Modern sensor network applications are often implemented wirelessly in order to lessen installation costs and reduce deployment times. Unfortunately, these wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes must often rely on batteries or energy harvesting techniques in order to sustain their operation and supply the power needed to maintain communication within the...
There are five main contributions of this dissertation. The first contribution is new closed-form expressions for channel capacity of a new class of channel matrices. The second contribution is the discovery of the structure for optimal binary quantizer and the associated methods for finding an optimal quantizer that maximizes mutual...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) planning techniques have been central to automating a gamut of tasks from the mundane route planning and beer production to the ethereal image processing of space-ship images. Of all the planning techniques, hierarchical- decomposition planning has been the technique most employed in industrial-strength planners. Hierarchical-decomposition planning is...
General purpose computer systems have seen increased performance potential through the parallel processing capabilities of multicore processors. Yet this potential performance can only be attained through parallel applications, thus forcing software developers to rethink how everyday applications are designed. The most readily form of Thread Level Parallelism (TLP) within any...
Worst-case analysis is often meaningless in practice. Some problems never reach the anticipated worst-case complexity. Other solutions get bogged down with impractical constants during implementation, despite having favorable asymptotic running times. In this thesis, we investigate these contrasts in the context of finding maximum flows in planar digraphs. We suggest...
Error correction codes (ECCs) have been widely used in communication systems and storage devices. Nowadays, the rapid development of integrated circuit technologies makes feasible the implementation of powerful ECCs such as turbo code and low-density parity-check (LDPC) code. However, these high-performance codes require complex decoding algorithms, resulting in large hardware...
IO transactions within a computer system have evolved along with other system components (i.e., CPU, memory, video) from programmed IO (PIO). In current mainstream systems (spanning from HPC to mobile) the IO transactions are CPU-centric descriptor-based DMA transactions. The key benefit is that slower IO devices can DMA write system...
Network coding, as the next generation of data routing protocols, enables each intermediate node in a network to process and encode its received data before forwarding it to the next nodes. Hence, the core idea in network coding is to allow a network to encode the data that is being...
Authentication is a means of developing an electronic signature that works like a written signature. It assumes that your data is publicly known but nevertheless ensures that the message is not tampered with and that you have an audit trail.
This project discusses the techniques and concepts used to design...
Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a well-known framework for devising the optimal decision making strategies under uncertainty. Typically, the decision maker assumes a stationary environment which is characterized by a time-invariant transition probability matrix. However, in many real-world scenarios, this assumption is not justified, thus the optimal strategy might not...