The Internet is divided into multiple layers to reduce and manage complexity. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) developed a 7 layer network model and had been revised to a 5 layer TCP/IP based Internet Model. The layers of the Internet can also be divided into top layer TCP/IP protocol suite layers and the underlying transport network layers. SONET/SDH, a dominant transport network, was designed initially for circuit based telephony services. Advancement in the internet world with voice and video services had pushed SONET/SDH to operate with reduced efficiencies and increased costs. Hence, redesign and redeployment of the transport network has been and continues to be a subject of research and development. Several projects are underway to explore new transport network ideas such as G.709 and GMPLS.<p> This dissertation presents the Geographical Cell Transport (GCT) protocol as a candidate for a next generation transport network. The GCT transport protocol and its cell format are described. The benefits provided by the proposed GCT transport protocol as compared to the existing transport networks are investigated. Existing switch architectures are explored and a best architecture to be implemented in VLSI for the proposed transport network input queued virtual output queuing is obtained. The objectives of this switch are high performance, guaranteed fairness among all inputs and outputs, robust behavior under different traffic patterns, and support for Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning. An implementation of this switch architecture is carried out using HDL.<p> A novel pseudo random number generation unit is designed to nullify the bias present in an arbitration unit. The validity of the designed is checked by developing a traffic load model. The speedup factor required in the switch to maintain desired throughput is explored and is presented in detail. Various simulation results are shown to study the behavior of the designed switch under uniform and hotspot traffic. The simulation results show that QoS behavior and the crossing traffic through the switch has not been affected by hotspots.

The Internet is divided into multiple layers to reduce and manage complexity. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) developed a 7 layer network model and had been revised to a 5 layer TCP/IP based Internet Model. The layers of the Internet can also be divided into top layer TCP/IP protocol suite layers and the underlying transport network layers. SONET/SDH, a dominant transport network, was designed initially for circuit based telephony services. Advancement in the internet world with voice and video services had pushed SONET/SDH to operate with reduced efficiencies and increased costs. Hence, redesign and redeployment of the transport network has been and continues to be a subject of research and development. Several projects are underway to explore new transport network ideas such as G.709 and GMPLS.<p> This dissertation presents the Geographical Cell Transport (GCT) protocol as a candidate for a next generation transport network. The GCT transport protocol and its cell format are described. The benefits provided by the proposed GCT transport protocol as compared to the existing transport networks are investigated. Existing switch architectures are explored and a best architecture to be implemented in VLSI for the proposed transport network input queued virtual output queuing is obtained. The objectives of this switch are high performance, guaranteed fairness among all inputs and outputs, robust behavior under different traffic patterns, and support for Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning. An implementation of this switch architecture is carried out using HDL.<p> A novel pseudo random number generation unit is designed to nullify the bias present in an arbitration unit. The validity of the designed is checked by developing a traffic load model. The speedup factor required in the switch to maintain desired throughput is explored and is presented in detail. Various simulation results are shown to study the behavior of the designed switch under uniform and hotspot traffic. The simulation results show that QoS behavior and the crossing traffic through the switch has not been affected by hotspots.

No description available.

This thesis investigates the potential of express bus to serve travel demand in a polycentric region, using the Atlanta metropolitan area as a case study. Express bus, which serves as the primary mode of line-haul transit commuting for most suburbs in the Atlanta region, is primarily focused on serving traditional suburb-to-city commutes. However, more than half of the commutes in the Atlanta metro are to suburban locations. This thesis investigates the potential of an author-devised plan to enhance the transit commute to suburban employment centers, using express bus as the primary technology. Working mostly with existing routes, the plan incorporates ideas found in the literature, such as intermediate stops, transfer hubs, and local bus serving first and last mile connections. The thesis also tested existing plans, off of which the author's plan was devised. Tests were performed using the trip-based model of the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC). Dramatic gains were seen as a result of the author-devised plan, such that 8,000 daily transit trips are added, and express bus ridership increases by 50%. Performance improved especially for routes in which intermediate stops were added. The results have implications for how transit can better serve travel demand in a polycentric region.

In this thesis I describe the development of a compact camera for ground-based multi TeV gamma-ray astronomy, using the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope (IACT) technique. The camera is based on multi-anode photomultipliers (MAPM) and is designed for use on the Gamma Cherenkov Telescope (GCT), which is proposed to be part of the Small Size Telescope (SST) array of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). GCT achieves high performance with a compact and cost efficient design via a Schwarzschild-Couder (SC) dual-mirror optical system. The GCT optical design allows the use of a compact camera of diameter roughly 0.5 m. The curved focal plane is equipped with 32 tiles of 64-pixels MAPM for a total of 2048 pixels of ~0.2° angular size, resulting in a field of view of ~9°. The GCT camera is designed to record the flashes of Cherenkov light from electromagnetic cascades, which last only a few tens of nanoseconds. I give a detailed description of the design, the challenges encountered during testing in the lab, and the performance of the most critical components. I give details on the custom front-end electronics modules that provide the required fast electronics, facilitating sampling and digitization, as well as first level of triggering. The camera-level triggering system is a custom backplane, developed to reject spurious triggers on the night sky background, which typically is of the order of few tens of millions of photons per pixel per second. This is to be compared with the rate of the astrophysical signal, which is of the order of few hundreds of events per second at the relevant energies. Additionally I provide a detailed description of all the software needed for the data acquisition and control of the camera, from the very low level drivers to high level and user friendly processes. I follow the commissioning of the camera, from the individual core components to the integration of the system. I then describe the integration of the camera on the GCT prototype telescope structure, and the achievement of "first light", validating for the first time the full proof-of-concept of an IACT with SC optics. I also report a study I performed on expectations for an extragalactic survey for blazars with CTA. The cumulative source count distribution of blazars is presented, including implications from two different phenomena: axion-like particle (ALP) to gamma-ray oscillations in the intergalactic magnetic field, and secondary gamma rays from hadronic origins. I conclude that a shallow and wide survey will provide the best science return for CTA, that the impact of ALP is modest and that the secondary mechanism of gamma-ray production would allow detection of blazars up to redshift of 1 in the multi-TeV energy band.

No description available.

Submitted by Johnny Rodrigues (johnnyrodrigues@ufcg.edu.br) on 2018-08-06T17:59:05Z No. of bitstreams: 1 GEORGE MARCELO RODRIGUES ALVES - DISSERTAÇÃO PPGCC 2016..pdf: 15556672 bytes, checksum: 0109aeaa0d0af858151c540948a9859d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-06T17:59:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 GEORGE MARCELO RODRIGUES ALVES - DISSERTAÇÃO PPGCC 2016..pdf: 15556672 bytes, checksum: 0109aeaa0d0af858151c540948a9859d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-02-26 / Devido ao crescimento constante da quantidade de textos disponíveis na Web, existe uma necessidade de catalogar estas informações que surgem a cada instante. No entanto, trata-se de uma tarefa árdua e na qual seres humanos são incapazes de realizar esta tarefa de maneira manual, tendo em vista a quantidade incontável de dados que são disponibilizados a cada segundo. Inúmeras pesquisas têm sido realizadas no intuito de automatizar este processo de catalogação. Uma vertente de grande utilidade para as várias áreas do conhecimento humano é a indexação de documentos com base nos contextos temporais presentes nestes documentos. Esta não é uma tarefa trivial, pois envolve a análise de informações não estruturadas presentes em linguagem natural, disponíveis nos mais diversos idiomas, dentre outras dificuldades. 0 objetivo principal deste trabalho é criar uma abordagem capaz de permitir a indexação de documentos, determinando mapas de tópicos enriquecidos com conceitos e as respectivas informações temporais relacionadas. Tal abordagem deu origem ao RISO-GCT (Geração de Contextos Temporais), componente do Projeto RISO (Recuperação da Informação Semântica de Objetos Textuais), que tem como objetivo criar um ambiente de indexação e recuperação semântica de documentos possibilitando uma recuperação mais acurada. 0 RISO-GCT utilizou os resultados de um módulo preliminar, o RISO-TT (Temporal Tagger), responsável por etiquetar informações temporais presentes em documentos e realizar o processo de normalização das expressões temporais encontradas. Deste processo foi aperfeiçoada a abordagem responsável pela normalização de expressões temporais, para que estas possam ser manipuladas mais facilmente na determinação dos contextos temporais. Foram realizados experimentos para avaliar a eficácia da abordagem proposta nesta pesquisa. 0 primeiro, com o intuito de verificar se o Topic Map previamente criado pelo RISO-IC (Indexação Conceituai), foi enriquecido com as informações temporais relacionadas aos conceitos de maneira correta e o segundo, para analisar a eficácia da abordagem de normalização das expressões temporais extraídas de documentos. Os experimentos concluíram que tanto o RISO-GCT, quanto o RISO-TT incrementado obtiveram resultados superiores aos concorrentes. / Due to the constant growth of the number of texts available on the Web, there is a need to catalog that information which appear at every moment. However, it is an arduous task in which humans are unable to perform this task manually, given the increased amount of data available at every second. Numerous studies have been conducted in order to automate the cataloging process. A research line with utility for various áreas of human knowledge is the indexing of documents based on temporal contexts present in these documents. This is not a trivial task, as it involves the analysis of unstructured information present in natural language, available in several languages, among other difficulties. The main objective of this work is to create a model to allow indexing of documents, creating topic maps enriched with the concepts in text and their related temporal information. This approach led to the RISO-GCT (Temporal Contexts Generation), a part of RISO Project (Semantic Information Retrieval on Text Objects), which aims to create a semantic indexing environment and retrieval of documents, enabling a more accurate recovery. RISO-GCT uses the results of a preliminary module, the RISO-TT (Temporal Tagger) responsible the labeling temporal information contained in documents and carrying out the process of normalization of temporal expressions. Found. In this module the normalization of temporal expressions has been improved, in order allow a richer temporal context determination. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach proposed a in this research. The first, in order to verify that the topic map previously created by RISO-IC has been correctly enriched with temporal information related to the concepts correctly, and the second, to analyze the effectiveness of the normalization of expressions extracted from documents. The experiments concluded that both the RISO-GCT, as the RISO-TT, which was evolved during this work, obtained better results than similar tools.

No description available.