Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks in Marine Environment Monitoring: A Survey

With the rapid development of society and the economy, an increasing number of human activities have gradually destroyed the marine environment. Marine environment monitoring is a vital problem and has increasingly attracted a great deal of research and development attention. During the past decade, various marine environment monitoring systems have been developed. The traditional marine environment monitoring system using an oceanographic research vessel is expensive and time-consuming and has a low resolution both in time and space. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have recently been considered as potentially promising alternatives for monitoring marine environments since they have a number of advantages such as unmanned operation, easy deployment, real-time monitoring, and relatively low cost. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art technologies in the field of marine environment monitoring using wireless sensor networks. It first describes application areas, a common architecture of WSN-based oceanographic monitoring systems, a general architecture of an oceanographic sensor node, sensing parameters and sensors, and wireless communication technologies. Then, it presents a detailed review of some related projects, systems, techniques, approaches and algorithms. It also discusses challenges and opportunities in the research, development, and deployment of wireless sensor networks for marine environment monitoring

Non-Data Aided Rician Parameters Estimation in Temporal Fading Channel With 3 DoFs Gaussian Mixture Model

Rician distribution has been widely utilized to describe wireless fading channel. In the non-stationary temporal fading channel like industrial scenarios, both the specular and scattered components of the multi-path fading channel will be time varying. As a result, the online estimation of Rician parameters is necessary to provide stable wireless service. The traditional estimation approaches of Rician parameters are designed for channel measurement usage and therefore have to work in the data-aided mode for online estimation with modulated I/Q samples. To solve this problem, some non-data-aided algorithms have been proposed in recent years, but only valid in specific scenarios. In this paper, we formulate the estimation of Rician parameters from modulated I/Q samples as a two-dimensional Gaussian mixture model to provide a general non-data-aided Rician parameter estimation method. By involving a priori information of modulation scheme and the motivation of optimized gradient searching, the independent parameters in the maximum likelihood estimation can be significantly decreased to three, which leads to fast convergence of the modified expectation-maximization algorithm with high accuracy. The combination of these modifications has been finally formulated as a Rician mixture model. The numerical results and field measurements illustrate the feasibility of this methodology

Service Oriented Architecture for High Level Applications

Standalone high level applications often suffer from poor performance and reliability due to lengthy initialization, heavy computation and rapid graphical update. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is trying to separate the initialization and computation from applications and to distribute such work to various service providers. Heavy computation such as beam tracking will be done periodically on a dedicated server and data will be available to client applications at all time. Industrial standard service architecture can help to improve the performance, reliability and maintainability of the service. Robustness will also be improved by reducing the complexity of individual client applications

Generic Model Host System Design

There are many simulation codes for accelerator modelling; each one has some strength but not all. A platform which can host multiple modelling tools would be ideal for various purposes. The model platform along with infrastructure support can be used not only for online applications but also for offline purposes. Collaboration is formed for the effort of providing such a platform. In order to achieve such a platform, a set of common physics data structure has to be set. Application Programming Interface (API) for physics applications should also be defined within a model data provider. A preliminary platform design and prototype is discussed

Miscibility and phase structure of binary blends of poly lactide and poly (vinylpyrrolidone).

ABSTRACT: Blends of amorphous poly(DL-lactide) (DL-PLA) and crystalline poly(Llactide) (PLLA) with poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) were prepared by both solution/precipitation and solution-casting film methods. The miscibility, crystallization behavior, and component interaction of these blends were examined by differential scanning calorimetry. Only one glass-transition temperature (T g ) was found in the DL-PLA/PMMA solution/precipitation blends, indicating miscibility in this system. Two isolated T g 's appeared in the DL-PLA/PMMA solution-casting film blends, suggesting two segregated phases in the blend system, but evidence showed that two components were partially miscible. In the PLLA/PMMA blend, the crystallization of PLLA was greatly restricted by amorphous PMMA. Once the thermal history of the blend was destroyed, PLLA and PMMA were miscible. The T g composition relationship for both DL-PLA/PMMA and PLLA/PMMA miscible systems obeyed the Gordon-Taylor equation. Experiment results indicated that there is no more favorable trend of DL-PLA to form miscible blends with PMMA than PLLA when PLLA is in the amorphous state

Internet of Things in Marine Environment Monitoring: A Review

Marine environment monitoring has attracted more and more attention due to the growing concern about climate change. During the past couple of decades, advanced information and communication technologies have been applied to the development of various marine environment monitoring systems. Among others, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been playing an important role in this area. This paper presents a review of the application of the Internet of Things in the field of marine environment monitoring. New technologies including advanced Big Data analytics and their applications in this area are briefly reviewed. It also discusses key research challenges and opportunities in this area, including the potential application of IoT and Big Data in marine environment protection

Design of Accelerator Online Simulator Server Using Structured Data

Model based control plays an important role for a modern accelerator during beam commissioning, beam study, and even daily operation. With a realistic model, beam behaviour can be predicted and therefore effectively controlled. The approach used by most current high level application environments is to use a built-in simulation engine and feed a realistic model into that simulation engine. Instead of this traditional monolithic structure, a new approach using a client-server architecture is under development. An on-line simulator server is accessed via network accessible structured data. With this approach, a user can easily access multiple simulation codes. This paper describes the design, implementation, and current status of PVData, which defines the structured data, and PVAccess, which provides network access to the structured data

Gestational bisphenol A exposure advances puberty onset in female offspring: Critical time window identification

Increasing evidence shows that the early onset of puberty in female offspring may be caused by maternal prenatal exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) during pregnancy; however, the critical time window of maternal prenatal BPA exposure remains unknown. Here, we identify the critical time window of gestational BPA exposure that induces early onset of puberty in female offspring. Pregnant CD-1 mice were gavaged with BPA (8 mg/kg) daily during the early gestational stage (GD1–GD6), middle gestational stage (GD7–GD12) or late gestational stage (GD13–GD18). We show that maternal BPA exposure during the early and middle gestational stages could advance the vaginal opening time and increase the serum levels of kisspeptin-10 and GnRH in the female offspring at PND 34. Mechanistically, maternal BPA exposure during early and middle gestation could significantly increase CpG island methylation in the Eed gene promoters but reduce the mRNA expression of Eed in the hypothalamus tissues of the female offspring. In conclusion, the critical period of maternal BPA exposure-induced early onset of puberty in female offspring is early and middle gestation; this BPA-induced early onset of puberty might be partly attributed to epigenetic programming of the Eed gene in the hypothalamus. This study provides important insights regarding the relationship and the mechanisms between BPA and offspring pubertal development