Biodiversity metrics on ecological networks: Demonstrated with animal gastrointestinal microbiomes

Biodiversity has become a terminology familiar to virtually every citizen in modern societies.It is said that ecology studies the economy of nature,and economy studies the ecology of humans;then measuring biodiversity should be similar with measuring national wealth.Indeed,there have been many parallels between ecology and economics,actually beyond analogies.For example,arguably the second most widely used biodiversity metric,Simpson(1949)’s diversity index,is a function of familiar Gini-index in economics.One of the biggest challenges has been the high“diversity”of diversity indexes due to their excessive“speciation”-there are so many indexes,similar to each country’s sovereign currency-leaving confused diversity practitioners in dilemma.In 1973,Hill introduced the concept of“numbers equivalent”,which is based on Renyi entropy and originated in economics,but possibly due to his abstruse interpretation of the concept,his message was not widely received by ecologists until nearly four decades later.What Hill suggested was similar to link the US dollar to gold at the rate of$35 per ounce under the Bretton Woods system.The Hill numbers now are considered most appropriate biodiversity metrics system,unifying Shannon,Simpson and other diversity indexes.Here,we approach to another paradigmatic shift-measuring biodiversity on ecological networks-demonstrated with animal gastrointestinal microbiomes representing four major invertebrate classes and all six vertebrate classes.The network diversity can reveal the diversity of species interactions,which is a necessary step for understanding the spatial and temporal structures and dynamics of biodiversity across environmental gradients.

Network coding with diversity and outdated channel state information

Physical-layer network coding （PNC） has the potential to significantly improve the throughput of wireless networks where the channels can be modeled as additive white Gaussian noise （AWGN） channel. As extending to mul- tiple channels, this technique requires both amplitude and phase compensation at each transmitter and will lead to inef- ficient systems yielding no diversity even with perfect channel state information （CSI）. In order to avoid these limita- tions, we apply network coding with diversity （NCD） to achieve a form of selection diversity and extend NCD to coop- erative multiple access channels in this paper. However, in practical wireless communication systems, the CSI could become outdated due to the difference between the CSI used in the relay selection and data transmission phases. Hence, the selected relay may not be the best one during data transmission phase due to the dynamic change in the wireless channels. Therefore, we first explore the relation between the present and past CSIs. Exploiting this relationship, the NCD scheme with outdated CSI is investigated based on the past CSI. To evaluate the performance of this scheme, an information-theoretic metric, namely the outage capacity, is studied under this condition.

A Beamforming Technique Using Rotman Lens Antenna for Wireless Relay Networks

Rotman lens,which is a radio frequency beam-former that consists of multiple input and multiple output beam ports,can be used in industrial,scientific,and medical applications as a beam steering device.The input ports collect the signals to be propagated through the lens cavity toward the output ports before being transmitted by the antenna arrays to the destination in order to enhance the error performance by optimizing the overall signal to noise ratio(SNR).In this article,a low-cost Rotman lens antenna is designed and deployed to enhance the overall performance of the conventional cooperative communication systems without needing any additional power,extra time or frequency slots.In the suggested system,the smart Rotman lens antennas generate a beam steering in the direction of the destination to maximize the received SNR at the destination by applying the proposed optimal beamforming technique.The suggested optimal beamforming technique enjoys high diversity,as well as,low encoding and decoding complexity.Furthermore,we proved the advantages of our suggested strategy through both theoretical results and simulations using Monte Carlo runs.The Monte Carlo simulations show that the suggested strategy enjoys better error performance compared to the current state-of-the-art distributed multiantenna strategies.In addition,the bit error rate(BER)curves drawn from the analytical results are closely matching to those drawn from our conducted Monte Carlo simulations.