Networking Research Group Seminar
Vehicular Networking Research Systems Laboratory

FALL 2007
Sep-6-2007
11:00AM
1410 PEC
Speaker:
Dr. Hassan Artail
Associate Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
American University of Beirut (AUB)

Topic:Collaborative and Distributed Semantic Caching for MANETs

Abstract: Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) are receiving great attention because of their easy deployment and potential applications. Mobile nodes in MANETs acquire data from data servers through access points. Each mobile node in a MANET sends a request to the access point each time it needs data. In order to avoid this costly operation, data caching at mobile nodes is employed. Several caching techniques for MANETs have been proposed and implemented. Cooperative and Adaptive Caching is a recent directory-based caching scheme that separates the query from its response and caches each one on a specific node in the network. When a new request is issued, nodes cooperate to find its answer and send it to the requesting node. In this work, we additionally apply semantic caching by semantically comparing each submitted request with all cached queries. The semantic analysis process may include trimming the request into fragments and combining the answers of these fragments to calculate the total answer of the request. Mathematical analysis and experimental results prove the viability of the proposed system in terms of query response time, generated traffic, and hit ratio.


FALL 2006

Sep-13-2006
11:00AM
121 CIS
Speaker: Dr. Zhen-Jun Shi
Topic: Optimization and Its Applications

Sep-21-2006
10:30AM
  121 CIS
Speaker: Mr. Nathan Balon
Topic: Increasing Broadcast Reliability in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract: Broadcast transmissions are the predominate form of network traffic in a VANET. However, since there is no MAC-layer recovery on broadcast frames within an 802.11-based VANET, the reception rates of broadcast messages can become very low, especially under saturated conditions. In this paper, we present an adaptive broadcast protocol that improves the reception rates of broadcast messages.  We rely on the observation that a node in a VANET is able to detect network congestion by simply analyzing the sequence numbers of packets it has recently received. Based on the percentage of packets that are successfully received in the last few seconds, a node is able to dynamically adjust the contention window size and thus improve performance.

Oct-10-2006
11:00AM
  121 CIS
Speaker: Dr. Shengquan Wang
Topic: Temperature-Constrained Real-Time Systems

Abstract: As power density in processors has increased exponentially in recent years, processors are prone to overheating caused by the large energy consumption. Temperature is becoming one of the big concerns in  system design. Naturally, power management plays a key role in  maintaining temperature. However, the majority of the literature  focuses on power management for the purpose of saving energy, not for  maintaining safe temperature levels. While energy and temperature are  closely related, power control mechanisms and temperature control  mechanisms are quite different. This is due to the fact that energy- aware techniques focus on dealing with the average energy consumption  while temperature-aware ones focus on handling peak energy consumption.

I am interested in temperature-constrained real-time systems, which have two major constraints: the delay constraint for jobs and the temperature constraint for the processor. Dynamic speed scaling is  one of the major techniques for power management, which can control  the power in the processor by dynamically changing the speed of the processor. Dynamic speed scaling allows for a trade-off between the performance metrics of delay and temperature in temperature- constrained real-time systems: to meet the delay constraint, we run  the processor at a higher speed; to maintain the safe temperature  levels, we run the process at a lower speed. In this talk, I am going  to present some preliminary results and some potential research areas.

Oct-17-2006
11:00AM
  121 CIS
Speakers: Dr. Jinhua Guo
Topics: Contexted Assisted Routing Procotols for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

Abstract: Due to the very high rate of topological changes and frequent network partitions, routing in VANETs is a formidable challenge.  Previous studies in ad hoc networks mainly deal with networks in which the topology changes are very slow.  However, the high mobility aspects of the nodes as in the case for VANETs are not well studied.  Furthermore, there have previously been few studies on how the specific movement patterns of vehicles may influence the protocol performance and applicability.  In this paper, we propose a Context Assisted Routing (CAR) protocol, which takes into account various domain specific contexts while routing packets.  A source node exploits global context information such as road topology, traffic information, and roadside access points, to compute the forwarding trajectory, which efficiently bypasses the topology holes.  The intermediate nodes utilize local context information, such as locations, velocities and driving directions of neighboring vehicles to greedily forward the packets to nodes that lie on the trajectory.  Simulation results show that the proposed CAR protocol outperforms the traditional geographic forwarding in terms of packet delivery ratio and average delivery delay.

Oct-24-2006
11:00AM
  121 CIS
Speaker: Dr. Zhen-Jun Shi
Topic: Several New Line Search Methods and Its Convergence

Abstract: In this report, we proposed several new line search methods for unconstrained minimization problems. The modified line search rule used in the method makes the step-size have a wider scope than the original line search rules do. It is clarified that the new line search methods have global convergence under mild conditions. It is  also proved that the search direction plays an important role in line search methods and that the step-size rule mainly guarantees the global convergence in much more cases. The convergence rate of these methods is also investigated. These theoretical results can help us design some new effective
algorithms in practice.

Oct-31-2006
11:00AM
  121 CIS
Speakers: Mr. John P. Baugh
Topics: Security and Privacy in VANETs using Group Signatures

Abstract: With the ever-increasing interest in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) and specifically in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), there is much research and interest in the security and privacy considerations that deal with these types of networks.  In this talk, I will describe the fundamental information regarding VANETs and a privacy-preserving cryptographic paradigm known as group signatures, and why this signature scheme may be appropriate for the vehicular environment.

Nov-16-2006
11:00AM
  121 CIS
Speaker: Dr. Bruce Elenbogen
Topic: Choosing Effective Multiple Leaky Buckets for Traffic Shaping of VBR ATM traffic