How Effective are Toll Roads in Improving Operational Performance?

The main focus of this research is to develop a systematic analytical framework and evaluate the effect of a toll road on region’s traffic using travel time and travel time reliability measures. The travel time data for the Triangle Expressway in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States was employed for the assessment process. The spatial and temporal variations in the travel time distributions on the toll road, parallel alternate route, and near-vicinity cross-streets were analyzed using various travel time reliability measures. The results indicate that the Triangle Expressway showed a positive trend in reliability over the years of its operation. The parallel route reliability decreased significantly during the analysis period, whereas the travel time reliability of cross-streets showed a consistent trend. The stabilization of travel time distributions and the reliability measures over different years of toll road operation are good indicators, suggesting that further reduction in performance measures may not be seen on the near vicinity corridors. The findings from link-level and corridor-level analysis may help with transportation system management, assessing the influence of travel demand patterns, and evaluating the effect of planned implementation of similar projects

3-D Statistical Channel Model for Millimeter-Wave Outdoor Mobile Broadband Communications

This paper presents an omnidirectional spatial and temporal 3-dimensional statistical channel model for 28 GHz dense urban non-line of sight environments. The channel model is developed from 28 GHz ultrawideband propagation measurements obtained with a 400 megachips per second broadband sliding correlator channel sounder and highly directional, steerable horn antennas in New York City. A 3GPP-like statistical channel model that is easy to implement in software or hardware is developed from measured power delay profiles and a synthesized method for providing absolute propagation delays recovered from 3-D ray-tracing, as well as measured angle of departure and angle of arrival power spectra. The extracted statistics are used to implement a MATLAB-based statistical simulator that generates 3-D millimeter-wave temporal and spatial channel coefficients that reproduce realistic impulse responses of measured urban channels. The methods and model presented here can be used for millimeter-wave system-wide simulations, and air interface design and capacity analyses.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, ICC 2015 (London, UK, to appear

Inflation with f(R,ϕ)f(R,\phi) in Jordan frame

We consider an $f(R)$ action that is non-minimally coupled to a massive scalar field. The model closely resembles scalar-tensor theory and by conformal transformation can be transformed to Einstein frame. To avoid the ambiguity of the frame dependence, we obtain an exact analytical solution in Jordan frame and show that the model leads to a period of accelerated expansion with an exit. Further, we compute the scalar and tensor power spectrum for the model and compare them with observations.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Exact inflationary solutions in exponential gravity

We consider a modified gravity model of the form $f(R,\phi)=R e^{h(\phi)R}$, where the strong gravity corrections are taken to all orders and $\phi$ is a self-interacting massless scalar field. We show that the conformal transformation of this model to Einstein frame leads to non-canonical kinetic term and negates the advantage of the Einstein frame. We obtain exact solutions for the background in the Jordan frame without performing conformal transformations and show that the model leads to inflation with exit. We obtain scalar and tensor power-spectrum in Jordan frame and show that the model leads to red-tilt. We discuss the implications of the same in the light of cosmological observations.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

User Attitudes on E-Books Collection in Mahatma Gandhi University Library: A Case Study

A study on the user’s attitudes, interest and understanding of e-book collections. The sample taken for the study is the E-book collection developed at the Mahatma Gandhi University Library and its users. The survey assessed the impact of the e-books on teaching learning and research. The problems associated with the use of e-books aware also identified. The inference of the study are that the user’s require an orientation on different types of collections, and also extended facilities for access which is possible in this format