3-D electrical impedance tomography for piecewise constant domains with known internal boundaries

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a badly posed inverse problem, but can be stabilized if one assumes that the conductivity is piecewise constant, with a relatively small number of distinct regions, and that the region boundaries are known, for example from prior anatomical imaging. With this assumption, we introduce a three-dimensional (3-D) boundary element method (BEM) model for the forward EIT map from injected currents to measured voltages, and 3-D inverse solutions for both BEM and the finite element method (FEM) which explicitly take into account the parameterization implied by the known boundary locations. We develop expressions for the Jacobians for both methods, since they are nonlinear, to more rapidly solve the inverse problem. We show simulation results in a torso geometry with the heart and lungs as inhomogeneities. In a simulation study, we could reconstruct the conductive values of some internal organs of a human torso with more than 92% accuracy even with inaccurate internal boundary locations, a randomized rather than constant conductivity profile (with the standard deviation of the Gaussian-distributed conductivities set to 20% of their mean values), signal to measurement noise of 50 dB, and with different meshes used for the forward and inverse problems. BEM and FEM perform similarly, leading to the conclusion that the choice between them should be based on secondary considerations such as computational efficiency or the need to model conductivity anisotropies     

An Enhanced Cooperative Communication Scheme for Physical Uplink Shared Channel in NB-IoT

Wireless Personal Communications - Smart Home is one of the most established applications of the Internet of Things. Almost every equipment we use in our daily life—appliances, electric...     

Analysis of Multi-Server Scheduling Paradigm for Service Guarantees during Network Mobility

Multi-server scheduling of traffic flows over heterogeneous wireless channels affix fresh concerns of inter-packet delay variations and associated problems of out-of-sequence reception, buffer management complexity, packet drops and re-ordering overhead. In this paper, we have presented an exclusive multi-server scheduling algorithm that is specifically tuned for mobile routers equipped with multiple wireless interfaces and has attained multiple care-of-address registrations with its home agent (HA). The proposed adaptive, Self-clocked, Multi-server (ASM) scheduling algorithm is based on predetermined transmission deadlines for each arrived packet at the mobile router. The mobile flows receive desired service levels in accordance with their negotiated service rates and are only constraint by the cumulative capacity of all active links. The major challenge lies in the handling of asymmetric channels to stitch into a unified virtual channel of higher capacity with reliable service guarantees during mobility. The sorted list of transmission schedules is used to assign physical channels in increasing order of their availability. This approach specifically encapsulates the physical layer disconnections during the handovers and ensures continuous service to ongoing flows. The proposed scheduling scheme is supplemented by an analytical model and simulations to verify its efficacy. The simulation results demonstrate higher degree of reliability and scalability of service provisioning to flows during mobility.     

MC-BRM: A distributed RWA algorithm with minimum wavelength conversion

There are two strategies for solving Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) in wavelength-routed networks: centralized and distributed. Centralized approaches are appropriate for small networks with light traffic, whereas distributed approaches are suitable for large networks with heavy traffic. Solving RWA problem in distributed algorithms can be generally divided into two phases: routing phase and wavelength assignment phase. Allocating a wavelength over a physical path for a connection request can be performed by one of two major strategies: Backward Reservation Method (BRM) and Forward Reservation Method (FRM). In this work, we assume that every node in the network can be equipped with a number of wavelength converters. Wavelength converters are usually chosen in a free policy. However, we propose a distributed algorithm, called Minimum-Conversion Backward Reservation Method (MC-BRM), that attempts to establish light-paths with minimum number of wavelength conversions. The MC-BRM algorithm can efficiently reduce the number of required wavelength conversions in the network. Besides improving blocking probability, MC-BRM can lead to better fairness in establishing light-paths with different number of hops. Finally, we make the worst case analysis for estimating wavelength conversion usages in individual nodes.     

Humidity sensing properties of Cu2O-PEPC nanocomposite films

In this study, the blend of copper oxide nanopowder (Cu2O), 3 wt.% and poly-N-epoxypropylcarbazole (PEPC), 2 wt.% in benzol were drop-casted on glass substrates with pre-deposited surface-type silver electrodes for the fabrication of Cu2O-PEPC nanocomposite thin films. The thicknesses of the Cu2O-PEPC films were in the range of 10-13 μm. The effect of humidity on the electrical properties of the nanocomposite films was investigated by measurement of the capacitance and dissipation of the samples at two different frequencies of the applied voltage: 120 Hz and 1 kHz. The AC resistance of the samples was determined from values of dissipation. The DC resistance was measured directly. The effect of ageing on the humidity sensing properties of the nanocomposite was observed. After the ageing it was observed that at 120 Hz and 1 kHz, under humidity of up to 86% RH , the capacitance of the cell increased by 85 and 8 times and resistance decreased by 345 and 157 times, accordingly, with respect to 30% RH conditions. It was found that with increase of the frequency, the capacitance and resistance of the samples decreased. It is assumed that the humidity response of the cell is associated with diffusion of water vapors and doping of the semiconductor nanocomposite by water molecules.     

Fast and Ultraclean Approach for Measuring the Transport Properties of Carbon Nanotubes

In this work, a fast approach for the fabrication of hundreds of ultraclean field‐effect transistors (FETs) is introduced, using single‐walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs). The synthesis of the nanomaterial is performed by floating‐catalyst chemical vapor deposition, which is employed to fabricate high‐performance thin‐film transistors. Combined with palladium metal bottom contacts, the transport properties of individual SWCNTs are directly unveiled. The resulting SWCNT‐based FETs exhibit a mean field‐effect mobility, which is 3.3 times higher than that of high‐quality solution‐processed CNTs. This demonstrates that the hereby used SWCNTs are superior to comparable materials in terms of their transport properties. In particular, the on–off current ratios reach over 30 million. Thus, this method enables a fast, detailed, and reliable characterization of intrinsic properties of nanomaterials. The obtained ultraclean SWCNT‐based FETs shed light on further study of contamination‐free SWCNTs on various metal contacts and substrates.     

Mixed analog-digital crossbar-based hardware implementation of sign–sign LMS adaptive filter

Recently announcement of a physical realization of a fundamental circuit element called memristor by researchers at Hewlett Packard (HP) has attracted so much interest worldwide. Combination of this newly found element with crossbar interconnect technology, opened a new field in designing configurable or programmable electronic systems which can have applications in signal processing and artificial intelligence. In this paper, based on the simple memristor crossbar structure, we will propose a new mixed analog-digital circuit as a hardware implementation of the sign–sign least mean square (LMS) adaptive filter algorithm. In this proposed hardware, any multiplication and addition is performed with infinite precision and there is no necessity for the quantization of the input signal. Since the coefficients of the filter are stored in the switches of the crossbar, they can remain unchanged theoretically for an infinite period of time.     

Interference management for spectral coexistence in a heterogeneous satellite network

With the advent of the fifth generation of mobile radio communication by 2020, there will be many challenges such as increasing service demand with low delay in providing billions of end users called the satellite mobile users. It is expected that terrestrial communication systems will be faced with a dense network having many small cells anywhere and anytime. Therefore, there are some remote regions in the world where terrestrial systems cannot provide any services to end users. Furthermore, because of lack of spectral resources, it is very important that the spectrum is shared between satellite systems and terrestrial equipment by a suitable solution to interference management. In this paper, a heterogeneous satellite network that includes low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation and terrestrial equipment is proposed to provide low delay services. In this type of structure, interference management based on transmission power control between LEO satellite systems and mobile users is very important for obtaining high throughput. Moreover, in order to mitigate interference, transmission power control is shown based on noncooperative Stackelberg game under many subgames through pricing‐based algorithm and convex optimization method. Finally, the simulation results show that the performance of this study's system model will be improved through the proposed algorithm.