The impact of Rayleigh fading channel effects on the RF-DNA fingerprinting process

The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of many electronic and electromechanical devices connected to the Internet. It is estimated that the number of connected IoT devices will be between 20 and 50 billion by the year 2020. The need for mechanisms to secure IoT networks will increase dramatically as 70% of the edge devices have no encryption. Previous research has proposed RF-DNA fingerprinting to provide wireless network access security through the exploitation of PHY layer features. RF-DNA fingerprinting takes advantage of unique and distinct characteristics that unintentionally occur within a given radio’s transmit chain during waveform generation. In this work, the application of RF-DNA fingerprinting is extended by developing a Nelder-Mead-based algorithm that estimates the coefficients of an indoor Rayleigh fading channel. The performance of the Nelder-Mead estimator is compared to the Least Square estimator and is assessed with degrading signal-to-noise ratio. The Rayleigh channel coefficients set estimated by the Nelder-Mead estimator is used to remove the multipath channel effects from the radio signal. The resulting channel-compensated signal is the region where the RF-DNA fingerprints are generated and classified. For a signal-to-noise ratio greater than 21 decibels, an average percent correct classification of more than 95% was achieved in a two-reflector channel

Strategies to cope with risks of uncertain water supply in spate irrigation systems

Flood based irrigation in particular spate irrigation relies on variable flood scenarios occurring every year. Management of spate flood for spate irrigation must cope with the variability and uncertainty of water supply. Coping with water supply risks is often the only way to harness the opportunities for a productive use of water in arid environment. Integrating and strengthening community responses into irrigation policies and improvement plans could ensure sustainable and productive spate irrigated systems that can achieve food security for the poor population. This research analyses and evaluates risks and coping strategies developed by farming communities in the Gash spate irrigation system in Sudan, Eastern Africa. The research has synthesized different coping strategies developed by farmers, water user associations and water managers to cope with low, high and untimely flood risks. The research provides different frameworks that can assist with the identification of risk sources, pathways and propagation as well as evaluation of locally developed strategies at field, secondary and intake systems. The findings of this study contribute to the scarce knowledge on spate irrigation systems and provide scientifically sound and evidence-based insights to aid informed policy and decision making to improve productivity and sustainability of the spate irrigation systems

Preprint: Using RF-DNA Fingerprints To Classify OFDM Transmitters Under Rayleigh Fading Conditions

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a collection of Internet connected devices capable of interacting with the physical world and computer systems. It is estimated that the IoT will consist of approximately fifty billion devices by the year 2020. In addition to the sheer numbers, the need for IoT security is exacerbated by the fact that many of the edge devices employ weak to no encryption of the communication link. It has been estimated that almost 70% of IoT devices use no form of encryption. Previous research has suggested the use of Specific Emitter Identification (SEI), a physical layer technique, as a means of augmenting bit-level security mechanism such as encryption. The work presented here integrates a Nelder-Mead based approach for estimating the Rayleigh fading channel coefficients prior to the SEI approach known as RF-DNA fingerprinting. The performance of this estimator is assessed for degrading signal-to-noise ratio and compared with least square and minimum mean squared error channel estimators. Additionally, this work presents classification results using RF-DNA fingerprints that were extracted from received signals that have undergone Rayleigh fading channel correction using Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) equalization. This work also performs radio discrimination using RF-DNA fingerprints generated from the normalized magnitude-squared and phase response of Gabor coefficients as well as two classifiers. Discrimination of four 802.11a Wi-Fi radios achieves an average percent correct classification of 90% or better for signal-to-noise ratios of 18 and 21 dB or greater using a Rayleigh fading channel comprised of two and five paths, respectively.Comment: 13 pages, 14 total figures/images, Currently under review by the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Securit

EFFECT OF INNOVATIVE INTERVENTION IN ELIMINATING STIGMA AND DISCRIMINATION AMONG PEOPLE LIVING WITH AIDS IN KHARTOUM STATE, SUDAN 2013

Since the outbreak of the epidemic, almost 78 million people have been infected with the HIV virus and about 39 million people have died of HIV. Globally, 35.0 million people were recorded to be living with HIV at the end of 2013. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most severely affected region, and accounts for almost 71% of the people living with HIV worldwide12. HIV/AIDS cases in Sudan increases gradually from one case in 1986 to 10444 cases in 2009, to about 0.67% 13. People living with the disease are the main source through which HIV is spreading. They suffer social stigma and community discrimination. Information, Education, and Communication (IEC) are public health approach aim in changing or reinforcing health-related behaviors to a target audience through communication methods and principles 1. A quasi-experimental study was conducted in Khartoum State, which aim to study the effect of information, education, and communication in reducing stigmatization and discrimination among people living with AIDS/HIV (PLWAIDS/HIV). 25 participants of the total registered members of PLWAIDS/HIV in the society have been selected by systematic random sampling. An intensive intervention using IEC was conducted for six months. Data which were collected before and after the intervention were compared and analyzed using Chi-square test through a computer using SPSS Program. Furthermore, this was presented in tables and graphs. The study revealed that there was a significant elimination of social stigma and a slight decrease in the feeling of community discrimination. The IEC strategy has been proven to be effective in a significant elimination of social stigma and has slightly decreased the feeling of community discrimination

EFFECT OF INNOVATIVE INTERVENTION IN ELIMINATING STIGMA AND DISCRIMINATION AMONG PEOPLE LIVING WITH AIDS IN KHARTOUM STATE, SUDAN 2013

Since the outbreak of the epidemic, almost 78 million people have been infected with the HIV virus and about 39 million people have died of HIV. Globally, 35.0 million people were recorded to be living with HIV at the end of 2013. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most severely affected region, and accounts for almost 71% of the people living with HIV worldwide12. HIV/AIDS cases in Sudan increases gradually from one case in 1986 to 10444 cases in 2009, to about 0.67% 13. People living with the disease are the main source through which HIV is spreading. They suffer social stigma and community discrimination. Information, Education, and Communication (IEC) are public health approach aim in changing or reinforcing health-related behaviors to a target audience through communication methods and principles 1. A quasi-experimental study was conducted in Khartoum State, which aim to study the effect of information, education, and communication in reducing stigmatization and discrimination among people living with AIDS/HIV (PLWAIDS/HIV). 25 participants of the total registered members of PLWAIDS/HIV in the society have been selected by systematic random sampling. An intensive intervention using IEC was conducted for six months. Data which were collected before and after the intervention were compared and analyzed using Chi-square test through a computer using SPSS Program. Furthermore, this was presented in tables and graphs. The study revealed that there was a significant elimination of social stigma and a slight decrease in the feeling of community discrimination. The IEC strategy has been proven to be effective in a significant elimination of social stigma and has slightly decreased the feeling of community discrimination

Presentation and Intraoperative Findings of Penetrating Abdominal Injuries in a Battle Field Hospital, Yemen 2018 – 2019

Background Abdominal war wounds have the strange history of all injuries suffered in times of armed conflict. Of all major life threatening injuries, wounds in the abdomen are ---      --the most amenable to surgical intervention likely to produce good results and the return of the patient to a productive life. Most patients with blunt and penetrating trauma were treated conservatively and surgically respectively. The cure rate is higher in surgical than in conservative management. Objective this study aimed to describe the presentation and intraoperative findings in penetrating abdominal injury in battle field hospital, Yemen War, 2018 – 2019 Methods An Observational, descriptive, hospital based cross sectional study was conducted in Field Hospital in Yemen within the period from September 2018 to March 2019. Data entered, cleaned and analyzed using SPSS version 25.0. Results This study covered 80 study participants. The majority of them were classified as military personnel (91.2%).. The majority of them were males with male: female ratio of 19: 1 with ages ranging from 10 to 53 years and a mean ± SD of 31.7 ± 9.9 . Our study found that two thirds of the patients had gun shots (66.3%), blast injury (16.3%), explosive injury (15%) and sharpness among only (8.8%). The average time from injury to laparotomy was less than one hour in more than three quarters of the study participants (80%). Concerning the presentation of the study participants, half of them (51.3%) were shocked, (21.3%) evisceration, and (61.4%) reported peritonism presentation. Nearly two thirds of the patients showed inlet only (65%), while (22.5%) presented with both inlet and outlet and only (12.5%) lost part of their abdominal wall. More than half of the study participants received Medical help outside the battle field hospital (53.8%), such as blood transfusion (53.5%) and intravenous fluids for the majority of them. Regarding the intraoperative findings, the majority of the patients (95%) had operated, on average, for five hours or less. Nearly half of them had been injured in 1 – 3 organs (45%) while (7.5%) of them was injured in more than six organs. The most affected organs were Jejunum (75.6%), Ileum (73.1%), and large colon (43.6%),while the liver and splenic injuries were(32.1%) and (17.9%) respectively . Furthermore, cardiac arrest occurred only among a small proportion (2.5%) of the study patients. Only (1.3%) mortality reported. Only (1.3%) had reactionary bleeding as an early post-operative complication among our study patients. Finally, our study realized that most of the patients (83.7) were evacuated within 6 to 12 hours. Conclusion and recommendation The majority of patients with abdominal gunshot wounds are best served by laparotomy; however, select patients may be managed expectantly. All cases of such injuries should have exploratory laparotomy as soon as possible with a short time interval between the injury and the operation to prevent morbidity and mortality

High Sensitive C Reactive Protein in Sudanese Type 2 Diabetic Patients

Background: Researchers proved the association between inflammatory condition, high sensitive C reactive protein (hs-CRP), and cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) in type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM). Therefore, this study aimed to assess the hs-CRP level in type 2 DM patients and their relation to diabetes cardiovascular complications. Materials and methods: In a case-control study, 205 previously diagnosed type 2 DM patients and 100 controls were included. Serum high Sensitive C Reactive Protein (hs-CRP) was estimated immune-turbidimetrically using Cobas C-311® fully automated analyzer. Also, triglyceride (TG), total cholesterol (TC), high-density lipoprotein (HDL-C), and low-density lipoprotein (LDL-C) were measured. Results: Type 2 DM patients had an increased level of hs-CRP (p-value 0.020). Females had higher levels of hs-CRP, TC, HDL-C, and LDL-C than males (p-value 0.005, 0.000, 0.000, and 0.000, respectively). Moreover, patients who received statin drugs had decreased levels of hs-CRP, TC, and LDL-C (p-value 0.030, 0.000, and 0.000, respectively). The correlation analysis revealed hs-CRP correlates positively with BMI (r: 0.56, P-value 0.000). Conclusion: The data showed that type 2 DM patients had higher hs-CRP. Moreover, hs-CRP positively associated with BMI. Therefore, obesity might be related to CVDs in type 2 DM patient. Keywords High sensitive C reactive protein, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 DM, obesity, Sudan

Implementation of Direction Control Algorithms for Fixed Wings UAV

The demand for unmanned aircraft vehicles, UAV, has grown quite significantly in recent years. It is therefore important to implement efficient and accurate computer controlled navigation algorithms on such vehicles to guarantee the successful and reliable delivery of the vehicle to its final destination. This paper describes algorithms that use the Global Positioning system data to navigate from the current position to the destination point. The algorithm continuously adjusts the direction of flight thus ensuring the shortest path to the target. The algorithm has been successfully tested within Khartoum Province

Analysis of Tooth Extraction Causes and Patterns

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate the causes and patterns of extraction of permanent teeth in the targeted population. METHODS: The study was conducted for a period of 11 months. An especially designed form was used to record the causes for extraction of a permanent tooth. Further, it was analyzed for age, gender, education, occupation, smoking, tooth position, endodontic treatment, chewing, esthetics, needs replacement, type of existing prosthesis, and causes for extraction. The various causes which were considered to determine association with the tooth extraction were dental caries, periodontal problems, trauma, orthodontics, prosthodontic failures, endodontic failures, and others. RESULTS: The percentage of extractions was almost the same in males and females aged. Maximum extractions were noticed in 36–45 years of age group (32.5%). The presence of caries was observed to be the main reason for extraction (68.1%), followed by periodontal problems (17.6%) and orthodontic problems (4.8%). The most frequently extracted posterior teeth were first mandibular molar (22.2%), followed by the third maxillary molar (15.2%). CONCLUSION: Dental caries was found to be the most common reason for the extraction of teeth. Molar teeth were found to be the most frequently extracted, with an increased number of extracted first premolars as a result of orthodontic treatment. Maxillary teeth are extracted more than mandibular, mainly due to caries and periodontal problems

An Assessment of Entropy-Based Data Reduction for SEI Within IoT Applications

The research community remains focused on addressing Internet of Things (IoT) security concerns due to its continued proliferation and use of weak or no encryption. Specific Emitter Identification (SEI) has been introduced to combat this security vulnerability. Recently, Deep Learning (DL) has been leveraged to accelerate SEI using the signals’ Time-Frequency (TF) representation. While TF representations improve DL-based SEI accuracy–over raw signal learning–these transforms generate large amounts of data that are computationally expensive to store and process by the DL network. This study investigates the use of entropy-based data reduction applied to “tiles” selected from the signals’ TF representations. Our results show that entropy-based data reduction lowers the average SEI performance by as little as 0.86% while compressing the memory and training time requirements by as much as 92.65% and 80.7%, respectively