Wireless Resource Management in Industrial Internet of Things

Wireless communications are highly demanded in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to realize the vision of future flexible, scalable and customized manufacturing. Despite the academia research and on-going standardization efforts, there are still many challenges for IIoT, including the ultra-high reliability and low latency requirements, spectral shortage, and limited energy supply. To tackle the above challenges, we will focus on wireless resource management in IIoT in this thesis by designing novel framework, analyzing performance and optimizing wireless resources. We first propose a bandwidth reservation scheme for Tactile Internet in the local area network of IIoT. Specifically, we minimize the reserved bandwidth taking into account the classification errors while ensuring the latency and reliability requirements. We then extend to the more challenging long distance communications for IIoT, which can support the global skill-set delivery network. We propose to predict the future system state and send to the receiver in advance, and thus the delay experienced by the user is reduced. The bandwidth usage is analysed and minimized to ensure delay and reliability requirements. Finally, we address the issue of energy supply in IIoT, where Radio frequency energy harvesting (RFEH) is used to charge unattended IIoT low-power devices remotely and continuously. To motivate the third-party chargers, a contract theory-based framework is proposed, where the optimal contract is derived to maximize the social welfare

Dynamic Topology Estimation and Resource Allocation for Power Line Communication

Power line communication (PLC), which uses existing infrastructure of power delivery for data transfer, is regarded as an economical, pervasive and extensive communication solution for smart grid and home broadband applications. One of the challenges of applying communication technologies to power line network lies in acquirement of channel state information (CSI), which is dependent on network topology. Moreover, the knowledge of topology provides a basis for the design of routing protocols and power flow optimization. Therefore, efficient approaches for dynamic topology estimation are highly demanded. While dynamic routing and resource allocation enable high-speed and multi-tasking communication services over power lines. In this thesis, a dynamic topology estimation scheme for PLC is investigated, and a cross-layer routing and resource allocation scheme assisted by dynamic topology estimation is developed to improve the system performance. In the first contribution, a high-resolution and low-complexity dynamic topology estimation scheme for time-varying indoor PLC networks is proposed. The scheme consists of three parts: a) a time-frequency domain reflectometry (TFDR) based path length estimation method, which requires measurement at a single PLC modem and achieves a much higher resolution than the frequency domain reflectometry (FDR) based method; b) a node-by-node greedy algorithm for topology reconstruction, which is much more computationally efficient than the existing peak-by-peak searching algorithm; c) an impulsive noise assisted dynamic topology re-estimation method, which results in a significant complexity reduction over fixed-frequency re-estimation. In the second contribution, a cross-layer routing and resource allocation (RA) scheme assisted by dynamic topology estimation is proposed to optimize the system throughput of indoor PLC network with heterogeneous delay requirements. The proposed scheme provides a multi-layer solution, which conducts the network layer routing based on the result of PHY layer resource allocation which is constrained by the MAC layer queuing delay. With the dynamic topology estimation proposed in the first contribution, the routing can be solved centrally at the source, which is more robust against topology changes compared to distributed solutions. The proposed cross-layer RA scheme consists of subcarrier allocation (SA) to multiple users and power allocation (PA) to subcarriers satisfying heterogeneous delay requirements. It is demonstrated that the proposed centralized routing strategy achieves a much lower packet loss rate (PLR) than a distributed routing scheme; while with optimal RA, the system throughput is significantly improved compared to the routing schemes without considering RA

Introduction: Ways of Machine Seeing

How do machines, and, in particular, computational technologies, change the way we see the world? This special issue brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to explore the entanglement of machines and their ways of seeing from new critical perspectives. This 'editorial' is for a special issue of AI & Society, which includes contributions from: María Jesús Schultz Abarca, Peter Bell, Tobias Blanke, Benjamin Bratton, Claudio Celis Bueno, Kate Crawford, Iain Emsley, Abelardo Gil-Fournier, Daniel Chávez Heras, Vladan Joler, Nicolas Malevé, Lev Manovich, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Perle Møhl, Bruno Moreschi, Fabian Offert, Trevor Paglan, Jussi Parikka, Luciana Parisi, Matteo Pasquinelli, Gabriel Pereira, Carloalberto Treccani, Rebecca Uliasz, and Manuel van der Veen

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction towards E-shopping in Malaysia

Online shopping or e-shopping has changed the world of business and quite a few people have decided to work with these features. What their primary concerns precisely and the responses from the globalisation are the competency of incorporation while doing their businesses. E-shopping has also increased substantially in Malaysia in recent years. The rapid increase in the e-commerce industry in Malaysia has created the demand to emphasize on how to increase customer satisfaction while operating in the e-retailing environment. It is very important that customers are satisfied with the website, or else, they would not return. Therefore, a crucial fact to look into is that companies must ensure that their customers are satisfied with their purchases that are really essential from the ecommerce’s point of view. With is in mind, this study aimed at investigating customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed among students randomly selected from various public and private universities located within Klang valley area. Total 369 questionnaires were returned, out of which 341 questionnaires were found usable for further analysis. Finally, SEM was employed to test the hypotheses. This study found that customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia is to a great extent influenced by ease of use, trust, design of the website, online security and e-service quality. Finally, recommendations and future study direction is provided. Keywords: E-shopping, Customer satisfaction, Trust, Online security, E-service quality, Malaysia

RadioLab tra presente e futuro

Il progetto nazionale dell’INFN sul monitoraggio ambientale del radon ha coinvolto per oltre un decennio scuole su tutto il territorio nazionale. Recentemente, alcune attività hanno coinvolto molte sedi rafforzandone l’efficacia e l’impatto su studenti e insegnanti. Tra queste ricordiamo il sondaggio sulla conoscenza del radon, la scuola estiva nazionale e le attività di calibrazione con protocolli comuni. La pandemia ha interrotto bruscamente le attività in presenza e l’organizzazione scolastica post-lockdown richiede di ripensare alcune azioni per ampliare la diffusione della consapevolezza di questa problematica tra i cittadini, ora che il recepimento della normativa europea sul radon `e giunto a compimento