High Utility Video Surveillance System on Public Transport using WiMAX technology

Video surveillance on public transport is a useful tool to fight against anti-social behaviour like vandalism, harassment, graffiti and terrorism. Real-time video surveillance on moving public transport faces serious technological challenges mainly due to limited throughput offered by existing communication technologies at high vehicular speeds. Success of real-time video surveillance on public transport heavily depends on future communication technologies like WiMAX. WiMAX has emerged as an exciting technology with promises to offer high throughput and improved quality of services (QoS), key requirements for video surveillance on public transport. WiMAX however, offers limited throughput at high vehicular speeds mainly because of multipath fading that causes high bit error rate at the receiver at vehicular speeds. In our previous works, we showed that it is possible to estimate the bit error rate at the receiver end at various vehicular speeds in WiMAX and accordingly, some proactive measures can be adopted to improve the throughput to some extents. Overall throughput however, may still be insufficient to support the streaming video data from all the cameras mounted on a public transport at high vehicular speeds. In this paper, we propose a new scheme that estimates utility for different cameras and puts some low utility cameras offline and thereby maintains high utility of the video surveillance system when the throughput at high vehicular speeds become insufficient. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme

A Proactive Forward Error Control Scheme for Mobile WiMAX Communication

The IEEE 802.16 standard, also known as WiMAX, has yet to prove its effectiveness when the end terminals are not static and free to move at vehicular speeds. High bit error rate caused by multipath fading at high vehicular speeds, is the key reason for low throughput at high speeds. Standard error control mechanisms like transmission control protocol (TCP) and forward error correction (FEC) have limited impact on the overall throughput at vehicular speeds. In this paper, we propose a proactive FEC scheme that adjusts the FEC code size based on the estimated bit error rate at various vehicular speeds. We show a mathematical model to estimate the bit error rate in WiMAX communication. We then propose a FEC scheme to proactively compute the FEC code size. We simulated the proposed scheme for a centralized video surveillance system in a public train where the train is the mobile node and sends real-time video data to the base stations. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves significantly higher throughput and lower jitter compared to existing schemes

Call Admission Control Scheme for Improved Quality of Service in WiMAX Communication at Vehicular Speeds

The IEEE 802.16e standard, also known as mobile WiMAX, has emerged as an exciting mobile wireless communication technology that promises to offer both high throughput and guaranteed quality of service (QoS). Call admission control (CAC) scheme serves as a useful tool for WiMAX, which ensures that resources are not overcommitted and thereby, all existing connections enjoy guaranteed QoS. Existing CAC schemes largely depend on readily available information like currently available resources and bandwidth demand of the new call while making an acceptance or rejection decision once a new request arrives. Since wireless channels are not as reliable as wired communication, CAC scheme in WiMAX communication faces a serious challenge of making a right estimate of the usable channel capacity (i.e., effective throughput capacity) while computing the available resources in various communication scenarios. Existing CAC schemes do not consider the impact of mobility at vehicular speeds when computing the usable link capacity and available resources. In this paper, we propose a new CAC scheme that estimates the usable link capacity for WiMAX communication at various vehicular speeds and uses this information while making a CAC decision. The proposed CAC scheme takes the speed distribution model of a mobile node into account during the CAC decision making process. Simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme achieves lower dropping rate and improved QoS compared to existing schemes

A Novel Mobile WiMAX Solution for Higher Throughput

The IEEE 802.16 standard, also known as WiMAX, has emerged as an exciting technology for broadband wireless communications with potentials to offer high throughput and support high bandwidth demanding applications. WiMAX, however, has yet to prove its effectiveness when the end terminals are not fixed and have the capacity to move from one place to another at different speeds. Recent studies suggest that while WiMAX (802.16e) has the potential to deliver a data rate up to 75 Mb/s for fixed wireless communications, it fails drastically for mobile wireless communications, often providing a data rate less than 1 Mb/s when the mobile nodes travel at high speeds, which offers a huge challenge for QoS management. Multipath fading that causes high bit error rate at the receiver end is a key reason for low throughput at high speed. Bit error rate and maximum packet size determine the packet error rate, and error recovery for higher number of corrupted packets is not always an attractive option for many real-time applications with delay and jitter constraints. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model to estimate the bit error probability when the mobile station travels at different speeds. The estimated value of bit error probability is then taken into account to proactively compute the appropriate maximum packet size that offers the best chance to achieve improved throughput at different operating conditions. We simulated the proposed scheme for a centralized video surveillance system in a public train where the train is the mobile node and sends real-time video data to the base stations. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves significantly higher throughput and lower jitter compared to other standard schemes

The Role of Watershed Planning and Governance in Human Health and Well-being in the Credit River Watershed in southern Ontario

The role of watershed planning and governance is crucial in ecosystems health, and human health and well-being. This project particularly focuses on the assessment of the 12 human health and well-being indicators (identified in the governance stakeholders' workshop organized by CVC in collaboration with York University on November 6, 2014) and the identification of the roles of the governance stakeholders in monitoring these indicators. In this project, the indicators have been assessed in light of the information solicited through in-person and telephone interviews with the governance stakeholders working in municipalities, conservation authorities, public health agencies, not-for-profit organizations, community organizations and academic institutions mainly within the Region of Peel. The interviews were conducted using a semistructured questionnaire which comprised questions pertaining to the mandate of the organizations of the stakeholders with respect to human health and well-being, general benefits of measuring these indicators, specific benefits to vulnerable groups for measuring the indicators, weaknesses of measuring the indicators, and uses of these indicators for different purposes. The interviews' results identify the relationships between the indicators and partnerships among different stakeholders in monitoring or implementing these indicators. The results also impart that some indicators (e.g. % people using natural space) are hard to define and measure, some indicators (e.g. air quality index) can be employed at both local and provincial levels, some indicators (e.g. % imperviousness) are quantitative and cannot be easily understood by the general public, and some indicators (e.g. land cover change) are considered master variables and cannot be measured alone. The results also identify the need for defining natural and green spaces for consistent application of the indicators

Rerouting Technique for Faster Restoration of Preempted Calls

In a communication network where resources are shared between instantaneous request (IR) and book-ahead (BA) connections, activation of future BA connections causes preemption of many on-going IR connections upon resource scarcity. A solution to this problem is to reroute the preempted calls via alternative feasible paths, which often does not ensure acceptably low disruption of service. In this paper, a new rerouting strategy is proposed that uses the destination node to initiate the rerouting and thereby reduces the rerouting time, which ultimately improves the service disruption time. Simulations on a widely used network topology suggest that the proposed rerouting scheme achieves more successful rerouting rate with lower service disruption time, while not compromising other network performance metrics like utilization and call blocking rate

An Improved FEC Scheme for Mobile Wireless Communication at Vehicular Speeds

WiMAX has emerged as a promising wireless communication technology with potential to deliver high throughput and guaranteed quality of service to the end applications. Recent studies suggest that while WiMAX (802.16e) is capable of delivering a data rate of up to 75 Mbps for fixed wireless communications, data rate decreases drastically for mobile wireless communications, often providing a data rate less than 1 Mb/s when the mobile nodes travel at vehicular speeds. High bit error rate caused at high vehicular speeds is the key reason for low throughput. In noisy mobile communication environments, standard error control mechanisms like the transmission control protocol (TCP) has limited and often detrimental impacts on the overall throughput because of the excessive retransmission overheads. To address this issue, WiMAX standard incorporates forward error correction (FEC) mechanism that eliminates the need for retransmissions. In FEC, extra parity bits are added to the original message to recover the corrupted information. Adaptive FEC that adjusts the size of extra parity bits in response to packet retransmission requests is an enhancement over standard FEC that uses fixed block of party bits. Existing adaptive FEC schemes, however, have limited efficiency when the end terminal moves at vehicular speeds. In this paper, we propose a new FEC scheme that estimates and adjusts the size of extra parity bits to suit the channel conditions. We apply the concept of interval based data sampling to address the dynamic nature of communication environments at high vehicular speeds

Improving Mobile Sensor Connectivity Time in the IEEE 802.15.4 Networks

In the IEEE 802.15.4 medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks, a sensor node needs to associate with a coordinator before it starts sending or receiving data. The sensor node will mostly choose the nearest coordinator to associate with. However, this method is not suitable for a constantly moving sensor node because it will end up switching coordinators too often due to short connectivity time. The IEEE 802.15.4 has a simplistic and inadequate method of choosing a coordinator in this context. In this paper, we introduce a method to increase the mobile sensor node connectivity time with its co-ordinator in IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled mode. Our method is based on the timestamp of the beacons received from the nearby coordinators and filtering weak beacon signals. By choosing the coordinator which has sent the most recent received beacon with good signal quality, we increase the moving node connectivity time with the coordinator. Our technique results in significant improvement by reducing the number of times the moving node switches coordinators. This increases the throughput and reduces the wasted power in frequent associations

Source Localisation in Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Optimised Maximum Likelihood

Maximum likelihood (ML) is a popular and effective estimator for a wide range of diverse applications and currently affords the most accurate estimation for source localisation in wireless sensor networks (WSN). ML however has two major shortcomings namely, that it is a biased estimator and is also highly sensitive to parameter perturbations. An Optimisation to ML (OML) algorithm was introduced that minimises the sum-of-squares bias and exhibits superior performance to ML in statistical estimation, particularly with finite datasets. This paper proposes a new model for acoustic source localisation in WSN, based upon the OML estimation process. In addition to the performance analysis using real world field experimental data for the tracking of moving military vehicles, simulations have been performed upon the more complex source localisation and tracking problem, to verify the potential of the new OML-based model