VLC Enabled Hybrid Wireless Network for B5G/6G Communications

Wireless Personal Communications - In the present scenario, there is a boom in the demand of the users to achieve increased capacity, high data, low latency, and high-performance rates. 5G New...     

Electrospun microporous gelatin–polycaprolactone blend tubular scaffold as a potential vascular biomaterial

The work reported involved the fabrication of an electrospun tubular conduit of a gelatin and polycaprolactone (PCL) blend as an adventitia‐equivalent construct. Gelatin was included as the matrix for increased biocompatibility with the addition of PCL for durability. This is contrary to most of the literature available for biomaterials based on blends of gelatin and PCL where PCL is the major matrix. The work includes the assiduous selection of key electrospinning parameters to obtain smooth bead‐free fibres with a narrow distribution of pore size and fibre diameter. Few reports elucidate the optimization of all electrospinning parameters to fabricate tubular conduits with a focus on obtaining homogeneous pores and fibres. This stepwise investigation would be unique for the fabrication of gelatin–PCL electrospun tubular constructs. The fabricated microfibrous gelatin–PCL constructs had pores of size ca 50–100 μm reportedly conducive for cell infiltration. The measured value of surface roughness of 57.99 ± 17.4 nm is reported to be favourable for protein adhesion and cell adhesion. The elastic modulus was observed to be similar to that of the tunica adventitia of the native artery. Preliminary in vitro and in vivo biocompatibility tests suggest safe applicability as a biomaterial. Minimal cytotoxicity was observed using MTT assay. Subcutaneous implantation of the scaffold demonstrated acute inflammation which decreased by day 15. The findings of this study could enable the fabrication of smooth bead‐free microfibrous gelatin–PCL tubular construct as viable biomaterial which can be included in a bilayer or a trilayer scaffold for vascular tissue engineering. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry     

A study of the energy consumption characteristics of cryptographic algorithms and security protocols

Security is becoming an everyday concern for a wide range of electronic systems that manipulate, communicate, and store sensitive data. An important and emerging category of such electronic systems are battery-powered mobile appliances, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cell phones, which are severely constrained in the resources they possess, namely, processor, battery, and memory. This work focuses on one important constraint of such devices-battery life-and examines how it is impacted by the use of various security mechanisms. In this paper, we first present a comprehensive analysis of the energy requirements of a wide range of cryptographic algorithms that form the building blocks of security mechanisms such as security protocols. We then study the energy consumption requirements of the most popular transport-layer security protocol: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). We investigate the impact of various parameters at the protocol level (such as cipher suites, authentication mechanisms, and transaction sizes, etc.) and the cryptographic algorithm level (cipher modes, strength) on the overall energy consumption for secure data transactions. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive analysis of the energy requirements of SSL. For our studies, we have developed a measurement-based experimental testbed that consists of an iPAQ PDA connected to a wireless local area network (LAN) and running Linux, a PC-based data acquisition system for real-time current measurement, the OpenSSL implementation of the SSL protocol, and parameterizable SSL client and server test programs. Based on our results, we also discuss various opportunities for realizing energy-efficient implementations of security protocols. We believe such investigations to be an important first step toward addressing the challenges of energy-efficient security for battery-constrained systems.     

Partitioned encoding schemes for algorithm-based fault tolerance inmassively parallel systems

Considers the applicability of algorithm based fault tolerance (ABET) to massively parallel scientific computation. Existing ABET schemes can provide effective fault tolerance at a low cost For computation on matrices of moderate size; however, the methods do not scale well to floating-point operations on large systems. This short note proposes the use of a partitioned linear encoding scheme to provide scalability. Matrix algorithms employing this scheme are presented and compared to current ABET schemes. It is shown that the partitioned scheme provides scalable linear codes with improved numerical properties with only a small increase in hardware and time overhead     

Prevalence of hepatitis B and C virus infections among haemodialysis patients in Pune (western India)

Vascular injuries may occur as complications of elbow dislocation and usually involve the brachial artery. A case report is presented in which only the radial artery was compromised as a result of the dislocation.     

Sintering studies of nano-crystalline zinc oxide

Sintering and grain growth of nano-crystalline undoped ZnO has been studied in detail over a wide range of temperature and holding time. Below 800 °C, sintering of over 70% theoretical density is not observed, irrespective of particle size. At 900 °C for 6 h, the nano-crystalline sample sinters to 99% of theoretical density whereas the density for as received sample is 93% of theoretical density. However, at 1300 °C or higher, the densification is found to be much faster and after a few hours becomes independent of holding time. Grain growth studies reveal a similar feature of attaining saturation over holding time. The average saturated grain size is found to be ∼1.5 and ∼2.2 μm at 800 and 900 °C, respectively, while at 1300 °C or higher, it is in between 12 and 13 μm.     

DESP: a distributed economics-based subcontracting protocol for computation distribution in power-aware mobile ad hoc networks

In this paper, we present a new economics-based power-aware protocol, called the distributed economic subcontracting protocol (DESP) that dynamically distributes task computation among mobile devices in an ad hoc wireless network. Mobile computation devices may be energy buyers, contractors, or subcontractors. Tasks are transferred between devices via distributed bargaining and transactions. When additional energy is required, buyers and contractors negotiate energy prices within their local markets. Contractors and subcontractors spend communication and computation energy to relay or execute buyers' tasks. Buyers pay the negotiated price for this energy. Decision-making algorithms are proposed for buyers, contractors, and subcontractors, each of which has a different optimization goal. We have built a wireless network simulator, called ESIM, to assist in the design and analysis of these algorithms. When the average communication energy required transferring a task is less than the average energy required to execute a task, our experimental results indicate that markets based on our protocol and decision-making algorithms fairly and effectively allocate energy resources among different tasks in both cooperative and competitive scenarios.