A New Access Control Solution for a Multi-Provider Wireless Environment

The fundamental goal in future 4G mobile multi-service networks is to provide an efficient mobile computing environment. We presume that future terminals will be equipped with multiple heterogeneous wireless interfaces. We want to enable each user to seamlessly move between different providers networks. Besides seamless roaming, a key consideration is also devoted to quality-of-service provision. In this article, we propose a model and an architectural framework for supporting quality of service in the context of interconnected multi-provider wireless systems. The proposed integrated COPS-based management and RADIUS-based access control architecture will allow providers to offer multimedia services while optimizing the use of the underlying network resources. We suggest new concepts and protocols to provide solutions to these challenges and describe the French national research project named MMQoS aiming on building such future networks.     

Smart Materials Enabled with Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare Wearables

Contemporary medicine suffers from many shortcomings in terms of successful disease diagnosis and treatment, both of which rely on detection capacity and timing. The lack of effective, reliable, and affordable detection and real-time monitoring limits the affordability of timely diagnosis and treatment. A new frontier that overcomes these challenges relies on smart health monitoring systems that combine wearable sensors and an analytical modulus. This review presents the latest advances in smart materials for the development of multifunctional wearable sensors while providing a bird's eye-view of their characteristics, functions, and applications. The review also presents the state-of-the-art on wearables fitted with artificial intelligence (AI) and support systems for clinical decision in early detection and accurate diagnosis of disorders. The ongoing challenges and future prospects for providing personal healthcare with AI-assisted support systems relating to clinical decisions are presented and discussed.     

A survey of peer-to-peer live video streaming schemes – An algorithmic perspective

Live video streaming applications have gained great popularity among users but exert great pressure on video servers and the Internet. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks provide an attractive solution due to their low cost and high scalability. A large number of P2P live video streaming schemes have been proposed and many deployments have appeared on the Internet. These schemes pursue vastly diverse directions, from mimicking IP multicast to BitTorrent-like swarming to distributed hash tables. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and in-depth survey of P2P live video streaming schemes from an algorithmic perspective. Our purpose is to acquaint future designers with the critical design choices and their impacts on system performance. The primary objective of a P2P live video streaming system is to distribute packets from the video source to peers, and the collective paths through which a packet traverses form a tree. We focus on three aspects of how these trees are formed: determining the supplier–receiver relationships for each packet, handling the departure of the supplier or receiver before their relationship expires, and handling lost packets. We identify critical design choices in each aspect and propose a taxonomy according to these choices. Because the surveyed papers use different performance metrics and the reported results are heavily influenced by their experimental settings, we consider two measures to identify the impact of each design choice: we use a set of “internal” metrics in addition to the commonly used “external” metrics, and we examine performance metrics of schemes that have made the same design choice. For better understanding of how the design choices interact with one another and exposing future designers to the design choices specific to each individual scheme, we also provide systematic summaries for a large number of schemes.     

Thermal analysis,design, and implementation of an L-band high-power stepped impedance low-pass filter

This paper presents high power, thermal analyses, and implementation of a stepped impedance high-power low-pass filter (LPF). A comprehensive model and analysis have been developed for the design and simulation of the LPF. In this analysis, power handling capacity and breakdown-voltage are discussed, and the effects of critical points are considered. The attenuation due to conductor and dielectric losses is also studied. The novelty of our approach lies in employing theoretical analysis to estimate the power-dissipation of the filter based on the proposed equivalent circuit. An accurate method is also introduced to calculate attenuation in the filter's elements. Thermal analysis to obtain accurate temperature profiles is done for the first time based on the electro-thermal simulation. Consequently, an effective cooling method is used to spread heat across the entire filter. Finally, the filter was implemented and tested to operate at L-band with handling 8 kW peak and 800 W average power. The insertion-loss is less than 0.27 dB, the stop-band attenuation is more than 60 dB, and the return-loss is better than 15.7 dB. The filter is capable of tolerating produced heat without any destructive effects at a maximum temperature of about 200°C above ambient. The theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the LPF is suitable for high-power microwave applications.     

Interference Cancellation with Space Diversity for Downlink MC-CDMA Systems

Modern wireless communications require an efficient spectrum usage and high channel capacity and throughput. Multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO), Linear equalizers, multi-user detection and multicarrier code-division multiple access (MC-CDMA) are possible solutions to achieve spectral efficiency, high channel capacity, eliminate multiple access interference (MAI), eliminate Inter symbol interference (ISI) and robustness against frequency selective fading. In this paper, we combine all these techniques and investigate BER performance. We propose a low complexity receiver structure for Single-input Multiple-output (SIMO) downlink MC-CDMA systems. It employs an interference cancellation scheme to suppress the interference caused by the multipath fading channel. Also, the proposed scheme is developed for MIMO MC-CDMA system. The performance analysis of Downlink MIMO MC-CDMA systems with V-BLAST over frequency selective fading channel is investigated under various number of transmit and receive antennas. The simulation results show proposed SIMO equalization with parallel interference cancellation scheme is effective in reducing the ISI and the MAI. It improves the performance significantly and the simulation results show that MIMO MC-CDMA with V-BLAST multi-user detection provides high data rate and the BER significant improvement.     

Printing Nanostructures with a Propelled Anti‐Pinning Ink Droplet

Striving for cheap and robust manufacturing processes has prompted efforts to adapt and extend methods for printed electronics and biotechnology. A new “direct‐write” printing method for patterning nanometeric species in addressable locations has been developed, by means of evaporative deposition from a propelled anti‐pinning ink droplet (PAPID) in a manner analogous to a snail‐trail. Three velocity‐controlled deposition regimes have been identified; each spontaneously produces distinct and well‐defined self‐assembled deposition patterns. Unlike other technologies that rely on overlapping droplets, PAPIDs produce continuous patterns that can be formed on rigid or flexible substrates, even within 3D concave closed shapes, and have the ability to control the thickness gradient along the pattern. This versatile low cost printing method can produce a wide range of unusual electronic systems not attainable by other methods.     

Numerical Characterization of Advective Gas Flow through GM/GCL Composite Liners Having a Circular Defect in the Geomembrane

Numerical experiments were conducted to understand the effect of geometric and transport characteristics of a geomembrane-geosynthetic clay liner (GM/GCL) composite liner on gas leakage rate through a circular defect in the geomembrane (GM). The originality of the approach proposed in this paper rests on the use of a new conceptual two-layered system for modeling of GM/GCL composite liners where the interface zone between the GM and geosynthetic clay liner (GCL) has been merged with the GCL cover geotextile and handled as one layer; the GCL bentonite layer was considered the second layer. The role of the carrier geotextile layer was ignored since it can be considered as a no pressure loss layer. Analysis of numerical simulation results shows the existence of a constitutive leakage flow surface which enables evaluation of the leakage flow state for different geometric and transport properties of GM/GCL composite liners. Furthermore, the determined surface was also exploited to evaluate gas leakage rates under the framework of the Forchheimer’s analytical solution. The gas leakage rate predictions were found to be in good agreement with experimental results obtained at different GCL moisture content.     

Layered software patterns for data analysis in big data environment

The proliferation of textual data in society currently is overwhelming, in particular, unstructured textual data is being constantly generated via call centre logs, emails, documents on the web, blogs, tweets, customer comments, customer reviews, etc. While the amount of textual data is increasing rapidly, users’ ability to summarise, understand, and make sense of such data for making better business/living decisions remains challenging. This paper studies how to analyse textual data, based on layered software patterns, for extracting insightful user intelligence from a large collection of documents and for using such information to improve user operations and performance.     

5G enhanced mobile broadband multi-criteria scheduler for dense urban scenario

Telecommunication Systems - Mobile communication networks have entered a new age by introducing fifth-generation technologies (5G). The International Union of Telecommunications (IUT) proposes new...