Guest Editorial: Nonlinear Optimization of Communication Systems

Linear programming and other classical optimization techniques have found important applications in communication systems for many decades. Recently, there has been a surge in research activities that utilize the latest developments in nonlinear optimization to tackle a much wider scope of work in the analysis and design of communication systems. These activities involve every “layer” of the protocol stack and the principles of layered network architecture itself, and have made intellectual and practical impacts significantly beyond the established frameworks of optimization of communication systems in the early 1990s. These recent results are driven by new demands in the areas of communications and networking, as well as new tools emerging from optimization theory. Such tools include the powerful theories and highly efficient computational algorithms for nonlinear convex optimization, together with global solution methods and relaxation techniques for nonconvex optimization

Network coding for wireless communication networks

This special issue includes a collection of 19 outstanding research papers which cover a diversity of topics on the application of network coding in wireless communication networks.published_or_final_versio

Synchronization in wireless communications

The last decade has witnessed an immense increase of wireless communications services in order to keep pace with the ever increasing demand for higher data rates combined with higher mobility. To satisfy this demand for higher data rates, the throughput over the existing transmission media had to be increased. Several techniques were proposed to boost up the data rate: multicarrier systems to combat selective fading, ultra wide band (UWB) communications systems to share the spectrum with other users, MIMO transmissions to increase the capacity of wireless links, iteratively decodable codes (e.g., turbo codes and LDPC codes) to improve the quality of the link, cognitive radios, and so forth

Advances on Network Protocols and Algorithms for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is an emerging area of wireless ad hoc networks that facilitates ubiquitous connectivity between smart vehicles through Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) or Vehicle-to-Roadside (V2R) and Roadside-to- Vehicle (R2V) communications. This emerging field of technology aims to improve safety of passengers and traffic flow, reduces pollution to the environment and enables in-vehicle entertainment applications. The safety-related applications could reduce accidents by providing drivers with traffic information such as collision avoidances, traffic flow alarms and road surface conditions. Moreover, the passengers could exploit an available infrastructure in order to connect to the internet for infomobility and entertainment applications.Lloret, J.; Ghafoor, KZ.; Rawat, DB.; Xia, F. (2013). Advances on Network Protocols and Algorithms for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Mobile Networks and Applications. 18(6):749-754. doi:10.1007/s11036-013-0490-7S749754186Lloret J, Canovas A, Catalá A, Garcia M (2013) Group-based protocol and mobility model for VANETs to offer internet access. J Netw Comput Appl 36(3):1027–1038. doi: 10.1016/j.jnca.2012.02.009Khokhar RH, Zia T, Ghafoor KZ, Lloret J, Shiraz M (2013) Realistic and efficient radio propagation model for V2X communications. KSII Trans Internet Inform Syst 7(8):1933–1953. doi: 10.3837/tiis.2013.08.011Ghafoor KZ (2013) Routing protocols in vehicular ad hoc networks: survey and research challenges, Netw Protocol Algorithm 5(4). doi: 10.5296/npa.v5i4.4134Ghafoor KZ, Bakar KA, Lloret J, Ke C-H, Lee KC (2013) Intelligent beaconless geographical routing for urban vehicular environments. Wirel Netw 19(3):345–362. doi: 10.1007/s11276-012-0470-zGhafoor KZ, Bakar KA, Lee K, AL-Hashimi H (2010) A novel delay- and reliability- aware inter-vehicle routing protocol. Netw Protocol Algorithms 2(2):66–88. doi: 10.5296/npa.v2i2.427Dias JAFF, Rodrigues JJPC, Isento JN, Pereira PRBA, Lloret J (2011) Performance assessment of fragmentation mechanisms for vehicular delay-tolerant networks. EURASIP J Wirel Commun Netw 2011(195):1–14. doi: 10.1186/1687-1499-2011-195Zhang D, Yang Z, Raychoudhury V, Chen Z, Lloret J (2013) An energy-efficient routing protocol using movement trend in vehicular Ad-hoc networks. Comput J 58(8):938–946. doi: 10.1093/comjnl/bxt028Ghafoor KZ, Lloret J, Bakar KA, Sadiq AS, Mussa SAB (2013) Beaconing approaches in vehicular Ad Hoc networks: a survey. Wirel Pers Commun. doi: 10.1007/s11277-013-1222-9Sadiq AS, Bakar KA, Ghafoor KZ, Lloret J (2013) An intelligent vertical handover scheme for audio and video streaming in heterogeneous vehicular networks. Mobile Netw Appl. doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0465-8Khamayseh YM (2013) Network size estimation in VANETs. Netw Protocol Algorithm 5(3):136–152. doi: 10.5296/npa.v5i6.3838Rawat DB, Popescu DC, Yan G, Olariu S (2011) Enhancing VANET performance by joint adaptation of transmission power and contention window size. IEEE Trans Parallel Distrib Syst 22(9):1528–1535Yan G, Rawat DB, Bista BB. Provisioning vehicular ad hoc networks with quality of services. Int J Space-Based Situated Comput 2(2):104–111Rawat DB, Bista BB, Yan G, Weigle MC (2011) Securing vehicular ad-hoc networks against malicious drivers: a probabilistic approach, International Conference on Complex, Intelligent, and Software Intensive Systems Pp. 146–151. June 30, 2011Sun W, Xia F, Ma J, Fu T, Sun Y. An optimal ODAM-based broadcast algorithm for vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks. KSII Trans Internet Inform Syst 6(12): 3257–3274Vinel AV, Dudin AN, Andreev SD, Xia F (2010) Performance modeling methodology of emergency dissemination algorithms for vehicular ad-hoc networks, 6th Communication Systems, Networks & Digital Signal Processing (CSNDSP 2010), Pp. 397–400AL-Hashimi HN, Bakar KA, Ghafoor KZ (2010) Inter-domain proxy mobile IPv6 based vehicular network. Netw Protocol Algorithm 2(4):1–15. doi: 10.5296/npa.v2i4.488Ghafoor KZ, Bakar KA, Mohammed MA, Lloret J (2013) Vehicular cloud computing: trends and challenges, in the book “mobile computing over cloud: technologies, services, and applications”. IGI GlobalYan G, Rawat DB, Bista BB (2012) Towards secure vehicular clouds, Sixth International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems (CISIS 2012), Pp. 370–375Fernández H, Rubio L, Reig J, Rodrigo-Peñarrocha VM, Valero A (2013) Path loss modeling for vehicular system performance and communication protocols evaluation. Mobile Netw Appl. doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0463-xAllouche Y, Segal M (2013) A cluster-based beaconing approach in VANETs: near optimal topology via proximity information. Mobile Netw Appl. doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0468-5Merah AF, Samarah S, Boukerche A, Mammeri A (2013) A sequential patterns data mining approach towards vehicular route prediction in VANETs. Mobile Netw Appl. doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0459-6Zhang D, Huang H, Zhou J, Xia F, Chen Z (2013) Detecting hot road mobility of vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Mobile Netw Appl. doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0467-6El Ajaltouni H, Boukerche A, Mammeri A (2013) A multichannel QoS MAC with dynamic transmit opportunity for. Mobile Netw Appl. doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0475-6Reñé S, Esparza O, Alins J, Mata-Díaz J, Muñoz JL (2013) VSPLIT: a cross-layer architecture for V2I TCP services over. Mobile Netw Appl. doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0473-8Blanco B, Liberal F (2013) Amaia Aguirregoitia, application of cognitive techniques to adaptive routing for VANETs in city environments. Mobile Netw Appl. doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0466-7Kim J, Krunz M (2013) Spectrum-aware beaconless geographical routing protocol for cognitive radio enabled vehicular networks. Mobile Netw Appl. doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0476-5Dias JAFF, Rodrigues JJPC, Isento JNG, Niu J (2013) The impact of cooperative nodes on the performance of vehicular delay-tolerant networks. Mobile Netw Appl. doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0464-9Sadiq AS, Bakar KA, Ghafoor KZ, Lloret J, Khokhar R (2013) An intelligent vertical handover scheme for audio and video streaming in heterogeneous vehicular networks. Mobile Netw Appl. doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0465-8Machado S, Ozón J, González AJ, Ghafoor KZ (2013) Structured peer-to-peer real time video transmission over vehicular Ad Hoc networks. Mobile Netw Appl. doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0461-zLin C, Wu G, Xia F, Yao L (2013) Enhance the attacking efficiency of the node compromise attack in vehicular Ad-hoc network using connected dominating set. Mobile Netw Appl. doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0469-

IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Energy Management in Buildings

Energy usage in buildings has become a critical concern globally, and with that, the concept of energy management in buildings has emerged to help tackle these challenges. The energy management system provides a new opportunity for the building's energy requirements, and is an essential method for energy service, i.e., energy saving, consumption,

A comprehensive survey of wireless body area networks on PHY, MAC, and network layers solutions

Recent advances in microelectronics and integrated circuits, system-on-chip design, wireless communication and intelligent low-power sensors have allowed the realization of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). A WBAN is a collection of low-power, miniaturized, invasive/non-invasive lightweight wireless sensor nodes that monitor the human body functions and the surrounding environment. In addition, it supports a number of innovative and interesting applications such as ubiquitous healthcare, entertainment, interactive gaming, and military applications. In this paper, the fundamental mechanisms of WBAN including architecture and topology, wireless implant communication, low-power Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing protocols are reviewed. A comprehensive study of the proposed technologies for WBAN at Physical (PHY), MAC, and Network layers is presented and many useful solutions are discussed for each layer. Finally, numerous WBAN applications are highlighted

QoS routing in ad-hoc networks using GA and multi-objective optimization

Much work has been done on routing in Ad-hoc networks, but the proposed routing solutions only deal with the best effort data traffic. Connections with Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, such as voice channels with delay and bandwidth constraints, are not supported. The QoS routing has been receiving increasingly intensive attention, but searching for the shortest path with many metrics is an NP-complete problem. For this reason, approximated solutions and heuristic algorithms should be developed for multi-path constraints QoS routing. Also, the routing methods should be adaptive, flexible, and intelligent. In this paper, we use Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and multi-objective optimization for QoS routing in Ad-hoc Networks. In order to reduce the search space of GA, we implemented a search space reduction algorithm, which reduces the search space for GAMAN (GA-based routing algorithm for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks) to find a new route. We evaluate the performance of GAMAN by computer simulations and show that GAMAN has better behaviour than GLBR (Genetic Load Balancing Routing).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Special Issue on Survivable and Resilient Communication Networks and Services

Communication networks and services play a vital role in our modern lives. This importance is expected to continue to grow in future decades. More and more business, healthcare or government organizations will become increasingly dependent on the communication between their offices and people. Not only does modern society depend on these services in terms of availability but also in terms of proper functioning in all circumstances. These services having stringent requirements with respect to protection of privacy and security. Anonymity (such as e-health) cannot accept, for example, temporary leakage of confidential information by accident whether a result of human error or technical problems. The information and communication network technology itself have also been evolving with tremendous breakthroughs. Users have more and more different types of mobile devices that interconnect them to the Internet. These mobile devices provide incentives to generate novel technology paradigms that enable more flexible provisioning, network virtualization, or improved power efficiency. The robustness and fault tolerance of these novel evolutions is as crucial as ever

Foreword by guest editors for the Special Issue on the 2013 ICUFN Conferencs

Jeong, S.; Rodrigues, JJPC.; Cano Escribá, JC. (2014). Foreword by guest editors for the Special Issue on the 2013 ICUFN Conferencs. Wireless Personal Communications. 78(4):1827-1831. doi:10.1007/s11277-014-2046-yS1827183178