An effective solution to the problems caused by the explosive growth of World Wide Web is a web caching that employing an additional server, called proxy cache, between the clients and main server for caching the popular web objects near the clients. However, a single proxy cache can easily become the bottleneck. Deploying groups of cooperative caches provides scalability and robustness by eliminating the limitations caused by a single proxy cache. Two common architectures to implement the cooperative caching are hierarchical and distributed caching systems. Unfortunately, both architectures suffer from performance limitations. We propose an efficient hybrid caching architecture eliminating these limitations by using both the hierarchical and same level caches. Our performance evaluation with our investigated simulator shows that the proposed architecture offers the best of both existing architectures in terms of cache hit rate, the number of query messages from clients, and response time.

In this paper, the 128bit AES block cipher algorithm OCB (Offset Code Book) mode for privacy and authenticity of high speed packet data was efficiently designed in C language level and was optimized to support the required capacity of contents server using high performance DSP. It is known that OCB mode is about two times faster than CBC-MAC mode. As an experimental result, the encryption / decryption speed of the implemented block cipher was 308Mbps, 311 Mbps respectively at 1GHz clock speed, which is 50% faster than a general design with 3.5% more memory usage.

The invariance relation existing in the non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is used for constructing robust image hashes in this work. The image is first re-scaled to a fixed size. Low-pass filtering is performed on the luminance component of the re-sized image to produce a normalized matrix. Entries in the normalized matrix are pseudo-randomly re-arranged under the control of a secret key to generate a secondary image. Non-negative matrix factorization is then performed on the secondary image. As the relation between most pairs of adjacent entries in the NMF's coefficient matrix is basically invariant to ordinary image processing, a coarse quantization scheme is devised to compress the extracted features contained in the coefficient matrix. The obtained binary elements are used to form the image hash after being scrambled based on another key. Similarity between hashes is measured by the Hamming distance. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust against perceptually acceptable modifications to the image such as Gaussian filtering, moderate noise contamination, JPEG compression, re-scaling, and watermark embedding. Hashes of different images have very low collision probability. Tampering to local image areas can be detected by comparing the Hamming distance with a predetermined threshold, indicating the usefulness of the technique in digital forensics.

In this paper we present a simple, efficient method for detecting the blurry photographs. Recently many digital cameras are equipped with various auto-focusing functions to help users take well-focused pictures as easily as possible. In addition, motion compensation devices are able to compensate motion causing blurriness in the images. However, digital pictures can be degraded by limited contrast, inappropriate exposure, imperfection of auto-focusing or motion compensating devices, unskillfulness of the photographers, and so on. In order to decide whether to process the images or not, or whether to delete them or not, reliable measure of image degradation to detect blurry images from sharp ones is needed. This paper presents a blurriness/sharpness measure, and demonstrates its feasibility by using extensive experiments. This method is fast, easy to implement and accurate. Regardless of the detection accuracy, the proposed measure in this paper is not demanding in computation time. Needless to say, this measure can be used for various imaging applications including auto-focusing and astigmatism correction.

The problem of assigning customers to satellite channels is a difficult combinatorial optimization problem and is NP-complete. For this combinatorial optimization problem, standard optimization methods take a large computation time and so genetic algorithms (GA) and ant colony optimization (ACO) can be used to obtain the best and/or optimal assignment of customers to satellite channels. In this paper, we present a comparative study of GA and ACO to this problem. Various issues related to genetic algorithms approach to this problem, such as solution representation, selection methods, genetic operators and repair of invalid solutions are presented. We also discuss an ACO for this problem. In ACO methodology, three strategies, ACO with only ranking, ACO with only max-min ant system (MMAS), and ACO with both ranking and MMAS, are considered. A comparison of these two approaches (i,e., GA and ACO) with the standard optimization method is presented to show the advantages of these approaches in terms of computation time.

A digital home is a ubiquitous environment that is expected to be realized in the near future. All information appliances in a house are connected to each other through wired and/or wireless home networks. Authenticated user can access the various services provided by the digital home, and the access is not restricted by equipment, time, or location. The technologies that form the digital home can be grouped into two categories: wired networking technologies and wireless networking technologies. For the purpose of ubiquitous environments, wireless-networks offer suitable and seamless high-quality services. A wireless LAN can be created simply by equipping a single access point. For that reason, the cost of establishing such a network is low and using it is easy. Of course, there is an exciting new wireless technology. It is the Ultra Wide Band (UWB). However, it is not enough to bring wireless convenience, although offering a broad range of high-speed data transfer capabilities, Because of unstable. Thus, of the wireless-networking systems, we focus on the wireless LAN. We quantitatively analyze its capabilities. The dynamic and adaptive wireless LAN provides a foundation for the evolution toward the next generation of wireless and adaptive networks. The difference between wired LAN and wireless LAN in upload and download rates is small. Although the wireless LAN experiences a greater loss rate than the wired LAN, the difference is minimal. We conclude that a wireless LAN is suitable for use in an apartment environment.