Efficiency measurement of Islamic and conventional banks in Saudi Arabia:an empirical and comparative analysis

Saudi Arabia, beside Malaysia and many other Muslim countries, is one of those countries where Islamic and conventional banking operate in parallel. Over the last decade, the country’s banking industry is growing at rapid pace that accounts for the largest share in GCC. The present study measures and compares the performance of Saudi conventional and Islamic banking industry and identifies the areas where the strategic measures are required to improve the banking performance. It applies non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for the data from 2008-2016 of Saudi banking industry and provides comprehensive empirical results at individual bank vis-a-vis industry levels. The empirical results demonstrate a mix trend among the banks in achieving technical, pure technical and scale efficiency. It is observed that with the common pledge to expanding market share and performance, both conventional and Islamic banks have been successful in improving their levels of efficiency. At individual bank level, Al-Rajhi is the only bank that has achieved the highest score in terms of technical, pure technical and scale efficiency, while in the conventional banking group, both Saudi Hollandi and National Commercial banks are found on the top position. Despite the growth of incomes and deposits of entire banking industry in Saudi Arabia, this study particularly recommends for the Islamic banks to redirect their short term and long-term marketing strategies and to focus on improving their management skills at the branch level

Performance evaluation for low complexity cascaded Sphere Decoders using K best detection algorithm

In this letter a new detection scheme combining the conventional Sphere decoders and K best detection algorithm is proposed. This algorithm leverages the Sphere decoder (SD) results to use smaller values of K in K best algorithm to achieve better performance. Post K best detection algorithm Darlington pairs of SD-K SD, SD-K1SD, and K-K1 SD are used to get the final detection results. The proposed K best detection algorithm finds out smallest K paths by counting and sorting the bits of every candidate, which is much simpler as used in conventional sphere decoders. The computational complexity has been calculated in terms of time taken to visit the average number of K paths taken by Conventional SDs K-SDs and Darlington pair of SDs. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations are used to demonstrate that the proposed approach exhibits significant performance gain over conventional SD schemes in terms of bit error rate and computational time. Besides, a complete analytical approach is provided to validate the simulation results

Impact of antenna and beam-selection-based sectored relay planning for performance evaluation of 4G LTE-A tri-sectored cell

The deployment of Relay Nodes (RNs) in 4G LTE-A networks, mainly originating from the wireless backhaul link, provides an excellent network planning tool to enhance system performance. Better coordination between the base station and relays to mitigate inter-cell interference becomes an important aspect of achieving the required system performance, not only in the single-cell scenario, but also in multi-cell scenarios. In this paper, we model and analyze two basic approaches for designing a 4G LTE-A tri-sectored cellular system. The approaches are based on Antenna Selection Sectored Relaying (ASSR) and Beam Selection Sectored Relaying (BSSR). The main purpose of the proposed schemes is to enhance system performance by improving the quality of the wireless relay backhaul link. In this technique, antenna selection takes into consideration Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) communication, whereas BSSR considers the case of Line-Of-Sight (LOS) communication using heuristic beam forming approach. The resource allocation problem has also been investigated for relay based cooperative LTE-A tri-sectored cell in the downlink. The best possible location for relay node in the sector, power allocation and MIMO channel modeling is formulated as an optimization problem with the aim of maximizing the end to end link rate and the Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) of 4G LTE-A systems. Power allocation/optimization has been solved by means of the duality equation of the stationary Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) condition and is used to derive optimal values for the beam forming vector on both the relay as well as the access link. The performance of the proposed scheme is verified through simulations carried out using MATLAB software. The simulation results show a significant improvement in the SINR, throughput capacity, and coverage area of the 4G LTE-A cell, while guaranteeing better quality of service. Keywords: Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A), Relay Node (RN), Sectored Relaying (SR), Antenna Selection Sectored Relaying (ASSR), Beam Selection Sectored Relaying (BSSR), Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT