WINSYS 2011 Abstracts

Area 1 - Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 2 - Wireless and Mobile Technologies
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 3 - Mobile Software and Services
Short Papers

Area 1 - Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 27
Title:

DISTRIBUTED JOINT POWER AND RATE ADAPTATION IN AD HOC NETWORKS
Authors:

Fredrick Mzee Awuor, Karim Djouani and Guillaume Noel
Abstract: Ad hoc networks are dynamic and scalable entities that autonomously adapt to nodes entering the network (i.e. increasing interference) or exiting the network (i.e. due to energy depletion), poor connectivity among others. In such networks, nodes exhibit individualistic behaviours where nodes selfishly compete for the limited network resources (i.e. energy and bandwidth) to maximize their own utilities. This consequently degrades network performance leading to low data rates, poor power efficiency, loss of connectivity etcetera. This paper considers a network utility maximization (NUM) strategy based on coupled interference minimization to adapt the transmission power and data rates in ad hoc networks. The proposed distributive joint power and rate adaptation (JRPA) algorithm employs costing (and reward) mechanisms to promote users’ cooperation such that both users’ local and network global optimum is always attained. This is similar to a super-modular game hence the optimality and convergence of JRPA is analysed using super-modular game theory. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm improves network performance since users’ are compels to transmit at optimal data rates and power levels just enough to sustain the transmission.
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Paper Nr: 44
Title:

APPLICATION OF ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION TO DEVELOP ENERGY EFFICIENT PROTOCOL IN MOBILE AD-HOC NETWORKS
Authors:

Sanjay K. Dhurandher, Mohammad S. Obaidat and Mayank Gupta
Abstract: Foraging Behavior in Ant Swarms can be very helpful when applied to the protocols in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs). When the Ant Colony Optimization Scheme (ACO) is applied to a protocol, larger number of paths are generated from the source to destination which helps in improving the packet delivery ratio because an alternate back up path is always available in case a path gets broken due to the mobile nodes. In this paper, we apply the ACO scheme on an already existing Energy efficient protocol Conditional Max-Min Battery Capacity Routing (CMMBCR) (C.-K. Toh, 2001). The CMMBCR not only takes care of the total transmission energy in the network but also the residual battery capacity of the nodes. Hence applying ACO scheme on CMMBCR makes it more efficient in terms of energy, packet delivery ratio etc. The efficiency of our proposed protocol A-CMMBCR is then established by comparing it with some of the other existing Energy aware protocols such as Energy-Aware Routing protocol (EAAR) (Dhurandher et al., 2009), Minimum Transmission Power Routing (MTPR) (Scott and Bambos, 1996) and CMMBCR. The results are captured in the form of a graphical format.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 7
Title:

DEVELOPMENT TOOLS FOR PERVASIVE COMPUTING IN EMBEDDED SYSTEMS (PECES) MIDDLEWARE
Authors:

Ran Zhao, Kirusnapillai Selvarajah and Neil Speirs
Abstract: The main objective of the PECES project is the development of system software to enable the communication among heterogeneous devices across multiple smart spaces, breaking the traditional barrier of “smart islands” where only the services offered in a nearby spatial area can be used easily. PECES development tools help the application developer to build and test the PECES middleware based applications. This paper presents a set of tools, namely Peces Project, Peces Device Definition, Peces Ontology Instantiation, Peces Service Definition and Peces Role Specification Definition which enable application developers to build the PECES middleware based application using the novel concepts such as role assignment context ontologies and heterogeneous communication technologies. Furthermore, this paper proposes new tools which enable to model and simulate the smart space applications.
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Paper Nr: 8
Title:

MAC SCHEDULING IN LARGE-SCALE UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC NETWORKS
Authors:

Wouter van Kleunen, Nirvana Meratnia and Paul J. M. Havinga
Abstract: The acoustic propagation speed under water poses significant challenges to the design of underwater sensor networks and their medium access control protocols. Scheduling allows reducing the effects of long propagation delay of the acoustic signal and has significant impacts on throughput, energy consumption, and reliability. In this paper we propose two approaches for scheduling large-scale underwater networks. One approach is a centralized scheduling approach, which yields the most efficient schedules but has significant communication and computational overhead. Our second approach uses clustering to split up the network in independent clusters. This approach provides significant benefits in terms of communication and computation, but yields less efficient schedules than the centralized approach. We evaluate both approaches in terms of efficiency, communication overhead and computation overhead of the resulting schedule. We show that the centralized approach yield the best schedule at the cost of significant communication and computation overhead. The distributed scheduling approach yield less efficient schedules but offers significant communication and computational complexity advantages.
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Paper Nr: 12
Title:

DEPLOYMENT OF A WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK IN A VINEYARD
Authors:

José A. Gay-Fernández and Iñigo Cuiñas
Abstract: A complete analysis for the deployment of a wireless sensor network in a vineyard is presented in this paper. First, due to the lack of propagation models for peer to peer networks in plantations, propagation experiments have been carried out to determine the propagation equations. This model was then used for planning and deploying an actual wireless sensor network. Afterwards, some sensor data are presented and finally, some general conclusions are extracted from the experiments and presented in the paper.
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Paper Nr: 16
Title:

QOS-AWARE MULTIPATH ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR DELAY SENSITIVE APPLICATIONS IN MANETS - A Cross-layer Approach
Authors:

Mu’ath Obaidat, M. A. Ali, Ihsan Shahwan, M. S. Obaidat and Suhaib Obeidat
Abstract: This paper proposes a QoS multipath routing protocol (QMRP) for MANETs based on the single path AODV routing protocol. QMRP establishes node-disjoint paths that experience the lowest delay. Other delay-aware routing protocols do not factor in the projected contribution of the node requesting a route in the total network load. The implication is that the end-to-end (E2E) delay obtained through RREQ is no longer accurate. Unlike its predecessors, QMRP takes into account the projected contribution of the source node in the calculation of E2E delay. To obtain accurate estimate of path delay, QMRP uses cross-layer communication to achieve link and channel-awareness. Performance evaluation of QMRP and comparison with AODV using OPNET show that QMRP outperforms AODV in terms of average throughput, delay and packet loss has been conducted.
Paper Nr: 26
Title:

FINGERPRINT INDOOR POSITION SYSTEM BASED ON OPENMAC
Authors:

A. Verónica Medina, José A. Gómez, Octavio Rivera, Enrique Dorronzoro and Manuel Merino
Abstract: This paper presents a work in progress for the developing of a fingerprint indoor position system based on OpenMAC, an IEEE 802.15.4 embedded software implementation from Atmel to be used in different scenarios like e_health, ambient living or smart building. The system is thought to work as another one that we have yet developed but using the BitCloud Stack, a full-featured, second generation embedded software stack from the same supplier, but improving it. The first steps followed up in the system development are shown in this paper.
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Paper Nr: 29
Title:

PROTECTION AGAINST BYZANTINE ATTACKS ON WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
Authors:

Björn Stelte
Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks are vulnerable to many different kind of attacks. Especially insider attacks known as Byzantine attacks are very harmful and is not easy to defend a wireless sensor network against such attacks. The problem is that insider attacks are much easier to perform in sensor networks than in classical computer networks. The presented concept of a cluster-based sensor network is based on cluster heads equipped with data diodes and can be used to prevent Byzantine attacks. To reduce the impact of cluster head tampering a security mechanism based on the Byzantine Generals's Problem will be introduced. Finally, details concerning our implementation of cluster nodes on low-power FPGA are given.
Paper Nr: 18
Title:

MULTIPLE TARGETS DETECTION AND LOCALIZATION BASED ON BLIND ESTIMATION IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK
Authors:

Peng Zhang, Xiaoyong Deng, Huimin Wen and Jifu Guo
Abstract: Observations of sensors are modeled as mixed signals in multiple targets scenario. Each element of mixing matrix represents the power decay of a pair of target and sensor, and each column preserves the waveform formed by the corresponding target respectively. Making use of blind estimation algorithms, we get the estimation of mixing matrix. Target locations are then estimated using the least squares method.
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Paper Nr: 22
Title:

A LOAD-BALANCED TOPOLOGY MAINTENANCE WITH PARTIAL RECONSTRUCTION OF CONNECTED DOMINATING SETS
Authors:

Youn-Sik Hong, Hwa-Seok Lim and Chol-Ho Lee
Abstract: Node failure in a connected dominating set (CDS) is an event of non-negligible probability. For applications where fault tolerance is critical, a traditional dominating-set based routing may not be a desirable form of clustering. For a typical localized algorithm to construct CDS, it has the time complexity of ?(?^3), where ? is the maximum degree of an input graph. In this paper we inspect the problem of load balancing in a dominating-set based routing. The motivation of load balancing is to prolong the network lifetime, while minimize the partitions of the network due to node failure, where they cause interruptions in communication among nodes. The idea is that by finding alternative nodes within a restricted range and locally reconstructing a CDS to include them, instead of totally reconstructing a new CDS. The number of nodes which should be awaken during partial reconstruction is less than 2(?-1)*?, where ? is the number of nodes from CDS and the number of neighbour of the faulty node.
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Paper Nr: 42
Title:

EFFICIENT NETWORK DESIGN FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING APPLICATIONS - A Practical Approach
Authors:

Farooq Sultan and Salam A. Zummo
Abstract: The deployment of a wireless sensor network is highly dependent on the target environment. Once the characteristics of the desired area are know, the question of network size arises. Factors like transmission power level, cost of network deployment and the coverage area directly affect the size of the network. This paper analyzes the behaviour of a typical multi-hop wireless sensor network operating in an outdoor environment. By considering two separate cases; fixed cost and fixed deployment area, we present best network set-up statistics based on actual received power measurements.
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Area 2 - Wireless and Mobile Technologies

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 11
Title:

MODULATION-MODE ASSIGNMENT IN SVD-ASSISTED MULTIUSER MIMO-OFDM SYSTEMS
Authors:

Sebastian Aust, Andreas Ahrens and César Benavente-Peces
Abstract: In order to comply with the demand on increasing available data rates in particular in wireless technologies, systems with multiple transmit and receive antennas, also called MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) systems, have become indispensable for future generations of wireless systems. Due to the strongly increasing demand in high-data rate transmission systems, frequency non-selective MIMO links have reached a state of maturity and frequency selective MIMO links are in the focus of interest. In this field, the combination of MIMO transmission and OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) can be considered as an essential part of fulfilling the requirements of future generations of wireless systems. However, single-user scenarios have reached a state of maturity. By contrast multiple users’ scenarios require substantial further research, where in comparison to ZF (zero-forcing) multiuser transmission techniques, the individual user’s channel characteristics are taken into consideration in this contribution. The performed joint optimization of the number of activated MIMO layers and the number of transmitted bits per subcarrier along with the appropriate allocation of the transmit power shows that not necessarily all user-specific MIMO layers per subcarrier have to be activated in order to minimize the overall BER under the constraint of a given fixed data throughput.
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Paper Nr: 23
Title:

EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION FOR TR-UWB SYSTEMS - By Time Delayed Sampling & Correlation (TDSC)
Authors:

Jorge A. Pardiñas-Mir, Muriel Muller, Roger Lamberti and Claude Gimenes
Abstract: Detection results of transmitted reference ultra-wideband signals (TR-UWB) are presented. The signals are received through the implementation in CMOS technology of the ‘Time Delayed Sampling and Correlation’ (TDSC) detection method, which allows the test of its performance and validates the first stage of the synchronization process. This method has been proposed to achieve a UWB system with low cost, low complexity and low power consumption for medium to low data rate applications such as ranging or localization. Detection of such signals has been done successfully in both a direct cable connection as well in a wireless system with a real channel. In both cases they were used in the sub GHz band (group1) and also in the low band UWB signals.
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Paper Nr: 43
Title:

CONGESTION CONTROL WITH DYNAMIC THRESHOLD ADAPTATION AND CROSS-LAYER RESPONSE FOR TCP OVER IEEE 80.11 WIRELESS NETWORKS
Authors:

Rung-Shiang Cheng, Der-Jiunn Deng and Han-Chieh Chao
Abstract: Wireless technologies provide mobile access and enable rapid and cost-effective network deployment. But a wireless link is generally accompanied by high interference, transmission errors and a varying latency. The erratic packet losses usually lead to a curbing of the flow of segments on the TCP connection, and thus limit TCP performance. This paper presents a threshold control mechanism with cross-layer response approach for improving TCP Vegas performance in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. By making slight modifications to the legacy IEEE 802.11 MAC and TCP, the numerical results reveal that the proposed scheme provides a significant improvement in TCP performance under IEEE 802.11 wireless environments.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 10
Title:

WIDEBAND WIRELESS PROPAGATION IN CONFINED SPACES
Authors:

Asrar U. H. Sheikh, M. Imran Akram and Khurram Masood
Abstract: This paper presents the results of channel sounding experiment performed in confined environment. The swept time-delay cross-correlation technique is used as a method for sounding to measure the channel impulse response (CIR). PDF of the envelope and power for the received CIR is presented.The path loss exponent has been calculated. The data has been analysed for impulse response and channel parameters like average delay, rms delay spread, number of paths and channel bandwidth. The CIR is used in calculation of total received power.
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Paper Nr: 41
Title:

COMPLEXITY ANALYSIS OF A HYBRID THRESHOLD-BASED ZF-MMSE EQUALIZER FOR SIC-BASED MIMO-OFDM RECEIVERS
Authors:

Nikolaos I. Miridakis and Dimitrios D. Vergados
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new reception scheme for MIMO-OFDM systems, which can switch between two different equalization methodologies, accordingly, on a subcarrier basis. In fact, the proposed receiver is based on the ordered successive interference cancellation (SIC) technique and uses jointly zero forcing SIC (ZF-SIC) and minimum mean squared error SIC (MMSE-SIC) according to a defined threshold value. The modulation scheme considered in this study is QPSK. Our main objective, here, is the provision of the computational complexity efficiency. Hence, a complexity analysis is provided and upper and lower complexity bounds for the proposed scheme are also derived.
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Paper Nr: 39
Title:

AN INTELLIGENT MAINTENANCE BASED ON MACHINE LEARNING APPROACH FOR WIRELESS AND MOBILE SYSTEMS
Authors:

Amine Chohra, Felicita Di Giandomenico, Stefano Porcarelli and Andrea Bondavalli
Abstract: To enhance wireless and mobile system dependability, audit operations are necessary, to periodically check the database consistency and recover in case of data corruption. Consequently, how to tune the database audit parameters and which operation order and frequency to apply becomes important aspects, to optimize performance and satisfy a certain degree of Quality of Service, over system life-cycle. The aim of this work is then to suggest an intelligent maintenance system based on reinforcement Q-Learning approach, built of a given audit operation set and an audit manager, in order to maximize the performance (performability and unreliability). For this purpose, a methodology, based on deterministic and stochastic Petri nets, to model and analyze the dependability attributes of different scheduled audit strategies is first developed. Afterwards, an intelligent (reinforcement Q-Learning) software agent approach is developed for planning and learning to derive optimal maintenance policies adaptively dealing with the highly dynamic evolution of the environmental conditions. This intelligent approach, is then implemented with feedforward artificial neural networks under the supervised gradient back-propagation learning to guarantee the success even with large state spaces, exploits intelligent behaviors traits (learning, adaptation, generalization, and robustness) to derive optimal actions in different system states in order to achieve an intelligent maintenance system.
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Area 3 - Mobile Software and Services

Short Papers
Paper Nr: 38
Title:

EFFICIENT DELEGATION-BASED AUTHENTICATION PROTOCOL WITH STRONG MOBILE PRIVACY
Authors:

Jian-Zhu Lu, Hong-Qing Ren and Jipeng Zhou
Abstract: In 2008, Tang and Wu designed a one-time alias mechanism for protecting the mobile privacy of a user. Recently, Youn and Lim proposed an improved delegation-based authentication protocol to provide private roaming service. In this article, we show that a link between requests may disclose information about the mobile privacy of a sender, and that the aliases of a user fail to achieve the unlinkability in Tan-Wu’s scheme. We remedy this situation by suggesting an enhanced protocol that utilizes a pseudorandom function. Compared to Youn-Lim’s protocol, our design is more efficient than theirs.
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