Sharif Digital Repository

Prolonging the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is one of the most important goals in the sensor network research. A lot of work has been done to achieve this goal. Since sensor nodes normally have limited resources in terms of energy, bandwidth and computation capability, efficiency is a key design goal in sensor network research. Data aggregation is a very important method to conserve energy by eliminating the inherent redundancy of raw data in dense WSNs. Previous research on data aggregation has demonstrated its effectiveness in reducing traffic, easing congestion and decreasing the energy consumption. However, few are actually designed for a real world application and... 

In this thesis the effect of frame aggregation mechanism in maximizing throughput in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) have been investigated. Frame aggregation has become a part of the IEEE 802.11 standard as the amendment IEEE 802.11n. First, we have a quick review on access control layer in IEEE 802.11 standard then illustrate the necessity of frame aggregation. Afterwards, we propose an analytical model for the analysis of an IEEE 802.11n network comprised of an Access Point (AP) and several conventional nodes, all in the coverage area of each other. This analytical model focuses on downlink throughput; therefore only AP uses frame aggregation and the other nodes use basic IEEE 802.11... 

Technology advances in the era of wireless communications leads to the birth of a very useful network called Wireless sensor Network which is very interesting for scientists and researchers. While these networks consist of tens to thousands of tiny sensor nodes, they consume their energy from none-rechargeable batteries. Reducing energy consumption and extend the life of network is the most challenging requirement for these kinds of networks; in some environments like military training which precision and sensitivity are critical, it might take at least K sensors to cover the whole area and these conditions leads to a vast data repetition in network and as a result energy exhaustions in... 

According to the principle No. 44 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Roads are in the public domain and are at the discretion of the Government. The result of this rule is that there is always a free route on the side of the freeway and motorists have the right to choose between a freeway and its successor road. This is a perfect laboratory condition which gives the opportunity that can be used with discrete choice models to estimate the demand of freeway versus its successor. In this paper we estimate the determinant parameters of the freeway demand versus the successor road and price elasticity of demand that can be calculated separately for each path. The results show... 

Using short rammed aggregate piers (RAP) is one of the ground improvement methods that is suitable for loose sands and soft clays. In this method, gravel or crushed stone is placed in layers with specific thickness in a pre-drilled cavity and each layer is fully compacted with impacts of a hammer. The basic advantages of these piers are increasing soil lateral stresses due to aggregate ramming and increasing the consolidation rate due to high permeability of aggregates. The main application of RAPs is soil improvement underneath shallow foundations, in order to increase the bearing capacity and reduce settlement of foundation. Regarding the usual height of 1.5 to 5m of these piers, a... 

Out of several ground improvement techniques available, stone columns have been widely used. This technique has been successfully applied to increase the bearing capacity and to reduce the settlement for foundation of structures like liquid storage tanks, earthen embankments, raft foundations, etc., where a relatively large settlement is permissible. This technique has, generally, been proven successful in increasing the stiffness of weak soils, upgrading their safe bearing capacity, and reducing their total and differential settlements, as well as speeding up their consolidation process. The beneficial effects of stone column installation in weak deposits is manifested in the form of... 

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has been a research topic for more than a decade, and the range of potential applications has spanned beyond the military domain into commercial domains. A key feature of current WSN solutions is operation in unlicensed frequency bands, for instance, the worldwide available 2.4 GHz band. However, the same band is shared by other wireless applications, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, as well as other proprietary technologies. There is evidence that unlicensed spectrum is becoming overcrowded, to solve this problem, concept of cognitive radio has been introduced.
A main challenge for routing in cognitive radio wireless sensor networks is the collaboration... 

Methiocarb [3,5-dimethyl-4-(methylthio) phenyl methylcarbamate] is an N-methylcarbamate with neurotoxic action. Because carbamate pesticides are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, they are considered to be carcinogens and mutagens. Methiocarb pesticide is widely used throughout the world particularly effective as fungicides, insecticide and bird repellent. To prevent its harmful effects on animals, humans, and the environment, it is of crucial importance to develop simple and sensitive methods for in-situ detection of methiocarb. This research describes a simple and low-cost method for on-site monitoring of methiocarb insecticide. Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) aggregation caused by methiocarb,... 

Asphaltene, the heaviest and most polarizable fraction of crude oil, has a potential to precipitate, deposit and plug pipelines, causing considerable production costs. The main objective of this study is to contribute to the thermodynamic and transport modeling of asphaltene in order to predict its precipitation, segregation and deposition. Potential calculation of some thermophysical properties of asphaltene is also explored. Predicting the flow assurance issues caused by asphaltene requires the ability to model the phase behavior of asphaltene as a function of pressure, temperature and composition. It has been previously demonstrated that the Perturbed Chain form of Statistical Association... 

The inevitable emergence of electric vehicles into the transportation industry in the near future can be a potential challenge or an opportunity for the power system. Vehicle-to-Grid can provide services for microgrids and the electricity market. The players of the game for participation of electric vehicles in microgrid or electricity market are vehicle owners, microgrid operators, and the aggregators. The formation and continuation of this interaction requires the interests of all institutions involved in the subject to be considered. Since there has not yet been an established conceptual or executive framework for the utilization of these vehicles in Vehicle-to-Grid idea considering... 

Image retrieval refers to the task of finding images related to a query image within an image set. Due to ever-increasing volumes of data, it has become increasingly necessary to find suitable and efficient methods for searching in massive databases. In this thesis, modern image retrieval techniques developed within the last 15 years have been studied, with an aim to satisfy three primary constraints of efficiency, accuracy, and low memory usage. Our focus has been on content-based retrieval; meaning that instead of using text and other information, we directly utilize image features for analysis and processing. To achieve this, we studied two established techniques, the bag-of-words model,... 

Two phase flow through porous media is one of great interests which have been studied for decades in petroleum sciences and even other fields, e.g. hydrology and physics, to solve problems such as enhanced oil recovery, contaminated groundwater or CO2 sequestration projects. Flow in porous media typically predict by means of Darcy’ law which in two phase flow lead to equations such as Buckley-Leverett or Koval, but today it is well approved that compact prediction of flow pattern by these equations may be accompanied by enormous errors and it’s because flow in certain condition is fractal. In this work a new mechanistic model has been used for simulating of immiscible drainage process and... 

In recent years, metallic nanoparticles, specially gold and silver nanoparticles, have received great attention for biological and metal ions analysis, due to the surface plasmon resonance phenomena. Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) have recently gained much interest in colorimetric probe based on aggregation or anti-aggregation of AuNPs, due to their simplicity and having high order of magnitude extinction coefficients, in addition to the dependence of surface plasmon resonance wavelength and intensity on the interparticles distances. In the first part of this thesis, a highly sensitive colorimetric method for detection of copper ions based on anti-aggregation of citrate capped AuNPs was... 

Sign language is recognized by considering the combination of the hand gesture, orientation, location and patterns of hand and arm movement. These complex interactions make the character and word recognition very challenging. In this paper, with the aid of sensory gloves and multiple inertial measurement units (IMUs) we measure the shoulder and elbow joint trajectories and hand gesture to train the discriminant functions to recognize the words intended and represented by sign language. For recognition of hand gesture, the Naive Baysian classifier was used while for Eulerian angles a new time series similarity measures were computed. Different aggregation method was used to integrate temporal... 

In this work, effects of information aggregation on risk attitude of Iranian individuals is being studied through two experiments. In these experiments a risk-free asset with a guaranteed revenue and a risky asset is introduced to each individual. Then the individual has to allocate a certain amount of money between two assets. In both experiments three treatments of control, separation and aggregation are defined in a way that the degree of information aggregation increases respectively. Given the specific treatment assigned to each individual, complementary information is presented, in orderto finalize the decision. Next a financial market simulation for a five year horizon is conducted to... 

Data aggregation is an efficient method to conserve energy by reducing packet transmissions in Wireless Sensor Networks. However, providing end-to-end data reliability is a major challenge when the network uses data aggregation. In this case a packet loss can miss a complete subtree of values, so greatly affect final results. Data transmission in multiple paths can tolerate this problem, but it may incur some computational error for duplicate-sensitive aggregates when aggregating individual sensor values multiple times. In this thesis, we have proposed a reliable data Aggregation protocol which uses the available path redundancy to deliver a correct aggregate result to the sink with a high...