Exploiting Device-to-Device Communications to Enhance Spatial Reuse for Popular Content Downloading in Directional mmWave Small Cells

With the explosive growth of mobile demand, small cells in millimeter wave (mmWave) bands underlying the macrocell networks have attracted intense interest from both academia and industry. MmWave communications in the 60 GHz band are able to utilize the huge unlicensed bandwidth to provide multiple Gbps transmission rates. In this case, device-to-device (D2D) communications in mmWave bands should be fully exploited due to no interference with the macrocell networks and higher achievable transmission rates. In addition, due to less interference by directional transmission, multiple links including D2D links can be scheduled for concurrent transmissions (spatial reuse). With the popularity of content-based mobile applications, popular content downloading in the small cells needs to be optimized to improve network performance and enhance user experience. In this paper, we develop an efficient scheduling scheme for popular content downloading in mmWave small cells, termed PCDS (popular content downloading scheduling), where both D2D communications in close proximity and concurrent transmissions are exploited to improve transmission efficiency. In PCDS, a transmission path selection algorithm is designed to establish multi-hop transmission paths for users, aiming at better utilization of D2D communications and concurrent transmissions. After transmission path selection, a concurrent transmission scheduling algorithm is designed to maximize the spatial reuse gain. Through extensive simulations under various traffic patterns, we demonstrate PCDS achieves near-optimal performance in terms of delay and throughput, and also superior performance compared with other existing protocols, especially under heavy load.Comment: 12 pages, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Band Gap Closing in a Synthetic Hall Tube of Neutral Fermions

We report the experimental realization of a synthetic three-leg Hall tube with ultracold fermionic atoms in a one-dimensional optical lattice. The legs of the synthetic tube are composed of three hyperfine spin states of the atoms, and the cyclic inter-leg links are generated by two-photon Raman transitions between the spin states, resulting in a uniform gauge flux $\phi$ penetrating each side plaquette of the tube. Using quench dynamics, we investigate the band structure of the Hall tube system for a commensurate flux $\phi=2\pi/3$. Momentum-resolved analysis of the quench dynamics reveals that a critical point of band gap closing as one of the inter-leg coupling strengths is varied, which is consistent with a topological phase transition predicted for the Hall tube system.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure

AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF IT FIT MOTIVATION IN A CLOUD-COMPUTING CLASSROOM

In recent years, digital learning has received more attention from the field of education, and many schools in Taiwan have begun to introduce the cloud-computing classroom platform as another learning environment for students. However, as there remains a lack of research on fit and performance in the cloud-computing classroom, this study attempts to explore students’ views and effects when using the cloud-computing classroom. The research methods include case study and survey. Case study involved interviews with 18 students regarding their motivations and usage of the Ming Chuan University cloud-computing classroom. Based on the interview results, this study proposed three propositions, which were converted to three hypotheses. We collected data from a field survey and our results showed that (1) the user’s needs positively and affect the perceived fit; (2) the user’s usage of the cloud-computing classroom positively and affects the perceived fit; (3) the perceived fit in the usage of the cloud-computing classroom positively and affect user performance. Implications for academic researchers and practitioners are discussed