U.S. Wind Turbine Manufacturing: Federal Support for an Emerging Industry

[Excerpt] This report discusses the U.S. wind turbine manufacturing industry, its supply chain, employment and international trade trends, major federal policy efforts aimed at supporting the industry, and issues affecting its future. The wind industry’s national trade group, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), reported an estimated 30,000 Americans were employed directly and indirectly in wind turbine manufacturing in 2011, compared to 2,500 in 2004. Another 45,000 U.S. workers reportedly were employed in other parts of the wind industry in 2011, including construction and services. Wind turbine equipment and component manufacturing jobs range in pay from about $30,000 to around$90,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Following an unprecedented period of growth in the U.S. wind power market between 2005 and 2009, about half as many new wind turbines were installed in 2011 (some 3,500) as in 2009

Wireless broadband access: WiMAX and beyond - Investigation of bandwidth request mechanisms under point-to-multipoint mode of WiMAX networks

The WiMAX standard specifies a metropolitan area broadband wireless access air interface. In order to support QoS for multimedia applications, various bandwidth request and scheduling mechanisms are suggested in WiMAX, in which a subscriber station can send request messages to a base station, and the base station can grant or reject the request according to the available radio resources. This article first compares two fundamental bandwidth request mechanisms specified in the standard, random access vs. polling under the point-to-multipoint mode, a mandatory transmission mode. Our results demonstrate that random access outperforms polling when the request rate is low. However, its performance degrades significantly when the channel is congested. Adaptive switching between random access and polling according to load can improve system performance. We also investigate the impact of channel noise on the random access request mechanism

Service-Oriented Process Models in Telecommunication Business

The thesis concentrates on to evaluate challenges in the business process management and the need for Service-oriented process models in telecommunication business to alleviate the integration work efforts and to reduce total costs of ownership. The business aspect concentrates on operations and business support systems which are tailored for communication service providers. Business processes should be designed in conformance with TeleManagement Forum's integrated business architecture framework. The thesis rationalizes the need to transform organizations and their way of working from vertical silos to horizontal layers and to understand transformational efforts which are needed to adopt a new strategy. Furthermore, the thesis introduces service characterizations and goes deeper into technical requirements that a service compliant middleware system needs to support. At the end of the thesis Nokia Siemens Networks proprietary approach – Process Automation Enabling Suite is introduced, and finally the thesis performs two case studies. The first one is Nokia Siemens Networks proprietary survey which highlights the importance of customer experience management and the second one is an overall research study whose results have been derived from other public surveys covering application integration efforts