Interdisciplinary research: roles for self-organization

No generally accepted principles and guidelines currently exist to help engineers design local interaction mechanisms that result in a desired global behavior. However, several communities have developed ways of approaching this problem in the context of niched application areas. Because the ideas underlying these approaches are often obscured or underemphasized in technical papers, the authors review the role of self-organization in their work. They provide a better picture of the status of the emerging field of self-organizing systems or autonomic computing.     

Low sintering temperature of (Zn0.65Mg0.35)TiO3–xCaTiO3-based dielectric with controlled temperature coefficient

(Zn_0.65Mg_0.35)TiO₃–xCaTiO₃-based dielectric ceramics sintered at low temperature thanks to ZnO–B₂O₃ glass phase addition are investigated. The effects of such additions on the dilatometric curves, the microstructure, the phase composition and the dielectric properties have been carefully examined. It is shown that the sintering temperature is significantly lowered to 930 °C by the addition of 2 wt.% of ZnO–B₂O₃ glass phase. The temperature coefficient of permittivity (τ_?) could be controlled by varying the CaTiO₃ content and lead to near zero τ_? value. As an optimal composition, (Zn_0.65Mg_0.35)TiO₃ + 7%CaTiO₃, co-sinterable with silver electrodes at 930 °C, exhibits at 1 MHz, a relative permittivity of ?_r = 21, a temperature coefficient of the permittivity τ_? of ?4 ppm/°C and low dielectric losses (tan(δ) < 10^?3). These interesting properties make this system promising to manufacture Ag-based electrodes multilayer dielectric devices.     

Sintering of glass-added BaZn1/3Nb2/3O3 ceramics

The complex perovskite oxide Ba(Zn_1/3Nb_2/3)O₃ (BZN) has been studied for its attractive dielectric properties which place this material interesting for applications as multilayer ceramics capacitors or hyperfrequency resonators. This material is sinterable at low temperature with combined glass phase–lithium salt additions, and exhibits, at 1 MHz very low dielectric losses combined with relatively high dielectric constant and a good stability of this later versus temperature. The 2 wt.% of ZnO–SiO₂–B₂O₃ glass phase and 1 wt.% of LiF-added BZN sample sintered at 900 °C exhibits a relative density higher than 95% and attractive dielectric properties: a dielectric constant ?_r of 39, low dielectrics losses (tan(δ) < 10⁻³) and a temperature coefficient of permittivity τ_? of 45 ppm/°C⁻¹. The 2 wt.% ZnO–SiO₂–B₂O₃ glass phase and 1 wt.% of B₂O₃-added BZN sintered at 930 °C exhibits also attractive dielectric properties (?_r = 38, tan(δ) < 10⁻³) and it is more interesting in terms of temperature coefficient of the permittivity (τ_? = −5 ppm/°C). Their good dielectric properties and their compatibility with Ag electrodes, make these ceramics suitable for L.T.C.C applications.     

Integrating RFID and WLAN for indoor positioning and IP movement detection

Location awareness in an indoor environment and wireless access to Internet applications are major research areas towards the overwhelming success of wireless and mobile communications. However, the unpredictable indoor radio propagation and handover latency due to node mobility are the main challenging issues that need to be addressed. For tackling efficiently both problems of indoor localization and handover management, we propose combining key benefits of two outstanding wireless technologies, i.e. radio frequency identification (RFID) and a wireless local area network (WLAN) infrastructure. WLANs, such as IEEE 802.11 (WiFi), are now very common in many indoor environments for providing wireless communication among WiFi-enabled devices by accessing an Access Point (infrastructure mode) or through peer to peer connections (ad hoc mode). However, the small cell size of the Access Points (APs) in a WiFi-based network drives the need for frequent handovers leading to increased latency. RFID is an emerging technology consisting of two basic components, a tag and a reader, and its main purpose is the automatic identification of tagged objects by a reader. However, in the presence of multiple readers, RFID suffers from the so-called reader collision problem, mainly due to the inability for direct communication among them. In this paper, we propose a hybrid RFID and WLAN system; the RFID technology is employed for collecting information that is used for both localization and handover management within the WLAN, whereas the WLAN itself is utilized for controlling and coordinating the RFID reading process. In our system architecture, tag IDs of a RFID tag deployment are correlated with both location and topology information in order to determine the position and predict the next subnetwork of a Mobile Node (MN) with a reader attached to its mobile device. The role of the WLAN is to coordinate the readers when accessing the RFID channel for retrieving tags?? IDs, hence compensating the persisting RFID collision problem among multiple readers. Numerical results based on extensive simulations validate the efficiency of the proposed hybrid system in providing accurate and time efficient localization and reducing the IP handover latency.     

Wireless sensor networks: a survey on recent developments and potential synergies

Wireless sensor network (WSN) has emerged as one of the most promising technologies for the future. This has been enabled by advances in technology and availability of small, inexpensive, and smart sensors resulting in cost effective and easily deployable WSNs. However, researchers must address a variety of challenges to facilitate the widespread deployment of WSN technology in real-world domains. In this survey, we give an overview of wireless sensor networks and their application domains including the challenges that should be addressed in order to push the technology further. Then we review the recent technologies and testbeds for WSNs. Finally, we identify several open research issues that need to be investigated in future. Our survey is different from existing surveys in that we focus on recent developments in wireless sensor network technologies. We review the leading research projects, standards and technologies, and platforms. Moreover, we highlight a recent phenomenon in WSN research that is to explore synergy between sensor networks and other technologies and explain how this can help sensor networks achieve their full potential. This paper intends to help new researchers entering the domain of WSNs by providing a comprehensive survey on recent developments.     

Scene analysis indoor positioning enhancements

The emergence of innovative location-oriented services and the great advances in mobile computing and wireless networking motivated the development of positioning systems in indoor environments. However, despite the benefits from location awareness within a building, the implicating indoor characteristics and increased user mobility impeded the implementation of accurate and time-efficient indoor localizers. In this paper, we consider the case of indoor positioning based on the correlation between location and signal intensity of the received Wi-Fi signals. This is due to the wide availability of WLAN infrastructure and the ease of obtaining such signal strength (SS) measurements by standard 802.11 cards. With our focus on the radio scene analysis (or fingerprinting) positioning method, we study both deterministic and probabilistic schemes. We then describe techniques to improve their accuracy without increasing considerably the processing time and hardware requirements of the system. More precisely, we first propose considering orientation information and simple SS sample processing during the training of the system or the entire localization process. For dealing with the expanded search space after adding orientation-sensitive information, we suggest a hierarchical pattern matching method during the real-time localization phase. Numerical results based on real experimental measurements demonstrated a noticeable performance enhancement, especially for the deterministic case which has additionally the advantage of being less complex compared to the probabilistic one.     

A new policy‐aware terminal for QoS,AAA and mobility management

Policy‐based management has been widely studied in recent years. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has recently introduced the policy‐based networking as a means of managing IP networks according to the new constraints defined in the network, such as the guarantee of the quality of service (QoS). Network management based on policies, is modelled as a state machine, which moves from one state to another according to the enforced policy. The IETF policy‐based networking is defined for application to network nodes. However, some recent work suggests extending the policy‐based networking to the end‐user terminals. In this paper, we present an analysis of such an extension and we propose some possible solutions to support new policy‐aware terminals. In addition, we present AAA, QoS and mobility management that user such a policy‐aware terminals. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Path selection algorithms for fault tolerance in wireless mesh networks

Recently Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged as a key technology for providing high-bandwidth networking among peer nodes over a specific coverage area. Features such as low cost, ease of deployment, self-configuration and self-healing make them one of the most promising global telecommunication systems. Despite their advantages, however, several research challenges remain in all protocol layers. In this paper, we address the main challenging issues related to the routing aspects in a WMN. Routing in such networks is performed through multi-hop paths where intermediate nodes cooperatively make forwarding decisions based on their knowledge regarding the network topology. However, in an unideal dynamic environment due to frequent or rare node failures/misbehavior, traditional ad-hoc routing protocols suffer from high routing overhead or energy consumption. Motivated by this, we propose several path selection algorithms which adapt to such topology dynamics. The main objective of these routing schemes is to provide fault tolerance without sacrificing the energy and computational complexity efficiency. Numerical investigations, based on extensive simulations, validate the effectiveness of our proposals even when faulty nodes subsist in the environment.     

QoS-aware handover control in current and future wireless/mobile networks

In this article we propose to enhance a handover management in a QoS and 4G based environments by providing a handover decision mechanism that considers QoS and other policies constraints. We introduce a policy based handover by combining the mobility management with the policy based architecture in order to achieve handovers that are triggered not only on the signal strength basis, but also on policy constraints such as cost, resource availability or load balancing. The policy based architecture will provide the handover triggering mechanism and the decision support related to the best next cell where the mobile node will move to. We also introduce mobility parameters in the Service Level Specification (sls) that specifies the handover type, the accepted handover packet loss, and the accepted handover delay. Based on thesesls mobility parameters, the QoS service classes can be mapped to the smooth handover (minimum packet loss), the fast handover (minimum delay), or the seamless handover (fast and smooth).     

Signalling analysis in integrated 4G networks

Scarce radio resources and the ambition to increase the number of mobile customers with a guarantee of service are pushing mobile communication systems from homogeneous non‐service convergent 2G and convergent‐service 2.5G and 3G wireless systems to heterogeneous integrated and convergent service 4G networks. This evolution has had several consequences from network design, control and service management points of view. In the emerging integrated 4G networks one of the issues is the signalling of information related to different control purposes such as QoS, mobility and security signalling. In fact, some questions such as which are the candidate signalling protocols, and which approach of integrated signalling to be adopted (unified versus non‐unified) need to be considered in the context of the emerging 4G integrated network. This is precisely the scope of this paper. We first identify the requirements related to mobility, security/AAA and QoS signalling, then we consider candidate signalling protocols and we propose possible approaches in the integration of signalling in the context of 4G networks. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.