Assessment of organizational reliability capability

A reliability capability assessment process can assist OEMs and system integrators in assessing prospective suppliers for their ability to design and manufacture reliable products before they are delivered for use, and on an ongoing basis, help a company in identifying shortcomings in its reliability program, which can be rectified by subsequent improvement actions. The assessment can also help to establish reliability management practices for use by designers, suppliers, customers, and independent authorities. The assessment method may be used to evaluate the reliability capability of all types of electronics-related industries that perform activities influencing the reliability of a product. It can produce increased customer satisfaction, provide competitive opportunities, and shorten the product development cycle. In summary, a reliability capability assessment can be used for: 1) specifying or planning reliability practices if product development is implemented internally; 2) evaluating reliability practices to determine the extent to which a supplier is capable of providing a product that meets the reliability requirements/needs; and 3) improving reliability practices if the current reliability practices have been evaluated and improvement is desired or required.     

Routing Correlated Data in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Sensory data gathered from sensor nodes in physical proximity tend to exhibit strong correlation. To minimize such redundancy and hence curtail the load in wireless sensor networks with a goal to conserve energy, effective in-network fusion schemes have been extensively proposed in the literature. To this end, routing schemes supporting data fusion are extremely important as they dictate where and when sensory data streams shall intersect with each other and thus fusion will be performed. In this article we briefly articulate this problem and classify recently proposed routing schemes supporting data fusion in wireless sensor networks into three categories: routing-driven, coding-driven, and fusion-driven. We also give an overview of various algorithms in each category by summarizing their design approaches, benefits, and drawbacks.     

A model of front-illuminated n+-p-p+high-efficiency silicon solar cell

A realistic model of a front-illuminated n⁺-p-p⁺ silicon solar cell is developed by solving the current continuity equations for minority carriers in the quasi-neutral regions in steady state, assuming the light in the cell is trapped as a result of multiple reflections at the front and the back of the cell. This model is used to study the effects of the front emitter thickness and doping level and the light trapping on the J-V characteristic and thereby on the open-circuit voltage, short-circuit current density, curve factor, and the efficiency of the cell. A textured cell with an emitter thickness in the range of 0.3-1.0 μm with its doping ≈5×10¹⁸ cm^-3 and the recombination velocities of minority carriers as large as 200 cm/s at the n⁺ front surface and 10 cm/s at the back of the p base can exhibit an efficiency in excess of 26% (under AM 1.5 sunlight of 100 mW/cm² intensity) at 25°C if the light reflection losses at the front surface can be made small     

An Integrated CAD Methodology for Evaluating MOSFET and Parasitic Extraction Models and Variability

An integrated computer-aided design (CAD) framework for evaluating MOSFET and layout parasitic extraction (LPE) models and circuit simulators used in the timing and power analysis of CMOS products is presented. This unified CAD methodology builds a step-wise understanding of the underlying parameter values in the models and their impact on circuit performance. A number of circuit experiments are included to extract the contributions of key MOSFET parameters and physical layout sensitive parasitic elements from circuit simulation results. This CAD setup thus allows easy and detailed comparison of different technologies, device models, and LPE tools to prevent possible bugs in the software as well as inaccuracies in device and parasitic models and timing tools. The software code to carry out the circuit simulations, analysis, and display of the results in an automated fashion has been specifically developed to support this framework. Some of the experiments designed for this work are also placed on the product chip for model-to-hardware correlation. The comparison of the hardware data to the model predictions points to the sources of any discrepancies and aids in tuning the product design to reflect changes in the technology as part of an overall design for manufacturing (DFM) platform     

Location Update versus Paging Trade-Off in Cellular Networks: An Approach Based on Vector Quantization

In this paper, we propose two information-theoretic techniques for efficiently trading off the location update and paging costs associated with mobility management in wireless cellular networks. Previous approaches always attempt to accurately convey a mobile's movement sequence and hence cannot reduce the signaling cost below the entropy bound. Our proposed techniques, however, exploit the rate distortion theory to arbitrarily reduce the update cost at the expense of an increase in the corresponding paging overhead. To this end, we describe two location tracking algorithms based on spatial quantization and temporal quantization, which first quantize the movement sequence into a smaller set of codewords and then report a compressed representation of the codeword sequence. Although the spatial quantization algorithm clusters individual cells into registration areas, the more powerful temporal quantization algorithm groups sets of consecutive movement patterns. The quantizers themselves are adaptive and periodically reconfigure to accommodate changes in the mobile's movement pattern. Simulation study with synthetic and real movement traces for both single-system and multisystem cellular networks demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can reduce the mobile's update frequency to 3-4 updates/day with reasonable paging cost, low computational complexity, storage overhead, and codebook updates.     

Polynomial approximated phase-only multiple sector beam patterns of linear antenna arrays with pre-fixed amplitude distribution using real-valued genetic algorithms

In this paper, the authors present second degree polynomial approximated phase-only synthesis of two different types of symmetric sector or flat-top beams of equally spaced linear antenna arrays of isotropic radiators with single pre-fixed cosine on a pedestal amplitude distributions using real-coded or real-valued genetic algorithm. This gives a regular shape to the phase distributions of the radiators. Regular shape phase distributions result in simpler feed network design compared to irregular shape phase distributions. A good agreement between desired and synthesized pattern using genetic algorithm (GA) is reported.     

Designing a green optical network unit using ARMA-based traffic prediction for quality of service-aware traffic

The optical access networks (OANs) provide an attractive solution to the bandwidth bottleneck problem of the last mile. However, it has been proved (Baliga et al. in J Lightwave Technol 27(13):2391–2403, 2009; Baliga et al. in IEEE Commun Mag 49(6):70–77, 2011) that the OAN consumes a significant ratio of the total energy consumed in an optical networking scenario. This has provided incentive for inspection of energy-efficient schemes for OANs. It has been demonstrated in the literature that energy consumption figures of an OAN can be improved by either designing efficient hardware or employing better media access control (MAC) protocols. In this paper, we design a MAC protocol for OANs to ensure energy-efficiency in the presence of quality of service (QoS)-aware traffic. The proposed scheme incorporates traffic prediction-based selection of different sleep (energy-efficient) modes of operation, of the optical network units—ONUs (OAN end units). It also implements switching between different sleep modes to maintain high QoS with significant energy-efficiency figures. The discussed scheme requires processing at the ONU only and can work independent of the entire OAN (ONU assisted). Thus, our proposal is an attractive solution for the already deployed networks or even in green field deployment.     

A dynamic quarantine scheme for controlling unresponsive TCP sessions

In addition to unresponsive UDP traffic, aggressive TCP flows pose a serious challenge to congestion control and stability of the future Internet. This paper considers the problem of dealing with such unresponsive TCP sessions that can be considered to collectively constitute a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack on conforming TCP sessions. The proposed policing scheme, called HaDQ (HaTCh-based Dynamic Quarantine), is based on a recently proposed HaTCh mechanism, which accurately estimates the number of active flows without maintenance of per-flow states in a router. We augment HaTCh with a small Content Addressable Memory (CAM), called quarantine memory, to dynamically quarantine and penalize the unresponsive TCP flows. We exploit the advantage of the smaller, first-level cache of HaTCh for isolating and detecting the aggressive flows. The aggressive flows from the smaller cache are then moved to the quarantine memory and are precisely monitored for taking appropriate punitive action. While the proposed HaDQ technique is quite generic in that it can work with or without any AQM scheme, in this paper we have integrated HaDQ and an AQM scheme to compare it against some of the existing techniques. For this, we extend the HaTCh scheme to develop a complete AQM mechanism, called HRED. Simulation-based performance analysis indicates that by using a proper configuration of the monitoring period and the detection threshold, the proposed HaDQ scheme can achieve a low false drop rate (false positives) of less than 0.1%. Comparison with two AQM schemes (CHOKe and FRED), which were proposed for handling unresponsive UDP flows, shows that HaDQ is more effective in penalizing the bandwidth attackers and enforcing fairness between conforming and aggressive TCP flows.     

Media-independent pre-authentication supporting secure interdomain handover optimization [architectures and protocols for mobility management in all-IP mobile networks]

Handovers may cause delays and packet losses that affect real-time communication performance. Mobility protocols at several layers are designed to support handover, but they need to be optimized to ensure high-quality application performance. Existing optimization techniques are not sufficient to take care of interdomain and intertechnology handovers involving different access technologies, such as Wi-Fi, GSM, CDMA, and WiMAX. We categorize several types of handover, describe handover delay components, and propose a handover optimization framework called media independent pre-authentication that can provide optimizations for interdomain and intertechnology handover in a manner that is transparent to mobility management protocols. In addition, we also present experimental results demonstrating that this framework can achieve a significant reduction in handover delays for both network-layer and application-layer mobility management protocols.     

Secure and Privacy-Preserving RFID Authentication Scheme for Internet of Things Applications

Wireless Personal Communications - Privacy issue has become a crucial concern in internet of things (IoT) applications ranging from home appliances to vehicular networks. RFID system has found...