DADC: A Novel Duty-cycling Scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 Cluster-tree-based IoT Applications

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is one of the widely adopted specifications for realizing different applications of the Internet of Things. It defines several physical layer options and Medium Access Control (MAC) sub-layer for devices with low-power operating at low data rates. As devices implementing this standard are primarily battery-powered, minimizing their power consumption is a significant concern. Duty-cycling is one such power conserving mechanism that allows a device to schedule its active and inactive radio periods effectively, thus preventing energy drain due to idle listening. The standard specifies two parameters, beacon order and superframe order, which define the active and inactive period of a device. However, it does not specify a duty-cycling scheme to adapt these parameters for varying network conditions. Existing works in this direction are either based on superframe occupation ratio or buffer/queue length of devices. In this article, the particular limitations of both the approaches mentioned above are presented. Later, a novel duty-cycling mechanism based on MAC parameters is proposed. Also, we analyze the role of synchronization schemes in achieving efficient duty-cycles in synchronized cluster-tree network topologies. A Markov model has also been developed for the MAC protocol to estimate the delay and energy consumption during frame transmission.

Bilinear damage evolution in AA2011 wire drawing processes

This paper presents an experimental and numerical analysis of damage evolution in AA2011 aluminum alloy wires drawn under different scenarios. To this end, load-unload tensile tests were firstly carried out in order to characterize the degradation of the mechanical response in every cycle where the experimental results show a bilinear damage relationship in terms of the effective plastic strain. Therefore, a modification of the classical Lemaitre model is proposed in this work in order to reproduce bilinear paths of damage with the addition of only two parameters that can be directly obtained from the material characterization. Then, the damage predictive capability of this new experimental-based model is assessed in numerical simulations of the drawing process in one and two passes (considering for this last case the sequential and tandem configurations) where the computed predictions are compared with the corresponding experimental data showing a good agreement between them.

Context-bounded verification of thread pools

Thread pooling is a common programming idiom in which a fixed set of worker threads are maintained to execute tasks concurrently. The workers repeatedly pick tasks and execute them to completion. Each task is sequential, with possibly recursive code, and tasks communicate over shared memory. Executing a task can lead to more new tasks being spawned. We consider the safety verification problem for thread-pooled programs. We parameterize the problem with two parameters: the size of the thread pool as well as the number of context switches for each task. The size of the thread pool determines the number of workers running concurrently. The number of context switches determines how many times a worker can be swapped out while executing a single task---like many verification problems for multithreaded recursive programs, the context bounding is important for decidability. We show that the safety verification problem for thread-pooled, context-bounded, Boolean programs is EXPSPACE-complete, even if the size of the thread pool and the context bound are given in binary. Our main result, the EXPSPACE upper bound, is derived using a sequence of new succinct encoding techniques of independent language-theoretic interest. In particular, we show a polynomial-time construction of downward closures of languages accepted by succinct pushdown automata as doubly succinct nondeterministic finite automata. While there are explicit doubly exponential lower bounds on the size of nondeterministic finite automata accepting the downward closure, our result shows these automata can be compressed. We show that thread pooling significantly reduces computational power: in contrast, if only the context bound is provided in binary, but there is no thread pooling, the safety verification problem becomes 3EXPSPACE-complete. Given the high complexity lower bounds of related problems involving binary parameters, the relatively low complexity of safety verification with thread-pooling comes as a surprise.

Analysis and Research on Spatial Nodes of Historical Villages based on Spatial Syntax Theory: Cuiwei Village in Qianshan Area of Zhuhai as an Example

This research takes Cuiwei Village located in Qianshan District of Zhuhai City as an example. The village is investigated and analyzed through field research, and the street scale, spatial structure, functional characteristics of streets, internal commercial distribution forms, and functions in the Cuiwei Historic Block are studied and analyzed. Based on the convex space analysis method and the line of sight analysis method in the space syntax theory, with the help of the Depthmap software, the complex street nodes, that is, the space of the two nodes A and B analyzed. Through the establishment of a viewshed model, including the analysis of the viewport integration degree, the viewport agglomeration degree, the viewport connection value and the spatial characteristics of the historical area, the most representative traditional buildings in the village, namely the Sanwang Temple and the Weishi Mansion, are selected. =N and when the radius R=3, observe the changes of the two parameters, the integration of the visual field and the visual depth of the two historical buildings. And with the help of Baidu time machine photos in different periods to observe and record the store's changes and people's behavioural characteristics. The results show that: at the present stage, the coordination of villages is poor, people's recognition in the village space is weak, and people cannot use local perception to reflect the overall space. There are obvious sub-interfaces between the interior of the village and the outside world—good but poor global intelligibility. After an on-the-spot investigation and analysis, it can be seen that although people can walk out of Cuiwei Village, they are always in a state of confusion, and it is difficult to grasp the spatial form of the overall area. Therefore, the space syntax analysis results are consistent with the field survey results, so this research method has good reference value and reference significance in the study of village space.

Mechanical Strength Study of a Cranial Implant Using Computational Tools

The human head is sometimes subjected to impact loads that lead to skull fracture or other injuries that require the removal of part of the skull, which is called craniectomy. Consequently, the removed portion is replaced using autologous bone or alloplastic material. The aim of this work is to develop a cranial implant to fulfil a defect created on the skull and then study its mechanical performance by integrating it on a human head finite element model. The material chosen for the implant was PEEK, a thermoplastic polymer that has been recently used in cranioplasty. A6 numerical model head coupled with an implant was subjected to analysis to evaluate two parameters: the number of fixation screws that enhance the performance and ensure the structural integrity of the implant, and the implant’s capacity to protect the brain compared to the integral skull. The main findings point to the fact that, among all tested configurations of screws, the model with eight screws presents better performance when considering the von Mises stress field and the displacement field on the interface between the implant and the skull. Additionally, under the specific analyzed conditions, it is observable that the model with the implant offers more efficient brain protection when compared with the model with the integral skull.

Large Time Behavior on the Linear Self-Interacting Diffusion Driven by Sub-Fractional Brownian Motion With Hurst Index Large Than 0.5 I: Self-Repelling Case

Let SH be a sub-fractional Brownian motion with index 12<H<1. In this paper, we consider the linear self-interacting diffusion driven by SH, which is the solution to the equationdXtH=dStH−θ(∫0tXtH−XsHds)dt+νdt,X0H=0,where θ &lt; 0 and ν∈R are two parameters. Such process XH is called self-repelling and it is an analogue of the linear self-attracting diffusion [Cranston and Le Jan, Math. Ann. 303 (1995), 87–93]. Our main aim is to study the large time behaviors. We show the solution XH diverges to infinity, as t tends to infinity, and obtain the speed at which the process XH diverges to infinity as t tends to infinity.

Online Adaptation of Two-Parameter Inverter Model in Sensorless Motor Drives

<div>This paper designs parameter adaptation algorithms for online simultaneous identification of a two-parameter sigmoid inverter model for compensating inverter nonlinearity to reduce the voltage error in flux estimation for a position sensorless motor drive. The inverter model has two parameters, a2 and a3, where a2 is “plateau voltage”, and a3 is a shape parameter that mainly accounts for the stray capacitor effect. Parameter a3 is identified by the (6k ± 1)-th order harmonics in measured current. Parameter a2 is identified by the amplitude mismatch of the estimated active flux. It is found that the classic linear flux estimator, i.e., the hybrid of voltage model and current model, cannot be used for a2 identification. This paper proposes to use a saturation function based nonlinear flux estimator to build an effective indicator for a2 error. The coupled identifiability of the two parameters is revealed and analyzed, which was not seen in literature. The concept of the low current region where the two-way coupling between a2 and a3 occurs is established. In theory, it is suggested to stop the inverter identification in the low current region. However, the experimental results in which dc bus voltage variation and load change are imposed, have shown the effectiveness of the proposed online inverter identification and compensation method, even in low current region.</div>

Three-dimensional Digital Anatomical Measurement of Modified Sacroiliac Screws

Purpose To rebuild a model of the pelvis and effectively simulate the trajectory of modified sacroiliac screws, we measured the parameters of each screw and screw channel and assessed the safety and feasibility of the parameters in adults.Method and materials One hundred (50 males and 50 females) normal adult pelvic CT (computed tomography) images were randomly selected and imported into Mimics software to rebuild the three-dimensional pelvis model. In these models, each ideal channel of modified screws was simulated, and then we obtained the precise parameters of screws and channels using Mimics and Three-matic software.Results The results of the comparison (right vs. left) showed that there were no significant differences in any of the angles, radius or M1SI parameters (the first modified sacroiliac). However, one parameter (BS) of M2SI (the second modified sacroiliac), two parameters (AP and BS) of M3SI (the third modified sacroiliac), and three parameters (AP、BS、L) of M4SI (the fourth modified sacroiliac) were statistically significant (P < 0.05). The result of comparison (between genders) showed that there were no significant differences in M1SI and M2SI; in contrast, the radius, length and the α angle of M3SI and M4SI were significantly different between genders (P < 0.05), and the radius of M4SI required special attention. If the radius of the limiting screw channel was >3.50 mm, 52 cases (52%, 24 males and 28 females) could not complete the M4SI screw placement among 100 samples. If the radius of the limiting screw channel was >3.0 mm, a total of 10 cases (10%, 2 males and 8 females) could not complete the M4SI screw placement.Conclusion Through the measurement of 100 healthy adult real three-dimensional pelvic models, we obtained the parameters of each modified sacroiliac screw and measured the three angles of each screw based on international coordinates for the first time, which can instruct clinical application.

An application of neighbourhoods in digraphs to the classification of binary dynamics

A binary state on a graph means an assignment of binary values to its vertices. A time dependent sequence of binary states is referred to as binary dynamics. We describe a method for the classification of binary dynamics of digraphs, using particular choices of closed neighbourhoods. Our motivation and application comes from neuroscience, where a directed graph is an abstraction of neurons and their connections, and where the simplification of large amounts of data is key to any computation. We present a topological/graph theoretic method for extracting information out of binary dynamics on a graph, based on a selection of a relatively small number of vertices and their neighbourhoods. We consider existing and introduce new real-valued functions on closed neighbourhoods, comparing them by their ability to accurately classify different binary dynamics. We describe a classification algorithm that uses two parameters and sets up a machine learning pipeline. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method on simulated activity on a digital reconstruction of cortical tissue of a rat, and on a non-biological random graph with similar density.

Identification of Track Stability Model Parameters Based on Numerical Experiments

In the article, an identification method of railway track stability model parameters based on energy equilibrium is presented by the authors. A study of two parameters directly influencing the continuous welded track (CWR) stability is described by the authors, i.e., the rail-sleeper structure stiffness Bz is considered one beam, and the ballast lateral resistance r0. These parameters were estimated with the use of a numerical model for various railway track types. The adopted concept is based on the assumption that it is possible to determine substitute values for both parameters. Therefore, using one value of both of these parameters, we label them substitute parameters. The assumed numerical model forced lateral displacements of a track section, and, based on the obtained track section displacement results, energy equilibrium was determined. The equilibrium takes into account the work of external load and the bending work of rail-sleeper structure with the substitute stiffness Bz and the ballast deformation work, also with the substitute value of lateral resistance r0 with lateral displacement. The aim is to identify these substitute values to be used for analysing track stability with the semi-analytical model. These analyses are part of the studies related to the development of a method of assessing various methods of increasing track stability.