A Distributed Shared Memory(DSM) system consists of several computers that share a memory area and has no global clock. Therefore, an ordering of events in the system is necessary. Synchronization is a mechanism for coordinating activities between processes, which are program instantiations in a system.

The algorithms which control network routing are specific to the network because the algorithms are designed to take advantage of that network's topology. The "goodness" of a network includes such criteria as a simple routing algorithm and a simple routing algorithm would increase the use of the shuffle-exchange network.

The purpose of this project is to improve the existing version of the Sequential Alignment and Position Verification System (SAPVS) for functional proton radiosurgery and to evaluate its performance after improvement .

Networks of distributed, remote sensors are providing ecological scientists with a view of our environment that is unprecedented in detail. However, these networks are subject to harsh conditions, which lead to malfunctions in individual sensors and failures in network communications. This behavior manifests as corrupt or missing measurements in the data. Consequently, before the data can be used in ecological models, future experiments, or even policy decisions, it must be quality controlled (QC'd) to flag affected measurements and impute corrected values. This dissertation describes a probabilistic modeling approach for real-time automated QC that exploits the spatial and temporal correlations in the data to distinguish sensor failures from valid observations. The model adapts to a site by learning a Bayesian network structure that captures spatial relationships among sensors, and then extends this structure to a dynamic Bayesian network to incorporate temporal correlations. The final QC model contains both discrete and continuous variables, which makes inference intractable for large sensor networks. Consequently, we examine the performance of three approximate methods for inference in this probabilistic framework. Two of these algorithms represent contemporary approaches to inference in hybrid models, while the third is a greedy search-based method of our own design. We demonstrate the results of these algorithms on synthetic datasets and real environmental sensor data gathered from an ecological sensor network located in western Oregon. Our results suggest that we can improve performance over networks with less sensors that use exhaustive asynchronic inference by including additional sensors and applying approximate algorithms. / Graduation date: 2013

Family conversation between homes is difficult to initiate at mutually agreeable times as neither participant has exact knowledge of the other's activities or intentions. Whether calling to plan an important family gathering or simply to connect with family members, the question is: Is now a good time to call? People expect friends and family to learn their activity patterns and to minimize interruptions when calling. Can technology provide awareness cues to the caller, even prior to the initiation of the call? This research focuses on sampling the everyday activities of home life to determine environmental factors, which may serve as an indicator for availability. These external factors may be effective for identifying household routines of availability and useful in determining when to initiate conversation across homes. Several workplace studies have shown a person's interruptibility can be reliably assessed and modeled from specific environmental cues; this work looks for similar predictive power in the home. Copresence, location, and activity in the home were investigated as correlates to availability and for their effectiveness within the social protocol of family conversation. These studies indicate there are activities that can be sensed, either in real-time or over some time span, that correlate to self-reported availability. However, the type and amount of information shared is dependent upon individual preferences, social accessibility, and patterns of activities. This research shows friends and family can improve their predictions of when to call if provided additional context, and suggests that abstract representations of either routines or explicit availability status is sufficient and may be preferred by providers. Availability prediction is feasible in the home and useful to those outside the home, but the level of detail to provide in particular situations needs further study. This work has implications for the development of groupware systems, the automatic sensing of activity to deal with interruption, and activity recognition in the home.

The purpose of this research is to present a low-power wireless communication receiver with an enhanced performance by relieving the system complexity and performance degradation imposed by a quantization process. With an overwhelming demand for more reliable communication systems, the complexity required for modern communication systems has been increased accordingly. A byproduct of this increase in complexity is a commensurate increase in power consumption of the systems. Since the Shannon's era, the main stream of the methodologies for promising the high reliability of communication systems has been based on the principle that the information signals flowing through the system are represented in digits. Consequently, the system itself has been heavily driven to be implemented with digital circuits, which is generally beneficial over analog implementations when digitally stored information is locally accessible, such as in memory systems. However, in communication systems, a receiver does not have a direct access to the originally transmitted information. Since the received signals from a noisy channel are already continuous values with continuous probability distributions, we suggest a mixed-signal system in which the received continuous signals are directly fed into the analog demodulator and the subsequent soft-decision Viterbi decoder without any quantization involved. In this way, we claim that redundant system complexity caused by the quantization process is eliminated, thus gives better power efficiency in wireless communication systems, especially for battery-powered mobile devices. This is also beneficial from a performance perspective, as it takes full advantage of the soft information flowing through the system.

Thesis (Engineer's) --Naval Postgraduate School, 1976. / "September 1976." "AD A035848." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 122-123) Available via the Internet.

Os recentes padrões de sistemas de comunicação estão incluindo em suas normas mecanismos de retransmissão de pacotes. Este trabalho apresenta mecanismos de retransmissão de pacotes de formas simples e mais eficientes do que os mecanismos clássicos de retransmissão de pacotes. São apresentados esquemas de retransmissão de pacotes que utilizam retransmissões parciais e combinação por diversidade. Além disso, serão apresentadas análises teóricas para validar os resultados obtidos das simulações. Estas análises teóricas são obtidas através das análises de EXIT charts e da informação mútua. Os resultados e análises foram realizados em canais do tipo AWGN e com desvanecimento por blocos (Block-Fading). A complexidade computacional, facilidade de implementação e baixo consumo médio de energia por transmissão dos métodos propostos são alguns dos motivos pelos quais, tornam-se interessantes tanto para a área acadêmica quanto para a indústria. / Modern standards of communication systems are including in their standards retransmission mechanisms. This work presents mechanisms for retransmission of packets by simpler and more efficient than the classical mechanisms of packet retransmissions. The proposed schemes are presented that use packet retransmission with partial retransmission and diversity combining. In addition, theoretical analysis will be presented to validate the results of the simulations. These theoretical analysis are obtained through the analysis EXIT charts and mutual information. The results and analysis were performed on channels such as AWGN and Block-Fading. The computational complexity, ease implementation and low average energy consumption for transmission of the proposed methods are some of the reasons they become interesting both for academia and for industry.

CAPES / Nesta tese, a relação de troca entre Eficiência Espectral e Eficiência Energética (EE-SE, do inglês Energy Efficiency-Spectral Efficiency) de um sistema de comunicação sem fio com múltiplas antenas empregando Seleção de Antena de Transmissão/Combinação de Máxima Razão (TAS/MRC, do inglês Transmit Antenna Selection/Maximum Ratio Combining) é investigada. Um modelo de consumo (PCM, do inglês Power Consumption Model) realista é considerado e demonstra-se que utilizar o esquema TAS/MRC pode promover economia de energia significativa quando comparada ao esquema Múltiplas Antenas de Transmissão/Recepção (MIMO, do inglês Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) na região de baixa para média eficiência espectral, independentemente do número de antenas, assim como possuir melhor desempenho energético em relação à utilização do esquema Combinação de Máxima Razão na Transmissão (MRT, do inglês Maximum Ratio Transmission) para qualquer valor de eficiência espectral. Para um número fixo de antenas, resultados obtidos demonstram que o ganho em eficiência energética do TAS/MRC sobre o MIMO se torna ainda maior com o aumento do número de antenas transmissoras. O valor ótimo de eficiência espectral que maximiza a eficiência energética é obtido analiticamente e comprovado por resultados numéricos. Expressões para avaliar a capacidade e a relação EE-SE do TAS sob a influência de correlação entre as antenas do receptor são obtidas e se demonstra que considerar um modelo de consumo não realista pode levar a equívocos na comparação entre TAS/MRC e MIMO. / In this dissertation, we investigate the Energy Efficiency-Spectral Efficiency (EE-SE) trade- off of a multiple antenna wireless communication system employing Transmit Antenna Selection/Maximum Ratio Combining (TAS) scheme. A realistic power consumption model (PCM) is considered, and it is shown that the use of TAS/MRC can provide significant energy savings when compared to Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) in the low to medium spectral efficiency region, regardless the number of antennas, as well as outperform transmit beamforming scheme (MRT) for the entire spectral efficiency range. For a fixed number of receive antennas, our results also show that the energy efficiency gain of TAS over MIMO becomes even greater as the number of transmit antennas increases. The optimal value of spectral efficiency that maximizes the energy efficiency is obtained analytically, and confirmed by numerical results. Expressions that evaluate the capacity and the EE-SE trade-off for TAS under the influence of receiver correlation are obtained and it is shown that considering a non- realistic power consumption model can lead to mistakes when comparing TAS and MIMO.

Nesta dissertação, uma análise da eficiência energética de transmissão de dados sem fio é efetuada, comparando desde a simples transmissão direta entre dois nós, passando por redes cooperativas, onde múltiplos nós possuem informações independentes para enviar para um destino em comum, chegando aos mais avançados esquemas de cooperação com codificação de rede. O objetivo é verificar os benefícios gerados pela diminuição da taxa de erro (ocasionada pela codificação de rede) e do aumento da ordem de diversidade (proporcionado pela cooperação entre os nós) em termos de diminuição do consumo energético para transmissão de uma mesma quantidade de informação. A análise é realizada considerando desvanecimento em bloco Nakagami-m, de forma que o efeito da presença de linha de visada também possa ser avaliado. Através das equações de probabilidade de outage e de um modelo de hardware, expressões que representam o consumo energético de cada cenário foram obtidas. Além disto, a partir da análise gráfica dos resultados obtidos, foi possível perceber que existe um número ótimo de nós que minimiza o consumo energético da Codificação de Rede Dinâmica Generalizada (GDNC) para uma dada distância. Uma expressão que representa esse número foi obtida, e é a maior contribuição deste trabalho, pois se no projeto da rede sem fio cooperativa conjuntos menores contendo o número ótimo de nós (chamados de clusters de cooperação) forem organizados, o consumo energético da rede será minimizado. Estes resultados também são apresentados e, para as configurações utilizadas, a economia de energia pode ser de até 10x. / In this dissertation, an energy efficiency analysis of wireless systems is performed, comparing several schemes, from the direct transmission between two nodes, going through cooperative networks, where multiple nodes have independent information to send to a common destination, and getting to the most advanced network-coded cooperative systems. It is intended to evaluate the gain generated by the error rate reduction (caused by the network coding) and by the increase in the diversity order (provided by the cooperation between the nodes) in terms of the energy consumption reduction when transmitting the same amount of information. The analysis is performed considering Nakagami-m block fading, so the influence of some line-of-sight is also evaluated. Through the outage probability equations and a hardware model, energy consumption expressions for each scenario were obtained. Furthermore, through the graphical analysis of the numeric results, it was possible to notice that exists an optimal number of nodes that minimizes the energy consumption of the Generalized Dynamic Network Coding (GDNC) scheme for a given distance. An expression that represents this number was also obtained, and is the great contribution of this work, since if in the network project smaller sets containing the optimal number of nodes (called cooperation clusters) are organized, the energy consumption will be minimized. These results are also presented, and for the considered configuration, the energy saving can reach 10x.