We put forth our opinion regarding the enhanced plasticity and modulation of mechanical properties of polymeric films obtained through electrospinning process in this article. In majority of the pharmaceutical, biomedical, and packaging applications, it is desirable that polymer based matrices should be soft, flexible, and have a moderate toughness. In order to convert inflexible and brittle polymers, adjuvants in the form of plasticizers are added to improve the flexibility and smoothness of solvent casted polymer films. However, many of these plasticizers are under scrutiny for their toxic effects and environmental hazards. In addition, plasticizers also increase the cost of end products. This has motivated the scientific community to investigate alternate approaches. The changes imparted in membrane casted by electrospinning were tried to be proved by SEM, Mechanical property study, DSC and XRD studies. We have showed dramatic improvement in flexibility of poly(ε-caprolactone) based nanofiber matrix prepared by electrospinning method whereas solvent casting method without any plasticizer produced very brittle, inflexible film of PCL. Modulation capacity of mechanical properties is also recorded. We tried to support our opinion by citing several similar findings available in the open literature. The electrospinning method helps in plasticization and in tuning mechanical properties.

Free-space optical (FSO) links are considered as cost-effective, noninvasive alternative to fiber optic cables for 5G cellular backhaul networking. For FSO-based backhaul networks, we propose an additional millimeter-wavelength (MMW) radio-frequency (RF)-FSO link, used as a backup. Uninterrupted and reliable network connection is possible by switching between primary FSO link and the secondary RF-FSO link; when the primary link is under atmospheric turbulence, the secondary link maintains connectivity as the MMW RF link exhibits complementary characteristics to atmospheric effects. In order to analytically assess the improvement, we also derive concise mathematical expressions for different performance metrics, such as outage probability, average bit error rate (BER), and capacity. Our results demonstrate that the FSO/RF-FSO topology performs better than a single FSO link in terms of outage probability and BER. The dual-hop mixed RF-FSO link is realized with an amplify and forward (AF) relay that adapts an average power scaling strategy. The irradiance fluctuations in the FSO links are modeled by gamma-gamma distribution, assuming strong atmospheric turbulence while it is assumed that the RF link experiences multipath Rayleigh fading. For switching between links, a single FSO threshold is considered first, followed by a dual FSO threshold to prevent unnecessary switching.

In this letter, we develop closed-form analytical expressions for the false alarm and missed detection probabilities of a cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) scheme using cognitive radio (CR) nodes that are equipped with improved energy detectors (IEDs), employ receive antenna diversity, and operate over Hoyt (Nakagami-q) or Rician (Nakagami-n) faded sensing channels. The derived expressions are validated through extensive simulations.

In this paper, we investigate the detection performance of cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) using energy detector in several fading scenarios. The fading environments comprise relatively less-studied Hoyt and Weibull channels in addition to the conventional Rayleigh, Rician, Nakagami-m and log-normal shadowing channels. We have presented an analytical framework for evaluating different probabilities related to spectrum sensing, i.e. missed detection, false alarm and total error due to both of them, for all the fading/shadowing models mentioned. The major theoretical contribution is, however, the derivation of closed-form expressions for probability of detection. Based on our developed framework, we present performance results of CSS under various hard decision fusion strategies such as OR rule, AND rule and Majority rule. Effects of sensing channel signal-to-noise ratio, detection threshold, fusion rules, number of cooperating cognitive radios (CRs) and fading/shadowing parameters on the sensing performance have been illustrated. The performance improvement achieved with CSS over a single CR-based sensing is depicted in terms of total error probability. Further, an optimal threshold that minimises total error probability has been indicated for all the fading/shadowing channels.

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