Description: This book chapter discusses a time synchronization scheme for wireless sensor networks that aims to save sensor battery power while maintaining network connectivity for as long as possible. It focuses on aspects of wireless sensor networks. These include designing a hybrid method between reference broadcast synchronization (RBS) and timing-sync protocol for sensor networks (TPSN) to reduce the number of transmissions required to synchronize an entire network, extending single-hop synchronization methods to operate in large multi-hop networks, verifying that the hybrid methods operate as desired by simulating against RBS and TPSN, and maintaining network connectivity and coverage.

Description: This paper discusses enhanced channel assignment and load distribution in IEEE 802.11 WLANs. Abstract: An algorithm to reduce congestion and balance users' load in IEEE 802.11b/g wireless local area networks (WLANs) is presented, which takes into account overlapping channel interference between access points (APs) and the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) experienced by the users. After finding the best channel assignment at the APs, the algorithm then finds the most congested access point (MCAP). It reexamines the users' association with APS by minimizing the congestion at the MCAP. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is capable of significantly reducing the overall congestion in the WLAN while mitigating channel interference. Our algorithm has also been shown to be scalable and it performs well for networks of different topologies.

Description: This article discusses agent-based distance vector routing. Abstract: In spite of the ever-increasing availability of computation and communication resources in modern networks, the overhead associated with network management protocols, such as traffic control and routing, continues to be an important aspect in the design of new methodologies. Resource efficiency of such protocols has become even more prominent with the recent developments of wireless and ad-hoc networks, which are marked by much more severe resource constraints in terms of bandwidth, memory, and computational capabilities. This paper presents an Agent-Based approach to Distance Vector Routing that addresses these resources constraints. Agent-Based Distance Vector Routing (ADVR) is a resource efficient implementation of Distance Vector Routing that is fault tolerant and scales well for large networks. ADVR draws upon some basic biologically inspired principles to facilitate coordination among the mobile agents that implement the routing task. Specifically, simulated pheromones are used to control the movement of agents within the network and to dynamically adjust the number of agents in the population. The behavior of ADVR is analyzed and compared to that of traditional Distance Vector Routing.

Description: This article discusses classifying genes to the correct Gene Ontology Slim term in Saccharomyces cerevisiae using neighbouring genes with classification learning. Abstract: Background: There is increasing evidence that gene location and surrounding genes influence the functionality of genes in the eukaryotic genome. Knowing the Gene Ontology Slim terms associated with a gene gives the authors insight into a gene's functionality by informing the authors how its gene product behaves in a cellular context using three different ontologies: molecular function, biological process, and cellular component. In this study, the authors analyzed if they could classify a gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae to its correct Gene Ontology Slim term using information about its location in the genome and information from its nearest-neighbouring genes using classification learning. Results: The authors performed experiments to establish that the MultiBoostAB algorithm using the J48 classifier could correctly classify Gene Ontology Slim terms of a gene given information regarding the gene's location and information from its nearest-neighbouring genes for training. Different neighbourhood sizes were examined to determine how many nearest neighbours should be included around each gene to provide better classification rules. The authors' results show that by just incorporating neighbour information from each gene's two-nearest neighbours, the ...

Description: This paper discusses building multilingual semantic networks. Abstract: We present a system that allows non-expert Web users to contribute towards building a multilingual lexical resource. Our study focuses on the Romanian-English language pair, and the target resource is a Romanian WordNet strongly connected to the English WordNet. We use a bilingual dictionary, a monolingual definition dictionary and documents on the Web to build synsets, attach them a gloss, and provide some examples. The results of the semi-automatic acquisition system are judged by two human judges, and they are compared to automatic approaches to building a Romanian WordNet.