9,417 research outputs found
Ordered Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding in G.fast Downstream
G.fast is an upcoming next generation DSL standard envisioned to use
bandwidth up to 212 MHz. Far-end crosstalk (FEXT) at these frequencies greatly
overcomes direct links. Its cancellation based on non-linear
Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding (THP) proved to show significant advantage over
standard linear precoding. This paper proposes a novel THP structure in which
ordering of successive interference pre-cancellation can be optimized for
downstream with non-cooperating receivers. The optimized scheme is compared to
existing THP structure denoted as equal-rate THP which is widely adopted in
wireless downlink. Structure and performance of both methods differ
significantly favoring the proposed scheme. The ordering that maximizes the
minimum rate (max-min fairness) for each tone of the discrete multi-tone
modulation is the familiar V-BLAST ordering. However, V-BLAST does not lead to
the global maximum when applied independently on each tone. The proposed novel
Dynamic Ordering (DO) strategy takes into account asymmetric channel statistics
to yield the highest minimum aggregated rate.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figures, Accepted at the 2015 IEEE Globecom 2015,
Selected Areas in Communications: Access Networks and Systems, 6-10 December,
201
Contact patterns among high school students
Face-to-face contacts between individuals contribute to shape social networks
and play an important role in determining how infectious diseases can spread
within a population. It is thus important to obtain accurate and reliable
descriptions of human contact patterns occurring in various day-to-day life
contexts. Recent technological advances and the development of wearable sensors
able to sense proximity patterns have made it possible to gather data giving
access to time-varying contact networks of individuals in specific
environments. Here we present and analyze two such data sets describing with
high temporal resolution the contact patterns of students in a high school. We
define contact matrices describing the contact patterns between students of
different classes and show the importance of the class structure. We take
advantage of the fact that the two data sets were collected in the same setting
during several days in two successive years to perform a longitudinal analysis
on two very different timescales. We show the high stability of the contact
patterns across days and across years: the statistical distributions of numbers
and durations of contacts are the same in different periods, and we observe a
very high similarity of the contact matrices measured in different days or
different years. The rate of change of the contacts of each individual from one
day to the next is also similar in different years. We discuss the interest of
the present analysis and data sets for various fields, including in social
sciences in order to better understand and model human behavior and
interactions in different contexts, and in epidemiology in order to inform
models describing the spread of infectious diseases and design targeted
containment strategies.Comment: Supplementary Information at
http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.figshare.com/1677807/File_S1.pd
THE SENSITIVITY OF TRAVEL COST ESTIMATES OF RECREATION DEMAND TO THE FUNCTIONAL FORM AND DEFINITION OF ORIGIN ZONES
The travel-cost of estimating a recreation demand function requires specifying the functional form of the first-stage demand curve and defining the width of the concentric origin zones. A Monte Carlo approach is used to determine the sensitivity of demand and valuation estimates to alternative choices about these two issues. Demand and valuation estimates are shown to be sensitive to the definition of the origin zone and to the use of a semilog versus a double log first-stage demand curve. The proper choice or origin zones is unclear, but a semilog form is more appropriate than a double log form.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,
Activity driven modeling of time varying networks
Network modeling plays a critical role in identifying statistical
regularities and structural principles common to many systems. The large
majority of recent modeling approaches are connectivity driven. The structural
patterns of the network are at the basis of the mechanisms ruling the network
formation. Connectivity driven models necessarily provide a time-aggregated
representation that may fail to describe the instantaneous and fluctuating
dynamics of many networks. We address this challenge by defining the activity
potential, a time invariant function characterizing the agents' interactions
and constructing an activity driven model capable of encoding the instantaneous
time description of the network dynamics. The model provides an explanation of
structural features such as the presence of hubs, which simply originate from
the heterogeneous activity of agents. Within this framework, highly dynamical
networks can be described analytically, allowing a quantitative discussion of
the biases induced by the time-aggregated representations in the analysis of
dynamical processes.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure
Simulation of an SEIR infectious disease model on the dynamic contact network of conference attendees
The spread of infectious diseases crucially depends on the pattern of
contacts among individuals. Knowledge of these patterns is thus essential to
inform models and computational efforts. Few empirical studies are however
available that provide estimates of the number and duration of contacts among
social groups. Moreover, their space and time resolution are limited, so that
data is not explicit at the person-to-person level, and the dynamical aspect of
the contacts is disregarded. Here, we want to assess the role of data-driven
dynamic contact patterns among individuals, and in particular of their temporal
aspects, in shaping the spread of a simulated epidemic in the population.
We consider high resolution data of face-to-face interactions between the
attendees of a conference, obtained from the deployment of an infrastructure
based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices that assess mutual
face-to-face proximity. The spread of epidemics along these interactions is
simulated through an SEIR model, using both the dynamical network of contacts
defined by the collected data, and two aggregated versions of such network, in
order to assess the role of the data temporal aspects.
We show that, on the timescales considered, an aggregated network taking into
account the daily duration of contacts is a good approximation to the full
resolution network, whereas a homogeneous representation which retains only the
topology of the contact network fails in reproducing the size of the epidemic.
These results have important implications in understanding the level of
detail needed to correctly inform computational models for the study and
management of real epidemics
Human Computation and Economics
This article is devoted to economical aspects of Human Computation (HC) and
to perspectives of HC in economics. As of economical aspects of HC, it is first
observed that much of what makes HC systems effective is economical in nature
suggesting that complexity being reconsidered as a “HC complexity” and the conception
of efficient HC systems as a “HC economics”. This article also points to the
relevance of HC in the development of standard software and to the importance of
competition in HC systems. As of HC in economics, it is first argued that markets
can be seen as HC systems avant la lettre. Looking more closely at financial markets,
the article then points to a speed differential between transactions and credit
risk awareness that compromises the efficiency of financial markets. Finally, a HCbased
credit risk rating is proposed that, overcoming the afore mentioned speed
differential, holds promise for better functioning financial markets
Concepts for design of an energy management system incorporating dispersed storage and generation
New forms of generation based on renewable resources must be managed as part of existing power systems in order to be utilized with maximum effectiveness. Many of these generators are by their very nature dispersed or small, so that they will be connected to the distribution part of the power system. This situation poses new questions of control and protection, and the intermittent nature of some of the energy sources poses problems of scheduling and dispatch. Under the assumption that the general objectives of energy management will remain unchanged, the impact of dispersed storage and generation on some of the specific functions of power system control and its hardware are discussed
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