Effectiveness of Explicit Stations Grouping in Crowded Wireless LANs

In this letter, we evaluate the effectiveness of a multi-stage contention scheme for wireless local area networks (WLANs) medium access control (MAC). Multi-stage contention schemes basically divide the stations into smaller groups to resolve the contention more efficiently. Previous researchers have proposed virtual grouping schemes for WLANs MAC. Here we quantitatively analyze what can be achieved with a simple grouping scheme, i.e. through multi-stage contention. Our analysis shows that the multi-stage scheme is efficient in resolving contention, making it a good alternative to the commonly used exponential backoff mechanism.     

Highly Flexible Graphene Oxide Nanosuspension Liquid‐Based Microfluidic Tactile Sensor

A novel graphene oxide (GO) nanosuspension liquid‐based microfluidic tactile sensor is developed. It comprises a UV ozone‐bonded Ecoflex–polydimethylsiloxane microfluidic assembly filled with GO nanosuspension, which serves as the working fluid of the tactile sensor. This device is highly flexible and able to withstand numerous modes of deformation as well as distinguish various user‐applied mechanical forces it is subjected to, including pressing, stretching, and bending. This tactile sensor is also highly deformable and wearable, and capable of recognizing and differentiating distinct hand muscle‐induced motions, such as finger flexing and fist clenching. Moreover, subtle differences in the handgrip strength derived from the first clenching gesture can be identified based on the electrical response of our device. This work highlights the potential application of the GO nanosuspension liquid‐based flexible microfluidic tactile sensing platform as a wearable diagnostic and prognostic device for real‐time health monitoring. Also importantly, this work can further facilitate the exploration and potential realization of a functional liquid‐state device technology with superior mechanical flexibility and conformability.     

Bridging the semantic gap in multimedia emotion/mood recognition for ubiquitous computing environment

With the advent of the ubiquitous era, multimedia emotion/mood could be used as an important clue in multimedia understanding, retrieval, recommendation, and some other multimedia applications. Many issues for multimedia emotion recognition have been addressed by different disciplines such as physiology, psychology, cognitive science, and musicology. Recently, many researchers have tried to uncover the relationship between multimedia contents such as image or music and emotion in many applications. In this paper, we introduce the existing emotion models and acoustic features. We also present a comparison of different emotion/mood recognition methods.     

A cross-layer framework for privacy enhancement in RFID systems

In this paper, we introduce a cross-layer framework for enhancing privacy in RFID systems. The framework relies on mechanisms in the physical (PHY) layer, as well as the medium access control (MAC) layer, to provide flexible protection over the unique identifiers of low-cost RFID tags. Such a framework prevents adversaries and malicious parties from tracking RFID tags through the monitoring of their unique identifiers. More specifically, our framework relies on masking of the identifier at the PHY layer, whereby bit-collisions are induced between the backscattered tag identifier and a protective mask, such that a legitimate reader can be allowed to recover the tag identifier but an illegitimate party would not be able to do so. To strengthen the level of protection provided by the bit-collision masking method, we present the randomized bit encoding scheme that is used in our framework. In addition, we also incorporate mechanisms in the MAC layer, and make use of cross-layer interactions between the MAC and the PHY layers to provide flexible privacy protection. This allows tags that do not require privacy protection to be read conveniently while allowing tags that need to be protected to stay protected.     

Multiple penetration of a TEz-polarized plane wave intomultilayered cylindrical cavity-backed apertures

A generalized mathematical procedure is developed for investigating a TE_z-polarized plane wave penetration through two-dimensional (2-D) multilayered cylindrical cavity-backed apertures. The mathematical treatment is based on the direct integral equation technique combined with the Galerkin's procedure. Both the near- and far-zone field solutions to such a multiple coupling system are obtained in an analytical form. By taking the aperture edge effects into account, the magnetic currents on the surrounded multiple apertures are expanded in terms of a series of Chebyshev polynomials of the first kind. Furthermore, parametric studies are performed to show the variation of the penetrated near-zone magnetic field in various cylindrical cavity-backed apertures with the aperture number and geometrical sizes     

Hot-carrier reliability comparison for pMOSFETs with ultrathinsilicon-nitride and silicon-oxide gate dielectrics

The degradation of 100-nm effective channel length pMOS transistors with 14 Å equivalent oxide thickness Jet Vapor Deposition (JVD) Si₃N₄ gate dielectric under hot-carrier stress is studied. Interface-state generation is identified as the dominant degradation mechanism. Hot-carrier-induced gate leakage may become a new reliability concern. Hot-carrier reliability of 14 Å Si₃N₄ transistors is compared to reliability of 16 Å SiO₂ transistors     

Promising zeolite-type hydrocarbon trap catalyst by a knowledge-based combinatorial approach

Libraries consisting of more than 100 zeolite samples were prepared and examined for developing a promising HC trap catalyst. Parallel adsorptions of toluene onto the catalyst samples were conducted over a 10 × 10 array reactor under dry and wet conditions with or without a heating process three knowledge-based conditions for developing an automotive catalyst during the cold-start period. FAU and BEA type zeolites revealed a high performance of toluene adsorption under the dry condition. However, FAU type zeolite significantly decreased the amount of toluene adsorbed in the presence of water in the feed gas stream, mainly due to the hydrophobicity of the catalyst surface. Over Beta type zeolites, the toluene adsorbed was found to be considerably preserved, even after forced desorption temperature-ramping to the warm-up condition of an automotive engine. Li, K, or Ag ion-exchanged Beta zeolites seem to be particularly promising as an HC trap catalyst.     

Interference Cancellation for High-Frequency Surface Wave Radar

The performance of high-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) is known to suffer from external environmental interference and noise, such as cochannel radio-frequency interference from other radiating source, ionospheric clutter, lightning impulsive noise, etc. This paper experimentally evaluates the interference cancellation performance of various adaptive beamforming schemes with respect to the aforementioned three types of interferences in an attempt to find the most promising adaptive cancellation scheme in practical HFSWR environment.     

Electromagnetic dyadic Green's functions for multilayeredspheroidal structures. I: formulation

Dyadic Green's functions (DGFs) and their scattering coefficients are formulated in this paper for defining the electromagnetic fields in multilayered spheroidal structures. The principle of scattering superposition is applied, in a similar form of the DGF in an unbounded medium under spheroidal coordinates, the scattering DGFs due to multiple spheroidal interfaces are expanded in terms of the spheroidal vector wave functions. For the lack of general orthogonality of the spheroidal radial and angular functions, the Green's dyadics are expressed in a different way where the coordinate unit vectors are also combined in the construction, as compared with the conventional form of vector wave eigenfunction expansion. The matrix equation systems satisfied by the coupled scattering (i.e., reflection and transmission) coefficients of the DGFs are obtained so that these coefficients can be solved uniquely. The DGFs can be employed to investigate effects of spheroidal radomes used to protect the airborne or satellite antenna systems and of handy phone radiation near the spheroid-shaped human head, and so forth. Numerical calculations about the applications of the formulated multilayered DGFs are presented in part II of this paper