Editorial
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| Title | Editorial |
| Authors | |
| Abstract | Information technology has touched every term of our lives covering all aspects. IIT 2006 aimed at bridging the digital gap by providing exciting technical and educational programs, tutorials, exhibits, demonstrations and many other activities to explore and learn about the latest frontiers in Information Technology. Sponsored by IEEE Communication Society, Innovations 2006 provided a rigorous technical paper program on a wide range of IT fields categorized in the following areas: Information & Communication Technology Infrastructure; Web Technologies, Applications & Service;E-Business, E-Governance & Information System and Socio-Economic Implications of ICTs. Out of more than 300 papers submitted to IIT 2006 conference, we have chosen 9 outstanding papers to be published in this special issue. All of these papers have been reviewed a second time and were recommended to contain 30% more new material to be accepted and published in this Special Issue. In the first paper, by A. Lakas and M. Boulmalf, an experimental analysis of VoIP over wireless LANs is discussed. They propose to study and measure the effect of the handover for both intra and inter-mobility for VoIP traffic. Then, E. Barka et. al., investigate the impact of security on the performance of WLAN. More specifically, they analyze the impact of different implementations of encryption techniques used by two security protocols, namely Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) on the throughput over WLAN IEEE 802.11g. The results show that within the same access point range, the security adds moderate degradation on the throughput that may affect some applications over both infrastructure and ad-hoc WLANs. Next, O. Salazar et. al. study roaming in heterogeneous multioperator wireless networks. They present a SIP-based roaming architecture to enable service mobility in heterogeneous multi-operator wireless networks. The objective is to establish mutual trust between cellular network operators and unlicensed wireless networks through an efficient SLA monitoring and enforcement and brokerbased access control. Wireless LAN standard (Wi-Fi) and the WPAN standard (Bluetooth and Zigbee) products utilize the same unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band. Co-existence between such wireless technologies within the same frequency spectrum is crucial to ensure that each wireless technology maintains and provides its desired performance requirements. K. Shuaib et. al. provide a brief description of the newly introduced Zigbee standards including the Physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers. It focuses on developing MatLab/Simulink models for the Zigbee protocol and the performance evaluation of these models. The main contribution of the next paper, by I. Salehy et. al. is to propose a general framework for fault tolerance in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The proposed framework can be used to guide the design and development of FT solutions and to evaluate existing ones. They present a comparative study of the existing schemes and identify potential enhancements. In the next paper, F. Aloul et. al. propose a new approach to solve the shortest path problem using advanced Boolean satisfiability (SAT) techniques. SAT has been the focus of researchers in the last few years. SAT solvers use intelligent search algorithms that can traverse the search space and efficiently prune parts that contain no solutions. These solvers have recently been used to solve many problems in Engineering and Computer Science. In this paper, the authors show how to formulate the shortest path problem in non-optical networks as a SAT problem. They also show how to use SAT in finding routing and wavelength assignments in optical networks. This approach is verified on various network topologies. Divisible loads are those workloads that can be partitioned by a scheduler into any arbitrary chunks. The problem of scheduling divisible loads has been defined for a long time. But, almost all proposed approaches attempt to perform scheduling in dedicated environments such as LANs, whereas scheduling in non-dedicated environments such as Grids remains an open problem. In the next paper, the authors first introduce a computation model that explains the impact of local (internal) tasks and Grid (external) tasks that arrive at a given worker. This model helps estimate the available computing power of a worker under the fluctuation of the number of local and Grid applications. Based on this model, they propose the CPU power prediction strategy. Then, they build a new dynamic scheduling algorithm by incorporating the prediction strategy into a static scheduling algorithm. Finally, we chose two application papers: one on wireless biomedical system and the other on practical design of a smart antenna system. The former, by T. Landolsi et. al. proposes a wireless stand-alone, embedded system design that integrates the monitoring of three biomedical parameters into a single personal medical device. The goal is to build a compact and cost-effective device capable of monitoring several medical parameters while patients conduct their normal daily activities. A communication protocol and patient monitoring software application are developed to store data that can be later downloaded to a physician’s workstation for analysis and diagnosis. The latter by R. M. Shubair et. al. presents a practical design of a smart antenna system based on direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation and adaptive beamforming. DOA estimation is based on the MUSIC algorithm to identify the directions of the source signals incident on the sensor array comprising the smart antenna system. Adaptive beamforming is achieved using the LMS algorithmfor directing the main beam towards the desired source signals and generating deep nulls in the directions of interfering signals. The smart antenna system designed involves a hardware part which provides real data measurements of the incident signals received by the sensor array. Results obtained verify the improved performance of the smart antenna system when the practical measurements of the signal environment surrounding the sensor array are used. We hope that the readers of this Special Issue enjoy reading and finding it useful in their future research. We first would like to thank the authors who worked hard to add substantial materials to the conference versions. Also, we would like to thank the Editor In Chief, George J. Sun for his patience throughout this process. |
| Publisher | ACADEMY PUBLISHER |
| Date | 2007-06-01 |
| Source | Journal of Communications Vol 2, No 4 (2007): Special Issue: Selected Best Papers of Innovations in Information Technology Co |
| Rights | Copyright © ACADEMY PUBLISHER - All Rights Reserved.To request permission, please check out URL: http://www.academypublisher.com/copyrightpermission.html. |