Chitosan and sodium alginate—Based bioadhesive vaginal tablets

Metronidazole was formulated in mucoadhesive vaginal tablets by directly compressing the natural cationic polymer chitosan, loosely cross-linked with glutaraldehyde, together with sodium alginate with or ine cellulose (MCC). Sodium carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) was added to some of the formulations. The drug content in tablets was 20%. Drug dissolution rate studies from tablets were carried out in buffer pH 4.8 and distilled water. Swelling indices and adhesion forces were also measured for all formulations. The formula (FIII) containing 6% chitosan, 24% sodium alginate, 30% sodium CMC, and 20% MCC showed adequate release properties in both media and gave lower values of swelling index compared with the other examined formulations. FIII also proved to have good adhesion properties with minimum applied weights. Moreover, its release properties (% dissolution efficiency, DE) in buffer pH 4.8, as well as release mechanism (n values), were negligibly affected by aging. Thus, this formula may be considered a good candidate for vaginal mucoadhesive dosage forms

Adaptive Transmission in MIMO AF Relay Networks with Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes over Nakagami-m Fading

In this article, we apply different adaptive transmission techniques to dual-hop multiple-input multiple-output amplify-and-forward relay networks using orthogonal space-time block coding over independent Nakagami-m fading channels. The adaptive techniques investigated are optimal simultaneous power and rate (OSPR), optimal rate with constant power (ORCP), and truncated channel inversion with fixed rate (TCIFR). The expressions for the channel capacity of OSPR, ORCP, and TCIFR, and the outage probability of OSPR, and TCIFR are derived based on the characteristic function of the reciprocal of the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the destination. For sufficiently high SNR, the channel capacity of ORCP asymptotically converges to OSPR while OSPR and ORCP achieve higher channel capacity compared to TCIFR. Although TCIFR suffers from an increase in the outage probability relative to OSPR, it provides the lowest implementation complexity among the considered schemes. Along with analytical results, we further adopt Monte Carlo simulations to validate the theoretical analysis