Management of public water supply to reduce energy cost and improve wind power uptake

This paper presents a study on the implementation of Real-Time Pricing (RTP) based Demand Side Management (DSM) of water pumping at a clean water pumping station in Northern Ireland, with the intention of minimising electricity costs and maximising the usage of electricity from wind generation. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) was used to create pumping schedules based on system constraints and electricity tariff scenarios. Implementation of this method would allow the water network operator to make significant savings on electricity costs while also helping to mitigate the variability of wind generation.

Management of public water supply to reduce energy cost and improve wind power uptake

This paper presents a study on the implementation of Real-Time Pricing (RTP) based Demand Side Management (DSM) of water pumping at a clean water pumping station in Northern Ireland, with the intention of minimising electricity costs and maximising the usage of electricity from wind generation. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) was used to create pumping schedules based on system constraints and electricity tariff scenarios. Implementation of this method would allow the water network operator to make significant savings on electricity costs while also helping to mitigate the variability of wind generation.

Turing's menagerie:Talking lions, virtual bats, electric sheep and analogical peacocks: Common ground and common interest are necessary components of engagement

This theoretical paper attempts to define some of the key components and challenges required to create embodied conversational agents that can be genuinely interesting conversational partners. Wittgenstein's argument concerning talking lions emphasizes the importance of having a shared common ground as a basis for conversational interactions. Virtual bats suggests that-for some people at least-it is important that there be a feeling of authenticity concerning a subjectively experiencing entity that can convey what it is like to be that entity. Electric sheep reminds us of the importance of empathy in human conversational interaction and that we should provide a full communicative repertoire of both verbal and non-verbal components if we are to create genuinely engaging interactions. Also we may be making the task more difficult rather than easy if we leave out non-verbal aspects of communication. Finally, analogical peacocks highlights the importance of between minds alignment and establishes a longer term goal of being interesting, creative, and humorous if an embodied conversational agent is to be truly an engaging conversational partner. Some potential directions and solutions to addressing these issues are suggested.

VLSI design and implementation of 2-D Inverse Discrete Wavelet Transform

This paper proposes a JPEG-2000 compliant architecture capable of computing the 2 -D Inverse Discrete Wavelet Transform. The proposed architecture uses a single processor and a row-based schedule to minimize control and routing complexity and to ensure that processor utilization is kept at 100%. The design incorporates the handling of borders through the use of symmetric extension. The architecture has been implemented on the Xilinx Virtex2 FPGA.

A Frequency-Dependent Equivalence Between Groove Gap Waveguide and Rectangular Waveguide

Recently gap waveguides have been shown as a potential alternative to conventional waveguides in the millimeter-wave band. Groove Gap Waveguide (GGW) has until now been studied though direct correspondence with rectangular waveguide with the same propagation channel dimensions. However there have been observed differences in the above cutoff propagation characteristics between these waveguide types. Furthermore, the behaviour of GGW below cutoff remains unknown. This work presents a discussion of below and above cutoff propagation characteristics, and introduces a simple model that explains observed GGW behavior and establishes its propagation characteristics.

Broadband Dual-Polarized Antenna with High Port Isolation and Polarization Purity

This paper presents a novel high symmetry balun which significantly improves the performance of dipole-based dual-polarized antennas. The new balun structure provides enhanced differential capability leading to high performance in terms of port-to-port isolation and far-field cross polarization. An example antenna using this balun is proposed. The simulated results show 53.5% of fractional bandwidth within the band 1.71−2.96 GHz (VSWR<1.5) and port-to-port isolation >59 dB. The radiation characteristic shows around 9 dBi of gain and far-field cross polarization <−48 dBi over the entire bandwidth. The detailed balun functioning and full antenna measurements will be presented during the conference. Performance comparison with similar structures will be also provided.

Beamforming and interference cancellation schemes for D2D communications

We investigate device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular networks with M-antenna base stations. We consider both beamforming (BF) and interference cancellation (IC) strategies under quantized channel state information (CSI), as well as, perfect CSI. We derive tight closed-form approximations of the ergodic achievable rate which hold for arbitrary transmit power, location of users and number of antennas. Based on these approximations, we derive insightful asymptotic expressions for three special cases namely high signal-to-noise (SNR), weak interference, and large M. In particular, we show that in the high SNR regime a ceiling effect exists which depends on the received signal-to-interference ratio and the number of antennas. Moreover, the achievable rate scales logarithmically with M. The ergodic achievable rate is shown to scale logarithmically with SNR and the antenna number in the weak interference case. When the BS is equipped with large number of antennas, we find that the ergodic achievable rate under quantized CSI reaches a saturated value, whilst it scales as log2M under perfect CSI.

I/Q imbalance in two-way AF relaying: Performance analysis and detection mode switch

This paper studies the impact of in-phase and quadrature-phase imbalance (IQI) in two-way amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying systems. In particular, the effective signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is derived for each source node, considering four different linear detection schemes, namely, uncompensated (Uncomp) scheme, maximal-ratio-combining (MRC), zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) based schemes. For each proposed scheme, the outage probability (OP) is investigated over independent, non-identically distributed Nakagami-m fading channels, and exact closed-form expressions are derived for the first three schemes. Based on the closed-form OP expressions, an adaptive detection mode switching scheme is designed for minimizing the OP of both sources. An important observation is that, regardless of the channel conditions and transmit powers, the ZF-based scheme should always be selected if the target SINR is larger than 3 (4.77dB), while the MRC-based scheme should be avoided if the target SINR is larger than 0.38 (-4.20dB).

Uplink Performance of Conventional and Massive MIMO Cellular Systems with Delayed CSIT

This work studies the uplink of a cellular network with zero-forcing (ZF) receivers under imperfect channel state information at the base station. More specifically, apart from the pilot contamination, we investigate the effect of time variation of the channel due to the relative users' movement with regard to the base station. Our contributions include analytical expressions for the sum-rate with finite number of BS antennas, and also the asymptotic limits with infinite power and number of BS antennas, respectively. The numerical results provide interesting insights on how the user mobility degrades the system performance which extends previous results in the literature.

N-opcode analysis for android malware classification and categorization

Malware detection is a growing problem particularly on the Android mobile platform due to its increasing popularity and accessibility to numerous third party app markets. This has also been made worse by the increasingly sophisticated detection avoidance techniques employed by emerging malware families. This calls for more effective techniques for detection and classification of Android malware. Hence, in this paper we present an n-opcode analysis based approach that utilizes machine learning to classify and categorize Android malware. This approach enables automated feature discovery that eliminates the need for applying expert or domain knowledge to define the needed features. Our experiments on 2520 samples that were performed using up to 10-gram opcode features showed that an f-measure of 98% is achievable using this approach.

I/Q imbalance in two-way AF relaying: Power allocation and performance analysis

We investigate the performance of dual-hop two-way amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying in the presence of inphase and quadrature-phase imbalance (IQI) at the relay node. In particular, the effective signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at both sources is derived. These SINRs are used to design an instantaneous power allocation scheme, which maximizes the minimum SINR of the two sources under a total transmit power constraint. The solution to this optimization problem is analytically determined and used to evaluate the outage probability (OP) of the considered two-way AF relaying system. Both analytical and numerical results show that IQI can create fundamental performance limits on two-way relaying, which cannot be avoided by simply improving the channel conditions.

Multiuser dual-hop relaying over hybrid RF/FSO links

The performance of multiuser dual-hop relaying over mixed radio frequency/free-space optical (RF/FSO) links is investigated. RF links are used for the simultaneous data transmission from m single-antenna sources to the relay, which is equipped with n ≥ m receive antennas and a photo-aperture transmitter. The relay operates under the decode-and-forward protocol and utilizes the popular ordered V-BLAST technique to successively decode each user's transmitted stream. A common norm-based ordering approach is adopted, where the streams are decoded in an ascending order. After the V-BLAST decoding, the relay retransmits the initial information to the destination, which is equipped with a photo-detector, via a point-to-point FSO link in m consecutive timeslots. Analytical expressions for the end-to-end outage probability and average symbol error probability of each user are derived. Some engineering insights are manifested, such as the diversity order, the impact of the pointing error displacement on the FSO link and the severity on the turbulence-induced channel fading.