Geographic routing has been widely studied over the years as an effective solution for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), especially because of the availability of wireless devices and global positioning system services. Given the unpredictable behavior of VANETs, selecting the next relay node has been proved a very challenging task. Therefore, in order to maintain acceptable network performance, the routing algorithm needs to be carefully designed to adapt to the fast network changes. The Geographic Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) protocol is a widely adopted position-based routing protocol for VANETs, which makes it a good benchmark candidate. In this paper, we analyze the shortcomings of GPSR and propose a new strategy named Path Aware GPSR (PA-GPSR), which includes additional extension tables in the Neighbors' Table to select the best path and bypass the nodes that have delivered such previous packets in recovery mode. Moreover, our proposed algorithm can eliminate packet routing loops avoiding the delivery of the same packet to the same neighbor node. These PA-GPSR features can, for instance, help to overcome link-breakage due to the unavoidable reasons, such as road accidents or dead-end roads. We used the Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) and Network Simulator-version 3 (NS-3) platform to compare our proposed algorithm to the traditional GPSR and Maxduration-Minangle GPSR (MM-GPSR) in scenarios varying the number of nodes as well as the number of source-destination pairs. Our results show that the proposed PA-GPSR strategy performed better than the traditional GPSR and MM-GPSR when packet loss rate, end-to-end delay, and network yield are considered as performance metrics.

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The traditional way engineering and engineering technology courses are taught is based on traditional lecture and laboratory experiments, which are still the most frequent teaching methods used nowadays around the world. On the other hand, active learning methodologies grounded in scientific research in education have been attracting considerable attention over the past years with numerous research studies indicating the efficacy of such learning styles.In this article, the author addresses the main challenges and shares active learning strategies used to encourage active learning and engagement among students in face-to-face Electrical Engineering Technology (EET) courses. The implementation of active learning, cooperative learning and problem-based learning in EET hands-on courses is discussed. The assessment results have indicated that the instructional approaches used have been successful in meeting the teaching goals, which once again serves as evidence for the effectiveness of active learning as research studies have indicated.

In this paper the use of MATLAB, and in particular Simscape, will be discussed as a simulation tool to model multi-domain physical systems in power electronics and electrical machines courses. The overall system response (both static and dynamic) of power electronics and electrical machine circuits are demonstrated and emphasized using Simscape language. Including Simscape in the curriculum reinforces conceptual ideas presented in lectures, as it increases students' focus on conceptual material, and their familiarity to modeling systems using MATLAB/Simulink.

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Vehicles on cooperative inter-vehicular applications establish a mutual awareness of their presence by periodically broadcasting beacon messages. However, high vehicle density and poorly controlled beaconing lead to congested channel and degradation of system performance. Periodic beaconing may also lower the delivery rate of beacons and other types of messages. In this paper, we describe a beaconing rate control approach considering the density of nodes during beacon forwarding and adjusting the successive beacon delay to mitigate the congestion and maximize the delivery efficiency of beaconing. Our strategy can be adopted for any beacon-based algorithms. Therefore, we selected the widely adopted position-based routing protocol for VANETs known as Geographic Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) to apply the proposed algorithm and evaluate the impact in the performance metrics. Our proposed algorithm shows performance improvement over standard GPSR related to the number of drops caused by collision and beacon load reduction, which keeps the information accuracy.

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The more "real world" exposure students get on all aspects of control system development the better prepared they will be to quickly adapt to product development in industry. Undergraduate student involvement in automotive hybrid development competitions, such as EcoCAR, exposes them to areas that they usually not see in typical undergraduate controls courses. EcoCAR design competition exposes them to a product development experience very similar to what they would see in industry. This paper will discuss the benefits obtained by undergraduate students and industry sponsors participating in design competitions such as EcoCAR. The student exposure experienced in the competition includes a complete system architecture selection and design, control strategy development, both high and low level control code generation, in the loop testing, and product validation. The students also have the opportunity to interface with professionals from the sponsor companies guiding them on use of state-of-the-art industry engineering tools and techniques.