A chipless RFID tag for smart temporal applications

A compact, robust, chipless radio frequency identification (RFID) tag is proposed. Resonant elements patterned in a concentric fashion encode data in the spectral domain employing frequency shift encoding. The proposed tag encodes 28.25 data bits over a miniscule physical footprint of 25 × 25 mm². The formulated scheme is demonstrated to be viable for encoding of temporal variables. The electromagnetic performance of the presented design is investigated for different laminates: Rogers RT/duroid® 5880 and Taconic TLX‐0. Multiple tag prototypes employing a variety of substrates are realized and evaluated for in‐laboratory performance. The proposed design is compared with existing work reported in literature. Code density of 4.52 bits/cm² has been successfully achieved. The tag design operates from 3.07 to 10.6 GHz and is readily realizable on flexible laminates. Smart retail, intelligent packaging, adaptive ticketing, and similar time‐related applications can be materialized using the proposed tag.     

Electrical stimulation in isolated rabbit retina.

Experiments were conducted to assess the effect of stimulating electrode parameters (size, position, and waveform shape) on electrically elicited ganglion cell action potentials from isolated rabbit retina. Thirty-eight isolated rabbit retinas were stimulated with bipolar stimulating electrodes (either 125 or 25 microm in diameter) positioned on either the ganglion or the photoreceptor side. Recording electrodes were placed between the optic disc and the stimulating electrodes. Cathodic-first, biphasic, current waveforms of varying pulse durations (0.1, 0.5, 1 ms) were used. For the four conditions tested (125-electrode and 25-microm electrode, ganglion cell, and photoreceptor positions) threshold currents ranged from 6.7 to 23.6 microA, depending on location and pulse duration. With 1-ms pulse duration, no statistically significant difference was seen between threshold currents when either size electrode was used to stimulate either the ganglion cell side or the photoreceptor side. For all groups, the threshold currents using the 1-ms pulse were lower than those using 0.1 ms, but the 0.1-ms pulses used less charge. These experiments provide a number of valuable insights into the relative effects of several stimulation parameters critical to the development of an implanted electronic retinal prosthesis.     

Visual Prosthesis

Electronic visual prostheses have demonstrated the ability to restore a rudimentary sense of vision to blind individuals. This review paper will highlight past and recent progress in this field as well as some technical challenges to further advancement. Retinal implants have now been tested in humans by four independent groups. Optic nerve and cortical implants have been also been evaluated in humans. The first implants have achieved remarkable results, including detection of motion and distinguishing objects from a set. To improve on these results, a number of research groups have performed simulations that predict up to 1000 individual pixels may be needed to restore significant functions such as face recognition and reading. In order to achieve a device that can stimulate the visual system in this many locations, issues of power consumption and electronic packaging must be resolved.     

A novel IPv6 traceback architecture using COPS protocol

In any Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, invaders may use incorrect or spoofed Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in the attacking packets and thus disguise the actual origin of the attacks. This is primarily due to the stateless nature of the Internet. IP traceback algorithms provide mechanisms for identifying the true source of an IP datagram on the Internet ensuring at least the accountability of cyber attacks. While many IP traceback techniques have been proposed, most of the previous studies focus and offer solutions for DDoS attacks done on Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) environment. IPv4 and IPv6 networks differ greatly from each other, which urge the need of traceback techniques specifically tailored for IPv6 networks. In this paper, we propose a novel traceback architecture for IPv6 networks using Common Open-Policy Service and a novel packet-marking scheme. We also provide complete underlying protocol details required for traceback support in IPv6 networks. The proposed architecture is on demand and only single packet is required to traceback the attack.     

Speech understanding performance of cochlear implant subjects using time-frequency masking-based noise reduction

Cochlear implant (CI) recipients report severe degradation of speech understanding under noisy conditions. Most CI recipients typically can require about 10-25 dB higher signal-to-noise ratio than normal hearing (NH) listeners in order to achieve similar speech understanding performance. In recent years, significant emphasis has been put on binaural algorithms, which not only make use of the head shadow effect, but also have two or more microphone signals at their disposal to generate binaural inputs. Most of the CI recipients today are unilaterally implanted but they can still benefit from the binaural processing utilizing a contralateral microphone. The phase error filtering (PEF) algorithm tries to minimize the phase error variance utilizing a time-frequency mask for noise reduction. Potential improvement in speech intelligibility offered by the algorithm is evaluated with four different kinds of mask functions. The study reveals that the PEF algorithm which uses a contralateral microphone but unilateral presentation provides considerable improvement in intelligibility for both NH and CI subjects. Further, preference rating test suggests that CI subjects can tolerate higher levels of distortions than NH subjects, and therefore, more aggressive noise reduction for CI recipients is possible.     

Joint admission control,cell association,power allocation and throughput maximization in decoupled 5G heterogeneous networks

Downlink (DL)-uplink (UL) coupled cell association scheme was adopted in 3rd generation (3G) homogeneous network and 4th generation (4G) heterogeneous network (HetNet). In the coupled cell association scheme, a user is associated to single base station (BS) in DL & UL based on the strongest received signal power (SRSP) in DL from a macro base station (MBS) and multiple small base stations (SBS) in HetNet. This is a sub-optimal solution for cell association as most of the users are associated to a MBS due to dominant transmit power and brings challenges like multiple interference issues and imbalanced user traffic load which leads to a degraded throughput in HetNet. In this paper, we investigate downlink uplink decoupled cell association scheme to address these issues and formulate a sum-rate maximization problem in terms of admission control, cell association and power allocation for MBS only, coupled and decoupled HetNet. The formulated optimization problem falls into class of a mixed integer non linear programming (MINLP) problem which is NP-hard and requires exhaustive search to find the optimal solution. However, computational complexity of the exhaustive search increases exponentially with the increase in number of users. Therefore, an outer approximation algorithm (OAA) is proposed as a solution to find near optimal solution with less computation complexity. Extensive simulations work has been done to evaluate the decoupled cell association scheme in HetNet vs the coupled cell association scheme in traditional MBS only and HetNet. Results show the effectiveness of decoupled cell association scheme in terms of KPIs, such as throughput, addressing user traffic load imbalances and number of users attached.

     

A biomimetic retinal stimulating array.

A retinal prosthesis capable of restoring face recognition, reading, and mobility to blind patients is within the capability of microsystems technology. Electrode arrays can be made dense enough to be able to place thousands of pixels into the macula. Electrode materials can supply safe and effective stimulus current. This review examines some prior work in electrical stimulation of the retina and simulations of phosphene-based vision as a basis to produce design constraints for a biomimetic retinal-stimulating array. An array is designed considering the needs of the end users (blind individuals), the biology of diseased retina, and the limits of electrode technology. Other technology to support the system such as high-density stimulus generation circuitry and hermetic packaging face significant challenges but solutions can likely be realized to some degree.     

Experimental and Theoretical Study of O-Substituent Effect on the Fluorescence of 8-Hydroxyquinoline

The synthesis and characterization of different ether and ester derivatives of 8-hydroxyquinoline have been made. UV-visible and fluorescence spectra of these compounds have revealed spectral dependence on both solvent and O-substituent. The fluorescence intensity of ether derivatives revealed higher intensity for 8-octyloxyquinoline compared with 8-methoxyquinoline, whereas those of ester derivatives had less fluorescence than 8-hydroxyquinoline. Theoretical calculations based on Time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) were carried out for the quinolin-8-yl benzoate(8-OateQ) compound to understand the effect of O-substituent on the electronic absorption of 8-hydroxyquinaline (8-HQ). The calculations revealed comparable results with those obtained from the experimental data. Optimized geometrical structure was calculated with DFT at B3LYP/6-311++G** level of theory. The results indicated that 8-OateQ is not a coplanar structure. The absorption spectra of the compound were computed in gas-phase and solvent using B3LYP and CAM-B3LYP methods with 6-311++G ** basis set. The agreement between calculated and experimental wavelengths was very good at CAM-B3LYP/6-311++G** level of theory.     

Intrusion Detection Systems in Internet of Things and Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) devices work mainly in wireless mediums; requiring different Intrusion Detection System (IDS) kind of solutions to leverage 802.11 header information for intrusion detection. Wireless-specific traffic features with high information gain are primarily found in data link layers rather than application layers in wired networks. This survey investigates some of the complexities and challenges in deploying wireless IDS in terms of data collection methods, IDS techniques, IDS placement strategies, and traffic data analysis techniques. This paper’s main finding highlights the lack of available network traces for training modern machine-learning models against IoT specific intrusions. Specifically, the Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) Cup dataset is reviewed to highlight the design challenges of wireless intrusion detection based on current data attributes and proposed several guidelines to future-proof following traffic capture methods in the wireless network (WN). The paper starts with a review of various intrusion detection techniques, data collection methods and placement methods. The main goal of this paper is to study the design challenges of deploying intrusion detection system in a wireless environment. Intrusion detection system deployment in a wireless environment is not as straightforward as in the wired network environment due to the architectural complexities. So this paper reviews the traditional wired intrusion detection deployment methods and discusses how these techniques could be adopted into the wireless environment and also highlights the design challenges in the wireless environment. The main wireless environments to look into would be Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) and IoT as this are the future trends and a lot of attacks have been targeted into these networks. So it is very crucial to design an IDS specifically to target on the wireless networks.     

Modeling and percept of transcorneal electrical stimulation in humans

Retinal activation via transcorneal electrical stimulation (TcES) in normal humans was investigated by comparing subject perception, model predictions, and brain activation patterns. The preferential location of retinal stimulation was predicted from 3-D admittance modeling. Visual cortex activation was measured using positron emission tomography (PET) and (18)F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG). Two different corneal electrodes were investigated: DTL-Plus and ERG-Jet. Modeling results predicted preferential stimulation of the peripheral, inferior, nasal retina during right eye TcES using DTL-Plus, but more extensive activation of peripheral, nasal hemiretina using ERG-Jet. The results from human FDG PET study using both corneal electrodes showed areas of visual cortex activation that consistently corresponded with the reported phosphene percept and modeling predictions. ERG-Jet was able to generate brighter phosphene percept than DTL-Plus and elicited retinotopically mapped primary visual cortex activation. This study demonstrates that admittance modeling and PET imaging consistently predict the perceived location of electrically elicited phosphenes produced during TcES.