No abstract

Kumar et al. GWAS for Multiple Rust Resistance genome-wide association for identification of a large number of favorable alleles for leaf, stripe, and stem rust resistance for broadening the genetic base. Quick conversion of these QTL into user-friendly markers will accelerate the deployment of these resistance loci in wheat breeding programs.

One of the major impediments to providing broadband connectivity in semi-urban and rural India is the lack of robust and affordable backhaul. Fiber connectivity in terms of backhaul that is being planned (or provided) by the Government of India would reach only till rural offices (named Gram Panchayat) in the Indian rural areas. In this exposition, we articulate how TV white space can address the challenge in providing broadband connectivity to a billion plus population within India. The villages can form local Wi-Fi clusters. The problem of connecting the Wi-Fi clusters to the optical fiber points can be addressed using a TV white space based backhaul (middle-mile) network.The amount of TV white space present in India is very large when compared with the developed world. Therefore, we discuss a backhaul architecture for rural India, which utilizes TV white spaces. We also showcase results from our TV white space testbed, which support the effectiveness of backhaul by using TV white spaces. Our testbed provides a broadband access network to rural population in thirteen villages.The testbed is deployed over an area of 25km 2 , and extends seamless broadband connectivity from optical fiber locations or Internet gateways to remote (difficult to connect) rural regions. We also discuss standards and TV white space regulations, which are pertinent to the backhaul architecture mentioned above.

Abstract-Licensed but unutilized television (TV) band spectrum is called as TV white space in the literature. Ultra high frequency (UHF) TV band spectrum has very good wireless radio propagation characteristics. The amount of TV white space in the UHF TV band in India is of interest. Comprehensive quantitative assessment and estimates for the TV white space in the 470-590MHz band for four zones of India (all except north) are presented in this work. This is the first effort in India to estimate TV white spaces in a comprehensive manner. The average available TV white space per unit area in these four zones is calculated using two methods: (i) the primary (licensed) user and secondary (unlicensed) user point of view; and, (ii) the regulations of Federal Communications Commission in the United States. By both methods, the average available TV white space in the UHF TV band is shown to be more than 100MHz! A TV transmitter frequency-reassignment algorithm is also described. Based on spatial-reuse ideas, a TV channel allocation scheme is presented which results in insignicant interference to the TV receivers while using the least number of TV channels for transmission across the four zones. Based on this reassignment, it is found that four TV band channels (or 32MHz) are sufficient to provide the existing UHF TV band coverage in India.

Abstract-The problem of sampling a discrete-time sequence of spatially bandlimited fields with a bounded dynamic range, in a distributed, communication-constrained, processing environment is addressed. A central unit, having access to the data gathered by a dense network of low-precision sensors, operating under stringent inter-node communication constraints, is required to reconstruct the field snapshots to maximum accuracy. Both deterministic and stochastic field models are considered. For stochastic fields, results are established in the almost-sure sense. The feasibility of having a flexible tradeoff between the oversampling rate (sensor density) and the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) precision, while achieving an exponential accuracy in the number of bits per Nyquist-interval per snapshot is demonstrated. This exposes an underlying "conservation of bits" principle: the bit-budget per Nyquist-interval per snapshot (the rate) can be distributed along the amplitude axis (sensor-precision) and space (sensor density) in an almost arbitrary discrete-valued manner, while retaining the same (exponential) distortion-rate characteristics. An achievable information scaling law for field reconstruction over a bounded region is also derived. With N one-bit sensors per Nyquist-interval, Θ(log N ) Nyquist-intervals, and total network bitrate Rnet = Θ((log N )2 ) (per-sensor bitrate Θ((log N )/N )), the maximum pointwise distortion goes to zero as. This is shown to be possible with only nearest-neighbor communication, distributed coding, and appropriate interpolation algorithms. For a fixed, nonzero target distortion, the number of sensors and the network rate needed is always finite.