Indoor radio channel characterization and modeling for a 5.2-GHz bodyworn receiver

[Abstract]: Wireless local area network applications may include the use of bodyworn or handportable terminals. For the first time, this paper compares measurements and simulations of a narrowband 5.2-GHz radio channel incorporating a fixed transmitter and a mobile bodyworn receiver. Two indoor environments were considered, an 18-m long corridor and a 42-m2 office. The modeling technique was a site-specific ray-tracing simulator incorporating the radiation pattern of the bodyworn receiver. In the corridor, the measured body-shadowing effect was 5.4 dB, while it was 15.7 dB in the office. First- and second-order small-scale fading statistics for the measured and simulated results are presented and compared with theoretical Rayleigh and lognormal distributions. The root mean square error in the cumulative distributions for the simulated results was less than 0.74% for line-of-sight conditions and less than 1.4% for nonline-of-sight conditions

Propagation modelling and measurements in a populated indoor environment at 5.2 GHz

There are a number of significant radiowave propagation phenomena present in the populated indoor environment, including multipath fading and human body effects. The latter can be divided into shadowing and scattering caused by pedestrian movement, and antenna-body interaction with bodyworn or hand portable terminals [1]. Human occupants within indoor environments are not always stationary and their movement will lead to temporal channel variations that can strongly affect the quality of indoor wireless communication systems. Hence, populated environments remain a major challenge for wireless local area networks (WLAN) and other indoor communication systems. Therefore, it is important to develop an understanding of the potential and limitations of indoor radiowave propagation at key frequencies of interest, such as the 5.2 GHz band employed by commercial wireless LAN standards such as IEEE 802.11a and HiperLAN 2. Although several indoor wireless models have been proposed in the literature, these temporal variations have not yet been thoroughly investigated. Therefore, we have made an important contribution to the area by conducting a systematic study of the problem, including a propagation measurement campaign and statistical channel characterization of human body effects on line-of-sight indoor propagation at 5.2 GHz. Measurements were performed in the everyday environment of a 7.2 m wide University hallway to determine the statistical characteristics of the 5.2 GHz channel for a fixed, transverse line-of-sight (LOS) link perturbed by pedestrian movement. Data were acquired at hours of relatively high pedestrian activity, between 12.00 and 14.00. The location was chosen as a typical indoor wireless system environment that had sufficient channel variability to permit a valid statistical analysis. The paper compares the first and second order statistics of the empirical signals with the Gaussian-derived distributions commonly used in wireless communications. The analysis shows that, as the number of pedestrians within the measurement location increases, the Ricean K-factor that best fits the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of the empirical data tends to decrease proportionally, ranging from K=7 with 1 pedestrian to K=0 with 4 pedestrians. These results are consistent with previous results obtained for controlled measurement scenarios using a fixed link at 5.2 GHz in [2], where the K factor reduced as the number of pedestrians within a controlled measurement area increased. Level crossing rate results were Rice distributed, considering a maximum Doppler frequency of 8.67 Hz. While average fade duration results were significantly higher than theoretically computed Rice and Rayleigh, due to the fades caused by pedestrians. A novel statistical model that accurately describes the 5.2 GHz channel in the considered indoor environment is proposed. For the first time, the received envelope CDF is explicitly described in terms of a quantitative measurement of pedestrian traffic within the indoor environment. The model provides an insight into the prediction of human body shadowing effects for indoor channels at 5.2 GHz

Solid state research of the Applied Physics Department for the year 1965

Solid state physics - semiconductor energy gap materials, crystal structure, epitaxial vacuum vaporization, magnetic behavior, and optical transmissio

Ca_{4}Sb_{2}O and Ca_{4}Bi_{2}O: two promising mixed-anion thermoelectrics

The environmental burden of fossil fuels and the rising impact of global warming have created an urgent need for sustainable clean energy sources. This has led to widespread interest in thermoelectric (TE) materials to recover part of the ∼60% of global energy currently wasted as heat as usable electricity. Oxides are particularly attractive as they are thermally stable, chemically inert, and formed of earth-abundant elements, but despite intensive efforts there have been no reports of oxide TEs matching the performance of flagship chalcogenide materials such as PbTe, Bi_{2}Te_{3} and SnSe. A number of ternary X_{4}Y_{2}Z mixed-anion systems, including oxides, have predicted band gaps in the useful range for several renewable-energy applications, including as TEs, and some also show the complex crystal structures indicative of low lattice thermal conductivity. In this study, we use ab initio calculations to investigate the TE performance of two structurally-similar mixed-anion oxypnictides, Ca_{4}Sb_{2}O and Ca_{4}Bi_{2}O. Electronic-structure and band-alignment calculations using hybrid density-functional theory (DFT), including spin–orbit coupling, suggest that both materials are likely to be p-type dopable with large charge-carrier mobilities. Lattice-dynamics calculations using third-order perturbation theory predict ultra-low lattice thermal conductivities of ∼0.8 and ∼0.5 W m^{−1} K^{−1} above 750 K. Nanostructuring to a crystal grain size of 20 nm is predicted to further reduce the room temperature thermal conductivity by around 40%. Finally, we use the electronic- and thermal-transport calculations to estimate the thermoelectric figure of merit ZT, and show that with p-type doping both oxides could potentially serve as promising earth-abundant oxide TEs for high-temperature applications

Using Broad Phonetic Group Experts for Improved Speech Recognition

In phoneme recognition experiments, it was found that approximately 75% of misclassified frames were assigned labels within the same broad phonetic group (BPG). While the phoneme can be described as the smallest distinguishable unit of speech, phonemes within BPGs contain very similar characteristics and can be easily confused. However, different BPGs, such as vowels and stops, possess very different spectral and temporal characteristics. In order to accommodate the full range of phonemes, acoustic models of speech recognition systems calculate input features from all frequencies over a large temporal context window. A new phoneme classifier is proposed consisting of a modular arrangement of experts, with one expert assigned to each BPG and focused on discriminating between phonemes within that BPG. Due to the different temporal and spectral structure of each BPG, novel feature sets are extracted using mutual information, to select a relevant time-frequency (TF) feature set for each expert. To construct a phone recognition system, the output of each expert is combined with a baseline classifier under the guidance of a separate BPG detector. Considering phoneme recognition experiments using the TIMIT continuous speech corpus, the proposed architecture afforded significant error rate reductions up to 5% relative

ThermoParser:Streamlined Analysis of Thermoelectric Properties

Thermoelectric materials, which convert heat into electricity, could be an important renewable energy source to help slow the encroaching climate crisis, not only by displacing fossil fuels, but by recycling waste heat, which makes up around 50 % of generated energy. With the growing computational capacity and development of several codes to calculate the key properties of thermoelectrics, they have become an increasingly popular area of computational materials research in recent years. Thermal transport packages include Phonopy, Phono3py, ShengBTE/ almaBTE, ALAMODE, TDEP and HiPhive; and electronic transport packages include BoltzTraP, BoltzTraP2, EPW, EPA, EPIC STAR, AMSET, Perturbo, TOSSPB and ElecTra. While separate packages are required for such different calculations, this makes data analysis complex, needing to load in different file formats, account for different data arrangements (e.g. array shapes), and convert to consistent units, even before one begins analysing anything. ThermoParser deals with these time-consuming and error-prone problems by loading data from multiple codes into a consistent data format with informative metadata, and facilitates the post-processing of thermoelectric properties by using this to accurately calculate and visualise them through an easy-to-use command-line interface (CLI) and a fully customisable Python package. Some of its utility can be seen by its use in the literature (sometimes under its former name, ThermoPlotter)

A SUMMARY OF REPORTED DEER-RELATED VEHICLE ACCIDENTS IN A VIRGINIA CITY

Data from 548 reported accidents involving white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and vehicles in Lynchburg during the years 1987-1991 were summarized. A majority (54.4%) occurred in the months October, November and December with 25.9% occurring in November. While accidents occurred at all hours, most (50%) occurred between 1700 and 0100 hrs.; about 12% occurred between 0600 and 0900 hrs. Accidents occurred on all days of the week (range 12.8% to 17.0%) and were not higher on work days. Adverse weather did not seem to he a factor increasing collisions; 80% of collisions occurred in clear weather. Most (75%) accidents occurred in dark conditions; 50% occurred on lighted highways. Accidents resulted in 9 human injuries and 1 human fatality