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In this paper, we study a novel transmission framework based on statistical channel state information (SCSI) by incorporating edge caching and beamforming in a fog radio access network (F-RAN) architecture. By optimizing the statistical beamforming and edge caching, we formulate a comprehensive nonconvex optimization problem to minimize the backhaul cost subject to the BS transmission power, limited caching capacity, and quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. By approximating the problem using the l 0 -norm, Taylor series expansion, and other processing techniques, we provide a tailored second-order cone programming (SOCP) algorithm for the unicast transmission scenario and a successive linear approximation (SLA) algorithm for the joint unicast and multicast transmission scenario. This is the first attempt at the joint design of statistical beamforming and edge caching based on SCSI under the F-RAN architecture.

A special strain of situational impairment, termed “Severely Constraining Situational Impairments” (SCSI), was explored from a novel qualitative perspective. When a severely impairing event presents, the multitude and complexity of ambient agents are often overwhelming, leading to the inability to devise a solution. To classify and help design for them, interviews and participatory design-based workshops were conducted, revealing that (1) participants attempt to complete mobile transactions, even if it might place them in considerable danger, and (2) significant differences exist in the modalities and steps used to address the onset of a severely impairing event versus those of a non-severe situational impairment. Design solutions generated from the workshops indicated that users want technology to take a larger role in helping manage the added cognitive load inherent in severely impairing events. The revealed implications for design indicate that to maximize the user experience in the mobile device transaction space, designers must account for the presence of these SCSI and the unique design specifications that they require.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and millimeter wave (mmWave) are two key enabling technologies for the fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks and beyond. In this paper, we consider mmWave NOMA systems with max-min fairness constraints. On the one hand, existing beamforming designs aiming at maximizing the spectrum efficiency (SE) are unsuitable for the NOMA systems with fairness in this paper. On the other hand, previous work on about mmWave NOMA mostly depends on full knowledge of channel state information (CSI) which is extremely difficult to obtain accurately in mmWave communication systems. To address this problem, we propose a heuristic hybrid beamforming design based on the statistical CSI (SCSI) user grouping strategy. An analog beamforming scheme is first proposed to integrate the whole cluster users to mitigate the inter-cluster interference in the first stage. Then two digital beamforming designs are proposed to further suppress the interference based on SCSI. One is the widely used zero forcing (ZF) approach and the other is derived from the signal-to leakage-plus-noise ratio (SLNR) metric extended from orthogonal multiple access (OMA) systems. The effective gains fed back from the users are used for the power allocation. We introduce the quadratic transform (QT) method and bisection approach to reformulate this complex problem so as to rend it solvable. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithms outperform the previous algorithms in term of user fairness.

Objectives: Developmental programming must work. Following quite a while of vital investigation into open private key sets, we disconfirm the development of Boolean rationale, which typifies the imperative standards of equipment and engineering. Methods/Statistical Analysis: So as to defeat this issue, we utilize interposable innovation to show that the acclaimed established calculation for the development of SCSI circles which keeps running in Ω(n2) time. Findings: We discredited that regardless of the way that the original psychoacoustic calculation for the refinement of computerized to simple converters. Application: FernyMarc might have the capacity to effectively give numerous neural networks without a moment\'s delay. Keywords: FerntMarc, RAID, XML

Uniaxial strength (UCS), tensile strength (BTS), and elastic modulus (E) are important rock strength parameters used in many engineering projects such as dam, bridge, and tunnel constructions. Several direct and indirect methods have been proposed to measure these parameters. For direct methods, standard samples should be prepared and loaded. Indirect methods are used to estimate these parameters when there is no access to the standard core for various reasons. In this regard, the single compressive strength test (SCS) is one of the indirect methods for estimating these parameters using small specimens. In the present study, the possibility of using SCS test for predicting strength parameters of marlstones is investigated. For this purpose, a total of 10 marlstone blocks were collected from different geological formations of Iran. After preparation of the standard samples, an attempt was made to determine uniaxial strength (UCS), Brazilian tensile (BTS), and elastic modulus (E) of each sample. Next, the samples were crushed and 50 small spherical particles with diameters of 3, 5, 8, 9, and 10 mm were prepared from each sample. A total of 500 particles were used for SCS testing. Then, the single compressive strength index (SCSI) was determined for each particle by plotting load-displacement diagrams; the SCSI of each sample was the average SCSI of 10 same size particles. Subsequently, UCS-SCSI, E-SCSI, and BTS-UCS correlations for specific particle sizes were proposed using the regression analysis. The mean values for the correlation coefficients were obtained as 0.93, 0.89, and 0.91, respectively. The empirical relationships were verified by conducting 100 tests on the control samples, which revealed the reliable validity of the outcomes. The results of this regression modeling, compared with the data obtained from SCS experiments on limestone and sandstone particles mentioned in the literature, demonstrated that the empirical relationships were affected by rock types. Therefore, rock-specific diagrams have to be drawn for particles with different lithologies.

The Southern Connecticut Stellar Interferometer (SCSI) is an intensity interferometer that is designed to use correlated photon arrival times to determine the geometry of stars. Originally a low-cost, two-telescope instrument that used a 1-pixel single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detector at the focal plane of each telescope to record photon events, it is now being upgraded to include a third telescope. This will allow for the simultaneous detection of the photon correlation at three baselines, and thus the ability to map out the two-dimensional geometry of the source much more efficiently than with the two-telescope arrangement. Recent papers in the literature suggest that it may be possible to derive phase information in the Fourier domain from such triple correlations for the brightest stars, potentially giving SCSI an imaging capability. Prior to investigating this possibility, steps must be taken to maximize the observing efficiency of the SCSI. We present here our latest efforts in achieving better pointing, tracking, and collimation with our telescopes, and we discuss our first modeling results of the three-telescope situation in order to understand under what conditions the upgraded SCSI could retrieve imaging information.

In this paper, we propose a method to predict the average packet error rate (PER) of a coded single carrier frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE) transmission scheme after minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalization when statistical channel state information (SCSI) is available. We assume that the encoded bits are spread over several blocks (which may correspond to a frequency hopping system for instance) which are transmitted under independent multipath random fading channel realizations. The PER prediction technique used here is based on the effective SNR mapping approach that gathers the signal to noise ratios (SNR)s of the different blocks into one single value. The novelty of this contribution resides in the fact that we propose a new expression for the effective SNR that allows us to approximate its statistical distribution with a beta random variable whose parameters depend on the SCSI. This approach enables us to compute the PER prediction with a lower complexity that the one required by conventional approaches. Moreover, we show by simulations that the accuracy of our solution is very close to the conventional ones, typically within 1 dB of error for PER of the order of $10^{-2}$.

iSCSI is an IP based SAN technology, that carrying SCSI commands over TCP/IP. Ceph integrates iSCSI Target as a gateway to provide block layer storage service. A single iSCSI Target could be a system bottleneck because of its computing and I/O performance limitations. However, current software-defined iSCSI Targets can not cooperate on handling SCSI3 Persistent Reservation with each other in an iSCSI Target cluster. In this paper, we have proposed and implemented a mechanism that can synchronize the SCSI3 Persistent Reservation status of an iSCSI LUN among a cluster of Linux iSCSI Targets. By feats of this feature, it would become possible to set up a cluster of iSCSI Targets hosting mutual Ceph RBD images with active/active connections to meet high-performance and high availability requirements of modern business.

Тема выпускной квалификационной работы: «Повышение масштабируемости системы хранения данных путем реализации стека протоколов SCSI в пространстве пользователя». Работа посвящена исследованию влияния исполнения логики стандарта SCSI в пространстве ядра Linux на масштабируемость ПО системы хранения данных, а также проектированию решения, позволяющего снизить накладные расходы. Работа проводилась на основе существующего коммерческого продукта. Исследование исходного решения и эксперименты показали, что полноценное использование драйвера-реализации SCSI, SCST, оказывает пагубное влияние на масштабируемость программного обеспечения системы хранения данных вследствие неэффективности применяемых алгоритмов и накладных расходов исполнения логики в ядре. С целью повышения масштабируемости системы было спроектировано и реализовано решение, заключающееся в переносе исполнения большей части логики SCSI в пространство пользователя. Представленный в работе подход основан на использовании драйвера SCST в качестве туннеля для передачи трафика от хостов в пространство пользователя, где была реализована логика конфигурирования необходимых сущностей и обработчики зависимых SCSI-команд. Результаты апробации нового решения показали высокий потенциал его внедрения в существующий продукт., The subject of the graduate work is “Increasing storage scalability by implementing the SCSI protocol stack in user-space”. The given work is devoted to estimation of the storage scalability overhead which can potentially arise from an execution of the SCSI protocol logic in the Linux kernel-space, as well as to designing a solution to reduce these overhead costs. The work was carried out based on the existing commercial storage system. The study of the initial solution and the experiments proved that the full use of the SCST kernel driver being an implementation of the SCSI target subsystem causes a significant scalability degradation due to an inefficiency of the applied algorithms and an overhead of the in-kernel execution. A solution based on transferring the execution of most of the SCSI logic to user-space was designed in order to increase the storage scalability. The approach presented in this work uses SCST as a tunnel for transmitting a host traffic to the storage software. In the same time, the logic for configuring SCSI entities and handling dependent protocol commands was optimized and re-implemented in user-space. The final testing and analysis of the new solution proved a high potential for its integration into the existing product.

A hybrid precoding scheme is proposed for high altitude platform (HAP) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems to obtain the radio frequency (RF) precoder and the baseband precoder with limited RF chains. We first exploit duality theory to derive the relation between the statistical channel state information (SCSI) and RF precoder, which is selected from a predefined codebook. Then, the baseband precoder is attained by zero forcing (ZF) based on the instantaneous effective channel matrix. A distinct performance gain is achieved by the proposed scheme according to the numerical results.

Objetivo: Realizar la traducción, validación y adaptación transcultural del Schoolagers' Coping Strategies Inventory (Inventario de Estrategias de Afrontamiento de Escolares) (SCSI) con estudiantes colombianos. Métodos: Estudio metodológico realizado entre 2015 y 2016 con alumnos entre 8 y 15 años de edad, de instituciones de enseñanza públicas y privadas de Ibagué, Colombia. Se utilizó la ficha para caracterización de la muestra y el SCSI. La validación transcultural ha sido organizada en ocho etapas: la traducción oficial para el español; la traducción del original para el inglés; la traducción reversa; la versión consensual; la validez facial y la adaptación al idioma de parte de los estudiantes; la validez facial y de contenido por especialistas; la versión final; la prueba piloto y de confiabilidad. Resultados: La versión original en inglés ha sido adaptada para el idioma español de Colombia con la intervención de estudiantes, de extractos socioeconómicos altos y bajos con grupos focales y prueba piloto, utilizando sus expresiones verbales y cambiando 4 ítems; y con la colaboración de especialistas en investigación metodológica y en coping, también cambiando 4 ítems, con confiabilidad de 0,80. Conclusión: El SCSI ha sido traducido, validado y adaptado transculturalmente para la población colombiana. La versión obtenida fue el SCSI-VCONF lo cual se mostró comprensible para la población investigada, válida y confiable para investigaciones con escolares para determinar la frecuencia de uso y la efectividad de estrategias de afrontamiento.

Sc-doped semiconductor clusters are the simplest transition metal- and rare-earth metal-doped semiconductor clusters. In this work, the structural evolution behavior and electronic properties of Sc...

Supply chain sustainability (SCS) is an approach that takes into consideration the environmental, economic, and social aspects of the supply chain processes, components, technologies, and logistics when designing a supply chain network. The elements that impact SCS encompass all kinds of waste, emissions, green management, workers’ health and well-being, market competitiveness, transportation, and financial aspects of the network. Supply chain experts should integrate sustainability practices in different phases of the supply chain and encourage organizations to orient their efforts toward designing sustainable supply chains. In this study, we present a new metric, “supply chain sustainability index (SCSI)” to assess the overall sustainability of a biomass supply chain network through three criteria: environmental, social, and economic sustainability. To pursue the objective of the study, a Bayesian Network approach is implemented to depict the causal relationship among different variables and to demonstrate a better analysis of the subject. For further assessment and analysis of the overall sustainability of the supply chain network, sensitivity analysis and belief propagation are performed. Results indicate that all three criteria are imperative to SCSI prediction; however, economic sustainability has a slightly higher effect among the three criteria, while social criteria have the lowest effect on SCSI.

This study focuses on local channel correlation based zero-forcing (ZF) precoding design for boosting weighted ergodic sum-rate (WESR) in the cooperative two-cell multiple-input single-output system. We first present that the WESRs of the statistical channel state information (SCSI) aided general eigenvector coordinated beamforming (SCSI-GE) and the conventional ZF beamforming with erroneous instantaneous channel state information (ICSI; eICSI-ZF) saturate to constant values at high SNR due to inter-cell interference. Motivated by this, we develop a ZF coordination framework with local SCSI requirement at the transmitter and low data-sharing backhaul load. Additionally, a low-cost but effective two-dimensional ZF precoding design called 2d-SZF is proposed, which involves only distributed computations based on the local channel correlation. Theoretical analysis and simulation results confirm that the proposed local SCSI-based 2d-SZF scheme yields the most desirable WESR while the WESRs of SCSI-GE and eICSI-ZF both saturate in the high regime of SNR, and are respectively sensitive to the level of spatial channel correlation and ICSI accuracy at finite SNR.

Contexto: Las imágenes espectrales (SI) contienen información espacio-espectral acerca de una escena disponible en un cubo de datos que usualmente comprende una cantidad significativa de éstos. Los sistemas tradicionales de (SI) adquieren datos redundantes ignorando la alta correlación entre las mediciones y las muestras redundantes. Los sistemas de compresión de imágenes espectrales comprimen los datos espectrales en la etapa de adquisición, lo que permite reducir la cantidad de datos y la redundancia. Actualmente, existen varios sistemas de imágenes espectrales disponibles que proporcionan nuevas funciones para los usuarios y abren un amplio campo de nuevas aplicaciones. Por ejemplo, los sistemas de CASSI, SCSI, SSCS, y HYCA son cuatro de los más destacados.Método: La revisión de algunos trabajos provee amplios estudios de tecnologías disponibles y muestra cómo se pueden utilizar las nuevas capacidades de los enfoques de formación de imágenes espectrales. Sin embargo, para la selección de una arquitectura específica se requiere una comparación cuantitativa y cualitativa de estos sistemas en los mismos escenarios.Resultados: En este trabajo se analiza el rendimiento cualitativo y cuantitativo de estos cuatro sistemas de compresión de imágenes espectrales para evaluarlos en los mismos escenarios. Para ello, cada arquitectura se modela como un sistema de ecuaciones lineales y el proceso de reconstrucción de las imágenes se logra con el mismo enfoque de optimización transmitancia, código de apertura y número de proyecciones.Conclusión: Se muestra que el sistema SSCSI alcanza el mejor rendimiento en la reconstrucción con el valor más alto PSNR.

The USB Power Delivery protocol enables USB-connected devices to negotiate power delivery and exchange data over a single connection such as a USB Type-C cable. The protocol incorporates standard commands;however, it also enables vendors to add non-standard commands called vendor-defined messages. These messages are similar to the vendorspecific commands in the SCSI protocol, which enable vendors to specify undocumented commands to implement functionality that meets their needs. Such commands can be employed to enable firmware updates, memory dumps and even backdoors. This chapter analyzes vendor-defined message support in devices that employ the USB Power Delivery protocol, the ultimate goal being to identify messages that could be leveraged in digital forensic investigations to acquire data stored in the devices. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28752-8_6

Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) has had an increasing role in the agricultural policy arena, as it aims to address climate change mitigation, adaptation and food security goals in an integrated way. In regions where agriculture has been constrained because of soil degradation and climate change, CSA aims to implement soil-based strategies that restore soil function and increase carbon storage. The extent to which such strategies succeed in achieving mitigation, adaptation and productivity goals is referred to as climate-smartness. The co-evolution of yield and Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) over the years presents a proxy for the trade-off between productivity, soil fertility and carbon sequestration. Yield and SOC are widely monitored, analysed and used to inform CSA planning. Yet their analysis is often conducted separately and for a small number of years, which neglects long-term soil fertility dynamics and their impact on crops. Given the absence of integrated climate-smartness metrics to capture the trade-offs and synergies between SOC and yield, we present a soil-based Climate-Smartness Index (SCSI). The SCSI is computed using normalized indicators of trend and variability of annual changes on yield and SOC data. The SCSI was calculated for a set of published experiments that compared Conservation Agriculture (CA) practices with conventional management. The CA treatments scored higher SCSI during the first 5 years of evaluation as compared to conventional management. Analysis of the temporal dynamics of climate-smartness indicated that minimum SCSI values typically occurred before 5 years after the start of the experiment, indicating potential trade-offs between SOC and yield. Conversely, SCSI values peaked between 5 and 10 years. After 20 years, the SCSI tended towards zero, as substantial changes in either SOC or yield are no longer evidenced. The SCSI can be calculated for annual crops under any soil management and at different time periods, providing a consistent metric for climate-smartness across both practices and time.