Manageable Fast Handover at Access Point in WLAN

The handover speed is always vital for the further development of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), which is enjoying a fast growth. Based on the handover technology specified in IEEE 802.11 WLAN, Manageable Fast Handover (MFHO) mechanism is proposed to speed up handover at the Access Point (AP), meet handover demands of services with different Quality of Service (QoS), and ensure service continuity. Adopting a handover policy named 'Make-before-break', this mechanism enables wireless APs to control and manage handover between two stations based on improving Inter-Access Point Protocol (IAPP). Tests have been carried out to compare functions and performance of MFHO and IAPP-based handover technology. The test results prove that MFHO provides a higher successful handover ratio and better handover performance than IAPP-based handover technology.

Liquid metal as energy transportation medium or coolant under harsh environment with temperature below zero centigrade

The current highly integrated electronics and energy systems are raising a growing demand for more sophisticated thermal management in harsh environments such as in space or some other cryogenic environment. Recently, it was found that room temperature liquid metals （RTLM） such as gallium or its alloys could significantly reduce the electronics temperature compared with the conventional coolant, like water, oil or more organic fluid. However, most of the works were focused on RTLM which may subject to freeze under low temperature. So far, a systematic interpretation on the preparation and thermal properties of liquid metals under low temperature （here defined as lower than O^C） has not yet been available and related applications in cryogenic field have been scarce. In this paper, to promote the research along this important direction and to overcome the deficiency of RTLM, a comprehensive evaluation was proposed on the concept of liquid metal with a low melting point below zero centigrade, such as mercury, alkali metal and more additional alloy candidates. With many unique virtues, such liquid metal coolants are expected to open a new technical frontier for heat transfer enhancement, especially in low temperature engineering. Some innovative ways for making low melting temperature liquid metal were outlined to provide a clear theoretical guideline and perform further experiments to discover new materials. Further, a few promising applied situations where low melting temperature liquid metals could play irreplaceableroles were detailed. Finally, some main factors for optimization of low temperature coolant were summarized. Overall, with their evident merits to meet various critical requirements in modem advanced energy and power industries, liquid metals with a low melting temperature below zero centigrade are expected to be the next- generation high-performance heat transfer medium in thermal managements, especially in harsh environment in space.

A Novel Analysis of Delay and Power Consumption for Polling Schemes in the IoT

In the Internet of Things（IoT）, various battery-powered wireless devices are connected to collect and exchange data, and typical traffic is periodic and heterogeneous. Polling with power management is a very promising technique that can be used for communication among these devices in the IoT. In this paper, we propose a novel and scalable model to study the delay and the power consumption performance for polling schemes with power management under heterogeneous settings（particularly the heterogeneous sleeping interval）. In our model,by introducing the concept of virtual polling interval, we successfully convert the considered energy-efficient polling scheme into an equivalent purely-limited vacation system. Thus, we can easily evaluate the mean and variance of the delay and the power consumption by applying existing queueing formulae, without developing a new theoretical model as required in previous works. Extensive simulations show that our analytical results are very accurate for both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings.