Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, we report on a novel resonant THz sensor for label-free analysis. The structure consists of a silicon nitride dielectric ring resonator vertically coupled to a thin layer of graphene strip ring resonator on top. The cladding is assumed to be porous alumina on the top of the graphene strip, which enhances the interaction of the surface plasmon wave and the target molecules. Finite difference time domain analysis is used to systematically design the structure and to investigate the performance of the sensor. Our simulations show that the proposed structure has larger refractive index sensitivity and lower intrinsic quality factor with respect to the similar optical structure. It... 

Low-cost ethanol vapor sensors are fabricated by electrospinning of TiS2/PVP fibers on pre-patterned metal electrodes. TiS2 ribbons have been synthesized through sulfuration of titanium (Ti) foil using chemical vapor transport (CVT). We found selective and stable responses at a low concentration of ethanol vapor (2 ppm) at room temperature with the transient response and recovery times experimentally around 60 s and 2 s respectively. The relatively high responses of sensors (6800% at 18 ppm) are attributable to the synergy effect of TiS2/PVP composite structure. The mechanism of sensing is discussed based on proton hopping while the sensors exposed to ethanol vapor. © 2019 Wiley-VCH Verlag... 

In this paper, based on a successively accuracy-increasing approximation of the ℓ0 norm, we propose a new algorithm for recovery of sparse vectors from underdetermined measurements. The approximations are realized with a certain class of concave functions that aggressively induce sparsity and their closeness to the ℓ0 norm can be controlled. We prove that the series of the approximations asymptotically coincides with the ℓ1 and ℓ0 norms when the approximation accuracy changes from the worst fitting to the best fitting. When measurements are noise-free, an optimization scheme is proposed that leads to a number of weighted ℓ1 minimization programs, whereas, in the presence of noise, we propose... 

For the target parameter estimation in MIMO radars in the presence of strong clutter, non-adaptive compressive sensing methods have a poor performance. On the other hand, the adaptive ones usually need higher data acquisition time. In this paper, we propose an adaptive compressive sensing method called L-BGT that has tolerable data acquisition time. furthermore, we have presented the essential changes in a distributed MIMO radar to exploit an adaptive group testing compressive sensing method  

Highly sensitive flexible humidity sensors based on graphene quantum dots (GQDs) were developed. The GQDs were prepared using a facile hydrothermal method and characterized considering morphological, structural, and compositional experiments. Then, their humidity sensing properties in correlation with flexibility characteristics were investigated. Good selectivity and response (∼390 for a RH change of 99%), broad detection range (1-100% RH), rather short response and recovery times (12 and 43 s, respectively) as well as flexibility were obtained, demonstrating that the GQD sensors have potential for application in wearable electronics and RH monitoring. Detection of hydrogen (H2) gas by the... 

We consider the problem of walking a robot in an unknown polygon called “street”, starting from a point (Formula presented.) to reach a target (Formula presented.). The robot is assumed to have minimal sensing capability in a way that cannot infer any geometric properties of the environment, such as its coordinates, angles or distances; but it is equipped with a sensor that can only detect the discontinuities in the depth information (or gaps). Our robot can also locate the target point (Formula presented.) as soon as it enters in robot’s visibility region. In addition, one pebble is assumed to be available to the robot to be used as an identifiable point and to mark any position of the... 

HF radar systems are widely used for the measurement of ocean surface currents and wave parameters. Theoretical analysis of high frequency radio wave backscattering from the sea has been derived in the past. Also, the relationship between Bragg frequencies and surface currents is determined and has been proved by HF radars. It is known that when surface currents are present, the Bragg frequencies move to new frequencies. Their movement is proportional to the surface current in the direction toward radar. In addition, it is observed that sea surface current changes the second order part of the spectrum of radar reflection from the sea surface. In this paper, a theoretical analysis of... 

Sensor networks have a wide range of potential and practical application. A sensor network consists of a large number of tiny, low power and short-living sensors. Some sensor network applications require k-coverage to ensure the quality of surveillance. Meanwhile, energy is another primary concern for sensor networks. In this dissertation, an algorithm proposed which groups sensors in to disjoint subsets. Every subset cans k-cover the whole area. The subsets are scheduled to work successively. Therefore, the network lifetime is prolonged. Furthermore, sensing range is fixed. Also another algorithm, proposed which constructs some non-disjoint subsets, and in each active subset, each sensor... 

Due to high surface to volume ratio and tunable band gap, two dimensional (2D) layered materials such as MoS2, is good candidate for gas sensing applications. This research mainly focuses on variation of Density of States (DOS) of MoS2 monolayes caused by ethanol adsorption. The nanosheets are synthesized by liquid exfoliation, and then using Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy (STS) and Density Functional Theory (DFT), local electronic characteristic such as DOS and band gap in non-vacuum condition are analyzed. The results show that ethanol adsorption enhances DOS and deform orbitals near the valence and conduction bands that increase transport of carriers on the sheet. © 2018 IOP Publishing... 

A turn-on fluorometric assay is described for determination of the activity of enzyme telomerase. For this purpose, graphene quantum dots (GQDs) were first modified with the telomeric sequence (5′-amino-AATCCGTCGAGCAGAGTT-3′) via a condensation reaction. Injection of graphene oxide causes instant quenching of the blue fluorescence of the GQDs. Addition of cell extract containing telomerase, triggers the extension of telomer via addition of specific sequence (TTAGGG)n to its 3′ end. Fluorescence, best measured at excitation/emission wavelengths of 390/446 nm, is subsequently restored due to folding of the extended telomeric sequence into G-quadruplex structure. The method was applied to the... 

Effective spectrum sensing strategies enable cognitive radios (CRs) to identify and opportunistically transmit on under-utilized spectral resources. In this paper, sequential channel sensing problems for single and multiple secondary users (SUs) networks are effectively modeled through finite state Markovian processes. More specifically, a model for single user case is introduced and its performance is validated through analytical analysis. Then, in order to address multiple SUs case, this model is extended to include the modified p-persistent access (MPPA) protocol. Since the scheme utilized experiences a high level of collision among the SUs, to mitigate the problem appropriately,... 

Powerful spectrum sensing schemes enable cognitive radios (CRs) to find transmission opportunities in spectral resources allocated exclusively to primary users. In this paper, the problem of maximizing the average throughput of a cognitive radio system through optimizing its spectrum sensing time is investigated, and a systematic neural network-based optimization approach is proposed which avoids challenges associated with the conventional analytical solutions. The proposed method exploits a novel learning and optimization cycle to enable an effective cooperation between two kinds of well-known artificial neural networks and finds the optimum value of the channel sensing time without any... 

Fast, accurate and efficient sensing is of important aspects in cognitive radio technology. A new sensing circuit is proposed using a phase frequency detector for cognitive radio applications. Using this method, spectral sensing can be done in a very short time by a low cost, low power circuit, compared with available implemented methods. The PFD circuit resolves different frequencies without the need of variable filter bandwidth or the banks of filters. Also it accelerates sensing procedure because of short time needed to detect the signal. Simulations show the accurate operation of this method and comparison with other methods shows faster sweep rates  

A hybrid current/voltage sense amplification scheme is proposed for high speed SRAMs. The scheme includes an offset cancellation technique which makes it robust against the current sense amplifier (CSA) mismatch. The offset cancellation allows for fast open loop operation of the differential CSA. A fourfold reduction of the cell access time is achieved compared to the conventional scheme under similar cell current and bitline capacitance. Thanks to its automatic turn off nature, the proposed CSA incurs zero static power without an auxiliary turn off circuit. The reduction of the charge redistribution on the bitlines offers a low bitline dynamic power consumption as well. In this work, the... 

One of the most relevant characteristics of social networks is community structure, in which network nodes are joined together in densely connected groups between which there are only sparser links. Uncovering these sparse links (i.e. intercommunity links) has a significant role in community detection problem which has been of great importance in sociology, biology, and computer science. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called CS-ComDet, to efficiently detect the inter-community links based on a newly emerged paradigm in sparse signal recovery, called compressive sensing. We test our method on real-world networks of various kinds whose community structures are already known, and... 

In this paper, a Block Iterative Method with Adaptive Thresholding for Sparse Recovery (BIMATSR) is proposed to recover the received signal in an under-sampled distributed MIMO radar. The BIMATSR scheme induces block sparsity with the aid of a signal-dependent thresholding operator which increases the accuracy of the target parameter estimation task. We have proved that under some sufficient conditions, the suggested scheme converges to a stable solution. Moreover, different simulation scenarios confirm that the BIMATSR algorithm outperforms its counterparts in terms of the target parameter estimation. This superiority is achieved at the expense of slightly more computational complexity. It... 

Fragile data hiding has been extensively used for secure transmission of the sensitive data using cover images, audios and videos. In the past decade, increasingly the remote sensing applications require transmission and archiving of large number of aerial images and videos. Storage and processing of remote sensing data in the public cloud computing and storage platforms, with servers outside the control of the data owners, requires sufficient attention to persevering the privacy of the data. Furthermore, in the past few years the applications of drones and unmanned aerial vehicles demand algorithms designed especially for low altitude remote sensing data. In this paper, a novel fragile data... 

The effective utilization of the spectrum has become an essential goal in the communications field, which is addressed by the Cognitive Radio (CR) systems. The primary task in a CR system is to sense the spectrum to identify its holes to be exploited by the secondary users. In this paper, we tackle the compressed spectrum sensing problem in a cooperative manner. The CRs distributed in an area take the samples of the signal that has been reached to them through a wireless fading channel. The spectrum has the block-sparse structure. Moreover, the spectrum observed by different CRs in an area share the same block-sparse support. Therefore, we suggest to exploit the joint block-sparsity...