Contention aware mobility prediction routing for intermittently connected mobile networks

This paper introduces a novel multi-copy routing protocol, called predict and forward (PF), for delay tolerant networks, which aims to explore the possibility of using mobile nodes as message carriers for end-to-end delivery of the messages. With PF, the message forwarding decision is made by manipulating the probability distribution of future inter-contact and contact durations based on the network status, including wireless link condition and nodal buffer availability. In particular, PF is based on the observations that the node mobility behavior is semi-deterministic and could be predicted once there is sufficient mobility history information. We implemented the proposed protocol and compared it with a number of existing encounter-based routing approaches in terms of delivery delay, delivery ratio, and the number of transmissions required for message delivery. The simulation results show that PF outperforms all the counterpart multi-copy encounter-based routing protocols considered in the study.     

Conceptual framework for the security of mobile health applications on Android platform

Mobile Health (mHealth) applications are readily accessible to the average user of mobile devices, and despite the potential of mHealth applications to improve the availability, affordability and effectiveness of delivering healthcare services, they handle sensitive medical data, and as such, have also the potential to carry substantial risks to the security and privacy of their users. Developers of applications are usually unknown, and users are unaware of how their data are being managed and used. This is combined with the emergence of new threats due to the deficiency in mobile applications development or the design ambiguities of the current mobile operating systems. A number of mobile operating systems are available in the market, but the Android platform has gained the topmost popularity. However, Android security model is short of completely ensuring the privacy and security of users’ data, including the data of mHealth applications. Despite the security mechanisms provided by Android such as permissions and sandboxing, mHealth applications are still plagued by serious privacy and security issues. These security issues need to be addressed in order to improve the acceptance of mHealth applications among users and the efficacy of mHealth applications in the healthcare systems. Thus, this paper presents a conceptual framework to improve the security of medical data associated with Android mHealth applications, as well as to protect the privacy of their users. Based on the literature review that suggested the need for the intended security framework, three-distinct and successive phases are presented, each of which is described in a separate section. First, discussed the design process of the first phase to develop a security framework for mHealth apps to ensure the security and privacy of sensitive medical data. The second phase is discussed who to achieve the implementation of a prototypic proof-of-concept version of the framework. Finally, the third phase ending discussed the evaluation process in terms of effectiveness and efficiency for the proposed framework.     

Towards SoC Validation Through Prototyping: A Systematic Approach Based on Reconfigurable Platform

Hardware/software covalidation is becoming one of the most critical issues in current System-on-Chip (SoC) design. Nowadays, covalidation is usually performed by cosimulation which is slow and lacks accuracy. The other alternative is to build a hardware prototype specific to the application. However, this alternative is expensive in terms of time, man-power, and cost. As SoCs increase in complexity, validation becomes more and more difficult, time consuming and error prone. Thus, a new approach for covalidation is inescapable. In this paper, we present a novel efficient prototyping approach for complex SoC covalidation. The proposed approach enables systematic prototyping of embedded applications on a reconfigurable platform. The process starts from the RT level model of the application. The application and the reconfigurable platform have to be adapted to obtain the prototype. We decompose the prototyping process into four steps, in order to match the application and the platform. Besides, we propose adapted solutions to deal with constraints typically encountered in existing reconfigurable platforms. The main advantages of this method are: fast and accurate validation, systematic prototyping flow, and large application field. Prototyping of a subset of VDSL using the ARM Integrator platform illustrates the effectiveness of our approach.     

Novel Approach for Modeling Wireless Fading Channels Using a Finite State Markov Chain

Empirical modeling of wireless fading channels using common schemes such as autoregression and the finite state Markov chain (FSMC) is investigated. The conceptual background of both channel structures and the establishment of their mutual dependence in a confined manner are presented. The novel contribution lies in the proposal of a new approach for deriving the state transition probabilities borrowed from economic disciplines, which has not been studied so far with respect to the modeling of FSMC wireless fading channels. The proposed approach is based on equal portioning of the received signal‐to‐noise ratio, realized by using an alternative probability construction that was initially highlighted by Tauchen. The associated statistical procedure shows that a first‐order FSMC with a limited number of channel states can satisfactorily approximate fading. The computational overheads of the proposed technique are analyzed and proven to be less demanding compared to the conventional FSMC approach based on the level crossing rate. Simulations confirm the analytical results and promising performance of the new channel model based on the Tauchen approach without extra complexity costs.     

GPM: A generic and scalable P2P model that optimizes tree depth for multicast communications

Group communications (real‐time and non‐real‐time) refer to one‐to‐many or many‐to‐many communications. On the one hand, multicast is considered as an appropriate solution for supporting group communication‐oriented applications (we distinguish IP network multicast from application layer multicast). On the other hand, peer‐to‐peer model tends to be a good candidate for supporting today Internet applications (e.g. P2P IPTV, P2P VoIP, etc.). In this context, P2P has attracted significant interest in the recent years. This is mainly due to its properties that also make P2P well adapted to today social networks. In this paper, we propose GPM (Generic P2P Multicast): a novel generic and scalable approach, that optimizes multicast tree depth in P2P networks (structured and unstructured), and contributes to control the network overlay latency. For multicast tree construction, the approach we propose is based on a distributed algorithm using a specific data structures (adjacency and forwarding matrixes). GPM model inherits from P2P attributes such as scalability, flexibility and fault tolerance, while taking into consideration the respective characteristics of one‐to‐many and many‐to‐many type of applications. We also give a performance evaluation for validation and comparison purposes while considering some main existing application layer multicast protocols. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Modification of the electric properties of molecular devices via gradual increase of number of nitrogen atoms: A computational study

This paper introduces a new means to manipulate electronic structures and, consequently, the electrical properties of molecular devices via gradual increase of number of nitrogen atoms in the backbone of conjugated organic molecular systems. Diblock molecules were selected for this purpose. Density functional theory (DFT) was used to investigate geometrical and electronic structures in the absence and presence of external electric field. Furthermore, the tendency of the anchor sulfur atoms toward electrodes in a simulated closed circuit was estimated from the relative condensed Fukui function. The obtained results indicated that HOMO–LUMO gap decreases steadily with increasing the number of nitrogen atoms, which would be used as a means for modifying the electrical properties in a regular mode.     

Investigation de la gestion de qualité de service dans le réseau UMTS

Bit rate announced for the future standards of telecommunication, as well as the level of integration reached are, as many factors, determining for the establishment of new applications in mobile terminals. Nowadays, mobile video streaming services are possible. Mobile users expect to receive multimedia traffic with some performance guarantees, so we must ensure the necessary quality of service during the video transmission. This paper aims at investigating quality of service issue inUmts network. More specifically, we explore the main challenge of quality of service management to dynamically optimize the distribution of load inUmts networks. Our investigation is organized in the following way. We formalize the optimization problem which is based on the graph theory and modellingUmts network as well as mobile users and applications to be used. The simulation of our optimization model show a clear improvement of the quality of service perceived by anUmts user in terms of bit rate, blocking and connection drop.     

Coplanar Waveguide Fed Printed Antenna with Compact Size for Broadband Wireless Applications

A novel and simple coplanar waveguide fed compact antenna is introduced in this paper. The antenna structure combines the advantages of CPW with those of the broadband antenna and simplifies the structure of the antenna by reducing the number of metallization level to construct uni-planar antenna. Prototype of the proposed antenna have been constructed and studied experimentally. The measured results agrees well with the simulated prediction and shows a broad bandwidth of 6 GHz ranging from 3.5 GHz to 9.5 GHz with VSWR ≤2 (return loss ≤−10 dB), which is equivalent to 92.3% impedance bandwidth centered at 6.5 GHz. The proposed antenna shows stable radiation characteristics, gain and axial ratio of less than 1 dB over the whole operating bandwidth. Furthermore, an extensive parametric study was performed to realize the relationship between the resonance frequencies of the broadband antennas and different parameters which is helpful for advancement of the antenna design.     

Performance Analysis of MIMO Based CDMA Code Acquisition Over Rayleigh Fading Channels

This paper proposes a new MIMO based CDMA code acquisition scheme. The pilot codes consist of a number of short Gold code sequences which are transmitted in parallel using a group of transmit antennas. Reception diversity is performed by multiple receive antennas at the receiver. Three different acquisition detection techniques are proposed and compared. Corresponding threshold optimizations are investigated as well. Detection and false alarm probabilities are derived in closed form based on the outputs of non-coherent matched filters. The acquisition performance is evaluated in terms of mean acquisition time (MAT) in Rayleigh fading environment. It is shown that the proposed MIMO acquisition scheme exhibits a much better MAT performance than the conventional single-antenna acquisition scheme. The results reveal that multiple receive antennas can be utilized to significantly reduce the MAT at the expense of receiver complexity increase. On the other hand, increasing the number of transmit antennas makes the MAT performance more robust in the presence of strong interference.     

Design Guidelines for the Noise Optimization of a 0.18 μm CMOS Low-Noise Amplifier

This paper presents the design considerations for the noise optimization of fully integrated tuned low-noise amplifiers (LNA) based on the four noise parameters and two-port noise theory. Specifically, this paper provides the design guidelines for a 0.18 μm CMOS tuned LNA. These guidelines give a useful indication to the design tradeoffs associated with noise figure, power dissipation and gate overdrive voltage for the LNA designed using this technology. As a case study, a 10 GHz LNA has been designed using 0.18 μm CMOS technology for a wireless LAN application. The amplifier has a 2.4 dB noise figure with a −13 dBm third-order input intercept point, while drawing 5 mW from a 1.8 V power supply. The results show that the proposed theoretical contours of constant noise figure which relate the gate overdrive voltage and power dissipation can accurately predict the noise performance of a 0.18 μm CMOS LNA design Ahmed A. Youssef received the B.Sc. (Hon.) and M.Sc. degrees both in electrical engineering from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. Since 2003, he has been with the University of Calgary, AB, Canada, where he is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in RF integrated circuits and systems. Mr. Youssef has joined the Wireless Research Center at TRLab, Alberta, Canada as a research associate in 2004. His research interests include the analog high speed integrated circuit for the wireless LAN applications. Mr. Youssef is the recipient of the Mobinil Telecommunication Inc. Pre-master Fellowship in 1999. He also received the Young Scientist award at the Maastricht General Assembly of the International Union of Radio Science in 2002 and an Honorable Mention at 2003 in the Symposium of the Microelectronics Research & Development in Canada, Montreal. Mr. Youssef received the Gordon Lewis Hedberg Doctoral Scholarship in 2005.