New look on relay selection strategies for full-duplex multiple-relay NOMA over Nakagami-m fading channels

Wireless Networks - By removing the orthogonal use of radio-resources, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been introduced to improve the spectral efficiency of fifth generation (5G) and...     

Development and Simulation of Sulfur‐doped Graphene Supported Platinum with Exemplary Stability and Activity Towards Oxygen Reduction

Sulfur‐doped graphene (SG) is prepared by a thermal shock/quench anneal process and investigated as a unique Pt nanoparticle support (Pt/SG) for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). Particularly, SG is found to induce highly favorable catalyst‐support interactions, resulting in excellent half‐cell based ORR activity of 139 mA mg_Pt ^?1 at 0.9 V vs RHE, significant improvements over commercial Pt/C (121 mA mg_Pt ^?1) and Pt‐graphene (Pt/G, 101 mA mg_Pt ^?1). Pt/SG also demonstrates unprecedented stability, maintaining 87% of its electrochemically active surface area following accelerated degradation testing. Furthermore, a majority of ORR activity is maintained, providing 108 mA mg_Pt ^?1, a remarkable 171% improvement over Pt/C (39.8 mA mg_Pt ^?1) and an 89% improvement over Pt/G (57.0 mA mg_Pt ^?1). Computational simulations highlight that the interactions between Pt and graphene are enhanced significantly by sulfur doping, leading to a tethering effect that can explain the outstanding electrochemical stability. Furthermore, sulfur dopants result in a downshift of the platinum d‐band center, explaining the excellent ORR activity and rendering SG as a new and highly promising class of catalyst supports for electrochemical energy technologies such as fuel cells.     

VLM Precoded SLM Technique for PAPR Reduction in OFDM Systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is perhaps the most spectrally efficient, robust transmission technique discovered so far for communication systems, and it also mitigates the problem of multipath environment. High peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) has always been a major drawback of the OFDM systems. In this article, a new precoding technique has been proposed based on Vandermonde-like matrix (VLM) and selective mapping (SLM) to reduce PAPR in OFDM systems. VLM precoding reduces the autocorrelation of the input sequences while SLM takes an advantage of the fact that the PAPR is very sensitive to phase shifts of the signal. The main advantage of this proposed scheme is to achieve a significant reduction in PAPR without increasing the system complexity. Computer simulations show that, the proposed method outperforms the existing precoding techniques without degrading the error performance of the system.     

Four-wave mixing reduction technique based on smart filter approach

This paper proposed a new technique to suppress the four-wave mixing (FWM) effect by using a smart filter technique. The behaviour of FWM and the performance of wavelength division multiplexing systems with 4 and 16 channels were simulated in the presence of the proposed technique. The simulation was also performed under different parameters such as input power, number of channels and channel spacing. The FWM power drastically decreases by 12 and 19 dB for the 4 and 16 channels, respectively, when the smart filter is used as compared with the conventional system. In terms of system performance, the suggested approach for 4 and 16 channels at the first channel offers low bit error rate (BER) values of 3.23 × 10^?23 and 1.7 × 10^?21, respectively. The smart filter with the channel spacing variation for the 4-channel system subsequently improved the BER value at the fourth channel. Results confirm that the smart filter approach is an active solution that can suppress the FWM effect in optical transmission systems.     

Structural image retrieval using automatic image annotation and region based inverted file

Image retrieval has lagged far behind text retrieval despite more than two decades of intensive research effort. Most of the research on image retrieval in the last two decades are on content based image retrieval or image retrieval based on low level features. Recent research in this area focuses on semantic image retrieval using automatic image annotation. Most semantic image retrieval techniques in literature, however, treat an image as a bag of features/words while ignore the structural or spatial information in the image. In this paper, we propose a structural image retrieval method based on automatic image annotation and region based inverted file. In the proposed system, regions in an image are treated the same way as keywords in a structural text document, semantic concepts are learnt from image data to label image regions as keywords and weight is assigned to each keyword according to spatial position and relationship. As the result, images are indexed and retrieved in the same way as structural document retrieval. Specifically, images are broken down to regions which are represented using colour, texture and shape features. Region features are then quantized to create visual dictionaries which are similar to monolingual dictionaries like English or Chinese dictionaries. In the next step, a semantic dictionary similar to a bilingual dictionary like the English–Chinese dictionary is learnt to mapping image regions to semantic concepts. Finally, images are then indexed and retrieved using a novel region based inverted file data structure. Results show the proposed method has significant advantage over the widely used Bayesian annotation models.     

Design and Analysis of a Fractal Antenna Using Jeans Material for WiMax/WSN Applications

This paper presents a novel approach in designing fractal antennas operating at 2.45 GHz. Mainly focuses on design and simulation of a combination of Koch and Sierpinski fractal antenna with jeans as substrate material with dielectric constant 1.6 up to 2nd iteration. The design of antenna presented here can radiate at 2.45 GHZ, 3.64 GHZ, and 4.06 GHz frequencies with a reflection coefficient less than  ? 10 dB, VSWR between 1 and 2 and enhancement in bandwidth up to 200 MHz. This antenna has been simulated using CADFEKO software, fabricated and tested on VNA and has been observed that there is good conformity between simulation and experimental results. Besides that, Fractal antenna using jeans material as substrate for WiMAX/WSN Application at S and C frequency bands is small in size, flexible, less costly and low profile multiband antenna.

     

Uniform Virus‐Like Co–N–Cs Electrocatalyst Derived from Prussian Blue Analog for Stretchable Fiber‐Shaped Zn–Air Batteries

Zn‐air batteries (ZABs) offer promising commercialization perspectives for stretchable and wearable electronic devices as they are environment‐friendly and have high theoretical energy density. However, current devices suffer from limited energy efficiency and durability because of the sluggish oxygen reduction and evolution reactions kinetics in the air cathode as well as degenerative stretchability of solid‐state electrolytes under highly alkaline conditions. Herein, excellent bifunctional catalytic activity and cycling stability is achieved by using a newly developed Co–N–C nanomaterial with a uniform virus‐like structure, prepared via a facile carbonization of a prussian blue analogue (PBA). Furthermore, a solid‐state dual‐network sodium polyacrylate and cellulose (PANa‐cellulose) based hydrogel electrolyte is synthesized with good alkaline‐tolerant stretchability. A solid‐state fiber‐shaped ZAB fabricated using this hydrogel electrolyte, the virus‐like Co–N–Cs air cathode, and a zinc spring anode display excellent stretchability of up to 500% strain without damage, and outstanding electrochemical performance with 128 mW cm^?2 peak power density and good cycling stability for >600 cycles at 2 mA. The facile synthesis strategy demonstrated here opens up a new avenue for developing highly active PBA‐derived catalyst and shows, for the first time, that virus‐like structure can be favorable for electrochemical performance.     

A Distance Based Communication Mode Selection Mechanism for M2M Communications Over Cellular Networks

The implementation of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications in fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks can facilitate with several benefits like enhancement of bandwidth utilization, accommodating large number of users and decreasing traffic load on evolved node B (eNB). Integration of location information of unknown machine in communication mode selection mechanism is the key feature of this research. In this paper, a distance based communication mode selection mechanism using non-orthogonal resource sharing scheme is adopted in the proposed system model. Under the proposed mechanism, the expressions of throughput and RBs utilization policy are derived, which are the key parameters to evaluate the performance in the proposed network. Depending on the mode selection condition, such as threshold distance and threshold SINR between M2M users and regular cellular users, a UE can automatically choose its communication mode in the network. It is supposed that selection of mode before data transfer can improve the system performance. On the other hand, designing of efficient distance assisted proposed resource blocks (RBs) utilization policy reduces the traffic load on the eNB. Extensive simulations are carried out for evaluating the performance of the proposed mechanisms. The system performance is compared with various changeable parameters, such as throughput, mode selection threshold SINR, threshold distance and RBs. Besides, the proposed mechanism provides better network performance as well as reduces the traffic load in the proposed network.

     

Exploiting cooperative diversity with non-orthogonal multiple access over slow fading channel

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has attracted a significant attention to the research community as a potential candidate for 5G or future radio access. This article presents a NOMA-based cooperative network where a transmitter considered as a base station communicates simultaneously with two users treating as a far user and a near user via the help of a half-duplex decode-and-forward relay. We investigate the outage probability and the outage capacity of the proposed network over independent Rayleigh slow fading channels. Closed-form expressions of the outage probabilities are derived for both users. Approximate outage capacity of the users are also investigated at high signal to noise ratio regime. It has been shown that the proposed cooperative NOMA can achieve superior performance compared to the non-cooperative NOMA in terms of outage probability. The tightness between the simulation and theoretical results confirms the efficiency of the proposed protocol.