Reliable M2M/IoT data delivery from FANETs via satellite

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is rising in several application fields. This work deals with the communication challenges in UAV swarms, or flying ad hoc network (FANET), when taking into account non–line‐of‐sight scenarios. The use of satellites is a necessity in such operating conditions; thus, this work provides architectural considerations and performance assessments when several (FANETs) share an uplink random access satellite channel, fed with M2M/IoT traffic generated from on‐board sensors, to be reliably delivered to a remote ground destination.     

Effect of a food-grade enzyme preparation fromAspergillus oryzae on free fatty acid release in Manchego-type cheese from ovine and bovine milk

The addition of 50 mg Flavor Age (blend of lipase, proteinases and peptidases fromAspergillus oryzae) per kilogram of mixed ovine plus bovine milk for the manufacture of Manchego-type cheese caused the release of abundant free fatty acids (FFA), especially the short-chain fatty acids (C₄ to C₁₀). The effect accentuated with ripening time, the cheeses reaching a level of FFA around 2% at 120 days. The high concentration of FFA could have partially inhibited the growth of starter culture, as can be deduced from the higher residual lactose content of enzyme-treated cheeses. The results are compared and related to those obtained in a previous study on proteolysis and flavour development by the same enzyme preparation. They suggest that in the case of Man-chego-type cheese the liberation of FFA, although necessary, could be less important for flavour enhancement than the production of free amino acids.     

High-Gain Chemically Gated Organic Electrochemical Transistor

Organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) have exhibited promising performance as transducers and amplifiers of low potentials due to their exceptional transconductance, enabled by the volumetric charging of organic mixed ionic/electronic conductors (OMIECs) employed as the channel material. OECT performance in aqueous electrolytes as well as the OMIECs’ redox activity has spurred a myriad of studies employing OECTs as chemical transducers. However, the OECT's large (potentiometrically derived) transconductance is not fully leveraged in common approaches that directly conduct chemical reactions amperometrically within the OECT electrolyte with direct charge transfer between the analyte and the OMIEC, which results in sub-unity transduction of gate to drain current. Hence, amperometric OECTs do not truly display current gains in the traditional sense, falling short of the expected transistor performance. This study demonstrates an alternative device architecture that separates chemical transduction and amplification processes on two different electrochemical cells. This approach fully utilizes the OECT's large transconductance to achieve current gains of 10³ and current modulations of four orders of magnitude. This transduction mechanism represents a general approach enabling high-gain chemical OECT transducers.     

Ultrasound image segmentation with shape priors: application to automatic cattle rib-eye area estimation.

Automatic ultrasound (US) image segmentation is a difficult task due to the quantity of noise present in the images and the lack of information in several zones produced by the acquisition conditions. In this paper, we propose a method that combines shape priors and image information to achieve this task. In particular, we introduce knowledge about the rib-eye shape using a set of images manually segmented by experts. A method is proposed for the automatic segmentation of new samples in which a closed curve is fitted taking into account both the US image information and the geodesic distance between the evolving curve and the estimated mean rib-eye shape in a shape space. This method can be used to solve similar problems that arise when dealing with US images in other fields. The method was successfully tested over a database composed of 610 US images, for which we have the manual segmentations of two experts.     

A Symbolic Pole/Zero Extraction Methodology Based on Analysis of Circuit Time-Constants

This paper introduces a methodology for symbolic pole/zero extraction based on the formulation of the time-constant matrix of the circuits. This methodology incorporates approximation techniques specifically devoted to achieve an optimum trade-off between accuracy and complexity of the symbolic root expressions. The capability to efficiently handle even large circuits will be demonstrated through several practical circuits.     

Generation of Technology-Independent Retargetable Analog Blocks

This paper introduces a complete methodology for retargeting of analog cells to different sets of specifications. This methodology is technology-independent, thus allowing the migration, from one technology to another, of the circuit under retargeting. Careful integration of the device sizing and layout generation tasks via the incorporation of layout constraints during the sizing process allows to generate fully functional designs in a few minutes. The methodology is illustrated via the retargeting of a fully-differential Miller-compensated two-stage operational amplifier for a new set of specifications and two different technological processes.An erratum to this article can be found at     

Intrinsic selectivities and yields in the catalytic hydrogenation of polyenoic fatty acid methyl esters

Precise values of the intrinsic selectivities and yields for the hydrogenation products of methyl linolenate (Ln) and methyl linoleate (L) obtained under carefully controlled conditions using a commercial Ni catalyst are presented and analyzed in detail. The existence of a preferential adsorption of Ln and a significant co-hydrogenation of its double bonds are confirmed as being the dominant features under typical vegetable oil processing conditions. It is shown that the values of the selectivities that are obtained from the classical consecutive reactions network account for the intrinsic selectivity of the catalyst only while hydrogenating feedstocks with moderate to low (<10%) contents of Ln. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Universidad Nacional del Lltoral (U.N.L.)     

Analysis of network function sharing in Content Delivery Network-as-a-service slicing scenarios

Video content consumption is currently dominating the mix of traffic observed in Internet service provider (ISP) networks. The distribution of that content is usually performed by means of content delivery network (CDN) caches storing and delivering multimedia. The advent of virtualization is calling attention to the CDN providers as a use case for virtualizing the cache function. In parallel, there is a trend for sharing network infrastructures as a way of reducing deployment costs by ISPs. Then, an interesting scenario emerges when considering the possibility of sharing virtualized cache functions among ISPs which are sharing a common physical infrastructure, mostly considering that those ISPs offer similar video content catalogs to end users. Furthermore, when deciding to share the caches among ISPs, it is interesting to understand the impacts due to limiting the storage capacity at the edge sites. This paper investigates through simulations the potential efficiencies that can be achieved when sharing a virtual cache function if compared with the classical approach of independent virtual caches operated per ISP, as well as the implications of limiting the storage capacity of the caches at the edge.