Computer Engineering Commons^™

Vcare: A Personal Emergency Response System To Promote Safe And Independent Living Among Elders Staying By Themselves In Community Or Residential Settings, Priyankar Bhattacharjee

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

‘Population aging’ is a growing concern for most of us living in the twenty first century, primarily because many of us in the next few years will have a senior person to care for - spending money towards their healthcare expenditures AND/OR having to balance a full-time job with the responsibility of care-giving, travelling from another city to be with this elderly citizen who might be our parent, grand-parent or even community elders. As informal care-givers, if somehow we were able to monitor the day-to-day activities of our elderly dependents, and be alerted when wrong happens to them that would …

Performance Analysis Of Mobile Ad-Hoc Routing Protocols By Varying Mobility, Speed And Network Load, Nilotpal Sarmah

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

One of the most promising network that has emerged from the technology world is the mobile ad-hoc network or MANET. It is a type of multi-hop network. Wireless by nature, MANETs do not have a specific network infrastructure. It is a collection of wireless mobile devices that communicate with each other without the help of any third party backbone like a base-station or a router. It can be hard to imagine how every node in this type of network communicate with one another without having a router. In MANETs, nodes change locations with time, configure themselves and get the information …

Security Analysis Of Phasor Measurement Units In Smart Grid Communication Infrastructures

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), or synchrophasors, are rapidly being deployed in the smart grid with the goal of measuring phasor quantities concurrently from wide area distribution substations. By utilizing GPS receivers, PMUs can take a wide area snapshot of power systems. Thus, the possibility of blackouts in the smart grid, the next generation power grid, will be reduced. As the main enabler of Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS), PMUs transmit measured values to Phasor Data Concentrators (PDCs) by the synchrophasor standard IEEE C37.118. IEC 61850 and IEC 62351 are the communication protocols for the substation automation system and the security …

A Study On Countermeasures Against Steganography: An Active Warden Approach, Qilin Qi

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Digital steganography is a method used for hiding information in digital images. It can be used for secure communication. There have been many robust digital steganography methods invented in recent decades. The steganographic message can be inserted in multimedia cover signal such as audio, image and video. However, this technique also may be used by malicious users to transmit dangerous information through the Internet beyond the control of security agencies. How to detect and/or block potentially dangerous information transmission on the Internet through billions of multimedia files while not affecting innocent multimedia communications becomes a challenging problem. Existing steganalysis methods …

Design And Implementation Of A Hybrid Technology Networking System, Sushanta Mohan Rakshit

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The safety of rail transport has always been the top priority for the Federal
Railroad Administration (FRA). Legacy technology, like wayside monitoring, is still
in place and is largely relied upon for detection of faults. Modern technology like
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has been introduced recently. However, this
is largely used to detect a particular railcar rather than to monitor it for problems.
Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology is being evaluated by the railroads for real-time or near real-time monitoring of the status of railcars for timely response to problems and also for trend analysis.

ZigBee has been the networking …

An Ultra-Low Power Communication Protocol For A Self-Powered Wireless Sensor Based Animal Monitoring System, Tao Ma

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

To prevent and control the outbreak of contagious animal disease, many countries have developed animal identification and tracking systems. However, the current animal identification and tracking system, which is based on passive RFID technology, has many limitations such as the short communication range and incapability of automatically monitoring the animal. To overcome these limitations, our Advanced Telecommunications Engineering Laboratory (TEL) in Department of Computer and Electronics Engineering (CEEN), University of Nebraska-Lincoln took the mission of developing a more advanced monitoring system for animal identification and tracking. This dissertation work as a part of this mission was focusing on developing an …

A Novel Telecommunications-Based Approach To Mathematical Modeling Of Hiv Infection, Aaron T. Sharp

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

It is well known that biological systems utilize communication in some form, one prolific example of this is the propagation of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) in the human body. By modeling HIV infection as a communication system, we hope to gain a unique insight into HIV and biological communication systems in general. Such a model would provide researchers a platform for experimenting and simulating various biological communication systems. We have previously developed a layered communication protocol for interpreting biological communication systems using telecommunications paradigms and will apply said model to HIV proliferation. We will also demonstrate the effectiveness of the …

Optimized Delay-Sensitive Multimedia Communications Over Wireless Networks, Haiyan Luo

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Multimedia communication is expected to be the major application of the next-generation wireless networks. However, providing delay-sensitive, loss-tolerant and resource-guzzling multimedia services over the current resource-limited wireless networks is still a very challenging task. In addition to their heterogeneous nature and resource limitation, wireless networks also suffer from channel variations and environmental changes. In this dissertation, we study the optimization techniques for wireless multimedia communications and address the issues from different theoretical and practical perspectives.

To solve the issues resulting from the increasingly heterogeneous wireless networks, we propose a framework for error resilient source coding and distributed application-layer error control, …

A Comprehensive Analysis Of Lte Physical Layer, Fahimeh Rezaei

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) introduced Long Term Evolution (LTE) as the 3rd generation of mobile communication standards. LTE Release 8 describes a mobile communication standard which supports up to 300 Mbps of data transmission in downlink using the OFDM scheme as well as up to 75 Mbps throughput for uplink using the SC-FDMA modulation. In this thesis, an in-depth study of LTE performance based on Release 8 is conducted for uplink and downlink under different scenarios. The main objective of this study is to investigate a comprehensive analysis of physical layer throughput of LTE Release8 based on standard …

Cross-Layer Optimized Wireless Multimedia Networking, Dalei Wu

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Multimedia communications, especially real-time video communications, is expected to be the major application of the next-generation wireless networks. However, bringing delay-sensitive and loss-tolerant multimedia services based on the current wireless Internet is a very challenging task. In this dissertation, we address cross-layer optimized wireless multimedia networking from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In the first part of the dissertation, we propose cross-layer optimization frameworks for real-time video communications over wireless networks, where the expected received video quality is adopted as the objective function. With the user-centric objective function, we first study content-aware video communications in single-hop wireless networks by exploring …

Study Of Physical Layer Security In Wireless Communications, Mustafa Duruturk

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis has investigated security in wireless communications at physical layer. Security is an important issue for wireless communications and poses many challenges. Most security schemes have been applied to the upper layers of communications networks. Since in a typical wireless communication, transmission of data is over the air, third party receiver(s) may have easy access to the transmitted data. This work discusses a new security technique at the physical layer for the MIMO (802.11n) transmitters. For this project, the wireless medium is secured by transmitting a noise signal that is only recoverable by the receiver. This report includes an …

Quality-Driven Cross Layer Design For Multimedia Security Over Resource Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks, Wei Wang

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The strong need for security guarantee, e.g., integrity and authenticity, as well as privacy and confidentiality in wireless multimedia services has driven the development of an emerging research area in low cost Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). Unfortunately, those conventional encryption and authentication techniques cannot be applied directly to WMSNs due to inborn challenges such as extremely limited energy, computing and bandwidth resources. This dissertation provides a quality-driven security design and resource allocation framework for WMSNs. The contribution of this dissertation bridges the inter-disciplinary research gap between high layer multimedia signal processing and low layer computer networking. It formulates the …