A H-QoS-demand personalized home physiological monitoring system over a wireless multi-hop relay network for mobile home healthcare applications

For the elderly and chronic patients with cardiovascular disease who live alone, it is necessary to constantly monitor their physiological parameters, especially the electrocardiogram (ECG), to effectively prevent and control their health condition and even to provide urgent treatment or care while an emergency such as the abnormal variation of heart rate (HR) occurs. In this paper, a wireless in-home physiological monitoring system, based on multi-hop relay communications, which can ubiquitously and continuously monitor the patient's ECG at any time or any place at home without space limit and the “dead spot” due to the extended communication coverage by multi-hop wireless connectivity, is proposed. The system consists of a mobile-care device, which is responsible for capturing and wirelessly sending the patient's ECG data, a wireless multi-hop relay network (WMHRN) that is in charge of relaying the data sent by the former, and a residential gateway (RG), which is responsible for gathering and uploading the received ECG data to the remote care server through the Internet to carry out the patient's health condition monitoring and the management of pathological data. However, in order to assure that the ECG data can be effectively and timely forwarded, from the mobile-care device to the RG through the WMHRN, to meet the healthcare quality of service (H-QoS) demand for reliable and real-time end-to-end ECG transmission, the analysis of WMHRN latency in data-forwarding stage and the deployment consideration of wireless relay nodes are investigated in detail in this work. Moreover, an emergency alert service using short message service (SMS), based on the detection of abnormal variation of HR, is also used in the RG to further enhance the healthcare service quality. A prototype of this system has been developed and implemented. Finally, the experimental results are presented to verify the feasibility of the proposed system.     

Probe compensated single feed circularly polarized fractal‐shaped microstrip antennas

A single feed circularly polarized fractal boundary microstrip antenna with improved axial ratio bandwidth is presented. The low‐axial ratio bandwidth of single feed circularly polarized microstrip antenna is due to its probe reactance. In this article, the inherent disadvantage of this low‐AR bandwidth is overcome by compensating the probe reactance by incorporating capacitance in the form of small patch between the radiating patch and the probe. The perturbation of the patch is done using fractal curve as boundary. The proposed antenna exhibits impedance and axial ratio bandwidths of 9 and 2.2% respectively at 2.4 GHz. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2009.     

Self-managed topologies in P2P networks

The problem of efficient resource location is an important open issue in P2P systems. This paper introduces DANTE, a self-adapting P2P system that changes its peer links to form topologies where resources are located in an efficient manner via random walks. Additionally, this same self-adaptation capacity makes DANTE capable of reacting to events like changes in the system load or attacks on well-connected nodes by adjusting the topology to the new scenario. This adaptive behavior emerges as the global result of the individual work of nodes, without the intervention of any central entity or the need for global knowledge. Simulations show that this adaptation process makes the system scalable, resilient to attacks, and tolerant to a high transitivity of peers. Simulations are also used to compare this solution with other well-known self-adapting P2P system. From these results it can be concluded that the topologies achieved by DANTE offer better performance.     

Use of competition detection in TCP for simple topology networks

The fairness (or TCP-friendliness) of recent high-speed TCP proposals for high bandwidth-delay product networks is generally poor. We believe that the lack of TCP-friendliness of high-speed TCP proposals stems from their ineffectiveness in detecting competing TCP flows. We suggest a competition detection mechanism for a single TCP flow to detect the presence of competing TCP flows. We propose a new TCP, called Adaptive TCP (A-TCP) to demonstrate the usefulness of the competition detection mechanism. A-TCP uses the competition detection mechanism to control its aggressiveness: If it does not detect competing flows, a single A-TCP flow increases its sending rate aggressively in order to highly utilize the network. Otherwise, it behaves like a standard TCP flow to fairly share network resources with competing flows. We implemented A-TCP as part of Linux as well as in ns-2. Experimental results show that A-TCP achieves better fairness than existing high-speed TCP proposals when they compete against standard TCP in simple topology networks.     

Fuzzy logic techniques for navigation of several mobile robots

In this paper, navigation techniques for several mobile robots as many as one thousand robots using fuzzy logic are investigated in a totally unknown environment. Fuzzy logic controllers (FLC) using different membership functions are developed and used to navigate mobile robots. First a fuzzy controller has been used with four types of input members, two types of output members and three parameters each. Next two types of fuzzy controllers have been developed having same input members and output members with five parameters each. Each robot has an array of ultrasonic sensors for measuring the distances of obstacles around it and an infrared sensor for detecting the bearing of the target. These techniques have been demonstrated in various exercises, which depicts that the robots are able to avoid obstacles as well as negotiate the dead ends and reach the targets efficiently. Amongst the techniques developed, FLC having Gaussian membership function is found to be most efficient for mobile robots navigation.     

NURBS边界曲面直接生成法

由于非均匀有理B样条(NURBS)曲面的复杂性,传统NURBS边界曲面的生成是先构造孔斯曲面,再由孔斯曲面向NURBS曲面转换得到,其操作过程比较烦琐。针对此问题,提出了NURBS边界曲面直接生成算法,该算法根据给定的四条NURBS边界曲线,结合孔斯曲面生成方法直接插值生成NURBS曲面,从而避免了通过孔斯曲面向NURBS曲面转换所带来的计算代价,因此同传统方法相比,具有较低的计算代价。实验结果表明:该算法简化了曲面生成步骤,减少了曲面转换过程的计算量,生成的曲面边界信息明确,且连续性好。     

基于GSM短消息传输小流量数据的设计

伴随着GSM网络的全球化普及,短消息及其增值业务以其方便、灵活、快捷、价格低廉等优势已经迈入许多领域,并逐步取代传统的信息传输方式。因此,利用GSM通信模块和短消息技术构建无线发布平台来实现信息的传输和监控将成为一种必然趋势。本文提出的基于GSM短消息的小流量数据传输,将能稳定地进行数据采集和远程监控。     

An algorithm for recognizing palm polygons

A polygonP is said to be apalm polygon if there exists a pointxP such that the Euclidean shortest path fromx to any pointyP makes only left turns or only right turns. The set of all such pointsx is called thepalm kernel. In this paper we propose an O(E) time algorithm for recognizing a palm polygonP, whereE is the size of the visibility graph ofP. The algorithm recognizes the given polygonP as a palm polygon by computing the palm kernel ofP. If the palm kernel is not empty,P is a palm polygon.The extended abstract of this paper was reported at the Second Canadian Conference in Computational Geometry, pp. 246–251, 1990     

Do social media literacy skills help in combating fake news spread? Modelling the moderating role of social media literacy skills in the relationship between rational choice factors and fake news sharing behaviour

This study modelled the rational factors that predict fake news sharing behaviour. It also tested the moderating role of social media literacy skills. The focus was on social media users in Nigeria. An online survey was conducted to gather the responses from participants across Nigerian geopolitical zones. Structural equation modelling (SEM) Smart PLS 3.6 was used to analyse the data. We found that information sharing, the news finds me perception, trust in social media and status-seeking lead to fake news sharing among social media users in Nigeria. Specifically, trust in social media and status-seeking had a greater effect on fake news sharing behaviour. We also found that social media literacy skills significantly moderate the relationship between information sharing, status-seeking, the news finds me perception, trust in social media and fake news sharing in such a way that the effects/relationships are stronger among those with low social media literacy skills. This outcome contributes to theory and practice which was highlighted in the concluding aspect of this study.     

主动干扰辅助下的无人机隐蔽通信功率与位置联合优化

利用友好干扰节点发送人工噪声是无线隐蔽通信中一种常见实现方法,可以增加监听者做出判断的不确定性,从而实现隐蔽传输。为此,考虑在无人机隐蔽通信网络中,部署一个空中的友好干扰节点,发射人工噪声干扰地面监听者的检测。对无人机与地面用户之间实现无线隐蔽传输进行了研究,分析了其有效隐蔽性能,联合优化了2架无人机的发送功率和位置部署以最大化隐蔽传输速率,使用粒子群优化算法与功率位置交替迭代算法2种优化方法得到最优的无人机部署位置及功率分配方案。仿真结果表明,联合优化方案相比于固定位置只优化功率的基准方案可以显著地提高系统隐蔽传输性能,且交替迭代算法所得结果要优于粒子群优化算法。