Recent Advances in Communications and Networking Technology (Formerly Recent Patents on Telecommunication) (Discontinued) - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014

Networks and communications are the infrastructure on which multimedia and information technologies are built. There are a vast number of networking techniques that depend on the type of multimedia and information technology applications that the network is designed to facilitate. This issue concerns recent communication technologies for transmission, compression, security, and expression of a diverse range of data. In this issue, we discuss how networking techniques are applied in the areas of health, business and transport, which require multimedia and information. This special issue should provide insight into the design of networking technology for applications ranging from sensor networks to broadband networks. The first contribution, published by T. Huynh and W. Hwang, concerns throughput optimization in multicast wireless networks. Various applications, including mobile multimedia, airports, smart homes and audio–video conferencing, require multicast communication to deliver large volumes of data to a group of users. It is important that multiple users receive the same data simultaneously via a reliable transmission network. In this paper, the authors describe an analytical model used to characterize throughput optimization that guarantees the reliability of transmission. In the second contribution, G. Chung and H. Kim introduce digital yarns (or conductive yarns), which enable data transmission. These yarns are particularly interesting in that they can form a crucial element of wearable computing devices, creating a body area network. In particular, smart clothes woven from both ordinary and digital yarns are promising for future applications in many areas of our everyday lives. In this paper, the authors describe the concept of healthwear, with electro cardiogram (ECG) sensors connected using digital yarns. The third contribution is from J. Shim and J. Ko, and discusses the design and implementation of an Ethernet–xBee bridge module for wireless sensor networks, termed Eth2Bee. A wireless sensor network consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors that monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound or pressure. Eth2Bee can connect wireless networks to the Internet and provide a low-cost gateway technology for the Internet of Things (IoT). The fourth contribution concerns social networking. Yao Meng discusses the use of social media to promote physical activity. In particular, social influence is an effective method of effecting change in attitudes and behavior. She reports a field-study whereby participants used a walking promotion system, which implements workout groups and competition to encourage physical activity. She found that these workout groups, and the associated competition, had a significant effect on the likelihood of participants to use the system. The final contribution to this special issue concerns mobile secure transmission. With the rapid growth of the threedimensional (3D) content industry, 3D mobile secure transmission has recently become important, and digital watermarking and cryptographic protocols have been evaluated. Mobile 3D content, e.g., in mobile 3D games, often requires content security for copyright protection and piracy tracing of 3D graphic models. S. Lee and K. Kwon present a multiple watermarking scheme that uses the anonymous Buyer-Seller watermarking protocol. The method described in this paper can enable copyright protection and measure to prevent illegal copying. Consequently, I sincerely hope that this special issue will be enjoyable and useful to the readers.

Multicast communications can help to transmit traffic efficiently to target groups of interested users without extra bandwidth or power resources. However, compared to unicast transmission, multicast over wireless channels does not support reliable transmission due to limitation of the message overhead. In this paper, we study the problem of how to guarantee reliability while maintaining the maximum throughput in multicast communication. We propose a two-step policy to characterize the throughput-optimization problem with the reliability constraints of multicast communication. In the first step, we allocate a transmission rate to each group in order to guarantee the reliability constraint and to maximize the throughput of each group. In the second step, we assign indicator functions to the multicast group with the maximum throughput. The simulation results highlight the benefits of our approach to guarantee the reliability and maximize the throughput in multicast communications.

Digital yarns or conductive yarns are the ones that enable data transmission. In particular, smart clothes woven by both ordinary and digital yarns are more than wears, and eventually become wearable and mobile computing devices. Emphasizing a high potentiality of such clothes, we firstly introduce digital yarn that we developed, presenting its characteristics and a way of assessing its data transmission performance. Secondly, this paper presents health wear with ECG sensors and a circuit connected by digital yarns. Finally, it discusses healthcare services that such clothes can provide users with.

We present the design, prototyping, implementation, and test of Eth2Bee for the Xbee to Ethernet gateway for wireless personal area network. It supports ZigBee, WIFI, and Bluetooth. The Eth2Bee board is very useful for configuring in low power wireless sensor networks. Eth2Bee system is a combination of two technologies: Ethernet technology based on wired LAN technology and ZigBee technology based IEEE 802.15.4 standard WLPAN(Wireless Low-power Personal Area Network). This paper proposes the design, implementation, and test of Eth2Bee board hardware. We install the firmware into Eth2Bee and then install the Web service software for applications. Sensed data is passed to the Web through ZigBee wireless communications. We tested the prototyped Eth2Bee system and it gave good performance.

Physical inactivity is threatening the consistent trend of increased life expectancy that we have enjoyed over the past century. Thus, approaches to increase levels of physical activity are required. Social influence is an effective strategy for changing attitudes and behavior. An individual’s level of physical activity can be affected by interactions with his or her peer group; social interaction therefore can serve as a motivation for physical activity. The focus of the work reported here is to explore the use of social media to motivate people to increase their levels of physical activity. Following a review of recent research on methods of promoting physical activity, design strategies based on social interaction were identified. Based on these strategies, we implemented a system that aims to provide an enjoyable social network setting to motivate users to engage in sustained physical activity. We developed a walking-promotion system called Smart Manbo, which implements workout groups and competition to encourage physical activity. We evaluated this system by gathering user feedback via a 1-week user study with 16 participants. The results showed that the use of workout groups and competition had a significant effect on the likelihood of participants’ using the system. Competition rankings were positively correlated with the likelihood of use, and the ranking criterion was positively correlated with exercise motivation and the likelihood of system use.

This paper presents a multiple-watermarking scheme for mobile 3D secure transmission. The proposed scheme embeds a unique watermark and a WCA (Watermark Certification Authority) watermark into the spatial and encryption domains of mobile 3D content based on the Anonymous Buyer-Seller Watermarking Protocol. The seller generates a unique watermark and embeds it into the distribution of vertex data of the 3D content object. After receiving the encrypted watermark from the WCA, the seller embeds it into the encrypted vertex data by using an operator that satisfies the privacy homomorphic property. The proposed method was implemented using the mobile content tool, PowerVR MBX. Experimental results verified that the proposed method was capable of copyright protection and preventing illegal copying. The latter was verified by the watermarks being accurately extracted in the case of geometrical attacks.

The inter-cell interference problem is a key challenge in OFDMA-based cellular networks because it significantly decreases the throughput of the users at the cell edge. Mitigating this problem requires an inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) scheme that divides the spectrum into a power constant band and a power limited band for the cell edge users. Overall, static ICIC or frequency reuse schemes are effective when users are uniformly distributed across the network, whilst non-uniform user distributions suggest semi-static ICIC schemes where the power levels in the power limited bands are effectively set based on the interference situation from neighboring cells. In this paper we define a method that uses path-loss statistical measures to describe the non-uniform distribution between adjacent cells. Based on this method, we devise a new distributed algorithm that derives the suppression levels of transmit power a cell may set at a neighboring cell’s cell edge band based on the path-loss to the cell edge users of that neighboring cell. Our algorithm is evaluated by means of simulations and compared to reference frequency reuse schemes based on a non-uniform user distribution scenario where users are distributed in clusters. Simulation results show that the power suppression levels derived by our algorithm greatly improve spectral and energy efficiency as compared to 7-reuse and 1-reuse schemes respectively. It is also shown that our algorithm exploits the non-uniformity in the user distribution to improve the user throughput of cell edge users without any losses in the user throughput of the cell center users.

This paper focuses on solving the problem of checking the exponential stability of a class of stochastic fuzzy cellular neural networks with Markovian jumping parameters, time-varying delays and distributed delays. By constructing suitable Lyapunov functional and applying stochastic analysis, we firstly developed some sufficient conditions to guarantee the almost surely exponential stability and the exponential stability in the mean square of this kind of neural networks. We then showed, by developing several corollaries, that our results could be specialized to various cases including some published studies. Finally, a numerical example proves the effectiveness of our method.