This paper evaluates the effect of slot existence with limited length between flanges and web junction of I-shaped beams at the region of moment connections on vertical force and shear stress distribution in beam flanges and web at connection section in comparison with classical theory of stress distribution. The main purpose of this research is to evaluate the efficiency of the slot in connect...

The human brain is a highly complex organ with remarkable energy demands. Although it represents only 2% of the total body weight, it accounts for 20% of all oxygen consumption, reflecting its high rate of metabolic activity. Mitochondria have a crucial role in the supply of energy to the brain. Consequently, their deterioration can have important detrimental consequences on the function and pl...

The MPEG video coding is the most widely used video coding standard which usually generates variable bitrate (VBR) data streams. Although ATM can deliver VBR traffic, the burst traffic still has the possibility to be dropped due to network congestion. The cell loss can be minimized by using an enforced rate control method. However, the quality of the reproduced video may be sacrificed due to in...

A Q-manifold M is a supermanifold endowed with an odd vector field Q squaring to zero. The Lie derivative LQ along Q makes the algebra of smooth tensor fields on M into a differential algebra. In this paper, we define and study the invariants of Q-manifolds called characteristic classes. These take values in the cohomology of the operator LQ and, given an affine symmetric connection with curvat...

Optical Transport Networks (OTN) with automatical switching capabilities are named ASON. Hierarchical routing is required in the ASON recommendations to achieve scalability. Basically, hierarchical routing consists of three main components, an aggregation scheme, an update policy and a routing algorithm. This paper proposes a new network structure focusing on these three components. We propose ...

Efforts to provide connection oriented service over the inherently best-effort Internet started almost right after its birth. Today, there exist a multitude of solutions that have been proposed but have never been implemented due to their impracticability. We propose a practical solution for fast, low cost, scalable, and yet accurate QoS routing. We propose to use hierarchical approaches to mak...

In this paper, we report the design and implementation of a software suite called NetEx (short for Network Express) that can provide connection-oriented delay-guaranteed communication services at application level. With NetEx, user applications request connection set-up by specifying their traffic (using some standard traffic descriptors) and quality of service (e.g., delay bound). NetEx runs a...

In this paper, a novel distributed access protocol for a slotted wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) metro ring employing all-optical packet switching and supporting quality-of-service (QoS) classes is presented and analyzed. Since we assume that there are more nodes than available wavelengths in the network, we obtain a scalable multihop WDM ring as underlying network architecture. By divid...