ENHANCING UNDERGRADUATE ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION (SCALE 1 TO 1 DESIGN - BUILD METHOD)

On 1997, the board of RIBA – Royal Institute of Britch Architects – highly recommended “experimental learning” or “learning by doing” methods in design studio teaching in architecture as a “practicum”. (Wallis, 2005) Although practicum is the task of learning architecture as practice, most of practicum teaching applications in architectural education are either in postgraduate level or in extra curriculum activities. Based on international studies on Design-Build educations, teaching experience and observation of fresh graduates and junior architects, there is still a shortage between design and execution in undergraduate education level, students faces many problems during project implementation phase in reality due to the lack of experience. However, most of the construction sheets provided the needed execution data for installation phase; the 1 to 1 scale imagination was missing in those sheets. As for undergraduate level, in architecture career it is highly recommended to avoid this inability by encouraging the students to build big scale projects during the education process and increase their practical skills more in such projects in order to prepare students for practice. This paper focuses on evaluating the experiment of Design-Build education method in undergraduate level, which was done at faculty of Architecture-Design And Built Environment at Beirut Arab University- Tripoli campus. The method of “Design – Build” was applied in undergraduate core courses; Execution Design I (ARCH 333), Execution Design II (ARCH 334) and Digital Design & Fabrication Course (ARCH468). During the education of these courses, the students gained a construction experience in scale 1 to 1, which in turn gave them the ability of using manual and digital building skills practically. The evaluation of this experiment was based on instructors ’ observations, analysis, final semester jury members, grading results and students’ survey that lead to give guidelines and recommendations in order to develop this educational method for future applications

ESCAPE ROUTE DESIGNS AND SPECIFICATIONS FOR OFFICE BUILDINGS - “CCIAT” BUILDING AS A CASE STUDY

Many office buildings encounter various problems with their fire safety evacuation designs. The Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture Tripoli - North Lebanon (CCIAT) is considered the only modern office building in its context that lacks fire escape elements and emergency plans. This paper presents an analysis and proposals for an optimal evacuation scenario for the case of the CCIAT building, and develop solutions for similar office buildings. The problem is interpreted with reference to the positions of existing staircases and lifts and their connectivity with occupants’ offices and other facilities on the floors, in order to provide a comprehensive scenario for a fire escape safety design in the building. This paper relies on the Lebanese Building Regulations to evaluate the case of the CCIAT’s fire safety, along with the simulation software Pathfinder 2018 to evaluate the evacuation process of the existing design and the proposed solutions

Rapid Prototyping and Performance Evaluation of a MIMO CDMA System Using an FPGA-Based Hardware Platform

This paper investigates the rapid prototyping of a multiple input-multiple-output direct sequence-code division multiple access (MIMO DS-CDMA) system with rake receiver, implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) based hardware platform. The hardware implementation is created using the Altera DSP builder– a MATLAB/Simulink based system-level design tool and the Stratix EP1S80 DSP development board from Altera. The hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) co-simulation and the Logic Analyzer are used with the physical FPGA board implementing the design to evaluate the system performance and to verify the functionality of the hardware implementation in the MATLAB/Simulink environment. Results show that, in general, the bit error rate (BER) of the hardware implementation fell within the confidence intervals of the simulated BE

Exploiting Large-Scale Cooperative MIMO Approach in Relay-Assisted Next-Generation Cellular Systems

This paper proposes a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) beamforming scheme for cooperative relay-assisted 5G cellular systems. The relay nodes are divided into clusters, each consisting of cooperative nodes that form a virtual massive antenna array. Using particle swarm optimization (PSO), each cluster seeks the optimal transmit weight vectors that maximize the uplink cooperative MIMO channel capacity of each cluster

Massive MIMO Approach for Cooperative Relay-Assisted Millimeter- Wave Cellular Systems

This paper proposes a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) beamforming scheme for cooperative relay-assisted millimeter-wave cellular systems employing orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) such as the upcoming 5th generation (5G) systems

Hybrid Beamforming for Millimeter-Wave Heterogeneous Networks

Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) employing massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and millimeter-wave (mmWave) technologies have emerged as a promising solution to enhance the network capacity and coverage of next-generation 5G cellular networks. However, the use of traditional fully-digital MIMO beamforming methods, which require one radio frequency (RF) chain per antenna element, is not practical for large-scale antenna arrays, due to the high cost and high power consumption. To reduce the number of RF chains, hybrid analog and digital beamforming has been proposed as an alternative structure. In this paper, therefore, we consider a HetNet formed with one macro-cell base station (MBS) and multiple small-cell base stations (SBSs) equipped with large-scale antenna arrays that employ hybrid analog and digital beamforming. The analog beamforming weight vectors of the MBS and the SBSs correspond to the the best-fixed multi-beams obtained by eigendecomposition schemes. On the other hand, digital beamforming weights are optimized to maximize the receive signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the effective channels consisting of the cascade of the analog beamforming weights and the actual channel. The performance is evaluated in terms of the beampatterns and the ergodic channel capacity and shows that the proposed hybrid beamforming scheme achieves near-optimal performance with only four RF chains while requiring considerably less computational complexity

SER Performance of Large Scale OFDM-SDMA Based Cognitive Radio Networks

This paper proposes an adaptive large scale multiple input multiple output-beamforming scheme (LSMIMO-BF) for uplink (UL) access in broadband wireless cognitive networks with multiple primary users (PUs) and secondary users (SUs) sharing the same spectrum and employing orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). The proposed algorithm seeks the optimal transmit/receive weight vectors that maximize the UL MIMO channel capacity for each cognitive user while controlling the interference levels to PUs. Under the assumption of very large number of antennas at the base station, a closed-form expression for the symbol error rate (SER) performance of the cognitive LSMIMO-OFDM system is derived and compared with the one based on conventional beamforming schemes such as MIMO-maximum ratio combining (MIMO-MRC). The analysis and simulation show that when SUs are transmitting with the proposed constrained capacity-aware (CCA) scheme, the total interference level at the primary base station is reduced and the SER of PUs is improved compared to the case when the secondary network is using conventional MIMO-MRC. It was also shown that, as the number of base station antennas becomes larger, the constraints imposed by the primary network could be relaxed and the symbol error rate (SER) of SUs is improved without harming the PUs performance

Real-Time Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) Radar Using Software Defined Radio

In this paper, commercially-available software-defined radios (SDRs) are used to build a 64-channel, reconfigurable Active Electronically Scanned Arrays (AESA) radar operating in C-band (NATO G-band). The SDRs are used to design and implement a 3-dimensional multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) radar. The flexibility of the SDRs has been harnessed to evaluate the performance of a linear frequency modulated continuous wave (LFMCW) MIMO radar using three different methods of achieving the orthogonality, namely Time Division Multiplexing (TDM), Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM), and Code Division Multiplexing (CDM). In addition, the radar’s parameters are user-selectable and can be rapidly changed such that the radar can be used in different environments without requiring changes to the hardware. Measurements indicate that the radar is capable of detecting and localizing multiple targets in all 3-dimensions, including bearing, range, and Doppler. The MIMO radar operates in real-time, with a refresh rate of only 3 seconds. Experimental results are generated for the TDM mode of operation with further research reporting on the CDM and FDM modes of operation