Efficient Resource Management Mechanism for 802.16 Wireless Networks Based on Weighted Fair Queuing

Wireless Networking continues on its path of being one of the most commonly used means of communication. The evolution of this technology has taken place through the design of various protocols. Some common wireless protocols are the WLAN, 802.16 or WiMAX, and the emerging 802.20, which specializes in high speed vehicular networks, taking the concept from 802.16 to higher levels of performance. As with any large network, congestion becomes an important issue. Congestion gains importance as more hosts join a wireless network. In most cases, congestion is caused by the lack of an efficient mechanism to deal with exponential increases in host devices. This can effectively lead to very huge bottlenecks in the network causing slow sluggish performance, which may eventually reduce the speed of the network. With continuous advancement being the trend in this technology, the proposal of an efficient scheme for wireless resource allocation is an important solution to the problem of congestion. The primary area of focus will be the emerging standard for wireless networks, the 802.16 or “WiMAX”. This project, attempts to propose a mechanism for an effective resource management mechanism between subscriber stations and the corresponding base station

Mustang Daily, April 23, 1971

Student newspaper of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA.https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/studentnewspaper/2700/thumbnail.jp

Welfare assessment in Portuguese dairy goat farms : on-farm overall feasibility of an international prototype

Dissertação de Mestrado Integrado em Medicina VeterináriaThis study describes and assesses the application of the on-farm welfare assessment prototype for dairy goats (Capra hircus) developed by the AWIN project. Thirty Portuguese dairy goat farms were assessed from January to March 2014. Pen-level observations were carried out on 2715 animals and detailed individual observations were performed on 1172 of these animals. The main areas of concern were associated with claw overgrowth, queuing at feeding, overweight animals, poor hair coat condition and improper disbudding. The results obtained show that these welfare issues are related to farm sizes, with larger farms heading higher concerns. Furthermore, the reliability and feasibility of the animal-based indicators were tested. Overall, moderate to high levels of agreement between observers were identified, with the exception of Qualitative Behaviour Assessment (QBA). From all stages of the prototype ‘Queuing’ and ‘Clinical scoring’ were the most time consuming, with the mean time required to apply the prototype being longer in large farms. In conclusion, the protocol has shown the potential not only for legislative and regulatory purposes, but also as a certification, advisory/management and research tool, probably following a two-step approach.RESUMO - Avaliação de Bem-Estar Animal em Explorações Portuguesas de Caprinos de Leite: exequibilidade de um protótipo internacional de avaliação de bem-estar - Este estudo tem como objectivo descrever e avaliar a aplicação do protótipo de avaliação de bem-estar animal, desenvolvido pelo projecto AWIN em explorações de caprinos de leite em regime intensivo. Trinta explorações portuguesas foram avaliadas de Janeiro a Março de 2014, tendo sido efectuadas avaliações no parque de 2715 caprinos de leite e observações individuais a 1172 desses animais. Os principais problemas identificados nas explorações encontram-se associados a um crescimento excessivo das unhas, filas na manjedoura, animais com condição corporal elevada, com má condição do pêlo e alvo de uma má descorna. Os resultados obtidos indicam que estes problemas de bem-estar animal encontram-se relacionados com a dimensão das explorações, em que as de maior dimensão demonstram prevalências mais elevadas. A repetibilidade e exequibilidade dos indicadores que compõem o protótipo foram também testadas. De uma forma global, os níveis de repetibilidade entre os observadores, são moderados a elevados, com excepção da Avaliação Qualitativa do Comportamento (AQC). Das várias etapas que constituem o protótipo, as que envolvem mais tempo são a 'Presença de filas' e a 'Avaliação clínica', com o tempo médio necessário para a sua aplicação atingindo valores mais elevados em explorações maiores. A realização deste estudo permite concluir que o protocolo final de avaliação de bem-estar animal em caprinos de leite terá potencial não só como uma base legislativa e regulamentar, mas igualmente como uma ferramenta de certificação, consultoria/gestão e de pesquisa, seguindo uma estratégia baseada em dois níveis de avaliação

Call Center Experience Optimization: A Case for a Virtual Predictive Queue

The evolution of the call center into contact centers and the growth of their use in providing customer-facing service by many companies has brought considerable capabilities in maintaining customer relationships but it also has brought challenges in providing quality service when call volumes are high. Limited in their ability to provide service at all times to all customers, companies are forced to balance the costs associated with hiring more customer service representatives and the quality of service provided by a fewer number. A primary challenge when there are not enough customer service representatives to engage the volume of callers in a timely manner is the significant wait times that can be experienced by many customers. Normally, callers are handled in accordance with a first-come, first-served policy with exceptions being skill-based routing to those customer service representatives with specialized skills. A proposed call center infrastructure framework called a Virtual Predictive Queue (VPQ) can allow some customers to benefit from a shorter call queue wait time. This proposed system can be implemented within a call center’s Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) device associated with computer telephony integration (CTI) and theoretically will not violate a first-come, first served policy

Performance issues in cellular wireless mesh networks

This thesis proposes a potential solution for future ubiquitous broadband wireless access networks, called a cellular wireless mesh network (CMESH), and investigates a number of its performance issues. A CMESH is organized in multi-radio, multi-channel, multi-rate and multi-hop radio cells. It can operate on abundant high radio frequencies, such as 5-50 GHz, and thus may satisfy the bandwidth requirements of future ubiquitous wireless applications. Each CMESH cell has a single Internet-connected gateway and serves up to hundreds of mesh nodes within its coverage area. This thesis studies performance issues in a CMESH, focusing on cell capacity, expressed in terms of the max-min throughput. In addition to introducing the concept of a CMESH, this thesis makes the following contributions. The first contribution is a new method for analyzing theoretical cell capacity. This new method is based on a new concept called Channel Transport Capacity (CTC), and derives new analytic expressions for capacity bounds for carrier-sense-based CMESH cells. The second contribution is a new algorithm called the Maximum Channel Collision Time (MCCT) algorithm and an expression for the nominal capacity of CMESH cells. This thesis proves that the nominal cell capacity is achievable and is the exact cell capacity for small cells within the abstract models. Finally, based on the MCCT algorithm, this thesis proposes a series of greedy algorithms for channel assignment and routing in CMESH cells. Simulation results show that these greedy algorithms can significantly improve the capacity of CMESH cells, compared with algorithms proposed by other researchers

Learning Human-Human Interactions in Images from Weak Textual Supervision

Interactions between humans are diverse and context-dependent, but previous works have treated them as categorical, disregarding the heavy tail of possible interactions. We propose a new paradigm of learning human-human interactions as free text from a single still image, allowing for flexibility in modeling the unlimited space of situations and relationships between people. To overcome the absence of data labelled specifically for this task, we use knowledge distillation applied to synthetic caption data produced by a large language model without explicit supervision. We show that the pseudo-labels produced by this procedure can be used to train a captioning model to effectively understand human-human interactions in images, as measured by a variety of metrics that measure textual and semantic faithfulness and factual groundedness of our predictions. We further show that our approach outperforms SOTA image captioning and situation recognition models on this task. We will release our code and pseudo-labels along with Waldo and Wenda, a manually-curated test set for still image human-human interaction understanding.Comment: To be presented at ICCV 2023. Project webpage: https://learning-interactions.github.i

Voice over IP

The area that this thesis covers is Voice over IP (or IP Telephony as it is sometimes called) over Private networks and not over the Internet. There is a distinction to be made between the two even though the term is loosely applied to both. IP Telephony over Private Networks involve calls made over private WANs using IP telephony protocols while IP Telephony over the Internet involve calls made over the public Internet using IP telephony protocols. Since the network is private, service is reliable because the network owner can control how resources are allocated to various applications, such as telephony services. The public Internet on the other hand is a public, largely unmanaged network that offers no reliable service guarantee. Calls placed over the Internet can be low in quality, but given the low price, some find this solution attractive. What started off as an Internet Revolution with free phone calls being offered to the general public using their multimedia computers has turned into a telecommunication revolution where enterprises are beginning to converge their data and voice networks into one network. In retrospect, an enterprise\u27s data networks are being leveraged for telephony. The communication industry has come full circle. Earlier in the decade data was being transmitted over the public voice networks and now voice is just another application which is/will be run over the enterprises existing data networks. We shall see in this thesis the problems that are encountered while sending Voice over Data networks using the underlying IP Protocol and the corrective steps taken by the Industry to resolve these multitudes of issues. Paul M. Zam who is collaborating in this Joint Thesis/project on VoIP will substantiate this theoretical research with his practical findings. On reading this paper the reader will gain an insight in the issues revolving the implementation of VoIP in an enterprises private network as well the technical data, which sheds more light on the same. Thus the premise of this joint thesis/project is to analyze the current status of the technology and present a business case scenario where an organization will be able to use this information

An Introduction to Computer Networks

An open textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses on computer networks