UAV-Empowered Disaster-Resilient Edge Architecture for Delay-Sensitive Communication

The fifth-generation (5G) communication systems will enable enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable low latency, and massive connectivity services. The broadband and low-latency services are indispensable to public safety (PS) communication during natural or man-made disasters. Recently, the third generation partnership project long term evolution (3GPPLTE) has emerged as a promising candidate to enable broadband PS communications. In this article, first we present six major PS-LTE enabling services and the current status of PS-LTE in 3GPP releases. Then, we discuss the spectrum bands allocated for PS-LTE in major countries by international telecommunication union (ITU). Finally, we propose a disaster resilient three-layered architecture for PS-LTE (DR-PSLTE). This architecture consists of a software-defined network (SDN) layer to provide centralized control, an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) cloudlet layer to facilitate edge computing or to enable emergency communication link, and a radio access layer. The proposed architecture is flexible and combines the benefits of SDNs and edge computing to efficiently meet the delay requirements of various PS-LTE services. Numerical results verified that under the proposed DR-PSLTE architecture, delay is reduced by 20% as compared with the conventional centralized computing architecture.Comment: 9,

IEEE Access special section editorial: Mission critical public-safety communications: architectures, enabling technologies, and future applications

Disaster management organizations such as fire brigades, rescue teams, and emergency medical service providers have a high priority demand to communicate with each other and with the victims by using mission-critical voice and data communications [item 1) in the Appendix]. In recent years, public safety agencies and organizations have started planning to evolve their existing land mobile radio system (LMRS) with long-term evolution (LTE)-based public safety solutions which provides broadband, ubiquitous, and mission-critical voice and data services. LTE provides high bandwidth and low latency services to the customers using internet protocol-based LTE network. Since mission critical communication services have different demands and priorities for dynamically varying situations for disaster-hit areas, the architecture and the communication technologies of the existing LTE networks need to be upgraded with a system that has the capability to respond efficiently and in a timely manner during critical situations

To Investigate the Refractive Index of Blood Plasma Suspended in Various Tonicity Solutions

This paper reports the data of the RI of plasma of normal blood, which is measured using Abbes\u27 refractometer. The experimental values are compared to normal blood serum erythrocytes with Blood of Plasma suspended in various tonicity solutions between and 1.336 to 1.343, whereas the normal blood plasma refractive index is 1.351. As a result, the refractive index the worth of erythrocytes washed with different tonicity solutions are slightly lower than those of normal blood. If this optical parameter is standardized, it has the potential to be used as a tool in the medical field

Modelling, Simulation, and Control of a Flexible Space Launch Vehicle

Modern Space Launch Vehicles (SLVs), being slender in shape and due to the use of lightweight materials, are generally flexible in nature. This structural flexibility, when coupled with sensor and actuator dynamics, can adversely affect the control of SLV, which may lead to vehicle instability and, in the worst-case scenario, to structural failure. This work focuses on modelling and simulation of rigid and flexible dynamics of an SLV and its interactions with the control system. SpaceX's Falcon 9 has been selected for this study. The flexible modes are calculated using modal analysis in Ansys. High-fidelity nonlinear simulation is developed which incorporates the flexible modes and their interactions with rigid degrees of freedom. Moreover, linearized models are developed for flexible body dynamics, over the complete trajectory until the first stage's separation. Using classical control methods, attitude controllers, that keep the SLV on its desired trajectory, are developed, and multiple filters are designed to suppress the interactions of flexible dynamics. The designed controllers along with filters are implemented in the nonlinear simulation. Furthermore, to demonstrate the robustness of designed controllers, Monte-Carlo simulations are carried out and results are presented.Comment: Presented at 20th International Bhurban Conference on Applied Sciences and Technology (IBCAST), 202

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface for Physical Layer Security in 6G-IoT: Designs, Issues, and Advances

Sixth-generation (6G) networks pose substantial security risks because confidential information is transmitted over wireless channels with a broadcast nature, and various attack vectors emerge. Physical layer security (PLS) exploits the dynamic characteristics of wireless environments to provide secure communications, while reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can facilitate PLS by controlling wireless transmissions. With RIS-aided PLS, a lightweight security solution can be designed for low-end Internet of Things (IoT) devices, depending on the design scenario and communication objective. This article discusses RIS-aided PLS designs for 6G-IoT networks against eavesdropping and jamming attacks. The theoretical background and literature review of RIS-aided PLS are discussed, and design solutions related to resource allocation, beamforming, artificial noise, and cooperative communication are presented. We provide simulation results to show the effectiveness of RIS in terms of PLS. In addition, we examine the research issues and possible solutions for RIS modeling, channel modeling and estimation, optimization, and machine learning. Finally, we discuss recent advances, including STAR-RIS and malicious RIS.Comment: Accepted for IEEE Internet of Things Journa

Impact of Relationship, Task & Role Conflict on Teaching Performance in Educational Institutes

Conflict related to interpersonal issues, personal taste, values, and lack of clarity towards their work. This study & its results examined that; how teachers/Professors respond to above mentioned conflicts. Because Interpersonal conflict among the organizations is a latest research area that increasingly getting importance in today’s competitive business environment. Questionnaires were used for the feedback purpose which elaborates about role conflict and employee’s performance. 158 valid responses gathered in two weeks. Data was processed and analyzed via statistic software i.e. SPSS. The results revealed that relationship conflict, task conflict and role conflict has significant impact on employees performance. High correlations among relationship conflict, task conflict, and role conflict on teacher’s performance were found from this study. And there exits inverse relationship between relationship & role conflict with employee’s performance and positive with task conflict. Special techniques and strategies should be applied for minimizing the relationship and role conflicts amongst the employees in an organization in order to obtain maximum out of them

SafeSpace MFNet: Precise and Efficient MultiFeature Drone Detection Network

The increasing prevalence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, has generated a demand for reliable detection systems. The inappropriate use of drones presents potential security and privacy hazards, particularly concerning sensitive facilities. To overcome those obstacles, we proposed the concept of MultiFeatureNet (MFNet), a solution that enhances feature representation by capturing the most concentrated feature maps. Additionally, we present MultiFeatureNet-Feature Attention (MFNet-FA), a technique that adaptively weights different channels of the input feature maps. To meet the requirements of multi-scale detection, we presented the versions of MFNet and MFNet-FA, namely the small (S), medium (M), and large (L). The outcomes reveal notable performance enhancements. For optimal bird detection, MFNet-M (Ablation study 2) achieves an impressive precision of 99.8\%, while for UAV detection, MFNet-L (Ablation study 2) achieves a precision score of 97.2\%. Among the options, MFNet-FA-S (Ablation study 3) emerges as the most resource-efficient alternative, considering its small feature map size, computational demands (GFLOPs), and operational efficiency (in frame per second). This makes it particularly suitable for deployment on hardware with limited capabilities. Additionally, MFNet-FA-S (Ablation study 3) stands out for its swift real-time inference and multiple-object detection due to the incorporation of the FA module. The proposed MFNet-L with the focus module (Ablation study 2) demonstrates the most remarkable classification outcomes, boasting an average precision of 98.4\%, average recall of 96.6\%, average mean average precision (mAP) of 98.3\%, and average intersection over union (IoU) of 72.8\%. To encourage reproducible research, the dataset, and code for MFNet are freely available as an open-source project: github.com/ZeeshanKaleem/MultiFeatureNet.Comment: Paper accepted in IEEE TV