EV-CAST: Interference and Energy-Aware Video Multicast Exploiting Collaborative Relays

Video multicast over wireless local area network (WLAN) has been gaining attraction for applications sharing a venue-specific common video with multiple users. However, wireless multicast is limited by a receiver that has the weakest communication link to the source. Collaborative relaying could overcome this challenge by enabling selected receiver nodes to relay the packets from the source to other receivers. We propose EV-CAST, an interference and energy-aware video multicast system using collaborative relays, which entails (i) online topology management based on interference-aware link characterization, (ii) joint selection of relay nodes and transmission parameters, and (iii) polling-based relay protocol. Our proposed algorithm, the core of EV-CAST, judiciously selects the relay nodes and transmission parameters in consideration of interference, battery status, and spatial reuse. Our prototype-based experiment results demonstrate that EV-CAST enhances video multicast delivery under various network scenarios. EV-CAST enables 2x more nodes to achieve a target video packet loss ratio with 0.59x shorter airtime than the state-of-the-art video multicast scheme.N

Nanotextured Polymer Substrate for Flexible and Mechanically Robust Metal Electrodes by Nanoimprint Lithography

Metal thin film electrodes on flexible polymer substrates are inherently unstable against humidity and mechanical stresses because of their poor adhesion properties. We introduce a novel approach for improving the adhesion characteristics of metal–polymer interface based on the nanostructuring of the polymer substrate by using nanoimprint lithography. The adhesion characteristics of metal–polymer interface were measured by accelerated test, cyclic bending test and double cantilever beam (DCB) test. The interface of Au/Ti dual layer thin film and nanoimprinted PMMA substrate shows over 2.03 and 1.95 times higher adhesion energy (<i>G</i>_c) than that of Au/Ti dual layer thin film and plane PMMA substrate in air and wet environments, respectively. The adhesion energy between metal thin film and polymer substrate was dramatically improved by the increased surface roughness and mechanical interlocking effect of numerous nanoscale anchors at the edges of nanoimprinted surface, which was verified by both experiment and numerical analysis