A Step towards Global Engineering Education: The U.S.−Brazil Engineering Exchange Partnership

Global markets are currently dictating the way that national economies around the world design and distribute consumer goods and services. Engineers are in the midst of this dynamic development. In this context, universities around the world are increasingly making an effort to establish international partnerships in their educational and research programs. Study abroad or international programs provide students value-added technical and cultural experiences, and are recognized as high-impact educational experiences. However, engineering students typically do not have the same variety of offerings of international program as students in other disciplines, such as the humanities or social science fields. In this article, the authors provide an overview of the critical aspects of developing a consortium among two universities in the U.S. and two Brazilian universities. The goal of this consortium is establishing a self-sustainable student exchange program in undergraduate engineering education, and increasing the opportunities and participation for American engineering students in international experiences. The activities in this program include the establishment of an agreement between the institutions, the implementation of a course transfer process, and the development of a procedure for foreign language training and cultural preparation. In addition, the authors also discuss the key lessons learned over the first three years of the four-year program (October’07 to September’11)

Multicanonical Monte Carlo Method Applied to the Investigation of Polarization Effects in Optical Fiber Communication Systems

Polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) is a major source of impairments in optical fiber com‐ munication systems. PMD causes distortion and broadens the optical pulses carrying infor‐ mation and lead to inter-symbol interference. In long-haul transmission systems it is necessary to limit the penalty caused by polarization effects [1], so that the probability of ex

NR Sidelink Performance Evaluation for Enhanced 5G-V2X Services

The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has specified Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) radio access technology in Releases 15–17, with an emphasis on facilitating direct communication between vehicles through the interface, sidelink PC5. This interface provides end-to-end network slicing functionality together with a stable cloud-native core network. The performance of direct vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications has been improved by using the sidelink interface, which allows for a network infrastructure bypass. Sidelink transmissions make use of orthogonal resources that are either centrally allocated (Mode 1, Release 14) or chosen by the vehicles themselves (Mode 2, Release 14). With growing interest in connected and autonomous vehicles, the advancement in radio access technologies that facilitate dependable and low-latency vehicular communications is becoming more significant. This is especially necessary when there are heavy traffic conditions and patterns. We thoroughly examined the New Radio (NR) sidelink’s performance based on 3GPP Releases 15–17 under various vehicle densities, speeds, and distance settings. Thus, by evaluating sidelink’s strengths and drawbacks, we are able to optimize resource allocation to obtain maximum coverage in urban areas. The performance evaluation was conducted on Network Simulator 3 (NS3.34/5G-LENA) utilizing various network metrics such as average packet reception rate, throughput, and latency

Wavelet-Based Harmonic Magnitude Measurement in the Presence of Interharmonics

The increasing proliferation of power electronic converters, nonlinear loads, and distributed generation are leading to increased levels of harmonic and interharmonics in power networks. As a consequence, power quality (PQ) has become a critical performance indicator for power utilities and end-users. This study proposes a novel harmonic estimation method based on the real-time stationary discrete wavelet packet transform (RT-SDWPT). The proposed technique decomposes an input signal into frequency bands with harmonic information at cutoff frequencies and uses a compensation strategy to estimate root mean square (RMS) values of harmonics at every sampling period. The performance and effectiveness of the proposed method are assessed using real measurement data from field cases and experimental setup. The real measurements include challenging scenarios with harmonics, subharmonics, interharmonics, frequency deviation, and non-stationary PQ events. The proposed method outperforms the harmonic estimation provided by the discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-based approach and existing wavelet packet-based methods in terms of accuracy and speed

Cyber-resilient Routing for Internet of Vehicles Networks During Black Hole Attack

The ever need for transportation safety, faster and convenient travel, decrease in energy consumption, as well as inter-connectivity has led to the field of intelligent transportation system (ITS). At the core of ITS is the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) combining hardware/sensors, software, and network technologies. Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) create mechanisms to connect IoV main elements, including vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), and Vehicle-to-Sensors (V2S). ITS systems heavily rely on its network connecting different parts of its infrastructure and ensuring data exchanges. However, VANET security is one of the primary challenges faced by connected vehicles. In IoV, the network is accessed by a variety device making the system vulnerable to a multitude of malicious attacks, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and black hole attacks. Since critical vehicle systems can be accessed remotely, successful attacks can lead to fatalities. In VANET, any node can function as a router for the other nodes, therefore a malicious node connected to the network may inject spoofed routing tables to the other nodes thereby affecting the operation of the entire network. To overcome this issue, we proposed a security scheme designed to improve routing protocols in the detection of black hole attack. The proposed approach is demonstrated on a Network Simulator (NS3.27) using different network parameters such as average packet loss rate, end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio (PDR) and network yield. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed method adds 10-15% improvement (on average) in End-to-End Delay, Packet Delivery Rate, Packet Loss Rate and Network Yield as compared with conventional Greedy Parameter Stateless Routing and Path Aware Greedy Parameter Stateless Routing under the black hole attack

Dimensionamento de redes de sinalização por canal comum

Orientador: Ivanil S. BonattiDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Eletrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: As redes de sinalização por canal comum têm papel preponderante nas redes modernas de telecomunicações que requerem robustez e alta confiabilidade. Neste trabalho é apresentada uma nova metodologia para a implantação das redes de sinalização integrada ao planejamento da comutação telefônica. Partindo-se da rede telefônica de troncos, planejada para um ano horizonte, é proposta uma abordagem top-down de projeto que resulta em uma rede de sinalização segura e de baixo custo. A metodologia segue os seguintes passos: previsão de demanda, determinação do número de pares STP (Sígnaling Transfer Poínt), localização desses pares na rede, filiação dos nós SP (Sígnaling Poínt) e dimensionamento dos enlaces de sinalização considerando os casos de falhas simples na rede. O trabalho é finalizado com exemplos de aplicação em que são analisadas diversas topologias para a rede de sinalização de uma cidade de médio porte e outra de grande porte. ...Observação: O resumo, na íntegra, poderá ser visualizado no texto completo da tese digitalAbstract: The Common Channel Signaling Network (CCSN) plays a major role in the modern telecommunication network, which requires robustness and reliability features. This work presents a proposal for the dimensioning of the CCSN integrated to trunk network planning. Beginning with the trunk network, planned for a one year target, a top-down methodology that results in a reliable and less expensive signaling network is proposed. The methodology respects the following steps: signaling traffic estimation, number of STP (Signaling Transfer Point) pairs, localization of the STP function, affiliating of the SP (Signaling Point) nodes and dimensioning of the signaling links considering the failure states. At last, examples of application are presented where several topologies of CCSN are analyzed for a small city and for a big city. ...Note: The complete abstract is available with the full electronic digital thesis or dissertationsMestradoMestre em Engenharia Elétric

Optimum receiver filters for optical fiber systems with polarization mode dispersion

We use a semi-analytical receiver model combined with importance sampling applied to first-order polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) to show that the performance of optical fiber systems whose optical and electrical receiver filter bandwidths are optimized for polarization-mode dispersion in practical on-off-keyed systems is equivalent to the performance of the same systems in which the receiver filters are optimized for operation in the absence of PMD.We also observed an increase in the sensitivity of the performance with respect to variations in the receiver filter bandwidths in the return-to-zero format in systems with PMD when compared with PMD-free operation. © 2009 IEEE

Receiver optimization for 40 Gbit/s optical fiber systems with polarization mode dispersion

We show that the performance of on-off-keyed 40 Gbit/s optical fiber systems whose optical and electrical receiver filter bandwidths are optimized for polarization-mode dispersion is equivalent to the performance of the same systems in which the receiver filters are optimized for operation in the absence of PMD. We also observed an increase in the sensitivity of the performance with respect to variations in the receiver filter bandwidths in the return-to-zero format in systems with PMD when compared with PMD-free operation. ©2009IEEE

Improvement and performance evaluation of GPSR-based routing techniques for vehicular ad hoc networks

Geographic routing has been widely studied over the years as an effective solution for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), especially because of the availability of wireless devices and global positioning system services. Given the unpredictable behavior of VANETs, selecting the next relay node has been proved a very challenging task. Therefore, in order to maintain acceptable network performance, the routing algorithm needs to be carefully designed to adapt to the fast network changes. The Geographic Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) protocol is a widely adopted position-based routing protocol for VANETs, which makes it a good benchmark candidate. In this paper, we analyze the shortcomings of GPSR and propose a new strategy named Path Aware GPSR (PA-GPSR), which includes additional extension tables in the Neighbors\u27 Table to select the best path and bypass the nodes that have delivered such previous packets in recovery mode. Moreover, our proposed algorithm can eliminate packet routing loops avoiding the delivery of the same packet to the same neighbor node. These PA-GPSR features can, for instance, help to overcome link-breakage due to the unavoidable reasons, such as road accidents or dead-end roads. We used the Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) and Network Simulator-version 3 (NS-3) platform to compare our proposed algorithm to the traditional GPSR and Maxduration-Minangle GPSR (MM-GPSR) in scenarios varying the number of nodes as well as the number of source-destination pairs. Our results show that the proposed PA-GPSR strategy performed better than the traditional GPSR and MM-GPSR when packet loss rate, end-to-end delay, and network yield are considered as performance metrics