28041902
Guest Editorial: Special Section on Wireless Internet
WIRELESS communications have made spectacular progress in recent years. In particular, the merge of various wireless communication systems and the Internet has become more critical so that users can enjoy all kinds of services in the Internet while owning mobility. For example, modern wireless networks can support Internet applications for web accessing and multimedia services. Many issues need to be addressed for such combinations. Host mobility adds a new dimension to many research issues, such as network protocols, resource managements, Web access, and multimedia transmission. For different applications, diverse traffic types should be supported. Lightweight mobile computing devices, such as PDAs and Bluetooth, will be attached to the Internet. Various wireless communication devices, such as Bluetooth and wireless LANs, will be hooked up to the Internet. All these issues bring new challenges. This special section is targeted at the related issues in wireless Internet. More than 50 submissions were received, and 10 papers were accepted in this special issue. The first five papers cover the service issues in wireless Internet. The paper by B. Emako, R. Glitho, and S. Pierre discusses the design, implementation, and evaluation issues of wireless Internet telephony. Y. Lee and I.F. Akyildiz present a new scheme to reduce the link and signaling costs in Mobile IP. The paper by P. McKinley, U.I. Padmanabhan, N. Ancha, and S.M. Sadjadi describes a composable proxy infrastructure that enables mobile Internet users to collaborate via heterogeneous devices and network connections. V.A. Chitre and J.N. Daigle present an analytical model to assess GPRS’s capability of supporting IP-based Internet services. Performance optimization of VoIP calls over wireless links using H.323 protocol is proposed by S.K. Das, E. Lee, K. Basu, and S.K. Sen. Thenextsetof threepaperscovers issuesrelatedtowireless LANs and sensor networks. The important coverage issue concerning the deployment of sensors in a wireless ad hoc sensor network is addressed in the first paper by X.-Y. Li, P.-J. Wan, and O. Frieder. A polling mechanism to support QoS in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs is proposed by S.-C. Lo, G. Lee, and W.-T. Chen. Formation of scatternets for Bluetooth-based wireless networks is discussed in the paper by C. Petrioli, S. Basagni, and I. Chlamtac. The last set of two papers covers management issues in mobile networks. An analysis for movement-based mobility management in mobile networks is discussed in the first paper by Y. Fang, who makes a thorough numerical analysis for finding the optimal mobility management under various network operation scenarios possible. Admission control for schedulingbursty traffic inCDMAsystems isdiscussed in the paper by Y.-K. Kwok and V.K.N. Lau, where six efficient rate allocation schemes are proposed. Finally, wewould like to take the opportunity to thank the contributingauthors, reviewers, theAreaEditor,Dr. S.L.Min, and the Editor-in-Chief, Professor J.-L. Gaudiot. Without their support, this special section would not be possible.
22500122
Performance of hot billing mobile prepaid service
Abstract Prepaid service has become an important mobile application with rapid growth for subscription rate in the recent years. Implementation of prepaid service may generate large network traffic that significantly affects the performance of a mobile network. This paper studies the hot billing solution for prepaid service. We investigate how the amount of prepaid credit and the frequency of call detail record (CDR) transmissions affect network signaling and potential bad debt that a service provider may bear. Our study suggests that a prepaid service provider should encourage customers to buy large prepaid credits by giving them discounts. Furthermore, based on call traffic, an optimal CDR transmission frequency can be found by using our modeling technique.
27686957
Determining the Global Progress of Parallel Simulation
2805042
A new random walk model for PCS networks
This paper proposes a new approach to simplify the two-dimensional random walk models capturing the movement of mobile users in personal communications services (PCS) networks. Analytical models are proposed for the new random walks. For a PCS network with hexagonal configuration, our approach reduces the states of the two-dimensional random walk from (3n/sup 2/+3n-5) to n(n+1)/2, where n is the layers of a cluster. For a mesh configuration, our approach reduces the states from (2n2-2n+1) to (n/sup 2/+2n+4)/4 if n is even and to (n/sup 2/+2n+5)/4 if n is odd. Simulation experiments are conducted to validate the analytical models. The results indicate that the errors between the analytical and simulation models are within 1%. Three applications (i.e., microcell/macrocell configuration, distance-based location update, and GPRS mobility management for data routing) are used to show how our new model can be used to investigate the performance of PCS networks.
15619003
A Graphical User Interface Design for Network Simulation
Abstract This article describes a prototyping effort of a flexible graphical user interface (GUI) for a simulation tool called COPS. The GUI is designed to allow parameter setup for all modules in simulation model, and can be easily replaced by new GUIs implemented in different languages/graphical tools. This article provides design guidelines and implementation details of the flexible GUI.
16848330
A flexible graphical user interface for performance modeling
We identify three goals for the graphical user interface (GUI) of a network simulation environment: user friendliness, model re-usability, and application extensibility. We address the user friendliness issue by proposing a simple yet efficient approach to setup parameters for the simulation models. We address the application extensibility issue by a two-layer GUI architecture. The two layers are loosely-coupled, and the first layer can be easily replaced (without affecting the other components of the simulation environment). We address the model re-usability issue by subnetworks. Unlike most existing simulation packages where subnetwork is simply a method to group the nodes, the subnetwork construct in our approach is an integral part of the simulation environment (i.e., all operations for a basic node also apply to a subnetwork). The port concept is used to explicitly define the I/O relationship between a subnetwork and the outside world. Parameter dialog boxes are used to set up the parameters for a subnetwork conveniently. Finally, a simple stack mechanism is proposed to measure subnetwork-wide output statistics.<<ETX>>
6671545
LES: A Layout Expert System
In this paper we describe an expert system for layout generation in a hierarchical VLSI design system. It applies a combination of rule- and algorithmic-based techniques on a new layout style. Experimental results have demonstrated the superiority of this expert system against various standard-cell systems and its competitiveness with human designers.
8520040
The embedded software consortium of taiwan
The advancement of semiconductor manufacturing technology makes it practical to place a traditional board-level embedded system on a single chip. The evolvement of system-on-chip (SoC) techniques presents new challenges for integrated circuit designs as well as embedded software and systems. To address these challenges, the Ministry of Education (MOE) of Taiwan has been running the VLSI Circuits and Systems Education Program since 1996. This program adopts a top-down approach by forming six domain-specific, intercollegiate consortia. The Embedded Software (ESW) consortium addresses the challenges of embedded software for SoC systems. This paper first introduces the six-consortium architecture and the organization and programs of ESW. We next describe the embedded software curriculum developed by ESW. This curriculum will later be implemented in most universities and colleges in Taiwan to promote the capabilities of embedded software design and implementations. Finally, we present an execution summary of ESW 2004.
13768633
Software Defined Radio - A High Performance Embedded Challenge
Wireless communication is one of the most computationally demanding workloads. It is performed by mobile terminals (“cell phones”) and must be accomplished by a small battery powered system. An important goal of the wireless industry is to develop hardware platforms that can support multiple protocols implemented in software (software defined radio) to support seamless end-user service over a variety of wireless networks. An equally important goal is to provide higher and higher data rates. This paper focuses on a study of the wideband code division multiple access protocol, which is one of the dominant third generation wireless standards. We have chosen it as a representative protocol. We provide a detailed analysis of computation and processing requirements of the core algorithms along with the interactions between the components. The goal of this paper is to describe the computational characteristics of this protocol to the computer architecture community, and to provide a high-level analysis of the architectural implications to illustrate one of the protocols that would need to be accommodated in a programmable platform for software defined radio. The computation demands and power limitations of approximately 60 Gops and 100~300 mW, place extremely challenging goals on such a system. Several of the key features of wideband code division multiple access protocol that can be exploited in the architecture include high degrees of vector and task parallelism, small memory footprints for both data and instructions, limited need for complex arithmetic functions such as multiplication, and a highly variable processing load that provides the opportunity to dynamically scale voltage and frequency.
13450793
On IEEE 802.14 medium access control protocol
In this article we present a comprehensive survey on the architecture, protocol issues, and standard of the hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) networks which are evolving from the existing residential CATV networks. We first describe the HFC architecture and discuss the problems in providing two-way communication. Then, we identify three important medium access control (MAC) issues in designing the IEEE 802.14 standard; namely, synchronization, upstream channel access modes, and collision resolution. Resolutions adopted by the IEEE 802.14 Committee are illustrated after giving a protocol overview. Key resolutions include compensating round trip correction (RTC), interleaving minislots of data and request concurrently, and resolving collisions by multiple collision resolution engines, using the n-ary tree plus p-persistence algorithm with a first transmission rule. A comparative summary of some draft proposals that lead to the standard is given. Finally, we pinpoint two headend algorithms, minislot allocation and request scheduling, which are left open in the standard. They do not affect interoperability but may have a critical impact on performance.
31678954
Exposing Phylogenetic Relationships by Genome Rearrangement
Abstract Evolutionary studies based on large-scale rearrangement operations, as opposed to the traditional approaches on point mutations, have been considered as a promising alternative for inferring the evolutionary history of species. Genome rearrangement problems lead to combinatorial puzzles of finding parsimonious scenarios towards measuring what difference species have and explaining how a species evolves from another. Throughout this chapter, we will focus on the introduction of computing the genomic distance, arising from the effects of a set of rearrangement events, between a pair of genomes. In the end, two experiments on Campanulaceae and Proteobacteria are used to simply show how to exploit the genome rearrangement approach for exposing phylogenetic relationships.