Architectures for Cognitive Radio Testbeds and Demonstrators – An Overview

Wireless communication standards are developed at an ever-increasing rate of pace, and significant amounts of effort is put into research for new communication methods and concepts. On the physical layer, such topics include MIMO, cooperative communication, and error control coding, whereas research on the medium access layer includes link control, network topology, and cognitive radio. At the same time, implementations are moving from traditional fixed hardware architectures towards software, allowing more efficient development. Today, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and regular desktop computers are fast enough to handle complete baseband processing chains, and there are several platforms, both open-source and commercial, providing such solutions. The aims of this paper is to give an overview of five of the available platforms and their characteristics, and compare the features and performance measures of the different systems

On the use of gamma irradiation crosslinked PVA membranes in hydrogen fuel cells

There is growing interest in the use of fuel cells (FC) with hydrogen as the main fuel for stationary, mobile, and transportation applications. In the FC concept membranes play increasingly important roles. Polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are considered as the most promising fuel cell technology for a wide range of applications due to the stable operation, the high energy generation yield and the simplicity of the system. In this work, we develop different types of membranes based on poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA). PVA is a water-soluble polymer that is used in practical applications because of its easy preparation, excellent chemical resistance, thermal and mechanical properties. Crosslinking of the PVA was performed by gamma irradiation since radiation chemistry is found to be a very effective method for constructing three-dimensional polymeric networks. The samples prepared in this way were then immersed in the alkaline solution over a certain period of time to turn them into conductive membranes. Ionic conductivity of the PVA hydrogels, was then measured as a function of concentration of KOH solutions and temperature. Cyclic voltammetry of these PVA hydrogel electrolytes was performed to determine the width of the electrochemical stability window. We examined these membranes impregnated with saturated 6 M KOH electrolyte as polymer membrane for fuel cells application. Our experiments showed that PEMFCs with PVA and Nafion(R) membranes had similar polarization curves, under same conditions. Furthermore, PVA membranes proved to be stable during the real cell tests. This study offers a possibility for more earnest approach to the use of PVA membranes for fuel cell applications. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved