central Lancashire, U.K., in 2001, the M.Sc. degree in Telecommunications from University College London, U.K., in 2002 and the Ph.D degree in the Personal Wireless Networks and Outdoor Optical Links from Bournemouth University, U.K., in 2006. He is currently working in wireless solution division of British Telecom. His research focuses on performance modelling and analysis as well as discrete-event simulation of wireless communication protocols and wireless communication networks. He has published over 20 papers in the areas of wireless communications. Anthony C. Boucouvalas has worked at GEC Hirst Research Centre, and became Group Leader and Divisional Chief Scientist until 1987, when he joined Hewlett Packard (HP) Laboratories as Project Manager. He joined Bournemouth University in 1994 and became a Professor in Multimedia Communications in 1996, and in 1999 became Director of the Microelectronics and Multimedia Research Centre. His current research interests span the fields of wireless communications, optical fibre communications and components, multimedia communications, and human-computer interfaces, where he has published over 200 papers. He has contributed to the formation of IrDA as an industry standard and he is now a Member of the IrDA Architectures Council. He is a Fellow of Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce, (FRSA) and a Fellow of IEE, (FIEE). In 2002 he became a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (FIEEE), for contributions to optical fibre components and optical wireless communications. He is an Editor of numerous Journals and in the Organising committee of many conferences.     

Effective Capacity-Based Quality of Service Measures for Wireless Networks

An important objective of next-generation wireless networks is to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees. This requires a simple and efficient wireless channel model that can easily translate into connection-level QoS measures such as data rate, delay and delay-violation probability. To achieve this, in Wu and Negi (IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communications 2(4) (2003) 630–643), we developed a link-layer channel model termed effective capacity, for the setting of a single hop, constant-bit-rate arrivals, fluid traffic, and wireless channels with negligible propagation delay. In this paper, we apply the effective capacity technique to deriving QoS measures for more general situations, namely, (1) networks with multiple wireless links, (2) variable-bit-rate sources, (3) packetized traffic, and (4) wireless channels with non-negligible propagation delay. Dapeng Wu received B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 1990, M.E. in Electrical Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in 1997, and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, in 2003. From July 1997 to December 1999, he conducted graduate research at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, New York. During the summers of 1998, 1999 and 2000, he conducted research at Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Sunnyvale, California, on architectures and traffic management algorithms in the Internet and wireless networks for multimedia applications. Since August 2003, he has been with Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, as an Assistant Professor. His research interests are in the areas of networking, communications, multimedia, signal processing, and information and network security. He received the IEEE Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (CSVT) Transactions Best Paper Award for Year 2001. Currently, he is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and Associate Editor for International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing. He served as Program Chair for IEEE/ACM First International Workshop on Broadband Wireless Services and Applications (BroadWISE 2004); and as TPC member of over 20 conferences such as IEEE INFOCOM'05, IEEE ICC'05, IEEE WCNC'05, and IEEE Globecom'04. He is Vice Chair of Mobile and wireless multimedia Interest Group (MobIG), Technical Committee on Multimedia Communications, IEEE Communications Society. He is a member of the Award Committee, Technical Committee on Multimedia Communications, IEEE Communications Society. He is also Director of Communications, IEEE Gainesville Section. Rohit Negi received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India in 1995. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University, CA, USA, in 1996 and 2000 respectively, both in Electrical Engineering. He has received the President of India Gold medal in 1995. Since 2000, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, where he is an Assistant Professor. His research interests include signal processing, coding for communications systems, information theory, networking, cross-layer optimization and sensor networks.     

QoS Mechanisms for the MAC Protocol of IEEE 802.11 WLANs

There are two essential ingredients in order for any telecommunications system to be able to provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees: connection admission control (CAC) and service differentiation. In wireless local area networks (WLANs), it is essential to carry out these functions at the MAC level. The original version of IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol for WLANs does not include either function. The IEEE 802.11e draft standard includes new features to facilitate and promote the provision of QoS guarantees, but no specific mechanisms are defined in the protocol to avoid over saturating the medium (via CAC) or to decide how to assign the available resources (via service differentiation through scheduling). This paper introduces specific mechanisms for both admission control and service differentiation into the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The main contributions of this work are a novel CAC algorithm for leaky-bucket constrained traffic streams, an original frame scheduling mechanism referred to as DM-SCFQ, and a simulation study of the performance of a WLAN including these features. This work has been partly funded by the Mexican Science and Technology Council (CONACYT) through grant 38833-A. José R. Gallardo received the B.Sc. degree in Physics and Mathematics from the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City, the M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from CICESE Research and Graduate Education Center in Ensenada, Mexico, and the D.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the George Washington University, Washington, DC. From 1997 to 2000 he worked as a Research Associate at the Advanced Communications Engineering Centre of the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. From May to December 2000, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Broadband Wireless and Internetworking Research Laboratory of the University of Ottawa. Since December 2000, Dr. Gallardo has been with the Electronics and Telecommunications Department of CICESE Research Center, where he is a full professor. His main areas of interest are traffic modeling, traffic control, as well as simulation and performance evaluation of broadband communications networks, with recent emphasis on wireless local area networks (WLANs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Paúl Medina received the B.Eng. degree from the Sonora Institute of Technology, Obregon, Mexico, and the M.Sc. degree from CICESE Research and Graduate Education Center, Ensenada, Mexico, both in Electrical Engineering. From July to September 2005, he worked as a Research Associate at the Broadband Wireless and Internetworking Research Laboratory of the University of Ottawa, Canada. Mr. Medina is currently with CENI²T, Ensenada, Mexico, working as a lead engineer in projects related to routing and access control in wireless sensor networks, as well as IP telephony over wireless LANs. Weihua Zhuang received the B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees from Dalian Maritime University, Liaoning, China, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of New Brunswick, Canada, all in electrical engineering. Since October 1993, she has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, ON, Canada, where she is a full professor. She is a co-author of the textbook Wireless Communications and Networking (Prentice Hall, 2003). Dr. Zhuang received the Outstanding Performance Award in 2005 from the University of Waterloo, and the Premier’s Research Excellence Award in 2001 from the Ontario Government. She is an Editor/Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, and International Journal of Sensor Networks. Her current research interests include multimedia wireless communications, wireless networks, and radio positioning.     

Cross-layer modeling of adaptive wireless links for QoS support in heterogeneous wired-wireless networks

Future wired-wireless multimedia networks require diverse quality-of-service (QoS) support. To this end, it is essential to rely on QoS metrics pertinent to wireless links. In this paper, we develop a cross-layer model for adaptive wireless links, which enables derivation of the desired QoS metrics analytically from the typical wireless parameters across the hardware-radio layer, the physical layer and the data link layer. We illustrate the advantages of our model: generality, simplicity, scalability and backward compatibility. Finally, we outline its applications to power control, TCP, UDP and bandwidth scheduling in wireless networks. The work by Q. Liu and G. B. Giannakis are prepared through collaborative participation in the Communications and Networks Consortium sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory under the Collaborative Technology Alliance Program, Cooperative Agreement DAAD19-01-2-0011. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. The work by S. Zhou is supported by UConn Research Foundation internal grant 445157. Qingwen Liu (S’04) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering and information science in 2001, from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 2003, from the University of Minnesota (UMN). He currently pursues his Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota (UMN). His research interests lie in the areas of communications, signal processing, and networking, with emphasis on cross-layer analysis and design, quality of service support for multimedia applications over wired-wireless networks, and resource allocation. Shengli Zhou (M’03) received the B.S. degree in 1995 and the M.Sc. degree in 1998, from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), both in electrical engineering and information science. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota, 2002, and joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Connecticut, 2003. His research interests lie in the areas of communications and signal processing, including channel estimation and equalization, multi-user and multi-carrier communications, space time coding, adaptive modulation, and cross-layer designs. He serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications since Feb. 2005. G. B. Giannakis (Fellow’97) received his Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, 1981. From September 1982 to July 1986 he was with the University of Southern California (USC), where he received his MSc. in Electrical Engineering, 1983, MSc. in Mathematics, 1986, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, 1986. After lecturing for one year at USC, he joined the University of Virginia in 1987, where he became a professor of Electrical Engineering in 1997. Since 1999 he has been a professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he now holds an ADC Chair in Wireless Telecommunications. His general interests span the areas of communications and signal processing, estimation and detection theory, time-series analysis, and system identification -- subjects on which he has published more than 200 journal papers, 350 conference papers and two edited books. Current research focuses on transmitter and receiver diversity techniques for single- and multi-user fading communication channels, complex-field and space-time coding, multicarrier, ultra-wide band wireless communication systems, cross-layer designs and sensor networks. G. B. Giannakis is the (co-) recipient of six paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing (SP) and Communications Societies (1992, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004). He also received the SP Society’s Technical Achievement Award in 2000. He served as Editor in Chief for the IEEE SP Letters, as Associate Editor for the IEEE Trans. on Signal Proc. and the IEEE SP Letters, as secretary of the SP Conference Board, as member of the SP Publications Board, as member and vice-chair of the Statistical Signal and Array Processing Technical Committee, as chair of the SP for Communications Technical Committee and as a member of the IEEE Fellows Election Committee. He has also served as a member of the IEEE-SP Society’s Board of Governors, the Editorial Board for the Proceedings of the IEEE and the steering committee of the IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communications.     

QoS-driven asynchronous uplink subchannel allocation algorithms for space-time OFDM-CDMA systems in wireless networks

In order to support the diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for differentiated data applications in broadband wireless networks, advanced techniques such as space-time coding (STC) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are implemented at the physical layer. However, the employment of such techniques evidently affects the subchannel-allocation algorithms at the medium access control (MAC) layer. In this paper, we propose the QoS-driven cross-layer subchannel-allocation algorithms for data transmissions over asynchronous uplink space-time OFDM-CDMA wireless networks. We mainly focus on QoS requirements of maximizing the best-effort throughput and proportional bandwidth fairness, while minimizing the upper-bound of scheduling delay. Our extensive simulations show that the proposed infrastructure and algorithms can achieve high bandwidth fairness and system throughput while reducing scheduling delay over wireless networks. Xi Zhang (S’89-SM’98) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Xidian University, Xi’an, China, the M.S. degree from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, all in electrical engineering and computer science, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science (Electrical Engineering—Systems) from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. He is currently an Assistant Professor and the Founding Director of the Networking and Information Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA. He was an Assistant Professor and the Founding Director of the Division of Computer Systems Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Beijing Information Technology Engineering Institute, Beijing, China, from 1984 to 1989. He was a Research Fellow with the School of Electrical Engineering, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, James Cook University, Queensland, Australia, under a Fellowship from the Chinese National Commission of Education. He worked as a Summer Intern with the Networks and Distributed Systems Research Department, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hills, NJ, and with AT&T Laboratories Research, Florham Park, NJ, in 1997. He has published more than 80 technical papers. His current research interests focus on the areas of wireless networks and communications, mobile computing, cross-layer designs and optimizations for QoS guarantees over mobile wireless networks, wireless sensor and Ad Hoc networks, wireless and wireline network security, network protocols design and modeling for QoS guarantees over multicast (and unicast) wireless (and wireline) networks, statistical communications theory, random signal processing, and distributed computer-control systems. Dr. Zhang received the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2004 for his research in the areas of mobile wireless and multicast networking and systems. He is currently serving as an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, an Associated Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, and and Associated Editor for the IEEE Communications Letters, and is also currently serving as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine for the Special Issues of “Next Generation of CDMA vs. OFDMA for 4G Wireless Applications”. He has served or is serving as the Panelist on the U.S. National Science Foundation Research-Proposal Review Panel in 2004, the WiFi-Hotspots/WLAN and QoS Panelist at the IEEE QShine 2004, as the Symposium Chair for the IEEE International Cross-Layer Designs and Protocols Symposium within the IEEE International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC) 2006, the Technical Program Committee Co-Chair for the IEEE IWCMC 2006, the Poster Chair for the IEEE QShine 2006, the Publicity Co-Chair for the IEEE WirelessCom 2005, and as the Technical Program Committee members for IEEE GLOBECOM, IEEE ICC, IEEE WCNC, IEEE VTC, IEEE QShine, IEEE WoWMoM, IEEE WirelessCom, and IEEE EIT. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Jia Tang (S’03) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China, in 2001. He is currently a Research Assistant working towards the Ph.D. degree in the Networking and Information Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA. His research interests include mobile wireless communications and networks, with emphasis on cross-layer design and optimizations, wireless quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for mobile multimedia networks, wireless diversity techniques, and wireless resource allocation. Mr. Tang received the Fouraker Graduate Research Fellowship Award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University in 2005.     

Effect of Antenna Beam Pattern and Layout on Cellular Performance in High Altitude Platform Communications

High Altitude Platforms may offer high spectrum efficiency by deploying multi-beam, multi-cell communications networks. The properties of the antennas carried by the HAP payload are key to the effective exploitation of these benefits. This paper compares different models for the antenna sidelobe region and quantifies, in each case, the carrier to interference ratio for a 3 channel re-use plan. Networks of 121 and 313 cells are compared. We show how the ITU recommended pattern for the 47/48 GHz band leads to pessimistic results compared to an adapted pattern which fits that of measured data for an elliptic beam lens antenna. The method is then extended to consider other radiation patterns. Spectrum sharing issues are explored with reference to further ITU recommendations and comparison with measurement data. Finally, an ITU type cellular layout which uses the same antenna for each cell is compared to an alternative hexagonal layout where each cell has equal size. John Thornton is a physics graduate of the University of York, UK, obtained an MSc. in microwave physics from the University of Portsmouth, UK, in 1995 and a PhD from the UK's Open University in 2002. He has held research posts at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, developing sub-millimetre wave solid state sources and receivers, and at the University of Oxford, on projects including passive radar transponders, array antennas and superconducting filters. In 2000 he returned to York to join the Department of Electronics as a Research Fellow, where his research interests include microwave techniques, wireless broadband and scanning antennas. David Pearce BA(Cantab), DPhil(York) MIEEE, AMIEE, is a lecturer in the Department of Electronics in the University of York and has worked in the field of Fixed Wireless Access schemes for the last five years. Prior to this he worked developing new copper-based local area network schemes in both academia and industry; including heavy involvement in the standardisation work for ISO-8802.5 token ring. Current research interests are focused on media access schemes for multimedia traffic and adaptive techniques for optimising the bandwidth efficiency of wireless networks. David Grace received his MEng in Electronic Systems Engineering and D.Phil from the University of York, UK in 1993 and 1999 respectively. Since 1994 he has been a member of the Communications Research Group where he is now a Senior Research Fellow whose current interests include radio resource management for broadband communications, particularly from high-altitude platform, and terrestrial ad hoc networks. He is Principal Scientific Officer for CAPANINA, a major European Framework 6 project developing broadband communications from high-altitude platforms. He has been an invited speaker at several conferences and industrial locations in the fields of HAP systems. He is a nominated Researcher in the European NEWCOM Network of Excellence, and a Director of SkyLARC Technologies Ltd, a York based company, specialising in broadband communications from aerial platforms. He is a member of IEE and IEEE. Masayuki Oodo received B.E., M.E., and D.E. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, respectively in 1992,1994, and 1997. In 1997, he joined the Communications Research Laboratory (CRL), now part of the National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT). Since July 2004 he has been a visiting research fellow at the University of York. His research interests are array antennas for wireless communications and frequency-sharing between HAPS and other systems. Dr. Oodo received the Paper Presentation Award from IEEJ (The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan) in 1995, the Young Scientist Award from URSI in 1996, the Young Engineer Award from IEICE (The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers) of Japan in 1997, and the Young Engineer Award from IEEE AP-S Tokyo Chapter in 1998. Konstantinos Katzis received his BEng degree in Computer Systems Engineering in 2000 and his MSc in Radio Systems Engineering in 2001, both from the University of Hull, UK. Since 2001 he has been a member of the Communications Research Group at York where he has been working on Resource Allocation Techniques for HAPs for his PhD degree. Currently he is a Research Associate working on Radio Resource Management for the European project CAPANINA. His current research interests include Resource allocation and spectrum management, multiple access schemes and medium access control protocol modelling. Tim Tozer MA(Cantab), CEng, FIEE, MIEEE, is Senior Lecturer in Electronics at York, since 1987, and leader of the Communications Research Group. Research interests include: wireless access techniques; multi-user, satellite and High Altitude Platform communications. He has held numerous grants and research contracts from industry, government and international organisations, and is a named author on over 180 technical publications. He is active in the IEE Professional Network on Satellite Systems and Applications. Tim is a regular invited presenter at international conferences, workshops and tutorials, in the fields of VSAT and HAPs communications. He has previous experience in industry, including work on military satellite systems at DERA (now QinetiQ). Tim is also Managing Director of SkyLARC Technologies Ltd.     

Impact of the access network topology on the handoff performance

Micromobility protocols such as Cellular IP, Hawaii and Hierarchical Mobile IP are developed to solve problems of high handoff latency and control overhead, which occur when Mobile IP is used in combination with frequent handoffs. Up to now, tree access network topologies are considered to evaluate the protocol performance. However, for reasons of robustness against link failures and load balancing, extra uplinks and mesh links in the topology are desired. This article makes a classification of several topology types and gives a model that points out to which extent the topology influences the protocol performance in terms of handoff latency and handoff packet loss. Simulations confirm the results calculated by the model. Performance metrics such as load balancing, end-to-end delay and robustness against link failures are also evaluated. The study points to several shortcomings of the existing micromobility protocols for different topology types. Several aspects of the studied handoff schemes, their advantages and drawbacks are identified. L. Peters is a Research Assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders (F.W.O.-V., Belgium) Liesbeth Peters was born in Temse, Belgium, in 1978. She received her Master of Science degree in Electrotechnical Engineering from Ghent University, Gent, Belgium in 2001. Since August 2001, she has been working as a doctoral researcher with the Department of Information Technology (INTEC) of the Faculty of Applied Sciences, Ghent University, where she joined the Broadband Communications Networks Group. Since October 2002, she works there as a research assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research—Flanders (F.W.O.-V., Belgium). Her current research interests are in broadband wireless communication and the support of IP mobility in wired cum wireless networks. Ingrid Moerman was born in Gent, Belgium, in 1965. She received the degree in Electro-technical Engineering and the Ph.D degree from the Ghent University, Gent, Belgium in 1987 and 1992, respectively. Since 1987, she has been with the Interuniversity Micro-Electronics Centre (IMEC) at the Department of Information Technology (INTEC) of the Ghent University, where she conducted research in the field of optoelectronics. In 1997, she became a permanent member of the Research Staff at IMEC. Since 2000 she is part-time professor at the Ghent University. Since 2001 she has switched her research domain to broadband communication networks. She is currently involved in the research and education on broadband mobile & wireless communication networks and on multimedia over IP. Her main research interests related to mobile & wireless communication networks are: adaptive QoS routing in wireless ad hoc networks, personal networks, body area networks, wireless access to vehicles (high bandwidth & driving speed), protocol boosting on wireless links, design of fixed access/metro part, traffic engineering and QoS support in the wireless access network. Ingrid Moerman is author or co-author of more than 300 publications in the field of optoelectronics and communication networks. Bart Dhoedt received a degree in Engineering from the Ghent University in 1990. In September 1990, he joined the Department of Information Technology of the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of Ghent. His research, addressing the use of micro-optics to realize parallel free space optical interconnects, resulted in a PhD degree in 1995. After a 2 year post-doc in opto-electronics, he became professor at the Faculty of Applied Sciences, Department of Information Technology. Since then, he is responsible for several courses on algorithms, programming and software development. His research interests are software engineering and mobile & wireless communications. Bart Dhoedt is author or co-author of more than 100 papers published in international journals or in the proceedings of international conferences. His current research addresses software technologies for communication networks, peer-to-peer networks, mobile networks and active networks. Piet Demeester finished his PhD thesis at the Department of Information Technology (INTEC) at the Ghent University in 1988. At the same department he became group leader of the activities on Metal Organic Vapour Phase Epitaxial growth for optoelectronic components. In 1992 he started a new research group on Broadband Communication Networks. The research in this field resulted in already more than 300 publications. In this research domain he was and is a member of several programme committees of international conferences, such as: ICCCN, the International Conference on Telecommunication Systems, OFC, ICC, and ECOC. He was Chairman of DRCN’98. In 2001 he was chairman of the Technical Programme Committee ECOC’01. He was Guest Editor of three special issues of the IEEE Communications Magazine. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Journals “Optical Networks Magazine” and “Photonic Network Communications”. He was a member of several national and international PhD thesis commissions. Piet Demeester is a member of IEEE (Senior Member), ACM and KVIV. His current research interests include: multilayer networks, Quality of Service (QoS) in IP-networks, mobile networks, access networks, grid computing, distributed software, network and service management and applications (supported by FWO-Vlaanderen, the BOF of the Ghent University, the IWT and the European Commission). Piet Demeester is currently full-time professor at the Ghent University, where he is teaching courses in Communication Networks. He has also been teaching in different international courses.     

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.     

Experimental Evaluation of Topology Control and Synchronization for In-Building Sensor Network Applications

While multi-hop networks consisting of 100s or 1000s of inexpensive embedded sensors are emerging as a means of mining data from the environment, inadequate network lifetime remains a major impediment to real-world deployment. This paper describes several applications deployed throughout our building that monitor conference room occupancy and environmental statistics and provide access to room reservation status. Because it is often infeasible to locate sensors and display devices near power outlets, we designed two protocols that allow energy conservation in a large class of sensor network applications. The first protocol, Relay Organization (ReOrg), is a topology control protocol which systematically shifts the network’s routing burden to energy-rich nodes, exploiting heterogeneity. The second protocol, Relay Synchronization (ReSync), is a MAC protocol that extends network lifetime by allowing nodes to sleep most of the time, yet wake to receive packets. When combined, ReOrg and ReSync lower the duty cycle of the nodes, extending network lifetime. To our knowledge, this research provides the first experimental testbed evaluation of energy-aware topology control integrated with energy-saving synchronization. Using a 54-node testbed, we demonstrate an 82–92% reduction in energy consumption, depending on traffic load. By rotating the burden of routing, our protocols can extend network lifetime by 5–10 times. Finally, we demonstrate that a small number of wall-powered nodes can significantly improve the lifetime of a battery-powered network. W. Steven Conner is a Wireless Network Architect in the Communications Technology Lab, Intel Research and Development. He currently leads a team developing self-configuring wireless mesh networking technology and is an active participant in IEEE 802.11 standards development. His current research interests include wireless mesh networking, sensor networks, and network self-configuration protocols. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Arizona. Jasmeet Chhabra received B.E. (1996) and M.S. (1999) degrees from University of Delhi and University of Maryland, College Park, respectively. Since 1999 he has been a researcher in the Communications Technology Lab, Intel Research and Development. His current research interests include sensor networks, ubiquitous computing, mesh networks and security. Mark Yarvis received B.S. (1991), M.S. (1998), and Ph.D. (2001) degrees in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 2001, he has been a Senior Researcher in the Communications Technology Lab, Intel Research and Development. He is currently the principle investigator of the Intel Research Heterogeneous Sensor Networking project. His research interests include heterogeneous systems, sensor networks, and pervasive and mobile computing. He is a member of IEEE and ACM. WWW: Lakshman Krishnamurthy manages the radio networks initiative in the Intel Corporate Technology Group and is also the principal investigator of the EcoSense wireless sensor network Strategic Research Project. He leads research efforts into new wireless mesh protocols and techniques to provide ease of use and improve performance of wireless networks. As part of the EcoSense project, Lakshman is driving wireless sensing into Intel fabs by piloting a preventative maintenance application. Currently, he also serves on the program committees of the ACM SenSyS and IEEE SECOM conferences. Lakshman received a Ph.D in computer science from the University of Kentucky and a BE in instrumentation technology from the University of Mysore, India.This revised version was published online in August 2005 with a corrected cover date.