Temporal Isolation Among LTE/5G Network Functions by Real-time Scheduling

Radio access networks for future LTE/5G scenarios need to be designed so as to satisfy increasingly stringent requirements in terms of overall capacity, individual user performance, flexibility and power efficiency. This is triggering a major shift in the Telcom industry from statically sized, physically provisioned network appliances towards the use of virtualized network functions that can be elastically deployed within a flexible private cloud of network operators. However, a major issue in delivering strong QoS levels is the one to keep in check the temporal interferences among co-located services, as they compete in accessing shared physical resources. In this paper, this problem is tackled by proposing a solution making use of a real-time scheduler with strong temporal isolation guarantees at the OS/kernel level. This allows for the development of a mathematical model linking major parameters of the system configuration and input traffic characterization with the achieved performance and response-time probabilistic distribution. The model is verified through extensive experiments made on Linux on a synthetic benchmark tuned according to data from a real LTE packet processing scenario

Clinical presentation and survival of smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis patients of a University General Hospital in a developing country

From January 1995 to August 1997 we evaluated prospectively the clinical presentation, laboratory findings and short-term survival of smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) patients who sought care at our hospital. After providing informed, written consent, the patients were interviewed and laboratory tests were performed. Information about survivorship and death was collected through September 1998. Eighty-six smear-positive pulmonary TB patients were enrolled; 26.7% were HIV-seropositive. Seventeen HIV-seronegative pulmonary TB patients (19.8%) presented chronic diseases in addition to TB. In the multiple logistic regression analysis a CD4+ cell count or = 50 years were independently associated with decreased survival. Among HIV-seronegative persons, the presence of an additional disease increased the risk of death of almost six-fold. Use of antiretroviral drugs was associated with a lower risk of death among HIV-seropositive smear-positive pulmonary TB patients (RH = 0.32, 95% CI 0.10-0.92). In our study smear-positive pulmonary TB patients had a low short-term survival rate that was strongly associated with HIV infection, age and co-morbidities. Therapy with antiretroviral drugs reduced the short-term risk of death among HIV-seropositive patients after TB diagnosis

Solving ambiguities in MDS relative localization

Monitoring teams of mobile nodes is becoming crucial in a growing number of activities. Where it is not possible to use fixed references or external measurements, one of the possible solutions involves deriving relative positions from local communication. Well-known techniques such as trilateration and multilateration exist to locate a single node although such methods are not designed to locate entire teams. The technique of Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), however, allow us to find the relative coordinates of entire teams starting from the knowledge of the inter-node distances. However, like every relative-localization technique, it suffers from geometrical ambiguities including rotation, translation, and flip. In this work, we address such ambiguities by exploiting the node velocities to correlate the relative maps at two consecutive instants. In particular, we introduce a new version of MDS, called enhanced Multidimensional Scaling (eMDS), which is able to handle these types of ambiguities. The effectiveness of our localization technique is then validated by a set of simulation experiments and our results are compared against existing approaches

Motorcycle accidents in forensic pathology. Human factors, and injury and crash tipologies

The aim of this study is to investigate the association between the main human factors, related to motorcycle accidents, and the accident configuration and the lesive pattern. The present study considers the 200 two-wheel crashes occurred in Italy in the Province of Pavia between 1999 and 2001. For all cases a revision of the injured people’s interviews and their clinical records has been made. All the accidents of the survey have been examined considering the traumatic lesion abscribed to the accident to assess a direct causal link between human factors and the crash tipology and the injury pattern. Chi-square test was used to evaluate the relationship between the variables and a logistic regression was performed to evaluate the association of injury severity with some variables supposed to be predictive factors. Frontal-lateral impact collisions are about 6 times more likely to be caused by a traffic scan error of the other vehicle driver (no rider) than other types of crashes (OR= 5,8; p < 0,0001; IC 95%: 2,875-11,736). Contusions-abrasions show the highest percentages in motorcyclists with no coverage worn (p < 0,001) and riders with no clothing have a higher risk to be severely injured than riders with coverage, but it is not statistically significant. Instead, there is not a statistical significant association between: rider’s gender, rider’s age, riding experience and accident configuration; damaged region of the helmet and cranium injury severity

Risk factors for road traffic accidents severity in the province of Milan, Italy

To identify the major risk factors for the severity of road accidents in the province of Milan the police reports of more than 120 thousand accidents occurred in 2004 and 2005 were analysed. Logistic model to evaluate the different risk factors was performed. The risk of being injured or of dying rather than of being unhurt was higher for riders of two-wheeled vehicles (bicycles, motorcycles and mopeds) than for car drivers (OR of being injured 35.42, 34.96 and 26.97 respectively; OR of dying 133.32, 72.79 and 26.18 respectively). Women have a higher risk of being injured (OR: 1.98) but a lower risk of dying (OR: 0.64). Accidents which occurred during the night and during the weekend are more serious. The most dangerous accidents are the single-vehicle ones (OR of injuries with respect to head-on or side accidents: 1.88; OR of death: 1.85). Accidents on extra-urban roads and accidents on a wet or slippery surface are more associated with the risk of sustaining injuries (OR: 1.07 and OR: 1.20 respectively). The risk of being killed when involved in a road accident is higher for older drivers (>=65 years) compared with people younger than 30 years of age (OR: 2.84) and on extra-urban road and on motorway (OR with respect to accident in the urban area: 5.17 and 2.05 respectively)