Search

Higher fuel economy standards and more stringent limitations on greenhouse gas emissions for ground vehicles have been made due to public concerns about energy crisis and environmental issues. By organizing a group of automated vehicles into a platoon at a short intervehicular distance, the overall fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of vehicle platoon can be decreased due to reduced aerodynamic drag, which is called the platooning technology. In addition, the eco-driving technology can help further increase the fuel efficiency of vehicle platoon by optimizing speed trajectories of vehicles. However, little research has been done into the combination of the eco-driving and platooning technologies. Based on distributed model predictive control (DMPC), this paper proposes an ecological cooperative look-ahead control strategy for a platoon of automated vehicles travelling on a freeway with varying slopes, where both the eco-driving and platooning technologies are used. To maximize the fuel efficiency of vehicle platoon, an ecological cooperative look-ahead control problem (Eco-CLC) is first formulated based on DMPC, where rotational inertia coefficient related to reduction ratio of gear box, aerodynamic drag related to spacing and model constraints are considered. Since the Eco-CLC problem is a nonconvex and nonlinear optimization problem with hard state constraints, it is very difficult to quickly obtain its optimal solution. To enhance real-time control performance, after the hard state constraints of the Eco-CLC problem are transformed into parts of the multi-objective function using the band-stop function, the improved ecological cooperative look-ahead control (iEco-CLC) based on DMPC is given. A particle swarm optimization algorithm with multiple dynamic populations is further presented to quickly solve the iEco-CLC problem online. Simulation results demonstrate, compared with benchmarks, the proposed strategy can save more than 21% of fuel for vehicle platoon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American automobile industry is facing substantial environmental and energy challenges driving the pursuit of alternative powertrain technologies—“The intervening mechanism by which power is transmitted from an engine to a propeller or axle that it drives,” which nominally includes engine, transmission, drive shafts, differentials, and the final drive. Emerging alternative fuel vehicles are showing their potential to address these challenges. However, diffusion of new technologies has many complications. This paper uses system dynamics modeling to investigate the impacts of individual and organizational parameters. This model embeds two traditional modeling methods for technology adoption, the Bass diffusion model and multinomial logit regression method. Five types of powertrain systems and three major stakeholders are considered. Mathematical relationships among different variables are elaborated. The qualitative impacts of government feebate, manufacturer willingness, and consumer purchasing preferences on economic and environmental issues are addressed using scenario analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many radio-frequency identification (RFID) applications, one of the essential systematic functionalities is to quickly detect missing-tag event in case of misplacement or other incorrect operations. In this paper, we focus on probabilistically detecting the missing tags for the anonymous multicategory RFID systems without revealing the tag privacy. The main objective is to minimize the detection time while satisfying the required detection reliability of each category. First, we propose to use a multihash technique to sequentially detect the missing tags category-by-category, called segmented sequential detection approach, in which the frame segmentation is adopted to reduce the detection time. Then, we propose an enhanced segmented sequential detection approach to further improve the detection efficiency by deactivating the identified existing tags. We conduct extensive simulations to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed two missing tag detection approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides novel analysis methods and detailed simulations for determining the impact of out-of-band emissions (OOBE) of adjacent band wireless services on mobile receive-only wireless services. Using the interference from the adjacent cellular bands on an operational digital wireless receive-only system as an example, we demonstrate the impact of the interference from adjacent cellular band transmitters and determine the performance impact such as outage on satellite receivers in realistic roadway conditions. This paper presents new methods for determining appropriate OOBE spectral masks for use by new cellular subscriber transmitters. This paper considers realistic propagation and traffic conditions in five cities throughout the United States and offers approaches that the engineering community may use to determine interference conditions between new cellular and fixed broadband mobile services in adjacent spectrum bands to existing receive-only mobile receiver systems, such as satellite radio. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Direct radio-based vehicle-to-vehicle communication can help prevent accidents by providing accurate and up-to-date local status and hazard information to the driver. In this paper, we assume that two types of messages are used for traffic safety-related communication: 1) Periodic messages ("beacons") that are sent by all vehicles to inform their neighbors about their current status (i.e., position) and 2) event-driven messages that are sent whenever a hazard has been detected. In IEEE 802.11 distributed-coordination-function-based vehicular networks, interferences and packet collisions can lead to the failure of the reception of safety-critical information, in particular when the beaconing load leads to an almost-saturated channel, as it could easily happen in many critical vehicular traffic conditions. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of transmit power control to avoid saturated channel conditions and ensure the best use of the channel for safety-related purposes. We propose a distributed transmit power control method based on a strict fairness criterion, i.e., distributed fair power adjustment for vehicular environments (D-FPAV), to control the load of periodic messages on the channel. The benefits are twofold: 1) The bandwidth is made available for higher priority data like dissemination of warnings, and 2) beacons from different vehicles are treated with "equal rights," and therefore, the best possible reception under the available bandwidth constraints is ensured. We formally prove the fairness of the proposed approach. Then, we make use of the ns-2 simulator that was significantly enhanced by realistic highway mobility patterns, improved radio propagation, receiver models, and the IEEE 802.11p specifications to show the beneficial impact of D-FPAV for safety-related communications. We finally put forward a method, i.e., emergency message dissemination for vehicular environments (EMDV), for fast and effective multihop information dissemination of event-driven messages and show that EMDV benefits of the beaconing load control provided by D-FPAV with respect to both probability of reception and latency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes results from a channel measurement campaign performed at several small airports in the U.S. in the 5-GHz band. This paper is a companion to another paper, which describes channel models for large airports. We classify the small airport surface channel into three propagation regions based upon different delay dispersion conditions. The channel characteristics of these regions in the delay and frequency domains are discussed with examples. We provide empirical stochastic channel models (of different bandwidths) to accurately represent the channel on the airport surface area for all propagation regions. The models are provided in the form of tapped delay lines, and complete statistical tap descriptions are given. Several key observations, including the presence of severe amplitude fading, some correlated scattering, and statistically nonstationary behavior, are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes several small printed circuit board planar antennas that can be integrated with amplifiers for short-range vehicle wireless communication. The antennas are designed for the 315-MHz frequency band, which is commonly used for control and security devices in the USA and Canada. Each antenna has dimensions of 50 × 70 mm (much less than the free-space wavelength λ = 0.95 m) and is implemented on FR-4 dielectric substrate. These investigated antennas were compared with respect to input impedance, radiation resistance, radiation efficiency, directivity, directionality, bandwidth, matching system complexity, and gain. This paper also includes experimental verification of the final antenna design in the vehicle. It is shown that the antenna diversity method can increase communication range for remote keyless entry systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a mobile telecommunications network, the period when a mobile station (MS) resides in a cell (the radio coverage of a base station) is called the cell residence time of that MS. The period between when a call arrives at the MS and when the MS moves out the cell is called the excess life of the cell residence time for that MS. In performance evaluation of a mobile telecommunications network, it is important to derive the excess life distribution from the cell residence times. This distribution determines if a connected call will be handed over to a new cell, and therefore significantly affects the call dropping probability of the network. In mobile-telecommunications-network simulation, generating the excess-life random numbers is not a trivial task, which has not been addressed in the literature. This paper shows how to generate the random numbers from the excess life distribution, and develop the excess-life random number generation procedures for cell residence times with gamma, Pareto, lognormal, and Weibull distributions. This paper indicates that the generated random numbers closely match the true excess-life distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors study the performance of scheduling algorithms exploiting the multiuser selection diversity. Schedulers with affordable-rate transmission and adaptive transmission based on the absolute signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the normalized SNR are considered. In contrast to previous studies on the multiuser-diversity systems, the channel dynamics is taken into consideration in this paper by a novel formulation based on the level crossing analysis of stochastic processes. Then, the authors make the connection between the Doppler frequency shift, which indicates the channel temporal correlation, and the average (channel) access time, the average waiting time (AWT) between accesses, and the average access rate (AAR) of active users. These properties are important for the scheduler design, especially for applications where delay is a concern. In addition, analytical expressions for the system throughput and the degree of fairness (DOF) when users have nonidentical average channel conditions are presented. These expressions quantify the effect of disparateness in users' average channel conditions on the system performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reverse link capacity of a direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) system in a multicell environment has been studied recently, and significant capacity improvements due to the use of beamforming have been observed. However, system performance with beamforming will be affected by several impairments, such as direction of arrival estimation errors, array perturbations, mutual coupling, and signal spatial spreads. In this paper, reverse link performance of CDMA systems with beamforming under these impairments (imperfect beamforming) is investigated. A simplified beamforming model is developed to evaluate the system performance in terms of user capacity, bit-error rates (BER), and outage probabilities. Both signal-to-interference-ratio-based power control and strength-based power control are considered in this paper. The capacity and BER degradations due to different impairments are shown, and outage probabilities under different power control schemes are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a realistic evaluation of the power mobile handsets are able to transmit and receive. It has been suggested to use the so-called total radiated power (TRP) and the total isotropic sensitivity (TIS) for the uplink and downlink, respectively, which may be seen as special cases of the general mean-effective-gain (MEG) measure. These measures are computed from the spherical radiation pattern of the handset and the different measures are obtained by using different models of the mobile propagation environment. In this paper, the results obtained via the spherical radiation patterns are compared with the equivalent performance obtained in a live Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network using data from the Abis network interface. This method does not require altering of the handsets and the testing uses normal calls in the network. The investigation is based on measurements with four different commercially available handsets carried out in two different indoor environments and involving 22 test users. In addition, a series of measurements were also made with a phantom simulating the handset user, allowing a test of how well the phantom represents the average user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been recent extensive research on integrating cellular networks and ad hoc networks to overcome the limitations of cellular networks. Although several schemes have been proposed to use such hybrid networks to improve the performance of individual multicast groups, they do not address quality of service (QoS) issues when multiple groups are present. This paper, on the other hand, considers an interesting scenario of hybrid networks when an ad hoc network cannot accommodate all the groups and a base station has to select a subset of groups to optimize its bandwidth savings and maximize the utilization of the ad hoc network while providing QoS support for multicast users. In this paper, a network model for multicast admission control that takes wireless interference into account is developed, the group selection problem is formulated as a multidimensional knapsack problem, and an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation and a polynomial-time dynamic algorithm are proposed. A distributed implementation of the dynamic algorithm in real systems is also examined. Simulation studies demonstrate that the dynamic algorithm is able to achieve very competitive performance under various conditions, in comparison with the optimal solution computed by the ILP approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A complete complementary code based direct sequence code division multiple access (CC/DS-CDMA) system has been proposed recently as a potential candidate for beyond third generation (B3G) wireless communications. This paper addresses the issues that design of efficient code assignment schemes should be based on a flexible physical layer support, which is extremely important for emerging cross-layer designs in future wireless applications. The study in this paper considers a CC/DS-CDMA system with multiple time slots, three traffic classes and two dynamic code-flock assignment schemes, namely random assignment (RA) and compact assignment (CA). Simulation results show that the CC/DS-CDMA system has variable capacity property (VCP), which is sensitively affected by different code-flock assignment schemes. In general, CA can offer lower blocking probability, whereas RA can offer a larger mean system capacity and higher throughput when offered traffic is heavy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses about the special section on cross-layer design for mobile ad hoc networks and wireless sensor networks published within the May 01, 2006 issue in the U.S. The first section, which consist of seven papers, focuses on the capacity analysis/enhancement and quality-of-service support. The following papers, from eight to twelve, address the routing issues. In addition, four paper after the 12th explores the idea of cross-layer design.

In this paper, a management strategy is developed to realize the real-time optimal torque distribution between the internal combustion (IC) engine and the electric motor of parallel hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). Without depending on future information, a set of instantaneous cost functions is defined as the objective of a multiobjective problem, which includes vehicle energy consumption, selected emission species, and an evaluation criterion for the battery state of charge (SOC). The varying-domain method is then utilized to introduce a flexible priority among objectives and to transform the multiobjective problem into a nonlinear programming problem, the optimal solution of which is subsequently found by a genetic algorithm, i.e., GENOCOPIII. A comparison of the simulation results demonstrates the flexibility of the proposed varying-domain optimal management strategy (VOMS) under different driving conditions. Compared with the rule-based management strategy (RBMS) and the weighted sum management strategy (WSMS), the VOMS potentially improves the fuel economy, emission reduction, and stability of the SOC. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For safety messages in a vehicular networking environment, strict messaging frequency requirements exist. For instance, six out of eight cooperative vehicular safety applications, as chosen by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership, require a minimum of 10 Hz, whereas the precrash sensing application requires an even higher frequency of 50 Hz, for messages that convey the positions of vehicles. Currently, the collisions of periodic safety message broadcasts for the IEEE Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) system are left to the IEEE 802.11p medium access control (MAC) to resolve. With small contention window sizes stipulated in the 802.11p amendment, however, the MAC offers only limited relief to the collision problem, particularly toward the beginning of the control channel (CCH) interval. In this paper, we show that application-level control of the message transmission phase is desirable, when the frequency adaptation is not allowed due to the application requirement. We demonstrate through simulation and analysis that the proposed technique achieves up to 50% higher message reception probability compared with that relying only on the 802.11p MAC. The proposed method works in the safety applications themselves; therefore, the existing standards need not be modified. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes the application of a novel multiobjective self-adaptive differential evolution (MOSADE) algorithm for the simultaneous optimization of component sizing and control strategy in parallel hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). Based on an electric assist control strategy, the HEV optimal design problem is formulated as a nonlinear constrained multiobjective problem with competing and noncommensurable objectives of fuel consumption and emissions. The driving performance requirements are considered constraints. The proposed MOSADE approach adopts an external elitist archive to retain nondominated solutions that are found during the evolutionary process. To preserve the diversity of Pareto optimal solutions, a progressive comparison truncation operator based on the normalized nearest neighbor distance is proposed. Moreover, a fuzzy set theory is employed to extract the best compromise solution. Finally, the optimization is performed over the following three typical driving cycles that are currently used in the U.S. and European communities: 1) the file transfer protocol; 2) ECE +EUDC; and 3) Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule. The results demonstrate the capability of the proposed approach to generate well-distributed Pareto optimal solutions of the HEV multiobjective optimization design problem. The comparison with the reported results of genetic-algorithm-based weighting sum approaches and Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II reveals the superiority of the proposed approach and confirms its potential for optimal HEV design. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the fuel consumption minimization problem of a blended-mode plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). A simplified mathematical model of the PHEV was constructed to obtain optimal solutions for depleting the battery to a given final state of charge (SOC) under constant vehicle speed. An optimal power strategy was constructed from theoretical analysis and simulation for constant speed cases and then applied to typical drive-cycle simulations for a middle-size plug-in sport utility vehicle in the Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency US06 (Supplemental Federal Test Procedure), and the CR-City drive cycles. Simulation results indicate that the proposed control strategy is more efficient than other strategies of interest. Only the electric system loss characteristics, vehicle power demand, total battery energy, and trip distance are needed to implement the proposed control strategy in a PHEV. It does not rely on the detailed trip information other than the total trip distance. Therefore, it is possible to implement the control strategy in real time if the total trip distance is known before the trip. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the development of active/passive roll control systems, a vehicle model that can represent realistic roll behavior is essential for predicting the impending rollover and for accurately applying the control force to avoid vehicle rollover. The vehicle roll center is a key parameter that influences the vehicle roll dynamics. Since the roll center movement becomes important as the vehicle roll angle increases, it is desirable to include this effect in the roll-control system. This paper proposes a dynamic roll stability indicator (RSI) incorporating roll-center movement that generates rollover threshold in terms of lateral acceleration. A robust parameter identification algorithm using a disturbance observer is designed to estimate the lateral and vertical roll-center movements. These estimates are later used in the RSI to update the rollover threshold. The. effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through simulations, and its performance is compared with other rollover warning algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing the capacity of the very high frequency air/ground (A/G) radio system that supports United States air traffic control is a major reason for upgrading the system to a four-slot time-division multiple-access (TDMA) architecture. Since aviation safety requires a dedicated, immediately accessible AJG circuit for each controller, the thousands of circuits in the nationwide system must have compatible frequency/slot assignments that will allow them all to operate simultaneously if necessary. System capacity may be defined as the size to which the system can grow before it will no longer be feasible to find a compatible assignment for every required new circuit. This paper describes a strategy for combining MG circuits into multislot TDMA ‘bundles’ in a way that will enhance capacity by efficiently using available frequencies and slots. To quantify the resultant capacity gain, the authors have applied the strategy in a series of nationwide system growth simulations, noting the numbers of hypothetical future circuit requirements that were met before frequency denials started to become necessary in some cases. Their results indicate that the capacity of the TDMA version of the system would be 2.8-3.7 times that of the present-day AM analog version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an approach to improve turbo code performance on the space time transmit diversity (STTD) code-division multiple-access (CDMA) forward link through better estimation of the channel state information (CSI) required by the mobile turbo decoder. An improved CSI estimation scheme that accounts for the unique nature of CDMA STTD intracell interference is presented. It is compared to a standard CSI estimation scheme that assumes all STTD interference and noise can be represented as additive white Gaussian noise at the mobile receiver input. An STTD CDMA forward link simulation shows that link performance is significantly improved when the mobile turbo decoder uses the more accurate CSI provided by improved estimation. However, the degree of improvement depends on the turbo decoding algorithm, mobile velocity, and whether the base station is using STTD or single-antenna transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privacy is becoming a major issue in ad hoc networks. In this paper, using pseudonimity for achieving communication anonymity in networks that apply geographic-routing algorithms is explored. An Anonymous Receiver-Contention POsitioning (ARCPO) routing algorithm is proposed. Node identities (IDs) are kept anonymous. Pseudonyms, i.e., the positions of destinations, are used for data-packet delivery. The anonymity for a destination relies on the difficulty of matching its position to its ID by any observer. Position servers that provide node position information act as trusted third parties and handle identity management. Node mobility makes the use of the pseudonym momentary, and therefore can further improve privacy. The anonymity for the source and intermediate nodes in the path is also achieved because they are not required to reveal any identity information. A receiver-contention mechanism is proposed so that a next hop can be generated without local position information exchange, which otherwise may lead to severe privacy degradation. Analysis and simulation show that while ARCPO guarantees anonymous communication in ad hoc networks, its routing performance degrades moderately compared with other position routing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors propose a node-cooperative automatic repeat request (ARQ) scheme for wireless ad hoc networks, which is suitable for mobile wireless channels with high and correlated frame-error profile. An analytical model based on a two-state Markovian process is proposed to describe the behavior of the proposed retransmission scheme and to obtain its throughput, average delay, and delay jitter. The results of Monte Carlo simulations are included to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme and to verify the accuracy of the analytical models. Results show that a cooperation among a small number of nodes can significantly improve the performance of the retransmission process in terms of throughput, average delay, and delay jitter by reducing the average duration of retransmission trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last several years, the interest in wireless networking has grown significantly due to the availability of many wireless products, such as cell phones, wireless enabled mice, keyboards, modems, and many other products. Bluetooth-enabled cell phones, personal digital assistance (PDAs), and laptops are becoming common. Wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) products are growing at a rapid rate. Several companies have already started developing WiMax products. The reason for the rapid growth of wireless technology is that it provides the users with additional convenience over the wired technology. General Motors Corporation introduced a Bluetooth network in its 2003 Saab 9–3 model car. Having a wireless personal area network (WPAN) in a vehicle will allow the driver to control the various operations within the vehicle without taking his hands off the steering wheel. For example, the driver will be able to make a phone call through a Bluetooth-enabled headset and a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone using voice-activated dialing features. If the Bluetooth network is connected to the vehicle's wired network through an appropriate gateway device, then the driver will be able to control the lights, windshield wipers, air flow, heat, and various other features of the vehicle through a Bluetooth-enabled headset and voice-activated features. An in-vehicle WPAN will also allow the users to use their PDAs as electronic car keys. Though an in-vehicle WPAN can provide the users with many convenient features, it can also make the vehicle system vulnerable to many types of security attacks unless it is properly designed. In this paper, the authors present a technique for building an in-vehicle secure WPAN (SWPAN). The technique is user friendly and easy to use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new multicarrier system, termed multisymbol encapsulated orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MSE-OFDM), is proposed, in which one cyclic prefix (CP) is used for multiple OFDM symbols. The original motivation for the MSE-OFDM proposal is to reduce the redundancy due to the CP in static-channel environments. The authors then found that an alternative implementation of the system can be used to improve the robustness to frequency offset and reduce the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). Equalization and demodulation algorithms for the MSE-OFDM system are proposed. A new preamble and the corresponding frequency-offset and channel estimation techniques are studied for the MSE-OFDM system. Using the proposed MSE-OFDM preamble, the joint maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of the frequency offset and the channel impulse response (CIR) is investigated in this paper. Possible ways to reduce the joint estimation complexity, including exploitation of the preamble structure, approximation of the joint ML estimator, and fast Fourier transform (FFT) pruning, are discussed. The performance of the proposed MSE-OFDM systems and channel estimators are analyzed and verified through numerical simulations. An analysis on the bandwidth efficiency, the performance with frequency offset, and the PAPR of the MSE-OFDM system are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a coherent demodulation scheme that reduces the multiple-access interference (MAI) considerably in a band-limited direct-sequence code-division multiple-access system. The despreading signal is obtained from a combination of the conventional despreading signal and its weighted early and late versions that are used in the delay-locked loop (DLL). It is shown that with appropriate choice of the weighting parameter of the early-late signals of the DLL, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio of the decision variable is increased, which leads to improvement in the bit-error performance and hence the potential increase in the system capacity by about 25%. The analyses are performed in the frequency domain. The effect of imperfect synchronization on the system performance is also analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with channel acquisition and tracking in the uplink of a multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) system. The transmission medium is characterized by multipath propagation, and the goal is to estimate the channel frequency response and the noise-power of each active user. Channel acquisition is performed jointly with the noise-power estimation following two different approaches. The first assumes independently faded subcarriers, while the second exploits the fading correlation across the signal bandwidth to improve the system performance. Both schemes are based on the maximum likelihood (ML) criterion and exploit some training blocks carrying known symbols. Channel tracking is pursued through least mean square (LMS) techniques using data decisions provided by a partial parallel interference cancellation (PPIC) receiver. Numerical results are given to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed methods and to present comparisons with other existing solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent designs for brake-by-wire systems use ‘resolvers’ to provide accurate and continuous measurements for the absolute position and speed of the rotor of the electric actuators in brake callipers (permanent magnet DC motors). Resolvers are absolute-angle transducers that are integrated with estimator modules called ‘angle tracking observer’ and together they provide position and speed measurements. Current designs for angle-tracking observers are unstable in applications with high acceleration and/or speed. In this paper, we introduce a new angle-tracking observer in which a closed-loop linear time-invariant (LTI) observer is integrated with a quadrature encoder. Finite-gain stability of the proposed design and its robustness to three different kinds of parameter variations are proven based on theorems of input-output stability in nonlinear control theory. In our experiments, we examined the performance of our observer and two other methods (a well-known LTI observer and an extended Kalman filter) to estimate the position and speed of a brake-by-wire actuator. The results show that because of the very high speed and acceleration of the actuator in this application, the LTI observer and Kalman filter cannot track the rotor position and diverge. In contrast, with a properly designed open-loop transfer function and selecting a suitable switching threshold, our proposed angle-tracking observer is stable and highly accurate in a brake-by-wire application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the problem of quality-of-service group communications in a heterogeneous network, which consists of multiple mobile ad hoc networks attached to the backbone Internet. A heuristic multicast algorithm named delay and delay variation multicast algorithm (DDVMA) is proposed. DDVMA is designed for solving the delay- and delay-variation-bounded multicast tree problem, which has been proved to be NP-complete. It can find a multicast tree satisfying the multicast end-to-end delay constraint and minimizing the multicast delay variation. Two concepts, which can help the DDVMA achieve better performance in terms of multicast delay variation than the delay and delay variation constraint algorithm that is known to be the most efficient so far, are proposed, namely, 1) the proprietary second shortest path and 2) the partially proprietary second shortest path. An analysis is given to show the correctness of DDVMA, and simulations are conducted to demonstrate the performance improvement of DDVMA in terms of multicast delay variation. It is also shown that the strategy employed by DDVMA is also applicable to handling the mobility of mobile hosts in a heterogeneous network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy constraints have a significant impact on the design and operation of wireless sensor networks. This paper investigates the base station (BS) selection (or anycast) problem in wireless sensor networks. A wireless sensor network having multiple BSs (data sink nodes) is considered. Each source node must send all its locally generated data to only one of the BSs. To maximize network lifetime, it is essential to optimally match each source node to a particular BS and find an optimal routing solution. A polynomial time heuristic is proposed for optimal BS selection and anycast via a sequential fixing procedure. Through extensive simulation results, it is shown that this algorithm has excellent performance behavior and provides a near-optimal solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy-efficient routing is a critical problem in multihop wireless networks due to the severe power constraint of wireless nodes. Despite its importance and many research efforts toward it, a distributed routing algorithm that maximizes network lifetime is still missing. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel utility-based nonlinear optimization formulation to the maximum lifetime routing problem. Based on this formulation, a fully distributed localized routing algorithm is further presented, which is proved to converge at the optimal point, where the network lifetime is maximized. Solid theoretical analysis and simulation results are presented to validate the proposed solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joint scheduling and power control schemes have previously been proposed to reduce power dissipation in wireless ad hoc networks. However, instead of power consumption, throughput is a more important performance concern for some emerging multihop wireless networks, such as wireless mesh networks. This paper examines joint link scheduling and power control with the objective of throughput improvement. The MAximum THroughput link Scheduling with Power Control (MATH-SPC) problem is first formulated and then a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation is presented to provide optimal solutions. However, simply maximizing the throughput may lead to a severe bias on bandwidth allocation among links. To achieve a good tradeoff between throughput and fairness, a new parameter called the demand satisfaction factor (DSF) to characterize the fairness of bandwidth allocation and formulate the MAximum Throughput fAir link Scheduling with Power Control (MATA-SPC) problem is defined. An MILP formulation and an effective polynomial-time heuristic algorithm, namely, the serial linear programming rounding (SLPR) heuristic, to solve the MATA-SPC problem are also presented. Numerical results show that bandwidth can be fairly allocated among all links/flows by solving the MILP formulation or by using the heuristic algorithm at the cost of a minor reduction of network throughput. In addition, extensions to end-to-end throughput and fairness and multiradio wireless multihop networks are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new cross-layer communication protocol for vehicular Internet access along highways is introduced. The objective of the new Controlled Vehicular Internet Access (CVIA) protocol is to increase the end-to-end throughput while achieving fairness in bandwidth usage between road segments. To achieve this goal, the CVIA protocol eliminates contention in relaying packets over long distances. CVIA creates single-hop vehicle clusters and mitigates the hidden node problem by dividing the road into segments and controlling the active time of each segment. Using an analytical throughput estimation model, the protocol parameters are flue-tuned to provide fairness among road segments. Simulation results confirm that the proposed CVIA protocol provides higher throughput and better fairness in multihop data delivery in vehicular networks when compared with purely IEEE 802.11-based protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel multihop virtual multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication protocol is proposed by the cross-layer design to jointly improve the energy efficiency, reliability, and end-to-end (ETE) QoS provisioning in wireless sensor network (WSN). In the protocol, the traditional low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy protocol is extended by incorporating the cooperative MIMO communication, multihop routing, and hop-by-hop recovery schemes. Based on the protocol, the overall energy consumption per packet transmission is modeled and the optimal set of transmission parameters is found. Then, the issues of ETE QoS provisioning of the protocol are considered. The ETE latency and throughput of the protocol are modeled in terms of the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of each link. Then, a nonlinear constrained programming model is developed to find the optimal BER performance of each link to meet the ETE QoS requirements with a minimum energy consumption. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed to solve the problem. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed protocol in energy saving and QoS provisioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A network of sensors can be used to obtain state-based data from the area in which they are deployed. To reduce costs, the data, sent via intermediate sensors to a sink, are often aggregated (or compressed). This compression is done by a subset of the sensors called ‘aggregators.’ Inasmuch as sensors are usually equipped with small and unreplenishable energy reserves, a critical issue is to strategically deploy an appropriate number of aggregators so as to minimize the amount of energy consumed by transporting and aggregating the data. In this paper, the authors first study single-level aggregation and propose an Energy-Efficient Protocol for Aggregator Selection (EPAS) protocol. Then, they generalize it to an aggregation hierarchy and extend EPAS to Hierarchical EPAS. The optimal number of aggregators with generalized compression and power-consumption models was derived, and fully distributed algorithms for aggregator selection were presented. Simulation results show that the algorithms significantly reduce the energy consumption for data collection in wireless sensor networks. Moreover, the algorithms do not rely on particular routing protocols and are thus applicable to a broad spectrum of application environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main characteristics of wireless ad hoc networks is their node-centric broadcast nature of communication, leading to interferences and spatial contention between adjacent wireless links. Due to such interferences, pessimistic concerns have been recently raised with respect to the decreasing network capacity in wireless ad hoc networks when the number of nodes scales to several orders of magnitude higher. Such studies assume uniformly distributed nodes in the network and randomized traffic patterns. In this paper, we argue that in all cases of end-to-end data communications—including one-to-k unicast and multicast data dissemination as well as/c-to-one data aggregation—the maximum achievable end-to-end data throughput (measured on the sources) heavily depends on the strategy of arranging the topology of transmission between sources and destinations, as well as possible per-node operations such as coding. An optimal strategy achieves better end-to-end throughput than an arbitrary one. We present theoretical studies and critical insights with respect to how these strategies may be designed so that end-to-end throughput may be increased. After all, under all circumstances—in either a lightly loaded or a congested network—increasing end-to-end throughput from its baseline is always beneficial to applications using ad hoc networks to communicate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Referring received signal strength (RSS) to a signal propagation model to find user location is one of the most promising strategies in wireless communications. This paper develops a simple method based on relative signal-strength measurements, that is, the differences in stationary signal strength measured at the user location from multiple base transceiver stations (BTSs). The stationary signal strength is the averaged RSS and also is a stationary Gaussian process. In using this method, it is vitally important to confirm that some uncertain propagation parameters can be canceled out while a signal propagation model is merged into our method for locating users. In this way, the differences in stationary signal strength lead to two solutions: One is the distance difference between pairs of BTSs, and the other is the distances from the user location to the multiple BTSs. Consequently, the hyperbolic positioning algorithm due to the distance-difference solution and the circular positioning algorithm due to the distances solution can be presented, respectively. Afterward, some experimental results were drawn from a field trial in a real propagation environment. Results show that the hyperbolic and circular positioning algorithms can locate the user to within about 350 and 300 m in 67 percentile, respectively. Compared with the numerical result reported in the literature on existing methods based on RSS only, our method is superior. Despite the result not meeting Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requirements, this method proved to be sufficiently simple and efficient in terms of the computation at burden and network signaling load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]