A Distributed Routing Method for Dynamic Multicasting

Single point, sender based control does not scale well for multicast delivery. For applications, such as group video or teleconferencing a low total cost multicast tree is required. In this article we present a destination driven algorithm to minimize the total tree cost of multicast tree in a dynamic situation for the whole session duration. In this heuristic approach we considered the staying duration of participants are available at the time of joining. The performance of our algorithm is analyzed through extensive simulation and evaluated against several other existing dynamic multicast routing and also against one well known near optimum heuristic algorithm used for solving Steiner tree problem. We have further tested our algorithm using erroneous information given by the joining participants. Simulation results show that its performance does not degrade that much even when the range of error is considerably high, which proves the robustness of our algorithm.     

Process for cobalt separation and recovery in the presence of nickel from sulphate solutions by Cyanex 272

The present paper deals with the extraction of cobalt from a solution containing cobalt and nickel in a sulphate medium similar to the leach liquor obtained by the dilute sulphuric acid pressure leaching of the Pacific Ocean nodules matte followed by copper extraction. The commercial extractant Cyanex 272 (bis (2, 4, 4-trimethylpentyl) phosphinic acid) is used for this purpose. The leach liquor used for the present study contains Co =1.78 g/L and Ni=16.78 g/L. Before cobalt extraction, impurities, such as copper and iron, are removed from the leach liquor by the precipitation method. Increasing the concentration of Cyanex 272 increased the extraction percentage of cobalt due to the increase of equilibrium pH. Cobalt extraction efficiency of >99.9 % is achieved with 0.20 M Cyanex 272 in two counter-current stages at an aqueous: organic (A:O) phase ratio of 1.5∶1. Complete stripping of cobalt from the loaded organic containing 2.73 g/L Co was carried out at pH 1.4 by a synthetic cobalt spent electrolyte in two stages at an A:O ratio of 1∶2. The enrichment of cobalt during extraction and stripping operations was about 3.5 times. A complete process flowsheet for the separation and recovery of cobalt is presented.     

Effect of ultrasound on thermoset polyurethane: NMR relaxation and diffusion measurements

Recycling of rubber-based materials is of increasing industrial environmental importance. In order to characterize the effect of ultrasound on polymer networks, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxation and pulsed-gradient diffusion measurements were made at 70.5 °C in polyurethane rubber (PUR) and foam after subsequent treatment by intense ultrasound. The proton transverse relaxation decay was analyzed in terms of molecular and segmental mobilities of all motional species, a chemical and physical network as well as diffusing sol. The diffusivity spectrum, measurable in foams, reflected the changing molecular weight distribution of low-molecular weight sol and oligomers. It was observed that the effect of ultrasound was less pronounced in PUR than rubbers like SBR, PDMS and BR owing to its low degree of unsaturation. The investigation on the foams is the first of its kind to be reported.     

Partition oriented frame based fair scheduler

Proportionate fair schedulers provide an effective methodology for scheduling recurrent real-time tasks on multiprocessors. However, a drawback in these schedulers is that they ignore a task’s affinity towards the processor where it was executed last, causing frequent inter-processor task migrations which ultimately results in increased execution times. This paper presents Partition Oriented Frame Based Fair Scheduler (POFBFS), an efficient proportional fair scheduler for periodic firm and soft real-time tasks that ensures a bounded number of task migrations. Experimental results reveal that POFBFS can achieve 3 to 100 times reduction in the number of migrations suffered with respect to the General-ERfair algorithm (for a set of 25 to 100 tasks running on 2 to 8 processors) while simultaneously maintaining high fairness accuracy.     

Reactive flash sintering: MgO and α-Al2O3 transform and sinter into single-phase polycrystals of MgAl2O4

We show that flash experiments with three phase mixed-powders of yttria-stabilized zirconia (8YSZ), MgO, and α-Al₂O₃ not only produce polycrystals of high density, but also the transformation of magnesia and alumina into single-phase spinel. The presence of zirconia facilitates the onset of the flash. The sintering experiments in the laboratory were extended to live experiments at the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory in order to measure the time-dependent evolution of single-phase spinel. The phase transformation occurred in <3 seconds during Stage II. Later, during Stage III the cubic zirconia transformed partly into the monoclinic phase, which reverted back to the cubic phase when the flash was extinguished by turning off the current to the specimen. The results underpin a recent report on the synthesis of single-phase bismuth ferrite from constituent oxides in reactive flash experiments, raising the specter of flash as a method for synthesis as well as sintering of complex oxide ceramics. The role of zirconia in catalyzing the flash in the present study is discussed.     

A ROBUST MART ALGORITHM FOR TOMOGRAPHIC APPLICATIONS

The present work is concerned with the development of a robust reconstruction algorithm for applications involving tomography. In an earlier study it was shown that among the ART family of algorithms, the multiplicative algebraic reconstruction algorithm (MART) was the most appropriate for tomographic reconstruction [1]. In the present work, the MART algorithm has been extended so that (a) its performance is now acceptable over a wider range of relaxation factors, (b) the time requirement for convergence to a solution is lower, and (c) its performance is less sensitive to noise in the projection data. Applications considered for evaluating the proposed algorithms are (1) a circular region with holes, (2) a three-dimensional temperature field in a differentially heated fluid layer, and (3) experimental data recorded in a differentially heated fluid layer using an interferometer. The proposed algorithms are seen to be an improvement over those presently available, for all three examples considered.     

Electrophoretic Deposition of Zirconia Thin Film on Nonconducting Substrate for Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Application

Electrophoretic deposition (EPD) of 8 mol% yttria‐stabilized zirconia (YSZ) electrolyte thin film has been carried out onto nonconducting porous NiO‐YSZ cermet anode substrate using a fugitive and electrically conducting polymer interlayer for solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) application. Such polymer interlayer burnt out during the high‐temperature sintering process (1400°C for 6 h) leaving behind a well adhered, dense, and uniform ceramic YSZ electrolyte film on the top of the porous anode substrate. The EPD kinetics have been studied in depth. It is found that homogeneous and uniform film could be obtained onto the polymer‐coated substrate at an applied voltage of 15 V for 1 min. After the half‐cell (anode + electrolyte) is co‐fired at 1400°C, a suitable cathode composition (La_0.65Sr_0.3MnO₃) thick film paste is screen printed on the top of the sintered YSZ electrolyte. A second stage of sintering of such cathode thick film at 1100°C for 2 h finally yield a single cell SOFC. Such single cell produced a power output of 0.91 W/cm² at 0.7 V when measured at 800°C using hydrogen and oxygen as fuel and oxidant, respectively.     

CNS: a new energy efficient transmission scheme for wireless sensor networks

We present in this paper a new energy-efficient communication scheme called CNS (Compression with Null Symbol) that combines the power of data compression and communication through silent symbol. The concept of communication through silent symbol is borrowed from the energy efficient schemes proposed in Sinha (Proceedings of 6th IEEE consumer communications and networking conference (CCNC), Las Vegas, pp. 1–5, 2009), Ghosh et al. (Proceedings of 27th IEEE international performance computing and communications conference (IPCCC), USA, pp. 85–92, 2008), and Sinha and Sinha (Proceedings of international conference on distributed computing and internet technologies (ICDCIT), LNCS, pp. 139–144, 2008). We show that the average theoretical energy saving at the transmitter by CNS is 62.5%, assuming an ideal channel and for equal likelihood of all possible binary strings of a given length. Next, we propose a transceiver design that uses a hybrid modulation scheme utilizing FSK and ASK so as to keep the cost/complexity of the radio devices low. Considering an additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and a non-coherent detection based receiver, CNS shows a saving in transmitter energy by 30% when compared to binary FSK, for equal likelihood of all possible binary strings of a given length. Simultaneously, there is a saving of 50% at the receiver for all types of data modulation due to halving of the transmitted data duration, compared to binary encoding. In contrast, RBNSiZeComm proposed in Sinha (Proceedings of 6th IEEE consumer communications and networking conference (CCNC), Las Vegas, pp. 1–5, 2009), TSS proposed in Ghosh et al. (Proceedings of 27th IEEE international performance computing and communications conference (IPCCC), USA, pp. 85–92, 2008) and RZE proposed in Sinha and Sinha (Proceedings of international conference on distributed computing and internet technologies (ICDCIT), LNCS, pp. 139–144, 2008) generate average transmitter energy savings of about 41, 20, and 35.2%, respectively. Also, at the receiver side, while RBNSiZeComm does not generate any saving, TSS and RZE produce about 36.9 and 12.5% savings on an average, respectively. Considering certain data types that may occur in the context of some wireless sensor networks (WSN) based applications (e.g., remote healthcare, agricultural WSNs, etc.), our simulation results demonstrate that for AWGN noisy channels, the transmitter side savings vary from about 33–50% on an average, while for RBNSiZeComm, this saving is about 33–61% on the same data set (Sinha in Proceedings of 6th IEEE consumer communications and networking conference (CCNC), Las Vegas, pp. 1–5, 2009). Thus, taking into account the low cost/complexity of the proposed transceiver, these results clearly establish that CNS can be a suitable candidate for communication in low power wireless sensor networks, such as in remote healthcare applications, body area networks, home automation, WSNs for agriculture and many others.