Hybrid wavelet measurement matrices for improving compressive imaging

Compressive sensing principle claims that a compressible signal can be recovered from a small number of random linear measurements. However, the design of efficient measurement basis in compressive imaging remains as a challenging problem. In this paper, a new set of hybrid wavelet measurement matrices is proposed to improve the quality of the compressive imaging, increase the compression ratio and reduce the processing time. The performance of these hybrid wavelet matrices for image modeling and reconstruction is evaluated and compared with other traditional measurement matrices such as the random measurement matrices, Walsh and DCT matrices. The compressive imaging approach chosen in this study is the block compressive sensing with smoothed projected Landweber reconstruction technique. The simulation results indicate that the imaging performance of the proposed hybrid wavelet measurement matrices is approximately 2–3 dB better than that obtained using Gaussian matrix especially at higher compression ratios.     

An effective back‐off selection technique for reliable beacon reception in VANETs

In safety‐critical scenarios, reliable reception of beacons transmitted by a subject vehicle is critical to avoid vehicle collision. According to the employed contention window sizes in IEEE 802.11p, beacons are transmitted with a small contention window size. As a result, multiple vehicles contend for the shared channel access by selecting the same back‐off slot. This is a perfect recipe for synchronous collisions wherein reliable beacon delivery cannot be guaranteed for any vehicle. We consider the problem of selecting the back‐off slots from the current contention window to provide reliable delivery of beacons transmitted by a subject vehicle to its neighbors. Given a safety scenario, we propose a Pseudo‐Random Number Generator (PRNG)‐inspired back‐off selection (PBS) technique. The proposed technique works on the hypothesis that synchronous collisions of beacons transmitted by a subject vehicle can be reduced if all its neighbors select different back‐off slots (ie, not the back‐off slot selected by the subject vehicle). The discrete‐event simulations demonstrate that PBS can increase the overall message reception from a subject vehicle, in comparison with the uniform random probability back‐off selection in IEEE 802.11p.     

Single-stage three-phase boost power factor correction circuit for AC–DC converter

This article presents a single-stage three-phase power factor correction (PFC) circuit for AC-to-DC converter using a single-switch boost regulator, leading to improve the input power factor (PF), reducing the input current harmonics and decreasing the number of required active switches. A novel PFC control strategy which is characterised as a simple and low-cost control circuit was adopted, for achieving a good dynamic performance, unity input PF, and minimising the harmonic contents of the input current, at which it can be applied to low/medium power converters. A detailed analytical, simulation and experimental studies were therefore conducted. The effectiveness of the proposed controller algorithm is validated by the simulation results, which were carried out using MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. The proposed system is built and tested in the laboratory using DSP-DS1104 digital control board for an inductive load. The results revealed that the total harmonic distortion in the supply current was very low. Finally, a good agreement between simulation and experimental results was achieved.     

Tensor-based methods for high-power amplifier identification and predistortion linearization

Aligned with the recent revolution of smart cities concept, a lot of work has been done to support the education process in direct or indirect way. In countries like Lebanon, in which the choice of school does not depend on the residence location, parents are becoming more and more selective in the quality of schools they are choosing for their children. This fact may lead parents to choose a modern and good school even if it is far from their residence. On the other hand, and even if the school was close enough, the traffic congestion would make the on-feet journey of the kid to the school very risky. Driving children to school is a solution. However, it consumes a lot of time and effort each day in the morning and the afternoon. Hence, school buses are commonly used by all schools to take the student from and to his home. Nevertheless, waiting the bus each day to arrive is an exhausting and a time-wasting mission. In this paper we present a smart transportation system for school buses that helps in saving parents’ time, by avoiding waiting school buses in the morning and then in the afternoon to return kids back, especially with the increasing traffic jams at these hours. The proposed mobile and web application is designed to help parents, school and the bus to communicate automatically and easily via the application in order to detect kids’ arrival time. The bus application side will notify parents few minutes before its approaching to their homes. Furthermore, the system will allow parents to inform the school and hence the bus application side about the absence of their kid. The system has been efficiently and dynamically designed and implemented so it can be hosted and used by any school administration without the need to any major modifications. It has been tested on a summer school to prove its efficiency and marked an important positive feedback from the school and the parents’ sides.     

Scattering of Electromagnetic Waves by a Coated Nihility Cylinder

An analytical solution for the scattering of electromagnetic plane waves from an infinitely long nihility cylinder, coated with a double positive (DPS), double negative (DNG), epsilon negative (ENG), or mu negative (MNG) layer of uniform thickness is presented. The solution is determined by solving the scalar wave equation in the cylindrical coordinates, for different regions and applying the appropriate boundary conditions at the interfaces. Both TM and TE polarizations as incident plane have been considered in the analysis. Comparison of behaviors of a coated nihility cylinder with a coated PEC cylinder has been made. It is noted that two situations are more closer for DNG coating as compared to DPS coating.     

MC-CDMA with exponential power profile in Nakagami fading channel

A refined study of multi-carrier code division multiple access transmission over a Nakagami fading channel is proposed. The channel power is modeled with an exponential power profile rather than the uniform profile prevalent in other papers. An expression for the bit error rate (BER) is then derived. Numerical results show that MC-CDMA performances depend on the power dispersion of interferers around the desired user power.     

Influence of Ag micro-particle additions on the microstructure, hardness and tensile properties of Sn-9Zn binary eutectic solder alloy

In this study, an addition of Ag micro-particles (8-10 μm) with a content in the range between 0 and 1.5 wt.% to Sn-9Zn eutectic solder, were examined in order to understand the effect of Ag additions as the particulate reinforcement on the microstructural and mechanical properties as well as the thermal behavior of the newly developed composite solders. Here, an approach to prepare a micro-composite solder alloy by mixing Ag micro-particles with a molten Sn-Zn solder alloy was developed. The composite solder was prepared by mechanically mixing Ag micro-particles into the Sn-9Zn alloy melt to ensure a homogeneous distribution of the reinforcing particles. The distribution of the Ag micro-particles in the matrix was found to be fairly uniform. The Ag particles reacted with the Zn and formed ε-AgZn₃ intermetallic compounds (IMC) in the β-Sn matrix. It was found that the more Ag particles added to the Sn-9Zn solder, the more Ag-Zn compound formed. In the Sn-9Zn/XAg composite solder, the microstructure was composed of AgZn₃ IMC and α-Zn phase in the β-Sn matrix. Interestingly, as the Ag particles in the composite solder increased, the α-Zn phase was found to be depleted from the matrix. The average tensile strength of the composite solders increased with the Ag micro-particles content up to a certain limit. Beyond this limit, the addition of Ag particles actually decreased the strength.     

Contention aware mobility prediction routing for intermittently connected mobile networks

This paper introduces a novel multi-copy routing protocol, called predict and forward (PF), for delay tolerant networks, which aims to explore the possibility of using mobile nodes as message carriers for end-to-end delivery of the messages. With PF, the message forwarding decision is made by manipulating the probability distribution of future inter-contact and contact durations based on the network status, including wireless link condition and nodal buffer availability. In particular, PF is based on the observations that the node mobility behavior is semi-deterministic and could be predicted once there is sufficient mobility history information. We implemented the proposed protocol and compared it with a number of existing encounter-based routing approaches in terms of delivery delay, delivery ratio, and the number of transmissions required for message delivery. The simulation results show that PF outperforms all the counterpart multi-copy encounter-based routing protocols considered in the study.     

Conceptual framework for the security of mobile health applications on Android platform

Mobile Health (mHealth) applications are readily accessible to the average user of mobile devices, and despite the potential of mHealth applications to improve the availability, affordability and effectiveness of delivering healthcare services, they handle sensitive medical data, and as such, have also the potential to carry substantial risks to the security and privacy of their users. Developers of applications are usually unknown, and users are unaware of how their data are being managed and used. This is combined with the emergence of new threats due to the deficiency in mobile applications development or the design ambiguities of the current mobile operating systems. A number of mobile operating systems are available in the market, but the Android platform has gained the topmost popularity. However, Android security model is short of completely ensuring the privacy and security of users’ data, including the data of mHealth applications. Despite the security mechanisms provided by Android such as permissions and sandboxing, mHealth applications are still plagued by serious privacy and security issues. These security issues need to be addressed in order to improve the acceptance of mHealth applications among users and the efficacy of mHealth applications in the healthcare systems. Thus, this paper presents a conceptual framework to improve the security of medical data associated with Android mHealth applications, as well as to protect the privacy of their users. Based on the literature review that suggested the need for the intended security framework, three-distinct and successive phases are presented, each of which is described in a separate section. First, discussed the design process of the first phase to develop a security framework for mHealth apps to ensure the security and privacy of sensitive medical data. The second phase is discussed who to achieve the implementation of a prototypic proof-of-concept version of the framework. Finally, the third phase ending discussed the evaluation process in terms of effectiveness and efficiency for the proposed framework.     

Towards SoC Validation Through Prototyping: A Systematic Approach Based on Reconfigurable Platform

Hardware/software covalidation is becoming one of the most critical issues in current System-on-Chip (SoC) design. Nowadays, covalidation is usually performed by cosimulation which is slow and lacks accuracy. The other alternative is to build a hardware prototype specific to the application. However, this alternative is expensive in terms of time, man-power, and cost. As SoCs increase in complexity, validation becomes more and more difficult, time consuming and error prone. Thus, a new approach for covalidation is inescapable. In this paper, we present a novel efficient prototyping approach for complex SoC covalidation. The proposed approach enables systematic prototyping of embedded applications on a reconfigurable platform. The process starts from the RT level model of the application. The application and the reconfigurable platform have to be adapted to obtain the prototype. We decompose the prototyping process into four steps, in order to match the application and the platform. Besides, we propose adapted solutions to deal with constraints typically encountered in existing reconfigurable platforms. The main advantages of this method are: fast and accurate validation, systematic prototyping flow, and large application field. Prototyping of a subset of VDSL using the ARM Integrator platform illustrates the effectiveness of our approach.