1369726
Adaptive Data Fusion for Energy Efficient Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks
While in-network data fusion can reduce data redundancy and, hence, curtail network load, the fusion process itself may introduce significant energy consumption for emerging wireless sensor networks with vectorial data and/or security requirements. Therefore, fusion-driven routing protocols for sensor networks cannot optimize over communication cost only - fusion cost must also be accounted for. In our prior work, while a randomized algorithm termed MFST is devised toward this end, it assumes that fusion shall be performed at any intersection node whenever data streams encounter. In this paper, we design a novel routing algorithm, called adaptive fusion Steiner tree (AFST), for energy efficient data gathering. Not only does AFST jointly optimize over the costs for both data transmission and fusion, but also AFST evaluates the benefit and cost of data fusion along information routes and adaptively adjusts whether fusion shall be performed at a particular node. Analytically and experimentally, we show that AFST achieves better performance than existing algorithms, including SLT, SPT, and MFST
20456243
Energy-Efficient Cooperative Image Processing in Video Sensor Networks
Different from conventional sensor networks, video sensor networks are distinctly characterized by their immense information and directional sensing models. In this paper, we propose an innovative, systematic method for image processing in video sensor networks in order to reduce the workload for individual sensors. Given the severe resource constraints on individual sensor nodes, our approach is to employ the redundancy among sensor nodes by partitioning the sensing task among highly correlated sensors. For an object of interest, each sensor only needs to capture and deliver a fraction of the scene of interests and these partial images can be fused at the sink to reconstruct a composite image. In particular, we detail how the sensing task can be partitioned among the sensors and propose an image fusion algorithms based on epipolar line constraint to fuse the received partial images at the sink. The experimental results show that our approach can achieve satisfactory results and we give detailed discussions on the effects of different system parameters.
19403347
DVSR: a high-performance metro ring protocol
The Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) IEEE 802.17 standard is under development as a new high-speed backbone technology for metropolitan area networks. A key performance objective of RPR is to simultaneously achieve high utilization, spatial reuse, and fairness, an objective not achieved by current technologies such as SONET and Gigabit Ethernet or by legacy ring technologies such as FDDI. The core technical challenge for RPR is the design of a bandwidth allocation algorithm that dynamically achieves these properties. The difficulty is in the distributed nature of the problem, that upstream ring nodes must inject traffic at a rate according to congestion and fairness criteria downstream. Unfortunately, the proposed algorithms in the current draft standards have a number of critical limitations. For example, we show that in a two-flow two-link scenario with unbalanced and constant-rate traffic demand, a draft RPR algorithm will suffer from dramatic bandwidth oscillations within nearly the entire range of the link capacity. Moreover, such oscillations hinder spatial reuse and decrease throughput significantly. We are developing a new dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm called Distributed Virtual-time Scheduling in Rings (DVSR). The key idea is for nodes to compute a simple lower bound of temporally and spatially aggregated virtual time using per-ingress counters of packet (byte) arrivals. We show that with this information propagated along the ring, each node can remotely approximate the ideal fair rate for its own traffic at each downstream link. Hence, DVSR flows rapidly converge to their ring-wide fair rates while maximizing spatial reuse. To evaluate DVSR, we are using a combination of theoretical analysis, simulation, and implementation, including a proof-of-concept prototype of DVSR on a 1 Gb/sec network processor testbed.
10742303
Stability and sensitivity for congestion control in wireless networks with time varying link capacities
While extensive efforts have been devoted to providing optimization based, distributed congestion control schemes for efficient bandwidth utilization and fair allocation in both wireline and wireless networks, a common assumption therein is fixed link capacities. This unfortunately will limit the application scope in multi-hop wireless networks where channels are ever changing. In this paper, we explicitly model link capacities to be time varying and investigate congestion control problems in multi-hop wireless networks. In particular we propose a primal-dual congestion control algorithm which is proved to be trajectory stable in the absence of feedback delay. Different from system stability around a single equilibrium point, trajectory stability Guarantees the system is stable around a time varying reference trajectory. Moreover, we obtain sufficient conditions for the scheme to be locally stable in the presence of delay. Our key technique is to model time variations of capacities as perturbations to a constant link. Furthermore, to study the robustness of the algorithm against capacity variations, we investigate the sensitivity of the control scheme and through simulations to study the tradeoff between stability and sensitivity.
37573411
On Coverage Problems of Directional Sensor Networks
In conventional sensor networks, the sensors often are based on omni-sensing model. However, directional sensing range and sensors are great application chances, typically in video sensor networks. Thus, the directional sensor network also demands novel solutions, especially for deployment policy and sensor’s scheduling. Toward this end, this paper evaluates the requirements of deploying directional sensors for a given coverage probability. Moreover, the paper proposes how to solve the connectivity problem for randomly deployed sensors under the directional communication model. The paper proposes a method for checking and repairing the connectivity of directional sensor networks for two typical cases. We design efficient protocols to implement our idea. A set of experiments are also performed to prove the effectivity of our solution. The results of this paper can be also used to solve the coverage problem of traditional sensor networks as a special case.
16164675
Energy efficient routing with adaptive data fusion in sensor networks
While in-network data fusion can reduce data redundancy and hence curtail network load, the fusion process itself may introduce significant energy consumption for emerging wireless sensor networks with vectorial data. Therefore, fusion-driven routing protocols for sensor networks cannot optimize over communication cost only -- fusion cost must also be accounted for. Towards this end, we design a novel routing algorithm, called Adaptive Fusion Steiner Tree (AFST), for energy efficient data gathering in sensor networks that jointly optimizes over the costs for data transmission and data fusion. Furthermore, AFST evaluates the benefit and cost of data fusion along information routes and adaptively adjusts whether fusion shall be performed. Analytically and experimentally, we show that AFST achieves better performance than existing algorithms including SLT, MFST, and SPT.
54297489
Iso-Map: Energy-Efficient Contour Mapping in Wireless Sensor Networks
Contour mapping is a crucial part of many wireless sensor network applications. Many efforts have been made to avoid collecting data from all the sensors in the network and producing maps at the sink, which is proven to be inefficient. The existing approaches (often aggregation based), however, suffer from heavy transmission traffic and incur large computational overheads on each sensor node. We propose Iso-Map, an energy-efficient protocol for contour mapping, which builds contour maps based solely on the reports collected from intelligently selected ?isoline nodes? in wireless sensor networks. Iso-Map achieves high-quality contour mapping while significantly reducing the generated traffic from O(n) to O(?n), where n is the total number of sensor nodes in the field. The pernode computation overhead is also restrained as a constant. We conduct comprehensive trace-driven simulations to verify this protocol, and demonstrate that Iso-Map outperforms the previous approaches in the sense that it produces contour maps of high fidelity with significantly reduced energy cost.
2900427
Reconstructing B-spline Curves from Point Clouds--A Tangential Flow Approach Using Least Squares Minimization
We present a novel algorithm based on least-squares minimization to approximate point cloud data in 2D plane with a smooth B-spline curve. The point cloud data may represent an open curve with self intersection and sharp corner. Unlike other existing methods, such as the moving least-squares method and the principle curve method, our algorithm does not need a thinning process. The idea of our algorithm is intuitive and simple - we make a B-spline curve grow along the tangential directions at its two end-points following local geometry of point clouds. Our algorithm generates appropriate control points of the fitting B-spline curve in the least squares sense. Although presented for the 2D case, our method can be extended in a straightforward manner to fitting data points by a B-spline curve in higher dimensions
14257785
Comparison of probabilistic combination methods for protein secondary structure prediction
MOTIVATION
Protein secondary structure prediction is an important step towards understanding how proteins fold in three dimensions. Recent analysis by information theory indicates that the correlation between neighboring secondary structures are much stronger than that of neighboring amino acids. In this article, we focus on the combination problem for sequences, i.e. combining the scores or assignments from single or multiple prediction systems under the constraint of a whole sequence, as a target for improvement in protein secondary structure prediction.


RESULTS
We apply several graphical chain models to solve the combination problem and show that they are consistently more effective than the traditional window-based methods. In particular, conditional random fields (CRFs) moderately improve the predictions for helices and, more importantly, for beta sheets, which are the major bottleneck for protein secondary structure prediction.
18179447
Towards Designing Neural Network Ensembles by Evolution
This paper proposes a co-evolutionary learning system, i.e., CELS, to design neural network (NN) ensembles. CELS addresses the issue of automatic determination of the number of individual NNs in an ensemble and the exploitation of the interaction between individual NN design and combination. The idea of CELS is to encourage different individual NNs in the ensemble to learn different parts or aspects of the training data so that the ensemble can learn the whole training data better. The cooperation and specialisation among different individual NNs are considered during the individual NN design. This provides an opportunity for different NNs to interact with each other and to specialise. Experiments on two real-world problems demonstrate that CELS can produce NN ensembles with good generalisation ability.
866017
Contour map matching for event detection in sensor networks
Many sensor network applications, such as object tracking and disaster monitoring, require effective techniques for event detection. In this paper, we propose a novel event detection mechanism based on matching the contour maps of in-network sensory data distribution. Our key observation is that events in sensor networks can be abstracted into spatio-temporal patterns of sensory data and that pattern matching can be done efficiently through contour map matching. Therefore, we propose simple SQL extensions to allow users to specify common types of events as patterns in contour maps and study energy-efficient techniques of contour map construction and maintenance for our pattern-based event detection. Our experiments with synthetic workloads derived from a real-world coal mine surveillance application validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.