EOCC-TARA for Software Defined WBAN

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a promising cost-effective technology for the privacy confined military applications and healthcare applications like remote health monitoring, telemedicine, and e-health services. The use of a Software-Defined Network (SDN) approach improves the control and management processes of the complex structured WBANs and also provides higher flexibility and dynamic network structure. To seamless routing performance in SDN-based WBAN, the energy-efficiency problems must be tackled effectively. The main contribution of this paper is to develop a novel Energy Optimized Congestion Control based on Temperature Aware Routing Algorithm (EOCC-TARA) using Enhanced Multi-objective Spider Monkey Optimization (EMSMO) for SDN-based WBAN. This algorithm overcomes the vital challenges, namely energy-efficiency, congestion-free communication, and reducing adverse thermal effects in WBAN routing. First, the proposed EOCC-TARA routing algorithm considers the effects of temperature due to the thermal dissipation of sensor nodes and formulates a strategy to adaptively select the forwarding nodes based on temperature and energy. Then the congestion avoidance concept is added with the energy-efficiency, link reliability, and path loss for modeling the cost function based on which the EMSMO provides the optimal routing. Simulations were performed, and the evaluation results showed that the proposed EOCC-TARA routing algorithm has superior performance than the traditional routing approaches in terms of energy consumption, network lifetime, throughput, temperature control, congestion overhead, delay, and successful transmission rate

Epidemiological profile of infertile couples in Western Iraq

Infertility affecting approximately one in seven couples globally is a poorly documented issue in Iraq. This study examines the epidemiology of infertility among 82 Iraqi couples undergoing assisted conception at Al-Razzi Hospital in Ramadi. Retrospective analysis of medical records provided insights into sociodemographic profiles, infertility types (primary or secondary), and causes. The age range for males and females was 17-59 years, with means of 34.5 (±7.4) and 31.4 (±7.3) years, respectively. Infertility duration spanned a mean of 4.9 (±3.9) years. Primary infertility affected 74% of couples, while 25.6% experienced secondary infertility. Among the couples, the biochemical pregnancy rate was 45%, the clinical pregnancy rate was 38%, and the rate of live births was 24%. The average embryo transfer was 3.4, with a 21% miscarriage rate. This study emphasizes high rates of primary infertility dominated by female factors. Future research should consider larger population and detailed data on outcomes of in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycles to enhance understanding on the current (in)fertility status in Iraq

An integrated multi-criteria decision-making framework for a medical device selection in the healthcare industry

Medical devices used in healthcare organizations are costly, and the process of selecting these devices requires considering multiple criteria such as effectiveness and ease of use. Careful selection of these devices is daunting since it entails the evaluation of various measures. This research investigates the selection process of the same type of medical devices, especially when alternatives are available, and the organization needs to make a good selection. A Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) framework based on the integration of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and ELimination Et Choice Translating Reality (ELECTRE) method is developed. The framework model includes 10 criteria, which are selected based on real-life inputs from professional physicians. Seven Ultrasound machines (referred to as alternatives) are evaluated using the developed framework. A case study is conducted on the best selection practice of an Ultrasound machine in a gynecology clinic based in the Kingdom of Jordan. Results revealed that the best and worst alternatives of ultrasound machines are identified and compared with all other options

Design of Mobile Healthcare Reminder for Chronic Diabetes

Mobile technology has been increasingly used in healthcare services. However, little has been done in handling patients of chronic disease. Accordingly, this study aims to design a mobile reminder system that cares for patients’ selfmanagement of their chronic diabetes. To achieve the main aim, the following sub objectives have been formulated; (i) to identify the requirements for the mobile healthcare reminder suitable for chronic diabetes, (ii) to develop and construct the prototype of the system, (iii) to evaluate the prototype in terms of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and satisfaction. The prototype has been evaluated using an adapted questionnaire, involving 30 patients in Baghdad Hospital. The results reveal that the prototype is perceived useful and easy to use by the participants. Also, they are highly satisfied with the prototype. The outcome of this study would help mobile healthcare applications developers to design future mobile reminder system particularly for patients who are suffering from chronic diseas

THE BEHAVIOR OF CONCRETE CONTAINING POLYPROPYLENE FIBERS AND STEEL MESH ON THE IMPACT RESISTANCE

Annually, engineers face many sustainability problems due to thousands of tons of concrete being manufactured for buildings and structures. So, alternatives to some construction materials are used. In this research, cement composites reinforced with steel mesh and cement composites reinforced with polypropylene fibers (PPFs) were used. For this purpose, 36 concrete slabs were poured with dimensions of 40 x 40 x 4 cm containing steel mesh, and PPF with dimensions (10 x 10, 15x15, 20x20, 25x25, and 40x40) cm in the center of the slab. The impact resistance of both types of concrete was examined, in addition to noting the initial cracking of the samples and examining the energy absorption at the initial cracking and the final failure of both types, through the results, it was found that the use of steel mesh 40x40 cm is the best in terms of its resistance to repeated impact loads as well as its energy absorption

Utilizing an enhanced cellular automata model for data mining

Data mining deals with clustering and classifying large amounts of data, in order to discover new knowledge from the existent data by identifying correlations and relationships between various data-sets. Cellular automata have been used before for classification purposes. This paper presents a cellular automata enhanced classification algorithm for data mining. Experimental results show that the proposed enhancement gives better performance in terms of accuracy and execution time than previous work using cellular automata

A Novel Heuristic Data Routing for Urban Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

This work is devoted to solving the problem of multi-criteria multi-hop routing in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), aiming at three goals, increasing the end-to-end delivery ratio, reducing the end-to-end latency, and minimizing the network overhead. To this end and beyond the state-of-the-art, HEuristic ROuting for Vehicular Networks (HERO), which is a distributed routing protocol for urban environments, encapsulating two main components, is proposed. The first component, road-segment selection, aims to prioritize the road segments based on a heuristic function that contains two probability distributions, namely, shortest distance distribution (SDD) and connectivity distribution (CD). The mass function of SDD is the product of three quantities, the perpendicular distance, the dot-production angle, and the segment length. On the other hand, the mass function of CD considers two quantities, the density of vehicles and the inter-distance of vehicles on the road segment. The second component, vehicle selection, aims to prioritize the vehicles on the road segment based on four quantities, the relative speed, the movement direction, the available buffer size, and the signal fading. The simulation results showed that HERO achieved a promising performance in terms of delivery success ratio, delivery delay, and communication overhead

Novel Architecture and Heuristic Algorithms for Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks

This article extends the promising software-defined networking technology to wireless sensor networks to achieve two goals: 1) reducing the information exchange between the control and data planes, and 2) counterbalancing between the sender's waiting-time and the duplicate packets. To this end and beyond the state-of-the-art, this work proposes an SDN-based architecture, namely MINI-SDN, that separates the control and data planes. Moreover, based on MINI-SDN, we propose MINI-FLOW, a communication protocol that orchestrates the computation of flows and data routing between the two planes. MINI-FLOW supports uplink, downlink and intra-link flows. Uplink flows are computed based on a heuristic function that combines four values, the hops to the sink, the Received Signal Strength (RSS), the direction towards the sink, and the remaining energy. As for the downlink flows, two heuristic algorithms are proposed, Optimized Reverse Downlink (ORD) and Location-based Downlink(LD). ORD employs the reverse direction of the uplink while LD instantiates the flows based on a heuristic function that combines three values, the distance to the end node, the remaining energy and RSS value. Intra-link flows employ a combination of uplink/downlink flows. The experimental results show that the proposed architectureand communication protocol perform and scale well with both network size and density, considering the joint problem of routing and load balancing

SDORP: SDN based Opportunistic Routing for Asynchronous Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), it is inappropriate to use conventional unicast routing due to the broadcast storm problem and spatial diversity of communication links. Opportunistic Routing (OR) benefits the low duty-cycled WSNs by prioritizing the multiple candidates for each node instead of selecting one node as in conventional unicast routing. OR reduces the sender waiting time, but it also suffers from the duplicate packets problem due to multiple candidates waking up simultaneously. The number of candidates should be restricted to counterbalance between the sender waiting time and duplicate packets. In this paper, software-defined networking (SDN) is adapted for the flexible management of WSNs by allowing the decoupling of the control plane from the sensor nodes. This study presents an SDN based load balanced opportunistic routing for duty-cycled WSNs that addresses two parts. First, the candidates are computed and controlled in the control plane. Second, the metric used to prioritize the candidates considers the average of three probability distributions, namely transmission distance distribution, expected number of hops distribution and residual energy distribution so that more traffic is guided through the nodes with higher priority. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol can significantly improve the network lifetime, routing efficiency, energy consumption, sender waiting time and duplicate packets as compared with the benchmarks