Non-aggregated magnetite nanorods with average diameters of 20-30 nm and lengths of up to 350 nm were synthesized via in situ, template free hydrothermal technique. These nanorods capped with different concentrations (1, 1.5, 2 and 2.5 g) of nicotinic acid (vitamin B3); possessed good magnetic properties and easy dispersion in aqueous solutions. Our new synthesis technique maintained the uniform

This paper addresses a modified kinetic-hydraulic model for up-flow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactor aimed to treat wastewater of biodegradable organic substrates as acetic acid based on Van der Meer model incorporated with biological granules inclusion. This dynamic model illustrates the biomass kinetic reaction rate for both direct and indirect growth of microorganisms coupled with the

This paper presents a comparative study of four fractional order filters used for edge detection. The noise performance of these filters is analyzed upon the addition of random Gaussian noise, as well as the addition of salt and pepper noise. The peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of the detected images is numerically compared. The mean square error (MSE) of the detected images as well as the

One of the challenges of the design of Software Defined Radios (SDR) is to maintain a high level of reconfigurability without sacrificing data rates. In this paper, we consider the USRP N210, which is an SDR kit made by Ettus Research. It consists of an FPGA connected to an RF front-end. The USRP is operated by a host computer where most of the processing is done while the FPGA is used mainly to

In this paper, we characterize the asymmetric total degrees of freedom (DoF) of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) 3-way channel. Each node has a separate-antenna full-duplex MIMO transceiver with a different number of antennas, where each antenna can be configured for either signal transmission or reception. Each node has two unicast messages to be delivered to the two other nodes. We first

The discrete tent map is one of the most famous discrete chaotic maps that has widely-spread applications. This paper investigates a set of four generalized tent maps where the conventional map is a special case. The proposed maps have extra degrees of freedom which provide different chaotic characteristics and increase the design flexibility required for many applications. Mathematical analyses

This paper proposes two measures for the evaluation of permutation techniques used in image encryption. First, a general mathematical framework for describing the permutation phase used in image encryption is presented. Using this framework, six different permutation techniques, based on chaotic and non-chaotic generators, are described. The two new measures are, then, introduced to evaluate the

In this paper we characterize the proactive diversity gain of a cognitive network with predictable primary and secondary requests. Network performance is analyzed under two proposed proactive service policies that preserve higher priority for the primary user. The first policy preserves the primary diversity bound as if there is no secondary user in the network, whereas the second policy boosts

We consider a cooperative relaying system with any number of source terminals, one shared relay, and a common destination. We assume a slotted time division multiple access (TDMA) framework in which each source terminal is allocated a fraction of the time. We propose a novel hybrid cooperative scheme for the described network. In contrast to former works which assume that the relay only transmits

In this paper, we study the problem of scalable videos multicast streaming over multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks over a contention-based MAC, with the objective of maximizing the overall received videos quality. We propose a three-stage heuristic framework solution for the complex joint channel assignment, video quality selection and multicast routing problem. That framework is