Analysis of Convective Heat Flow Visualization within Porous Right Angled Triangular Enclosures with a Concave/Convex Hypotenuse

Analysis of natural convection in porous right angled triangular enclosures with a concave/convex hypotenuse has been carried out using the Bejan's heatlines approach. A generalized non-Darcy model without Forchheimer term is employed for fluid flow in a porous matrix and the governing equations are solved by the Galerkin finite element method. The cavity is subjected to a thermal boundary condition of an isothermal cold left wall, isothermal hot curved right wall, and adiabatic bottom wall. Due to intense closed loop heatlines, thermal mixing is higher in convex cases compared to the concave case for all parameters. Average heat transfer rate is found to be largest in the concave hypotenuse case.     

Measurement and Classification of Out-of-Sequence Packets in a Tier-1 IP Backbone

We present a classification methodology and a measurement study for out-of-sequence packets in TCP connections going over the Sprint IP backbone. Out-of-sequence packets can result from many events including loss, looping, reordering, or duplication in the network. It is important to quantify and understand the causes of such out-of-sequence packets since it is an indicator of the performance of a TCP connection, and the quality of its end-end path. Our study is based on passively observed packets from a point inside a large backbone network-as opposed to actively sending and measuring end-end probe traffic at the sender or receiver. A new methodology is thus required to infer the causes of a connection's out-of-sequence packets using only measurements taken in the "middle" of the connection's end-end path. We describe techniques that classify observed out-of-sequence behavior based only on the previously and subsequently-observed packets within a connection and knowledge of how TCP behaves. We analyze numerous several-hour packet-level traces from a set of OC-12 and OC-48 links for tens of millions connections generated in nearly 7600 unique ASes. We show that using our techniques, it is possible to classify almost all out-of-sequence packets in our traces and that we can quantify the uncertainty in our classification. Our measurements show a relatively consistent rate of out-of-sequence packets of approximately 4%. We observe that a majority of out-of-sequence packets are retransmissions, with a smaller percentage resulting from in-network reordering     

Chernoff-Type Direct Product Theorems

Consider a challenge-response protocol where the probability of a correct response is at least α for a legitimate user and at most β<α for an attacker. One example is a CAPTCHA challenge, where a human should have a significantly higher chance of answering a single challenge (e.g., uncovering a distorted letter) than an attacker; another example is an argument system without perfect completeness. A natural approach to boost the gap between legitimate users and attackers is to issue many challenges and accept if the response is correct for more than a threshold fraction, for the threshold chosen between α and β. We give the first proof that parallel repetition with thresholds improves the security of such protocols. We do this with a very general result about an attacker’s ability to solve a large fraction of many independent instances of a hard problem, showing a Chernoff-like convergence of the fraction solved incorrectly to the probability of failure for a single instance. Russell Impagliazzo: Research partially supported by NSF Awards CCR-0515332 and CNS-0716790. Views expressed are not endorsed by the NSF. Ragesh Jaiswal: Research partially supported by NSF Awards CCR-0515332, CCF-0634909, CNS-0524765 and CNS-0716790. Views expressed are not endorsed by the NSF.     

Impact of pointing errors and turbulence effects on POLSK and coherent OWC-based FSO system over generalized turbulence channel model

The emerging technology in wireless communication, free space optics (FSO) offers a myriad of merits over current radio frequency links due to its wide license-free bandwidth, ease of installation, high security features and viable cost for short-distance communication. Its unparallel high-speed data rate and immunity against electromagnetic interference makes FSO the emerging technology of today. Atmospheric conditions like absorption, scattering, turbulence and pointing error prevail during wireless transmission. Through this paper we aim at elucidating the effect of the error introduced by misalignment between the transmitter and receiver that are ideally required to be in the line of sight rendering pointing error. Pointing error and turbulence effects are the main limitation parameters for our analysis. For this purpose, we have taken into consideration three different modulation techniques polarization shift keying, coherent OWC and on–off keying FSO communication system. We derived the novel expressions for the average spectral efficiency (ASE) over the generalized turbulence model for these modulation techniques. The ASE is analyzed against average transmitted optical power with the maximum ASE of 50 bits/s/Hz at the transmitted power of 10 dBm for coherent OWC technique.     

Polymer electronic materials: a review of charge transport

This article presents an overview of the charge transport phenomenon in semiconducting polymer materials. In these disordered systems both intrinsic and extrinsic parameters play significant roles. In general, π‐electron delocalization, interchain interaction, band gap, carrier density, extent of disorder, morphology and processing of materials determine the electrical and optical properties. The chemical structure, especially the role of side groups, is quite important in both physical and processing properties. The nature of charge carriers and their role in charge transport depend on the structure and morphology of the system. Hence in several semiconducting polymer devices, the correlations among structure, morphology and transport are rather strong. The dependence of carrier mobility on temperature and electric field needs to be understood in the framework of competing models based on carrier hopping, trapping/detrapping and tunneling. Exactly what determines the dispersive/nondispersive, polaronic and correlative transport regimes is yet to be quantified. An understanding of the carrier mobility in semiconducting polymers is necessary to optimize the performance of polymeric electronic devices. Copyright © 2006 Society of Chemical Industry     

Performance evaluation studies for time-sharing computer systems

This paper reviews the work carried out in evaluating the performance of time-sharing computer systems in terms of performance measures such as response time, CPU efficiency. CPU productivity, etc. The review indicates that most of the work is limited to processor-sharing systems in which the quantum size tends to zero. Models with finite state-dependent quantum size needs to be developed further to be useful for system designers and operations managers of time-sharing systems. Other areas requiring further analytical work have been highlighted at the end of the paper.     

Stochastic behaviour of a standby redundant system with three modes

This paper discusses the stochastic behaviour of a two-unit cold standby redundant system in which each unit works in three different modes-normal, partial failure and total failure. Failure-time distributions of units are exponential, whereas repair-time distributions are arbitrary. Explicit expressions for the Laplace-Stieltjes transforms of the distribution function of the first passage time, mean time to system failure and steady state availability of the system are obtained. A few particular cases are discussed.     

Enhanced field emission from copper nanowires synthesized using ion track-etch membranes as scaffolds

Copper nanowires have been synthesized at different pH values through the template assisted electrodeposition technique using polycarbonate track-etch membranes as scaffolds. The effect of pH (0.8–2.8) of the electrolyte on structure, morphology, composition and deposition rate of copper into the pores of the template, while keeping other electrochemical conditions same, was investigated. X-ray diffraction analysis confirmed the face centered cubic phase of synthesized nanowires. With the change in pH, no shift in peaks was observed except the inclusion of an additional peak of copper oxide in nanowires synthesized at pH 2.8. The nanocrystallite size, strain, lattice stress and energy density were evaluated by X-ray analysis. Field emission scanning electron microscopy images revealed that nanowires obtained at pH 0.8, 1.1 and 1.4 showed incomplete deposition in the pores of the membrane whereas, the nanowires obtained at pH 1.7 were densely stacked, vertically aligned and uniform along the diameter and that obtained from pH 2.0–2.8 had overdeposition on their top. An increase in deposition rate was observed with the increase in pH value. The average diameter of Cu nanowires was found to be ~?105 nm. The electrical conductivity of as-grown nanowires was observed to decrease 13-fold as the transition from bulk values to the nanosystem. Nanowires prepared at pH of 1.7 were characterized for their field-emission properties. A very large field-enhancement factor of ~?10,855 was obtained indicating that Cu nanowires grown by reported technique shows outstanding potential as efficient field-emitters for flat panel displays.