Infrastructure dependent wireless multicast - the effect of spatial diversity and error correction

The use of multiple Access Points (APs) with one AP placed at the middle of a coverage area and the remaining placed at the edge may reduce the Packet Error Rate (PER) experienced by a group of multicast receivers. This paper shows that Spatial Diversity can augment the channel quality experienced especially by those nodes which are located farther from the Master AP, i.e. the AP at the middle, however this study also demonstrates the need for error correction scheme. The aim of this analysis is to propose a means of enhancing the infrastructure end of an IEEE 802.11n Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), such that multicast data can be delivered reliably in order to guarantee that the received video has an adequate Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), but with the constraint that the Medium Access Control (MAC) and the Physical (PHY) layer of the receivers are not modified, hence a legacy IEEE 802.11n node may join the multicast group and experience good Quality of Service.peer-reviewe

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

Optimizing Network Coding Algorithms for Multiple Applications.

Deviating from the archaic communication approach of treating information as a fluid moving through pipes, the concepts of Network Coding (NC) suggest that optimal throughput of a multicast network can be achieved by processing information at individual network nodes. However, existing challenges to harness the advantages of NC concepts for practical applications have prevented the development of NC into an effective solution to increase the performance of practical communication networks. In response, the research work presented in this thesis proposes cross-layer NC solutions to increase the network throughput of data multicast as well as video quality of video multicast applications. First, three algorithms are presented to improve the throughput of NC enabled networks by minimizing the NC coefficient vector overhead, optimizing the NC redundancy allocation and improving the robustness of NC against bursty packet losses. Considering the fact that majority of network traffic occupies video, rest of the proposed NC algorithms are content-aware and are optimized for both data and video multicast applications. A set of content and network-aware optimization algorithms, which allocate redundancies for NC considering content properties as well as the network status, are proposed to efficiently multicast data and video across content delivery networks. Furthermore content and channel-aware joint channel and network coding algorithms are proposed to efficiently multicast data and video across wireless networks. Finally, the possibilities of performing joint source and network coding are explored to increase the robustness of high volume video multicast applications. Extensive simulation studies indicate significant improvements with the proposed algorithms to increase the network throughput and video quality over related state-of-the-art solutions. Hence, it is envisaged that the proposed algorithms will contribute to the advancement of data and video multicast protocols in the future communication networks

Joint Source-Channel Coding of JPEG 2000 Image Transmission Over Two-Way Multi-Relay Networks

In this paper, we develop a two-way multi-relay scheme for JPEG 2000 image transmission. We adopt a modified time-division broadcast (TDBC) cooperative protocol, and derive its power allocation and relay selection under a fairness constraint. The symbol error probability of the optimal system configuration is then derived. After that, a joint source-channel coding (JSCC) problem is formulated to find the optimal number of JPEG 2000 quality layers for the image and the number of channel coding packets for each JPEG 2000 codeblock that can minimize the reconstructed image distortion for the two users, subject to a rate constraint. Two fast algorithms based on dynamic programming (DP) and branch and bound (BB) are then developed. Simulation demonstrates that the proposed JSCC scheme achieves better performance and lower complexity than other similar transmission systems