Factors that influence zambian higher education lecturer’s attitude towards integrating ICTs in teaching and research

This paper investigates factors that influence Zambian higher education lecturer’s attitude towards integrating ICTs in research and teaching. To determine these factors, we used online administered survey with a total of 163 respondents from public and private higher education institutions in Zambia. Quantitative data analysis based on descriptive and inferential statistics was used in this study. Inferential analysis was employed to investigate the relationships among variables using Pearson correlation analysis and completely randomized design. The results revealed that lack of adequate Internet bandwidth is among the major barrier or obstacle for assimilating ICTs in research and teaching for Zambian higher education lecturers. Additionally, training lecturers on the use of ICTs e.g. email, PowerPoint presentations, electronic boards and its advantages is the most important incentive to motivate lecturers to incorporate ICTs in research and teaching. Therefore, this study contributes to literature on factors that influence higher education lecturers’ attitude towards integrating ICTs in research and teaching. This study also demonstrates a positive correlation between the important factors that influence lecturers in integrating ICTs in research and teachingPeer Reviewe

Time division multiple access scheduling strategies for emerging vehicular ad hoc network medium access control protocols: a survey

[EN] Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging and promising technology, which allows vehicles while moving on the road to communicate and share resources. These resources are aimed at improving traffic safety and providing comfort to drivers and passengers. The resources use applications that have to meet high reliability and delay constraints. However, to implement these applications, VANET relies on medium access control (MAC) protocol. Many approaches have been proposed in the literature using time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme to enhance the efficiency of MAC protocol. Nevertheless, this technique has encountered some challenges including access and merging collisions due to inefficient time slot allocation strategy and hidden terminal problem. Despite several attempts to study this class of protocol, issues such as channel access and time slot scheduling strategy have not been given much attention. In this paper, we have relatively examined the most prominent TDMA MAC protocols which were proposed in the literature from 2010 to 2018. These protocols were classified based on scheduling strategy and the technique adopted. Also, we have comparatively analyzed them based on different parameters and performance metrics used. Finally, some open issues are presented for future deployment.Tambawal, AB.; Noor, RM.; Salleh, R.; Chembe, C.; Anisi, MH.; Michael, O.; Lloret, J. (2019). Time division multiple access scheduling strategies for emerging vehicular ad hoc network medium access control protocols: a survey. Telecommunication Systems. 70(4):595-616. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-018-00542-8S59561670

Spectrum sensing framework for infrastructure based cognitive vehicular communications / Chembe Christopher

Vehicular communication is posed to aid road users overcome challenges faced today by sharing road conditions. However, vehicular communication still faces many challenges before deployment. One such challenge is insufficient radio frequency channels. Vehicular communications has been allocated 75MHz for dedicated short range communication (DSRC) at 5.9GHz bands. Nevertheless, the channels can get congested during peak hours or accident scenarios affecting the transmission of safety messages. To alleviate the problem of scarcity of channels in vehicular communications, dynamic spectrum access and Cognitive Radio (CR) technology is proposed. CR identifies spectrum opportunities in licensed frequency bands that can be accessed by unlicensed users through spectrum sensing. Spectrum sensing is performed by an individual vehicle or cooperation. In vehicular communications, spectrum sensing is challenging due to vehicle mobility and dynamic topological changes. Additionally, many challenges associated with spectrum sensing still exist such as shadowing, multipath fading and unknown primary user (PU) activities. This research aims at mitigating some of the problems of spectrum sensing in vehicular communication mentioned above by proposing a sensing framework. The proposed framework is divided in two parts. The first part involves sensing of PU signal by individual vehicles on the road using adaptive sensing. The adaptive sensing is based on energy detection and cyclostationary feature detection. The history of sensing results by vehicles is sent to road side unit (RSU) and used in aiding the framework to predict licensed channels likely to be free later. The results are used as reward for reinforcement learning at RSU. The second part of the framework involves RSU learning behavior of PU activity patterns using the sensing history. The framework is evaluated and validated through simulation under realistic VANET scenarios. The performance of the proposed framework is compared to history based approaches in literature

Factors that influence Zambian higher education lecturer’s attitude towards integrating ICTs in teaching and research

This paper investigates factors that influence Zambian higher education lecturer’s attitude towards integrating ICTs in research and teaching. To determine these factors, we used online administered survey with a total of 163 respondents from public and private higher education institutions in Zambia. Quantitative data analysis based on descriptive and inferential statistics was used in this study. Inferential analysis was employed to investigate the relationships among variables using Pearson correlation analysis and completely randomized design. The results revealed that lack of adequate Internet bandwidth is among the major barrier or obstacle for assimilating ICTs in research and teaching for Zambian higher education lecturers. Additionally, training lecturers on the use of ICTs e.g. email, PowerPoint presentations, electronic boards and its advantages is the most important incentive to motivate lecturers to incorporate ICTs in research and teaching. Therefore, this study contributes to literature on factors that influence higher education lecturers’ attitude towards integrating ICTs in research and teaching. This study also demonstrates a positive correlation between the important factors that influence lecturers in integrating ICTs in research and teaching

Enhanced weight-based clustering algorithm to provide reliable delivery for VANET safety applications.

A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging and promising wireless technology aimed to improve traffic safety and provide comfort to road users. However, the high mobility of vehicles and frequent topology changes pose a considerable challenge to the reliable delivery of safety applications. Clustering is one of the control techniques used in VANET to make the frequent topology changes less dynamic. Nevertheless, research has shown that most of the existing clustering algorithms focus on cluster head (CH) election with very few addressing other critical issues such as cluster formation and maintenance. This has led to unstable clusters which could affect the timely delivery of safety applications. In this study, enhanced weight-based clustering algorithm (EWCA) was developed to address these challenges. We considered any vehicle moving on the same road segment with the same road ID and within the transmission range of its neighbour to be suitable for the cluster formation process. This was attributed to the fact that all safety messages are expected to be shared among the vehicles within the vicinity irrespective of their relative speedto avoid any hazardous situation. To elect a CH, we identified some metrics on the basis of the vehicle mobility information. Each vehicle was associated with a predefined weight value based on its relevance. A vehicle with the highest weight value was elected as the primary cluster head (PCH). We also introduced a secondary cluster head (SeCH) as a backup to the PCH to improve the cluster stability. SeCH took over the leadership whenever the PCH was not suitable for continuing with the leadership. The simulation results of the proposed approach showed a better performance with an increase of approximately40%- 45% in the cluster stability when compared with the existing approaches. Similarly, cluster formation messages were significantly minimized, hence reducing the communication overhead to the system and improving the reliable delivery of the safety applications

Infrastructure based spectrum sensing scheme in VANET using reinforcement learning

Spectrum sensing is one of the fundamental functionality performed by a cognitive radio to identify vacant radio spectrum for dynamic spectrum access (DSA). However, there are many challenges still existing before the benefits of DSA can be realized. The challenges include multipath fading, shadowing and hidden primary user (PU) problem. The challenges are more severe in vehicular communication due to unique characteristics such as dynamic topology caused by vehicle mobility. Furthermore, spectrum sensing is dependent on the activities of the PU traffic pattern which are not known in advance. In a typical cognitive radio network, the PU plays a passive role. Therefore, a sensing technique should account for traffic pattern of the PU autonomously. However, most of the proposed spectrum sensing schemes in vehicular communication assumes a static ON/OFF PU model which does not realistically model the PU traffic pattern. In this paper, we propose reinforcement learning (RL) to model the traffic pattern of the PU and use the model to predict channels likely to be free in future. The RL is implemented on road side unit (RSU) which send predicted vacant PU channels to vehicles on the road. Before the channels can be used, vehicles perform spectrum sensing. To account for multipath fading and shadowing, adaptive spectrum sensing is proposed. The results from spectrum sensing, sensing time and PU channel capacity are calculated into a scalar value and used as reward for RL at RSU. The RSU continuously update the reward for channels of interest using sensing history from passing vehicles as reward. Compared to history based schemes from literature, the RL technique proposed in this paper performs better