Multi-sensor data fusion is a concept whereby data collected from multiple sensors is processed and combined in a manner that improves the accuracy of the decision making process compared to that in a single sensor system. While the underlying principle of multi-sensor data fusion is simple (i.e., multiple information sources providing redundancy and diversity), there are several challenges associated with realizing a cost-effective and robust system, which requires a cross-disciplinary approach with joint multi-disciplinary optimization. A system leveraging multi-sensor data fusion techniques will typically consist of an array of sensors, feeding data into a central node that processes and fuses the data to make a decision or an inference. Application of the multi-sensor data fusion concept can be found in both the commercial and military sectors. The first challenge is associated with the design of sensors, which can be either homogeneous or heterogeneous. In complex systems, information may have to be gathered in a variety of forms, such as radio, optical, thermal, and acoustic. The second challenge is the reliable transfer the data from the sensor nodes to the central node. The sensors may be mobile (and perhaps power constrained) and/or not co-located. The third challenge is the fusion of data from multiple sensors, particularly when they are heterogeneous. Different sensors may experience different noise levels and different operating conditions. Hence, multi-sensor data fusion systems have three main areas of focus for cross-disciplinary research – sensors, networking, and data fusion. Joint optimization of these areas can use signal processing techniques that are well established in communication systems, such as estimation theory, error control coding, and sigma-delta processing. In this workshop, we will explore this theme by inviting subject matter experts in sensor design, network protocol design, and data fusion algorithms.

Sensor networks have many applications, and security issues in some sensor applications are very important such as monitoring applications in the battle fields. Sensor networks differ from other traditional networks with many aspects such as limited energy, limited memory space, limited computation capability, etc. Therefore, sensor network security has some unique features which do not exist in other networks.

This tutorial will provide an overview of the security issues and solutions of sensor networks including attacks, encryption, authentication, key managements, secure routing, secure aggregation, secure location, intrusion detection, privacy issues, security services, RFID security, Zigbee Security, lightweight ciphers, security in sensor and actuator networks, security in underwater sensor networks, etc.

Workshop on Security and Privacy in 4G Networks will bring together security and privacy experts, practitioners, standards developers and others in academia, industry and government. The objective of this workshop is to identify the key issues to be addressed by future research in the areas of security and privacy in 4G networks that will constitute of a new air interface providing higher capacity and increased coverage in the form of multi-hop communication and interworking with existing radio access networks. The spectrum for a new air interface in 4G will be decided this year at WRC 2007. Since research, standardization, and development of 4G will become more focused than before, this is the perfect time to identify the research topics in 4G. The characteristics of 4G, e.g., enhanced internetworking and high mobility, will lead to added system requirements that are far more complex than what we have seen in current networks.  As the 4G network provides many new service applications, security and privacy will become one of the key issues in 4G

Service- and application-oriented networks represent an area of convergence between communications and computing, based on modular, distributed and re-configurable capabilities, and blending network and service functions in a way that emphasizes end-user and business functionality. The objective of this workshop is to address network-level as well as application and service-layer topics of analysis, design, monitoring and experimentation. The top-down interplay between services and networking creates unique modeling, design and implementation challenges. The goal of this workshop is to focus the community's efforts in building up this important area by discussing perspective issues and required breakthroughs in research and development. The workshop format will be a combination of original papers, review/white papers, quick "hot topic" presentations, and a panel discussion with participants from industry, the NSF, and academia. This will allow workshop participants to obtain a global perspective of the scope of this area and of the technical challenges associated with it, in a participative and interactive manner.

The current age of pervasive communication, worldwide networked systems, and converged networks brings the areas of fault tolerance, fault management and quality guarantees to the forefront of today's research topics. Of special importance are cross-domain techniques, distributed fault management architectures, and autonomic protocols for improving the reliability, dependability, and manageability of network-centric systems.  

A number of developments suggest that optical networking is making a comeback to service providers' networks, and many signs point to the access segment of these networks.   Broadband access (wire-line and wireless), multimedia, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), video streaming (conventional and high-definition), and IPTV are drivers thereto and are paving the way for new technology and service paradigms.   Service providers, Telcos and Cable MSOs alike, are facing the challenge of triple play (delivering voice, data, and video to their customers) and optical access solutions are enabling them to do so.

Stretching fiber towards the last mile has always been an interesting option for the industry.   However, this option was not cost effective until recently.   Today, progress in optical technologies brought down the cost of many optical components, devices, and systems, which are instrumental for optical access. Meanwhile, bandwidth-hungry services and demand for triple-play delivery are changing the economics of optical access solutions, which is making a new case for FTTx. This acronym embraces a number of optical access technologies, such as Fiber To The Curb (FTTC), Fiber To The Node (FTTN), Fiber To The Building (FTTB), Fiber To The Home (FTTH), and Fiber To The Premises (FTTP).   Today, FTTx relies on Passive Optical Network (PON) and active Optical Ethernet (OE) architectures.

Although most of the spectrum is allocated much of it is unused. The enormous growth in the wireless industry has come from using a small part of the wireless spectrum, nominally less than 10% under 3 GHz. There is growing evidence of scarcity and overcrowding in these bands reflected for example, by price paid for cellular spectrum. However, measurements have shown other parts of the spectrum -- although allocated -- are virtually unused, and known widely as spectrum white spaces. These white spaces vary from place to place and time to time. Cognitive Radio (CR) technologies enable harnessing these spectrum white spaces, permitted by new spectrum regulation. Specifically, spectrum regulation to allow the unlicensed use of television bands is well underway in the US.

The breakthrough provided by Cognitive Radios is significant because it allows the development of new and innovative types of devices and services for businesses and consumers, without disrupting television and other authorized services. Key benefits include: (a) access to abundant new spectrum, (b) better propagation therefore reliable, low outage communication and low power operation, and (c) peaceful coexistence with other wireless networks. Cognitive Radio topic has featured in MIT Technology Review's top ten most promising emerging technologies. Accordingly, during the last few years, there has been a lot of effort by the FCC, industry and standard groups to make CRs happen. There has also been significant research effort in academia for better understanding of the technical requirements and potential solutions.

The aim of this tutorial is to bring together, and put in context, all the recent progress in addressing the various aspects of cognitive radio networks for license-exempt use of TV bands. This tutorial will cover recent relevant FCC regulation, technical challenges pertaining to communications, networking protocols and implementation, and summarize the emerging standard(s) for Cognitive Radios in TV bands.

This tutorial on latest advances in wireless data networking is designed for engineers and managers involved in design and deployments of wireless equipment.  In addition to providing an overview of technology, issues, and standards, it also covers the technical details. The tutorial will focus on technological developments that enable high-speed wireless networks such as IEEE 802.11n LANs, WiMAX, and Ultra wideband and how these technologies achieve the features and what products are available. 

Technology, industry status, and products featured include:

• Wireless PHY: CDMA, OFDM, OFDMA, Adaptive Antenna System (AAS), MIMO, Turbo Codes, Space-Time Block Codes, Software defined radios
• Ultra Wideband: How it works, FCC Rules on UWB, Advantages, DS-UWB, Multi-Band OFDM, Applications, Products
• IEEE 802.11n: Major Components, Status, Products, Issues
• WiMAX Overview: Technical and Business Challenges, Prior Efforts, Spectrum Options, QoS Classes, WiBro, Products
• Other Access Technologies: IEEE 802.11, HSDPA, HSUPA, HSPA, EV-DO, LTE, IEEE 802.20, IEEE 802.22

In the future, each automobile may serve as a mobile node in the global communications infrastructure, and many potential applications can be supported, including road safety, advanced traffic management, passenger infotainment, and resource management in transportation and telecommunications infrastructure. Significant industrial and governmental efforts have been undertaken to enhance “passive safety” to “active safety” by employing networking functions in vehicles and infrastructures. The unique features of automotive networking and telematics applications generate many interesting research interests and activities, and are expected to foster new transportation products and services. The wireless networking among vehicles and between vehicles and the infrastructure has different characteristics from other conventional wireless networking problems. For example, due to rapidly changing topology as vehicles move around, there are resemblances to mobile ad hoc networking scenarios. However, the constraints and optimizations are very different. One such example is that power efficiency is no longer an issue for vehicle communications as it is for traditional ad hoc networking. Vehicles in general are also constrained to move within roads (and within lanes most of the time) and with higher mobility. Automotive applications also demand stringent communications performance requirements that are not seen in conventional multi-hop wireless networks.

This tutorial course is designed to address important research challenges undertaken for automotive networking and telematics applications. The focus is on network protocols, emerging communications standards, and performance modeling for active safety, telematics, and infotainment applications enabled by a vehicular-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle wireless communications technology.

Topics of interest include:

• Vehicular networking: an overview
• Vehicular network architecture and protocols
• Vehicular network MAC, routing, collision avoidance, and congestion control
• Security for automotive networking
• Enabling technologies for active safety applications
• Resource management and performance modeling in vehicular networks

The World Wide Web has become such a predominant Internet application that many in the public think that the Web is the Internet. The Web has certainly evolved far from browsing static HTML pages. The Web is now used for e-mail, shopping, banking, socializing, multimedia 
entertainment, and even replacing traditional desktop office applications. The Web's apparent ease of use can mislead some users into a false sense of security. A Web browser is a complex software program with many capabilities, which can be used to open various avenues of attack. For example, a malicious website might download malicious software or deceive a user into disclosing private information. A malicious script might exploit a browser vulnerability to take over a user's computer. A website might install a cookie to monitor a user's browsing habits. Besides risks to Web clients, Web servers are popular targets for attacks. A compromised server could disclose private personal data, or be used as a platform to launch attacks.

The adoption of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques in wireless communications systems is fueled by the promises of high spectral efficiency and robustness to multipath fading. A key component of a MIMO system is the MIMO detector at the receiver, whose job is to recover the symbols that are transmitted simultaneously from multiple transmitting antennas. In practical applications, the MIMO detector is often the bottleneck for both performance and complexity.

This tutorial will present the basic principles of MIMO detection. We describe the fundamental problem, and present an overview of MIMO techniques that are used in practice. Our coverage ranges from simple linear detectors based on the zero-forcing and minimum-MSE criteria to the optimal maximum-likelihood tree-based sphere detector.  In between, we will describe successive-cancellation or decision-feedback detectors, multistage detectors, and suboptimal tree-based detectors like the MMSE sphere detector, the Fano algorithm, the M-algorithm, and the K-best algorithm. The impact of both lattice-based preprocessing and ordering on performance and complexity will be described.

This tutorial will benefit practicing engineers and researchers who are interested in understanding and doing research in MIMO and related topics, particularly those who are engaged in the design of high-speed wireless data systems.

In mobile tactical ad hoc networks, nodes are constantly in motion and/or operate on limited power. When nodes are in motion, links can be obstructed by intervening objects. When nodes must conserve power, links are shut down. These result in intermittent connectivity. When no path exists between source and destination, network partition occurs. Examples of an intermittently connected network (ICN) are: (a) an inter-planet satellite communication network where satellites and ground nodes may only communicate with each other several times a day, (b) a sensor network where sensors are not powerful enough to send data to a collecting server or are scheduled to be wake/sleep periodically, and (c) a military ad hoc network where nodes (e.g. tanks, airplanes, soldiers) may move randomly and are subject to being destroyed. Applications in ICNs must tolerate delays beyond conventional IP forwarding delays and these networks are referred to as delay/disruption tolerant networks (DTN). New protocols specifically for DTNs must be developed as existing protocols designed for the Internet do not work properly. 

Recently there has been much research activity in the emerging area of intermittently connected ad hoc networks and delay/disruption tolerant networks. There are different types of DTNs depending on the nature of the network environment. Routing in DTNs is one of the key components in the DTN architecture proposed by the DTN research group. Therefore, researchers have proposed different routing protocols for different types of DTNs in the last few years.

This tutorial will review the state of the art in DTN networks, especially routing protocols. We categorize these routing protocols based on information used. For deterministic time evolving networks, three main approaches are discussed: the tree approach, the space and time approach, and the modified shortest path approach. For stochastic time evolving networks, the following approaches are reviewed: the epidemic or random forwarding approach, predication or history based approach (including per contact routing based on one-hop information only and per contact routing based on average end to end information), the model based routing approach as well as approaches which control the movement of certain special nodes. Recent developments in erasure coding and network coding applied to DTNs are also discussed.

Fast-paced innovation in the networking industry has addressed customer challenges like security, application delivery, compliance etc in the form of a plethora of point-function products. Introduction of such point-function products into networks has resulted in complex and ad-hoc network architectures. The same is also true for application architectures.

CIO’s today are looking for ways to reduce Total Cost of Ownership and enhance Time-to-Market for their businesses. Virtualization is one technology that presents an answer to these problems. Storage and Server virtualization technologies deliver increased utilization and enhanced agility of datacenters.

This tutorial introduces concepts of network virtualization and its interaction with computer, storage virtualization within the Data Center as well as in the context of Grid Computing within the logical boundaries of an Enterprise. The participants will learn how these virtualization techniques can be applied cost-effectively to maintain service continuity in the era of Globalization.