Earticle

In recent years, various multimedia services have become available and the demand for three-dimensional television (3DTV) is growing rapidly. Since 3DTV is considered as the next generation broadcasting service that can deliver photo-realistic and immersive experiences, a number of advanced 3D video processing techniques have been studied. In this paper, after reviewing the overall 3D video system, we explain several challenging technical issues of 3D video processing.

In this paper, two novel dynamic transmit antenna shuffling schemes, namely ‘Optimal’ and ‘Max STBC’, are presented in order to reduce the interference in V-BLAST/STBC scheme. These antenna shuffling schemes with the channel state information (CSI) from the receiver, which significantly improves performance of the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) system in Rayleigh flat-fading channels by selecting the appropriate antenna shuffling pattern, have been compared with a few other related schemes in terms of bit error rate (BER) and system capacity. The ‘Optimal’ antenna shuffling scheme improves the BER performance significantly with a gain of 2 dB at BER of 10-3 compared to all other schemes, while the ‘Max STBC’ antenna shuffling scheme enhances the V-BLAST/STBC system capacity by 4 %.

Recently, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has been broadly studied in ubiquitous computing environments. In WSN, it is important to reduce communication overhead by using an energy-efficient routing protocol because the resources of the sensor node are limited. Although there exist some cluster-based routing protocols, they have some problems. First, the random selection of a cluster head incurs a node concentration problem. Secondly, they have a low reliability for data communication due to the less consideration of node communication range. Finally, data communication overhead is greatly increased while constructing clusters. To solve these problems, we, in this paper, propose a new energy-efficient routing protocol using message success rate. To resolve the node concentration problem, we design a new cluster head selection algorithm based on node connectivity and devise cluster maintenance algorithms. Moreover, to guarantee data communication reliability, we use message success rate, which is one of popular measures for data communication reliability, in order to select a routing path. Finally, to reduce data communication overhead, we use only the information of neighboring nodes during both cluster construction and cluster head selection phases. Through our performance analysis, we show that our protocol outperforms existing schemes in terms of communication reliability and energy efficiency.

With the development of wireless communication technologies and popularity of smart phones, many people are using location-based services (LBSs). However, since users continuously request LBS queries to LBS server by sending their exact location data, their privacy information is in danger. Therefore, cloaking area creation schemes have been proposed to protect the user’s location privacy. However, because the existing techniques generate a cloaking area in a centralized manner, an anonymizer suffers from performance degradation and security problem. Therefore, a cloaking area creation scheme based on distributed system is required for the safe and comfortable use of mobile users. In this paper, we propose a grid-based cloaking area creation scheme for continuous LBS queries in distributed systems. The proposed scheme stores information and performs operations in a distributed manner to create a cloaking area. In addition, the proposed scheme uses aggregate nodes to prevent query issuers' bottleneck. Finally, we show from a performance analysis that our cloaking area creation scheme shows better performance than the existing centralized cloaking area creation schemes.

This paper presents a novel approach to the inference of trustworthiness of individual components shared between multiple composite services in distributed services environments. In such environments, multiple component services are orchestrated from distributed providers to create new valueadded services. A component service can be shared by several distributed compositions. A composite service is offered to its consumers who rate its reliability and satisfaction after each transaction. However, since composite services are provided as an integrated service it is not possible to attribute failures or causes of dissatisfaction to individual components in isolation. A collaborative detection mechanism can provide a solution to the evaluation of component trustworthiness based on consumer reporting of composite service execution results.

With the current human movement tracking technology it is possible to build a real-time virtual musical instrument with a gestural interface which is similar to a real musical instrument. In this paper, a simple finger triggering based controller for virtual musical instruments is presented. The virtual musical instruments that can be operated by using this controller are piano and drum. This system consists of three main components; finger data glove system, musical notes recognition system, and data transceiver system. Finger triggering devices are mounted to each finger in a data glove. This finger data glove has the capability to get data from triggered devices and the attached microcontroller in the data glove system is used to receive the data before transmitted to the musical notes recognition system through wireless or wired transmission. The musical notes recognition system matches the received triggering signal data with the predefined musical notes data using matching algorithm. When the data is matched, the musical notes data will be playing the associated musical notes. The developed system has the ability to switch the virtual musical instruments between piano and drum. Nevertheless, this developed finger triggered virtual musical instruments has the real-time capability to analyze the sounds or musical notes that have yet encountered in the studio.

The resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) includes activities which have to be scheduled due to precedence and resource restrictions such that an objective is satisfied. There are several variants of this problem currently, and also different objectives are considered with regards to the specific applications. This paper tries to introduce a new multiagent learning algorithm (MALA) for solving the multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem (MMRCPSP), in which the activities of the project can be performed in multiple execution modes. This work aims to minimize the total project duration which is referred to its makespan. The experimental results show that our method is a new one for this specific problem and can outperform other algorithms in different areas.