Sharif Digital Repository

Influence tactics are methods which people use to influence others. These tactics may have different effect due to their sources of power, context, etc. On the other hand, if others perceive somebody authentic while he/she is using a tactic, it can be more effective. Through in-depth interviews with the members of the government and private sector dialogue council in Yazd’s Chamber of Commerce, this research examines the tactics of rational persuasion, appraisal and ingratiation. It seems that knowing the person who is arguing, the validity of his argument, emotionalizing the meeting atmosphere and some side factors like body language are effective in the perception of authenticity from that... 

A qualitative study has been conducted in order to identify evidence of bounded rationality in software engineers' career decision making. Tversky and Kahneman's heuristics and biases approach has been used as a theoretical framework of the study. The theoretical framework comprised four decision-making and judgment heuristics, i.e. availability, representativeness, anchoring and adjustment, and affect heuristic. The data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis method. The final results revealed that software engineers did make use of heuristics in making career decisions. Several incidents of the use of availability, representativeness, and... 

Career orientation has been defined as one’s career aspirations and preferences regarding to the self realization of his/her needs, values and competencies with attention to environmental factors such as opportunities and threats, For example one who wants to establish his/her own business has entrepreneurial career orientation. In spite of the importance of identifying MBA students’ career orientations, it seems that past studies have paid little attention to this topic in Iran. The results of this study can be a helpful guide in educational planning of management faculties regarding to students’ career orientations and for organizations in human resource management regarding to required... 

The general and primary goal of this research was to identify the barriers to effective managerial coaching and their mechanisms of influence in an organization. With regard to deeper understanding of the context as the research progressed, the final goal of the study was to identify barriers to effective managerial coaching and their mechanism of influence when a manager faces employee’s undesirable performance, in a data center services unit. Managerial coaching is the manager’s practice of facilitating employee’s learning which improves the employee’s performance toward independent performance. The study was conducted in two main phases using grounded theory approach. Data was collected... 

In this study we investigate the performance of amplify-and-forward (AF) and beamforming schemes in wireless networks. In our study we consider a general cooperative network consisting one transmit-receive pair and an arbitrary number of relays in which each relay has a separate power constraint. A two-step master-slave protocol is deployed in which at the first stage, relays listen to the transmitter and at the second stage, relays forward the recently received signal coherently. Main contributions of this dissertation are providing the exact closed-form of bit error rate analysis in the case of general AF networks, providing an integral-form upper bound of error probability of network... 

In this dissertation we will study the problem of transmitting the information of continuous source over fading channel, especially when the transmitter does not have complete information about the channel status. In this situation we will have a tradeoff between the Quality of received packets and the Reliability in transmissions. To increase the quality of packets, for example, we should increase the quantization, and therefore, the transmission rates at the transmitter. But this will also increase the Error Probability at the receiver. It means that if the receiver gets the transmitted packet, it will have a better estimation of information source, but it is likely that error happens and... 

Analysis of traditional spectrum allocation schemes shows underutilization of radio spectrum. This is main motivation behind deployment of cognitive radios and improving spectrum efficiency. One of the most important issues in cognitive radio networks is to guarantee quality of service (QoS) constraints for the primary users. Another problem which must be considered during network design is to design distributed algorithm with few amount of control messages. However, there is a tradeoff between to be distributed of algorithm and to be efficient. We have used game theory to analyze convergence, effectiveness and uniqueness of stable point of network.
This thesis is organized in two parts.... 

In this thesis, we investigate game theoretic approaches for distributed resource allocation in the downlink of cognitive radio networks. As the problem of joint frequency and power allocation in the downlink of cognitive radio networks has not been studied using game theory, this was an incentive for us to pay attention to the downlink and try to propose decentralized and distributed approaches for resource allocation in the downlink of these networks.
The works done in this thesis can be divided into two main parts. In the first part, we study the problem of distributed power allocation in the downlink of cognitive radio networks and using game theory techniques, we propose a... 

In this thesis, the relationships between various leadership styles and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) were examined. For this, with a qualitative perspective and using the Grounded Method as the research methodology, dominant OCBs, effective leadership styles, the relationships between leadership behaviors and OCBs, and other influencing parameters were identified. In this regard, with a preliminary feasibility study, the possibility of implementing this research was verified and then, by using twelve in-depth interviews, required information was gathered. Main categories were recognized by coding the data and analyzing the relationship between the coded information. The... 

Several studies in the field of performance management have paid attention to the effect of systemic and instrumental factors on the effectiveness of performance management system. However, the impact of communication and relational factors has received less attention. Furthermore, it seems that similar approach has been used in organizations for considering systemic factors in designing performance management systems rather than human factors. The goal of this research was to study the relationship between employees' trust in their manager as an relational variable with the effectiveness of performance management system and to compare this relationship with the relationship between the... 

Joint multi-input multi-output (MIMO) filter-and-forward relaying and post-processing at base stations (BSs) for uplink coordinated multi-point (CoMP) reception has been investigated in the case of users-to-relay and relay-to-BSs frequency-selective fading channels. Signal transmission from users to BSs is performed in two phases. In the first phase, all users transmit their data to MIMO relay at the same time slot. In order to combat the interference due to frequency-selectivity of channels, MIMO relay passes its received signals through a finite impulse response (FIR) filter. Then, in the second phase, relay transmits the processed signals to the BSs. In order to further reducemean square... 

Replicating server information at shorter distances from users and delivering them at more suitable times, decreases average delay of serving requests as well as balancing backhaul link traffic. Due to limited cache size, cache placement strategies play key role in efficiency of such approaches. Well-known heuristic caching mechanisms such as Least Frequently Used (LFU) and Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC), while quite efficient in terms of complexity, are not optimal in terms of hit rate which is the key caching performance index. In this paper, we address the optimal cache placement problem from an analytic Markov Decision Process (MDP)-based view to maximize cache hit rate. In this... 

Team and organizational leadership, has always been noted by researchers as an important factor in team effectiveness and organizational success. In past, leadership was considered a top down process in which one person (leader) played all the leadership roles. Recently, new models have been suggested by researchers, considering the increased demand due to changes in business world, how organizations work and how they interact with their environment. One of these models that have attracted a lot of attention from scholars and organizations is distributed leadership. This new model of leadership is considered to be a complement to vertical (Conventional model of) leadership. In this model... 

In recent years, introduction of new technologies has highlighted the need to more data rate in mobile networks. Classical methods of resource allocation in mobile networks cannot respond to this huge demand for data rate because of their limitations. Resource allocation, as one of the operators’ tasks, plays a key role in the network efficiency and users’ data rate. Opportunistic resource allocation and scheduling have gained attention in recent years. On the other, using single-channel (frequency reuse-1) networks is also one of the methods to improve data rate in mobile networks. It is expected that the use of opportunistic scheduling in single-channel networks can repond to the huge... 

Telecommunications industry along energy industry will be among striking elements in improving next-generation lifestyle. With the growth of wireless communications at the heart of telecommunications industry, cellular networks as an inevitable part of our daily life, have been around as a fertile research field for both academia and industry. With the upcoming Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets), these researches are revisited to new horizons. After these shift paradigms,the proposed solutions, mostly fall into the category of network densification in terms of antenna per (active) user. Based on the strategy chosen to densify the network, we face two broad approaches: 1) Centralized... 

There has been a continuous increase in requested data rates in both uplink and downlink of wireless communications for a long time. But in recent years, this increase has become more extensive due to widespread use of smart phones and social networks. In order to cope with such a heavy demand, wireless telecommunication operators, have to improve frequency efficiency, by implementing more and more base-stations all over the network. But base-stations are very expensive instrument, due to their complex structure and having a high processing power. Therefore, building a network with so many base stations, may be as expensive that operators cannot afford it. “Cloud Radio Access Network”, or... 

Caching has been widely considered an efficient way of reducing and balancing the growing traffic in communications networks in recent years. In this thesis, for the first time, the stochastic requests traffic model in communication networks is considered and a performance analysis is provided based on such a realistic assumption. In addition, we introduce new comprehensive performance metrics which simultaneously take into account, the cache hit probability, load on the bottleneck links, and requests arrival rates. The main contribution of this thesis is to present a system model based on queuing theory and provide an analysis of the stability, maximum stable throughput, load on the... 

Design and production of a drug is a very time and money consuming process. It takes more than a decade and about 2.5 million dollars on various stages to design a drug. Attempts to reduce this cost and time to market will make drugs available to customers at a more reasonable time. Some stages such as animal testing phase and clinical trials, can not be replaced and must take place in practice. Fortunately, some laboratory steps are interchangeable with software algorithms. These algorithms can significantly reduce the cost and time to market of the drug if they are accurate enough. On the other hand, the remarkable results of machine learning, in particular, Deep Neural Networks, in areas... 

Business process management (BPM) is an approach which helps managers to gain success in their organization by becoming capable of identifying and developing their processes. Process improvement is a difficult and important step in BPM since modern organizations have a huge number of processes and activities with complex and complicated relationships and interrelationships. In this work our goal is to rank and prioritize processes based on operational limitations of the organization such as budget, human resources, consumer resources and also relationships among processes have been considered and finally develop a portfolio of processes which are vital and essential for improvement.... 

Today, the use of deep learning algorithms in the design of communication systems has received much attention. One of these areas is the partial or total design of these systems using deep networks. The overall design of a communication system using deep networks allows for global optimization and can provide better performance in cases where classical methods have suboptimal performance without significantly increasing the computational load. In this research, a comprehensive architecture for designing communication systems based on Auto-encoder neural networks is presented. This architecture has the same functionality as classical systems, considering all parts of these systems including...