Energy conservation and harvesting in wireless sensor networks

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Semiconductor Gas Sensors: Materials, Technology, Design, and Application

This paper presents an overview of semiconductor materials used in gas sensors, their technology, design, and application. Semiconductor materials include metal oxides, conducting polymers, carbon nanotubes, and 2D materials. Metal oxides are most often the first choice due to their ease of fabrication, low cost, high sensitivity, and stability. Some of their disadvantages are low selectivity and high operating temperature. Conducting polymers have the advantage of a low operating temperature and can detect many organic vapors. They are flexible but affected by humidity. Carbon nanotubes are chemically and mechanically stable and are sensitive towards NO and NH3, but need dopants or modifications to sense other gases. Graphene, transition metal chalcogenides, boron nitride, transition metal carbides/nitrides, metal organic frameworks, and metal oxide nanosheets as 2D materials represent gas-sensing materials of the future, especially in medical devices, such as breath sensing. This overview covers the most used semiconducting materials in gas sensing, their synthesis methods and morphology, especially oxide nanostructures, heterostructures, and 2D materials, as well as sensor technology and design, application in advance electronic circuits and systems, and research challenges from the perspective of emerging technologies. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Decision support system for plant and crop treatment and protection based on wireless sensor networks

A decision support system (DSS) able to protect/treat plants and crops taking into account the temporal and spatial variability of physical, environmental, and agricultural parameters has been described. It is based on remote sensing and the most sophisticated machine learning techniques: Gaussian processes and deep neural networks. An example of knowledge extraction and actionable rule definition has been presented too

WIRELESS SENSOR NODE WITH LOW-POWER SENSING

Wireless sensor network consists of a large number of simply sensor nodes that collect information from the external environment by sensors, process the information, and communicate with other neighboring nodes in the network. Usually sensor nodes operate with exhaustible batteries unattended. Since manual replacement or recharging the batteries is not an easy, desirable and always possible task, the power consumption becomes a very important issue in the development of these networks. The total power consumption of a node is a result of all steps of operation: sensing, data processing and radio transmission. In this work we focus on the impact of sensing hardware on the total power consumption of a sensor node. Firstly, we describe the structure of sensor node architecture, identify its key energy consumption sources, and introduce an energy model for the sensing subsystem as building block of a node. Secondly, with aim to reduce energy consumption of a node we propose implementation of two power-saving techniques: duty-cycling and power-gating. Duty-cycling is effective at system level. It is used for switching a node between active and sleep mode (with duty-cycle factor of 1% reduction of in dynamic energy consumption is achieved). Power-gating is implemented at circuit level with goal to decrease a power loss due to leakage current (in our design, a reduction of dynamic and static energy consumption of off-chip sensor elements as constituents of sensing hardware within a node of is achieved). Our MATLAB simulation results suggest that in total for a sensing hardware thanks to involving of duty-cycling and power-gating secures a three order of magnitude reduction ( ) in energy consumption can be achieved compared to a node architecture in which the implementation of  both energy saving techniques are omitted

MAC and baseband processors for RF-MIMO WLAN

The article describes hardware solutions for the IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) layer and IEEE 802.11a digital baseband in an RF-MIMO WLAN transceiver that performs the signal combining in the analogue domain. Architecture and implementation details of the MAC processor including a hardware accelerator and a 16-bit MACphysical layer (PHY) interface are presented. The proposed hardware solution is tested and verified using a PHY link emulator. Architecture, design, implementation, and test of a reconfigurable digital baseband processor are described too. Description includes the baseband algorithms (the main blocks being MIMO channel estimation and Tx-Rx analogue beamforming), their FPGA-based implementation, baseband printed-circuit-board, and real-time test

Cybersecurity for industrial Internet of Things: architecture, models and lessons learned

Modern industrial systems now, more than ever, require secure and efficient ways of communication. The trend of making connected, smart architectures is beginning to show in various fields of the industry such as manufacturing and logistics. The number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices used in such systems is naturally increasing and industry leaders want to define business processes which are reliable, reproducible, and can be effortlessly monitored. With the rise in number of connected industrial systems, the number of used IoT devices also grows and with that some challenges arise. Cybersecurity in these types of systems is crucial for their wide adoption. Without safety in communication and threat detection and prevention techniques, it can be very difficult to use smart, connected systems in the industry setting. In this paper we describe two real-world examples of such systems while focusing on our architectural choices and lessons learned. We demonstrate our vision for implementing a connected industrial system with secure data flow and threat detection and mitigation strategies on real-world data and IoT devices. While our system is not an off-the-shelf product, our architecture design and results show advantages of using technologies such as Deep Learning for threat detection and Blockchain enhanced communication in industrial IoT systems and how these technologies can be implemented. We demonstrate empirical results of various components of our system and also the performance of our system as-a-whole

Les premières traductions françaises et italiennes du Docteur Faust de Christopher Marlowe : Variations selon le contexte socioculturel

La présente thèse compare le drame Le Docteur Faust de Christopher Marlowe (1604, 1616) avec la première traduction française faite par Jean-Pierre Antoine Bazy (1850) et la première traduction italienne faite par Eugenio Turiello (1898) en visant à identifier les changements textuels révélateurs du contexte culturelle et idéologique au moment où se produisent les deux textes cibles. Le Docteur Faust est un exemple emblématique de l’instabilité du texte dramatique source. Il nous est parvenu en deux versions (le texte A et le texte B) différentes du point de vue structurel, thématique et doctrinal. En revanche, aucune version ne permet pas une interprétation cohérente. Ce travail a pour propos d’examiner si les traductions de Bazy et de Turiello, qui proviennent de contextes géographiques, historiques et littéraires différents mais étroitement liés, multiplient les lectures plausibles ou bien si elles aboutissent à une vision plus constante. En outre, on s’interroge sur la cause des variations textuelles, généralement dénommées en traductologie les glissements. Tout d’abord, j’ai identifié une régularité des glissements qui se manifestent dans deux traductions en question. Puis, j’ai analysé les effets des glissements sur la structure et la signification générales des textes. Enfin, en adoptant une approche socioculturelle de l’analyse des traductions, j’ai exploré la manière dont les changements sont déterminés par l’idéologie des traducteurs et leur interprétation de l’original. Cela explique leur position au sein de l’espace politique et idéologique de chaque culture d’arrivée, ainsi que les normes traductrices et culturelles adoptées au cours de la traduction.The aim of this research is to compare Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus (1604, 1616) with the first French translation by Jean-Pierre Antoine Bazy (1850) and the first Italian translation by Eugenio Turiello (1898) in search of the changes that are symptomatic of the cultural and ideological context of translation production. The case of Doctor Faustus represents the epitome of the instability of a dramatic source text. Two main versions of the play (the A-text and the B-text) differ in structural, thematic and doctrinal terms. At the same time, neither version delivers a coherent vision. The research seeks to examine whether Bazy’s and Turiello’s translation, belonging to different yet related geographical, historical and literary traditions, further multiply the potential readings of the original or whether they display a more consistent framework. In addition, we will analyse the causes of textual variation, commonly labelled in Translation Studies as shifts. First, we identified a pattern of shifts manifested in the target texts in question. Then, we discussed the ways in which the identified patterns of shifts affect the general meaning and the structure of the texts. Finally, adopting a socio-cultural approach, we showed how certain shifts are conditioned by the translators’ ideology and their interpretation of the original. This in turn reveals the positions they occupy within the political and ideological space of each target culture and the main cultural and translation norms operating in the recipient systems

Using Yield to Predict Long-term Reliability of Integrated Circuits: Application of Boltzmann-Arrhenius-Zhurkov Model

Modified Boltzmann-Arrhenius-Zhurkov (BAZ) constitutive model is applied to predict the reliability of integrated circuits. The model accounts for the impact of physical defects and process variations on the stress-free activation energy, which is viewed as a critical material\u27s property. It is shown that the probability of non-failure (reliability) and the corresponding mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) can be evaluated from the failure-oriented-accelerated-testing (FOAT) geared to the modified BAZ model. The general concept is illustrated by the experimental data