Search

3GPP LTE, or Long Term Evolution, the fourth generation wireless access technology, is being rolled out by many operators worldwide. Since LTE Release 10, network densification using small cells has been an important evolution direction in 3GPP to provide the necessary means to accommodate the anticipated huge traffic growth, especially for hotspot areas. Recently, LTE Release 12 has been started with more focus on small cell enhancements. This article provides the design principles and introduces the ongoing discussions on small cell enhancements in LTE Release 12, and provides views from two active operators in this area, CMCC and NTT DOCOMO.

To the Editor: We reported 2 cases of ectopic thyroid gland (ETG) masquerading as pituitary adenoma (PA). The first case was a 15-year-old boy with growth, and mental retardation whose height was 121 cm and weight was 44 kg on admission. Bone age development index was 40, while bone age showed 6–10 years old. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed pituitary hyperplasia [Figure 1a]. Thyroid ultrasonography did not found thyroid on the anterior aspect of the neck and the normal position of thyroid gland. The peak value of growth hormone experiments was 1.8 μg/L. Gonad function indicated testosterone (T) 0.55 nmol/L, luteotropic hormone 150 mU/L. After treatment with eltroxin, the patient was 21 cm higher than before in one year and his intelligence improved significantly comparatively. MRI after treatment showed pituitary hyperplasia significantly regressed [Figure 1b]. The second case was a 27-year-old female with galactorrhea, amenorrhea, and infertility. MRI showed the signal was obviously abnormal (uniform strengthening) in the saddle pituitary, the size was 1.0 cm × 1.5 cm × 1.6 cm, which indicated the PA was huge [Figure 1c]. Thyroid function showed FT4 9.07 pmol/L, TSH >150 mU/L, and 15 minutes serum prolactin was 2.66 μg/L. Gonad function, 8 after midnight (AM) serum adreno-cortico-tropic-hormone, and 8 AM serum cortisol were normal. Thyroid ultrasonography did not found thyroid at the normal position. History revealed that the patient was found thyroglossal cyst in 15 years old and accepted total excision of thyroglossal duct cyst in 18 years old. Then eltroxin was prescribed, and the patient was pregnant successfully in 7 months. Now, her menstruation is normal, and galactorrhea is rarely happen. These two cases were ectopic thyroid masquerading as PA. At present, classification of PA is based on plasma hormone levels or immunohistochemical staining, clinical features are always complex and confusing. In these two cases, retardation, infertility, and amenorrhea were not arising from PA, while the primary ectopic thyroid was the culprit. It caused primary hypothyroidism, TSH cell proliferation, and compensatory pituitary gland hyperplasis. Figure 1 (a) Magnetic resonance imaging of the 15-year-old teenager with ectopic thyroid before the treatment showed pituitary hyperplasia (black arrow), sagittal T1-weighed contrast enhanced image; (b) magnetic resonance imaging of the 15-year-old teenager with ... ETG, the most frequent form of thyroid dysgenesis, refers to the presence of thyroid tissue in locations other than the normal anterior neck region.[1] It remains a rare disease.[1,2] Moreover, females account for 65–80% of ETG cases.[3] Although ETG has been understood gradually, diagnostic delay in ETG remains common, and this delay compounded with inappropriate therapeutic methods is responsible for the poor outcome in affected patients, especially in adolescents and women with childbearing age. When aberrant thyroid was totally excised, thyroid function would be absent or inadequate permanently. Substitute therapy would be essential, cost unpleasantly high and therapeutic period, unfortunately, life-long time. Thereby, thyroid function test and color Doppler ultrasonography are necessary when PA is considered. If ETG is suspected, preoperative analysis is of particular significance. A high index of clinical awareness and education of clinical practitioners will help a great deal in improving the ultimate outcome in patients with ETG. Financial support and sponsorship The work was supported by grants from the Chinese National Natural Science Fund (No. 30900543), the Clinical Science Fund of PLA General Hospital (No. 2013FC-TSYS-1028) and the Beijing Natural Science Fund (No. 7152136). Conflicts of interest There are no conflicts of interest.

Indoor coverage is essential to the mobile user experience, because the signal power from the remote macro base stations is seriously weakened after penetrating the walls. Traditional indoor coverage system is a good solution but it can not be deployed in all the buildings. In order to enhance the received signal power inside the building, a relay can be used in a long term evolution (LTE) system. The benefits of relay are: it can be deployed anywhere quite near to the building since it uses wireless backhaul with less position limitation, and thus it can amplify the transmitting power due to the nearby position to the building comparing to the remote macro base stations. Then even with penetration loss, the received signal power inside the building is still high enough to carry traffic. The field test results show that a TD-LTE relay can improve the indoor received signal power and traffic obviously, and thus it's a good solution to enhance outdoor to indoor coverage.

Calculates the envelope thermal characteristics of the Phase Change Material (PCM) lightweight building fabrics, such as the thermal inertia index, storage heat coefficient, delay time and attenuation ratio,ect. Comparing with the common lightweight building fabric the envelope thermal characteristics of the PCM lightweight building fabrics has been improved preferably. The thermal inertia index, attenuation ratio and delay time of PCM components are respectively the 3.75,14 and 10 times as the one of the common building fabrics. So, it will be less cooling load in the PCM lightweight building than the common lightweight building. Then combining the nighttime ventilation we carries through the contrast experiments between light weight PCM wall and ordinary building in chongqing summer, the results show that the electricity consumption in light weight PCM wall room be 32.5% less than the one in ordinary room, the results also show that outdoor temperature have great effect on the energy efficiency.

To master the heat transfer rule of phase change material(PCM) wall, two kinds of hollow boxes was made with different material, one was made of pure EPS granule，the other one was made of EPS and PCM, temperature of cavum was measured during thermal translation process experiment. The hollow boxes was separated into 4 nodes finite element, the experiment time was divided into finite time point, the diathermanous process of boxes was simulated by finite element software system. The result indicated that simulation process by computer was inosculated with experiment, there was obvious temperature flateform during heat transfer of PCM wall, duration of different direction of phase change process was different, during ascendant process and descent process, change rate and distributing characteristic were contrary on the two sides of phase change point temperature.

In this paper, the impact of diversity order on symbol error rate (SER) performance is investigated for the cooperative amplify-and-forward (AF) multiple-input-and-multiple-output (MIMO) relaying system under the average power scaling (APS) constraints. Furthermore, the optimal power allocation (OPA) scheme is proposed based on the criterion of maximizing signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). Through the SER analysis and numerical results, it can be shown that the diversity order in AF MIMO relaying system under APS is MT (the number of transmitting antennas) when uniform power allocation (UPA) is adopted. Given MR receiving antennas at the relay nodes, the proposed novel OPA scheme can not only reduce the SER but also improve the diversity order efficiently up to MR even when MT = 1.

Relay is emerged recently as a promising solution not only to improve coverage but also end-to-end date rate. How to manage the radio resources effectively for the integrated cellular network are the key issues to be studied. The paper re-evaluates the traditional concept of adjustment and optimization for the call routing and congestion control as call routing and admission control (CRAC). With respect to the mobility and the variable wireless environment, the call re-routing algorithm which implements the intelligence and adaptability is also studied as call re-routing control (CRRC). The joint routing and re-routing control (JoRR) algorithm is proposed to realizes the global optimization of the existing algorithms Two schemes, namely Centralized Architecture (CA) and Decentralized Architecture (DA), are studied to implement the JoRR algorithm whose criterion is selected by considering the characteristics of the integrated cellular system and the tradeoff between the cost and the effectivity. At last, a set of system-level performance evaluation is provided based on the characteristics of the new network architecture.

In future wireless communication systems, an architecture introducing wireless relaying technologies into the cellular infrastructure, seems a promising approach to enlarge the coverage area and enhance system capacity. How to design an efficient call admission control algorithm to perform routing and channel allocation for such integrated cellular system, and manage the radio resources effectively are the key issues to be studied. Based on time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme, this paper proposes a novel call routing and admission control (CRAC) algorithm for the two-hop cellular system with the aim of extending system coverage and increasing system capacity cost-effectively. With the proposed CRAC algorithm, a mobile terminal (MT) can choose the conventional direct link or opt for the relaying considering the transmission quality as well as the traffic load balance. The simulation results show that the CRAC algorithm can decrease the blocking probability significantly and increase the system capacity and enhance the coverage by utilizing the limited channel resource efficiently. Keywords-Relaying, Call routing and admission control (CRAC), Cellular

The multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system is a huge reform to future wireless communication systems. The proposed MIMO-based virtual group cell structure is a novel cellular construction method, which is suitable for new advanced physical techniques. However, existing radio resource management algorithms are not suitable for multiple antenna environments. The paper improves the traditional admission control algorithm and makes it suitable for MIMO systems. According to the characteristics of the new network architecture, a different interference distribution model is provided to help evaluate the system performance.

This paper proposes a regulation algorithm for the power flow regulation of a power system. The proposed method employs nodes unbalanced powers, which serves to assess the unsolvable status of the power system and to guide the corrective control strategy. Particle swarm optimization is applied to find the optimal control action, where the objective functions to be optimized are nodes unbalanced powers and load shedding. The method is applied on the New-England 39-bus test system. The proposed approach results have been compared to those that reported in the literature recently. The results are promising and show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.

Background Patients with metastatic urothelial carcinoma (mUC) who progress after platinum-based chemotherapy have had few treatment options and uniformly poor outcomes. Atezolizumab (anti-programmed death-ligand 1) was approved in the USA for cisplatin-ineligible and platinum-treated mUC based on IMvigor210, a phase 2, single-arm, two-cohort study. Objective To evaluate the efficacy and safety of atezolizumab by the number of prior lines of systemic therapy in patients with pretreated mUC. Design, setting, and participants IMvigor210 enrolled 315 patients with mUC with progression during or following platinum-based therapy at 70 international sites between May 2014 and November 2014. Key inclusion criteria included age ≥18 yr, creatinine clearance ≥30ml/min, and Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status 0–1, with no limit on prior lines of treatment. Intervention Patients in this cohort received atezolizumab 1200mg intravenously every 3 wk until loss of clinical benefit. Outcome measurements and statistical analysis Centrally assessed Response Evaluation Criteria In Solid Tumors v1.1 objective response rate (ORR), median duration of response, overall survival (OS), and adverse events were evaluated by prior treatment. Potential differences between subgroups were evaluated using log-rank (for OS) and chi-square (for ORR and adverse events frequencies) testing. Results and limitations Three hundred and ten patients were efficacy and safety evaluable (median follow-up, 21 mo). Objective responses and prolonged OS occurred across all prespecified subgroups; median duration of response was not reached in most subgroups. In patients without prior systemic mUC therapy (first-line subgroup), ORR was 25% (95% confidence interval: 14–38), and median OS was 9.6 mo (95% confidence interval: 5.9–15.8). No significant differences in efficacy or toxicity by therapy line were observed. Conclusions Atezolizumab demonstrated comparable efficacy and safety in previously treated patients with mUC across all lines of therapy evaluated. Patient summary We investigated effects of previous treatment in patients with metastatic urothelial carcinoma that progressed after platinum-based therapy. Atezolizumab was active and tolerable no matter how many treatment regimens patients had received. ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02108652.