Geostatistical Techniques for Practical Wireless Network Coverage Mapping

The problem of mapping the extent of “usable” coverage of an existing wireless network is important in a large number of applications, including communicating the abilities of the network to users, identifying coverage gaps and planning expansion, discovering opportunities for spectrum reuse, and determining possible sources of interference with other networks. This thesis addresses fundamental but unsolved problems of measurement-based wireless coverage mapping: where should measurements be made, how many are necessary, and what can be said about the coverage at points that have not been measured. To address these problems, this thesis advocates a geostatistical approach using optimized spatial sampling and ordinary Kriging. A complete system for coverage mapping is developed that systematically addresses measurement, sampling, spatial modeling, interpolation, and visualization. This geostatistical method is able to produce more accurate and robust coverage maps than the current state of the art methods, and is able to discover coverage holes as effectively as dedicated heuristic methods using a small number of measurements. Several important practical extensions are investigated: applying these methods to drive-test measurements which have been resampled to alleviate effects from sampling bias, and crowd-sourced coverage mapping applications where volunteer-collected measurements may be sparse or infrequent. The resulting maps can then be refined iteratively, and updated systematically over time using an optimized iterative sampling scheme. An extensive validation is performed using measurements of production WiFi, WiMax, GSM, and LTE networks in representative urban and suburban outdoor environments

Artificial Neural Networks in Agriculture

Modern agriculture needs to have high production efficiency combined with a high quality of obtained products. This applies to both crop and livestock production. To meet these requirements, advanced methods of data analysis are more and more frequently used, including those derived from artificial intelligence methods. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are one of the most popular tools of this kind. They are widely used in solving various classification and prediction tasks, for some time also in the broadly defined field of agriculture. They can form part of precision farming and decision support systems. Artificial neural networks can replace the classical methods of modelling many issues, and are one of the main alternatives to classical mathematical models. The spectrum of applications of artificial neural networks is very wide. For a long time now, researchers from all over the world have been using these tools to support agricultural production, making it more efficient and providing the highest-quality products possible

Intelligent optimisation of analogue circuits using particle swarm optimisation, genetic programming and genetic folding

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University London.This research presents various intelligent optimisation methods which are: genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimisation (PSO), artificial bee colony algorithm (ABCA), firefly algorithm (FA) and bacterial foraging optimisation (BFO). It attempts to minimise analogue electronic filter and amplifier circuits, taking a cascode amplifier design as a case study, and utilising the above-mentioned intelligent optimisation algorithms with the aim of determining the best among them to be used. Small signal analysis (SSA) conversion of the cascode circuit is performed while mesh analysis is applied to transform the circuit to matrices form. Computer programmes are developed in Matlab using the above mentioned intelligent optimisation algorithms to minimise the cascode amplifier circuit. The objective function is based on input resistance, output resistance, power consumption, gain, upperfrequency band and lower frequency band. The cascode circuit result presented, applied the above-mentioned existing intelligent optimisation algorithms to optimise the same circuit and compared the techniques with the one using Nelder-Mead and the original circuit simulated in PSpice. Four circuit element types (resistors, capacitors, transistors and operational amplifier (op-amp)) are targeted using the optimisation techniques and subsequently compared to the initial circuit. The PSO based optimised result has proven to be best followed by that of GA optimised technique regarding power consumption reduction and frequency response. This work modifies symbolic circuit analysis in Matlab (MSCAM) tool which utilises Netlist from PSpice or from simulation to generate matrices. These matrices are used for optimisation or to compute circuit parameters. The tool is modified to handle both active and passive elements such as inductors, resistors, capacitors, transistors and op-amps. The transistors are transformed into SSA and op-amp use the SSA that is easy to implement in programming. Results are presented to illustrate the potential of the algorithm. Results are compared to PSpice simulation and the approach handled larger matrices dimensions compared to that of existing symbolic circuit analysis in Matlab tool (SCAM). The SCAM formed matrices by adding additional rows and columns due to how the algorithm was developed which takes more computer resources and limit its performance. Next to this, this work attempts to reduce component count in high-pass, low-pass, and all- pass active filters. Also, it uses a lower order filter to realise same results as higher order filter regarding frequency response curve. The optimisers applied are GA, PSO (the best two methods among them) and Nelder-Mead (the worst method) are used subsequently for the filters optimisation. The filters are converted into their SSA while nodal analysis is applied to transform the circuit to matrices form. High-pass, low-pass, and all- pass active filters results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique. Results presented have shown that with a computer code, a lower order op-amp filter can be applied to realise the same results as that of a higher order one. Furthermore, PSO can realise the best results regarding frequency response for the three results, followed by GA whereas Nelder- Mead has the worst results. Furthermore, this research introduced genetic folding (GF), MSCAM, and automatically simulated Netlist into existing genetic programming (GP), which is a new contribution in this work, which enhances the development of independent Matlab toolbox for the evolution of passive and active filter circuits. The active filter circuit evolution especially when operational amplifier is involved as a component is of it first kind in circuit evolution. In the work, only one software package is used instead of combining PSpice and Matlab in electronic circuit simulation. This saves the elapsed time for moving the simulation between the two platforms and reduces the cost of subscription. The evolving circuit from GP using Matlab simulation is automatically transformed into a symbolic Netlist also by Matlab simulation. The Netlist is fed into MSCAM; where MSCAM uses it to generate matrices for the simulation. The matrices enhance frequency response analysis of low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, band-stop of active and passive filter circuits. After the circuit evolution using the developed GP, PSO is then applied to optimise some of the circuits. The algorithm is tested with twelve different circuits (five examples of the active filter, four examples of passive filter circuits and three examples of transistor amplifier circuits) and the results presented have shown that the algorithm is efficient regarding design.Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) through University of Calabar, Nigeria

ESSE 2017. Proceedings of the International Conference on Environmental Science and Sustainable Energy

Environmental science is an interdisciplinary academic field that integrates physical-, biological-, and information sciences to study and solve environmental problems. ESSE - The International Conference on Environmental Science and Sustainable Energy provides a platform for experts, professionals, and researchers to share updated information and stimulate the communication with each other. In 2017 it was held in Suzhou, China June 23-25, 2017

A Statistical Approach to the Alignment of fMRI Data

Multi-subject functional Magnetic Resonance Image studies are critical. The anatomical and functional structure varies across subjects, so the image alignment is necessary. We define a probabilistic model to describe functional alignment. Imposing a prior distribution, as the matrix Fisher Von Mises distribution, of the orthogonal transformation parameter, the anatomical information is embedded in the estimation of the parameters, i.e., penalizing the combination of spatially distant voxels. Real applications show an improvement in the classification and interpretability of the results compared to various functional alignment methods

A comparison of the CAR and DAGAR spatial random effects models with an application to diabetics rate estimation in Belgium

When hierarchically modelling an epidemiological phenomenon on a finite collection of sites in space, one must always take a latent spatial effect into account in order to capture the correlation structure that links the phenomenon to the territory. In this work, we compare two autoregressive spatial models that can be used for this purpose: the classical CAR model and the more recent DAGAR model. Differently from the former, the latter has a desirable property: its ρ parameter can be naturally interpreted as the average neighbor pair correlation and, in addition, this parameter can be directly estimated when the effect is modelled using a DAGAR rather than a CAR structure. As an application, we model the diabetics rate in Belgium in 2014 and show the adequacy of these models in predicting the response variable when no covariates are available