We perform a demonstration experiment using the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration Unique Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS)/Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder Processing System to assess the improvement on trace gas retrievals upon switching to high spectral resolution CrIS radiance measurements (0.625 cm-1). The focus of this study is carbon monoxide retrievals. The experimental high spectral resolution CO retrievals show a remarkable improvement, of almost up to one order of magnitude in the degree of freedom of the signal, with respect to the low-resolution mode. Furthermore, high-resolution CO retrievals show similar skill with respect to existing CO operational products from the Atmospheric InfraRed Sounder, Atmospheric Sounder Interferometer, and Measurements of Pollution In The Troposphere instruments, both in terms of spatial variability and degrees of freedom. The results of this research provide evidence to support the need for high spectral resolution CrIS measurements. This is a fundamental prerequisite in guaranteeing continuity to the CO afternoon orbit monitoring as part of a multisatellite uniformly integrated long-term data record of atmospheric trace gases.

A challenge for the development of mobile applications is the heterogeneity of the different device classes. For instance, an application which runs well on a personal digital assistant (PDA) might be unsuitable for mobile phones. To facilitate the development of mobile applications we have develope

Location-based services in general require information about the position of certain objects. For instance, for a navigation service the position of the user needs to be known. This position is usually provided by a positioning system. However, it is typical for all positioning systems that they are

Using 802.11 concurrently for communications and positioning is problematic, especially if location-based services (e.g., indoor navigation) are concurrently executed with real-time applications (e.g., VoIP, video conferencing). Periodical scanning for measuring the signal strength interrupts the data flow. Reducing the scan frequency is no option because it hurts the position accuracy. For this reason, we need an adaptive technique to mitigate this problem.

Fingerprinting is a popular technology for 802.11-based positioning systems: Radio characteristics from different access points are measured at various positions and stored in a database. The database is copied to all mobile devices, and in case that a position estimate is needed, the device compares its currently measured radio characteristics with all the database entries. In this paper, we present two on-demand fingerprint selection algorithms to avoid the cumbersome and time-consuming approach of manually copying all fingerprints. Our algorithms only request those fingerprints from the database that are currently required to compute a position. The two algorithms differ in the way they shape the region for which fingerprints are requested. On-demand selection also allows storage-restricted mobile devices to utilize the positioning system. We carefully evaluate our algorithms in a real-world experiment. The results show that our algorithms do not harm the position accuracy of the positioning system. In addition, we analyze the space requirements of our algorithms and show that the typical constraints of mobile devices are met.

While indoor positioning systems based on 802.11 and fingerprinting work pretty well, it is unknown how to distribute large amounts of fingerprint data to mobile devices. Even worse, many mobile devices are restricted in terms of memory capabilites. We identified three classes of mobile devices representing different levels of storage capabilities. For each of these classes, we present a distribution approach for fingerprint data: the Union of Access Points (UAP), the Strongest Access Point (SAP), and the Intersection of Access Points (IAP) algorithm. These approaches utilize the 802.11 network to download only a subset of the fingerprint data to a mobile device. The subset covers the area close to the actual position of the mobile device in such a way that position estimates can be computed. The size of the subset is different for each of the three algorithms.

Not only the communication capabilities of 802.11, but also the capability to determine the position of mobile devices make 802.11 highly appealing for many application areas. Typically, a mobile device that wants to identify its position regularly performs active or passive scans to obtain the signal strength measurements of neighboring access points. However, so far, no investigations are known to have been launched into how regular scanning affects concurrent data transmissions from an end-user point of view. In this paper, we explore how common data communication is affected while actively or passively scanning at the same time. Furthermore, we present a novel scan scheme called monitor sniffing. Monitor sniffing exploits the fact that 802.11 operates on overlapping channels by overhearing the wireless interface. We have implemented our monitor sniffing algorithm using commodity 802.11g hardware, and we demonstrate that it does not disturb concurrent data communication

A large number of videos cannot be visualized on mobile devices (e.g.,PDAs or mobile phones)due to an inappropriate color depth of the displays. Important details are lost if the color depth is reduced. A major challenge is the preservation of the semantic content in spite of this fact. In this paper, we present a novel adaptation algorithm to enable the playback of videos on color-limited mobile devices. Dithering algorithms diffuse the error to neighbor pixels and do not work very well for videos. We propose a non-linear transformation of luminance values and use textures in combination with edges to reduce the color depth in videos.

A large number of previously recorded videos cannot be directly visualized on mobile devices like PDAs or mobile phones due to an inappropriate screen resolution of their displays. Transcoding can be used to change the resolution, however, the usual transcoding algorithms have problems preserving the semantic content. For instance, superimposed text is unreadable if the character size drops below a certain value. In this paper, we present a novel adaptation algorithm to scale and crop videos while preserving their semantic content. Semantic features in a shot are combined to select a suitable region to be resented in the adapted video.

Position-based routing suffers from inaccurate neighbor positions, especially at low beaconing rates. In this paper we propose to add dead-reckoning to the forwarder selection process to predict the positions of neighboring nodes. We have carried out simulations to investigate the consequences of this modification and explain the trade-offs. With the modified algorithm, we achieve a complete packet delivery for beaconing intervals of as much as 6 seconds for a medium-density German highway setting. We will show that the dead-reckoning scheme results in (a) less beacon traffic with equal or better neighbor position prediction and (b) less overhead induced by transmit failures when using the same beaconing frequencies.