Search

In MANETs, various QoS problems exist such as high error rates, handling node mobility, inefficient routing, power conservation, and limited processing capabilities of network devices. To obtain secure ad hoc routing, misbehaving or malicious nodes should be detected and isolated. Otherwise, the overall network performance will be decreased. The participating nodes should establish a network with an acceptable level of trust relationships among themselves. This problem is solved with the adoption of a trust management framework and by extending the conventional routing protocol. This paper proposes a new routing protocol (TRUST_AODV) that extends the AODV routing protocol by incorporating a trust algorithm that detects misbehaving nodes. For each node, the proposed algorithm computes the weighted trust by taking into account the packet delivery ratio, energy consumption rate and buffer length. TRUST_AODV secures the MANET against potential packet drop attacks and denial-of-service attacks. It also improves the network performance under heavy network load conditions. The simulation results demonstrate that it supports secure routing and optimised performance.

Cognitive networks are still in their infancy and are envisaged for efficient and autonomic management of increasing complexity of communication networks. A cognitive network (CN) is self-aware, self-configuring, self-optimising, self-healing and self-protecting. Therefore, it has knowledge about itself, its building blocks and their interconnection, and can share this knowledge and reason based on this. For developing a CN, two elements are required: knowledge representation and the cognition loop . In this paper, we present existing research work on cognitive networks that refers to ontological network representations for telecommunication network management. We provide a brief summary of artificial intelligent techniques that are appropriate for the development of a CN as well as the managerial implications of CNs. Architectural proposals, which are based on ontologies and comply with the requirements for a CN, are also presented.

Current end user devices are not able to display all kind of multimedia data. However, this does not conform to the vision of universal multimedia access (UMA). Server side resource adaptation can solve some of the problems caused by heterogeneity because the multimedia resources are transformed sufficiently such that they fit the consumer's preferences and usage environment before they are sent to client. MPEG-21 is the ISO/IEC standard that defines a normative open framework for multimedia delivery and consumption concerning all parties in the delivery and consumption chain. However, the implementation of an intelligent adaptation engine (AE) capable of determining the required transformations is intentionally left to the tool vendors. An AE, based on the MPEG-21 digital item adaptation (DIA) framework, has an adaptation decision-taking engine (ADTE). In this paper, we present research efforts on ADTEs and consider how intelligent ADTEs can be designed and developed.

The future of tourism organisations and enterprises will be information-oriented, knowledge-driven and much of their daily processes will be automated around the internet. The internet, including multimedia, has provided tremendous potential for remote integration and collaboration in business applications. This paper attempts to provide a review of the application of multimedia technology in tourism environments. It justifies the application of multimedia in various tourism sub-domains such as tourism marketing, tourism education, mobile learning for travellers, mobile tourism guides, multimedia kiosks, virtual museums, virtual tours, multimedia travel plans, cooking studios based on web recipes, video conferencing and modelling demand for space tourism services. A conceptual framework for the design of multimedia systems for tourism is presented and discussed. Future research directions are also proposed.

In recent years, the package tour industry has fostered a dependency on technology for its operational and strategic management. However, the existing tools for facilitating searches of availability of package tours do not provide intelligent matching between offered package tours and the personal requirements of the travellers. The objective of this research work was to design an intelligent web portal to serve as service provider in tasks related with package tours. This portal aims at helping people living in Europe to find package tours that match their personal travel preferences. For this purpose, the knowledge of the package tour domain has been represented by means of ontology. Additionally, the ontological component allows for defining an ontology-guided search engine, which provides more intelligent matches between package tours offers and travelling preferences.