Scoping report: current status of index-based insurance in Bangladesh

With current and anticipated increases in magnitude of extreme weather events and a declining consistency in weather patterns, particularly challenging for agriculture, there has been a growing interest in weather index-based insurance (IBI) schemes in Bangladesh. A number of weather index-based insurance products have already been tested and applied across Asia and Africa, with varying degrees of success, as a mechanism to improve livelihood security by enabling vulnerable populations to transfer risk associated with climate change, extreme weather events and other hazards. In the process, these efforts have generated important new knowledge on how these schemes can be designed and implemented for optimal results. However, the practice of index-based insurance is still limited in Bangladesh, and the experience and knowledge generated by the different stakeholders involved needs to be better communicated

Parallel Algorithms for Summing Floating-Point Numbers

The problem of exactly summing n floating-point numbers is a fundamental problem that has many applications in large-scale simulations and computational geometry. Unfortunately, due to the round-off error in standard floating-point operations, this problem becomes very challenging. Moreover, all existing solutions rely on sequential algorithms which cannot scale to the huge datasets that need to be processed. In this paper, we provide several efficient parallel algorithms for summing n floating point numbers, so as to produce a faithfully rounded floating-point representation of the sum. We present algorithms in PRAM, external-memory, and MapReduce models, and we also provide an experimental analysis of our MapReduce algorithms, due to their simplicity and practical efficiency.Comment: Conference version appears in SPAA 201

Network MIMO with Partial Cooperation between Radar and Cellular Systems

To meet the growing spectrum demands, future cellular systems are expected to share the spectrum of other services such as radar. In this paper, we consider a network multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) with partial cooperation model where radar stations cooperate with cellular base stations (BS)s to deliver messages to intended mobile users. So the radar stations act as BSs in the cellular system. However, due to the high power transmitted by radar stations for detection of far targets, the cellular receivers could burnout when receiving these high radar powers. Therefore, we propose a new projection method called small singular values space projection (SSVSP) to mitigate these harmful high power and enable radar stations to collaborate with cellular base stations. In addition, we formulate the problem into a MIMO interference channel with general constraints (MIMO-IFC-GC). Finally, we provide a solution to minimize the weighted sum mean square error minimization problem (WSMMSE) with enforcing power constraints on both radar and cellular stations.Comment: (c) 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other work

HAPS Gateway Link in the 5850-7075 MHz and Coexistence with Fixed Satellite Service

Gateway link is essential to connect HAPS platform to terrestrial based networks. This crucial link is incorporated in HAPS fixed service spectrum allocation in considerably high frequencies, renders the link for more attenuations by atmospheric gases, and rain effects, especially when the regional climate is not favorable. However, under the agenda item 1.20 of World Radio Conference-2012 (WRC-12) new HAPS allocation in the 5850-7075 MHz band is proposed. Although, spectrum features are incomparably reliable, on the contrary, Fixed Satellite Service (FSS) uplink transmissions will have signal levels much higher than those in HAPS systems and have the potential for causing interference at the HAPS gateway receiver. In this article a key aspect of co-channel interference phenomena is investigated to facilitate optimum frequency sharing in the band in question. By proposing mitigation techniques and statistical method this generic prediction model enhances the capability of the HAPS spectrum sharing and provides flexibility in spectrum planning for different fixed services

Measuring FL(x,Q2)/F2(x,Q2)F_L(x,Q^2)/F_2(x,Q^2) from Azimuthal Asymmetries in Deep Inelastic Scattering

We demonstrate that the angular distribution of hadrons produced in semi-inclusive deep inelastic final states is related to the inclusive longitudinal structure function. This relation could provide a new method of accessing $F_L(x,Q^2)$ in deep inelastic scattering measurements.Comment: 3 pages, LaTeX, The complete paper is also available via anonymous ftp at ftp://ttpux2.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de/ttp00/ttp00-03/ or via www at http://www-ttp.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de/Preprints

Global Analysis of Data on the Spin-orbit-coupled A1Σ+ and b3Πu States of Cs2

We present experimentally derived potential curves and spin-orbit interaction functions for the strongly perturbed A1+ u and b3u states of the cesium dimer. The results are based on data from several sources. Laser-induced fluorescence Fourier transform spectroscopy (LIF FTS) was used some time ago in the Laboratoire Aim´e Cotton primarily to study the X1+ g state. More recent work at Tsinghua University provides information from moderate resolution spectroscopy on the lowest levels of the b3± 0u states as well as additional high resolution data. From Innsbruck University, we have precision data obtained with cold Cs2 molecules. Recent data from Temple University was obtained using the optical-optical double resonance polarization spectroscopy technique, and finally, a group at the University of Latvia has added additional LIF FTS data. In the Hamiltonian matrix, we have used analytic potentials (the Expanded Morse Oscillator form) with both finite-difference (FD) coupled-channels and discrete variable representation (DVR) calculations of the term values. Fitted diagonal and off-diagonal spin-orbit functions are obtained and compared with ab initio results from Temple and Moscow State universities

Overlapped-MIMO Radar Waveform Design for Coexistence With Communication Systems

This paper explores an overlapped-multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna architecture and a spectrum sharing algorithm via null space projection (NSP) for radar-communications coexistence. In the overlapped-MIMO architecture, the transmit array of a collocated MIMO radar is partitioned into a number of subarrays that are allowed to overlap. Each of the antenna elements in these subarrays have signals orthogonal to each other and to the elements of the other subarrays. The proposed architecture not only improves sidelobe suppression to reduce interference to communications system, but also enjoys the advantages of MIMO radar without sacrificing the main desirable characteristics. The radar-centric spectrum sharing algorithm then projects the radar signal onto the null space of the communications system's interference channel, which helps to avoid interference from the radar. Numerical results are presented which show the performance of the proposed waveform design algorithm in terms of overall beampattern and sidelobe levels of the radar waveform and finally shows a comparison of the proposed system with existing collocated MIMO radar architectures.Comment: accepted at IEEE WCN

An Optimal Application-Aware Resource Block Scheduling in LTE

In this paper, we introduce an approach for application-aware resource block scheduling of elastic and inelastic adaptive real-time traffic in fourth generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. The users are assigned to resource blocks. A transmission may use multiple resource blocks scheduled over frequency and time. In our model, we use logarithmic and sigmoidal-like utility functions to represent the users applications running on different user equipments (UE)s. We present an optimal problem with utility proportional fairness policy, where the fairness among users is in utility percentage (i.e user satisfaction with the service) of the corresponding applications. Our objective is to allocate the resources to the users with priority given to the adaptive real-time application users. In addition, a minimum resource allocation for users with elastic and inelastic traffic should be guaranteed. Every user subscribing for the mobile service should have a minimum quality-of-service (QoS) with a priority criterion. We prove that our scheduling policy exists and achieves the maximum. Therefore the optimal solution is tractable. We present a centralized scheduling algorithm to allocate evolved NodeB (eNodeB) resources optimally with a priority criterion. Finally, we present simulation results for the performance of our scheduling algorithm and compare our results with conventional proportional fairness approaches. The results show that the user satisfaction is higher with our proposed method.Comment: 5 page