An altruistic cross‐layer recovering mechanism for ad hoc wireless networks

Video streaming services have restrictive delay and bandwidth constraints. Ad hoc networks represent a hostile environment for this kind of real‐time data transmission. Emerging mesh networks, where a backbone provides more topological stability, do not even assure a high quality of experience. In such scenario, mobility of terminal nodes causes link breakages until a new route is calculated. In the meanwhile, lost packets cause annoying video interruptions to the receiver. This paper proposes a new mechanism of recovering lost packets by means of caching overheard packets in neighbor nodes and retransmit them to destination. Moreover, an optimization is shown, which involves a video‐aware cache in order to recover full frames and prioritize more significant frames. Results show the improvement in reception, increasing the throughput as well as video quality, whereas larger video interruptions are considerably reduced. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Least Squares Boundary Residual Method for the Analysis of Step Discontinuities in Open Chiral Waveguides

We analyse the reflection, transmission and radiation characteristics of a step discontinuity in a grounded chiral slab and we show that the step radiation can be enhanced due to the effect of the chirality. The analysis is performed using a mode matching technique. The fields are expressed in terms of the discrete modes and the continuous spectrum using two subsets of hybrid radiation modes: incident transverse electric (ITE) and incident transverse magnetic (ITM) modes. The scattering matrix of the step is determined by minimizing the boundary residual error in the sense of the least squares. The influence of chirality on the characterization of the step is demonstrated and we show that control of the radiation pattern is achieved, including angle and width of the radiation beam.     

Molds and Resists Studies for Nanoimprint Lithography of Electrodes in Low-Voltage Polymer Thin-Film Transistors

A low-cost patterning of electrodes was investigated looking forward to replacing conventional photolithography for the processing of low-operating voltage polymeric thin-film transistors. Hard silicon, etched by sulfur hexafluoride and oxygen gas mixture, and flexible polydimethylsiloxane imprinting molds were studied through atomic force microscopy (AFM) and field emission gun scanning electron microscopy. The higher the concentration of oxygen in reactive ion etching, the lower the etch rate, sidewall angle, and surface roughness. A concentration around 30 % at 100 mTorr, 65 W and 70 sccm was demonstrated as adequate for submicrometric channels, presenting a reduced etch rate of 176 nm/min. Imprinting with positive photoresist AZ1518 was compared to negative SU-8 2002 by optical microscopy and AFM. Conformal results were obtained only with the last resist by hot embossing at 120 °C and 1 kgf/cm² for 2 min, followed by a 10 min post-baking at 100 °C. The patterning procedure was applied to define gold source and drain electrodes on oxide-covered substrates to produce bottom-gate bottom-contact transistors. Poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) devices were processed on high-κ titanium oxynitride (TiO _x N _y ) deposited by radiofrequency magnetron sputtering over indium tin oxide-covered glass to achieve low-voltage operation. Hole mobility on micrometric imprinted channels may approach amorphous silicon (～0.01 cm²/V s) and, since these devices operated at less than 5 V, they are not only suitable for electronic applications but also as sensors in aqueous media.     

Disaster-survivable cloud-network mapping

Cloud-computing services are provided to consumers through a network of servers and network equipment. Cloud-network (CN) providers virtualize resources [e.g., virtual machine (VM) and virtual network (VN)] for efficient and secure resource allocation. Disasters are one of the worst threats for CNs as they can cause massive disruptions and CN disconnection. A disaster may also induce post-disaster correlated, cascading failures which can disconnect more CNs. Survivable virtual-network embedding (SVNE) approaches have been studied to protect VNs against single physical-link/-node and dual physical-link failures in communication infrastructure, but massive disruptions due to a disaster and their consequences can make SVNE approaches insufficient to guarantee cloud-computing survivability. In this work, we study the problem of survivable CN mapping from disaster. We consider risk assessment, VM backup location, and post-disaster survivability to reduce the risk of failure and probability of CN disconnection and the penalty paid by operators due to loss of capacity. We formulate the proposed approach as an integer linear program and study two scenarios: a natural disaster, e.g., earthquake and a human-made disaster, e.g., weapons-of-mass-destruction attack. Our illustrative examples show that our approach reduces the risk of CN disconnection and penalty up to 90 % compared with a baseline CN mapping approach and increases the CN survivability up to 100 % in both scenarios.     

Dispersion characteristics of asymmetric coupled anisotropic dielectric waveguides using FDFD

The formulation is developed in the frequency domain and the finite difference method is used for the numerical solution of the scalar wave equation, written in terms of the transverse components of the magnetic field. As a result a conventional eigenvalue problem is obtained without the presence of spurious modes due to the implicit inclusion of the divergence of the magnetic field equal to zero. The formulation is developed to include biaxial anisotropic dielectrics with an index profile varying arbitrarily in the cross section of the waveguide under analysis. This formulation is then applied to the analysis of the influence on the dispersion characteristics of the dimensions of asymmetric coupled rectangular uniaxial anisotropic dielectric waveguides. As expected, the reduction of the height or the width of one of the rectangular dielectric waveguides causes the dispersion curves to move towards higher frequencies.     

Low-cost group rekeying for unattended wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are made up of large groups of nodes that perform distributed monitoring services. Since sensor measurements are often sensitive data acquired in hostile environments, securing WSN becomes mandatory. However, WSNs consists of low-end devices and frequently preclude the presence of a centralized security manager. Therefore, achieving security is even more challenging. State-of-the-art proposals rely on: (1) attended and centralized security systems; or (2) establishing initial keys without taking into account how to efficiently manage rekeying. In this paper we present a scalable group key management proposal for unattended WSNs that is designed to reduce the rekeying cost when the group membership changes.     

A meshless method for solving the EEG forward problem

We present a numerical method to solve the quasistatic Maxwell equations and compute the electroencephalography (EEG) forward problem solution. More generally, we develop a computationally efficient method to obtain the electric potential distribution generated by a source of electric activity inside a three-dimensional body of arbitrary shape and layers of different electric conductivities. The method needs only a set of nodes on the surface and inside the head, but not a mesh connecting the nodes. This represents an advantage over traditional methods like boundary elements or finite elements since the generation of the mesh is typically computationally intensive. The performance of the proposed method is compared with the boundary element method (BEM) by numerically solving some EEG forward problems examples. For a large number of nodes and the same precision, our method has lower computational load than BEM due to a faster convergence rate and to the sparsity of the linear system to be solved.     

MEG forward problem formulation using equivalent surface current densities

We present a formulation for the magnetoencephalography (MEG) forward problem with a layered head model. Traditionally the magnetic field is computed based on the electric potential on the interfaces between the layers. We propose to express the effect of the volumetric currents in terms of an equivalent surface current density on each interface, and obtain the magnetic field based on them. The boundary elements method is used to compute the equivalent current density and the magnetic field for a realistic head geometry. We present numerical results showing that the MEG forward problem is solved correctly with this formulation, and compare it with the performance of the traditional formulation. We conclude that the traditional formulation generally performs better, but still the new formulation is useful in certain situations.     

Vitamins as Active Agents for Highly Emissive and Stable Nanostructured Halide Perovskite Inks and 3D Composites Fabricated by Additive Manufacturing

The use of non-toxic and low-cost vitamins like α-tocopherol (α-TCP, vitamin E) to improve the photophysical properties and stability of perovskite nanocrystals (PNCs), through post-synthetic ligand surface passivation, is demonstrated for the first time. Especially interesting is its effect on CsPbI₃ the most unstable inorganic PNC. Adding α-TCP produces that the photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of freshly prepared and aged PNCs achieves values of ≈98% and 100%, respectively. After storing 2 months under ambient air and 60% relative humidity, PLQY is maintained at 85% and 67%, respectively. α-TCP restores the PL features of aged CsPbI₃ PNCs, and mediates the radiative recombination channels by reducing surface defects. In addition, the combination of α-TCP and PNCs facilitates the chemical formulation to prepare PNCs-acrylic polymer composites processable by additive manufacturing. This enables the development of complex shaped parts with improved luminescent features and long-term stability for 4 months, which is not possible for non-modified PNCs. A PLQY ≈92% is reached in the 3D printed polymer/PNC composite, the highest value obtained for a red-emitting composite solid until now as far as it is known. The passivation shell provided by α-TCP makes that PNCs inks do not suffer any degradation process avoiding the contact with the environment and preserve their properties after reacting with polar monomers during composite polymerization.