We propose a new analytic model of the IEEE 802.15.4 slotted CSMA/CA from which throughput and energy consumption are computed in saturation conditions. The analytic results are validated via ns-2 simulations. Introduction: IEEE 802.15.4 is designed for low data-rate and small-size wireless personal area networks (WPANs) [1]. This letter focuses on the star topology of 802.15.4 expected to be a dominant type at least in the foreseeable future. In the topology, each device uses a slotted carrier sense multiple access (CSMA/CA). In view of using binary exponential backoff, the CSMA/CA is similar to the IEEE 802.11 CSMA/CA. However, in 802.15.4, a backoff counter value of the device decreases regardless of the channel status, and the device senses the channel, i.e., performs Clear Channel Assessment (CCA), two times when the value reaches zero. The throughput and energy consumption are major performance metrics for 802.15.4. In [2], a Markov chain model of the 802.15.4 is proposed, where each state is based on the counter values as the 802.11 model in [3]. Both models describe the behavior of the protocols using the probability that the device is in the channel accessing states. However, in the 802.15.4, the probability is not suitable to describe the behavior because the channel sensing should be performed twice before entering the accessing states. Moreover, in the case of energy consumption, to the authors' best knowledge, there is no known analysis.

Here we report new H3PO4-doped cross-linked benzoxazine–benzimidazole copolymer membranes showing high proton conductivity and long-term durability for use in proton-exchange membrane fuel cells at elevated temperatures (>100 °C). The cross-linked copolymer membranes were prepared by mixing of poly[2,2′-(m-phenylene)-5,5′-bibenzimidazole] (PBI) with 3-phenyl-3,4-dihydro-6-tert-butyl-2H-1,3-benzoxazine (pBUa) in N,N -dimethylacetamide, with subsequent stepwise heating to 220 °C, and even large-sized films (30 cm × 140 m) could be easily prepared. The membranes showed high proton conductivities of up to 0.12 S cm–1 at 150 °C under anhydrous conditions. Membrane–electrode assemblies (MEAs) employing the membranes showed operating voltages of 0.71 V at 0.2 A cm–2. Furthermore, the MEAs displayed long-term durability up to 1999 cycles, with much slower performance decay, −0.03 mV h–1, than those prepared using the PBI membrane in in situ accelerated lifetime mode (load cycling testing).

Blood pressure (BP) monitoring has significant importance in the treatment of hypertension and different cardiovascular health diseases. As photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals can be recorded non-invasively, research has been highly conducted to measure BP using PPG recently. In this paper, we propose a U-net deep learning architecture that uses fingertip PPG signal as input to estimate arterial BP (ABP) waveform non-invasively. From this waveform, we have also measured systolic BP (SBP), diastolic BP (DBP), and mean arterial pressure (MAP). The proposed method was evaluated on a subset of 100 subjects from two publicly available databases: MIMIC and MIMIC-III. The predicted ABP waveforms correlated highly with the reference waveforms and we have obtained an average Pearson’s correlation coefficient of 0.993. The mean absolute error is 3.68 ± 4.42 mmHg for SBP, 1.97 ± 2.92 mmHg for DBP, and 2.17 ± 3.06 mmHg for MAP which satisfy the requirements of the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) standard and obtain grade A according to the British Hypertension Society (BHS) standard. The results show that the proposed method is an efficient process to estimate ABP waveform directly using fingertip PPG.

Wide-spread deployment of infrastructure WLANs has made Wi-Fi an integral part of today's Internet access technology. Despite its crucial role in affecting end-to-end performance, past research has focused on MAC protocol enhancement, analysis and simulation-based performance evaluation without sufficient consideration for modeling inaccuracies stemming from inter-layer dependencies, including physical layer diversity, that significantly impact performance. We take a fresh look at IEEE 802.11 WLANs, and using a combination of experiment, simulation, and analysis demonstrate its surprisingly agile performance traits. Our main findings are two-fold. First, contention-based MAC throughput degrades gracefully under congested conditions, enabled by physical layer channel diversity that reduces the effective level of MAC contention. In contrast, fairness and jitter significantly degrade at a critical offered load. This duality obviates the need for link layer flow control for throughput improvement but necessitates traffic control for fairness and QoS. Second, TCP-over-WLAN achieves high throughput commensurate with that of wireline TCP under saturated conditions, challenging the widely held perception that TCP throughput fares poorly over WLANs when subject to heavy contention. We show that TCP-over-WLAN prowess is facilitated by the self-regulating actions of DCF and TCP congestion control that jointly drive the shared physical channel at an effective load of 2-3 wireless stations, even when the number of active stations is very large. Our results highlight subtle inter-layer dependencies including the mitigating influence of TCP-over-WLAN on dynamic rate shifting.

Wide-spread deployment of infrastructure WLANs has made Wi-Fi an integral part of today's Internet access technology. Despite its crucial role in affecting end-to-end performance, past research has focused on MAC protocol enhancement, analysis and simulation-based performance evaluation without sufficient consideration for modeling inaccuracies stemming from inter-layer dependencies, including physical layer diversity, that significantly impact performance. We take a fresh look at IEEE 802.11 WLANs, and using a combination of experiment, simulation, and analysis demonstrate its surprisingly agile performance traits. Our main findings are two-fold. First, contention-based MAC throughput degrades gracefully under congested conditions, enabled by physical layer channel diversity that reduces the effective level of MAC contention. In contrast, fairness and jitter significantly degrade at a critical offered load. This duality obviates the need for link layer flow control for throughput improvement but necessitates traffic control for fairness and QoS. Second, TCP-over-WLAN achieves high throughput commensurate with that of wireline TCP under saturated conditions, challenging the widely held perception that TCP throughput fares poorly over WLANs when subject to heavy contention. We show that TCP-over-WLAN prowess is facilitated by the self-regulating actions of DCF and TCP congestion control that jointly drive the shared physical channel at an effective load of 2-3 wireless stations, even when the number of active stations is very large. Our results highlight subtle inter-layer dependencies including the mitigating influence of TCP-over-WLAN on dynamic rate shifting.