Amorphous Placement and Informed Diffusion for Timely Monitoring by Autonomous, Resource-Constrained, Mobile Sensors

Personal communication devices are increasingly equipped with sensors for passive monitoring of encounters and surroundings. We envision the emergence of services that enable a community of mobile users carrying such resource-limited devices to query such information at remote locations in the field in which they collectively roam. One approach to implement such a service is directed placement and retrieval (DPR), whereby readings/queries about a specific location are routed to a node responsible for that location. In a mobile, potentially sparse setting, where end-to-end paths are unavailable, DPR is not an attractive solution as it would require the use of delay-tolerant (flooding-based store-carry-forward) routing of both readings and queries, which is inappropriate for applications with data freshness constraints, and which is incompatible with stringent device power/memory constraints. Alternatively, we propose the use of amorphous placement and retrieval (APR), in which routing and field monitoring are integrated through the use of a cache management scheme coupled with an informed exchange of cached samples to diffuse sensory data throughout the network, in such a way that a query answer is likely to be found close to the query origin. We argue that knowledge of the distribution of query targets could be used effectively by an informed cache management policy to maximize the utility of collective storage of all devices. Using a simple analytical model, we show that the use of informed cache management is particularly important when the mobility model results in a non-uniform distribution of users over the field. We present results from extensive simulations which show that in sparsely-connected networks, APR is more cost-effective than DPR, that it provides extra resilience to node failure and packet losses, and that its use of informed cache management yields superior performance

Mengenal pasti masalah pemahaman dan hubungannya dengan latar belakang matematik, gaya pembelajaran, motivasi dan minat pelajar terhadap bab pengawalan kos makanan di Sekolah Menengah Teknik (ert) Rembau: satu kajian kes.

Kajian ini dijalankan untuk mengkaji hubungan korelasi antara latar belakang Matematik, gaya pembelajaran, motivasi dan minat dengan pemahaman pelajar terhadap bab tersebut. Responden adalah seramai 30 orang iaitu terdiri daripada pelajar tingkatan lima kursus Katering, Sekolah Menengah Teknik (ERT) Rembau, Negeri Sembilan. Instrumen kajian adalah soal selidik dan semua data dianalisis menggunakan program SPSS versi 10.0 untuk mendapatkan nilai min dan nilai korelasi bagi memenuhi objektif yang telah ditetapkan. Hasil kajian ini menunjukkan bahawa hubungan korelasi antara gaya pembelajaran pelajar terhadap pemahaman pelajar adalah kuat. Manakala hubungan korelasi antara latar belakang Matematik, motivasi dan minat terhadap pemahaman pelajar adalah sederhana. Nilai tahap min bagi masalah pemahaman pelajar, latar belakang Matematik, gaya pembelajaran, motivasi dan minat terhadap bab Pengawalan Kos Makanan adalah sederhana. Kajian ini mencadangkan penghasilan satu Modul Pembelajaran Kendiri bagi bab Pengawalan Kos Makanan untuk membantu pelajar kursus Katering dalam proses pembelajaran mereka

A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

Distributed Clustering in Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks Using Soft-Constraint Affinity Propagation

Absence of network infrastructure and heterogeneous spectrum availability in cognitive radio ad hoc networks (CRAHNs) necessitate the self-organization of cognitive radio users (CRs) for efficient spectrum coordination. The cluster-based structure is known to be effective in both guaranteeing system performance and reducing communication overhead in variable network environment. In this paper, we propose a distributed clustering algorithm based on soft-constraint affinity propagation message passing model (DCSCAP). Without dependence on predefined common control channel (CCC), DCSCAP relies on the distributed message passing among CRs through their available channels, making the algorithm applicable for large scale networks. Different from original soft-constraint affinity propagation algorithm, the maximal iterations of message passing is controlled to a relatively small number to accommodate to the dynamic environment of CRAHNs. Based on the accumulated evidence for clustering from the message passing process, clusters are formed with the objective of grouping the CRs with similar spectrum availability into smaller number of clusters while guaranteeing at least one CCC in each cluster. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the preference of DCSCAP compared with existing algorithms in both efficiency and robustness of the clusters