On feedback-based rateless codes for data collection in vehicular networks

The ability to transfer data reliably and with low delay over an unreliable service is intrinsic to a number of emerging technologies, including digital video broadcasting, over-the-air software updates, public/private cloud storage, and, recently, wireless vehicular networks. In particular, modern vehicles incorporate tens of sensors to provide vital sensor information to electronic control units (ECUs). In the current architecture, vehicle sensors are connected to ECUs via physical wires, which increase the cost, weight and maintenance effort of the car, especially as the number of electronic components keeps increasing. To mitigate the issues with physical wires, wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been contemplated for replacing the current wires with wireless links, making modern cars cheaper, lighter, and more efficient. However, the ability to reliably communicate with the ECUs is complicated by the dynamic channel properties that the car experiences as it travels through areas with different radio interference patterns, such as urban versus highway driving, or even different road quality, which may physically perturb the wireless sensors. This thesis develops a suite of reliable and efficient communication schemes built upon feedback-based rateless codes, and with a target application of vehicular networks. In particular, we first investigate the feasibility of multi-hop networking for intra-car WSN, and illustrate the potential gains of using the Collection Tree Protocol (CTP), the current state of the art in multi-hop data aggregation. Our results demonstrate, for example, that the packet delivery rate of a node using a single-hop topology protocol can be below 80% in practical scenarios, whereas CTP improves reliability performance beyond 95% across all nodes while simultaneously reducing radio energy consumption. Next, in order to migrate from a wired intra-car network to a wireless system, we consider an intermediate step to deploy a hybrid communication structure, wherein wired and wireless networks coexist. Towards this goal, we design a hybrid link scheduling algorithm that guarantees reliability and robustness under harsh vehicular environments. We further enhance the hybrid link scheduler with the rateless codes such that information leakage to an eavesdropper is almost zero for finite block lengths. In addition to reliability, one key requirement for coded communication schemes is to achieve a fast decoding rate. This feature is vital in a wide spectrum of communication systems, including multimedia and streaming applications (possibly inside vehicles) with real-time playback requirements, and delay-sensitive services, where the receiver needs to recover some data symbols before the recovery of entire frame. To address this issue, we develop feedback-based rateless codes with dynamically-adjusted nonuniform symbol selection distributions. Our simulation results, backed by analysis, show that feedback information paired with a nonuniform distribution significantly improves the decoding rate compared with the state of the art algorithms. We further demonstrate that amount of feedback sent can be tuned to the specific transmission properties of a given feedback channel

Error resilient stereoscopic video streaming using model-based fountain codes

Ankara : The Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and the Institute of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2009.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Bilkent University, 2009.Includes bibliographical references leaves 101-110.Error resilient digital video streaming has been a challenging problem since the introduction and deployment of early packet switched networks. One of the most recent advances in video coding is observed on multi-view video coding which suggests methods for the compression of correlated multiple image sequences. The existing multi-view compression techniques increase the loss sensitivity and necessitate the use of efficient loss recovery schemes. Forward Error Correction (FEC) is an efficient, powerful and practical tool for the recovery of lost data. A novel class of FEC codes is Fountain codes which are suitable to be used with recent video codecs, such as H.264/AVC, and LT and Raptor codes are practical examples of this class. Although there are many studies on monoscopic video, transmission of multi-view video through lossy channels with FEC have not been explored yet. Aiming at this deficiency, an H.264-based multi-view video codec and a model-based Fountain code are combined to generate an effi- cient error resilient stereoscopic streaming system. Three layers of stereoscopic video with unequal importance are defined in order to exploit the benefits of Unequal Error Protection (UEP) with FEC. Simply, these layers correspond to intra frames of left view, predicted frames of left view and predicted frames of right view. The Rate-Distortion (RD) characteristics of these dependent layers are de- fined by extending the RD characteristics of monoscopic video. The parameters of the models are obtained with curve fitting using the RD samples of the video, and satisfactory results are achieved where the average difference between the analytical models and RD samples is between 1.00% and 9.19%. An heuristic analytical model of the performance of Raptor codes is used to obtain the residual number of lost packets for given channel bit rate, loss rate, and protection rate. This residual number is multiplied with the estimated average distortion of the loss of a single Network Abstraction Layer (NAL) unit to obtain the total transmission distortion. All these models are combined to minimize the end-toend distortion and obtain optimal encoder bit rates and UEP rates. When the proposed system is used, the simulation results demonstrate up to 2dB increase in quality compared to equal error protection and only left view error protection. Furthermore, Fountain codes are analyzed in the finite length region, and iterative performance models are derived without any assumptions or asymptotical approximations. The performance model of the belief-propagation (BP) decoder approximates either the behavior of a single simulation results or their average depending on the parameters of the LT code. The performance model of the maximum likelihood decoder approximates the average of simulation results more accurately compared to the model of the BP decoder. Raptor codes are modeled heuristically based on the exponential decay observed on the simulation results, and the model parameters are obtained by line of best fit. The analytical models of systematic and non-systematic Raptor codes accurately approximate the experimental average performance.Tan, A SerdarPh.D

Community computation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-186).In this thesis we lay the foundations for a distributed, community-based computing environment to tap the resources of a community to better perform some tasks, either computationally hard or economically prohibitive, or physically inconvenient, that one individual is unable to accomplish efficiently. We introduce community coding, where information systems meet social networks, to tackle some of the challenges in this new paradigm of community computation. We design algorithms, protocols and build system prototypes to demonstrate the power of community computation to better deal with reliability, scalability and security issues, which are the main challenges in many emerging community-computing environments, in several application scenarios such as community storage, community sensing and community security. For example, we develop a community storage system that is based upon a distributed P2P (peer-to-peer) storage paradigm, where we take an array of small, periodically accessible, individual computers/peer nodes and create a secure, reliable and large distributed storage system. The goal is for each one of them to act as if they have immediate access to a pool of information that is larger than they could hold themselves, and into which they can contribute new stuff in a both open and secure manner. Such a contributory and self-scaling community storage system is particularly useful where reliable infrastructure is not readily available in that such a system facilitates easy ad-hoc construction and easy portability. In another application scenario, we develop a novel framework of community sensing with a group of image sensors. The goal is to present a set of novel tools in which software, rather than humans, examines the collection of images sensed by a group of image sensors to determine what is happening in the field of view. We also present several design principles in the aspects of community security. In one application example, we present community-based email spain detection approach to deal with email spams more efficiently.by Fulu Li.Ph.D

Efficient Performance and Lower Complexity of Error Control Schemes for WPAN Bluetooth Networks, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2014, nr 4

This paper presents a new technique of reduction retransmission time by decreasing the discarded packets and combating the complexity through error control techniques. The work is based on Bluetooth, one of the most common Wireless Personal Area Network. Its early versions employ an expurgated Hamming code for error correction. In this paper, a new packet format using different error correction coding scheme and new formats for the EDR Bluetooth packets are presented. A study for the Packet Error Probability of classic and Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) packets is also presented to indicate the performance. The simulation experiments are performed over Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh flat-fading channels. The experimental results reveal that the proposed coding scheme for EDR packets enhances the power efficiency of the Bluetooth system and reduce the losses of EDR packets

Embracing corruption burstiness: Fast error recovery for ZigBee under wi-Fi interference

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.The ZigBee communication can be easily and severely interfered by Wi-Fi traffic. Error recovery, as an important means for ZigBee to survive Wi-Fi interference, has been extensively studied in recent years. The existing works add upfront redundancy to in-packet blocks for recovering a certain number of random corruptions. Therefore the bursty nature of ZigBee in-packet corruptions under Wi-Fi interference is often considered harmful, since some blocks are full of errors which cannot be recovered and some blocks have no errors but still requiring redundancy. As a result, they often use interleaving to reshape the bursty errors, before applying complex FEC codes to recover the re-shaped random distributed errors. In this paper, we take a different view that burstiness may be helpful. With burstiness, the in-packet corruptions are often consecutive and the requirement for error recovery is reduced as ”recovering any k consecutive errors” instead of ”recovering any random k errors”. This lowered requirement allows us to design far more efficient code than the existing FEC codes. Motivated by this implication, we exploit the corruption burstiness to design a simple yet effective error recovery code using XOR operations (called ZiXOR). ZiXOR uses XOR code and the delay is significantly reduced. More, ZiXOR uses RSSI-hinted approach to detect in packet corruptions without CRC, incurring almost no extra transmission overhead. The testbed evaluation results show that ZiXOR outperforms the state-of-the-art works in terms of the throughput (by 47%) and latency (by 22%)This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61602095 and No. 61472360), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. ZYGX2016KYQD098 and No. 2016FZA5010), National Key Technology R&D Program (Grant No. 2014BAK15B02), CCFIntel Young Faculty Researcher Program, CCF-Tencent Open Research Fund, China Ministry of Education—China Mobile Joint Project under Grant No. MCM20150401 and the EU FP7 CLIMBER project under Grant Agreement No. PIRSES-GA- 2012-318939. Wei Dong is the corresponding author

A protocol design paradigm for rateless fulcrum code

Establecer servicios Multicast eficientes en una red con dispositivos heterogéneos y bajo los efectos de un canal con efecto de borradura es una de las prioridades actuales en la teoría de la codificación, en particular en Network Coding (NC). Además, el creciente número de clientes con dispositivos móviles de gran capacidad de procesamiento y la prevalencia de tráfico no tolerante al retardo han provocado una demanda de esquemas Multicast sin realimentación en lo que respecta a la gestión de recursos distribuidos. Las plataformas de comunicación actuales carecen de un control de codificación gradual y dinámico basado en el tipo de datos que se transmiten a nivel de la capa de aplicación. Este trabajo propone un esquema de transmisión fiable y eficiente basado en una codificación hibrida compuesta por una codificación sistemática y codificación de red lineal aleatoria (RLNC) denominada codificación Fulcrum. Este esquema híbrido de codificación distribuida tipo Rateless permite implementar un sistema adaptativo de gestión de recursos para aumentar la probabilidad de descodificación durante la recepción de datos en cada nodo receptor de la información. En última instancia, el esquema propuesto se traduce en un mayor rendimiento de la red y en tiempos de transmisión (RTT) mucho más cortos mediante la implementación eficiente de una corrección de errores hacia delante (FEC).DoctoradoDoctor en Ingeniería de Sistemas y Computació