Intelligent healthcare service based on context inference using smart device

In the field of “U-Healthcare Service”, many studies have been actively conducted to develop “smart device”-based healthcare applications that enable healthcare providers and patients to be better served through interoperations among various kinds of sensors and wireless network interfaces. In particular, contemporary intelligent healthcare services not only recognize users’ context information through smart devices, computers, and so forth, but also acquire information from heterogeneous sensors to achieve context-aware inference services. Among such information, the weather information is tightly related to diseases such as asthma and allergies. Therefore, there is a high demand for research to utilize the weather information for healthcare services. In this paper, we propose a context inference-based intelligent healthcare service that exploits both the weather conditions information and the diverse healthcare ontologies available on the Internet. The proposed service aims at modeling a context ontology in users’ healthcare service environment and defining the inference rules, thereby accomplishing a satisfactory real-time healthcare service.     

Energy-aware weighted graph based dynamic topology control algorithm

In this paper a new energy-aware weighted dynamic topology control (WDTC) algorithm is proposed to extend the lifetime of wireless network and balance the nodes’ energy consumption. The idea is that each node builds its local minimum spanning tree (MST) based on the energy-aware weighted graph and the network topology is adjusted accordingly. It was proved theoretically that the topology under WDTC algorithm could preserve the network connectivity and a sufficient condition for the degree of no more than 6 was also given. Simulation shows that WDTC algorithm can effectively prolong the network lifetime and has good topological features.     

ACSP: A novel security protocol against counting attack for UHF RFID systems

Current research on UHF RFID system security mainly focus on protecting communication safety and information privacy between a pair of specific tags and its corresponding interrogation reader. However, instead of stealing detailed private information of tags, adversaries may just want to estimate the cardinality of tags, which is named counting attack. Unfortunately, most existing protocols are vulnerable to counting attack. To defend against this attack, in this paper we propose ACSP, a novel Anti-Counting Security Protocol. ACSP employs session identifier and provides a corresponding authentication metric to verify the commands sent by the reader. To handle counting attack, ACSP periodically updates the session identifier, and securely identifies tags with encryption. We evaluate the performance of ACSP through theoretical analysis and qualitative comparison. Results show that ACSP can efficiently withstand counting attack as well as defending against regular security threats as existing protocols.     

A Lease Algorithm to Maintain Strong Mapping Cache Consistency

In the Locator/ID separation protocol (LISP) network, mapping caches are usually used in Ingress tunnel routers to cache recently used identifier-to-locator mappings of remote hosts. When the original mapping in the Egress tunnel router changes, it introduces the problem of cache consistency. In general, the mapping cache supports weak cache consistency by using the time-to-live (TTL) mechanism. However, a stale mapping could lead the packets to a wrong destination. In this paper, we first evaluate the performance of TTL by trace-driven simulation and the results indicate that maintaining strong mapping cache consistency has become an indispensable mechanism in the LISP network. Then we design the lease algorithm to realize the strong consistency and propose analytical models to decide the lease duration based on the state space overhead and the control message overhead, respectively. We present numerical results to estimate the mapping change frequency, to show the impact of different parameters on the lease duration and to explore the relationship between the state space and control message overhead. Finally, we do the trace-driven simulation to compare the lease algorithm to polling-every-time and invalidation in terms of the state space and control messages. The lease algorithm with an appropriate lease duration can balance the state space and the control message overhead while providing strong mapping cache consistency.     

Enhancing QoS of Mobile Devices by a New Handover Process in PMIPv6 Networks

The handover processes in present IP mobility management protocols incur significant latency, thus aggravating QoS of consumer devices. In this paper, we introduce an enhanced handover process for the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) protocol, which is a recently developed IP mobility management protocol aiming at providing network-based mobility support. The proposed handover process further improves handover performance of PMIPv6 by allowing a new access network obtains handover context before a consumer??s mobile node (MN) moves to the new access network. Data packets destined for the MN are buffered to prevent packet loss and immediately delivered to the MN as the MN moves to the new access network. We evaluate the handover latency and data packet loss of the proposed handover process compared to the basic one of PMIPv6. The conducted analysis results confirm that the proposed handover process yields the reduced handover latency compared to that of the basic PMIPv6 and also prevents data packet loss. We moreover evaluate the buffering cost of the proposed handover process.     

A nine node finite element for analysis of geometrically non-linear shells

A nine node finite element is presented for the analysis of thin shell structures undergoing large deflection. The finite element formulation is based on the concept of degenerate solid shell element and the Hellinger-Reissner principle with independent strain. Three versions of assumed independent strain are selected to suppress spurious kinematic modes. One version leads to a finite element model which is kinematically stable at element level while the other two give globally stable models. Numerical tests indicate that the finite element model which is stable at element level may reveal the locking effect in certain cases. However, the other two models are free of locking.     

Study of a nine-node mixed formulation finite element for thin plates and shells

A nine-node element, designated as SHEL9, has been developed for analysis of thin plates and shells. The element formulation is based on the degenerate solid shell concept and a modified Hellinger-Reissner principle with independent in-plane and transverse shear strains. Numerical tests indicate that the present SHEL9 element with uniform 3 × 3 point integration rule is free of locking, and it gives reliable solutions even for thin plates and shells.     

A satellite selection criterion incorporating the effect of elevation angle in GPS positioning

When positioning by global positioning systems, geometric dilution of precision is generally used as a satellite selection criterion. While it takes account of only geometric effects, there are other factors causing positioning error, such as ionospheric delay, tropospheric delay, and multipath. In this paper, a new criterion for satellite selection, which considers the effect of these errors, is proposed and the effectiveness of the proposed criterion is shown.