An isostable coordinate based amelioration strategy to mitigate the effects of Jet lag

Commercial air travel has become extremely commonplace in the last 20 to 30 years especially as the world has moved towards new heights of globalization. Though air travel has greatly reduced transit times allowing people to cover thousand of miles within hours, it comes with its fair share of issues. jet-lag can be regarded to be at the top of those list of problems; jet-lag typically results from rapid travel through multiple time zones which causes a significant misalignment between the person\u27s internal circadian clock and the external time. A person\u27s circadian clock is governed by a population of coupled neurons entrained to a 24-hour light and dark cycle and thus after rapid air travel, the neuron population needs a certain time to get accustomed to the new time zone. This misalignment can result in a variety of health problems including, but not limited to, lethargy, insomnia and adverse effects to the sleep cycle. Various techniques have been proposed and are currently in use for jet-lag treatment like melatonin ingestion or making drastic changes to one\u27s own routine prior to air travel. However, these treatment strategies are normally accompanied with long re-entrainment times or following a strict schedule to help with correcting the sleep cycle. The presented work explores an alternate strategy for jet-lag treatment using the notion of operational phase and isostable coordinates for model reduction and then, applying optimal control to derive inputs which can be applied directly to the model. To show the framework\u27s efficacy, results are presented by applying the strategy to a 2-d model; preliminary results show that the proposed approach greatly reduces the reentrainment time required to acclimatize to the new time zone

Analysis and design of energy harvesting wireless communication systems

Wireless-powered communication is an emerging technology for powering the large number of miniature devices of the future. In a wireless-powered communication system, low-power sensors extract energy from the incident wireless signals to power their operations such as information transmission, sensing or reception. Due to sporadic energy availability, however, such a system is fundamentally different from a traditionally-powered communication system. This dissertation investigates three distinct aspects of wireless-powered communications to get insights on the system operation. First, leveraging concepts from finite-length information theory, an analytical framework is developed for examining wireless-powered communications with short packets, i.e., in the finite blocklength regime. This is relevant as remotely-powered communications may entail short packets due to small payloads, low-latency requirements, or limited energy to support a longer transmission. Second, using a stochastic geometry framework, an analytical model is developed for characterizing the performance of wireless-powered communications in the millimeter wave (mmWave) band. The proposed model incorporates the key features of mmWave systems such as directional beamforming and sensitivity to building blockages. Finally, the power transfer efficiency and the energy efficiency of a wireless-powered communication system aided by massive MIMO is characterized. The broad goal of this dissertation is to better understand wireless-powered communications in the context of the emerging technologies for 5G.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

A stochastic geometry analysis of cooperative wireless networks powered by energy harvesting

textEnergy harvesting technology is essential for enabling green, sustainable and autonomous wireless networks. In this report, a large-scale wireless network with energy harvesting transmitters is considered, where a group of transmitters forms a cluster to cooperatively serve a desired user in the presence of co-channel interference and noise. Using stochastic geometry, simple closed-form expressions are derived to characterize the outage performance at the user as a function of important parameters such as the energy harvesting rate, the energy buffer size and the cluster size for a given cluster geometry. The analysis is further extended to characterize the delay due to transmission failure. The developed framework is flexible in that it allows the in-cluster transmitters to have possibly different energy harvesting capabilities. The analytical expressions are first validated using simulations and then used for investigating the impact of different parameters such as cluster and buffer size on outage performance. The results suggest that substantial outage performance can in fact be extracted with a relatively small energy buffer. Moreover, the utility of having a large energy buffer increases with the cluster size as well as with the energy harvesting rate.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Optimal Management of community Demand Response

More than one-third of the electricity produced globally is consumed by the residential sectors [1], with nearly 17% of CO2 emissions, are coming from residential buildings according to reports from 2018 [2] [3]. In order to cope with increase in electricity demand and consumption, while considering the environmental impacts, electricity providers are seeking to implement solutions to help them balance the supply with the electricity demand while mitigating emissions. Thus, increasing the number of conventional generation units and using unreliable renewable source of energy is not a viable investment. That’s why, in recent years research attention has shifted to demand side solutions [4]. This research investigates the optimal management for an urban residential community, that can help in reducing energy consumption and peak and CO2 emissions. This will help to put an agreement with the grid operator for an agreed load shape, for efficient demand response (DR) program implementation. This work uses a framework known as CityLearn [2]. It is based on a Machine Learning branch known as Reinforcement Learning (RL), and it is used to test a variety of intelligent agents for optimizing building load consumption and load shape. The RL agent is used for controlling hot water and chilled water storages, as well as the battery system. When compared to the regular building usage, the results demonstrate that utilizing an RL agent for storage system control can be helpful, as the electricity consumption is greatly reduced when it’s compared to the normal building consumption

The Adaptive Coding Techniques for Dependable Medical Network Channel

The readily existing cellular networks play an important role in the daily life communications by integrating a wide variety of wireless multimedia services with higher data transmission rates, capable to provide much more than basic voice calls. In order to increase the demands of reliable medical network infrastructure economically and establish reliable medical transmission via cellular networks, this chapter has been designed as a dependable wireless medical network using an existing mobile cellular network with sophisticated channel coding technologies, providing a new novel way of the network that is adopted as a “Medical Network Channel (MNC)” system. Adding such adaptive outer coding with an existing cellular standard as inner coding makes a concatenated channel to carry out the MNC design. The adaptive design of extra outer channel codes depends on the Quality of Services (QoS) of Wireless Body Area Networks WBANs and also on the remaining errors from the inner-used cellular decoders. The adaptive extra code has been optimized toward “Medical Network Channel (MNC)” for different medical data QoS priority levels. The accomplishment of QoS constraints for different WBAN medical data has been investigated in this chapter for “Medical Network Channel (MNC)” by using the theoretical derivations, where positive acceptable results were achieved

A Stochastic Geometry Approach to Doppler Characterization in a LEO Satellite Network

A Non-terrestrial Network (NTN) comprising Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites can enable connectivity to underserved areas, thus complementing existing telecom networks. The high-speed satellite motion poses several challenges at the physical layer such as large Doppler frequency shifts. In this paper, an analytical framework is developed for statistical characterization of Doppler shift in an NTN where LEO satellites provide communication services to terrestrial users. Using tools from stochastic geometry, the users within a cell are grouped into disjoint clusters to limit the differential Doppler across users. Under some simplifying assumptions, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and the probability density function are derived for the Doppler shift magnitude at a random user within a cluster. The CDFs are also provided for the minimum and the maximum Doppler shift magnitude within a cluster. Leveraging the analytical results, the interplay between key system parameters such as the cluster size and satellite altitude is examined. Numerical results validate the insights obtained from the analysis.Comment: Accepted in IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 202

ROLE OF PAKISTANI FEMALE PEACEKEEPERS IN ENHANCING INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

In recent years, there has been growing recognition of the effectiveness of an all-gender-inclusive approach to peacekeeping missions in conflict zones, as highlighted in the UNSCR 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. UN has acknowledged the importance of female peacekeepers as potential role models for girls in male-dominated societies and has taken steps to increase their numbers. Pakistan has been a significant contributor to UN Peacekeeping missions over the past six decades and has also achieved the target of deploying female soldiers in its contingent forces. This study uses qualitative methods, primarily focus group discussions, to evaluate the constructive impact of UN female peacekeepers and their potential to enhance passive compliance towards International Humanitarian Law in conflict zones. It also explores whether female peacekeepers make a unique contribution and investigates the existing gap in research on their performance and the challenges they face in the field. The study highlights the need for further research and support to address the social and cultural factors that continue to restrict the contribution of female peacekeepers, particularly from countries like Pakistan, where women face significant challenges in the security sector.   Bibliography Entry Malik, Salma, Ahmed Hasan Awan and Talha Ibrahim. 2023. "Role of Pakistani Female Peacekeepers in Enhancing International Humanitarian Law: Opportunities and Challenges." Margalla Papers 27 (1): 186-198