Device Discovery in Frequency Hopping Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

This research develops a method for efficient discovery of wireless devices for a frequency hopping spread spectrum, synchronous, ad hoc network comprised of clustered sub-networks. The Bluetooth wireless protocol serves as the reference protocol. The development of a discovery, or outreach, method for scatternets requires the characterization of performance metrics of Bluetooth piconets, many of which are unavailable in literature. Precise analytical models characterizing the interference caused to Bluetooth network traffic by inquiring devices, the probability mass function of packet error rates between arbitrary pairs of Bluetooth networks, and Bluetooth discovery time distribution are developed. Based on the characterized performance metrics, three scatternet outreach methods are developed and compared. Outreach methods which actively inquire on a regular basis, as proposed in literature, are shown to produce lower goodput, have greater mean packet delay, require more power, and cause significant delays in discovery. By passively remaining available for outreach, each of these disadvantages is avoided

Testing the performance and feasibility of Bluetooth communications in pervasive systems

Smart and mobile environments require seamless connections. However, due to the frequent process of ''discovery'' and disconnection of mobile devices while data interchange is happening, wireless connections are often interrupted. To minimize this drawback, a protocol that enables an easy and fast synchronization is crucial. Bearing this in mind, Bluetooth technology appears to be a suitable solution to carry on such connections due to the discovery and pairing capabilities it provides. Nonetheless, the time and energy spent when several devices are being discovered and used at the same time still needs to be managed properly. It is essential that this process of discovery takes as little time and energy as possible. In addition to this, it is believed that the performance of the communications is not constant when the transmission speeds and throughput increase, but this has not been proved formally. Therefore, the purpose of this project is twofold: Firstly, to design and build a framework-system capable of performing controlled Bluetooth device discovery, pairing and communications. Secondly, to analyze and test the scalability and performance of the \emph{classic} Bluetooth standard under different scenarios and with various sensors and devices using the framework developed. To achieve the first goal, a generic Bluetooth platform will be used to control the test conditions and to form a ubiquitous wireless system connected to an Android Smartphone. For the latter goal, various stress-tests will be carried on to measure the consumption rate of battery life as well as the quality of the communications between the devices involved

Bluetooth naming for situated interaction in ubiquitous environments

Degree of Master Mobile Systems (Msc)This work presents a study over Bluetooth naming and how it may be used as a simple interaction mechanism where people have active control on how they expose themselves and manage their Bluetooth presence. The main goal is to provide a control mechanism built on one’s presence and availability. Bluetooth Extended Naming (BEN), the technique here introduced, enables a selfexpression in a way that allows people to use their device name along with additional semantic elements as tags, commands, smileys, etc. In order to support this technique, an investigation effort was taken in order to identify and collect the needs and relevant aspects that would affect its use. Building on this and aiming to fulfill the goal of interacting with public displays, it was specified the grammar of a command language, its language processor developed and integrated on a reactive display control called Instant Places. The proposed language has been evaluated through several studies of diverse methodology that were conducted along different phases. Initially, a usability study based on questionnaires and procedural interviews was conducted in order to validate the feasibility of BEN as an interaction technique and to determine its limitations and optimizations. A public deployment of Instant Places with limited support of BEN also took place at this phase, for the purpose of collecting logs for analysis. Results of both studies showed no significant limitation, confirming the viability of the adoption of BEN as an interaction technique. In a later phase, a qualitative evaluation study was conducted on the command language usage. Results showed positive feedback from users and indicated a correct and successful usage of the language overall, even though some of the command purpose were not obvious. Bluetooth Extended Naming demonstrated to be functional and effective as technique for interaction. The results obtained regarding adoption rates and usage observations confirm this. The potential limitations that were anticipated, regarding public rejection and technical difficulties, revealed little impact on its use.Este trabalho apresenta um estudo exploratório sobre como a nomeação Bluetooth pode ser utilizada como um mecanismo de interacção simples, que permita às pessoas ter um papel activo no modo pelo qual elas se expõe e gerem a sua presença Bluetooth. O objectivo não é suportar interacção complexa mas criar um mecanismo de controlo construído sobre o estar presente e dísponivel. A nomeação extendida Bluetooth (BEN), a técnica que este trabalho introduz, pretende disponibilizar um meio de expressão próprio que permita às pessoas utilizarem o nome Bluetooth do seu dispositivo pessoal com elementos adicionais com uma semântica própria, como tags, comandos, smileys, etc. De forma a suportar esta técnica de interacção, foi feito um levantamento sobre aspectos relevantes do uso do Bluetooth e limitações a vários níveis que pudessem condicionar a sua utilização. Sobre este conhecimento foi definida a gramática de uma linguagem de comandos que cobrisse as necessidades e os objectivos da interacção com ecrãs públicos através de BEN. Foi desenvolvido um processador baseado na gramática da ultima versão da linguagem e integrado num sistema reactivo de controlo de ecrãs denominado Instant Places. A linguagem proposta foi avaliada através de vários estudos de metodologia variada, efectuados em diferentes etapas. Inicialmente foi efectuado um estudo de usabilidade baseado em questionários e entrevistas procedimentais no sentido de validar a viabilidade da nomeação Bluetooth como técnica de interacção e de determinar limitações e possíveis optimizações. Nesta fase, foi também realizada uma instalação pública do sistema Instant Places com suporte limitado de interacção pela nomeação Bluetooth com geração de logs de utilização para análise. Os resultados iniciais demonstraram não haver limitações significativas quer ao nível dos dispositivos quer ao nível da sua utilização para que a técnica proposta seja adoptada. Numa fase posterior, foi efectuado um estudo baseado na avaliação qualitativa do uso da linguagem de comandos definida para suportar o BEN. O feedback obtido foi positivo e na generalidade, os resultados mostraram uma utilização correcta e bem sucedida da linguagem, apesar da finalidade não ser sempre ser óbvia. Observou-se a validação de algumas das decisões de design da linguagem e foram detectados pontos de evolução futura. A nomeação extendida Bluetooth mostrou ser uma técnica funcional e eficaz para efeitos de interacção. Os resultados relativos à sua adopção e a observações de utilização confirmam-no. As potenciais limitações iniciais revelaram pouco impacto na sua utilização, no que diz respeito a dificuldades técnicas e à rejeição por parte do público

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2006

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems and Engineering Management, Operational Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics and Engineering Physics

Enabling Censorship Tolerant Networking

Billions of people in the world live under heavy information censorship. We propose a new class of delay tolerant network (DTN), known as a censorship tolerant network (CTN), to counter the growing practice of Internet-based censorship. CTNs should provide strict guarantees on the privacy of both information shared within the network and the identities of network participants. CTN software needs to be publicly available as open source software and run on personal mobile devices with real-world computational, storage, and energy constraints. We show that these simple assumptions and system constraints have a non-obvious impact on the design and implementation of CTNs, and serve to differentiate our system design from previous work. We design data routing within a CTN using a new paradigm: one where nodes operate selfishly to maximize their own utility, make decisions based only on their own observations, and only communicate with nodes they trust. We introduce the Laissez-faire framework, an incentivized approach to CTN routing. Laissez-faire does not mandate any specific routing protocol, but requires that each node implement tit-for-tat by keeping track of the data exchanged with other trusted nodes. We propose several strategies for valuing and retrieving content within a CTN. We build a prototype BlackBerry implementation and conduct both controlled lab and field trials, and show how each strategy adapts to different network conditions. We further demonstrate that, unlike existing approaches to routing, Laissez-faire prevents free-riding. We build an efficient and reliable data transport protocol on top of the Short Message Service (SMS) to serve a control channel for the CTN. We conduct a series of experiments to characterise SMS behaviour under bursty, unconventional workloads. This study examines how variables such as the transmission order, delay between transmissions, the network interface used, and the time-of-day affect the service. We present the design and implementation of our transport protocol. We show that by adapting to the unique channel conditions of SMS we can reduce message overheads by as much as 50\% and increase data throughput by as much as 545% over the approach used by existing applications. A CTN's dependency on opportunistic communication imposes a significant burden on smartphone energy resources. We conduct a large-scale user study to measure the energy consumption characteristics of 20100 smartphone users. Our dataset is two orders of magnitude larger than any previous work. We use this dataset to build the Energy Emulation Toolkit (EET) that allows developers to evaluate the energy consumption requirements of their applications against real users' energy traces. The EET computes the successful execution rate of energy-intensive applications across all users, specific devices, and specific smartphone user-types. We also consider active adaptation to energy constraints. By classifying smartphone users based on their charging characteristics we demonstrate that energy level can be predicted within 72% accuracy a full day in advance, and through an Energy Management Oracle energy intensive applications, such as CTNs, can adapt their execution to maintain the operation of the host device

An Arts Based Narrative Inquiry into Learning in an Early Childhood Education and Care Degree

Within a rhizomatic, arts-based narrative inquiry into my practice as a lecturer in a Third Level Institute of Technology I attempt to deterritorialise the pedagogical spaces of an Early Childhood degree. Inspired by Richardson and St. Pierre’s (2005) notion of writing as inquiry and Creative Arts Practices (CAP) Ethnography I experiment with poetry, art and film in order to find my research voice and move through the complexity of learning using the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). An epistemological dialogue with my past traces a movement away from the dominance of positivist psychology as I step gingerly into autoethnography. I position myself within emerging stories of learner, teacher and researcher and formulate a research project that explores learning and teaching in an Early Years degree in Ireland. Using the troublesome concept of intelligence in a first year psychology class a Learning Carnival is devised to transform the passive lecture space and mount a challenge to dominant psychometric traditions. A focus group allowed students to articulate the role of musical, kinaesthetic, linguistic and other ‘intelligences’ (Gardner, 1983) in the ways they learned and a film called ‘Practice and the Internet’ was made to playfully deconstruct some of the findings. Troublesome knowledge is better conceived as troubling knowledge embracing uncertainty in learning and promoting an active process over a static entity. Likewise intelligence as a noun already presupposes a measurable entity and limits the potential to conceive learning as active, open ended and consisting of various creative processes. Following a number of pioneers of arts based research and identity construction (Leitch, 2010; O’ Grady, 2012), a self-study method prompted students’ writing, portraits, masks and images to explore how they constructed their lives in their final year of a professional Early Childhood course. In collaboration with the students a short film called ‘A Murmuration of Early Childhood’ celebrated their artwork and collective poem ‘Imagine a Child’. An assemblage of research data allowed individual voices within a collective participant voice to merge with the academy and maintain their primacy in a powerful evocative performance text called ‘A Dawn Chorus’. In exposing the influences on the author’s researcher and learner identity the thesis performs a becoming-other and achieves a relative deterritorialization of the pedagogical spaces of teaching and learning (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). In producing a challenge to dominant understandings of learning and intelligences the thesis makes a significant contribution to knowledge and scholarship through the use of arts-based narrative inquiry providing creative alternatives to teacher education in the Early Years. The autoethnographic lens highlights the complex political and social contexts that frame educational experiences and structure relationships between learners and educators and raises questions about the marginalisation and feminisation of childcare in Ireland. Of significance in this study are the ways that learners demonstrate their own agency within limited subject positions and the power of education to provide a route to exhibit and express a personal identity beyond that of mother, father, old, young, male, female, carer. Employing Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry, the thesis makes a significant contribution to knowledge through its focus on creative processes from conception to representation producing a piece of work that is polyphonic, dialogic and novel in the Bakhtinian sense (see Kim, 2016, pp. 72-76). To open up inquiry through creative media means going beyond the predictable and stepping into the unknown world of discovery where meaning emerges from the playful interactions between learners and educators – resonating with the notion of aesthetic play in narrative inquiry (Latta, 2013, in Kim, 2016, ps. 85 - 88). It is hoped that this work will join a burgeoning literature in narrative inquiry that empowers other educators to enter liminal moments of risk and improvise on a tune, take lines of flight and challenge modes of thinking that limit human experience

Interim Report 1: Learning Communities Project

This is the first comprehensive report of the research conducted in relation to the Learning Communities Project, a collaboration between Athabasca University and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.Executive summary This is the first formal report of the Learning Communities Project (LCP), based on results of the evaluation and research activities conducted to date. The major findings of the project, and observations about processes used, are as follows: 1. The project is focused on the learning needs of adults; therefore, andragogy, the art and science of teaching adults, forms part of the basic philosophy of the project. Similarly, distance education, focusing on any time/anyplace learning, is assumed to be the most appropriate type of delivery for courses included in the project. Other elements of the project deemed to be suitable, even required, for adults include prior learning assessment and recognition (PLAR), a focus on essential skills, and instruction designed to recognize the self-direction and autonomy needs of adults. 2. The above having been stated, the project also recognizes that many adult learners have not experienced self-direction in learning, or do not feel confident exercising full on adult autonomy as students. The LCP therefore seeks to provide support and assistance as individually required, to help students feel comfortable and be successful in any learning projects embarked on within the project. (As part of the concern for individual learning preferences, learning styles and preferences are also focus of research, and are considered in instructional design decisions.) 3. Distance education in this project is defined in the classic sense, as learning in which the learner and the tutor are normally separated, technology is used for interaction, there is institutional support throughout the learning process, and the prospect of two-way communication always exists. 4. Based on research to date, potential LCP participants are usually transitory (only a fraction live in the project’s regions), often from outside of Alberta, frequently subject to long commutes, and fully employed (many routinely work overtime). This is especially true of potential students in the CNQ Horizon site. The implications for learner interest and motivation, programming content, instructional design, course and module delivery, and student support, while it is evident there are implications, are being worked out as a core part of the project. 5. Technology is available in the region, due to the availability of Alberta SuperNet, and the technical resources of CNQ (at the Horizon site) and the post-secondary institutions that are already active in the region. As well, agencies such as eCampusAlberta, Alberta North, and the Canadian Virtual University already provide resources and learning opportunities to potential students. Despite these resources, and access to the Alberta SuperNet for broadband Internet connections, it is still true that rural areas are generally less well served technologically than urban areas (especially true of aboriginal communities); however, it is also true that rural residents are often more open to technology-based learning than those in urban areas. 6. Programming interests among CNQ employees or contractors who have inquired about or registered in courses through the project so far are primarily career-related, including business administration, accounting, project management, engineering, Blue Seal, and health and safety courses. In the communities, pre-employment courses, and technology and trades training (especially if including employment-related hands-on experience), have been identified as major areas of interest. 7. Based on survey and interviews, potential students encounter numerous barriers to participation in education and training programs, beginning with the fatigue they experience at the end of long work days, and extending to a potential lack of familiarity, access to, or comfort with technology, lack of familiarity with the distance education as a learning style, and lack of information about the connection between courses, credits, and career advancement. 8. Tracking registrations that result from project activity remains problematic. The project is studying various ways to identify registrations generated by LCP activities, essential to determining the project’s impact. 9. The research portion of the project has produced and circulated five occasional reports, and this interim report. The purpose of research to date has been formative – intended to be of immediate use to project planners and participants. Feedback from project participants indicates that these reports have had the desired impact on project development. 10. The research team have under development of paper for peer review, addressing the question of the programming that is currently available in the project’s regions, and the rationale for what is currently being offered (or not offered). Additional data are being gathered regarding the uptake and efficacy of programming, including registrations and completions, for a future publication. As well, the research team has plans to present at relevant conferences in the first half of 2008 in Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Alberta.Athabasca University; Canadian Natural Resources Ltd