End-of-life care (EOLC) has become a significant area of expertise in the intensive care unit (ICU). Critical care nurses are the primary caregivers of patients in the ICU and they provide EOLC for patients and families daily. Nurses have portrayed EOLC as difficult and demanding work; yet, they have also described their experiences of providing EOLC as rewarding, gratifying, and a privilege. The purpose of this study was to explore nurses’ meaningful experiences with providing EOLC for patients and families in the context of the ICU. Van Manen’s approach to interpretive phenomenology was used. Unstructured face-to-face interviews were conducted with six registered nurses who were employed in a medical/surgical tertiary care ICU. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. The essence of nurses’ meaningful experiences in providing EOLC was ‘being able to make a difference’. For the nurses, being able to make a difference reflected their efforts to create a good death for the dying patient and their family. The nurses had to navigate a variety of challenges that affected the creation of a good death, however, they made it work by building relationships quickly with families, taking care of themselves, and recognizing it’s a privilege to provide EOLC. These research findings contribute to an expanding body of knowledge and understanding with regards to nurses’ role with the provision of EOLC in the ICU.

Peer to peer networks are becoming increasingly popular among Internet users as the downloading peers share the storage and upload bandwidth load of the system. This makes it possible for a large number of users to share a data file available at a server without the server upload bandwidth becoming a bottleneck. The P2P technology is being widely used not only for file sharing but also for video on demand, live streaming and IPTV. The delay deadlines are more stringent in live streaming and IPTV than those in file sharing as the traffic is real time. The performance perceived by a user depends upon whether the video stream is being downloaded at the streaming rate. Coolstreaming is the first large scale P2P IPTV system. We model the multi-channel Coolstreaming system via an open queueing network. The peer dynamics at a channel is modelled by a closed queueing network working at a faster rate. We compute the expected number of substreams in the overlay of New Coolstreaming which are not being received at the proper rate. The computation of the Markov chain with a very large state space is handled using the two time scale decomposition. Further we characterize the end to end delay encountered by a video stream originating from the server and received at a user of New Coolstreaming. Three factors contribute towards the delay. The first factor is the mean path length in terms of overlay hops of the partnership graph. The second factor is the mean number of routers between any two overlay peers in the network layer and the third factor is the queueing delay at a router in the Internet. The mean shortest path length in terms of overlay peers in the New Coolstreaming graph is shown to be O(logn)where nis the number of peers in the overlay. This is done by modelling the overlay by a random graph. The mean shortest path in terms of routers in the Internet’s router level topology is seen to be at most O(logNI)where NIis the number of routers in the Internet. We also discuss a method by which we can get the mean delay at a router in the Internet. Thus, the mean end to end delay in New Coolstreaming is shown to be upper bounded by O(lognlogNIE[W])where E[W]is the mean delay at a router in the Internet.

Jag kommer i denna uppsats beskriva den designprocess som pågått vid skapandet av en webbaserad informationsplattform från koncept till slutprodukt. Mitt uppdrag har varit att effektivisera en webbyrås nuvarande sätt att hantera och sprida information på, som bestod av en blandning mellan digital och analog information, och skapa en ny webbaserad informationsplattform. Den nya webbaserade informationsplattformen ska kunna samla all information på en plats och skapa ett effektivare informationsutbyte mellan de anställda på företaget. Jag har använt mig av två teoretiska ramverk; Nielsens tio heuristics samt Krugs visuella design hierarki. Jag har arbetat nära beställaren för att kunna skräddarsy webbplatsen till deras behov. Resultatet efter ett omfattande arbete med designmallar och front-end kodning blev grunden för webbyråns webbaserade informationsplattform, utvecklad för att effektivisera spridningen av information på företaget. / In this essay I will describe the design process during the creation of a web-based information platform, from concept to final product. My assignment has been to take a web agency’s current way of managing and distributing information, which consisted of a mix between digital and analog information, and create a new web-based information platform. The new web-based information-platforms purpose is to gather all information in one place for easier exchange of information between employees at the company and make it more efficient. I used two theoretical frameworks as a theoretical base working on the project; Nielsen's ten heuristics and Krugs visual design hierarchy. I have worked closely with the client to customize the platform to their needs. The result after extensive work with design templates and front-end coding became the foundation for the web agency’s web-based platform, developed to distribute information more efficiently within the agency.

Depuis leur émergence, les réseaux de capteurs sans fil (WSN) n’ont cessé de se développer devenant un acteur clé dans de nombreuses applications telles que le suivi militaires, la surveillance à distance, la bio-détection et de la domotique. Ces réseaux sont basés sur la norme IEEE 802.15.4 qui est dédié aux réseaux personnels sans fil à faible débit (LR-WPAN) dans la bande de fréquences radio sans licence (868MHz/915MHz/2.4GHz). Faible consommation d'énergie, faible coût de mise en œuvre et le niveau élevé d'intégration sont les principaux défis de ces systèmes. L’émetteur-récepteur est le bloc qui consomme le plus d’énergie dans un nœud capteur, ainsi, la consommation d'énergie du frontal radiofréquence (RFFE) doit être réduite. Pour ce faire, plusieurs approches sont possibles, que ce soit au niveau circuit en enquêtant sur les modes de fonctionnement du transistor ou bien en combinant les fonctionnalités des blocs radiofréquences. Une autre stratégie est d’investiguer le niveau système en proposant de nouvelles architectures de démodulation. Cette thèse explore les exigences et les défis spécifiques pour la conception de circuits intégrés radiofréquences (RFIC) ultra-basse consommation pour les réseaux de capteurs sans fil. Ces travaux ont abouti à la conception d'un démodulateur compact réalisé dans une technologie CMOS 65nm et qui est compatible avec tous les types de modulation. / Since their emergence, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have been growing continually becoming a key player in many applications such as military tracking, remote monitoring, bio-sensing and home automation. These networks are based on IEEE 802.15.4 standard which is dedicated to low rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs) in the unlicensed radio band (868MHz/915MHz/2.4GHz). Low power consumption, low cost of implementation and high level of integration are the main challenges of these systems. As radio frequency transceiver is one of the most power hungry block in wireless sensor node, power consumption of radio frequency front-end (RFFE) must be reduced. To deal with, several approaches are possible, either at circuit level by investigating operating modes of transistors and merging functionalities or at system level by searching novel demodulation architecture. This thesis explores the specific requirements and challenges for the design of ultra-low power radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs), leading to the design of a compact demodulator implemented in 65 nm CMOS technology and compatible with all modulation schemes.

Software systems in the automotive domain are generally safety critical and subject to strict timing requirements. Systems of this character are often constructed utilizing periodically executed tasks, that have a hard deadline. In addition, these systems may have additional deadlines that can be specified on cause-effect chains, or simply task chains. They are defined by existing tasks in the system, hence the chains are not stand alone additions to the system. Each chain provide an end-to-end timing constraint targeting the propagation of data through the chain of tasks. These constraints specify the additional timing requirements that need to be fulfilled, when searching for a valid schedule. In this thesis, an offline non-preemptive scheduling method is presented, designed for single core systems. The scheduling problem is defined and formulated utilizing Constraint Programming. In addition, to ensure that end-to-end timing requirements are met, job-level dependencies are considered during the schedule generation. Utilizing this approach can guarantee that individual task periods along with end-to-end timing requirements are always met, if a schedule exists. The results show a good increase in schedulability ratio when utilizing job-level dependencies compared to the case where job-level dependencies are not specified. When the system utilization increases this improvement is even greater. Depending on the system size and complexity the improvement can vary, but in many cases it is more than double. The scheduling generation is also performed within a reasonable time frame. This would be a good benefit during the development process of a system, since it allows fast verification when changes are made to the system. Further, the thesis provide an overview of the entire process, starting from a system model and ending at a fully functional schedule executing on a hardware platform.

During the past years, wooden one and two family houses showed a higher growth rate on the German construction market compared to conventional material like brick and stone. Wood as construction material became more and more attractive. Furthermore, a growing demand on multifamily houses could be recognized, yet, wood has not been considered as an alternative in this field of application until now. Trying to understand the end-users attitudes towards wooden multifamily houses, this licentiate thesis aims at exploring German end-users’ perceptions of wooden multifamily houses. To collect the necessary data, the Association Pattern Technique (APT) was applied, which is a two-stage method and has its foundations in the Means-End theory. In the first stage, 31 in-depth laddering interviews were carried out, which served as the base for the matrix-survey in the second stage, where 229 answers were received. Extending the existing method in the matrix-survey stage allowed for important additional data to be uncovered. The results show that individuals associate certain product attributes with wooden multifamily houses and that these attributes are thought to entail specific consequences. These consequences are in turn linked with the personal values of the respondents. The most dominant perceptual orientations of different groups of respondents are shown and significant differences could be found in how individuals in German perceive wooden multifamily houses depending on age, income and habitation.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is seen as one of the next Internet revolutions. In a near future the majority of all connected devices to the Internet will be IoT devices. These devices will connect previously offline constrained systems, thus it is essential to ensure end-to-end security for such devices. Object Security is a concept where the actual packet or sensitive parts of the packet are encrypted instead of the radio channel. A compromised node in the network will with this mechanism still have the data encrypted ensuring full end-to-end security. This paper proposes an architecture for using the object security format COSE in a typical constrained short-range radio based IoT platform. The IoT platform utilizes Bluetooth Low Energy and the Constrained Application Protocol for data transmission via a capillary gateway. A proof-of-concept implementation based on the architecture validates that the security solution is implementable. An overhead comparison between current channel security guidelines and the proposed object security solution results in a similar size for each data packet. The thesis concludes that object security should be seen as an alternative for ensuring end-to-end security for the Internet of Things.

Enterprise Systems like customer-billing systems or financial transaction systems are required to process large volumes of data in a fixed period of time. Those systems are increasingly required to also provide near-time processing of data to support new service offerings. Common systems for data processing are either optimized for high maximum throughput or low latency. This thesis proposes the concept for an adaptive middleware, which is a new approach for designing systems for bulk data processing. The adaptive middleware is able to adapt its processing type fluently between batch processing and single-event processing. By using message aggregation, message routing and a closed feedback-loop to adjust the data granularity at runtime, the system is able to minimize the end-to-end latency for different load scenarios. The relationship of end-to-end latency and throughput of batch and message-based systems is formally analyzed and a performance evaluation of both processing types has been conducted. Additionally, the impact of message aggregation on throughput and latency is investigated. The proposed middleware concept has been implemented with a research prototype and has been evaluated. The results of the evaluation show that the concept is viable and is able to optimize the end-to-end latency of a system. The design, implementation and operation of an adaptive system for bulk data processing differs from common approaches to implement enterprise systems. A conceptual framework has been development to guide the development process of how to build an adaptive software for bulk data processing. It defines the needed roles and their skills, the necessary tasks and their relationship, artifacts that are created and required by different tasks, the tools that are needed to process the tasks and the processes, which describe the order of tasks.

The primary reason for the wireless technology evolution is towards building capacity and obtaining higher data rates. Enclosed locations, densely populated campus, indoor offices, and device-to-device communication will require radios that need to operate at data rates up to 10 Gbps. In the next few years, a new generation of communication systems would emerge to better handle the ever-increasing demand for much wider bandwidth requirements. Simultaneously, key factors such as size, cost, and energy consumption play a distinctive role towards shaping the success of future wireless technologies. In the perspective of 3GPP 5G next generation wireless communication systems, the X band was explicitly targeted with a vast range of applications in point to point radio, point to multi point radio, test equipment, sensors and future wireless communication. An X-band RF front-end circuit for next generation wireless network applications is presented in this work. It details the design of a low noise amplifier and a power amplifier for X band operation. The designed amplifiers were integrated with a wideband single-pole-double-throw switch to achieve an overall front-end structure for 10 GHz. The design was carried out and sent for fabrication using a GaN 0.15µm process provided by NRC, a novel design kit. Due to higher breakdown voltage, high power density, high efficiency, high linearity and better noise performance, GaN HEMTs are a suitable choice for future wireless communication. Thus, the assumption is to further explore capabilities of this process in front-end design for future wireless communications.

This diploma thesis solves the 3D printing problematics for non-commercial printers. Firstly possibilities of its using, heat diffusion and printing materials are described. Next part of thesis is focused on heating pads and printing nozzles for which 3D models in SolidWorks software are created. The temperature analyzes are tested with these models and then comparing of results is done. Working models for SolidWorks Plastics and SolidWorks Simulation software is created in following part. Thanks to this software tools printing model is simulated and deformation creating in printing process is observed. The most suitable solutions are chosen from gained solutions.