Environmental data monitoring and infection risks in UK care-homes in the context of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic drew attention to the critical role of building ventilation as a measure for controlling infection transmission. With the substantial number of COVID-19 outbreaks in care homes worldwide, the effectiveness of ventilation is an important consideration for infection control and wider exposure to indoor air pollutants. In this study, we used IoT-based sensors in two residential care homes to evaluate ventilation in various areas, including bedrooms, corridors, and communal spaces. Our monitoring focused on carbon dioxide (CO2) levels as a proxy for ventilation, as well as temperature and humidity, during the spring of 2022. We also developed a ventilation model using the software CONTAM and coupled it with an infection risk model to assess airborne transmission risks under different weather and occupancy conditions. Our results suggest that ventilation is generally adequate based on UK COVID-19 guidelines at the time, with CO2 below 800 ppm for the majority of the time, and opening windows in communal spaces in elderly care environments can help preserve indoor ventilation during periods of high occupancy. However, modelling data suggests that low CO2 values may be indicative of low occupancy in many spaces and therefore ventilation rates may not be sufficient to mitigate infection transmission. Encouraging positive ventilation behaviours in staff and residents, potentially supported by visible CO2 monitors, and taking additional precautions such as using air cleaners, enabling additional window openings or staff wearing masks during outbreaks and periods of high disease prevalence is likely to be beneficial for resident and staff health

Fahrzeug-Ad-hoc-Netzwerk: Hochwasser- und Routing-Protokolle für Sicherheits- und Managementanwendungen

Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET) is one of the key technologies in an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) to address issues regarding traffic management and road safety, traffic control and re-routing. Due to an increase in the number of vehicles, high bandwidth requirements for applications, and highly dynamic topology, VANET requires special attention for data dissemination procedures known as flooding and routing for reliable in-time data delivery. This study proposes a hybrid flooding mechanism to provide an efficient and reliable data delivery. In this dissertation, an adaptive protocol is proposed by combining the functionality of topology and position-based routing. Since route maintaining and recovery mechanisms add delays to the routing procedure, this study considers the reorientation of routing at the lower layer. The proposed routing protocols are implemented in the Veins framework and provides efficiency in term of in-time data delivery

Novel Data Link Layer Encoding Scheme for Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Network

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) provides multi-hop and multi-path communication by deploying network nodes in form of mesh topology and grasps the attention of research community and industry due to its features like self-healing and self-organizing etc. In multi-hop networks, bandwidth efficiency degrades with the increase in number of intermediate nodes. In this paper, we present a novel encoding scheme at data link layer with the characteristic of cut-through switch. By using the proposed technique, we can increase throughput by reducing re-transmissions in the network. We have verified our proposed method by simulation in NS3. The simulation results indicate that in-spite of high interference, we can achieve improved throughput and less delay with proposed model

An Emergency Response System: Construction, Validation, and Experiments for Disaster Management in a Vehicular Environment

Natural disasters and catastrophes not only cost the loss of human lives, but adversely affect the progress toward sustainable development of the country. As soon as disaster strikes, the first and foremost challenge for the concerned authorities is to make an expeditious response. Consequently, they need to be highly-organized, properly-trained, and sufficiently-equipped to effectively respond and limit the destructive effects of a disaster. In such circumstances, communication plays a vital role, whereby the consequences of tasks assigned to the workers for rescue and relief services may be streamlined by relaying necessary information among themselves. Moreover, most of the infrastructure is either severely damaged or completely destroyed in post-disaster scenarios; therefore, a Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is used to carry out the rescue operation, as it does not require any pre-existing infrastructure. In this context, the current work proposes and validates an effective way to relay the crucial information through the development of an application and the deployment of an experimental TestBed in a vehicular environment. The TestBed may able to provide a way to design and validate the algorithms. It provides a number of vehicles with onboard units embedded with a credit-card-size microcomputer called Raspberry Pi and a Global Positioning System (GPS) module. Additionally, it dispatches one of the pre-defined codes of emergency messages based on the level of urgency through multiple hops to a central control room. Depending on the message code received from a client, the server takes appropriate action. Furthermore, the solution also provides a graphical interface that is easy to interpret and to understand at the control room to visualize the rescue operation on the fly