The Future of WiMAX

WiMAX is being promoted as a potential solution to a number of problems that have plagued the wired and wireless broadband industry since it originated. Can WiMAX fulfill this promise in a crowded and competitive market? If so, what factors are critical to its success? Who will use WiMAX and for what purposes? This chapter identifies both the critical success factors that will give WiMAX an edge over other existing wireless technologies and the key applications that will contribute to its success. The top three critical success factors for WiMAX are availability of handset devices and consumer premise equipment, bandwidth speed, and interoperability and standardization. A panel of WiMAX experts concludes that broadband on demand, wireless services provider access, and Voice over IP are the top three killer applications for WiMAX.

Emerging Wireless Networks for Social Applications

This chapter describes the implementation and performance evaluation of a novel routing protocol called Pandora, which is designed for social applications. This protocol can be implemented in a broad number of devices, such as commercial wireless routers and laptops. It also provides a robust backbone integrating and sharing data, voice and video between computers and mobile devices. Pandora offers great performance with both fixed and mobile devices and includes important features such as: geographic positioning, residual battery energy monitoring, and bandwidth utilization. In addition, Pandora also considers the number of devices attached to the network. Pandora is experimentally evaluated in a testbed with laptops for the first stage and commercial wireless routers for the second stage. The main goal of Pandora is to provide a reliable backbone for social applications requiring a quality of service (QoS) guarantee. With this in mind, the following evaluation of Pandora considers the following types of traffic sources: transport control protocol (TCP), voice, video and user datagram protocol (UDP) without marks. Pandora is also compared with different queuing disciplines, including: priority queuing discipline (PRIO), hierarchical token bucket (HTB) and DSMARK. Finally, an Internet radio transmission is employed to test the network re-configurability. Results show that queuing the PRIO and HTB disciplines, which prioritizes UDP traffic, performed the best.

Deployment and Success Factors for the Mobile Internet

The mobile Internet is a fast-growing technology that provides access to the traditional stationary (fixed-line) Internet from devices connected to mobile communication networks. It is predicted that the convergence between mobile networks and the fixed-line Internet will be a core feature in the next generation network architecture, achieving fast ‘anywhere’ Internet access and global mobility management. Applying a case study approach, this paper reviews the New Zealand mobile Internet market mix, competition, and mobile service provision. The key mobile Internet deployment requirements are determined and analyzed in order to identify a set of mobile Internet critical success factors and to investigate the impact of the shift from fixed-line to mobile and wireless Internet data communication infrastructure.

Insights from Experimental Research on Distributed Channel Assignment in Wireless Testbeds

This article presents the DES-Chan framework for experimental research on distributed channel assignment algorithms in wireless mesh testbeds. The implementation process of channel assignment algorithms is a difficult task for the researcher since common operating systems do not support channel assignment algorithms. DES-Chan provides a set of common services required by distributed channel assignment algorithms and eases the implementation effort. The results of experiments to measure the channel characteristics in terms of intra-path and inter-path interference according to the channel distance on the DES-Testbed are also presented. The DES-Testbed is a multi-radio WMN with more than 100 nodes located on the campus of the Freie Universität Berlin. These measurements are an important input to validate common assumptions of WMNs and derive more realistic, measurement-based interference models in contrast to simplified heuristics.

Contemporary Music Students and Mobile Technology

Five billion songs, and counting, have been downloaded (completely legally) through Apple Computer’s online iTunes Store. The iTunes University links free educational content from over seventy tertiary institutions worldwide, and is now available to New Zealand tertiary institutions. The Internet has revolutionised the delivery and access of media and education – making access to a worldwide audience or market merely a Google (or iTunes Store) search away! But, what are the real-world practicalities of this for contemporary music students and teachers today? How can these tools be utilised to facilitate personalised learning environments. Within this context, this chapter presents and evaluates a mobile learning case study at Unitec in the Diploma of Contemporary Music on the Waitakere campus.

Microsystems for Wireless Sensor Networks with Biomedical Applications

This chapter introduces the concept of wireless interface, followed by the discussion of the fundamental items, concerning the fabrication of microsystems comprising low-power devices. Using as example, a design of a RF transceiver the frequency of 2.4 GHz and fabricated using a UMC RF CMOS 0.18 µm process, it will be discussed the main issues in the design of RF transceivers for integration in wireless microsystems. Then, it will be presented two biomedical applications for wireless microsystems: the first is a wireless EEG acquisition system, where it is presented the concept of EEG electrode and the characterisation of iridium oxide electrodes. The other application, is a wireless electronic shirt to monitoring the cardio-respiratory function. The main goal of these applications, is to improve the medical diagnostics and therapy by using devices which reduces healthcare costs and facilitates the diagnostic while at the same time preserving the mobility and lifestyle of patients.

Data Gathering in Correlated Wireless Sensor Networks with Cooperative Transmission Data Gathering in Correlated Wireless Sensor Networks with Cooperative Transmission

This chapter considers the problem of data gathering in correlated wireless sensor networks with distributed source coding (DSC), and virtual multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) based cooperative transmission. Using the concepts of super and sub modularity on a lattice, we analytically quantify as how the optimal constellation size, and optimal number of cooperating nodes, vary with respect to the correlation coefficient. In particular, we show that the optimal constellation size is an increasing function of the correlation coefficient. For the virtual MIMO transmission case, the optimal number of cooperating nodes is a decreasing function of the correlation coefficient. We also prove that in a virtual MIMO based transmission scheme, the optimal constellation size adopted by each cooperating node is a decreasing function of number of cooperating nodes. Also it is shown that, the optimal number of cooperating nodes is a decreasing function of the constellation size adopted by each cooperating node. We also study numerically that for short distance ranges, SISO transmission achieves better energy-mutual information (MI) tradeoff. However, for medium and large distance ranges, the virtual MIMO transmission achieves better energy-MI tradeoff.

Data Broadcast Management in Wireless Communication

The data broadcast policies have been developed for single channel and multi channel with various scheduling and indexing techniques. For the data management policies which consider the different broadcast cycles for different broadcast operators, it can be said that traditional types of data management policies are known previously, and the policies of Central Server (CS) and Unified Index Hub (UIH), which consider single broadcast cycle for all operators, are recent. This chapter presents both strategies very simply for better understanding, discusses the work done in the past and present on data broadcast management, along with suggestions for the future possibilities to explore the field.

Wireless handheld Device and LAN Security Issues

The application of WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) technology in the healthcare industry has gained increasing attention in recent years. It provides effective and efficient sharing of health information among healthcare professionals in timely treatment of patients (Collaborative Health Informatics Centre, 2000; Whetton, 2005a). However, there is still a concern among healthcare professionals whether health information is shared safely with WLAN technology. The primary aim of this study is to explore factors influencing healthcare professionals’ adoption of WLAN security technology. This study was conducted in regional health settings in Queensland, Australia using a focus group discussion and a questionnaire survey in a mixed research methodology. The outcomes indicate that learning support, user technology awareness, readiness of existing system, and social influence, are four important factors in healthcare professionals’ adoption of WLAN security technology. The findings suggest that healthcare professionals prefer to be more informed and prepared on knowledge of WLAN security technology before they decide to adopt it in their work environment. Therefore, their awareness of what the technology can do and cannot do for them, and the support they could get in learning to use the technology, play a crucial role. The healthcare professionals are concerned with how readily their existing system could support WLAN security technology and how people important to them would influence their decision in adopting WLAN security technology. Future research should extend the study in three areas. Firstly, future study should examine factors in this study with more regional areas of Australia. Secondly, future research should also examine the relationship between the factors and the demographic variables. Finally, there is also the possibility of examining the adoption factors with other security technology in healthcare, such as the pairing of WLAN technology and biometric security.

A Survey on Applied Cryptography in Secure Mobile Ad Hoc Networks and Wireless Sensor Networks

Many secure mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) use techniques of applied cryptography. Numerous security routing protocols and key management schemes have been designed based on public key infrastructure (PKI) and identity-based cryptography. Some of these security protocols are fully adapted to fit the limited power, storage, and CPUs of these networks. For example, one-way hash functions have been used to construct disposable secret keys instead of creating public/private keys for the public key infrastructure. In this survey of MANET and WSN applications we present many network security schemes using cryptographic techniques and give three case studies of popular designs.