Middleware is becoming increasingly important for building flexible communication systems that reduce software development cycle time and effort. Unfortunately, conventional middleware implementations of CORBA have historically lacked the efficiency, predictability, and scalability required by real-time systems. A decade of intensive R&D on design techniques and optimization principle patterns ...

This thesis investigates how the formal modeling and verification techniques of computer science can be used for the analysis of hybrid systems [7,14,22,37] systems involving both discrete and continuous behavior. The motivation behind such research lies in the inherent similarity of the hierarchical and decentralized control strategies of hybrid systems and the communication and operation prot...

The sequence of echoes detected by an active Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) is coherently added in an appropriate way to produce an image with greatly enhanced resolution in the azimuth, or along-track direction when compared with an image obtained from a standard Side Looking Sonar (SLS). The SAS processing originates from the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) concept. A complete introduction to ...

Smart antenna array technology has been shown to greatly improve the performance of wireless communication systems. In this article, we describe the impact of smart antenna array processing at the mobile terminal for Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) J.-F. Frigon (B) Electrical Engineering Department, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada e-mail: j-f.frigon@polymtl....

AlGaAs/GaAs HBTs are generating interest for their superior power performance in the 1-5 GHz frequency regime for applications such as wireless LANs and cellular telephones. Much of this interest stems from the fact that HBTs exhibit excellent linearity compared to other power devices. There has been little work done to understand and model the linearity of these devices. In this thesis the lin...

We introduce a new heuristic for the A* algorithm that references a data structure of size θ(|L| + |V |), where L represents a set of strategically chosen landmark vertices and V the set of vertices in the graph. This heuristic’s benefits are permitted by a new approach for computing landmark-based lower bounds, in which each landmark stores only the distances between it and vertices within its...

Query processing and optimization in centralized and distributed environments is well-researched. Centralized query optimization focused on minimizing the number of input/output (or I/O) from disk. Distributed query processing focused mainly on maximizing local computation and minimizing data transfer between nodes. Here the distribution of data was pre-determined and both connectivity and band...

Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging Simulated in MATLAB Matthew Schlutz This thesis further develops a method from ongoing thesis projects with the goal of generating images using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) simulations coded in MATLAB. The project is supervised by Dr. John Saghri and sponsored by Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems. SAR is a type of imaging radar in which the relative movement...

Transmission power control (TPC) is used in wireless networks to improve channel reuse and/or reduce energy consumption. It has been often applied to single-input single-output (SISO) systems, where each node is equipped with a single antenna. Multiinput multi-output (MIMO) systems can improve the throughput or the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by providing multiplexing or diversity gains, respec...

The Advanced Liquid Metal Reactor (ALMR) Actinide Recycle System is being developed in the United States for application early in the 21st century. The ALMR is a major part of this system and has missions beginning with near-term (10 years), medium term (15-20 years), and long-term (beyond 20 years) horizons. These missions use the same reactor design with modifications only to the reactor core...