Wuxiong Zhang

Low thermal conductivity and high thermoelectric figure of merit in n-type BaxYbyCo4Sb12 double-filled skutterudites

Filled skutterudites are one of the most promising thermoelectric materials for power generation applications. The choice and concentration of filler atoms are key aspects for achieving high thermoelectric figure of merit values. We report on the high temperature thermoelectric properties in the double-filled skutterudites BaxYbyCo4Sb12. The combination of Ba and Yb fillers inside the voids of the skutterudite structure provides a broad range of resonant phonon scattering and consequently a strong suppression in the lattice thermal conductivity is observed. A dimensionless thermoelectric figure of merit of 1.36 at 800K is achievable for n-type BaxYbyCo4Sb12.

Analysis of Access and Connectivity Probabilities in Vehicular Relay Networks

IEEE 802.11p and 1609 standards are currently under development to support Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communications in vehicular networks. For infrastructure-based vehicular relay networks, access probability is an important measure which indicates how well an arbitrary vehicle can access the infrastructure, i.e. a base station (BS). On the other hand, connectivity probability, i.e. the probability that all the vehicles are connected to the infrastructure, indicates the service coverage performance of a vehicular relay network. In this paper, we develop an analytical model with a generic radio channel model to fully characterize the access probability and connectivity probability performance in a vehicular relay network considering both one-hop (direct access) and two-hop (via a relay) communications between a vehicle and the infrastructure. Specifically, we derive close-form equations for calculating these two probabilities. Our analytical results, validated by simulations, reveal the tradeoffs between key system parameters, such as inter-BS distance, vehicle density, transmission ranges of a BS and a vehicle, and their collective impact on access probability and connectivity probability under different communication channel models. These results and new knowledge about vehicular relay networks will enable network designers and operators to effectively improve network planning, deployment and resource management.

Multi-Hop Connectivity Probability in Infrastructure-Based Vehicular Networks

Infrastructure-based vehicular networks (consisting of a group of Base Stations (BSs) along the road) will be widely deployed to support Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) and a series of safety and non-safety related applications and services for vehicles on the road. As an important measure of user satisfaction level, uplink connectivity probability is defined as the probability that messages from vehicles can be received by the infrastructure (i.e., BSs) through multi-hop paths. While on the system side, downlink connectivity probability is defined as the probability that messages can be broadcasted from BSs to all vehicles through multi-hop paths, which indicates service coverage performance of a vehicular network. This paper proposes an analytical model to predict both uplink and downlink connectivity probabilities. Our analytical results, validated by simulations and experiments, reveal the trade-off between these two key performance metrics and the important system parameters, such as BS and vehicle densities, radio coverage (or transmission power), and maximum number of hops. This insightful knowledge enables vehicular network engineers and operators to effectively achieve high user satisfaction and good service coverage, with necessary deployment of BSs along the road according to traffic density, user requirements and service types.

Gyrokinetic particle simulation of beta-induced Alfvén eigenmode

The beta-induced Alfven eigenmode (BAE) in toroidal plasmas is studied using global gyrokinetic particle simulations. The BAE real frequency and damping rate measured in the initial perturbation simulation and in the antenna excitation simulation agree well with each other. The real frequency is slightly higher than the ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) accumulation point frequency due to the kinetic effects of thermal ions. Simulations with energetic particle density gradient show exponential growth of BAE with a growth rate sensitive to the energetic particle temperature and density. The nonperturbative contributions by energetic particles modify the mode structure and reduce the frequency relative to the MHD theory. The finite Larmor radius effects of energetic particles reduce the BAE growth rate. Benchmarks between gyrokinetic particle simulation and hybrid MHD-gyrokinetic simulation show good agreement in BAE real frequency and mode structure.

Kalman interpolation filter for channel estimation of LTE downlink in high-mobility environments

The estimation of fast-fading LTE downlink channels in high-speed applications of LTE advanced is investigated in this article. In order to adequately track the fast time-varying channel response, an adaptive channel estimation and interpolation algorithm is essential. In this article, the multi-path fast-fading channel is modelled as a tapped-delay, discrete, finite impulse response filter, and the time-correlation of the channel taps is modelled as an autoregressive (AR) process. Using this AR time-correlation, we develop an extended Kalman filter to jointly estimate the complex-valued channel frequency response and the AR parameters from the transmission of known pilot symbols. Furthermore, the channel estimates at the known pilot symbols are interpolated to the unknown data symbols by using the estimated time-correlation. This article integrates both channel estimation at pilot symbols and interpolation at data symbol into the proposed Kalman interpolation filter. The bit error rate performance of our new channel estimation scheme is demonstrated via simulation examples for LTE and fast-fading channels in high-speed applications.

Treelet-Based Clustered Compressive Data Aggregation for Wireless Sensor Networks

Compressive sensing (CS)-based data aggregation has become an increasingly important research topic for large-scale wireless sensor networks since conventional data aggregations are shown to be inefficient and unstable in handling huge data traffic. However, for CS-based techniques, the discrete cosine transform, which is the most widely adopted sparsification basis, cannot sufficiently sparsify real-world signals, which are unordered due to random sensor distribution, thus weakening advantages of CS. In this paper, an energy-efficient CS-based scheme, which is called “treelet-based clustered compressive data aggregation” (T-CCDA), is proposed. Specifically, as a first step, treelet transform is adopted as a sparsification tool to mine sparsity from signals for CS recovery. This approach not only enhances the performance of CS recovery but reveals localized correlation structures among sensor nodes as well. Then, a novel clustered routing algorithm is proposed to further facilitate energy saving by taking advantage of the correlation structures, thus giving our T-CCDA scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms other reference approaches in terms of communication overhead per reconstruction error for adopted data sets.

New dual gas puff imaging system with up-down symmetry on experimental advanced superconducting tokamak

Gas puff imaging (GPI) offers a direct and effective diagnostic to measure the edge turbulence structure and velocity in the edge plasma, which closely relates to edge transport and instability in tokamaks. A dual GPI diagnostic system has been installed on the low field side on experimental advanced superconducting tokamak (EAST). The two views are up-down symmetric about the midplane and separated by a toroidal angle of 66.6°. A linear manifold with 16 holes apart by 10 mm is used to form helium gas cloud at the 130×130 mm (radial versus poloidal) objective plane. A fast camera is used to capture the light emission from the image plane with a speed up to 390,804 frames/s with 64×64 pixels and an exposure time of 2.156 μs. The spatial resolution of the system is 2 mm at the objective plane. A total amount of 200 Pa.L helium gas is puffed into the plasma edge for each GPI viewing region for about 250 ms. The new GPI diagnostic has been applied on EAST for the first time during the recent experimental campaign under various plasma conditions, including ohmic, L-mode, and type-I, and type-III ELMy H-modes. Some of these initial experimental results are also presented.

Divertor asymmetry and scrape-off layer flow in various divertor configurations in Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak

Divertor asymmetry and its dependence on the ion ▿B direction has been investigated in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak by changing the divertor configuration from lower single null (LSN), via double null (DN), to upper single null (USN) during one single discharge. Divertor plasmas exhibit the usual in-out asymmetry in particle and heat fluxes in LSN with the ion ▿B direction toward the lower X-point, favoring the outer divertor, especially at high density. The in-out asymmetry is reversed when changing the divertor configuration from LSN to USN, thus clearly demonstrating the effect of classical drifts. DN exhibits an even stronger in-out divertor asymmetry, favoring the outer divertor. A significant top-down asymmetry is also seen for DN, with greater particle and heat fluxes to the bottom divertor. In addition, the parallel plasma flow has been measured by a fast moving Mach probe at the outer midplane, which shows similar magnitude to the Pfirsch-Schluter flow. Its contribution to th...

Wireless fractal cellular networks

With the seamless coverage of wireless cellular networks in modern society, it is interesting to consider the shape of wireless cellular coverage. Is the shape a regular hexagon, an irregular polygon, or another complex geometrical shape? Based on fractal theory, the statistical characteristic of the wireless cellular coverage boundary is determined by the measured wireless cellular data collected from Shanghai, China. The measured results indicate that the wireless cellular coverage boundary presents an extremely irregular geometrical shape, which is also called a statistical fractal shape. Moreover, the statistical fractal characteristics of the wireless cellular coverage boundary have been validated by values of the Hurst parameter estimated in angular scales. The statistical fractal characteristics of the wireless cellular coverage boundary can be used to evaluate and design the handoff scheme of mobile user terminals in wireless cellular networks.

Delay Performance of Network-Coding-Based Epidemic Routing

In this paper, we first challenge the accuracy of the so-called innovative assumption that is widely adopted in delay performance analysis of network-coding-based epidemic routing (NCER) in delay-tolerant networks (DTNs). We demonstrate that this optimistic assumption severely underestimates data delivery delay and solves this problem successfully by introducing an extra encounter factor δ. Based on this, we propose a coloring process (CP)-based analytical model to evaluate the delay performance of NCER. Numerical results show that our CP-based method outperforms traditional ordinary differential equation (ODE)-based methods on estimating the delay performance under different network sizes. Furthermore, to mitigate potential competition among multiple data streams from different nodes, we propose a feedback-based recovery protocol (FRP) that takes advantage of finite buffer space and significantly reduces the number of ineffective transmissions between nodes. As a result, FRP can achieve much better delay performance compared with existing protocols in prior work.