Porous Polymersomes with Encapsulated Gd‐Labeled Dendrimers as Highly Efficient MRI Contrast Agents

The use of nanovesicles with encapsulated Gd as magnetic resonance (MR) contrast agents has largely been ignored due to the detrimental effects of the slow water exchange rate through the vesicle bilayer on the relaxivity of encapsulated Gd. Here, the facile synthesis of a composite MR contrast platform is described; it consists of dendrimer conjugates encapsulated in porous polymersomes. These nanoparticles exhibit improved permeability to water flux and a large capacity to store chelated Gd within the aqueous lumen, resulting in enhanced longitudinal relaxivity. The porous polymersomes, ～130 nm in diameter, are produced through the aqueous assembly of the polymers, polyethylene oxide‐b‐polybutadiene (PBdEO), and polyethylene oxide‐b‐polycaprolactone (PEOCL). Subsequent hydrolysis of the caprolactone (CL) block resulted in a highly permeable outer membrane. To prevent the leakage of small Gd‐chelate through the pores, Gd was conjugated to polyamidoamine (PAMAM) dendrimers via diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid dianhydride (DTPA dianhydride) prior to encapsulation. As a result of the slower rotational correlation time of Gd‐labeled dendrimers, the porous outer membrane of the nanovesicle, and the high Gd payload, these functional nanoparticles are found to exhibit a relaxivity (R1) of 292 109 mM ^?1 s^?1 per particle. The polymersomes are also found to exhibit unique pharmacokinetics with a circulation half‐life of >3.5 h and predominantly renal clearance.     

Electrical Conductivity of Graphene Composites with In and In-Ga Alloy

Samples of composites of graphene with indium or indium-gallium alloy as the matrix were prepared by a process of spreading exfoliated graphene oxide on the foils, repeatedly folding and rolling. The foils were intermittently annealed and the process repeated by addition of more graphene oxide. Indium flux was used to remove any indium or gallium oxide. The samples were characterized by x-ray diffraction, and optical and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Electrical resistivity and temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) were measured using a four-probe method in the temperature range of 260 K to 340 K, and the results were used to determine the volume fraction of graphene from effective mean-field analysis. The volume fraction of graphene remained between 0.11 and 0.14 in samples of In with graphene and between 0.12 and 0.13 in samples of In-Ga with graphene. The results indicate that the electrical resistivity and the TCR of the composite were reduced by the addition of graphene. The resistivity of graphene remained between 1.19 × 10⁻⁶ ohm cm and 1.87 × 10⁻⁶ ohm cm in all samples and was thus almost independent of the matrix composition. The electrical resistivity of graphene was found to be an order of magnitude smaller than that of indium or the indium-gallium alloy.     

Timely Effective Handover Mechanism in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Next-generation wireless networks should be able to coordinate and integrate different communication systems. It has been a challenging problem to support a seamless handover in these diverse wireless network environments. Link level triggers can provide information about events which can help handover decision and layer 3 entities better streamline their handover related activities. In most conventional layer 2 triggering approaches, a pre-defined threshold for a specific perspective such as the received signal strength is used. This may cause too late or too early handover executions. In this paper we propose a new predictive handover framework that uses the neighbor network information to generate timely the link triggers so that the required handover procedures can appropriately finish before the current link goes down. First we estimate a required handover time for the given neighbor network conditions, then using a predictive link triggering mechanism the handover start time is dynamically determined to minimize handover costs. The handover costs are analyzed in terms of the total required handover time and the service disruption time. The numerical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed method significantly enhances the handover performance in heterogeneous wireless networks.     

A Distributed Node Localization Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

A distributed node localization scheme for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is presented in this paper, and it includes three generic phases: (1) determine node-beacon distances, (2) compute node positions, and (3) refine the positions. Different from previous researches, we propose an algorithm combination Min–max + LI for the position derivation and SD method for the refinement in our scheme. Simulation shows that our proposed scheme can perform more robust than some representative distributed node localization schemes presented in previous researches in terms of the trade-off among accuracy, coverage, computation cost, and communication overhead.     

Buffering-deflection tradeoffs in optical burst switching

A very important issue in optical burst switching (OBS) networks is the excessive burst drop when no suitable network resources are found during path reservation. In this study, a network scenario is evaluated in which AWG-based optical nodes are used as burst router nodes within the optical network. The two classical solutions to solve the burst contentions on the channels outgoing from the node are considered, that is, either based on buffering within the node, or by exploiting deflection routing. A performance evaluation is carried out to evaluate and compare these solutions for different network topologies with different node and traffic parameters. Our main contribution is to set numerical tradeoffs between burst deflection through the network and buffering in the node, so that a guidance in optical network design is provided where node buffering is inherently technologically limited.     

Adaptive DFE Multiuser Receiver for CDMA Systems using Two-Step LMS-Type Algorithm: An Equalization Approach

This paper presents an adaptive decision feedback equalizer (DFE) based multiuser receiver for code division multiple access (CDMA) systems over smoothly time-varying multipath fading channels using the two-step LMS-type algorithm. The frequency-selective fading channel is modeled as a tapped-delay-line filter with smoothly time-varying Rayleigh-distributed tap coefficients. The receiver uses an adaptive minimum mean square error (MMSE) multiuser channel estimator based on the reduced Kalman least mean square (RK-LMS) algorithm to predict these tap coefficients (Kohli and Mehra, Wireless Personal Communication 46:507–521, 2008). We propose the design of adaptive MMSE feedforward and feedback filters by using the estimated channel response. Unlike the previously available Kalman filtering algorithm based approach (Chen and Chen, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing 49:1523–1532, 2001), the incorporation of RK-LMS algorithm reduces the computational complexity of multiuser receiver. The computer simulation results are presented to show the substantial improvement in its bit error rate performance over the conventional LMS algorithm based receiver. It can be inferred that the proposed multiuser receiver proves to be robust against the nonstationarity introduced due to channel variations, and it is also beneficial for the multiuser interference cancellation and data detection in CDMA systems.     

Design of low-density parity check codes for MIMO systems with doubly-iterative receivers

In this paper, the Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) doubly-iterative receiver which consists of the Probabilistic Data Association detector (PDA) and Low-Density Parity-Check Code (LDPC) decoder is developed. The receiver performs two iterative decoding loops. In the outer loop, the soft information is exchanged between the PDA detector and the LDPC decoder. In the inner loop, it is exchanged between variable node and check node decoders inside the LDPC decoder. On the light of the Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) chart technique, an LDPC code degree profile optimization algorithm is developed for the doubly-iterative receiver. Simulation results show the doubly-receiver with optimized irregular LDPC code can have a better performance than the one with the regular one.     

Distributed node selection for threshold key management with intrusion detection in mobile ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), identity (ID)-based cryptography with threshold secret sharing is a popular approach for the security design. Most previous work for key management in this framework concentrates on the protocols and structures. Consequently, how to optimally conduct node selection in ID-based cryptography with threshold secret sharing is largely ignored. In this paper, we propose a distributed scheme to dynamically select nodes with master key shares to do the private key generation service. The proposed scheme can minimize the overall threat posed to the MANET while simultaneously taking into account of the cost (e.g., energy consumption) of using these nodes. Intrusion detection systems are modeled as noisy sensors to derive the system security situations. We use stochastic system to formulate the MANET to obtain the optimal policy. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

Detection Probability Estimation of Directional Antennas and Omni-Directional Antennas

This paper studies the problem of detection of directional antennas and omni-directional antennas by hostile detection systems. We present a model for calculating the probability of detecting a transmitter at arbitrary location around the transmitter. Our study shows that, if a directional antenna employs the same transmit power as an omni-directional antenna, the directional antenna can not decrease the probability of being detected. In some scenarios, a directional antenna is more likely to be detected than an omni-directional antenna. However, if a directional antenna provides the same Effective Isotropic Radiated Power in the direction of the receiver as an omni-directional antenna, the transmit power needed by a directional antenna to send data is much less than that of an omni-directional antenna. In this scenario, the probability of detecting a directional antenna is reduced by over 90%. This reveals that directional antennas can be used to build a secure path to send data at low probability of being detected by adversaries.