Mobility: a double-edged sword for HSPA networks

This paper presents an empirical study on the performance of mobile High Speed Packet Access (HSPA, a 3.5G cellular standard) networks in Hong Kong via extensive field tests. Our study, from the viewpoint of end users, covers virtually all possible mobile scenarios in urban areas, including subways, trains, off-shore ferries and city buses. We have confirmed that mobility has largely negative impacts on the performance of HSPA networks, as fast-changing wireless environment causes serious service deterioration or even interruption. Meanwhile our field experiment results have shown unexpected new findings and thereby exposed new features of the mobile HSPA networks, which contradict commonly held views. We surprisingly find out that mobility can improve fairness of bandwidth sharing among users and traffic flows. Also the triggering and final results of handoffs in mobile HSPA networks are unpredictable and often inappropriate, thus calling for fast reacting fallover mechanisms. We have conducted in-depth research to furnish detailed analysis and explanations to what we have observed. We conclude that mobility is a double-edged sword for HSPA networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public report on a large scale empirical study on the performance of commercial mobile HSPA networks

Challenges of Primary Frequency Control and Benefits of Primary Frequency Response Support from Electric Vehicles

As the integration of wind generation displaces conventional plants, system inertia provided by rotating mass declines, causing concerns over system frequency stability. This paper implements an advanced stochastic scheduling model with inertia-dependent fast frequency response requirements to investigate the challenges on the primary frequency control in the future Great Britain electricity system. The results suggest that the required volume and the associated cost of primary frequency response increase significantly along with the increased capacity of wind plants. Alternative measures (e.g. electric vehicles) have been proposed to alleviate these concerns. Therefore, this paper also analyses the benefits of primary frequency response support from electric vehicles in reducing system operation cost, wind curtailment and carbon emissions

Duty ratio modulation direct torque control of brushless doubly-fed machines

For the brushless doubly-fed machine (BDFM), traditional direct torque control (DTC) has many problems such as big output torque ripple and uncertain inverter switch frequency. Based on the analysis of traditional DTC, this paper proposed a new torque control which applied duty ratio modulation into direct torque control. This new control method can decrease the torque ripple effectively by adding zero voltage in each control cycle. According to the brushless BDFM state equation and the prediction of torque, flux linkage in the next moment and the theory of electromagnetic torque equals to referenced value at the instant moment in one control cycle, torque ripple can be decreased. Through theoretical analysis and experiments, the proposed control method has all advantages of traditional direct torque control and can decrease torque ripple and flux linkage ripple, which can optimize the performance of direct torque control