Assessing Diagnosis Approaches for Wireless Sensor Networks:Concepts and Analysis

Diagnosis is of great importance to wireless sensor networks due to the nature of error prone sensor nodes and unreliable wireless links. The state-of-the-art diagnostic tools focus on certain types of faults, and their performances are highly correlated with the networks they work with. The network administrators feel difficult in measuring the effectiveness of their diagnosis approaches and choosing appropriate tools so as to meet the reliability demand. In this work, we introduce the D-vector to characterize the property of a diagnosis approach. The D-vector has five dimensions, namely the degree of coupling, the granularity, the overhead, the tool reliability and the network reliability, quantifying and evaluating the effectiveness of current diagnostic tools in certain applications. We employ a skyline query algorithm to find out the most effective diagnosis approaches, i.e., skyline points（SPs）, from five dimensions of all potential D-vectors. The selected skyline D-vector points can further guide the design of various diagnosis approaches. In our trace-driven simulations, we design and select tailored diagnostic tools for GreenOrbs, achieving high performance with relatively low overhead.

Recent advances in the research for the homolog of breast cancer associated gene AtROW1 in higher plants

BARD1(BRCA1 associated RING domain protein 1), as an important animal tumor suppressor gene associated with many kinds of cancers, has been intensively studied for decades. Surprisingly, homolog of BARD1 was found in plants and it was renamed At ROW1(repressor of Wuschel-1) according to its extremely important function with regard to plant stem cell homeostasis. Although great advances have been made in human BARD1, the function of this animal tumor-suppressor like gene in plant is not well studied and need to be further elucidated. Here, we review and summarize past and present work regarding this protein. Apart from its previously proposed role in DNA repair, recently it is found essential for shoot and root stem cell development and differentiation in plants. The study of At ROW1 in plant may provide an ideal model for further elucidating the functional mechanism of BARD1 in mammals.

A Survey on Data Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks （WSNs） have been applied in a variety of application areas. Most WSN systems, once deployed, are intended to operate unattended for a long period. During the lifetime, it is necessary to fix bugs, reconfigure system parameters, and upgrade the software in order to achieve reliable system performance. However, manually collecting all nodes back and reconfiguring through serial connections with computer is infeasible since it is labor-intensive and inconvenient due to the harsh deploying environments. Hence, data dissemination over multi-hop is desired to facilitate such tasks. This survey discusses the requirements and challenges of data dissemination in WSNs, reviews existing work, introduces some relevant techniques, presents the metrics of the performance and comparisons of the state-of-the-art work, and finally suggests the possible future directions in data dissemination studies. This survey elaborates and compares existing approaches of two categories： structure-less schemes and structure-based schemes, classified by whether or not the network structure information is used during the disseminating process. In existing literatures, different categories have definite boundary and limited analysis on the trade-off between different categories. Besides, there is no survey that discusses the emerging techniques such as Constructive Interference （CI） while these techniques have the chance to change the framework of data dissemination. In a word, even though many efforts have been made, data dissemination in WSNs still needs some more work to embrace the new techniques and improve the efficiency and practicability further.