Objective video quality assessment methods often evaluate all the frames regardless of their importance. For wireless distorted videos, not every frame has the same contribution to the final overall quality due to the channel fading and interference, which may lead to the capacity variation in temporal. Besides, with the content similarity and error propagation pattern in temporal domain, it is possible to evaluate the overall quality with only part of the frames. In this paper, a demonstration is performed to show that the video quality can be evaluated with reduced frames set (RFS), and a state transition model is proposed to extract the RFS. At last, a video quality assessment (VQA) method is carried out based on RFS. Compared with several state-of-the-art methods, our method can achieve a suitable accuracy with less frames to be processed.

Considering the shortcomings of the existing vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication antennas, this paper proposes a regular hexagon broadband microstrip antenna. By loading shorting pins and etching V-shape slots with different size at each angle of the regular hexagon patch, it realizes impedance matching and obtains better impedance bandwidth. The simulated results show that the relative bandwidth of this antenna reaches 35.55%, covers the frequency band of 4.74 GHz to 6.79 GHz. The antenna acquires an omni-directional radiation pattern in the horizontal plane whose out of roundness is less than 0.5 dB. In addition, the antenna is manufactured and tested, whose tested results are basically consistent with simulated results. Because the height of antenna is 3 mm, it is easy to be hidden on roof of a vehicle for V2V communication.

From the perspective of compressed sensing (CS) theory, the channel estimation problem in large-scale multiple input multiple output (MIMO)-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system is investigated. According to the theory, the smaller mutual coherence the reconstruction matrix has, the higher success probability the estimation can obtain. Aiming to design a pilot that can make the system reconstruction matrix having the smallest mutual coherence, this paper proposes a low complexity joint algorithm and obtains a kind of non-orthogonal pilot pattern. Simulation results show that compared with the conventional orthogonal pilot pattern, applying the proposed pattern in the CS channel estimation can obtain the better normalized mean square error performance. Moreover, the bit error rate performance of the large-scale MIMO-OFDM system is also improved.

IEEE 802.15.4 protocol has attracted much attention in research and industrial communities as candidate technology for wireless body area sensor networks (WBASNs). IEEE 802.15.4 supports the exclusive use of a wireless channel through guaranteed time slot (GTS). However, on one hand, bandwidth underutilization rate may be lower because of the variance between the guaranteed bandwidth and the arrival rate. On the other hand, the waiting time for transmitting emergency notification is getting longer when the GTSs assigned to the nodes increase in WBASNs. To solve these problems, in this article, a new scheme is proposed to reduce transmission delay for the alarm notification in emergent situations. Simulation results are presented to validate the efficiency of the proposed scheme by comparing it with the medium access control (MAC) protocol of IEEE 802.15.4.

In a radio frequency identification (RFID) system, the backscattered signal is small and prone to interference. The performance of RFID tag identi?cation in interference scenarios is degraded compared to that in error-free scenarios. In this paper, a novel Mahalanobis distance estimate (MDE) method is proposed to jointly estimate the number of tags and packet error rate (PER). The MDE method is error resilient owing to its ability to achieve a stable estimation when interference is impairing the observed information. The proposed method achieves significantly enhanced accuracy over existing methods by taking all the information and correlations among the observed results into account. The MDE method improves the estimate performance based on efficient decorrelation and classification of the observed information. Moreover, the performance of the PER estimate is analyzed both in theory and through simulations. It can be concluded from the analysis that the estimated PER is unbiased and variance-bounded. Simulations show that the proposed estimate outperforms the previous proposals in terms of accuracy and stability, which makes it suitable for application in interference scenarios.

The fifth generation mobile communication (5G) systems can provide Gbit/s data rates from massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) combined with the emerging use of millimeter wavelengths in small heterogeneous cells. This paper develops an energy-efficiency based multi-user hybrid beamforming for downlink millimeter wave (mmWave) massive MIMO systems. To make better use of directivity gains of the analog beamforming and flexible baseband processing of the digital beamforming, this paper proposes the analog beamforming to select the optimal beam which can maximize the power of the objective user and minimize the interference to all other users. In addition, the digital beamforming maximizes the energy efficiency of the objective user with zero-gradient-based approach. Simulation results show the proposed algorithm provide better bit error rate (BER) performance compared with the traditional hybrid beamforming and obviously improved the sum rate with the increase in the number of users. It is proved that multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) can be a perfect candidate for mmWave massive MIMO communication system. Furthermore, the analog beamforming can mitigate the inter-user interference more effectively with the selection of the optimal beam and the digital beamforming can greatly improve the system performance through flexible baseband processing.

Echo cancellation plays an important role in current Internet protocol (IP) based voice interactive systems. Voice state detection is an essential part in echo cancellation. It mainly comprises two parts: double talk detection (DTD) and voice activity detection (VAD). DTD is used to detect doubletalk and prevent filter divergence in the presence of near-end speech, and VAD is used to determine the near-end voice activity and output silence indicator when near-end is silent. However, DTD straightforwardly proceeded may mistakenly declare double talk under double silent condition, coefficients update under the far-end silence condition may lead to filter divergence, and current VAD algorithms may misjudge the residual echo from the near end to be far-end voice. Therefore, a voice detection algorithm combining DTD and far-end VAD is proposed. DTD is implemented when VAD declares far-end speech, filtering and coefficients update will be halted when VAD declares far-end silence, and the far-end VAD adopted is multi-feature VAD based on short-time energy and correlation. The new algorithm can improve the accuracy of DTD, prevent filter divergence, and exclude the circumstance that far-end signal only contains residual echo from near end. Actual test results show that the voice state decision of the new algorithm is accurate, and the performance of echo cancellation is improved.

It is challenging and significant to explore the impacts of non-real-time services on real-time services from the perspective of jitter. Most of current researches on jitter made too many mathematical hypotheses on networks and traffic. This paper puts forward a tandem queuing model to characterize the real communication scenario where heterogeneous services are served by IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and then the packets served successfully are fed to Internet protocol (IP) networks. By analyzing the contention access processes in IEEE 802.15.4 WSNs, the authors derive the departure processes of the two types of services, i.e., the arrival processes of IP networks. The IP network is modeled as a queuing system, in which the real-time service is forwarded accompanied by the non-real-time service. Investigating the jitter of real-time services is intractable. Therefore, this paper abstracts this problem as a dynamic queuing system evolving on a dynamic time interval. Referring the transient analysis method (TAM), this paper obtains the queue length in a random time interval which is scaled by the arrival of real-time services. Queue length evolution is closely connected with the jitter. Benefiting from the derivation in probability generation domain, the jitter of real-time services is obtained.

A kind of dual-band-stop filter with an unsymmetrical T-shape defected ground structure (DGS) is proposed. The filter has two band gap centers at 4.9 GHz and 7.35 GHz, respectively, where the two centre frequencies are just the second and third harmonics 2.45 GHz. The filters with high band-stop performance and wideband spurious suppression can be achieved by cascading miniaturized unsymmetrical T-shape DGS. The attenuation of three-cascaded T-shape DGS filter is 30.77 dB at 4.9 GHz and 17.96 dB at 7.35 GHz respectively. The above experimental results are in good agreement with the simulation results, especially for the third harmonic.

In both wireless local area networks (WLAN) and mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), the IEEE 802.11e medium access control (MAC) protocol is proposed for an effective quality of service (QoS) solution. A number of studies have been done to enhance the performance of 802.11e in MANET by independently adjusting contention window (CW) size of each access category (AC) in every node. However, without the cooperation between the high priority flows and lower priority flows, the QoS goal of high priority flows cannot achieve effectively. In this article, a fuzzy logic based cooperative MAC protocol (FLCMAC) is proposed to cooperate amongst network flows and dynamically adjust access probability of each low priority flow affecting the high priority flows to satisfy their QoS requirement. The simulation results indicate that compared to the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) scheme of 802.11e, the FLCMAC consistently excels, in terms of throughput and delay under moderate and heavy background traffic both in single-hop and multi-hop scenarios.

Clustering provides an effective way to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. One of the major issues of a clustering protocol is selecting an optimal group of sensor nodes as the cluster heads to divide the network. Another is the mode of inter-cluster communication. In this paper, an energy-balanced unequal clustering (EBUC) protocol is proposed and evaluated. By using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, EBUC partitions all nodes into clusters of unequal size, in which the clusters closer to the base station have smaller size. The cluster heads of these clusters can preserve some more energy for the inter-cluster relay traffic and the ‘hot-spots’ problem can be avoided. For inter-cluster communication, EBUC adopts an energy-aware multihop routing to reduce the energy consumption of the cluster heads. Simulation results demonstrate that the protocol can efficiently decrease the dead speed of the nodes and prolong the network lifetime.

This article presents a data management solution based on the data distribution service (DDS) communication model. The basic DDS communication model consists of a unidirectional data exchange where applications that publish data ‘push’ the relevant data, which is updated to the local caches of co-located subscribers to the data [1]. DDS has no specified center node to forward data packets and maintain the communication data. This type of publish-subscribe (P/S) model presents integrity and consistency challenges in data management. Unlike peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed storage, DDS applications have a hard real-time environment and fewer data features, and the core problem is ensuring the integrity and consistency of data in distributed systems under this hard real-time environment. This article begins with a brief introduction of the communication model used by DDS, then analyzes persistent data management problems caused by such model, and provides an appropriate solution to these problems. This solution has been implemented in a prototype system of the real-time service bus (RTSB) of Tsinghua University.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are emerging as essential and popular ways of providing pervasive computing environments for various applications. Unbalanced energy consumption is an inherent problem in WSNs, characterized by multi-hop routing and a many-to-one traffic pattern. This uneven energy dissipation can significantly reduce network lifetime. In multi-hop sensor networks, information obtained by the monitoring nodes need to be routed to the sinks, the energy consumption rate per unit information transmission depends on the choice of the next hop node. In an energy-aware routing approach, most proposed algorithms aim at minimizing the total energy consumption or maximizing network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a novel energy aware hierarchical cluster-based (NEAHC) routing protocol with two goals: minimizing the total energy consumption and ensuring fairness of energy consumption between nodes. We model the relay node choosing problem as a nonlinear programming problem and use the property of convex function to find the optimal solution. We also evaluate the proposed algorithm via simulations at the end of this paper.

Opportunistic routing (OR) could adapt to dynamic wireless sensor networks (WSNs) because of its inherent broadcast nature. Most of the existing OR protocols focus on the variations of propagation environment which are caused by channel fading. However, a few works deal with the dynamic scenario with mobile nodes. In this paper, a mobile node (MN) aware OR (MN-OR) is proposed and applied to a WSN in the high-speed railway scenario where the destination node is deployed inside a high speed moving train, and the MN-OR not only considers the mobility of node but also utilizes the candidate waiting time induced by the timer-based coordination scheme. Specifically, to reduce the number of duplicate transmissions and mitigate the delay of information transmission, a new selection strategy of the candidate forwarders is presented. In addition, two priority assignment methods of the candidate forwarders are proposed for the general relay nodes (GRNs) and the rail-side nodes (RSNs) according to their different routing requirements. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MN-OR protocol can achieve better network performances compared with some existing routing schemes such as the well-known Ad-hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) and the extremely opportunistic routing (ExOR) protocols.

Anonymous proxy signature scheme can provide the privacy protection for the proxy signer. Recently, Yu et al. proposed an anonymous proxy signature, which can be viewed as the organic combination of proxy signature and ring signature. However, the efficiency is low. In this paper, we propose an efficient and secure proxy signature with the properties of anonymity and traceability, and it is provably secure in the random oracle model. Compared with Yu et al.’s scheme, the scheme has higher efficiency.

In this article a bridge between the expected complexity and performance of sphere decoding (SD) is built. The expected complexity of SD for infinite lattices is then investigated, which naturally is the upper-bound of those for all the finite lattices if given by the same channel matrix and signal noise ratio (SNR). Such expected complexity is an important characterization of SD in multi-antenna systems, because no matter what modulation scheme is used in practice (generally it has finite constellation size) this upper-bound holds. Above bridge also leads to a new method of determining the radius for SD. The numerical results show both the real value and upper-bound of average searched number of candidates in SD for 16-QAM modulated system using the proposed sphere radius determining method. Most important of all new understandings of expected complexity of SD are given based on above mentioned theoretic analysis and numerical results.

How to efficiently build routes among nodes is increasing important for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). This paper puts forward an interference aware routing protocol called Interference aware cross layer routing protocol (IA-CLR) for MANETs based on the IEEE 802.11 medium access layer (MAC). By defining the node’s sending and receiving capabilities, IA-CLR can indicate the interference strength of the link in a real and comprehensive way. Further more, in order to choose the route with minimum bottleneck link interference, a new routing metric is proposed by combining the MAC layer and the network layer for cross layer design. Simulation results show that IA-CLR can significantly improve the performances of network such as the average end-to-end delay, the packets loss ratio and the throughput.

Echo state network (ESN) has become one of the most popular recurrent neural networks (RNN) for its good prediction performance of non-linear time series and simple training process. But several problems still prevent ESN from becoming a widely used tool. The most prominent problem is its high complexity with lots of random parameters. Aiming at this problem, a minimum complexity ESN model (MCESN) was proposed. In this paper, we proposed a new wavelet minimum complexity ESN model (WMCESN) to improve the prediction accuracy and increase the practical applicability. Our new model inherits the characters of minimum complexity ESN model using the fixed parameters and simple circle topology. We injected wavelet neurons to replace the original neurons in internal reservoir and designed a wavelet parameter matrix to reduce the computing time. By using different datasets, our new model performed better than the minimum complexity ESN model with normal neurons, but only utilized tiny time cost. We also used our own packets of transmission control protocol (TCP) and user datagram protocol (UDP) dataset to prove that our model can deal with the data packet bit prediction problem well.

This paper investigates the resource allocation problem for the cluster-based cooperative multicast in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based cognitive radio (CR) systems. Aiming at maximizing the system sum rate, an efficient clustering scheme is proposed. It begins with the clustering phase where secondary users (SUs) with good channel conditions are selected as cluster heads, while others decide to which cluster they belong. When the clusters are organized, it turns to a two-stage data transmission phase: in stage 1, the secondary base station (BS) transmits data to the cluster heads; in stage 2, the cluster heads forward the received data to their cluster members. Based on this scheme, a joint subcarrier and power allocation algorithm is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the conventional multicast (CM) as well as the multiple description coding multicast (MDCM) in terms of the system sum rate.

Ring signature enables the members to sign anonymously without a manager, it has many online applications, such as e-voting, e-money, whistle blowing etc. As a promising post-quantum candidate, lattice-based cryptography attracts much attention recently. Several efficient lattice-based ring signatures have been naturally constructed from lattice basis delegation, but all of them have large verification key sizes. Our observation finds that a new concept called the split-SIS problem introduced by Nguyen et al. at PKC’15 is excellent in reducing the public key sizes of lattice-based ring signature schemes from basis delegation. In this research, we first define an extended concept called the extended split-SIS problem, and then prove that the hardness of the extended problem is as hard as the approximating SIVP problem within certain polynomial factor. Moreover, we present an improved ring signature and prove that it is anonymous and unforgeable against the insider corruption. Finally, we give two other improved existing ring signature schemes from lattices. In the end, we show the comparison with the original scheme in terms of the verification key sizes. Our research data illustrate that the public key sizes of the proposed schemes are reduced significantly.