Sharif Digital Repository

The Taguchi method, a robust experimental design, was used for optimization of synthesis of a novel biopolymer-based superabsorbent hydrogel, kappa-carrageenan (K-C)-g-acrylic acid (AA)-co-2-acrylamido-2- methylpropanesulfonic acid (AMPS). The Taguchi method was applied for the experimental and standard 18 orthogonal arrays (OA) with seven factors and three levels for each factor. In the synthesis of the superabsorbent, N,N'-methylene bisacrylamide (MBA) as crosslinker, ammonium persulfate (APS) as initiator, monomer ratio (AA/AMPS), K-C concentration, Total Monomer, neutralization percent (NU), and reaction temperature were used as important factors. After analyzing with analysis of... 

In this paper, the problem of resource allocation at an Ad hoc network with nodes not using any infrastructure to cooperate with each other is considered. By using a simple interference model in wireless links, the convergence and stability of a fair resource allocation scheme in the absence of delay is investigated. Also, the local stability of the scheme in the presence of upper-bounded delay is verified. Simulations results illustrate the convergence and fairness of this scheme considering different initial states for different sources. The performance of the scheme in the presence of different disturbances for each flow in transient and steady state along with its local stability in the... 

Due to the constraints of P2P networks (such as bandwidth limitation) multiple senders should be employed for reliable multimedia streaming. This paper introduces a mathematic approach to select a set of senders among all available senders to provide the most reliable stream for the receiver. This selection is based on upload bandwidths and availability of peers as well as bandwidth of links connecting the senders and the receiver. Our method is called IPROMISE as it is an improved version of the PROMISE algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate improved media quality delivered to the receiver, while the complexity of sender selection remains the same. © 2007 IEEE  

In this paper, one of the most important parameters in performance evaluation and protocol design of wireless networks, Link Excess Life (LEL), is investigated. An analytical model for LEL is proposed and evaluated. Evaluation of the proposed model leads to the first closed form expression for the excess life PDF. The closed form expression affords ease of further evaluations, e.g, an interesting result is that the average excess life is infinite for the proposed model. The effect of relative velocity distribution on the link excess life PDF is also investigated. The superposition property of LEL is mentioned and used to explore a systematic method for evaluation of the effect of stationary... 

Peer-to-peer overlay networks provide a useful infrastructure for building distributed applications. These networks provide efficient and fault-tolerant routing and object locating within a self-organizing overlay network. This paper presents a multi-dimensional overlay network called RAQNet which is based on RAQ1. RAQ supports exact match queries and range queries over multi-dimensional data efficiently. Moreover, its routing cost does not depend on the dimension of the search space. In RAQNet, we have improved its original routing algorithms and extended it to have topology awareness property. In RAQNet, nodes are connected to each other if their labels are "close" to each other with... 

Peer-to-peer networks are beginning to form the infrastructure of future applications. One of the problems with non structured peer-to-peer networks is their scalability limitation. These networks can't contain a large number of nodes because of the large amount of traffic that they have to handle. HyperCup is a structured overlay network that solves the scalability problem for message broadcasts. This overlay broadcasts search queries throughout the entire network and all nodes receive broadcasted messages. In this paper we introduce Semantic HyperCup, an extension of HyperCup which uses semantic data to route messages and reduce overlay network traffic through search queries. © 2006 IEEE  

Network Survivability is defined as the ability of a network to support the committed Quality of Services (QoS) continuously in the presence of different failure scenarios. Both availability and performance degradation of a system in presence of failure are integral components of survivability evaluation. Therefore, a composite model is presented for network survivability that includes system availability analysis to find out the cost due to system downtime, and system failure impact analysis to find out the transient performance degradation when failure occurs. A new analytical technique is presented to evaluate the excess loss due to failure (ELF) as the transient performance degradation... 

The concept of a nonlinear transfer function of a fibre-optic communication link is reviewed. Also an approximation of the nonlinear transfer function is introduced, which allows to define an equivalent single-span model of a dispersion-managed multi-span system. In this paper we will show its limits of validity and try to extent these limits by enhancing the theoretical model. In this respect we will discuss the impact of dispersion precompensation and show the influence of residual dispersion per span, number of spans and local dispersion on transmission systems with on-off keying and differential phase-shift keying modulation formats. This approach allows fast assessment of the... 

A novel biopolymer-based superabsorbent hydrogel was synthesized through chemical crosslinking by graft copolymerization of partially neutralized acrylic acid onto the hydrolyzed collagen, in the presence of a crosslinking agent and a free radical initiator. The Taguchi method, a robust experimental design, was employed for the optimization of the synthesis reaction based on the swelling capacity of the hydrogels. This method was applied for the experiments and standard L16 orthogonal array with three factors and four levels were chosen. The critical parameters that have been selected for this study are crosslinker (N,N′-methylene bisacrylamide), initiator (potassium persulfate), and monomer... 

Cooperation of nodes for routing and packet forwarding is inevitable in a mobile ad hoc network. Selfishness in such networks is a significant challenge and can cause network performance to noticeably degrade. In this paper, we propose some new selfishness models elicited from psychological behavior of human beings. We also evaluate performance of MANET in the presence of different percentages of selfish nodes that act based on our selfishness models. Results show that energy-based selfishness is a serious problem that could affect performance depends on mobility of nodes, density of network, and time of simulation. This kind of selfishness needs a comprehensive mechanism to cope with and we... 

In this work, the dynamic and vibrational behavior of a micro/nano-manipulator has been studied. The manipulator comprises three links attached serially. While the connection of the links is rigid, which makes the whole body a monolithic structure, the movement of the manipulator is derived from the links deflection. Piezoelectric layers were employed as an actuator to impose deflection on the links, thereby moving the manipulator. After defining the dynamic behavior of each link, manipulator equations of motion were developed. To evaluate the validity of the mathematical model, two FEM models were constructed. The observed results showed a good agreement between the models, and they... 

The Time Modulated Array (TMA) provides multiple radiation beams at different frequencies, by turning the radiating elements on and off. In this paper, we propose to add polarization diversity to a wireless communication link by leveraging the capabilities of the TMA. The proposed architecture switches between two orthogonal polarizations, instead of turning the antenna off, providing polarization diversity for the receivers. We show that the beams of each polarization at the sidebandsare exactly the same. However, the switching sequence should be optimized for the fundamental frequency to provide the same radiation level at each sideband. Two different switching sequences are proposed,... 

In this paper, by making slight modifications in protocol stack of wireless access points, the proposed CICADA scheme aims at isolating problems related to wireless section of a TCP connection from its wired portion, using IP spoofing and Virtual Protocol Stack scheme. As the simulation results for an 802.11 based system show, the proposed scheme improves the overall network throughput while reducing the mean and variance of end-to-end delay for voice and video flows due to smarter bandwidth allocation to elastic and real-time traffic. In addition, the proposed scheme uses a centralized NAT structure that prevents undesired disconnections during handovers and achieves a smaller handoff delay... 

Link adaptation of a wireless cellular network is of much attention due to the desire of maximizing both the a erage lin throughput and co erage reliability, which have conflicting effect on each other. In this paper, the intra-cell lin adaptation problem is formulated as a non-differentiable constrained optimization problem to maximize average link throughput while guaranteeing the best possible coverage reliability. To achieve this, a cutting plane optimization algorithm is employed. The performance of our method: adaptive modulation/coding with power management (AMCWPM) using proposed algorithm is compared with that of an adaptive modulation/coding (AMC) with no power management.... 

The insulation lifetime of power cables is determined by several factors. One of the more important of these is the occurrence of partial discharge (PD) at the dielectric. The ability to detect and locate a PD source is limited by attenuation of the high frequency PD pulses as they propagate through the cable. Therefore it is necessary to understand the high frequency response of such cables. Further, to enable reconstruction of PD signals as emitted a viable high frequency model for simulation is needed. This paper presents results of measurements of PD calibration pulse and high frequency sinusoid propagation in HV XLPE cables. In addition to the tests a cable model was developed using the... 

In this paper we propose a rate-efficient peer-to-peer architecture for video multicasting over the Internet. The limited capacity of the Internet hosts and the heterogeneous property of their access links are the main challenges of the peer-to-peer video multicasting over the Internet. Although, the rate-optimized overlay tree construction is a NP-hard problem, we propose a number of distributed and efficient protocols for rate-efficient overlay tree construction. Our proposed protocols include efficient join, improvement, overlay tree refinement and an optimum rate allocation protocol. The simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed protocols in rate-efficient overlay tree... 

This paper presents the SkipTree, a new balanced, distributed data structure for storing data with multidimensional keys in a peer-to-peer network. The SkipTree supports range queries as well as single point queries which are routed in O(log n) hops. SkipTree is fully decentralized with each node being connected to O(logn) other nodes. The memory usage for maintaining the links at each node is O(log n log log n) on average and O(log2 n) in the worst case. Load balance is also guaranteed to be within a constant factor. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005  

In this paper, by making slight modifications in protocol stack of wireless access points, the proposed CICADA scheme aims at isolating problems related to wireless section of a transmission control protocol (TCP) connection from its wired portion, using IP spoofing and virtual protocol stack scheme. As the simulation results for an 802.11 based system show, the proposed scheme improves the overall network throughput for both DCF and PCF scenarios, while reducing the mean and variance of end-to-end delay for voice and video flows due to smarter bandwidth allocation to elastic and real-time traffic. In addition, the proposed scheme uses a centralized network address translation (NAT)... 

In this paper, a new transport layer method is proposed utilizing a diversity scheme to make an end to end communication reliable and consequently reduce power consumption in large scale sensor networks. Sensor networks are composed of large number of battery powered nodes. Energy consumption is the most important design objective in sensor networks while delay and throughput are taken less into account. Wireless transmission is the other important characteristic of these networks. Small-scale fading decreases wireless communication performance. In a fading channel higher SNRs is needed and consequently more energy is consumed. In addition to error occurred because of poor communication...