Computer Engineering Commons^™

A Framework For Aggregating Network Performance In Distributed Brokering Systems, Gurhan Gunduz, Shrideep Pallickara, Geoffrey C. Fox

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

The Internet is presently being used to support increasingly complex interaction models as a result of more and more applications, services and frameworks becoming network-centric. Efficient utilization of network and networked resources is of paramount importance. Network performance gathering is a precursor to any scheme that seeks to provide adaptive routing capabilities for interactions. In this paper we present a network performance aggregation framework that is extensible and appropriate for distributed messaging systems that span multiple realms, disparate communication protocols and support different applications.

Automated Distribution And Management Of Software And Hardware Configurations For Heterogeneous Wireless Devices, Grainne Foley

Theses

The continuing evolution of wireless networks and services has increased the complexity and diversity of wireless networks and devices, placing significant emphasis on the need for flexible device configuration management. Widely varying wireless technologies currently operate independently worldwide, making global wireless network access for the mobile user confusing and unwieldy. New technologies, network access methodologies and improved services further obscure the evolving environment. The focus of effort for this thesis is the development of a system to automate the distribution and management of software and hardware configurations that enable different levels of wireless device reconfiguration. The scope of investigation will …

Identity Management, Duncan A. Buell, Ravi Sandhu

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Sentient Web, Michael N. Huhns

Faculty Publications

In a startling revelation, a team of university scientists has reported that a network of computers has become conscious and sentient, and is beginning to assume control of online information system. In spite of the ominous tone typically chosen for dramatic effect, a sentient Web would be more helpful and much easier for people to use. An agent is an active, persistent software component that perceives, reasons, and acts, and whose actions include communication. Agents inherently take intentional actions based on sensory information and memories of past actions. All agents have necessary communication ability, but they do not necessarily possess …

The Zen Of The Web, Jeff Heflin, Michael N. Huhns

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Commitments Among Agents, Ashok U. Mallya, Michael N. Huhns

Faculty Publications

Commitments are a powerful representation for modeling multiagent interactions. Previous approaches have considered the semantics of commitments and how to check compliance with them. However, these approaches do not capture some of the subtleties that arise in real-life applications such as e-commerce, in which contracts and institutions have implicit temporal references. In this column, we describe a rich representation for the temporal content of commitments that lets us capture realistic contracts and avoid ambiguities. Consequently, this approach lets us reason about whether, and at what point, a commitment is satisfied or breached, and whether it is or ever becomes unenforceable.

Being And Acting Rational, Michael N. Huhns

Faculty Publications

Rationality alone is insufficient to specify agent design. Using economic theory, we can program agents to behave in ways that maximize their utility while responding to environmental changes. However, economic models for agents, although general in principle, are typically limited in practice because the value functions that are tractable essentially reduce an agent to acting selfishly. Building a stable social system from a collection of agents motivated by self-serving interests is difficult. Finally, understanding rationality and knowledge requires interdisciplinary results from artificial intelligence, distributed.

Massive Deliberation, William H. Turkett Jr., John R. Rose, Michael N. Huhns

Faculty Publications

Agents are proliferating on the Web, making it conceivable that their collective reasoning ability might someday be harnessed for robust decision-making. The hope is that massive deliberation power can soon help solve problems that require knowledge, reasoning, and intelligence. Until recently, working individually or in small groups, agents across the Web could barely communicate and could only reason under conditions of severely bounded rationality. Projects such as Agentcities showed that widespread heterogeneous agents could collaborate on specific predefined tasks and provide diverse agent-based services. When the tasks are dynamic, of long duration, and ill defined, however, success requires planning that …

Interpolation Techniques For Overset Grids, Paul S. Sherman, Nathan B. Edgar

Journal of the Arkansas Academy of Science

The use of finite difference schemes in computational aeroacoustics requires the use of structured grids incomputational space. Complex geometries in the physical space can be modeled using multiple overlapping grids that are transformed into computational space. In this work, finite difference schemes are used that necessitate the addition of psuedo- or ghost-points in the overlap region of the grids for closure of the difference stencil. The functional values at these ghost points must be approximated from the values at the original grid points. This paper investigates interpolation techniques for these overset grids. An n th order interpolation scheme using Lagrange …

Dsp Processor Based Vision Processing And System Integration For Control Of Laser Aided Manufacturing Process (Lamp), Srinivas Musti

Masters Theses

"This thesis presents the research and development of a real-time vision system and integration of various subsystems to build the hybrid system for the Laser aided manufacturing process (LAMP), being developed at the University of Missouri--Rolla. A description of the real-time control architecture, showing the interaction of the real-time controller with various sensors and subsystems to monitor and regulate the process is presented.

Control of melt pool geometry is important for ensuring the final product quality since the bead size significantly influences the joint strength. However, during the deposition process, impurities and the plume present around the pool complicate the …

A Study Of The Security Implications Involved With The Use Of Executable World Wide Web Content, Christopher Hu

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Malicious executable code is nothing new. While many consider that the concept of malicious code began in the 1980s when the first PC viruses began to emerge, the concept does in fact date back even earlier. Throughout the history of malicious code, methods of hostile code delivery have mirrored prevailing patterns of code distribution. In the 1980s, file infecting and boot sector viruses were common, mirroring the fact that during this time, executable code was commonly transferred via floppy disks. Since the 1990s email has been a major vector for malicious code attacks. Again, this mirrors the fact that during …

Determining The Effectiveness Of Deceptive Honeynets, Nirbhay Gupta

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Over the last few years, incidents of network based intrusions have rapidly increased, due to the increase and popularity of various attack tools easily available for download from the Internet. Due to this increase in intrusions, the concept of a network defence known as Honeypots developed. These honeypots are designed to ensnare attackers and monitor their activities. Honeypots use the principles of deception such as masking, mimicry, decoying, inventing, repackaging and dazzling to deceive attackers. Deception exists in various forms. It is a tactic to survive and defeat the motives of attackers. Due to its presence in the nature, deception …

The Development Of An Interactive Multimedia Based Professional Development, James New

Theses : Honours

The role of the teacher has changed over time such that teachers are asked to augment their own specialist knowledge with skills from other domains, for example information technology. This study has examined the perceptions and experiences of teachers and speech pathologists involved in the production of an instructive Interactive Multimedia (IMM) product to deliver Professional Development (PD). The individuals involved in this project were teachers from the High Valley Language School (HVLS) -a specialised primary school. The study used a social action research methodology, which allowed the researcher to build theories from emergent data. The data collection process consisted …

Wireless Local Area Network Security : An Investigation Into Security Tool Usage In Wireless Networks, Susan Webb

Theses : Honours

Many organisations and individuals installing wireless local area networks (WLANs), which are based on the IEEE 802.11 b standard, have little understanding of the security issues that surround this technology.

This study was initiated to determine how WLAN security issues affect organisations in Perth, Western Australia. The scope of the study was restricted to 802.llb WLANs operating in infrastructure mode, where all traffic is transmitted by wireless access points (APs). This study was conducted in two phases. The general aims of the first phase were to determine the number of detectable WLANs in the Perth Central Business District (CBD) and …

Jsb Composability And Web Services Interoperability Via Extensible Modeling & Simulation Framework (Xmsf), Model Driven Architecture (Mda), Component Repositories, And Web-Based Visualization, Don Brutzman, Andreas Tolk

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

"Study Report prepared for the U. S. Air Force, Joint Synthetic Battlespace Analysis of Technical Approaches (ATA) Studies & Prototyping"

Overview: This paper summarizes research work conducted by organizations concerned with interoperable distributed information technology (IT) applications, in particular the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and Old Dominion University (ODU). Although the application focus is distributed modeling & simulation (M&S) the results and findings are in general easily applicable to other distributed concepts as well, in particular the support of operations by M&S applications, such as distributed mission operations. The core idea of this work is to show the necessity of …

United States Patent Application Publication: Divide And Conquer System And Method Of Dna Sequence Assembly, Khalid Sayood, Hasan H. Otu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

The present invention provides a new algorithm for assembling fragments from a long DNA sequence. The algorithm of the invention Solves simultaneously fragment assembly-related problems. Such as the fragment orientation, overlap and layout phases. This is achieved by clustering fragments with respect to their Average Mutual Information (AMI) profiles using the k-means algorithm.

Antenna Selection Scheme For Wireless Channels Utilizing Differential Space-Time Modulation, Le Chung Tran, Tadeusz A. Wysocki

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

In this paper, the authors prove that the differential space-time modulation techniques proposed in literature provide a full spatial diversity. Based on that, the authors propose an antenna selection scheme called general N-out-of-M antenna selection technique for wireless communications channels utilizing differential space-time modulation. The simulation shows that differential detection associated with our proposed technique provides much better bit error performance over that without antenna selection, and even over coherent detection without antenna selection at certain signal-to-noise ratios.

Displacement Based Route Update Strategies For Proactive Routing Protocols In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Mehran Abolhasan, Tadeusz Wysocki

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

This paper presents a new route update strategy for performing proactive route discovery in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). In this strategy, the rate at which route updates are sent into the network is controlled by how often a node changes its location by a required distance. We refer to this updating strategy as Minimum Displacement Update Routing (MDUR). We implemented MDUR on top of the Fisheye State Routing (FSR) protocol and investigated its performance by simulation. The simulations where performed in a number of different scenarios, with varied network mobility, density, traffic and boundary. Our results indicate that MDUR …

Convolutional Interleaver For Unequal Error Protection Of Turbo Codes, Sina Vafi, Tadeusz A. Wysocki, Ian Burnett

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

This paper describes construction of a convolutional interleaver as a block interleaver and discusses its application to turbo codes with equal and unequal error protection techniques. Based on simulations, different convolutional interleaver structures suitable for turbo codes with unequal error protection capability are suggested. Finally, based on conducted simulations the best method is selected.

Consensus Software: Robustness And Social Good, Michael N. Huhns

Faculty Publications

In this column I explore some far-reaching issues of software development that lie at the intersection of robust software and sociopolitical systems. These two areas might seem unrelated-and most software developers would likely be horrified to have politics intrude on their programming efforts-but the intersection occurs through these premises: software systems administer and control much of our societal infrastructure; people would appreciate and better accept that control if they had input into the nature of the control and the systems' behavior; designers can make software systems more robust through redundancy, in which different versions of software components might cover for …

A University Wide Smart Card System, Philip Cummins

Theses : Honours

Presently, many tertiary educational institutions utilise card technologies for staff and student identification and the support of other related services within the institution. A new type of card technology has been developed known as a Smart Card, where an existing plastic card has an embedded integrated circuit and is capable of expanding the range of applications and services capable within an institution. This thesis will detail the advantages that these new Smart Cards have over existing institution cards, detail other institution's attempts to use Smart Cards and finally, this thesis proposes a suitable system for integrating Smart Cards into an …

Design And Evaluation Of Processes For Transmuter Fuel Fabrication, Georg F. Mauer

Fuels Campaign (TRP)

• Project Objective: examine autonomous robotic fuel fabrication processes with regard to hot cell and equipment design, operations, and costs.

• Fabrication processes for different fuel types differ in terms of equipment types, throughput, and cost.

• Design options are restricted by the requirement to employ only radiation-hardened machinery and components

• Benefit to Department of Energy: decision support for the selection of the most suitable manufacturing process.

Frequency-Hopped Multiple-Access Communications With Noncoherent M-Ary Ofdm-Ask, A. Al-Dweik, Fuqin Xiong

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

A noncoherent, bandwidth-efficient modulation scheme is proposed for frequency-hopping multiple-access (FH-MA) networks. The proposed scheme is a combination of noncoherent M-ary amplitude-shift keying (NMASK) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). Using this scheme minimizes the required data bandwidth. The number of frequency slots available to the users increases significantly for a fixed spread-spectrum bandwidth (BW_SS). The effect of the multiple-access interference is reduced. Simple and accurate bit error rate expressions have been derived for FH-OFDM-MASK in additive white Gaussian noise channels and for FH-OFDM-ASK in Rayleigh fading channels.

Stone Coalgebras, Clemens Kupke, Alexander Kurz, Yde Venema

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

In this paper we argue that the category of Stone spaces forms an interesting base category for coalgebras, in particular, if one considers the Vietoris functor as an analogue to the power set functor. We prove that the so-called descriptive general frames, which play a fundamental role in the semantics of modal logics, can be seen as Stone coalgebras in a natural way. This yields a duality between the category of modal algebras and that of coalgebras over the Vietoris functor. Building on this idea, we introduce the notion of a Vietoris polynomial functor over the category of Stone spaces. …

Scalable Implementations Of Mpi Atomicity For Concurrent Overlapping I/O, Wei-Keng Liao, Alok Choudhary, Kenin Coloma, George K. Thiruvathukal, Lee Ward, Eric Russell, Neil Pundit

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

For concurrent I/O operations, atomicity defines the results in the overlapping file regions simultaneously read/written by requesting processes. Atomicity has been well studied at the file system level, such as POSIX standard. In this paper, we investigate the problems arising from the implementation of MPI atomicity for concurrent overlapping write access and provide a few programming solutions. Since the MPI definition of atomicity differs from the POSIX one, an implementation that simply relies on the POSIX file systems does not guarantee correct MPI semantics. To have a correct implementation of atomic I/O in MPI, we examine the efficiency of three …

The Mediated Data Integration (Medint) : An Approach To The Integration Of Database And Legacy Systems, Suvimol Mukviboonchai

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The information required for decision making by executives in organizations is normally scattered across disparate data sources including databases and legacy systems. To gain a competitive advantage, it is extremely important for executives to be able to obtain one unique view of information in an accurate and timely manner. To do this, it is necessary to interoperate multiple data sources, which differ structurally and semantically. Particular problems occur when applying traditional integration approaches, for example, the global schema needs to be recreated when the component schema has been modified. This research investigates the following heterogeneities between heterogeneous data sources: Data …

Automatic Human Face Detection In Color Images, Son Lam Phung

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Automatic human face detection in digital image has been an active area of research over the past decade. Among its numerous applications, face detection plays a key role in face recognition system for biometric personal identification, face tracking for intelligent human computer interface (HCI), and face segmentation for object-based video coding. Despite significant progress in the field in recent years, detecting human faces in unconstrained and complex images remains a challenging problem in computer vision. An automatic system that possesses a similar capability as the human vision system in detecting faces is still a far-reaching goal. This thesis focuses on …

Database Development And Intranet Based Image Included Database Management System For Ballistic Firearm Identification System, Toni C. Jiao

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The process of imaging, collecting and searching a cartridge case to identifying its suspected firearm is a time consuming procedure. Within this study, a cartridge case identification database management system in an Intranet environment is designed and implemented, thus enabling firearm examiners from different forensic laboratories to engage firearm identification without the constraints of time and location. Specifically, the study investigates appropriate database management system for image involved and Intranet secured ballistics firearm identification database. The results demonstrated that a computerized firearm identification system could be implemented in Intranet with a secure, scalable, performable Intranet database management system.

Mobile Communications And Mobile Services, Keng Siau, Z. Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As wireless technologies evolve, the coming mobile revolution will bring dramatic and fundamental changes to the world. This revolution has already begun and is gaining momentum. The revolution will impact numerous facets of our daily lives and the way business is conducted. It will provide important data in real time to assist decision makers, exert great influence on communications between businesses and their customers, and transform the way we live our lives. This paper examines issues in providing services via wireless technologies, i.e. mobile services. The paper discusses the challenges facing mobile services, such as changes in business strategies, investment …

An Analytical Model For Calculating Bounds On Call Blocking Probabilities In Leo Satellite Networks, A. Hali̇m Zai̇m

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

We present an analytical model for calculating upper and lower bounds for call-blocking probabilities in a LEO satellite network that carries voice calls. The method is especially useful for large systems where calculation of call-blocking probabilities are too expensive. Our method calculates upper and lower bounds very easily and produces fairly accurate results.