Smart Cities and Mobility: Does the Smartness of Australian Cities Lead to Sustainable Commuting Patterns?

ABSTRACT

Smart cities have become a popular concept because they have the potential to create a sustainable and livable urban future. Smart mobility forms an integral part of the smart city agenda. This paper investigates “smart mobility” from the angle of sustainable commuting practices in the context of smart cities. This paper studies a multivariate multiple regression model within a panel data framework and examines whether increasing access to broadband Internet connections leads to the choice of a sustainable commuting mode in Australian local government areas. In this case, access to the Internet is used as a proxy for determining urban smartness, and the use of different modes of transport including working at home is used to investigate sustainability in commuting behavior. The findings show that an increasing access to broadband Internet reduces the level of working from home, public transport use, and active transport use, but increases the use of private vehicles, perhaps to overcome the fragmentation of work activities the Internet creates. How to overcome the need for car-based travel for fragmented work activities while increasing smartness through the provisioning of broadband access should be a key smart city agenda for Australia to make its cities more sustainable.     

Towards Post-Anthropocentric Cities: Reconceptualizing Smart Cities to Evade Urban Ecocide

ABSTRACT

This short piece acts as a coda to this journal’s special issue on “Smart Cities and Innovative Technologies.” First, it provides a retrospective view of the origins of the smart city concept. The paper, secondly, presents the most recent perspectives on the new interpretations of the smart city notion. It then provides a commentary on the potential directions for a better reconceptualization of smart cities to evade a most likely urban ecocide. Lastly, the short communication concludes by asking two critical questions: (a) Will urban scholars, planners, designers, and activists be able to convince urban policymakers and the general public of the need for a post-anthropocentric urban turnaround? (b) How do the public, private, and academic sectors along with communities pave the way for post-anthropocentric cities and more-than-human futures?     

Performance of relay assisted uplink wireless communication using multi-layered STBC for multiple access channel

Telecommunication Systems - In this paper, we propose a relay assisted multiuser Multiple-input multiple-output wireless communication using multilayer space time block coding in the presence of...     

Social-connectivity-aware vertical handover for heterogeneous wireless networks

Vertical handover mechanism for a WLAN-cellular heterogeneous network could be made efficient with the use of context aware admission control strategy. Existing admission control methods aim to provide satisfactory quality of service, but rely solely on the availability of wireless resources in the target network. We propose that the admission control in WLAN should make use of social connectivity context of users in its coverage area to classify local and global traffic. In this paper, we introduce a novel Social-Connectivity-aware Vertical Handover (SCVH) scheme, which performs admission control using connectivity graph data from the online social networking services. A higher importance of visiting node for users resident in WLAN, advocates a higher priority for granting admission. We employ graph-theoretic concept of centrality to calculate the social importance of potential handing-over nodes. By giving handover precedence to higher-centrality nodes, we achieve an optimal allocation of wireless resources in addition to improved quality of service. The proposed handover strategy offers an additional advantage of reducing global social network traffic.     

Inferences on Weibull parameters with conventional type-I censoring

In this article we consider the statistical inferences of the unknown parameters of a Weibull distribution when the data are Type-I censored. It is well known that the maximum likelihood estimators do not always exist, and even when they exist, they do not have explicit expressions. We propose a simple fixed point type algorithm to compute the maximum likelihood estimators, when they exist. We also propose approximate maximum likelihood estimators of the unknown parameters, which have explicit forms. We construct the confidence intervals of the unknown parameters using asymptotic distribution and also by using the bootstrapping technique. Bayes estimates and the corresponding highest posterior density credible intervals of the unknown parameters are also obtained under fairly general priors on the unknown parameters. The Bayes estimates cannot be obtained explicitly. We propose to use the Gibbs sampling technique to compute the Bayes estimates and also to construct the highest posterior density credible intervals. Different methods have been compared by Monte Carlo simulations. One real data set has been analyzed for illustrative purposes.     

An environment-aware mobility model for wireless ad hoc network

Simulation is a cost effective, fast and flexible alternative to test-beds or practical deployment for evaluating the characteristics and potential of mobile ad hoc networks. Since environmental context and mobility have a great impact on the accuracy and efficacy of performance measurement, it is of paramount importance how closely the mobility of a node resembles its movement pattern in a real-world scenario. The existing mobility models mostly assume either free space for deployment and random node movement or the movement pattern does not emulate real-world situation properly in the presence of obstacles because of their generation of restricted paths. This demands for the development of a node movement pattern with accurately representing any obstacle and existing path in a complex and realistic deployment scenario. In this paper, we propose a general mobility model capable of creating a more realistic node movement pattern by exploiting the concept of flexible positioning of anchors. Since the model places anchors depending upon the context of the environment through which nodes are guided to move towards the destination, it is capable of representing any terrain realistically. Furthermore, obstacles of arbitrary shapes with or without doorways and any existing pathways in full or part of the terrain can be incorporated which makes the simulation environment more realistic. A detailed computational complexity has been analyzed and the characteristics of the proposed mobility model in the presence of obstacles in a university campus map with and without signal attenuation are presented which illustrates its significant impact on performance evaluation of wireless ad hoc networks.     

Bainite morphologies in a 0.2 C–1.5 Mn steel

The isothermal transformation products of austenite over a wide range of temperatures and times in the bainitic range in a 0.2 wt.% C–1.5 wt.% Mn steel have been studied by transmission electron microscopy in order to characterise the bainitic microstructures in low-carbon low-alloy steels. Widmanstätten ferrite has formed with alternate layers of austenite (martensite) as a transition product at 600 and 500°C that has finally transformed on further isothermal transformation to either pearlite (at 600°C) or upper bainite (at 500°C). This type of transformation product was referred to as BI bainite by earlier investigators, but on the basis of the present investigation it is concluded that such ferrite-austenite (martensite) structures are not bainitic as this is not the final transformation product either at 600 or 500°C. Both upper bainite and lath-type lower bainite are formed at 450°C while the transformation product has been only lath-type lower bainite at 400°C.