New challenges in solar energy resource and forecasting in Greece

Aerosols and clouds are the most important constituents in the atmosphere that affect the incoming solar radiation, either directly through absorbing and scattering processes or indirectly by changing the optical properties and lifetime of clouds. Under clear skies, aerosols become the dominant factor that affect the intensity of solar irradiance reaching the ground. Under cloudy skies, the high temporal and spatial variability of cloudiness is the key factor for the estimation of solar irradiance. In this study, recent research activities related to the climatology and the prediction of solar energy in Greece are presented with emphasis on new challenges in the climatology of global horizontal irradiance (GHI) and direct normal irradiance (DNI), the changes of DNI due to the decreasing aerosol optical depth and the short-term (15–240 min) forecasts of solar irradiance with the collaborative use of neural networks and satellite images.     

Personal Area Networks: Bluetooth or IEEE 802.11?

Interconnecting all our electronic devices we carry around, such as cellular phones, PDAs, and laptops, with wireless links requires a cheap, low-power radio technology that still delivers good performance. In this context, the Bluetooth wireless technology was developed to meet the requirements introduced by these personal area networks (PANs). However, today we see a widespread deployment of wireless local area network (WLAN) radios (primarily IEEE 802.11b) also in small devices, such as PDAs. This paper will compare the PAN capabilities of a Bluetooth-based system with an IEEE 802.11b-based system. In order to focus the comparison on link and networking functionality, the IEEE 802.11b radio is assumed to be operating at the same power level as the Bluetooth radio (i.e., assuming a 0 dBm radio). Results are obtained by means of simulations in which throughput and delay are measured for multihop and overlaid PANs. Estimations on power usage are also given in the simulations. The results indicate that as the number of PANs increases, the Bluetooth-based PANs basically maintain the same bandwidth per PAN, while the corresponding IEEE 802.11-based PANs suffer significantly from the increased co-channel interference. However, for cases with a few co-channel-interfering PANs (2-3 PANs hosting about 10-15 nodes), the IEEE 802.11b-based PANs offer a higher bandwidth per user than the corresponding Bluetooth PANs, which corresponds to the difference in link bandwidth between the two systems. At high interference levels, the Bluetooth PAN offers a higher capacity than the IEEE 802.11 PAN. The latter also shows unfairness among TCP connections in the PAN at high loads. The energy efficiency, defined as successfully transmitted bits per energy unit, decreases sharply for IEEE 802.11 with increased number of PANs, while Bluetooth maintains a constant level. Packet delays are also shown to be more stable for the Bluetooth PAN than for the IEEE 802.11 PAN as the number of PANs increases.     

MAC intelligence for adaptive multimedia in 802.11 networks

Services in wireless networks must be capable of receiving information about the network and adaptively tune their transport parameters to the underlying networking conditions and technologies. A central problem in wireless transports is obtaining reliable metrics of congestion. How can lower layers assist transports and what is the performance tradeoff with pure peer-to-peer end-to-end solutions? We design and evaluate a lower layer assistance architecture. We focus on adding minimal intelligence to lower layers, according to the end-to-end principle. We find that we can adequately solve the measurement problem by minimal medium access control (MAC) assistance and describe an architecture that can aid transports over wireless links. The MAC-assisted solution is scalable to large number of flows, where the performance of pure end-to-end transports deteriorates rapidly. An improvement factor of 30-50 is exhibited in our experiments. We argue that including this minimal additional functionality in the MAC is sufficient for transports. It is also necessary when compared with end-to-end techniques.