Decoupling 5G network control: Centralised coordination and distributed adaptation

© 2018 by CC BY-NC. Fifth generation mobile networks (5G) will be featured by miniaturised cells and massive dense deployment. Traditional centralised network control cannot adapt to high signalling delay, and is therefore not scalable for future 5G networks.To address this issue, we adopt the software-defined networking (SDN) approach of decoupled network control and data transmission. In particular, delay-sensitive interference suppression for data transmission is decoupled from delay-tolerant topology control and base station coordination. This substantially alleviates the requirement of network control on delay and complexity, hence simplifying 5G control plane design, reducing signalling overhead, and enhancing network scalability. Case studies show that our decoupled network control is effective for timely interference mitigation and reliable topology management. The stability and scalability of our approach are also demonstrated

Testing mechanisms of compensatory fitness of dioecy in a cosexual world

Questions: All else being equal, populations of dioecious species with a 50:50 sex ratio have only half the effective reproductive population size of bisexual species of equal abundance. Consequently, there is a need to explain how dioecious and bisexual species coexist. Increased mean individual seed mass, fecundity, and population density have all been proposed as attributes of unisexual individuals or populations that may contribute to the persistence or resilience of dioecious species. To date, no studies have compared sympatric dioecious and cosexual species with respect to all three components of fitness. In this study, we sought evidence for these compensatory advantages (higher seed mass, greater seed production per unit basal area, and higher population density) in dioecious species. Location: Five 20–25 ha forest dynamic plots spanning a latitudinal gradient in China, including two temperate, two subtropical, and one tropical forest. Methods: We used a phylogenetically corrected generalized linear modelling approach to assess the phylogenetic dependence and joint evolution of sexual system, seed mass and production, and ecological abundances among 48–333 species and 32,568–136,237 individuals per forest. Results: Across all five forests, we detected no consistent advantage for dioecious relative to sympatric cosexual species with respect to mean individual seed mass, seed production or the density of stems in any size class. Conclusions: Our study suggests that seed traits may provide compensatory mechanisms in some forests, but most often the coexistence of sexual systems cannot be explained by advantages of dioecy related to seed quality and demographic parameters. Future investigations of the factors that promote coexistence may increase our understanding by expanding the search to include attributes such as lifespan and tolerance or resistance to herbivores

Difficult Endoscopic Retrieval of a Migrated Stent inside a Pseudocyst

Endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) guided pseudocyst drainage can have complications such as bleeding, perforation, infection, and stent migration. We report a case of iatrogenic migration of stent inside a large dumbbell-shaped pseudocyst managed successfully with a difficult endoscopic retrieval procedure

A Study of Alkaline-Based H2-Br2 and H2-I2 Reversible Fuel Cells

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Generalized Painleve-Gullstrand descriptions of Kerr-Newman black holes

Generalized Painleve-Gullstrand metrics are explicitly constructed for the Kerr-Newman family of charged rotating black holes. These descriptions are free of all coordinate singularities; moreover, unlike the Doran and other proposed metrics, an extra tunable function is introduced to ensure all variables in the metrics remain real for all values of the mass M, charge Q, angular momentum aM, and cosmological constant \Lambda > - 3/(a^2). To describe fermions in Kerr-Newman spacetimes, the stronger requirement of non-singular vierbein one-forms at the horizon(s) is imposed and coordinate singularities are eliminated by local Lorentz boosts. Other known vierbein fields of Kerr-Newman black holes are analysed and discussed; and it is revealed that some of these descriptions are actually not related by physical Lorentz transformations to the original Kerr-Newman expression in Boyer-Lindquist coordinates - which is the reason complex components appear (for certain ranges of the radial coordinate) in these metrics. As an application of our constructions the correct effective Hawking temperature for Kerr black holes is derived with the method of Parikh and Wilczek.Comment: 5 pages; extended to include application to derivation of Hawking radiation for Kerr black holes with Parikh-Wilczek metho

Evaluation of absorbent materials for use as ad hoc dry decontaminants during mass casualty incidents as part of the UK’s Initial Operational Response (IOR)

Copyright: © 2017 Kassouf et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.The UK's Initial Operational Response (IOR) is a revised process for the medical management of mass casualties potentially contaminated with hazardous materials. A critical element of the IOR is the introduction of immediate, on-scene disrobing and decontamination of casualties to limit the adverse health effects of exposure. Ad hoc cleansing of the skin with dry absorbent materials has previously been identified as a potential means of facilitating emergency decontamination. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the in vitro oil and water absorbency of a range of materials commonly found in the domestic and clinical environments and to determine the effectiveness of a small, but representative selection of such materials in skin decontamination, using an established ex vivo model. Five contaminants were used in the study: methyl salicylate, parathion, diethyl malonate, phorate and potassium cyanide. In vitro measurements of water and oil absorbency did not correlate with ex vivo measurements of skin decontamination. When measured ex vivo, dry decontamination was consistently more effective than a standard wet decontamination method ("rinse-wipe-rinse") for removing liquid contaminants. However, dry decontamination was ineffective against particulate contamination. Collectively, these data confirm that absorbent materials such as wound dressings and tissue paper provide an effective, generic capability for emergency removal of liquid contaminants from the skin surface, but that wet decontamination should be used for non-liquid contaminants.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

3D wideband mmwave localization for 5G massive MIMO systems

© 2019 IEEE. This paper proposes a novel 3D localization method for wideband mmWave massive MIMO systems. A high dimensional linear interpolation (HDLI)-based preprocessing is first proposed to transform the frequency-associated dynamical array response vectors into the common counterparts at the reference frequency. Through this method, the received data in all frequency bands can be processed jointly, and thus the high temporal resolution provided by wideband mmWave systems can be fully exploited for position estimation. To reduce the computational complexity in the process of the parameter estimation, we then present a wideband beamspace (WBS)-based parameter estimation algorithm to estimate the angle and delay in the low-dimensional beamspace. By exploiting the quasi- optical propagation at the mmWave frequencies, a novel positioning scheme is also designed to determine the 3D location of the target. According to our analysis and simulation results, the proposed method is capable of achieving significantly reduced computational complexity, while maintaining high localization accuracy