Design of 24 GHz Radar with Subspace‐Based Digital Beam Forming for ACC Stop‐and‐Go System

For an adaptive cruise control (ACC) stop‐and‐go system in automotive applications, three radar sensors are needed because two 24 GHz short range radars are used for object detection in an adjacent lane, and one 77 GHz long‐range radar is used for object detection in the center lane. In this letter, we propose a single sensor‐based 24 GHz radar with a detection capability of up to 150 m and ±30° for an ACC stop‐and‐go system. The developed radar is highly integrated with a high gain patch antenna, four channel receivers with GaAs RF ICs, and back‐end processing board with subspace based digital beam forming algorithm.     

Piezoelectric Nylon‐11 Nanowire Arrays Grown by Template Wetting for Vibrational Energy Harvesting Applications

Piezoelectric polymers, capable of converting mechanical vibrations into electrical energy, are attractive for use in vibrational energy harvesting due to their flexibility, robustness, ease, and low cost of fabrication. In particular, piezoelectric polymers nanostructures have been found to exhibit higher crystallinity, higher piezoelectric coefficients, and “self‐poling,” as compared to films or bulk. The research in this area has been mainly dominated by polyvinylidene fluoride and its copolymers, which while promising have a limited temperature range of operation due to their low Curie and/or melting temperatures. Here, the authors report the fabrication and properties of vertically aligned and “self‐poled” piezoelectric Nylon‐11 nanowires with a melting temperature of ≈200 °C, grown by a facile and scalable capillary wetting technique. It is shown that a simple nanogenerator comprising as‐grown Nylon‐11 nanowires, embedded in an anodized aluminium oxide (AAO) template, can produce an open‐circuit voltage of 1 V and short‐circuit current of 100 nA, when subjected to small‐amplitude, low‐frequency vibrations. Importantly, the resulting nanogenerator is shown to exhibit excellent fatigue performance and high temperature stability. The work thus offers the possibility of exploiting a previously unexplored low‐cost piezoelectric polymer for nanowire‐based energy harvesting, particularly at temperatures well above room temperature.     

Self‐Crosslink Method for a Straightforward Synthesis of Poly(Vinyl Alcohol)‐Based Aerogel Assisted by Carbon Nanotube

As a new concept, a self‐crosslink mechanism for hydrothermal synthesis of poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) aerogel, assisted by multiwall carbon nanotubes, is reported. PVA, working as a low‐cost and commercially available raw material, exempts the complicated synthesis process and reserves its nontoxic nature since no organic crosslinkers are used in the synthesis process. The crosslink density and many other properties of the products can be easily tuned by simply altering the concentration of PVA precursors, which is considered to be another feature of our method. Dehydration between hydroxyl groups occurs in the hydrothermal process, leading to a reverse wettability of the products from hydrophilic to hydrophobic, thus their absorbing capacity for several organic solvents, such as bean oil and crude oil, is investigated. The absorbate has 10–52 times the original weight of the aerogel. As exhibited by the cytotoxic tests, the product has neglectable toxicity, suitable for application in environmental bioengineering. Furthermore, the product can be used as a facile substrate for transformation into conductive aerogel by in situ hybridizing with polypyrrole, showing a conductivity of 0.16 S m^?1. As it is rich in hydroxyl groups, the aerogels are believed to be further functionalized by the reactions related to the hydroxyl group.     

Suppressing Lithium Dendrite Growth by Metallic Coating on a Separator

Lithium (Li) metal is one of the most promising candidates for the anode in high‐energy‐density batteries. However, Li dendrite growth induces a significant safety concerns in these batteries. Here, a multifunctional separator through coating a thin electronic conductive film on one side of the conventional polymer separator facing the Li anode is proposed for the purpose of Li dendrite suppression and cycling stability improvement. The ultrathin Cu film on one side of the polyethylene support serves as an additional conducting agent to facilitate electrochemical stripping/deposition of Li metal with less accumulation of electrically isolated or “dead” Li. Furthermore, its electrically conductive nature guides the backside plating of Li metal and modulates the Li deposition morphology via dendrite merging. In addition, metallic Cu film coating can also improve thermal stability of the separator and enhance the safety of the batteries. Due to its unique beneficial features, this separator enables stable cycling of Li metal anode with enhanced Coulombic efficiency during extended cycles in Li metal batteries and increases the lifetime of Li metal anode by preventing short‐circuit failures even under extensive Li metal deposition.     

QoS provisioning for large-scale multi-ap WLANs

Large-scale deployment of IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs (WLANs) with a high density of access points (APs) has become commonplace due mainly to its potential for numerous benefits, such as ubiquitous service coverage, seamless handover, and improved link quality. However, the increased AP density can induce significant channel contention among neighboring cells, thus causing severe performance degradation and throughput imbalance between cells. There have been a plethora of research efforts to improve the WLAN performance, but most of them focused only on single WLAN environments without accounting for inter-cell contention. The de facto QoS-provisioning mechanism for WLANs, i.e., the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA), is no exception to this. The EDCA focuses only on inter-flow priority distinction and has not considered the effect of inter-cell contention which significantly restricts its efficiency. This paper presents an enhanced QoS provisioning framework that takes into account inter-cell level differentiation as well as inter-flow level priority, which may be viewed as extension of QoS provisioning from a single-WLAN domain to a multi-WLAN domain. We also propose an architecture for managing multi-AP systems in which a central controller regulates the wireless channel occupancy of APs by adaptively configuring the cell-level QoS parameters. Our extensive simulation results show that the proposed inter-AP cooperative QoS scheme overcomes the limit of legacy 802.11e and provides a high level of fairness in large-scale densely-deployed WLANs.     

船载卫通站天线极化面控制改进设计

极化面调整是船载卫通站天线跟踪线极化卫星实现极化匹配必备的基本功能,而船载卫通站穿越赤道后极化面需反转180°,传统的设计会由此引起通信中断。通过对赤道附近区域设备工作状态与位置特点的分析,从扩大极化面机械转动范围与优化极化控制程序两方面进行改进,利用天线馈源中波导的轴对称性,有效推迟了穿越赤道后极化面反转的时机。理论计算与实际应用测试表明,对于某船常用的航线与卫星,改进后的系统可将穿越赤道后极化面反转的时机推迟6.8 h以上,有效解决了卫通站穿越赤道时出现的通信中断问题。     

A comparative study of bandwidth reservation and admission control schemes in QoS‐sensitive cellular networks

This paper compares five different schemes – called CHOI, NAG, AG, BHARG, and NCBF – for reserving bandwidths for handoffs and admission control for new connection requests in QoS‐sensitive cellular networks. CHOI and NAG are to keep the handoff dropping probability below a target value, AG is to guarantee no handoff drops through per‐connection bandwidth reservation, and BHARG and NCBF use another type of per‐connection bandwidth reservation. CHOI predicts the bandwidth required to handle handoffs by estimating possible handoffs from adjacent cells, then performs admission control for each newly‐requested connection. On the other hand, NAG predicts the total required bandwidth in the current cell by estimating both incoming and outgoing handoffs at each cell. AG requires the set of cells to be traversed by the mobile with a newly‐requested connection, and reserves bandwidth for each connection in each of these cells. The last two schemes reserve bandwidth for each connection in the predicted next cell of a mobile where the two schemes use different admission control policies. We adopt the history‐based mobility estimation for the first two schemes. Using extensive simulations, the five schemes are compared quantitatively in terms of (1) handoff dropping probability, connection‐blocking probability, and bandwidth utilization; (2) dependence on the design parameters; (3) dependence on the accuracy of mobility estimation; and (4) complexity. The simulation results indicate that CHOI is the most desirable in that it achieves good performance while requiring much less memory and computation than the other four schemes. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Broadband access using subcarrier multiplexing and asymmetric digital subscriber lines

A broadband access system using subcarrier multiplexing on optical fibre and asymmetric digital subscriber lines (ADSL) or very high‐speed digital subscriber lines (VDSL) on unshielded twisted‐pair is proposed to provide broadband access. In this hybrid‐fibre/twisted‐pair (HFTP) system, the digital multiplexing/demultiplexing process is moved back to the central office by using subcarrier multiplexing for fibre transmission. Instead of installing in remote node, ADSL/VDSL transceivers are installed at the central office to greatly reduce the remote node complexity. The local node simply down‐converts the subcarrier multiplexed ADSL/VDSL signal to the baseband, suitable to send directly into the twisted‐pair. The reduction of complexity could result in a lower initial installation cost, especially for a low service penetration rate. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

X-ray reflectivity and atomic force microscopy studies of MOCVD grown AlxGa1-xN/GaN superlattice structures

The grazing incidence X-ray reflectivity (GIXR) technique and atomic force microscopy (AFM) were exploited to obtain an accurate evaluation of the surfaces and interfaces for metalorganic chemical vapor deposition grown Al<,x>Ga<,1-x>N/GaN superlattice structures. The X-ray diffraction results have been combined with reflectivity data to evaluate the layer thickness and Al mole fraction in the AIGaN layer. The presence of a smooth interface is responsible for the observation of intensity oscillation in GIXR, which is well correlated to step flow observation in AFM images of the surface. The structure with a low Al mole fraction (x = 0.25) and thin well width has a rather smooth surface for the R<,rms> of AFM data value is 0.45 nm.