Developing an open data portal for the ESA climate change initiative

We introduce the rationale for, and architecture of, the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Open Data Portal (http://cci.esa.int/data/). The Open Data Portal hosts a set of richly diverse datasets – 13 “Essential Climate Variables” – from the CCI programme in a consistent and harmonised form and to provides a single point of access for the (>100 TB) data for broad dissemination to an international user community. These data have been produced by a range of different institutions and vary across both scientific and spatio-temporal characteristics. This heterogeneity of the data together with the range of services to be supported presented significant technical challenges. An iterative development methodology was key to tackling these challenges: the system developed exploits a workflow which takes data that conforms to the CCI data specification, ingests it into a managed archive and uses both manual and automatically generated metadata to support data discovery, browse, and delivery services. It utilises both Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) data nodes and the Open Geospatial Consortium Catalogue Service for the Web (OGC-CSW) interface, serving data into both the ESGF and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). A key part of the system is a new vocabulary server, populated with CCI specific terms and relationships which integrates OGC-CSW and ESGF search services together, developed as part of a dialogue between domain scientists and linked data specialists. These services have enabled the development of a unified user interface for graphical search and visualisation – the CCI Open Data Portal Web Presence

Array joint detection for C/TDMA systems in UMTS environments

Two array-based schemes for intracell and intercell interference suppression are proposed. In both cases, the spatial and temporal characteristics of the propagation are jointly exploited by placing a narrowband beamformer prior to the corresponding data detection stage. In the first approach, the filtered training sequence joint detection receiver (FTS-JDR), the beamformer is devoted to exclusively cancel out intercell interference. This way, intracell users can be jointly detected in a MMSE detection block. In contrast, the second algorithm, known as the filtered training sequence multisensor receiver (FTS-MR), aims to attenuate all the interferers in the beamforming stage which allows the user of interest to be detected following a MLSE strategy. In order to assess the performance of the proposed schemes, a set of link-level computer simulations adopting FRAMES' proposal for UMTS air-interface as well as realistic channel models for third generation communication systems is provided. Simulation results indicate that lower BERs can be obtained by concentrating interference cancellation tasks in the beamforming block.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Natural Language Dialogue Service for Appointment Scheduling Agents

Appointment scheduling is a problem faced daily by many individuals and organizations. Cooperating agent systems have been developed to partially automate this task. In order to extend the circle of participants as far as possible we advocate the use of natural language transmitted by e-mail. We describe COSMA, a fully implemented German language server for existing appointment scheduling agent systems. COSMA can cope with multiple dialogues in parallel, and accounts for differences in dialogue behaviour between human and machine agents. NL coverage of the sublanguage is achieved through both corpus-based grammar development and the use of message extraction techniques.Comment: 8 or 9 pages, LaTeX; uses aclap.sty, epsf.te

Enabling RAN Slicing Through Carrier Aggregation in mmWave Cellular Networks

The ever increasing number of connected devices and of new and heterogeneous mobile use cases implies that 5G cellular systems will face demanding technical challenges. For example, Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) and enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) scenarios present orthogonal Quality of Service (QoS) requirements that 5G aims to satisfy with a unified Radio Access Network (RAN) design. Network slicing and mmWave communications have been identified as possible enablers for 5G. They provide, respectively, the necessary scalability and flexibility to adapt the network to each specific use case environment, and low latency and multi-gigabit-per-second wireless links, which tap into a vast, currently unused portion of the spectrum. The optimization and integration of these technologies is still an open research challenge, which requires innovations at different layers of the protocol stack. This paper proposes to combine them in a RAN slicing framework for mmWaves, based on carrier aggregation. Notably, we introduce MilliSlice, a cross-carrier scheduling policy that exploits the diversity of the carriers and maximizes their utilization, thus simultaneously guaranteeing high throughput for the eMBB slices and low latency and high reliability for the URLLC flows.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. Proc. of the 18th Mediterranean Communication and Computer Networking Conference (MedComNet 2020), Arona, Italy, 202

A review of policies and strategies affecting the peri-urban interface

As discussed elsewhere (Adell, 1999; Allen, 1999), whilst there is no accepted definition of what precisely constitutes the "peri-urban interface", the project team has identified at least three different approaches from where it has been conventionally conceptualised. These approaches may be classified according to the set of variables they choose to emphasise: physical attributes, such as proximity to the city and poor infrastructure; socio-economic variables; or urban-rural flows (of people, energy, goods)