Synchronization stability of general complex dynamical networks with time-varying delays: A piecewise analysis method

AbstractThe synchronization problem of some general complex dynamical networks with time-varying delays is investigated. Both time-varying delays in the network couplings and time-varying delays in the dynamical nodes are considered. The delays considered in this paper are assumed to vary in an interval, where the lower and upper bounds are known. Based on a piecewise analysis method, the variation interval of the time delay is firstly divided into several subintervals, by checking the variation of the derivative of a Lyapunov function in every subinterval, then the convexity of matrix function method and the free weighting matrix method are fully used in this paper. Some new delay-dependent synchronization stability criteria are derived in the form of linear matrix inequalities. Two numerical examples show that our method can lead to much less conservative results than those in the existing references

Celebrity-Following And Social Capital: A Study Of User Behavior In Microblogging

In recent years, microblogging has emerged as a disruptive new force in social networking. Unlike the bi-directional relationships on traditional SNS sites (such as Facebook), connections on most microblogging platforms (such as Twitter) is one-directional, by which users choose others to “follow” and each user has her own group of “followers”. Such asymmetric relationships are particularly ubiquitous between celebrities and their fans. This study investigated the impacts of microblogging users’ various celebrity-following activities from a social capital perspective. The results of a large-scale survey provided supportive evidence to our theoretical research model, i.e., microblogging users’ one-directional celebrity-fol lowing activities could increase their perceived social capital and such influences are mediated by their parasocial interactions with the celebrities

Detect-and-forward relaying aided cooperative spatial modulation for wireless networks

A novel detect-and-forward (DeF) relaying aided cooperative SM scheme is proposed, which is capable of striking a flexible tradeoff in terms of the achievable bit error ratio (BER), complexity and unequal error protection (UEP). More specifically, SM is invoked at the source node (SN) and the information bit stream is divided into two different sets: the antenna index-bits (AI-bits) as well as the amplitude and phase modulation-bits (APM-bits). By exploiting the different importance of the AI-bits and the APM-bits in SM detection, we propose three low-complexity, yet powerful relay protocols, namely the partial, the hybrid and the hierarchical modulation (HM) based DeF relaying schemes. These schemes determine the most appropriate number of bits to be re-modulated by carefully considering their potential benefits and then assigning a specific modulation scheme for relaying the message. As a further benefit, the employment of multiple radio frequency (RF) chains and the requirement of tight inter-relay synchronization (IRS) can be avoided. Moreover, by exploiting the benefits of our low-complexity relaying protocols and our inter-element interference (IEI) model, a low-complexity maximum-likelihood (ML) detector is proposed for jointly detecting the signal received both via the source-destination (SD) and relay-destination (RD) links. Additionally, an upper bound of the BER is derived for our DeF-SM scheme. Our numerical results show that the bound is asymptotically tight in the high-SNR region and the proposed schemes provide beneficial system performance improvements compared to the conventional MIMO schemes in an identical cooperative scenario.<br/