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In today’s power systems, electric vehicles (EVs) constitute a significant factor influencing electricity dynamics, with their important role anticipated in future smart grid systems. An important feature of electric vehicles is their dual capability to both charge and discharge energy to/from their battery storage. Notably, the discharge capability enables them to offer vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services. However, most V2G research focuses on passenger cars, which typically already have their own specific usage purposes and various traveling schedules. This situation may pose practical challenges in providing ancillary services to the grid. Conversely, electric school buses (ESBs) exhibit a more predictable usage pattern, often deployed at specific times and remaining idle for extended periods. This makes ESBs more practical for delivering V2G services, especially when prompted by incentive price signals from grid or utility companies (UC) requesting peak shaving services. In this paper, we introduce a V2G energy sharing model focusing on ESBs in various schools in a single community by formulating the problem as a leader–follower game. In this model, the UC assumes the role of the leader, determining the optimal incentive price to offer followers for discharging energy from their battery storage. The UC aims to minimize additional costs from generating energy during peak demand. On the other hand, schools in a community possessing multiple ESBs act as followers, seeking the optimal quantity of discharged energy from their battery storage. They aim to maximize utility by responding to the UC’s incentive price. The results demonstrate that the proposed model and algorithm significantly aid the UC in reducing the additional cost of energy generation during peak periods by 36% compared to solely generating all electricity independently. Furthermore, they substantially reduce the utility bills for schools by up to 22.6% and lower the peak-to-average ratio of the system by up to 9.5%.

In today’s power system landscape, renewable energy (RE) resources play a pivotal role, particularly within the residential sector. Despite the significance of these resources, the intermittent nature of RE resources, influenced by variable weather conditions, poses challenges to their reliability as energy resources. Addressing this challenge, the integration of an energy storage system (ESS) emerges as a viable solution, enabling the storage of surplus energy during peak-generation periods and subsequent release during shortages. One of the great challenges of ESSs is how to design ESSs efficiently. This paper focuses on a distributed power-flow system within a smart home environment, comprising uncontrollable power generators, uncontrollable loads, and multiple energy storage units. To address the challenge of minimizing energy loss in ESSs, this paper proposes a novel approach, called energy-efficient storage capacity with loss reduction (SCALE) scheme, that combines multiple-load power-flow assignment with a load-shifting algorithm to minimize energy loss and determine the optimal energy storage capacity. The optimization problem for optimal energy storage capacity is formalized using linear programming techniques. To validate the proposed scheme, real experimental data from a smart home environment during winter and summer seasons are employed. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm in significantly reducing energy loss, particularly under winter conditions, and determining optimal energy storage capacity, with reductions of up to 11.4% in energy loss and up to 62.1% in optimal energy storage capacity.

In recent years, low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) has received widespread popularity with long-range and wide-area communication at low power for the Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Among many vendors of LPWAN, long-range low-power wireless communications, also called LoRa, is one of the competing standards and is well known in both academia and industrial communities as an emerging research area. Among the LoRa applications, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) systems are emerging with the benefits of extended battery life and a long communication range. In this paper, we investigate the network capacity with the mixture of concurrent and sequential transmission (MCST) scheme over LoRa networks. From the simulation results, it can be seen that MCST is suitable for implementation in the LoRa network. Specifically, MCST can achieve higher throughput with low transmission latency and energy consumption compared to the existing CSMA approach LoRa MAC. Besides, we also propose a modified MCST over the LoRa (mMCST/LoRa) scheme to mitigate the transmission latency further. The simulation results reveal a better performance in terms of throughput, latency and energy consumption, regardless of the frame payload size and the number of nodes in the network.

Big Data (BD), Machine Learning (ML) and Internet of Things (IoT) are expected to have a large impact on Smart Farming and involve the whole supply chain, particularly for rice production. The increasing amount and variety of data captured and obtained by these emerging technologies in IoT offer the rice smart farming strategy new abilities to predict changes and identify opportunities. The quality of data collected from sensors greatly influences the performance of the modelling processes using ML algorithms. These three elements (e.g., BD, ML and IoT) have been used tremendously to improve all areas of rice production processes in agriculture, which transform traditional rice farming practices into a new era of rice smart farming or rice precision agriculture. In this paper, we perform a survey of the latest research on intelligent data processing technology applied in agriculture, particularly in rice production. We describe the data captured and elaborate role of machine learning algorithms in paddy rice smart agriculture, by analyzing the applications of machine learning in various scenarios, smart irrigation for paddy rice, predicting paddy rice yield estimation, monitoring paddy rice growth, monitoring paddy rice disease, assessing quality of paddy rice and paddy rice sample classification. This paper also presents a framework that maps the activities defined in rice smart farming, data used in data modelling and machine learning algorithms used for each activity defined in the production and post-production phases of paddy rice. Based on the proposed mapping framework, our conclusion is that an efficient and effective integration of all these three technologies is very crucial that transform traditional rice cultivation practices into a new perspective of intelligence in rice precision agriculture. Finally, this paper also summarizes all the challenges and technological trends towards the exploitation of multiple sources in the era of big data in agriculture.

In this paper, the performance of a new decision-directed signal reconstruction (DDSR) algorithm with optimal reconstruction thresholds for use with optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation is investigated. Clipping noise remains one of the main drawbacks in many practical optical OFDM transmission systems. It has been shown in previous studies that a time-domain based DDSR algorithm can be used to effectively reduce the clipping noise. However, in all existing works studying this DDSR algorithm, the decision threshold used to direct the time-domain signal reconstruction is fixed and equal to the level at which the transmitted signal is clipped. In this paper, it is shown that, due to the influences of the unavoidable noise at the receiver, fixing the DDSR threshold at the clipping level is not an optimal solution and can severely limit the advantages of using this algorithm. A detailed theoretical analysis is performed to investigate the key factors that influence the choices of the optimal DDSR thresholds. The presented simulation results are used to verify the accuracy of the theoretical analysis and also show that the performance of the DDSR algorithm is significantly improved by using the obtained optimal thresholds.

Today, renewable energy resources are a critical component of distributed energy systems. However, their intermittent nature makes them unstable energy sources, making them very difficult to use optimally in any energy system. Battery storage is a viable solution for this issue. In this paper, we consider distributed power-flow assignment consisting of unstable power generators, unpredictable power loads, and multiple energy storage systems (ESSs), with different combinations of logical power connections between them. We propose power-flow assignment (PFA) algorithms to deal with single and multiple loads to address the possibility of reducing energy loss and improving distributed power-flow assignment with the presence of ESSs in a smart home environment. Simulation results reveal that the increment of logical power connections between generators, loads, and storage systems can significantly reduce energy loss. The proposed PFA algorithms can reduce energy loss by about 67% compared to a power-flow assignment for which all the generated power is stored in an ESS directly during winter. The results further show that spring has the highest energy loss and stored energy in ESS compared to other seasons.

Full-duplex (FD) communication has been attractive as the breakthrough technology for improving attainable spectral efficiency since the 5G mobile communication system. Previous research focused on self-interference cancellation and medium access control (MAC) protocol to realize the FD system in wireless networks. This paper proposes an optimal achievable transmission capacity (OATC) scheme for capacity optimization in the FD multihop wireless networks. In this paper, the proposed OATC scheme considers the temporal reuse for spectral efficiency and the spatial reuse with transmit power control scheme for interference mitigation and capacity optimization. OATC scheme controls the transmit power to mitigate interference and optimizes the transmission capacity, which leads to the optimal achievable network capacity. We conduct the performance evaluation through numerical simulations and compare it with the existing FD MAC protocols. The numerical simulations reveal that considering only the concurrent transmissions in the FD system does not guarantee optimal transmission capacity. Moreover, the hybrid mechanism, including the sequential transmissions, is also crucial because of the interference problem. Besides, numerical simulation validates that the proposed OATC scheme accomplishes the optimal achievable network capacity with lower interference power and higher achievable throughput than the existing MAC protocols.

Full-duplex (FD) communication has been attractive as one of the research interests related to spectrum utilization for wireless networks from the previous evolution of communication systems. Previous studies discuss the realization of the FD system by focusing on self-interference cancellation and transmit power control in low-power wireless network scenarios. Today, capacity maximization is a key challenge in FD multihop wireless networks, in which the multi-channel allocation may lead to imbalance interference power due to the different number of simultaneous transmissions and its group selection that occurred on the same sub-channels. In this paper, we focus on the capacity maximization of the FD system by considering the influence of total interference power on each sub-channel and how to balance by selecting the different number of simultaneous transmissions to form a group that leads to a minimum difference in the total interference power on those sub-channels. Therefore, a channel interference balancing allocation (CIBA) scheme for balancing the total interference power in the multi-channel multihop wireless networks is proposed and further investigated by the idea of cooperative transmission. We also adopt the concept of interference distance to overcome the interference balancing problem of the proposed CIBA scheme. Performance evaluation results reveal that the proposed CIBA scheme achieves lesser total interference power and higher achievable capacity than other fixed channel allocation schemes.

Mining contrast subspace has emerged to find subspaces where a particular queried object is most similar to the target class against the non-target class in a two-class data set. It is important to discover those subspaces, which are known as contrast subspaces, in many real-life applications. Tree-Based Contrast Subspace Miner (TB-CSMiner) method has been recently introduced to mine contrast subspaces of queried objects specifically for numerical data set. This method employs tree-based scoring function to estimate the likelihood contrast score of subspaces with respect to the given queried object. However, it limits the use of TB-CSMiner on categorical values that are frequently encountered in real-world data sets. In this paper, the TB-CSMiner method is extended by formulating the tree-based likelihood contrast scoring function for mining contrast subspace in categorical data set. The extended method uses features values of queried object to gather target samples having similar characteristics into the same group and separate non-target samples having different characteristics from this queried object in different group. Given a contrast subspace of the target samples, the queried object should fall in a group having target samples more than the non-target samples. Several experiments have been conducted on eight real world categorical data sets to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed extended TB-CSMiner method by performing classification tasks in a two-class classification problem with categorical input variables. The obtained results demonstrated that the extended method can improve the performance accuracy of most classification tasks. Thus, the proposed extended tree-based method is also shown to have the ability to discover contrast subspaces of the given queried object in categorical data.

An environmental thermal comfort model has previously been quantified based on the predicted mean vote (PMV) and the physical sensors parameters, such as temperature, relative humidity, and air speed in the indoor environment. However, first, the relationship between environmental factors and physiology parameters of the model is not well investigated in the smart home domain. Second, the model that is not mainly for an individual human model leads to the failure of the thermal comfort system to fulfill the human’s comfort preference. In this paper, a cyber−physical human centric system (CPHCS) framework is proposed to take advantage of individual human thermal comfort to improve the human’s thermal comfort level while optimizing the energy consumption at the same time. Besides that, the physiology parameter from the heart rate is well-studied, and its correlation with the environmental factors, i.e., PMV, air speed, temperature, and relative humidity are deeply investigated to reveal the human thermal comfort level of the existing energy efficient thermal comfort control (EETCC) system in the smart home environment. Experimental results reveal that there is a tight correlation between the environmental factors and the physiology parameter (i.e., heart rate) in the aspect of system operational and human perception. Furthermore, this paper also concludes that the current EETCC system is unable to provide the precise need for thermal comfort to the human’s preference.

Accident models provide a conceptual representation of accident causation. They have been applied to environments that have been exposed to poisonous or dangerous substances that are hazardous in nature. The home environment refers to the indoor space with respect to the physical processes the of indoor climate, e.g., temperature change, which are not hazardous in general. However, it can be hazardous when the physical process is in some states, e.g., a state of temperature that can cause heat stroke. If directly applying accident models in such a case, the physical processes are missing. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes an accident model by extending the state-of-the-art accident model, i.e., Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Process (STAMP) with considering physical processes. Then, to identify causes of abnormal system behaviors that result in physical process anomalies, a hazard analysis technique called System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) is tailored and applied to a smart home system for indoor temperature adjustment. The analytical results are documented by a proposed landscape genealogical layout documentation. A comparison with results by applying the original STPA was made, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the tailored STPA to apply in identifying causes in our case.

Smart Homes are generally considered the final solution for living problem, especially for the health care of the elderly and disabled, power saving, etc. Human activity recognition in smart homes is the key to achieving home automation, which enables the smart services to automatically run according to the human mind. Recent research has made a lot of progress in this field; however, most of them can only recognize default activities, which is probably not needed by smart homes services. In addition, low scalability makes such research infeasible to be used outside the laboratory. In this study, we unwrap this issue and propose a novel framework to not only recognize human activity but also predict it. The framework contains three stages: recognition after the activity, recognition in progress, and activity prediction in advance. Furthermore, using passive RFID tags, the hardware cost of our framework is sufficiently low to popularize the framework. In addition, the experimental result demonstrates that our framework can realize good performance in both activity recognition and prediction with high scalability.

The ubiquitous coverage/connectivity requirement of wireless cellular networks has shifted mobile network operators’ (MNOs) interest toward dense deployment of small cells with coverage areas that are much smaller as compared to macrocell base stations (MBSs). Multi-operator small cells could provide virtualization of network resources (infrastructure and spectrum) and enable its efficient utilization, i.e., uninterrupted coverage and connectivity to subscribers, and an opportunity to avoid under-utilization of the network resources. However, a MNO with exclusive ownership to network resources would have little incentive to utilize its precious resources to serve users of other MNOs, since MNOs differentiate among others based on their ownership of the licensed spectrum. Thus, considering network resources scarcity and under-utilization, this paper proposes a mechanism for multi-operator small cells collaboration through negotiation that establishes a mutual agreement acceptable to all involved parties, i.e., a win−win situation for the collaborating MNOs. It enables subscribers of a MNO to utilize other MNOs’ network resources, and allows MNOs to offer small cells “as a service” to users with ubiquitous access to wireless coverage/connectivity, maximize the use of an existing network resources by serving additional users from a market share, and enhance per-user data rate. We validated and evaluated the proposed mechanism through simulations considering various performance metrics.

In the smart grid, residential consumption scheduling in demand-side management (DSM) is one of the key technologies to facilitate utility companies and users in order to achieve systems optimality such as minimizing energy cost and demand peak. The success of DSM implementation depends on the level of user participation. While most of the prior works on DSM have reported good optimal results, they show a lack of focus towards user-centric issues such as user preferences, consumption deviation, and system fairness. Failure to account for such issues may lead to lower user participation in DSM programs. To address this problem, we propose user-centric consumption scheduling and fair billing mechanism for DSM program which consider economic as well as comfort aspects. First, a user’s discomfort cost is integrated into price incentives for determining consumption schedules. Second, consumption rescheduling mechanism is designed to allow users to change their preferences if necessary, and request new schedules. Finally, to improve the level of system fairness and avoid strategic players who try to manipulate the consumption profile for their benefit, a fair billing mechanism is proposed at the end of the scheduling period which takes into account both rescheduling users and user’s consumption deviation level. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of energy cost saving and improving fairness in the user’s billing.

This paper investigates the design of overlapped chunked codes (OCC) for multi-source multi-relay networks where a physical-layer network coding approach, compute-and-forward (CF) based on nested lattice codes (NLC), is applied for the simultaneous transmissions from the sources to the relays. This code is called OCC/CF. In this paper, OCC is applied before NLC before transmitting for each source. Random linear network coding is applied within each chunk. A decodability condition to design OCC/CF is provided. In addition, an OCC with a contiguously overlapping, but non-rounded-end fashion is employed for the design, which is done by using the probability distributions of the number of innovative codeword combinations and the probability distribution of the participation factor of each source to the codeword combinations received for a chunk transmission. An estimation is done to select an allocation, i.e., the number of innovative blocks per chunk and the number of blocks taken from the previous chunk for all sources, that is expected to provide the desired performance. From the numerical results, the design overhead of OCC/CF is low when the probability distribution of the participation factor of each source is dense at the chunk size for each source.

The paper presents a game theoretic solution for distributed subchannel allocation problem in small cell networks (SCNs) analyzed under the physical interference model. The objective is to find a distributed solution that maximizes the welfare of the SCNs, defined as the total system capacity. Although the problem can be addressed through best-response (BR) dynamics, the existence of a steady-state solution, i.e., a pure strategy Nash equilibrium (NE), cannot be guaranteed. Potential games (PGs) ensure convergence to a pure strategy NE when players rationally play according to some specified learning rules. However, such a performance guarantee comes at the expense of complete knowledge of the SCNs. To overcome such requirements, properties of PGs are exploited for scalable implementations, where we utilize the concept of marginal contribution (MC) as a tool to design learning rules of players’ utility and propose the marginal contribution-based best-response (MCBR) algorithm of low computational complexity for the distributed subchannel allocation problem. Finally, we validate and evaluate the proposed scheme through simulations for various performance metrics.