A borrow-and-return model to reduce client waiting time for broadcasting-based VOD services

One way to broadcast a popular video is to use multiple channels, each broadcasting a portion of the video periodically. Among the many schemes falling in this category, this paper focuses on several representative schemes (such as FB, Pagoda, and RFS ), which all share a FSFC property by repeatedly broadcasting the first segment of the video on the first channel. We propose a general borrow-and-return model that can be immediately applied to any scheme owning the FSFC property to reduce the viewer's waiting time without increasing the number of channels required. Given a group of videos, the basic idea is to lend the free time slots of videos without viewers to those videos with viewers to speedup the latter's transmission. By so doing, some bandwidth may be vacated by the borrowing videos to benefit others' transmission. The effectiveness of this model is analyzed by applying it to the FB scheme.     

WLAN chip antenna mountable above the system ground plane of a mobile device

A novel wireless local-area network (WLAN) chip antenna suitable to be mounted above the system ground plane of a mobile device is presented. The antenna in the study is easily fabricated from folding a single metal plate onto a foam base, and mainly comprises a short-circuited radiating strip and an antenna ground. The antenna ground occupies the bottom surface and two adjacent side surfaces of the foam base. When the antenna is mounted at the corner of the system ground plane, this antenna ground structure is expected to effectively reduce the antenna's possible fringing electromagnetic fields inside the mobile device. In this case, when the associated element such as the radio-frequency shielding metal case is placed under the proposed antenna, small or negligible variations in the antenna performance are obtained. Design considerations of the proposed antenna for WLAN operation in the 2.4 GHz band are described, and results of the constructed prototypes are presented.     

Design and analysis of low-power cache using two-level filter scheme

Power consumption is an increasingly pressing problem in modern processor design. Since the on-chip caches usually consume a significant amount of power, it is one of the most attractive targets for power reduction. This paper presents a two-level filter scheme, which consists of the L1 and L2 filters, to reduce the power consumption of the on-chip cache. The main idea of the proposed scheme is motivated by the substantial unnecessary activities in conventional cache architecture. We use a single block buffer as the L1 filter to eliminate the unnecessary cache accesses. In the L2 filter, we then propose a new sentry-tag architecture to further filter out the unnecessary way activities in case of the L1 filter miss. We use SimpleScalar to simulate the SPEC2000 benchmarks and perform the HSPICE simulations to evaluate the proposed architecture. Experimental results show that the two-level filter scheme can effectively reduce the cache power consumption by eliminating most unnecessary cache activities, while the compromise of system performance is negligible. Compared to a conventional instruction cache (32 kB, two-way) implemented with only the L1 filter, the use of a two-level filter can result in roughly 30% reduction in total cache power consumption. Similarly, compared to a conventional data cache (32 kB, four-way) implemented with only the L1 filter, the total cache power reduction is approximately 46%.     

Decreasing miscibility with greater heterogeneity in ternary polymer blend: poly(cyclohexyl methacrylate), poly(α‐methyl styrene) and poly(4‐methyl styrene)

A ternary blend system comprising poly(cyclohexyl methacrylate) (PCHMA), poly(α‐methyl styrene) (PαMS) and poly(4‐methyl styrene) (P4MS) was investigated by thermal analysis, optical and scanning electron microscopy. Ternary phase behaviour was compared with the behaviour for the three constituent binary pairs. This study showed that the ternary blends of PCHMA/PαMS/P4MS in most compositions were miscible, with an apparent glass transition temperature (T_g) and distinct cloud‐point transitions, which were located at lower temperatures than their binary counterparts. However, in a closed‐loop range of compositions roughly near the centre of the triangular phase diagram, some ternary blends displayed phase separation with heterogeneity domains of about 1 µm. Therefore, it is properly concluded that ternary PCHMA/PαMS/P4M is partially miscible with a small closed‐loop immisciblity range, even though all the constituent binary pairs are fully miscible. Thermodynamic backgrounds leading to decreased miscibility and greater heterogeneity in a ternary polymer system in comparison with the binary counterparts are discussed. © 2003 Society of Chemical Industry     

Threshold‐Based Camera Motion Characterization of MPEG Video

We propose an efficient scheme for camera motion characterization in MPEG‐compressed video. The proposed scheme detects six types of basic camera motions through threshold‐based qualitative interpretation, in which fixed thresholds are applied to motion model parameters estimated from MPEG motion vectors (MVs). The efficiency and robustness of the scheme are validated by the experiment with real compressed video sequences.     

Self-Consistent Effects on the Starting Current of Gyrotron Oscillators

Self-consistent effects on the starting current of gyrotron oscillators are examined. Field profiles in the open cavity are shown to be sensitive to the interaction dynamics. This can either significantly raise or lower the oscillation threshold, particularly for the low-Q modes. The transition from resonant-mode oscillations at the low magnetic field to backward-wave oscillations at the high magnetic field is demonstrated.     

Medium access protocol design for delay-guaranteed multicode CDMA multimedia networks

To enable multimedia real-time applications over next-generation wireless code-division multiple access (CDMA) packet-switching networks, previous efforts show a proper scheduling policy is the key to provide delay-guaranteed access services to various traffic types with different bit error rate (BER) requirements. Considering the support of the prevailing Internet protocol (IP) with variable-length packets in future mobile networks, we develop a mathematically delay-optimal medium access control (MAC) protocol over multicode CDMA (MC-CDMA) environments under the continuous-time assumption. From our investigations, we suggest that a good MAC protocol should be designed by using a proper single-server scheduling policy to guarantee packet-delay, and controlling the maximal number of simultaneous spreading-code transmissions to maintain the required BER. We further evaluate the performance of some MC-CDMA MAC protocols supporting QoS on BER and packet-delay, and show that MAC schemes conforming to our design rules give better performance on packet-delay when maintaining acceptable BER of various traffic types.     

Catalytic dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene with carbon dioxide: promotional effect of antimony in supported vanadium–antimony oxide catalyst

Alumina-supported vanadium oxide, VO_x/Al₂O₃, and binary vanadium–antimony oxides, VSbO_x/Al₂O₃, have been tested in the ethylbenzene dehydrogenation with carbon dioxide and characterized by S_BET, X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, hydrogen temperature-programmed reduction and CO₂ pulse methods. VSbO_x/Al₂O₃ exhibited enhanced catalytic activity and especially on-stream stability compared to VO_x/Al₂O₃ catalyst. Incorporation of antimony into VO_x/Al₂O₃ increased dispersion of active VO_x species, enhanced redox properties of the systems and formed a new mixed vanadium–antimony oxide phase in the most catalytically efficient V_0.43Sb_0.57O_x/Al₂O₃ system.     

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天然气脱除Ｈ２Ｓ和ＣＯ２是天然气净化领域经常遇到的问题。Ｈ２Ｓ与醇胺的反应属瞬间质子反应，ＣＯ２与醇胺的反应则复杂得多，醇胺溶液对Ｈ２Ｓ的选择性分离主要依靠ＣＯ２与醇胺的反应速度差异来实现。文章介绍了伯胺，仲胺，叔胺及空间位阻胺溶液反应的机理和动力学。     

基于网络的家电产品故障诊断系统研究

介绍了基于网络的家电产品故障诊断系统的硬件拓扑结构、软件平台及系统开发。系统在硬件上采用了多种网络平台搭建方式及综合连接技术，软件上采用了IDRS诊断模型和基于事例的最新诊断技术。这也是诊断研究和应用的新领域。