Vol. 31 Issue 2/3

Sankara Malliga Gopalan, Meeradevi Thiyagarajan, Umaparvathi Manavalan and Parvathavartini Baladubramanian
The objective of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is to provide reliable end-to-end delivery of data over unreliable networks. Over the past few years, the problem of congestion control has received widespread attention. Many authors have reported that the TCP interacts with the lower layers, but still it cannot predict route failures and network congestion. Their proposals involving the network layer suggest notifying the TCP sender about a routing failure, when the routing layer detects one. The issues discussed above, with the possibility of further avenues for improving the performance of TCP in multihop wireless networks, served as the motivation for this paper. This paper describes the efficient techniques in various layers to improve the performance of TCP over multihop wireless networks. This work analyses the performance of the proposed two types of cross layer flavors, namely the TCP-AL and TCP-WPAL. The cross layer interaction, TCP-WPAL produced better performance than the TCP-AL.

Mirza Barjees Baig and Fahad Aldosari
Cholistan Desert located in the Eastern Pakistan and Sothern part of Punjab province is an extension of Great Indian Desert. Spreading over an area of about 2.6 million hectares (26,000 km2), the sandy desert with an annual mean rainfall varying from 100-250 mm has hot, dry and arid climate. The population of the desert has touched the figure of 110,000. Although ecological and climatic conditions for all the living organisms are extremely poor and relatively hard and harsh yet livestock sector is supporting the livelihoods of its inhabitants. The area is subjected to the prime issues like: extreme scarcity of water, drought conditions, over-grazing, deforestation, wind erosion, salinity. In the past, Cholistan Desert was the home to the many wildlife species but unfortunately this natural resource is vanishing fast. The paper presents an overview of the available resources of the area; provides the critical analyses of the strategies/interventions tried so far and examines the available options to realize sustainable development. The paper aims at reclaiming the desert lands and converting them into productive ecosystems (at least to the possible extent( by conserving its precious natural resources like: lands, water, flora and fauna; and identifying the alternate measures to elevate the livelihood of desert dwellers. The secondary data were used to make inferences, draw conclusions and suggest remedial measures. Through sustainable strategies, the rich heritage of desert biodiversity can be conserved and promoted. A holistic approach comprising of the initiatives like: Rural Extension and Development Initiatives (REDI); Improved Water Harvesting Techniques (IWHT); Saline Agriculture Approach, Desert-based Aquaculture (DBA), and improved water storage facilities are imperative to launch in order to make the desert greener. Innovative technologies discussed in the article could possibly reclaim the desert; sustain more vegetation to feed a greater number of animal units. Such initiatives if taken have the potential to elevate the livelihood of inhabitants of Cholistan Desert.