A Dynamic Multimedia User-Weight Classification Scheme for IEEE_802.11 WLANs

In this paper we expose a dynamic traffic-classification scheme to support multimedia applications such as voice and broadband video transmissions over IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Obviously, over a Wi-Fi link and to better serve these applications - which normally have strict bounded transmission delay or minimum link rate requirement - a service differentiation technique can be applied to the media traffic transmitted by the same mobile node using the well-known 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol. However, the given EDCA mode does not offer user differentiation, which can be viewed as a deficiency in multi-access wireless networks. Accordingly, we propose a new inter-node priority access scheme for IEEE 802.11e networks which is compatible with the EDCA scheme. The proposed scheme joins a dynamic user-weight to each mobile station depending on its outgoing data, and therefore deploys inter-node priority for the channel access to complement the existing EDCA inter-frame priority. This provides efficient quality of service control across multiple users within the same coverage area of an access point. We provide performance evaluations to compare the proposed access model with the basic EDCA 802.11 MAC protocol mode to elucidate the quality improvement achieved for multimedia communication over 802.11 WLANs.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC

An Adaptive Multimedia-Oriented Handoff Scheme for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Previous studies have shown that the actual handoff schemes employed in the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs (WLANs) do not meet the strict delay constraints placed by many multimedia applications like Voice over IP. Both the active and the passive supported scan modes in the standard handoff procedure have important delay that affects the Quality of Service (QoS) required by the real-time communications over 802.11 networks. In addition, the problem is further compounded by the fact that limited coverage areas of Access Points (APs) occupied in 802.11 infrastructure WLANs create frequent handoffs. We propose a new optimized and fast handoff scheme that decrease both handoff latency and occurrence by performing a seamless prevent scan process and an effective next-AP selection. Through simulations and performance evaluation, we show the effectiveness of the new adaptive handoff that reduces the process latency and adds new context-based parameters. The Results illustrate a QoS delay-respect required by applications and an optimized AP-choice that eliminates handoff events that are not beneficial.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figures, 4 table

Étude de l'énergie et du point d'émission radio des rayons cosmiques détectés dans l'expérience CODALEMA

The purpose of the CODALEMA experiment, installed at the Nançay Radio Observatory (France), is to study the radio-detection of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. Distributed over an area of 0,25 km2, the original device uses in coincidence an array of particle detectors and an array of short antennas. A new analysis of the energy reconstruction from radio data obtained with this device is presented. We suggest that an energy resolution of less than 20% can be achieved and that, not only the Lorentz force, but also another contribution proportional to all charged particles generated during the shower development, could play a significant role in the amplitude of the electric field measured by the antennas (as an effect of coherence or of charge excess). Since 2011, a new array of radio-detectors, consisting of 60 stand-alone and self-triggered stations, has been in deployment over an area of 1.5 km2 around the first device. This new development leads to specific challenges which are discussed in terms of recognition of cosmic rays and reconstruction of the curvature of radio wave fronts. For commonly-used minimization algorithms, we emphasize the importance of the convergence process induced by the minimization ofa non-linear least squares function that affects the results in terms of degeneration of the solutions. We derive a simple method to obtain a satisfactory estimate of the location of the apparent emission source, which mitigates the problems previously.Le but de l’expérience CODALEMA, installée à l’observatoire de radioastronomie de Nançay (France), est d’étudier la radiodétection des rayons cosmiques d’ultrahaute énergie. Le dispositif initial, réparti sur une aire de 0, 25 km2, utilise en coïncidence un réseau des détecteurs de particules et un réseau d’antennes. Utilisant cet appareillage, une nouvelle analyse visant à estimer l’énergie de la gerbe à partir des données radio est présentée. Nous déduisons qu’une résolution en énergie meilleure que 20% peut être atteinte et que, non seulement la force de Lorentz, mais aussi une contribution proportionnelle à la charge totale produite dans la gerbe atmosphérique joue un rôle significatif dans l’amplitude du champ électrique mesuré par les antennes (effet de cohérence ou d’excès de charge). Depuis 2011, un nouveau réseau de détection radio, constitué de 60 stations autonome auto-déclenchées est en déploiement sur une superficie de 1, 5 km2 autour du dispositif initial. Ce développement conduit à des défis spécifiques en termes d’identification des gerbes atmosphériques et de reconstruction de la courbure des fronts d’onde radio. Concernant la localisation de la source apparente de l’émission radio, pour les algorithmes de minimisation courants, nous soulignons l’importance du processus de convergence induit par la minimisation d’une fonction non linéaire des moindres carrés qui peut induire une dégénérescence des solutions. Une méthode alternative d’estimation est proposée

The evolving SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Africa: Insights from rapidly expanding genomic surveillance

INTRODUCTION Investment in Africa over the past year with regard to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) sequencing has led to a massive increase in the number of sequences, which, to date, exceeds 100,000 sequences generated to track the pandemic on the continent. These sequences have profoundly affected how public health officials in Africa have navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. RATIONALE We demonstrate how the first 100,000 SARS-CoV-2 sequences from Africa have helped monitor the epidemic on the continent, how genomic surveillance expanded over the course of the pandemic, and how we adapted our sequencing methods to deal with an evolving virus. Finally, we also examine how viral lineages have spread across the continent in a phylogeographic framework to gain insights into the underlying temporal and spatial transmission dynamics for several variants of concern (VOCs). RESULTS Our results indicate that the number of countries in Africa that can sequence the virus within their own borders is growing and that this is coupled with a shorter turnaround time from the time of sampling to sequence submission. Ongoing evolution necessitated the continual updating of primer sets, and, as a result, eight primer sets were designed in tandem with viral evolution and used to ensure effective sequencing of the virus. The pandemic unfolded through multiple waves of infection that were each driven by distinct genetic lineages, with B.1-like ancestral strains associated with the first pandemic wave of infections in 2020. Successive waves on the continent were fueled by different VOCs, with Alpha and Beta cocirculating in distinct spatial patterns during the second wave and Delta and Omicron affecting the whole continent during the third and fourth waves, respectively. Phylogeographic reconstruction points toward distinct differences in viral importation and exportation patterns associated with the Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omicron variants and subvariants, when considering both Africa versus the rest of the world and viral dissemination within the continent. Our epidemiological and phylogenetic inferences therefore underscore the heterogeneous nature of the pandemic on the continent and highlight key insights and challenges, for instance, recognizing the limitations of low testing proportions. We also highlight the early warning capacity that genomic surveillance in Africa has had for the rest of the world with the detection of new lineages and variants, the most recent being the characterization of various Omicron subvariants. CONCLUSION Sustained investment for diagnostics and genomic surveillance in Africa is needed as the virus continues to evolve. This is important not only to help combat SARS-CoV-2 on the continent but also because it can be used as a platform to help address the many emerging and reemerging infectious disease threats in Africa. In particular, capacity building for local sequencing within countries or within the continent should be prioritized because this is generally associated with shorter turnaround times, providing the most benefit to local public health authorities tasked with pandemic response and mitigation and allowing for the fastest reaction to localized outbreaks. These investments are crucial for pandemic preparedness and response and will serve the health of the continent well into the 21st century

Contributions à l'amélioration de la qualité de service dans les réseaux sans fil Wifi

Due to their wide proliferation, IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are expected to support multimedia applications such as voice and broadband video transmissions, which normally have a strict bounded transmission delay. The aim of this thesis is to enhance the support of these applications, and so, to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) scheme in IEEE 802.11 WLANs. Firstly, we focus our work on the link adaptation procedure performed over WiFi networks. A new dynamic time-based link adaptation mechanism, called Modified Adaptive Auto Rate Fallback, is proposed. Simulations are performed by means of the Network Simulator 2 and the results show the quality improvement of transmission link. The results also demonstrate that the proposed mechanism outperforms the basic solution in terms of providing support to both acknowledgment-based and time-based rate control decision. In the second part of this thesis, we introduce a new inter-node priority access scheme with the existing Enhanced Distributed Chanel Access of IEEE 802.11e networks. The new technique is based on the junction of a new inter-node priority with the existing inter-frame priority. The simulation results show that the proposed technique improves the basic 802.11e MAC protocol in terms of providing support to both strict priority and weighted fair service. Compared to other solutions, the new model is easier to implement in real systems, has better aggregate throughput and is more stable. As a third part of this work, a novel handoff scheme for IEEE 802.11 WLANs is proposed to reduce handoff latency and to improve the QoS support in multimedia applications. The proposed handoff scheme, called Prevent-Scan Handoff Procedure, uses an early pre-scan phase to avoid probe wait delays during next Handoff occurrence. Through extensive simulations, we prove that the new handoff procedure decreases handoff latency considerably and accelerates handoff by minimizing the time during which the MS remains out of contact with its AP. Therefore, the inter-frame delay incurred is within multimedia applications' delay restrictions. These simulations are carried out over a new IEEE 802.11 handoff simulator to provide performance evaluations. We prove that the new handoff technique achieves both fast and smooth handoff which is requested by multimedia applications.Le standard IEEE 802.11 est devenu la référence d’excellence pour les réseaux locaux sans fil par son très large déploiement au niveau mondial. L’objectif des travaux de cette thèse est d’élaborer de nouveaux algorithmes pour contribuer à l’amélioration du schéma global de la Qualité de Service (QoS) dans les réseaux WiFi. Nous avons proposé un nouvel algorithme appelé Modified Adaptive Auto Rate Fallback qui permet d’obtenir des performances très intéressantes en termes de débit général de sortie et du nombre de paquets erronés tout en restant compatible avec le standard IEEE 802.11. Les expérimentations menées avec cette nouvelle technique de contrôle de débit confirment le gain en performance obtenu par des simulations sous la plateforme Network Simulator 2. Nous avons également amélioré la méthode d’accès de la norme 802.11e « Enhanced Distributed Channel Access », en introduisant une nouvelle classification entre les stations mobiles. Des simulations sous la plateforme Network Simulator 2 ont prouvé une réduction considérable du taux de collisions dû à l’accès simultané par les stations mobiles et une amélioration du débit de transmission respectant ainsi les contraintes de la qualité de service liées aux applications multimédias. La dernière contribution porte sur le mécanisme de commutation entre les points d’accès (Handover) déployé dans les réseaux WiFi. Plus précisément, nous avons élaboré un nouveau mécanisme de Handover peu complexe et efficace appelé Prevent-Scan Handoff Procedure. Il permet de sélectionner un meilleur point d’accès candidat pour les prochaines transmissions d’une station mobile en mode infrastructure tout en réduisant à la fois le temps et le trafic engendré. Enfin, un nouveau simulateur a été développé afin d’analyser et de comparer les performances de la technique proposée avec des algorithmes de la littérature. Les résultats des simulations montrent une diminution de la latence et de la gigue par rapport aux approches récentes, et de plus notre méthode respecte la transmission des trames à QoS exigée

Recherche Interactive d'Objets à l'Aide de Modèles Visuels Interprétables

تعالج هذه الأطروحة مسألة البحث عن الأشياء في الصور الثابتة و هي محاولة لتحسين نتائج البحث المنتظرة عن طريق تفاعل المستخدم مع النظام . يتمثل الحل المقترح في تصميم نظام تفاعلي يتيح للمستخدم صياغة مفهومه المرئي عن طريق مجموعة مقتضبة من أجزاء صغيرة للصور هي عبارة عن كلمات مفاتيح قد تم تعلمها سابقا عن طريق تعلم آلي استنتاجي . يمكن للمستخدم حينئذ تخصيص أنموذجه أولا بالاختيار ثم بترجيح الأجزاء التي يراها مناسبة . يتمثل التحدي القائم في كيفية توليد نماذج مرئية مفهومة و مقتضبة . نكون قد ساهمنا في هذا المجال بنقطتين أساسيتين تتمثل الأولى في إدماج الواصفات المحلية للصور دون أي تكميم ، و بذلك يكون كل مكون من ناقلات الميزات ذات الأبعاد العالية مرتبط حصريا بمكان وحيد و محدد في الصورة . ثانيا ، نقترح إضافة قيود تسوية لدالة الخسارة من أجل التحصل على حلول متفرقة و مقتضبة . يساهم ذلك في تقلص عدد هذه الأجزاء المرئية و بالتالي في ربح إضافي لوقت التكهن . في إطار تحقيق الأهداف المرسومة ، قمنا بإعداد مشروع تعلم قائم على تعدد الأمثلة يرتكز أساسا على نسخة محورة لخوارزمية بلاسو . تجدر الإشارة في الأخير أنه يمكن توظيف هذا العمل باستخدام نوع أو عدة أنواع من الواصفات المحلية للصور.This thesis is an attempt to improve visual object retrieval by allowing users to interact with the system. Our solution lies in constructing an interactive system that allows users to define their own visual concept from a concise set of visual patches given as input. These patches, which represent the most informative clues of a given visual category, are trained beforehand with a supervised learning algorithm in a discriminative manner. Then, and in order to specialize their models, users have the possibility to send their feedback on the model itself by choosing and weighting the patches they are confident of. The real challenge consists in how to generate concise and visually interpretable models. Our contribution relies on two points. First, in contrast to the state-of-the-art approaches that use bag-of-words, we propose embedding local visual features without any quantization, which means that each component of the high-dimensional feature vectors used to describe an image is associated to a unique and precisely localized image patch. Second, we suggest using regularization constraints in the loss function of our classifier to favor sparsity in the models produced. Sparsity is indeed preferable for concision (a reduced number of patches in the model) as well as for decreasing prediction time. To meet these objectives, we developed a multiple-instance learning scheme using a modified version of the BLasso algorithm. BLasso is a boosting-like procedure that behaves in the same way as Lasso (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator). It efficiently regularizes the loss function with an additive L1-constraint by alternating between forward and backward steps at each iteration. The method we propose here is generic in the sense that it can be used with any local features or feature sets representing the content of an image region.L'objectif de cette thèse est d'améliorer la recherche d'objets visuels à l'aide de l'interactivité avec l'utilisateur. Notre solution est de construire un système intéractif permettant aux utilisateurs de définir leurs propres concepts visuels à partir de certains mots-clés visuels. Ces mots-clés visuels, qui en théorie représentent les mots visuels les plus informatifs liés à une catégorie d'objets, sont appris auparavant à l'aide d'un algorithme d'apprentissage supervisé et d'une manière discriminative. Le challenge est de construire des mots-clés visuels concis et interprétables. Notre contribution repose sur deux points. D'abord, contrairement aux approches existantes qui utilisent les sacs de mots, nous proposons d'employer les descripteurs locaux sans aucune quantification préalable. Deuxièmement, nous proposons d'ajouter une contrainte de régularisation à la fonction de perte de notre classifieur pour favoriser la parcimonie des modèles produits. La parcimonie est en effet préférable pour sa concision (nombre de mots visuels réduits) ainsi pour sa diminution du temps de prédiction. Afin d'atteindre ces objectifs, nous avons développé une méthode d'apprentissage à instances multiples utilisant une version modifiée de l'algorithme BLasso. Cet algorithme est une forme de boosting qui se comporte similairement au LASSO (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator). Il régularise efficacement la fonction de perte avec une contrainte additive de type L1 et ceci en alternant entre des itérations en avant et en arrière. La méthode proposée est générique dans le sens où elle pourrait être utilisée avec divers descripteurs locaux voire un ensemble structuré de descripteurs locaux qui décrit une région locale de l'image

Constant Tangential Angle Elected Interest Points

This paper presents a new interest points detector whose goal is to better catch visual attention than standard detectors. It is based on the generalization of Loy and Zelinsky transform which was originally developed to detect radial symmetry centers. The voting algorithm is here extended to a set of voting orientations which allows the construction of a more complete analyze space. The specificity of this detector is that it enables the detection of points with different topological natures with the same detector. Centers of geometric forms or curves as well as junctions or vanishing points can be detected depending on the image content. The paper describes and illustrates the principle of this new algorithm and discusses some properties and improvements. Preliminary experiments are also given and shows that the detected points are stable under several typical transformations and that they are promising in terms of objects generic subparts detection