Comprehensibility of Newly Introduced Water-sport Prohibitive Signs in Korea by Koreans and Westerners

Objective: The goal of this study is to evaluate the comprehensibility of the newly introduced water-sport prohibitive signs by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy (MKE, later merged into the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy) among Koreans and westerners, and to check whether the comprehensibility is affected by cultural differences. Background: The Ministry of Knowledge Economy had newly introduced fourteen water-sport prohibitive signs at the end of 2011 to alert people to potentially dangerous situations. However, no studies had been found so far to review or assess their comprehensibility. Method: Comprehensibility tests of fourteen water-sport prohibitive signs were conducted with forty Koreans and forty Westerners in two sequential sessions. In session I, participants were asked to guess the meaning of each sign verbally in an open-ended test. In session II, participants were encouraged to provide feedback for each sign after its intended meaning was given. Results: Only two out of fourteen signs satisfied the comprehension rate (67%) recommended by ISO standard for both groups (Koreans and Westerners). Cultural difference between Koreans and westerners significantly affect the comprehension rates of the investigated signs, and Westerners exhibit better overall comprehension than Koreans. Five poorly comprehended signs for both Korean and Western groups were identified. Conclusion: The recently introduced water-sport prohibitive warning signs by MKE still need a lot of improvements in order to be implemented nationally or internationally. There were significant differences in the signs' comprehensibility between Koreans and westerners. Application: The findings may serve as a useful input for researchers and watersport sign designers in creating easy-to-comprehend safety signs.clos

Outage Performance of Two-Hop OFDM Systems with Spatially Random Decode-and-Forward Relays

In this paper, we analyze the outage performance of different multicarrier relay selection schemes for two-hop orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems in a Poisson field of relays. In particular, special emphasis is placed on decode-and-forward (DF) relay systems, equipped with bulk and per-subcarrier selection schemes, respectively. The exact expressions for outage probability are derived in integrals for general cases. In addition, asymptotic expressions for outage probability in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region in the finite circle relay distribution region are determined in closed forms for both relay selection schemes. Also, the outage probabilities for free space in the infinite relay distribution region are derived in closed forms. Meanwhile, a series of important properties related to cooperative systems in random networks are investigated, including diversity, outage probability ratio of two selection schemes and optimization of the number of subcarriers in terms of system throughput. All analysis is numerically verified by simulations. Finally, a framework for analyzing the outage performance of OFDM systems with spatially random relays is constructed, which can be easily modified to analyze other similar cases with different forwarding protocols, location distributions and/or channel conditions

Adaptive OFDM Index Modulation for Two-Hop Relay-Assisted Networks

In this paper, we propose an adaptive orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) index modulation (IM) scheme for two-hop relay networks. In contrast to the traditional OFDM IM scheme with a deterministic and fixed mapping scheme, in this proposed adaptive OFDM IM scheme, the mapping schemes between a bit stream and indices of active subcarriers for the first and second hops are adaptively selected by a certain criterion. As a result, the active subcarriers for the same bit stream in the first and second hops can be varied in order to combat slow frequency-selective fading. In this way, the system reliability can be enhanced. Additionally, considering the fact that a relay device is normally a simple node, which may not always be able to perform mapping scheme selection due to limited processing capability, we also propose an alternative adaptive methodology in which the mapping scheme selection is only performed at the source and the relay will simply utilize the selected mapping scheme without changing it. The analyses of average outage probability, network capacity and symbol error rate (SER) are given in closed form for decode-and-forward (DF) relaying networks and are substantiated by numerical results generated by Monte Carlo simulations.Comment: 30 page

Decoding the `Nature Encoded' Messages for Distributed Energy Generation Control in Microgrid

The communication for the control of distributed energy generation (DEG) in microgrid is discussed. Due to the requirement of realtime transmission, weak or no explicit channel coding is used for the message of system state. To protect the reliability of the uncoded or weakly encoded messages, the system dynamics are considered as a `nature encoding' similar to convolution code, due to its redundancy in time. For systems with or without explicit channel coding, two decoding procedures based on Kalman filtering and Pearl's Belief Propagation, in a similar manner to Turbo processing in traditional data communication systems, are proposed. Numerical simulations have demonstrated the validity of the schemes, using a linear model of electric generator dynamic system.Comment: It has been submitted to IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC