Most of the cellular tra c (voice and data) is generated indoors. Due to attenuation from walls, quality of service (QoS) of di erent applications degrades for indoor tra c. Thus in order to provide QoS for such users the Macro base station (MBS) has to transmit at high power. This increases recurring costs to the service provider and contributes to green house emissions. Hence, Femtocells (FC) are considered as an option. Femto Access Points (FAP) are low cost, low powered, small base stations deployed indoors by customers. A substantial part of indoor tra c is diverted from the Macrocell (MC) through the FAP. Since the FCs also use the same channels as the MC, deployment of FCs causes interference to not only its neighbouring FCs but also to the users in the MC. Thus, we need better interference management techniques for this system. In this thesis, we consider a system with multiple Femtocells operating in a Macrocell. FCs and MC use same set of multiple channels and support multiple users. Each user may have a minimum rate requirement. To limit interference to the MC, there is a peak power constraint on each channel. In the rst part of the thesis, we consider sparsely deployed FCs where the interference between the FCs is negligible. For this we formulate the problem of channel allocation and power control in each FC. We develop computationally e cient, suboptimal algorithms to satisfy QoS of each user in the FC. If QoS of each user is not satis ed, we provide solutions which are fair to all the users. In the second part of the thesis, we consider the case of densely deployed FCs where we formulate the problem of channel allocation and power control in each Femtocell as a noncooperative Game. We develop e cient decentralized algorithms to obtain a Nash equilibrium (NE) at which QoS of each user is satis ed. We also obtain e cient decentralized algorithms to obtain fair NE when it may not be feasible to satisfy the QoS of all the users in the FC. Finally, we extend our algorithms to the case where there may be voice and data users in the system. In the third part of the thesis, we continue to study the problem setup in the second part, where we develop algorithms which can simultaneously consider the cases where QoS of users can be satis ed or not. We provide algorithms to compute Coarse Correlated Equilibrium (CCE), Pareto optimal points and Nash bargaining solutions. In the nal part of the thesis, we consider interference limit at the MBS and model FCs as sel sh nodes. The MBS protects itself via pricing subchannels per usage. We obtain a Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) by considering MBS as a leader and FCs as followers.

This dissertation presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of low-voltage capacitive RF MEMS switches. Although, RF MEMS switches have shown superior performance as compared to the existing solid-state semiconductor switches and are viable alternate to the present and the future communication systems, not been able to match the commercial standards due to their poor reliability. Dielectric charging due high actuation is one of the major concerns that limit the reliability of these switches. Hence, the focus of this thesis is on the development of low actuation voltage RF MEMS switches without compromising much on their RF and dynamic performances i.e., low insertion loss and high isolation. Four different switch topologies are studied and discussed. Electromechanical and electromagnetic modelling is presented to study the effect of various components that comprise a MEMS switch on the transient and the RF behaviour. The analytical expressions for switching and release times are established in order to estimate the switching and release times. An in-house developed surface micromachining process is adapted for the micro fabrication. This process eliminates the need for an extra mask used for the anchors and restricts the overall process to four-masks only. These switches are fabricated on 500 µm thick glass substrate. A 0.5 µm thick gold film is used as the structural material. For the final release of the switch, chemical wet etching technique is employed. The fabricated MEMS switches are characterized mechanically and electrically by measuring mechanical resonant frequency, quality factor, pull-in, and pull-up voltages. Since, low actuation voltage switches have slow response time. One of the key objectives of this thesis is to realize switches with fast response time at low actuation voltage. Measurements are performed to estimate the switching and release times. The measured Q-factors of switches are found to be in between 1.1 -1.4 which is the recommended value for Q in MEMS switches for a suppressed oscillation after the release. Furthermore, the effect of hole size on the switching dynamics is addressed. RF measurements are carried out to measure the S-parameters in order to quantify the RF performance. The measured results demonstrate that these switches need low actuation voltage in range of 4.5 V to 8.5 V for the actuation. The measured insertion loss less than -0.8 dB and isolation better than 30 dB up to 40 GHz is reported. In addition, the robustness of realized switches is tested using in-house developed Lab View-based automated measurement test set-up. The reliability test analysis shows no degradation in the RF performance even after 10 millions of switching cycles. Overall yield of 70 -80% is estimated in the present work. Finally, the experimentally measured results presented in this work prove the successful development of low actuation voltage capacitive RF MEMS switches and also offers that even with 0.5 µm thick gold film better reliability for MEMS switches can be achieved.

We consider the problem of designing revenue-optimal mechanisms for selling two heterogeneous items to a single buyer. Designing a revenue-optimal mechanism for selling a single item is simple: Set a threshold price based on the distribution, and sell the item only when the buyer’s valuation exceeds the threshold. However, designing a revenue-optimal mechanism to sell two heterogeneous items is a harder problem. Even the simplest setting with two items and one buyer remains unsolved as yet. The partial characterizations available in the literature have succeeded in solving the problem largely for distributions that are bordered by the coordinate axes. We consider distributions that do not contain (0; 0) in their support sets. Specifically, we consider the buyer’s valuations to be distributed uniformly over arbitrary rectangles in the positive quadrant. We anticipate that the special cases we solve could be a guideline to un-derstand the methods to solve the general problem. We explore two different methods – the duality method and the virtual valuation method – and apply them to solve the problem for distributions that are not bordered by the coordinate axes. The thesis consists of two parts. In the first part, we consider the problem when the buyer has no demand constraints. We assume the buyer’s valuations to be uniformly distributed over an arbitrary rectangle [c1; c1 + b1] [c2; c2 + b2] in the positive quadrant. We first study the duality approach that solves the problem for the (c1; c2) = (0; 0) case. We then nontrivially extend this approach to provide an explicit solution for arbitrary nonnegative values of (c1; c2; b1; b2). We prove that the optimal mechanism is to sell the two items according to one of eight simple menus. The menus indicate that the items must be sold individually for certain values of (c1; c2), the items must be bundled for certain other values, and the auction is an interplay of individual sale and a bundled sale for the remaining values of (c1; c2). We conjecture that our method can be extended to a wider class of distributions. We provide some preliminary results to support the conjecture. In the second part, we consider the problem when the buyer has a unit-demand constraint. We assume the buyer’s valuations (z1; z2) to be uniformly distributed over an arbitrary rectangle [c; c + b1] [c; c + b2] in the positive quadrant, having its south-west corner on the line z1 = z2. We first show that the structure of the dual measure shows significant variations for different values of (c; b1; b2) which makes it hard to discover the correct dual measure, and hence to compute the solution. We then nontrivially extend the virtual valuation method to provide a complete, explicit solution for the problem considered. In particular, we prove that the optimal mechanism is structured into five simple menus. We then conjecture, with promising preliminary results, that the optimal mechanism when the valuations are uniformly distributed in an arbitrary rectangle [c1; c1 + b1] [c2; c2 + b2] is also structured according to similar menus.

This dissertation is primarily concerned with the communication required to achieve secret key (SK) capacity in a multiterminal source model. The multiterminal source model introduced by Csiszár and Narayan consists of a group of remotely located terminals with access to correlated sources and a noiseless public channel. The terminals wish to secure their communication by agreeing upon a group secret key. The key agreement protocol involves communicating over the public channel, and agreeing upon an SK secured from eavesdroppers listening to the public communication. The SK capacity, i.e., the maximum rate of an SK that can be agreed upon by the terminals, has been characterized by Csiszár and Narayan. Their capacity-achieving key generation protocol involved terminals communicating to attain omniscience, i.e., every terminal gets to recover the sources of the other terminals. While this is a very general protocol, it often requires larger rates of public communication than is necessary to achieve SK capacity. The primary focus of this dissertation is to characterize the communication complexity, i.e., the minimum rate of public discussion needed to achieve SK capacity. A lower bound to communication complexity is derived for a general multiterminal source, although it turns out to be loose in general. While the minimum rate of communication for omniscience is always an upper bound to the communication complexity, we derive tighter upper bounds to communication complexity for a special class of multiterminal sources, namely, the hypergraphical sources. This upper bound yield a complete characterization of hypergraphical sources where communication for omniscience is a rate-optimal protocol for SK generation, i.e., the communication complexity equals the minimum rate of communication for omniscience. Another aspect of the public communication touched upon by this dissertation is the necessity of omnivocality, i.e., all terminals communicating, to achieve the SK capacity. It is well known that in two-terminal sources, only one terminal communicating success to generate a maximum rate secret key. However, we are able to show that for three or more terminals, omnivocality is indeed required to achieve SK capacity if a certain condition is met. For the specific case of three terminals, we show that this condition is also necessary to ensure omnivocality is essential in generating a SK of maximal rate. However, this condition is no longer necessary when there are four or more terminals. A certain notion of common information, namely, the Wyner common information, plays a central role in the communication complexity problem. This dissertation thus includes a study of multiparty versions of the two widely used notions of common information, namely, Wyner common information and Gács-Körner (GK) common information. While evaluating these quantities is difficult in general, we are able to derive explicit expressions for both types of common information in the case of hypergraphical sources. We also study fault-tolerant SK capacity in this dissertation. The maximum rate of SK that can be generated even if an arbitrary subset of terminals drops out is called a fault-tolerant SK capacity. Now, suppose we have a fixed number of pairwise SKs. How should one distribute them amongpairs of terminals, to ensure good fault tolerance behavior in generating a groupSK? We show that the distribution of the pairwise keys according to a Harary graph provides a certain degree of fault tolerance, and bounds are obtained on its fault-tolerant SK capacity.

Current day VLSI systems have started seeing increasing percentages of multiple energy domain components being integrated into the mainstream. Energy domains such as mechanical, optical, fluidic etc. have become all pervasive into VLSI systems and such systems are being manufactured routinely. The framework required to design such an integrated system with diverse energy domains needs to be evolved as a part of conventional VLSI design methodology. This is because manufacturing and design of these integrated energy domains although based on semiconductor processing, is still very ad-hoc, with each device requiring its dedicated design tools and process integration. In this thesis three different approaches in different energy domains, have been pro-posed. These three domains include modelling & simulation, synthesis & compilation and formal verification. Three different scenarios have been considered and it is shown that these tasks can be co-performed along with conventional VLSI circuits and systems. In the first approach a micro-mechanical beam bending case is presented. A thermal heat ow causing the beam to bend through thermal stress is analyzed for change in capacitance under a single analysis and modelling framework. This involves a seamless analysis through thermal, mechanical and electrical energy domains. The second part of the thesis explores synthesis and compilation paradigms. The concept of a Gyro-compiler analogous to a memory compiler is proposed, which primarily generates soft IP models for various gyro topologies. The final part of this thesis deals in showcasing a working prototype of a formal verification framework for MEMS based hybrid systems. The MEMS verification domain today is largely limited to simulation based verification. Many techniques have been proposed for formal verification of hybrid systems. Some of these methods have been extended to demonstrate, how MEMS based hybrid systems can be formally verified through ex-tensions of conventional formal verification methods. An adaptive cruise control (ACC) system with a gyro based speed sensor has been analyzed and formally verified for various specifications of this system.

A distributed application may be considered as a set of nodes which are spread across the network, and need to communicate with each other. The design and implementation of these distributed applications is greatly simplified using Group Communication Systems (GCSs) which provide multipoint to multipoint communication. Hence, GCSs can be used as building blocks for implementing distributed applications. The GCS is responsible for reliable delivery of group messages and management of group membership. The peer-to-peer model and the client-server model are the two models of distributed systems for implementing GCSs. In this thesis, our focus is on improving the capability of GCS based on the client-server model. Security is an important requirement of many distributed applications. For such applications, security has to be provided m the GCS itself. The security of a GCS includes confidentiality, authentication and non-repudiation of messages, and ensuring that the GCS is properly meeting its guarantees. The complexity and cost of implementation of the above three types of security guarantees greatly depend on whether the GCS servers are trusted by the group members or not. Making use of the GCS services provided by untrusted GCS servers becomes necessary when the GCS servers are managed by a third party. In this thesis, we have proposed algorithms for ensuring the above three security guarantees for GCSs in which servers are not trusted. As part of the solution, we have proposed a new digital multisignature scheme which allows group members to verify that a message has indeed been signed by all group members. The various group key management algorithms proposed in literature differ from each other with respect to the following four metrics: communication overhead, computational overhead, storage at each member and distribution of load among group members. We identify the need for a distributed group key management algorithm which minimizes the computational overhead on group members and propose an algorithm to achieve it.

Collective Communication Operations are widely used in MPI applications and play an important role in their performance. Hence, various projects have focused on optimization of collective communications for various kinds of parallel computing environments including LAN settings, heterogeneous networks and most recently Grid systems. The distinguishing factor of Grids from all the other environments is heterogeneity of hosts and network, and dynamically changing resource characteristics including load and availability. The first part of the thesis develops a solution for MPI broadcast (one-to-many) on Grids. Some current strategies take into consideration static information about network topology for determining an efficient broadcast tree for Grids. Some other strategies take into account only transient network characteristics. We combined both these strategies and cluster the network dynamically on the basis of link bandwidths. Given a set of network parameters we use Simulated Annealing (SA) to obtain the best schedule. Also, we can time tune individual. SAs, to adapt the solution finding process, on the basis of estimated available times before next broadcast invocations in the application. We also developed software architecture for updation of schedules. We compared our algorithm with the earlier approaches under loaded network conditions, and obtained average performance improvement of 20%. The second part of the thesis extends the work for MPI all gather (many-to-many) operation. Current popular techniques consider strict hierarchical schemes for this operation, wherein from each cluster a representative (or coordinator) node is chosen, and inter cluster communication is done through these representative nodes. This is non optimal as inter cluster communication is usually on high capacity links that can sustain more than one transfer with the same through- put. We developed a cluster based and incremental heuristic algorithm for allgather on Grids. We compared the time taken by allgather schedules determined by this algorithm with current popular implementations. We also compared our algorithm with a strategy where allgather is constructed from a set of broadcast trees. We obtained average performance improvement of 67% over existing strategies.

Network management plays a vital role to keep a network and its application work e ciently. The network management in MANETs is a crucial and the challenging task, as these networks are characterized by dynamic environment and the scarcity of resources. There are various existing approaches for network management in MANETs. The Ad hoc Network Management Protocol (ANMP) has been one of the rst e orts and introduced an SNMP-based solution for MANETs. An alternative SNMP-based solu-tion is proposed by GUERRILLA Management Architecture (GMA). Due to self-organizing characteristic feature of MANETs, the management task has to be distributed. Policy-based network management relatively o ers this feature, by executing and applying policies pre-viously de ned by network manager. Otherwise, the complexity of realization and control becomes di cult Most of the works address the current status of the MANET to take the network man-agement decisions. Currently, MANETs addresses the dynamic and intelligent decisions by considering the present situation and all related history information of nodes into consid-eration. In this connection we have proposed a network management system using agents (NMSA) for MANETs, resolving major issues like, node monitoring, location management, resource management and QoS management. Solutions to these issues are discussed as inde-pendent protocols, and are nally combined into a single network management system, i.e., NMSA. Agents are autonomous, problem-solving computational entities capable of performing e ective operation in dynamic environments. Agents have cooperation, intelligence, and mobility characteristics as advantages. The agent platforms provide the di erent services to agents, like execution, mobility, communication, security, tracking, persistence and directory etc. The platform execution environment allows the agents to run, and mobility service allows them to travel among the di erent execution environments. The entire management task will be delegated to agents, which then executes the management logic in a distributed and autonomous fashion. In our work we used the static and mobile agents to nd some solutions to the management issues in a MANET. We have proposed a node monitoring protocol for MANETs, which uses both static agent (SA) and mobile agents (MA), to monitor the nodes status in the network. It monitors the gradational energy loss, bu er, bandwidth, and the mobility of nodes running with low to high load of mobile applications. Protocol assumes the MANET is divided into zones and sectors. The functioning of the protocol is divided into two segments, The NMP main segment, which runs at the chosen resource rich node (RRN) at the center of a MANET, makes use of SA which resides at same RRN, and the NMP subsegment which runs in the migrated MAs at the other nodes. Initially SA creates MAs and dispatches one MA to each zone, in order to monitor health conditions and mobility of nodes of the network. MAs carrying NMP subsegment migrates into the sector of a respective zone, and monitors the resources such as bandwidth, bu er, energy level and mobility of nodes. After collecting the nodes information and before moving to next sector they transfer collected information to SA respectively. SA in turn coordinates with other modules to analyze the nodes status information. We have validated the protocol by performing the conformance testing of the proposed node monitoring protocol (NMP) for MANETs. We used SDL to obtain MSCs, that repre-sents the scenario descriptions by sequence diagrams, which in turn generate test cases and test sequences. Then TTCN-3 is used to execute the test cases with respect to generated test sequences to know the conformance of protocol against the given speci cation. We have proposed a location management protocol for locating the nodes of a MANET, to maintain uninterrupted high-quality service for distributed applications by intelligently anticipating the change of location of its nodes by chosen neighborhood nodes. The LMP main segment of the protocol, which runs at the chosen RRN located at the center of a MANET, uses SA to coordinate with other modules and MA to predict the nodes with abrupt movement, and does the replacement with the chosen nodes nearby which have less mobility. We have proposed a resource management protocol for MANETs, The protocol makes use of SA and MA for fair allocation of resources among the nodes of a MANET. The RMP main segment of the protocol, which runs at the chosen RRN located at the center of a MANET, uses SA to coordinate with other modules and MA to allocate the resources among the nodes running di erent applications based on priority. The protocol does the distribution and parallelism of message propagation (mobile agent with information) in an e cient way in order to minimize the number of message passing with reduction in usage of network resources and improving the scalability of the network. We have proposed a QoS management protocol for MANETs, The QMP main segment of the protocol, which runs at the chosen RRN located at the center of a MANET, uses SA to coordinate with other modules and MA to allocate the resources among the nodes running di erent applications based on priority over QoS. Later, to reallocate the resources among the priority applications based on negotiation and renegotiation for varying QoS requirements. The performance testing of the protocol is carried out using TTCN-3. The generated test cases for the de ned QoS requirements are executed with TTCN-3, for testing of the associated QoS parameters, which leads to performance testing of proposed QoS management protocol for MANETs. We have combined the developed independent protocols for node monitoring, location management, resource management, and QoS management, into one single network management system called Network Management System using Agents (NMSA) for MANETs and tested in di erent environments. We have implemented NMSA on Java Agent development environment (JADE) Platform. Our developed network management system is a distributed system. It is basically divided into two parts, the Network Management Main Segment and other is Network Management Subsegment. A resource rich node (RRN) which is chosen at the center of a MANET where the Main segment of NMSA is located, and it controls the management activities. The other mobile nodes in the network will run MA which has the subsegments of NMSA. The network management system, i.e., the developed NMSA, has Network manage-ment main (NMSA main), Zones and sector segregation scheme, NMP, LMP, RMP, QMP main segments at the RRN along with SA deployed. The migrated MA at mobile node has subsegments of NMP, LMP, RMP, and QMP respectively. NMSA uses two databases, namely, Zones and sectors database and Node history database. Implementation of the proposed work is carried out in a con ned environment with, JDK and JADE installed on network nodes. The launched platform will have AMS and DF automatically generated along with MTP for exchange of message over the channel. Since only one JVM, which is installed, will executes on many hosts in order to provide the containers for agents on those hosts. It is the environment which o ered, for execution of agents. Many agents can be executed in parallel. The main container, is the one which has AMS and DF, and RMI registry are part of JADE environment which o ers complete run time environment for execution of agents. The distribution of the platform on many containers of nodes is shown in Fig. 1. The NMSA is based on Linux platform which provides distributed environment, and the container of JADE could run on various platforms. JAVA is the language used for code development. A middle layer, i.e., JDBC (java database connection) with SQL provides connectivity to the database and the application. The results of experiments suggest that the proposed protocols are e ective and will bring, dynamism and adaptiveness to the applied system and also reduction in terms network overhead (less bandwidth consumption) and response time.

We consider optimal power allocation policies for a single server, multiuser wireless communication system. The transmission channel may experience multipath fading. We obtain very efficient, low computational complexity algorithms which minimize power and ensure stability of the data queues. We also obtain policies when the users may have mean delay constraints. If the power required is a linear function of rate then we exploit linearity and obtain linear programs with low complexity. We also provide closed-form optimal power policies when there is a hard deadline delay constraint. Later on, we also extend single hop results to multihop networks. First we consider the case, when the transmission rate is a linear function of power. We provide low complexity algorithms for joint routing, scheduling and power control which ensure stability of the queues, certain minimum rates, end-to-end hard deadlines, and/or upper bounds on the end-to-end mean delays. Further we extend these results to the multihop networks where the power is a general monotonically increasing function of rate. For our algorithms, we also provide rates of convergence to the stationary distributions for the queue length process and also approximate end-to-end mean delays. Finally, we provide computationally efficient algorithms that minimize the total power when there is a end-to-end hard deadline delay constraint.

Error-control codes, which are being extensively used in communication systems, have found themselves very useful in data storage as well during the past decade. This thesis deals with two types of codes for data storage, one pertaining to the issue of privacy and the other to reliability. In many scenarios, user accessing some critical data from a server would not want the server to learn the identity of data retrieved. This problem, called Private Information Retrieval (PIR) was rst formally introduced by Chor et al and they gave protocols for PIR in the case where multiple copies of the same data is stored in non-communicating servers. The PIR protocols that came up later also followed this replication model. The problem with data replication is the high storage overhead involved, which will lead to large storage costs. Later, Fazeli, Vardy and Yaakobi, came up with the notion of PIR code that enables information-theoretic PIR with low storage overhead. In the rst part of this thesis, construction of PIR codes for certain parameter values is presented. These constructions are based on a variant of conventional Reed-Muller (RM) codes called binary Projective Reed-Muller (PRM) codes. A lower bound on block length of systematic PIR codes is derived and the PRM based PIR codes are shown to be optimal with respect to this bound in some special cases. The codes constructed here have smaller block lengths than the short block length PIR codes known in the literature. The generalized Hamming weights of binary PRM codes are also studied. Another work described here is the implementation and evaluation of an erasure code called Coupled Layer (CL) code in Ceph distributed storage system. Erasure codes are used in distributed storage to ensure reliability. An additional desirable feature required for codes used in this setting is the ability to handle node repair efficiently. The Minimum Storage Regenerating (MSR) version of CL code downloads optimal amount of data from other nodes during repair of a failed node and even disk reads during this process is optimum, for that storage overhead. The CL-Near-MSR code, which is a variant of CL-MSR, can efficiently handle a restricted set of multiple node failures also. Four example CL codes were evaluated using a 26 node Amazon cluster and performance metrics like network bandwidth, disk read and repair time were measured. Repair time reduction of the order of 3 was observed for one of those codes, in comparison with Reed Solomon code having same parameters. To the best of our knowledge, such large gains in repair performance have never been demonstrated before.