Power efficiency enhancement analysis of an inverse class D power amplifier for NB-IoT applications

Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing - The power amplifiers (PAs) are generally the most power-consuming building blocks in Radio Frequency (RF) transceivers. This paper presents a high...     

A Comparison of ZnO Nanowires and Nanorods Grown Using MOCVD and Hydrothermal Processes

A comparison of ZnO nanowires (NWs) and nanorods (NRs) grown using metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) and hydrothermal synthesis, respectively, on p-Si (100), GaN/sapphire, and SiO₂ substrates is reported. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images reveal that ZnO NWs grown using MOCVD had diameters varying from 20 nm to 150 nm and approximate lengths ranging from 0.7 μm to 2 μm. The NWs exhibited clean termination/tips in the absence of any secondary nucleation. The NRs grown using the hydrothermal method had diameters varying between 200 nm and 350 nm with approximate lengths between 0.7 μm and 1 μm. However, the NRs grown on p-Si overlapped with each other and showed secondary nucleation. x-Ray diffraction (XRD) of (0002)-oriented ZnO NWs grown on GaN using MOCVD demonstrated a full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) of 0.0498 (θ) compared with 0.052 (θ) for ZnO NRs grown on similar substrates using hydrothermal synthesis, showing better crystal quality. Similar crystal quality was observed for NWs grown on p-Si and SiO₂ substrates. Photoluminescence (PL) of the NWs grown on p-Si and SiO₂ showed a single absorption peak attributed to exciton–exciton recombination. ZnO NWs grown on GaN/sapphire had defects associated with oxygen interstitials and oxygen vacancies.     

MFLP: a low power encoding for on chip networks

Network on chip (NoC) has been proposed as an appropriate solution for today’s on-chip communication challenges. Power dissipation has become a key factor in the NoCs because of their shrinking sizes. In this paper, we propose a new encoding approach aimed at power reduction by decreasing the number of switching activities on the buses. This approach assigns the symbols to data word in such a way that the more frequent words are sent by less power consumption. This algorithm dedicates the symbols with less ones to high probability data and uses transition signaling to transmit data. The proposed method, unlike the existing low power encoding, does not rely on spatial redundancy and keeps the width of the bus constant. Experimental evaluations show that our approach reduces the power dissipation up to 46 % with 2.70, 0.51, and 15.43 % power, critical path and area overhead in the NoCs, respectively.     

A secure search protocol for lightweight and low-cost RFID systems

In radio frequency identification (RFID) systems, search protocols are used to find a specific item in a large number of tagged products. These protocols should be secure against RFID attacks such as traceability, impersonation, DoS and eavesdropping. Sundaresan et al. (IEEE Trans Dependable Secure Comput, 2015) presented a server-less search protocol based on 128-bits PRNG function and claimed that their method can address all vulnerabilities of previous protocols. In this paper, we prove that Sundaresan et al.’s protocol is vulnerable to traceability attack with the high probability. In addition, we present an improved protocol to solve the proposed problem and analyze its security level informally and formally based on AVISPA tool and BAN logic.     

An Improvement Energy Consumption Policy Using Communication Reduction in Wireless Body Sensor Network

Dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) is an important wireless technology for current and future automotive safety and mitigation of traffic jams. In this work, we have designed a Coplanar waveguide microstrip patch antenna with linear, upper and bottom and side slots for application in DSRC. The patch antenna was designed using glass epoxy substrate (FR4). Various parametric analyses such as the current distribution, reflection coefficient, radiation pattern on E- and H-plane as well as the realized gain (dB) were performed. The results were obtained by simulation using high-frequency structure simulator tool. The proposed antenna covers a frequency band of 5.8–5.9 GHz which is highly dedicated to the DSRC wireless communication technology for enhancement of safety of the automotive transport system. The designed antenna shows a good return loss of ??19 dB at 5.9 GHz.The designed antenna shows a promising gain, return loss and radiation pattern for use in DSRC for automotive transport systems.

     

Optimal Resource Allocation in Heterogeneous MIMO Cognitive Radio Networks

The optimal resource allocation in MIMO cognitive radio networks with heterogeneous secondary users, centralized and distributed users, is investigated in this work. The core aim of this work is to study the joint problems of transmission time and power allocation in a MIMO cognitive radio scenario. The optimization objective is to maximize the total capacity of the secondary users (SUs) with the constraint of fairness. At first, the joint problems of transmission time and power allocation for centralized SUs in uplink is optimized. Afterwards, for the heterogeneous case with both the centralized and distributed secondary users, the resource allocation problem is formulated and an iterative power water-filling scheme is proposed to achieve the optimal resource allocation for both kinds of SUs. A dynamic optimal joint transmission time and power allocation scheme for heterogeneous cognitive radio networks is proposed. The simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed scheme and its superiority over other power control schemes.     

IGBDD: Intelligent Grid Based Data Dissemination Protocol for Mobile Sink in Wireless Sensor Networks

Lifetime and energy efficiency are important factors in the design of wireless sensor network. A critical issue during data collection is the formation of energy holes near the sink. Sensors which are located near the sink have to participate in relaying data on behalf of other sensors and thus their energy will be depleted very quickly. Mobile sink movement yields the significant performance gained by decreasing the amount of energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an Intelligent Grid Based Data Disseminating protocol for mobile sink in wireless sensor networks. We have utilized a virtual grid as the protocol’s substructure. In our proposed method, cell heads (CHs) will be selected based on the locations of virtual cross points (CPs) and CPs selection is needless to transfer any required data between neighbor nodes. We have optimized CPs selection using linear programming technique in order to increase network lifetime. By selecting the CHs based on our proposed algorithm, data will be disseminated toward the sink. Our data dissemination protocol is simple and has low overhead to construct and maintain. Also, we have presented a new method for sink location update which leads to the least cost in data transfer. Simulation results illustrate that by utilizing hierarchical functionality and selecting appropriate CPs and consequently selecting CHs, energy consumption will be decreased in comparison with other presented methods which directly lead to network lifetime increment. Also by determining an optimal cell size, packet delivery rate will be improved noticeably.     

A Weighted Feature Voting Approach for Robust and Real‐Time Voice Activity Detection

This paper concerns a robust real‐time voice activity detection (VAD) approach which is easy to understand and implement. The proposed approach employs several short‐term speech/nonspeech discriminating features in a voting paradigm to achieve a reliable performance in different environments. This paper mainly focuses on the performance improvement of a recently proposed approach which uses spectral peak valley difference (SPVD) as a feature for silence detection. The main issue of this paper is to apply a set of features with SPVD to improve the VAD robustness. The proposed approach uses a weighted voting scheme in order to take the discriminative power of the employed feature set into account. The experiments show that the proposed approach is more robust than the baseline approach from different points of view, including channel distortion and threshold selection. The proposed approach is also compared with some other VAD techniques for better confirmation of its achievements. Using the proposed weighted voting approach, the average VAD performance is increased to 89.29% for 5 different noise types and 8 SNR levels. The resulting performance is 13.79% higher than the approach based only on SPVD and even 2.25% higher than the not‐weighted voting scheme.