As the earth’s temperature increases, efficient heating, cooling, and lean building designs are critical to ensure environmental longevity for future generations. Reducing the usage of chemically involved mechanisms such as cooling units with hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants and improving natural absorption or reflection of sunlight is vital for sustainability and mandatory in any intelligent city design. This paper focuses on active temperature control utilizing novel intelligent window system designs that permit interior and external fixation. In addition to providing new smart home capabilities, the proposed system aims to reduce energy consumption, further providing benefits, including consumer cost savings and a reduction of fossil fuel usage. The paper provides the experimental test bed design and prototype of the intelligent system termed TRASS (Temperature Regulating Autonomous Solar Shade). TRASS is a self-sufficient product with communication capabilities and autonomous use. As the experimental results show, the autonomous control of the prototype allows accurate temperature regulation by managing the amount of sunlight. The model incorporates rechargeable batteries and alternative energy, allowing older generational homes and buildings to employ the system without needing external power. The system continuously maintains necessary environmental conditions indoors without user interaction. However, TRASS permits manual adjustments to ensure proper management at desired conditions.

Infrastructure limited zones like military environments differ from commercial and residential demands due to the sensitive applications and dynamic environments. Combative environments suffer from many challenges, including limited to no infrastructure access, rapid situational escalations, and possible adversarial attacks, both technological and physical. Regardless of the unstable situations, communication is a vital component necessary in any application. A lack of communication accessibility and private transmission can quickly become the adversary's advantages. In previous research, the authors designed a cooperative communication platform executing a different architecture than traditional models, such as the TCP/IP model [1] - thus, allowing custom communication implementations for additional cybersecurity advantages and more rapid deployment. This paper provides the passive link detection necessary for self-organizing mechanisms. The results depict useable links developed through passive discoveries and provide off-the-shelf hardware and software limitations and considerations.

Idle spectrum use and dynamic spectrum access are popular topics in academia and industry. Heterogenous networking is more popular than ever, with mobile offloading being the biggest motivator. Current communication implements several new protocols, such as 802.11u WiFi Certified Passpoint, multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP), 5G Core Access Traffic Steering, Switching, and Splitting (ATSSS), and CoopNet. This paper introduces the primary methods and models included in the first two stages (Discovery and Decision) of the CoopNet multipath architecture defined in [1]. The discovery and decision stages are the fundamental stages necessary as proof of concept for experimental implementation. The results show that implementing just the first two stages improves the local communication throughput, delay, and utility, enabling new features, including introducing infrastructure as a service.

In Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), fast and reliable dissemination of safety messages is a key step toward improving the overall road safety. In a highly dynamic VANET environment, safety message dissemination in a multi-hop manner is a challenging and complex problem that has gained significant attention recently. Many protocols and schemes have been proposed to efficiently share safety messages among vehicles. However, most existing techniques do not perform well under real-world traffic conditions, or perform adequately only under very limited scenarios and traffic conditions. This research proposes a highly efficient and reliable multi-hop broadcasting protocol, Intelligent Forwarding Protocol (IFP), that exploits handshake-less communication, ACK Decoupling, and an efficient collision resolution mechanism. In this research, IFP has been extensively studied and evaluated to establish its robustness and superiority over existing schemes. A key contribution of this paper is to present an in-depth analysis and optimization of IFP using theoretical modeling, thorough simulations, and extensive real-world experimentation. With IFP, the message propagation delay is significantly reduced and packet delivery ratio is drastically improved.

Progress in modern communication technology is continuous and accelerated. Demand for higher bandwidth, lower latency, more reliable connectivity is ever-growing. With it, supporting a higher number of devices connected, deep network awareness, as well as a more accessible network is essential. The introduction of cloud/fog computing, cooperative communication architectures, and the Internet of Things (IoT) show that the capabilities of traditional network architectures and protocols are becoming obsolete. Therefore, new technologies, such as Software-Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualization, Content-Centric Networking, and Cooperative Networking are being introduced to sustain future demands. One primary limitation is the use of the conventional TCP/IP five-layer network model. More specifically, the redundant header overhead exiting in convention communication is an inefficient use of bandwidth increasing the overall communication latency. This paper proposes a new universal packetization standard that can be used to reduce the header overhead, and to prepare for next-gen communication, such as Cooperative Multipath Communication. Cooperative Multipath Communication provides an alternative communication standard to the TCP/IP five-layer model. The paper proposes shifting the responsibilities from the bottom layers to the application layer and end nodes to eliminate the dependency on conventional methods. The result section shows a significant improvement in latency, throughput, and packet reception.

For human-driven as well as autonomous vehicles, one of the key requirements is continuous awareness of the surroundings to detect any potential threats (vehicles, pedestrians, wild-life etc.). This requires continuous cooperation between the vehicles by efficiently sharing safety information in a timely manner. However, this is a multi-dimensional and challenging problem due to the complex nature of the vehicular environment. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an elegant solution to efficiently share the safety information among vehicles by using only Basic Safety Messages (BSM), which are part of the existing V2V standards. Through this research, the vehicles are able to quickly and preemptively identify potential threats, not only in their close proximity, but also those which are further along the roadway by intelligently exchanging safety information between neighboring vehicles. Additionally, for the first time, the proposed architecture presents a practical approach of incorporating the onboard sensor data with the V2V communications. This leads to vehicles having improved visibility and situational awareness further outside of their one-hop coverage. Simulation results show that improved visibility of vehicles up to 2.6 km can be achieved while placing minimum overhead and complexity on the network.

Sharing emergency messages amongst vehicles on the road can greatly reduce traffic accidents. In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) to share these emergency messages, fast and reliable message dissemination is the key objective in a highly dynamic VANET environment. This research proposes a novel broadcasting protocol to achieve these goals by introducing handshake-less broadcasting, ACK Decoupling and efficient collision resolution mechanism. A key contribution of this paper is to analyze and optimize the broadcasting algorithm using thorough mathematical modeling with extensive simulations. With the suggested optimization process, the message propagation delay can be significantly reduced.

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is an extension of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) to share traffic information and emergency alerts amongst vehicles on the road. To support many applications in VANETs, most studies use GPS to find the furthest node with ACK to ensure successful message reception. However, this ACK procedure can be removed if a channel between the sender and receiver is clear such that the sender can overhear the broadcasted messages from the receiver. If the sender fails, nodes closer to the sender inform the sender of successful rebroadcasting, which serves as an ACK to the sender. This process will either entirely remove costly ACKing processes or at least decouple the messages propagation from ACKing to the sender, which will significantly improve the speed of message propagation. In this paper, we use Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) with ACK decoupling to ensure fast message propagation with reliable message recovery. Detailed simulation results show that the proposed SNR based approach with ACK decoupling outperforms the Smart Broadcast (SB) by 200% in average throughput and per hop delay, while ensuring the reliable dissemination of emergency messages in typical VANETs environments.