Proceedings of Abstracts Engineering and Computer Science Research Conference 2019

© 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. For further details please see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Note: Keynote: Fluorescence visualisation to evaluate effectiveness of personal protective equipment for infection control is © 2019 Crown copyright and so is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Under this licence users are permitted to copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information; adapt the Information; exploit the Information commercially and non-commercially for example, by combining it with other Information, or by including it in your own product or application. Where you do any of the above you must acknowledge the source of the Information in your product or application by including or linking to any attribution statement specified by the Information Provider(s) and, where possible, provide a link to this licence: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/This book is the record of abstracts submitted and accepted for presentation at the Inaugural Engineering and Computer Science Research Conference held 17th April 2019 at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK. This conference is a local event aiming at bringing together the research students, staff and eminent external guests to celebrate Engineering and Computer Science Research at the University of Hertfordshire. The ECS Research Conference aims to showcase the broad landscape of research taking place in the School of Engineering and Computer Science. The 2019 conference was articulated around three topical cross-disciplinary themes: Make and Preserve the Future; Connect the People and Cities; and Protect and Care

Achieving Universal Access to Broadband

The paper discusses appropriate policy measures for achieving universal access to broadband services in Europe. Access can be delivered by means of many different technology solutions described in the paper. This means a greater degree of competition and affects the kind of policy measures to be applied. The paper concludes that other policy measure than the classical universal service obligation are in play, and discusses various policy measures taking the Lisbon process as a point of departure. Available policy measures listed in the paper include, universal service obligation, harmonization, demand stimulation, public support for extending the infrastructure, public private partnerships (PPP), and others.Broadband, universal service, broadband policy, public private partnership, Lisbon process

ANTENNA FOR WIRELESS UNDERGROUND COMMUNICATION

Systems and methods are disclosed for an underground antenna structure for radiating through a dissipative medium, the antenna structure. The antenna structure includes a dielectric substrate, a feeding structure disposed on the substrate, and one or more electrical conductors. The one or more electrical conductors are disposed on the substrate, oriented, and buried within the dissipative medium. The electrical conductors are also adapted to radiate signals at a frequency in half-space adjacent to the dissipative medium. The adaptation includes a beamwidth state for one or more of the electrical conductors based at least in part on the relative permittivity of the dissipative medium

Mandate-driven networking eco-system : a paradigm shift in end-to-end communications

The wireless industry is driven by key stakeholders that follow a holistic approach of "one-system-fits-all" that leads to moving network functionality of meeting stringent End-to-End (E2E) communication requirements towards the core and cloud infrastructures. This trend is limiting smaller and new players for bringing in new and novel solutions. For meeting these E2E requirements, tenants and end-users need to be active players for bringing their needs and innovations. Driving E2E communication not only in terms of quality of service (QoS) but also overall carbon footprint and spectrum efficiency from one specific community may lead to undesirable simplifications and a higher level of abstraction of other network segments may lead to sub-optimal operations. Based on this, the paper presents a paradigm shift that will enlarge the role of wireless innovation at academia, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME)'s, industries and start-ups while taking into account decentralized mandate-driven intelligence in E2E communications