Structure and properties of polyimide‐bonded magnets processed from prepolymers based on diacetyl derivatives of aromatic diamines and dianhydrides

We report a novel method of polyimide (PI) synthesis from prepolymers based on dianhydrides and diacetyl derivatives of aromatic diamines that facilitate the preparation of a melt processable mixture at 300 ± 10°C of the prepolymer and magnetic Nd‐Fe‐B alloy to provide PI‐bonded magnets with enhanced properties. It is shown that chemical structure of the prepolymers strongly influences viscosity behavior via crystallization of the oligoimide in the melt, leading to formation of PI with rigid‐rod like structure. This structural ordering of the prepolymers based on diacetyl derivative of diamine used in this study, if not controlled, leads to exponential increase of melt viscosity with time, making it practically impossible to prepare melt processable mixture of the magnetic particles and the PI prepolymers at elevated temperatures. The results obtained demonstrate that appropriate dianhydrides and diacetyl derivatives of diamines that do not lead to crystallization of oligoimides in prepolymer mixture can be used under controlled processing conditions to prepare melt‐processable PI‐bonded magnets containing rigid‐rod like PI structure that significantly increases thermal stability of the magnets. The temperature dependencies of the magnetic properties of the PI‐bonded magnets under conditions that they are likely to encounter during their service life were found to be remarkably similar to that of commercial thermoplastic magnets such as injection‐molded nylon magnets. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 100: 478–485, 2006     

End-to-end delay margin balancing approach for routing in multi-class networks

This paper presents Quality of Service (QoS) based routing and priority class assignment algorithms. It introduces an end-to-end delay margin balancing approach to routing, and uses it to formulate a nonlinear optimization problem. In a single-class network, the formulation is shown to be convex; however in a multi-class priority network, it is only convex within specific regions, and is infeasible otherwise. A centralized off-line computation technique is proposed to calculate both the route configuration and end-to-end priority assignment. A gradient-based solution in the convex region and a heuristic to overcome the multi-class discontinuity are derived. An approximation of the optimization problem is developed for on-line distributed processing is then presented. Using the approximation, arriving traffic flows can use vector routing tables to search for routes. Compared with minimum-hop, minimum-delay, and min-interference routing algorithms, the proposed approach enables the single-class network to accommodate more users of different end-to-end delay requirements. In a multi-class priority network, results show that using the objective function to combine route and priority class assignment further increases the supportable network traffic volume. Mohamed Ashour received his B.Sc. (1991) and M.Sc. (1997) in Electrical Engineering from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt. He worked for Hughes and General Dynamics as a Telecommunications Engineer. Currently, he is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His current area of research is focused on traffic engineering, routing, and QoS provisioning in DiffServ and MPLS Networks. He is also interested in multi-class queuing analysis of long-range traffic, and QoS provisioning in ad hoc networks and satellite communications. Tho Le-Ngoc obtained his B. Eng. (with Distinction) in Electrical Engineering in 1976, his M.Eng. in Microprocessor Applications in 1978 from McGill University, Montreal, and his Ph.D. in Digital Communications 1983 from the University of Ottawa, Canada. During 1977–1982, he was with Spar Aerospace Limited as a Design Engineer and then a Senior Design Engineer, involved in the development and design of the microprocessor-based controller of Canadarm (of the Space Shuttle), and SCPC/FM, SCPC/PSK, TDMA satellite communications systems. During 1982–1985, he was an Engineering Manager of the Radio Group in the Department of Development Engineering of SRTelecom Inc., developed the new point-to-multipoint DA-TDMA/TDM Subscriber Radio System SR500. He was the System Architect of this first digital point-to-multipoint wireless TDMA system. During 1985–2000, he was a Professor the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Concordia University. Since 2000, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of McGill University. His research interest is in the area of broadband digital communications with a special emphasis on Modulation, Coding, and Multiple-Access Techniques. He is a Senior Member of the Ordre des Ingénieur du Quebec, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC), and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE). He is the recipient of the 2004 Canadian Award in Telecommunications Research, and recipient of the IEEE Canada Fessenden Award 2005.     

Performance analysis of M-PAM signaling with Tomlinson-Harashima precoding over ISI channels

An analytical method is developed to evaluate the symbol error probability of multilevel pulse amplitude modulation system using Tomlinson-Harashima precoding over inter-symbol interference channels. Analytical and simulation results are in an excellent agreement for different values of M.     

ZCZ‐CDMA and OFDMA using M‐QAM for broadband wireless communications

This paper considers direct‐sequence code‐division multiple‐access with zero‐correlation zone sequences (ZCZ‐CDMA) and orthogonal frequency‐division multiple‐access (OFDMA) schemes using M‐ary QAM signaling for broadband wireless communications. Their system structures, complexities and performances in both AWGN and multipath frequency‐selective fading channels are evaluated and compared. For ZCZ‐CDMA, joint suppression of the multipath fading interference and multiple‐access interference can be achieved with a reduced family‐size of the spreading sequences. For OFDMA, analytical and simulation results indicate that it has the same performance as ZCZ‐CDMA in fast time‐varying multipath fading channels. In time‐invariant or slowly time‐varying channels, where the channel information can be made available to transmitters, OFDMA outperforms ZCZ‐CDMA, offers a higher capacity and is more flexible for system reconfiguration with a comparable computational complexity. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performance evaluation of a switch using priority-based dynamic capacity allocation scheme

Performance-analysis of a switching system using priority-based dynamic capacity allocation is presented. The system provides connectivity between a number of point-to-multipoint communication access clusters. The scheduling of traffic transmission at each access cluster is based on a priority scheme with priority given to real-time (rt) traffic over nonreal-time (nrt) traffic. An analytical model is developed to evaluate the covariance functions of both rt and nrt traffic arriving at the output ports. Aggregate traffic arrival streams are approximated to 2-state Markov-modulated Poisson processes (MMPPs) by matching their statistical characteristics. Analytical and simulation results on performance of an example 4 /spl times/ 4 switch for different traffic loads are discussed.     

Multistage interference cancellation with diversity reception forasynchronous QPSK DS/CDMA systems over multipath fading channels

This paper introduces a multistage interference cancellation (MIC) technique with diversity reception for quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) asynchronous direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS/CDMA) systems over frequency-selective multipath Rayleigh fading channels. Unlike the previous MIC, which tries to remove the lump sum of the multiple-access interference (MAI) and self-interference (SI), this introduced MIC attempts to cancel only the MAI and part of the SI due to the intersymbol interference, while treating the remaining SI created by the current symbol as useful information for symbol decision. In this technique, the RAKE combining is used to collect signal replicas over multiple fading paths. Upper and lower bounds on the bit error probability are derived using a Gaussian approximation and the characteristic function method. Furthermore, effects of channel estimation error on the performance are studied. Analytical and simulation results show that the introduced MIC can provide a performance extremely close to that in an ideal single-user environment and outperforms the previous MIC even in the presence of channel estimation error     

Outage Probability with Correlated Lognormal Interferers using Log Shifted Gamma Approximation

The computation of outage probability in cellular radio system has been extensively studied. The Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) distribution involves the sum of lognormal distributions due to dominant effect of shadowing in both the signal and interference components. Since no closed-form expression can be found for the sum of lognormal distributions, many approximation methods and bounds were proposed in the past. In this paper, Log Shifted Gamma (LSG) approximation is proposed to calculate the sum of correlated lognormal random variables (RVs), hence the outage probability, accurately with a wide range of dB spreads, number of interferers M, correlation coefficients r among interference components, and noise power N. Overall, LSG approximation shows consistent accuracy due to its flexibility over the classical lognormal approximation, especially with small correlation coefficients r and/or large dB spreads.     

Diversity Analysis of Relay Selection Schemes for Two-Way Wireless Relay Networks

One-way wireless relay networks have recently received a lot of attention due to their ability to provide spatial diversity in fading wireless environment. Moreover, performing single-relay selection is a very attractive method due to its cost effective implementation and superior performance. However, one-way relay networks with the half-duplex signalling suffer from a spectral efficiency loss. To overcome such a drawback, two-way wireless relay networks have been proposed and these are also the networks considered in this paper. The paper analyzes the diversity orders of various relay selection schemes, including the best-relay selection, best-worse-channel selection, and maximum-harmonic-mean selection. The analysis is done for the amplify-and-forward protocol and under the two-step and three-step transmission procedures. In particular, it is shown that full diversity orders of R and R + 1 can be achieved in a R-relay wireless network with the two-step and three-step procedures, respectively. Numerical and simulation results are provided to verify our analysis.     

Adaptive multistage parallel interference cancellation for CDMA

Although the multistage interference cancellation detector is simple in structure, its performance degrades when the number of active users becomes large. In some cases, the performance is even worse than that without cancellation, due to the lack of the exact knowledge of the interfering signal in cancellation. Partial interference cancellation suggested by Divsalar and Simon (see IEEE Trans. Commun., vol.46, p.258-68, 1998) tries to remedy this weakness by reducing the cost of a wrong interference estimation through a weight in each stage. This paper presents an adaptive multistage structure based on the partial interference cancellation approach. In this structure, the weights are obtained by minimizing the mean-square error between the received signal and its estimate through a least mean square (LMS) algorithm. The resulting weights contain reliability information for the hard decisions made in the previous stage. Neither a training sequence nor a pilot signal is needed in the proposed scheme, and its complexity is much lower than that of linear multiuser detectors. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can outperform some of the existing interference cancellation methods in both the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and the multipath fading channels     

CD40/APC-specific antibodies with three T-cell epitopes loaded in the constant domains induce CD4+ T-cell responses

CD4+ T lymphocytes play a central role in the orchestration and maintenance of the adaptive immune response. Targeting of antigen to antigen presenting cells (APCs) increases peptide loading of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II molecules and CD4+ T-cell activation. APCs have been targeted by APC-specific recombinant antibodies (rAbs) with single T-cell epitopes integrated in the constant region of the heavy chain (C(H)). However, the strategy may be improved if several T-cell epitopes could be delivered simultaneously by one rAb. We here demonstrate that a single rAb can be loaded with multiple identical or different T-cell epitopes, integrated as loops between β-strands in C(H) domains. One epitope was inserted in C(H)1, while two were placed in C(H)2 of IgG. T-cell proliferation assays showed that all three peptides were excised from loops and presented on MHC class II to T-cells. Induction of T-cell activation by each epitope in the multi-peptide rAb was as good, or even better, than that elicited by corresponding single-peptide rAbs. Furthermore, following DNA vaccination of mice with plasmids that encode CD40-specific rAbs loaded with either one or three peptides, T-cell responses were induced. Thus, integration of multiple epitopes in C(H) region loops of APC-specific rAbs is feasible and may be utilized in design of multi-vaccines.