Energy and load balancing routing protocol for IoT

Due to the limitation of node energy resources, the management of energy consumption is one of the most important problems of the internet of things (IoT). Therefore, many studies have tried to optimize and manage energy consumption by focusing on different techniques. Although each of these studies has improved and optimized energy consumption, there are many important problems, including maintaining traffic balance and energy consumption of network nodes. Therefore, a new method is necessary to maintain the load and energy balancing of network nodes. Therefore, this paper introduces energy and load balancing routing protocol for IoT (ELBRP) based on the development of the RPL routing protocol and the efficiency of data distribution technique. The ELBRP performance has three steps. In the first step, along with the process of sending DODAG information object (DIO) messages, the status of network nodes is evaluated. In the second step, the DODAG communication graph is formed according to the ELBRP. In the third step, data transmission is done according to the distribution technique with the goal of balancing traffic and energy. The simulation results using cooja simulator showed the superiority of ELBRP in improving energy consumption and successful delivery ratio, reducing delay and increasing the network lifetime compared to the similar methods.     

Enhanced oil recovery from carbonate reservoirs by spontaneous imbibition of low salinity water

An experimental study was performed to investigate the impact of low salinity water on wettability alteration in carbonate core samples from southern Iranian reservoirs by spontaneous imbibition. In this paper, the effect of temperature, salinity, permeability and connate water were investigated by comparing the produced hydrocarbon curves. Contact angle measurements were taken to confirm the alteration of surface wettability of porous media. Oil recovery was enhanced by increasing the dilution ratio of sea water, and there existed an optimum dilution ratio at which the highest oil recovery was achieved. In addition, temperature had a very significant impact on oil recovery from carbonate rocks. Furthermore, oil recovery from a spontaneous imbibition process was directly proportional to the permeability of the core samples. The presence of connate water saturation inside the porous media facilitated oil production significantly. Also, the oil recovery from porous media was highly dependent on ion repulsion/attraction activity of the rock surface which directly impacts on the wettability conditions. Finally, the highest ion attraction percentage was measured for sodium while there was no significant change in pH for all experiments.     

A Weighted Feature Voting Approach for Robust and Real‐Time Voice Activity Detection

This paper concerns a robust real‐time voice activity detection (VAD) approach which is easy to understand and implement. The proposed approach employs several short‐term speech/nonspeech discriminating features in a voting paradigm to achieve a reliable performance in different environments. This paper mainly focuses on the performance improvement of a recently proposed approach which uses spectral peak valley difference (SPVD) as a feature for silence detection. The main issue of this paper is to apply a set of features with SPVD to improve the VAD robustness. The proposed approach uses a weighted voting scheme in order to take the discriminative power of the employed feature set into account. The experiments show that the proposed approach is more robust than the baseline approach from different points of view, including channel distortion and threshold selection. The proposed approach is also compared with some other VAD techniques for better confirmation of its achievements. Using the proposed weighted voting approach, the average VAD performance is increased to 89.29% for 5 different noise types and 8 SNR levels. The resulting performance is 13.79% higher than the approach based only on SPVD and even 2.25% higher than the not‐weighted voting scheme.     

High speed,low power VLSI CMOS vision sensor for geometric centre object tracking

In this article an object tracking CMOS sensor is presented. The architecture incorporates photo detection devices and pixel level processing elements for capturing and processing the image data and extracting the object's coordinates. The edges of the image scene are extracted by in-pixel edge detectors and the region (object) of interest, selected by the user, is segmented using a switch network. Coordinates of the desired region are obtained by extracting the geometric centre of the region. Tracking of the selected object is then performed by automatic reselection of the region using the updated coordinates. The proposed design presents less sensitivity to threshold adjustments than binarisation techniques. The sensor has been designed as a 64 × 64 pixel VLSI CMOS chip in the 0.35 μm standard CMOS technology. The proposed structure is analysed with regard to its operation in the presence of mismatches and noise. Features of the sensor are reported and compared with some previous object tracking designs. Because the power dissipation is small, the chip is ideal for low-power applications.     

Characterization of micromachined silicon rectangular waveguide at 400 GHz

We present the first characterization of a micromachined silicon rectangular waveguide at 400GHz. The silicon waveguide has an average loss of 0.086dB/mm for a range of 350-460GHz. The waveguides are formed using well known microfabrication techniques and demonstrate a successful first step towards the use of silicon waveguides as a viable option for THz systems.     

Improving Voice‐Service Support in Cognitive Radio Networks

Voice service is very demanding in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). The available spectrum in a CRN for CR users varies owing to the presence of licensed users. On the other hand, voice packets are delay sensitive and can tolerate a limited amount of delay. This makes the support of voice traffic in a CRN a complicated task that can be achieved by devising necessary considerations regarding the various network functionalities. In this paper, the support of secondary voice users in a CRN is investigated. First, a novel packet scheduling scheme that can provide the required quality of service (QoS) to voice users is proposed. The proposed scheme utilizes the maximum packet transmission rate for secondary voice users by assigning each secondary user the channel with the best level of quality. Furthermore, an analytical framework developed for a performance analysis of the system, is described in which the effect of erroneous spectrum sensing on the performance of secondary voice users is also taken into account. The QoS parameters of secondary voice users, which were obtained analytically, are also detailed. The analytical results were verified through the simulation, and will provide helpful insight in supporting voice services in a CRN.     

A quadratic optimization method for connectivity and coverage control in backbone-based wireless networks

The use of directional wireless communications to form flexible mesh backbone networks, which provide broadband connectivity to capacity-limited wireless networks or hosts, promises to circumvent the scalability limitations of traditional homogeneous wireless networks. The main challenge in the design of directional wireless backbone (DWB) networks is to assure backbone network requirements such as coverage and connectivity in a dynamic wireless environment. This paper considers the use of mobility control, as the dynamic reposition of backbone nodes, to provide assured coverage-connectivity in dynamic environments. This paper presents a novel approach to the joint coverage-connectivity optimization problem by formulating it as a quadratic minimization problem. Quadratic cost functions for network coverage and backbone connectivity are defined in terms of the square distance between neighbor nodes, which are related to the actual energy usage of the network system. Our formulation allows the design of self-organized network systems which autonomously achieve energy minimizing configurations driven by local forces exerted on network nodes. The net force on a backbone node is defined as the negative energy gradient at the location of the backbone node. A completely distributed algorithm is presented that allows backbone nodes to adjust their positions based on information about neighbors’ position only. We present initial simulation results that show the effectiveness of our force-based mobility control algorithm to provide network configurations that optimize both network coverage and backbone connectivity in different scenarios. Our algorithm is shown to be adaptive, scalable and self-organized.     

Measurements on a 215-GHz subharmonically pumped waveguide mixerusing planar back-to-back air-bridge Schottky diodes

This paper presents design and performance data for a 215-GHz subharmonically pumped waveguide mixer using an antiparallel-pair of planar air-bridge-type GaAs Schottky-barrier diodes. The waveguide design is a prototype for a 640-GHz system and uses split-block rectangular waveguide with a 2:1 width-to-height ratio throughout. The measured mixer noise and conversion loss are below that of the best reported whisker contacted or planar-diode mixers using the subharmonic-pump configuration at this frequency. In addition, the required local oscillator power is as low as 3 mW for the unbiased diode pair, and greater than 34 dB of LO noise suppression is observed. Separate sideband calibration, using a Fabry-Perot filter, indicates that the mixer can be tuned for true double sideband response at an intermediate frequency of 1.5 GHz. Microwave scale model measurements of the waveguide mount impedances are combined with a mixer nonlinear analysis computer program to predict the mixer performance as a function of anode diameter, anode finger inductance, and pad-to-pad fringing capacitance. The computed results are in qualitative agreement with measurements, and indicate that careful optimization of all three diode parameters is necessary to significantly improve the mixer performance     

Effect of baking in different ovens on the quality and structural characteristics of saltine crackers

The aim of the study was to evaluate the physical and microstructural characteristics of crackers baked in four different industrial baking ovens (indirect radiation-cyclotherm, indirect convection, hybrid and industrial tunnel-ITO). Indirect convection and cyclotherm ovens provide the highest (5685.43 ± 51 W m⁻²) and the lowest (4860 ± 38.87 W m⁻²) amount of heat flux, respectively. Despite the amount of heat flux, indirect convection led to crackers with the highest moisture (7.86% vs. 4.82% in clyclotherm) and specific volume, but the lowest hardness. Cyclotherm resulted in crackers with lower specific volume, surface area, porosity, smooth and regular surface. Conversely, the hybrid and ITO ovens showed closer heat flux, leading to crackers with similar moisture content, texture parameters, specific volume, browning and inner porosity. Overall results show the potential of baking using different ovens for modifying the quality parameters of the crackers.