Transport Properties of K_xV_2O_5·nH_2O Nanocrystalline Films

Five different compositions of K x V 2 O 5 ·nH 2 O(where x=0.00,0.0017,0.0049,0.0064 and 0.0091 mol) were prepared by the sol-gel process.Electrical conductivity and thermoelectric power were measured parallel to the substrate surface in the temperature range of 300-480 K.The electrical conductivity showed that all samples were semiconductors and that conductivity increased with increasing K content.The conductivity of the present system was primarily determined by hopping carrier mobility.The carrier density was evaluated as well.The conduction was confirmed to obey non-adiabatic small polaron hopping.The thermoelectric power or Seebeck effect,increased with increasing K ions content.The results obtained indicated that an n-type semiconducting behavior within the temperature range was investigated.     

Differential Time Signaling Data-Link Architecture

A new time-based high-speed data-link architecture, which we call Differential time Signaling (DTS) is presented. A clock pulse is embedded in the transmitted signal and is used as a time reference against which the rising and falling data pulse edge timings are compared. Using the DTS approach, data encoding is achieved by spacing the time between the embedded clock edges and the data pulse edges using a hierarchical time-delay resolution assignment to each bit in the data sequence. The proposed link is shown to concentrate the signal energy in a low bandwidth while reducing clock jitter effect. A simulated 3 Gb/s 90 nm CMOS DTS link using a 500 MHz clock signal is also described to provide a flavor for a monolithic realization. As a proof of concept, 700 Mb/s and 1.6 Gb/s DTS-based links have been designed using a commercial FPGA board. The measured eye diagrams for the transmitted and received signals over a 40-inch FR4 channel are presented.     

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.     

Sputtered metal lift-off for grating fabrication on InP based optical devices

Sputtered metal gratings have been realized using lift-off process based on bilayer resist electron beam lithography (EBL). The lithography mask is composed of PMMA (poly(methylméthacrylate)) layer deposited under HSQ (hydrogen silsesquioxane) inorganic resist. EBL is performed in HSQ, whereas PMMA is used to ease final lift-off. We demonstrate the possibility of patterning by lift-off metals with different sputtering yields and deposition conditions. Gratings with period of 200 nm and filling factor of 50% are obtained.     

A Dempster–Shafer Based Tit-for-Tat Strategy to Regulate the Cooperation in VANET Using QoS-OLSR Protocol

In this paper, we address the problem of cooperation among vehicles in VANET using QoS-OLSR protocol in the presence of selfish nodes. QoS-OLSR is a proactive protocol that considers the Quality of Service (QoS) of the nodes while electing the cluster-heads and selecting the Multi-Point Relay (MPRs) nodes. Cluster-heads and MPRs might misbehave on the roads by over-speeding or under-speeding. Classical and generous Tit-for-Tats are proposed to analyze the interaction among vehicles. However, both strategies are not able to enforce the cooperation due the fact that they (1) count on individual watchdogs monitoring, (2) rely on the node-to-node cooperation decision, (3) and ignore the high mobility and packet collisions. Therefore, we propose a Dempster–Shafer based Tit-for-Tat strategy that is able to improve the decision and regulate the cooperation in the vehicular network. This is done by (1) launching a cooperative watchdogs monitoring, (2) correlating the observations of the different watchdogs using Dempster–Shafer theory, and (3) propagating the decisions among clusters. Thereafter, we compare the Dempster–Shafer based strategy with several strategies derived from the original Tit-for-Tat. Simulation results prove that the Dempster–Shafer based strategy is able to maintain the survivability of the vehicular network in the presence of high mobility and packet collisions with minimal time and overhead.     

On the Performance of FFT/DWT/DCT-based OFDM Systems with Chaotic Interleaving and Channel Estimation Algorithms

The efficiency of data transmission over fading channels in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems depends on the employed interleaving method. In this study, we propose an improved chaotic interleaving scheme which aims to improve the performance of OFDM system under fading channel. In the proposed scheme, the binary data is interleaved with chaotic Baker map prior to the modulation process. In the sequel, significant degree of encryption is being added during data transmission. The performance of the proposed approach is tested on the conventional fast Fourier transform OFDM, discrete wavelet transform OFDM, and discrete cosine transform OFDM with and without chaotic interleaving. Furthermore, an expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm is proposed for improving channel impulse response (CIR) estimation based on a maximum likelihood principle. The proposed scheme makes use of EM algorithm to update the channel estimates until convergence is reached. The simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithms under Rayleigh fading environments where the symbol error rate essentially coincides with that of the perfect channel case after the fifth EM iteration.     

Scalable and fault‐tolerant key agreement protocol for dynamic groups

With the widespread use of the Internet, the popularity of group communication‐based applications has grown considerably. Since most communications over the Internet involve the traversal of insecure networks, basic security services are necessary for these collaborative applications. These security services can be facilitated if the authorized group members share a common secret. In such distributed applications, key agreement protocols are preferred to key distribution protocols. In the past two decades, there have been many proposals for key agreement protocols. Most of these protocols are not efficient and limit the size of the underlying group. In this paper, we consider the scalability problem in group key agreement protocols. We propose a novel framework based on extension of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol. The efficiency of our protocol comes from the clustering of the group members, where the common session key is established collaboratively by all participants. We present the auxiliary protocols needed when the membership changes. We show that our protocol is superior in complexity in both communication and computation overheads required to generate the session key. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Collision avoidance slot allocation scheme for multi-cluster wireless sensor networks

This paper introduces a collision avoidance slot allocation scheme for Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based Medium Access Control (MAC) in multi-cluster wireless sensor networks. TDMA MAC protocols have built-in active-sleep duty cycle that can be leveraged for limiting idle listening. Also, they can overcome the overhearing problem, thus have better energy efficiency. Enabling concurrent intra-cluster communications using a single radio channel is a key issue in TDMA MAC protocols. Using orthogonal frequency channels or different Code Division Multiple Access codes for different adjacent clusters can solve the problem at the expense of cost. In this paper, we propose a new distributed slot allocation protocol called  Coordinated   Time   Slot   Allocation (CTSA) that can reduce collisions significantly using a single radio channel. We use simulations to study the effects of different system parameters on the performance of our proposed protocol. Simulation results show that applying CTSA over clustering protocols can significantly reduce collisions. It also shows fast convergence for our proposed CTSA protocol. In this paper we apply our CTSA scheme to the Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy protocol which forms the basis for many cluster based routing protocols. CTSA is also compared with the SRSA algorithm proposed by Wu and Biswas (Wirel Netw 13(5):691–703, 2007) by means of simulation.