Community Engagement in Ireland's Developmental Welfare State: a study of the life cycle approach

The idea that people matter in modern democracies, often referred to as 'civic engagement' is recognised at the highest international level (United Nations 2008: 9). Civic or community engagement is essential to how budgets are decided, policy is developed and public services delivered. Significantly, community engagement is crucial in developing policy for sustained economic and social development. In Ireland the idea of the Developmental Welfare State (DWS) is based on the premise that the social policy system should support citizens so as to reach their full potential. Such a system comprises three overlapping elements: tax and welfare transfer, the provision of services and activist initiatives (National Economic and Social Council, 2005: ix-xviii). Civil Society Organisations have been challenged to 'operationalise the DWS' using a 'life cycle framework' as part of Ireland's corporatist partnership model (Department of Taoiseach, 2006: 40).

Generalized Selection Combining in Cognitive MIMO Relay Networks

We propose transmit antenna selection with receive generalized selection combining (TAS/GSC) in dual-hop cognitive decode-and-forward (DF) relay networks for reliability enhancement and interference relaxation. In this paradigm, a single antenna which maximizes the receive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is selected at the secondary transmitter and a subset of receive antennas with the highest SNRs are combined at the secondary receiver. To demonstrate the impact of multiple primary users on the cognitive relay network, we derive new closed-form expressions for the exact and asymptotic outage probability with TAS/GSC in the secondary network. Several important design insights are reached. We corroborate that the full diversity gain is achieved, which is entirely determined by the total number of antennas in the secondary network. The negative impact of the primary network on the secondary network is reflected in the SNR gain.

Multiuser Cognitive Relay Networks in the Presence of Direct Links

In this paper, we investigate a multiuser cognitive relay network with direct source-destination links and multiple primary destinations. In this network, multiple secondary users compete to communicate with a secondary destination assisted by an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay. We take into account the availability of direct links from the secondary users to the primary and secondary destinations. For the considered system, we select one best secondary user to maximize the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the secondary destination. We first derive an accurate lower bound of the outage probability, and then provide an asymptotic expression of outage probability in high SNR region. From the lower bound and the asymptotic expressions, we obtain several insights into the system design. Numerical and simulation results are finally demonstrated to verify the proposed studies.

Mitigating Cross-Network Interference in Cognitive Spectrum Sharing with Opportunistic Relaying

We examine the impact of primary and secondary interference on opportunistic relaying in cognitive spectrum sharing networks. In particular, new closed-form exact and asymptotic expressions for the outage probability of cognitive opportunistic relaying are derived over Rayleigh and Nakagami-m fading channels. Our analysis presents revealing insights into the diversity and array gains, diversity-multiplexing tradeoff, impact of primary transceivers' positions, and the optimal position of relays. We highlight that cognitive opportunistic relaying achieves the full diversity gain which is a product of the number of relays and the minimum Nakagami-m fading parameter in the secondary network. Furthermore, we confirm that the diversity gain reduces to zero when the peak interference constraint in the secondary network is proportional to the interference power from the primary network.

Ergodic Capacity of Cognitive TAS/GSC Relaying in Nakagami-m Fading Channels

We examine the impact of transmit antenna selection with receive generalized selection combining (TAS/GSC) for cognitive decode-and-forward (DF) relaying in Nakagami-m fading channels. We select a single transmit antenna at the secondary transmitter which maximizes the receive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and combine a subset of receive antennas with the largest SNRs at the secondary receiver. In an effort to assess the performance, we first derive the probability density function and cumulative distribution function of the end-to-end SNR using the moment generating function. We then derive new exact closed-form expression for the ergodic capacity. More importantly, by deriving the asymptotic expression for the high SNR approximation of the ergodic capacity, we gather deep insights into the high SNR slope and the power offset. Our results show that the high SNR slope is 1/2 under the proportional interference power constraint. Under the fixed interference power constraint, the high SNR slope is zero.