No abstract

Consumption of a low-protein, high-carbohydrate diet induces a striking increase in circulating fibroblast growth factor-21 (FGF21), which is associated with improved cardiometabolic health and increased longevity. Increased lifespan during this dietary protein "dilution" has been explained by resource-mediated trade-offs between reproduction and survival, such that fecundity is optimized at a greater relative intake of proteins/carbohydrates. The magnitude of this trade-off is thought to be sex-dependent. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that metabolic responses to dietary protein dilution are likewise dependent on sex. We maintained age-matched adult male and female C57BL/6J mice on isocaloric diets containing 22% fat and differing in the ratio of protein/carbohydrate. The normal protein (NP) control diet contained 18% protein and 60% carbohydrate by kcal. The protein diluted (PD) diet contained 4% protein and 74% carbohydrate. Consistent with previous reports, PD males gained less weight and less fat than did normal protein controls and exhibited both improved glucose tolerance and decreased plasma lipids. In contrast, these metabolic benefits were absent among age-matched females maintained on the same diets. Likewise, whereas circulating FGF21 was increased up to 66-fold among PD male mice, this was substantially blunted among female counterparts. Sex differences in energy balance, glucose control, and plasma FGF21 were reversed upon ovariectomy. Collectively, our findings support that female mice are relatively less sensitive to the metabolic improvements observed following dietary protein dilution. This is accompanied by blunted circulating levels of FGF21 and requires an intact female reproductive system.

This paper develops a sum-power minimized resource allocation (RA) algorithm subject to a sum-rate constraint for cooperative orthogonal frequency division modulation (OFDM) transmission with subcarrier-pair based opportunistic decode-and-forward (DF) relaying. The improved DF protocol first proposed in [1] is used with optimized subcarrier pairing. Instrumental to the RA algorithm design is appropriate definition of variables to represent source/relay power allocation, subcarrier pairing and transmission-mode selection elegantly, so that after continuous relaxation, the dual method and the Hungarian algorithm can be used to find an (at least approximately) optimum RA with polynomial complexity. Moreover, the bisection method is used to speed up the search of the optimum Lagrange multiplier for the dual method. Numerical results are shown to illustrate the power-reduction benefit of the improved DF protocol with optimized subcarrier pairing. Index Terms-Cooperative communication, resource allocation, decode and forward, OFDM.

No abstract

No abstract

The paper considers the problem of beamforming design for a multi-cell network of downlink users, who either harvest energy or decode information or do both by receiving signals from the multi-antenna base station (BS) within a time slot and over the same frequency band. Our previous contributions have showed that the time-fraction based energy and information transmission, under which first the energy is transferred within the initial fraction of time and then the information is transferred within the remaining fraction, is the most efficient design alternative both in terms of its practical implementation and network performance. However, at the time of writing, both energy and information beamforming has only been implemented for proper Gaussian signaling (PGS), which has limited the network's throughput. Although the network throughput could be improved in some specific scenarios by using non-orthogonal multi-access (NOMA), this may compromise the user secrecy. In order to circumvent the above implementations, we conceive improper Gaussian signaling (IGS) for information beamforming, which enables the network to substantially improve its throughput in any scenario without jeopardizing the user secrecy despite its lowcomplexity signal processing at the user end. A simpler subclass of IGS is also considered, which also outperforms NOMA PGS and works under any arbitrary scenario.

No abstract

The paper considers two possible approaches, which enable multiple pairs of users to exchange information via multiple multi-antenna relays within one time-slot to save the communication bandwidth in low-latency communications. The first approach is to deploy full-duplexes for both users and relays to make their simultaneous signal transmission and reception possible. In the second approach the users use a fraction of a time slot to send their information to the relays and the relays use the remaining complementary fraction of the time slot to send the beamformed signals to the users. The inherent loop self-interference in the duplexes and inter-full-duplexing-user interference in the first approach are absent in the second approach. Under both these approaches, the joint users' power allocation and relays' beamformers to either optimize the users' exchange of information or maximize the energy-efficiency subject to user quality-of-service (QoS) in terms of the exchanging information throughput thresholds lead to complex nonconvex optimization problems. Path-following algorithms are developed for their computational solutions. The provided numerical examples show the advantages of the second approach over the first approach.