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In the field of family counseling and psychology, various approaches have been developed to reduce conflicts and communication disorders between couples. This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of McMaster and Nichols family counseling approaches on problem-solving ability.. The present study was applied in terms of purpose and quasi-experimental in terms of the method with a pre-test-post-test design with the control group. The study population consisted of all couples referring to counseling centers in Boroujerd city in 2021-2022, whose number was reported to be about 700 people. Among them, 36 couples with marital incompatibility were selected as a sample and were randomly placed in two intervention groups and one control group (12 people in each group). The instrument of the present study was Ahmadi et al.'s (2010) Family Problem Solving Questionnaire (FPS). McMaster's family therapy intervention (Ryan et al., 2012) was performed in 10 sessions of 1.5 hours, and Nichols family therapy (Nichols, 2001) in 12 sessions of 1.5 hours each week. But the control group did not receive any intervention. Research data were analyzed by mixed analysis of variance (with repeated measures). Findings showed that McMaster's family therapy and Nichols's family therapy are effective on couples' problem-solving ability (p <0.05). The results also showed that there was no difference between the effectiveness of McMaster family therapy and Nichols family therapy interventions in adaptation (p <0.05). Considering the effectiveness of both interventions in increasing problem-solving ability, family therapy counselors can be suggested to use these two interventions to resolve conflicts between couples and increase problem-solving ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The availability of high bandwidth with low-latency communication in 5G mobile networks enables remote rendered real-time virtual reality (VR) applications. Remote rendering of VR graphics in a cloud removes the need for local personal computer for graphics rendering and augments weak graphics processing unit capacity of stand-alone VR headsets. However, to prevent the added network latency of remote rendering from ruining user experience, rendering a locally navigable viewport that is larger than the field of view of the HMD is necessary. The size of the viewport required depends on latency: Longer latency requires rendering a larger viewport and streaming more content. In this article, we aim to utilize multi-access edge computing to assist the backend cloud in such remote rendered interactive VR. Given the dependency between latency and amount and quality of the content streamed, our objective is to jointly optimize the tradeoff between average video quality and delivery latency. Formulating the problem as mixed integer nonlinear programming, we leverage the interpolation between client's field of view frame size and overall latency to convert the problem to integer nonlinear programming model and then design efficient online algorithms to solve it. The results of our simulations supplemented by real-world user data reveal that enabling a desired balance between video quality and latency, our algorithm particularly achieves the improvements of on average about 22% and 12% in term of video delivery latency and 8% in term of video quality compared to respectively order-of-arrival, threshold-based, and random-location strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging visual-based driving assistance systems involve time-critical and data-intensive computational tasks, such as real-time object recognition and scene understanding. Due to the constraints on space and power capacity, it is not feasible to install extra computing devices on all the vehicles. To solve this problem, different scenarios of vehicular fog computing have been proposed, where computational tasks generated by vehicles can be sent to and processed at fog nodes located for example at 5G cell towers or moving buses. In this paper, we propose Chameleon, a novel solution for task offloading for visual-based assisted driving. Chameleon takes into account the spatiotemporal variation in service demand and supply, and provides latency and resolution aware task offloading strategies based on partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). To evaluate the effectiveness of Chameleon, we simulate the availability of vehicular fog nodes at different times of day based on the bus trajectories collected in Helsinki, and use the real-world performance measurements of visual data transmission and processing. Compared with adaptive and random task offloading strategies, the POMDP-based offloading strategies provided by Chameleon shortens the average service latency of task offloading by up to 65% while increasing the average resolution level of processed images by up to 83%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly all bitrate adaptive video content delivered today is streamed using protocols that run a purely client based adaptation logic. The resulting lack of coordination may lead to suboptimal user experience and resource utilization. As a response, approaches that include the network and servers in the adaptation process are emerging. In this article, we present an optimized solution for network assisted adaptation specifically targeted to mobile streaming in multi-access edge computing (MEC) environments. Due to NP-Hardness of the problem, we have designed a heuristic-based algorithm with minimum need for parameter tuning and having relatively low complexity. We then study the performance of this solution against two popular client-based solutions, namely Buffer-Based Adaptation (BBA) and Rate-Based Adaptation (RBA), as well as to another network assisted solution. Our objective is two fold: First, we want to demonstrate the efficiency of our solution and second to quantify the benefits of network-assisted adaptation over the client-based approaches in mobile edge computing scenarios. The results from our simulations reveal that the network assisted adaptation clearly outperforms the purely client-based DASH heuristics in some of the metrics, not all of them, particularly, in situations when the achievable throughput is moderately high or the link quality of the mobile clients does not differ from each other substantially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plug-in electric vehicles are becoming one of indispensable prosumer electronics components for smart households and therefore, their cost efficient energy scheduling is one of the main challenging issues. In the current schemas, the charging and discharging interval of the vehicles are normally announced by the owners in advance leading to the suboptimal profit gain in some situations and hence consumers dissatisfaction. In this paper, we propose an efficient charging/discharging scheduling mechanism for electric vehicles in multiple homes common parking lot for smart households prosumers. The proposed mechanism takes into account the optimal interval allocation considering the instantaneous electricity load and the vehicles request pattern. Based on the data from the vehicles, a mixed optimization model is formulated by the central scheduler which aims to maximize the profit of consumers and is then solved using an effective algorithm. The optimization results are then sent to the system controller determining the interval and energy trading patterns between the power grid and the vehicles. The proposed algorithm has low complexity and ensures the energy satisfaction for all consumers. The performance of the scheduling schema is verified through multiple simulation scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the advancement in energy harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs), the data collection from one-hop stationary sensor nodes using a path-constrained mobile sink has become one of the challenging issues. Toward the throughput improvement, we propose a general framework for network throughput maximization (NTM) problem by optimizing practically feasible parameters. For each proposed scenario, a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) optimization model is introduced for the problem formulation. Due to the NP-Hardness of the MILP models, we design two efficient algorithms namely as ODSAA and ODAA for two practically implementable scenarios. Having a preknowledge about the deployed location of nodes, the proposed algorithms run centrally by sink and find the sub-optimal solutions within a reasonable computation time. Furthermore, under the uniform distribution of energy harvesting, we find out two threshold points on, respectively, energy harvesting mean and battery capacity of nodes after which the network throughput reaches a stable point. Finally, simulations are conducted on a different set of node deployments, which the results confirm that the proposed algorithms significantly improve the data throughput collected by sink and also the theoretical thresholds provide a confidence interval of 90 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In energy harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs), maximizing the data collection throughput is one of the most challenging issues. In this paper, we consider the problem of data collection on a pre-specified path using a mobile sink which has a fixed-mobility pattern. As a generalization of the previous works, we propose an optimization model for the problem which incorporates the effective and heterogeneous duration of sensors’ transmission in each time slot. To improve the network throughput, a simple condition is proposed which determines the maximum number of available time slots to each sensor node. Accordingly, the proposed condition specifies the constant velocity of the mobile sink. The NP-Hardness of the problem under the proposed condition is proved and an online centralized algorithm with less complexity is designed to handle the problem. Its complexity is in polynomial order and is easily scalable to the networks with large number of sensor nodes. Furthermore, we address the effect of increase in time slot period on the total amount of collected data which has not been yet exploited well. Finally, through extensive simulations on different set of deployed nodes, we observe that the proposed algorithm significantly increases the network throughput when the travelled distance by sink per time slot is reduced down to the adjusted point. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]