The recent development of metasurfaces, which may enable several use cases by modifying the propagation environment, is anticipated to have a substantial effect on the performance of 6G wireless communications. Metasurface elements can produce essentially passive sub-wavelength scattering to enable a smart radio environment. STAR-RIS, which refers to reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) that can transmit and reflect concurrently (STAR), is gaining popularity. In contrast to the widely studied RIS, which can only reflect the wireless signal and serve users on the same side as the transmitter, the STAR-RIS can both reflect and refract (transmit), enabling 360-degree wireless coverage, thus serving users on both sides of the transmitter. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the STAR-RIS, with a focus on the most recent schemes for diverse use cases in 6G networks, resource allocation, and performance evaluation. We begin by laying the foundation for RIS (passive, active, STAR-RIS), and then discuss the STAR-RIS protocols, advantages, and applications. In addition, we categorize the approaches within the domain of use scenarios, which includes increasing coverage, enhancing physical layer security (PLS), maximizing sum rate, improving energy efficiency (EE), and reducing interference. Next, we will discuss the various strategies for resource allocation and measures for performance evaluation. We aimed to elaborate, compare, and evaluate the literature in terms of setup, channel characteristics, methodology, and objectives. In conclusion, we examine the open research problems and potential future prospects in this field.

This paper focuses on system reliability analysis with dependent competing failure process due to soft failure and hard failure. Some new probabilistic methods based on cumulative shock model and nonlinear Wiener process under different shifting thresholds situation are obtained. Considering that nonlinearity exists extensively in practice, the continuous soft failure process is governed by random effected nonlinear Wiener process. Firstly, reliability evaluation models for hard failure and soft failure are obtained under the cumulative shock, respectively. Furthermore, some system reliability models under different shifting thresholds situation are studied, in which failure threshold will decrease after a certain number of shocks. A real numerical example about fatigue crack growth dataset is carried out to demonstrate the proposed procedure. Numerical results indicate that both random shocks and shifting threshold have significant effect on system reliability. Finally, some sensitivity analysis are also been given.

The connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) applications and services-based traffic make an extra burden on the already congested cellular networks. Offloading is envisioned as a promising solution to tackle cellular networks' traffic explosion problem. Notably, vehicular traffic offloading leveraging different vehicular communication network (VCN) modes is one of the potential techniques to address the data traffic problem in cellular networks. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art literature for vehicular data offloading under a communication perspective, i.e., vehicle to vehicle (V2V), vehicle to roadside infrastructure (V2I), and vehicle to everything (V2X). First, we pinpoint the significant classification of vehicular data/traffic offloading techniques, considering whether data is to download or upload. Next, for better intuition of each data offloading's category, we sub-classify the existing schemes based on their objectives. Then, the existing literature on vehicular data/traffic is elaborated, compared, and analyzed based on approaches, objectives, merits, demerits, etc. Finally, we highlight the open research challenges in this field and predict future research trends.

Environmental Stress Screening (ESS) is usually referred to the process of exposing a product to environmental stresses for detecting and eliminating latent defects made in manufacturing process. The common ESS profiles are using thermal cycling, random vibration or their combinations as the screening stresses. Various guidelines and standards have been available for determining an ESS profile. Nevertheless, there are cases that the standard ESS profiles may not be efficient enough to detect the latent defects in some manufacturing process. This paper reports the results of one industrial project on the ESS profile design for circuits. In the project, a comparative study was carried out for the evaluation of the ESS strength under the ESS profiles with incremental step stresses (ISS). The ISS profile under the study is firstly to implement a step thermal cycling and then perform the test with two screening stimuli concurrently: ordinary thermal cycling and random vibration of step increasing intensity levels. For the purpose of the comparative study, the ESS test samples were consisted of two groups A and B that were made at two different levels of manufacturing: soldering by skilled and unskilled workers, respectively. The comparative study shows that the ISS profiles are effective for exposing the latent defects in sample group A and B. Based on the project results, an ESS profile is recommended in this paper.