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The fading characteristics and broadcast nature of wireless channels are usually not fully considered in the design of routing protocols for wireless networks. In this paper, we address the routing issue from a link layer point of view. We focus on a multihop network with multiple relays at each hop and three routing strategies are designed to achieve the full diversity gain provided by the cooperation among relays. In particular, an optimal routing strategy is proposed to minimize the end-to-end outage, which requires the channel information of all the links and serves as a performance bound. An ad-hoc routing strategy is then proposed based on a hop-by-hop relay selection, which can be easily implemented in a distributed way. The outage analysis shows that the performance gap between these two routing strategies increases with the number of hops. To achieve a good complexity-performance tradeoff, an N-hop routing strategy is further proposed, where a joint optimization is performed every N hops. Simulation results are presented which verify the analysis.

In this paper, a unified analytical framework is established to study the stability, throughput and delay performance of homogeneous buffered IEEE 802.11 networks with Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). Two steady-state operating points are characterized using the limiting probability of successful transmission of Head-of-Line (HOL) packets p given that the network is in unsaturated or saturated conditions. The analysis shows that a buffered IEEE 802.11 DCF network operates at the desired stable point p = p L if it is unsaturated. p L does not vary with backoff parameters, and a stable throughput can be always achieved at p L . If the network becomes saturated, in contrast, it operates at the undesired stable point p = p A , and a stable throughput can be achieved at p A if and only if the backoff parameters are properly selected. The stable regions of the backoff factor q and the initial backoff window size W are derived, and illustrated in cases of the basic access mechanism and the request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) mechanism. It is shown that the stable regions are significantly enlarged with the RTS/CTS mechanism, indicating that networks in the RTS/CTS mode are much more robust. Nevertheless, the delay analysis further reveals that lower access delay is incurred in the basic access mode for unsaturated networks. If the network becomes saturated, the delay performance deteriorates regardless of which mode is chosen. Both the first and the second moments of access delay at p A are sensitive to the backoff parameters, and shown to be effectively reduced by enlarging the initial backoff window size W .

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As advances in life sciences and information technology bring profound influences on bioinformatics due to its interdisciplinary nature, bioinformatics is experiencing a new leap-forward from in-house computing infrastructure into utility-supplied cloud computing delivered over the Internet, in order to handle the vast quantities of biological data generated by high-throughput experimental technologies. Albeit relatively new, cloud computing promises to address big data storage and analysis issues in the bioinformatics field. Here we review extant cloud-based services in bioinformatics, classify them into Data as a Service (DaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and present our perspectives on the adoption of cloud computing in bioinformatics.ReviewersThis article was reviewed by Frank Eisenhaber, Igor Zhulin, and Sandor Pongor.

We propose a cross-layer design which combines truncated ARQ at the link layer and cooperative diversity at the physical layer. In this scheme, both the source node and the relay nodes utilize an orthogonal space-time block code for packet retransmission. In contrast to previous cooperative diversity protocols, here cooperative diversity is invoked only if the destination node receives an erroneous packet from the source node. In addition, the relay nodes are not fixed and are selected according to the channel conditions using CRC. It will be shown that this combination of adaptive cooperative diversity and truncated ARQ can greatly improve the system throughput compared to the conventional truncated ARQ scheme and fixed cooperative diversity protocols. We further maximize the throughput by optimizing the packet length and modulation level and will show that substantial gains can be achieved by this joint optimization. Since both the packet length and modulation level are usually discrete in practice, a computationally efficient algorithm is further proposed to obtain the discrete optimal packet length and modulation level.