Performance Analysis of Hybrid ALOHA/CDMA RFID Systems with Quasi-decorrelating Detector in Noisy Channels

In this paper we investigate the performance of a hybrid Aloha/CDMA radio frequency identification (RFID) system with quasi-decorrelating detector (QDD). Motivated by the fact that the QDD outperforms the conventional decorrelating detector (DD) in noisy network scenarios, we study and propose using QDD as one of the most promising candidates for the structure of RFID readers. Performance analysis in terms of bit error rate and the RFID system efficiency is considered considering CDMA code collision and detection error. Computer simulations are also performed, and the obtained results of QDD-based structure are compared with those of DD-based one to confirm the correctness of the design suggestion in different practical applications of tag identification and missing-tag detection

Review and Evaluation of Agricultural Policies in Years 2015-2017

This journal article describes main results of the OECD Annual Report published in 2018, titled “Review and evaluation of agricultural policy in 2017” for 51 selected countries in the world, including Vietnam. The report is closely prepared by MARD and OECD experts. The journal article emphasizes more on Vietnam by updating and adjusting data, information and policies in 2017 and 2018. The description presents the changing trend of agricultural policies applied in the world, considering whether this trend is in the direction of achieving sustainable productivity growth, environmental protection, and adaptation to climate change. On average in the last 20 years, trend of world policies has been better but far to catch above purposes. The development of international trade has made the commodity movement more freely and price gaps narrowed between countries and regions. This trend made agricultural markets developed more toward reflecting the scarcity of good and services. Average level of total agricultural supports has been reducing. Consequently, the world price indices and the total support have been converted between countries and commodities. However, the total agricultural support reduction is mainly in developed countries like OECD countries. Emerging and developing countries have increased their agricultural supports. Relative to GDP, the level of the total agriculture support in Vietnam has been reducing.Inside the total agricultural support, producer supports accounted 78% while general service support accounted only for 14%. Inside the producer support, market price support accounted for more than 50% in many countries. Payments based on outputs and inputs also accounted more than 50% in many countries. In Vietnam, the producer support is very small, negative level in 2015 and 2016 and became positive in 2017 and 2018. The agricultural producer support in 2017 is about 900 million USD. In the overall service support, many countries mainly invest in infrastructure construction, for example in Japan and Vietnam over 70%, while investments in other items are too small, for example that in Vietnam is only about 16%.In conclusion, OECD suggests that market price support should be reduced and finally eliminated. Similarly, output and input payments should be reduced and eliminated. Future policies should focus on general support service that helps producers to achieve sustainable productivity growth in the context of a changing and uncertain climate. OECD especially emphasizes on appropriate investments in research, together with efforts to ensure that the outputs of this research reach farmers. OECD also emphasizes on research that help producers to better manage risks including business risk, weather risk, and climate changes. Agricultural production and climate changes are strongly interacted. Future research should be the better co-operation between public and private sectors with the leading role of public sector. The future research should be co-operated more strongly between countries and regions because of the differences in histories, cultures, geology and climate

The Mediating Effects of Switching Costs on the Relationship between Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty: A Study in Retail Banking Industry in Vietnam

This paper develops and empirically tests the mediating role of switching costs in service quality - loyalty and satisfaction-loyalty relationships. Especially, different types of switching costs are tested separately providing more insights into their roles. A research model about the interrelationships between service quality, customer satisfaction, switching costs and customer loyalty is developed. Based on this model, a survey is conducted with retail banking customers, with and 261valid respondents. The hypotheses are then proposed and tested using Structural equation modeling technique (SEM). The analysis reveals that: positive switching cost is a significant mediator for both service quality-loyalty and satisfaction-loyalty relationships, while negative switching cost only mediates the service quality-loyalty relationship. These findings suggest that building and managing switching costs are necessary following-up steps after customer satisfaction for achieving long-term customer loyalty

The mediating effects of switching costs on the relationship between service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty: A study in retail banking industry in Vietnam

This paper develops and empirically tests the mediating role of switching costs in service quality - loyalty and satisfaction-loyalty relationships. Specially, different types of switching costs are tested separately providing more insights about their roles. This approach extended the insights on mediating effects of switching costs by differentiate the roles of positive switching costs and negative switching costs in the model. A research model about the interrelationships between service quality, customer satisfaction, switching costs and customer loyalty is developed. Based on this model, a survey is conducted with retail banking customers, with and 261 valid respondents. The hypotheses are then proposed and tested using Structural equation modeling technique (SEM). The analysis reveals that: positive switching cost is a significant mediator for both service quality-loyalty and satisfaction-loyalty relationships, while negative switching cost only mediates the service quality-loyalty relationship. These findings suggest that building and managing switching costs are necessary following-up steps after customer satisfaction for achieving long-term customer loyalty. However, using the right types of switching costs is necessary to significantly boost the loyalty from customers. © ExcelingTech Pub, UK

Ensembling techniques in solar panel quality classification

Solar panel quality inspection is a time consuming and costly task. This study tries to develop as reliable method for evaluating the panels quality by using ensemble technique based on three machine learning models namely logistic regression, support vector machine and artificial neural network. The data in this study came from infrared camera which were captured in dark room. The panels are supplied with direct current (DC) power while the infrared camera is located perpendicular with panel surface. Dataset is divided into four classes where each class represent for a level of damage percentage. The approach is suitable for systems which has limited resources as well as number of training images which is very popular in reality. Result shows that the proposed method performs with the accuracy is higher than 90%

D2D Communication Network with the Assistance of Power Beacon under the Impact of Co-channel Interferences and Eavesdropper: Performance Analysis

In this paper, we study and demonstrate the performance analysis of a device-to-device (D2D) com- munication network. Specifically, a source node trans- mits data to the destination node using the power bea- con’s harvested energy in order to overcome the limited energy budget. Besides, an eavesdropper located in the proximal region of a source is trying to overhear secure information. Notably, both eavesdropper and destina- tion are affected by co-channel interferences from other sources when they utilize the same frequency. By con- sidering the above discussions, we derived the closed- form expressions for outage probability (OP), intercept probability (IP), and secrecy outage probability (SOP) in connection with using the system model. The derived analytical expressions are then verified by utilizing both simulation and numerical results. Finally, the inten- sive parameters’ influences on the OP, IP, and SOP are also investigated

Security and Reliability Analysis of Satellite-Terrestrial Multi-Relay Networks with Imperfect CSI

This work investigates the security and reliabil- ity analysis for a novel satellite-terrestrial (SatTer) network. Specifically, a satellite attempts to transmit confidential infor- mation to a ground user (GU) via the support of multiple relay nodes in the presence of an eavesdropper that tries to overhear the information. A friendly jammer is deployed to improve the secure transmission between the satellite and the relays. Furthermore, satellite-to-relay generalized Rician fading channels and imperfect channel state information (CSI) are deployed to examine a general system model. In this context, the closed-formed expressions for the outage probability (OP) and intercept probability (IP) are derived corresponding to an amplify-and-forward (AF)-based relaying scheme, which is challenging and has not been studied before. Finally, the exactness of the mathematical analyses is validated through Monte Carlo simulations. Furthermore, the effects of various key parameters (e.g., channel estimation errors, satellite’s transmit power, relay’s transmit power, number of relays, and fading severity parameter) are examine

M^2UNet: MetaFormer Multi-scale Upsampling Network for Polyp Segmentation

Polyp segmentation has recently garnered significant attention, and multiple methods have been formulated to achieve commendable outcomes. However, these techniques often confront difficulty when working with the complex polyp foreground and their surrounding regions because of the nature of convolution operation. Besides, most existing methods forget to exploit the potential information from multiple decoder stages. To address this challenge, we suggest combining MetaFormer, introduced as a baseline for integrating CNN and Transformer, with UNet framework and incorporating our Multi-scale Upsampling block (MU). This simple module makes it possible to combine multi-level information by exploring multiple receptive field paths of the shallow decoder stage and then adding with the higher stage to aggregate better feature representation, which is essential in medical image segmentation. Taken all together, we propose MetaFormer Multi-scale Upsampling Network (M$^2$UNet) for the polyp segmentation task. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieved competitive performance compared with several previous methods

Village Baseline Study – Site Analysis Report for My Loi, Ky Anh district, Ha Tinh province – Viet Nam

Data collection for the Village Baseline Study (VBS) of My Loi village in the CCAFS benchmark site of central Viet Nam took place on 17- 19 October 2014. Focus group discussions were conducted separately for 45 men and 45 women villagers.. The VBS had three main topics: map of (1) community resources, (2) organizational landscapes, and (3) information networks. A seminar was held in December 2014 to seek participants’ feedback. My Loi village has experienced multiple extreme weather events (temperature and water stresses, storms and typhoons) throughout the years. The main constraints for agricultural development and livelihoods are limited water resources and poor conditions of irrigation systems, which are challenges to improving the agricultural production situation. Moreover, sand and rock mining have caused water pollution, erosion on riverbanks and loss of farmland area. Another constraint is marketing, as villagers are not aware of any organization involved in finding outlets for agricultural products. The potentials for developing innovative climate-smart solutions in the village are several: farmers have experiences and are interested in trying new varieties and adjusting farming calendars to improve the situation. Livestock expansion and agroforests/reforestation hold opportunities for improving household incomes. Furthermore, at least half of the organisations identified in the region are working to address food security issues