This paper provides and illustrates a design-based learning (DBL) approach for fostering individual sustainability competency in engineering education. We performed two studies with engineering students in typical educational activities. The first study helped students perform a topic-specific design task in the practicum unit of a sensor technology course, which compared the performance of the DBL approach and conventional passive learning approach. The second study guided students to develop innovative projects for participating in the "Internet Plus" Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition (IPIEC). To validate the proposed approach, stakeholder questionnaires and performance evaluations were implemented. The results show that the DBL approach was viable for sustainability competency teaching in terms of learning demand and teaching procedure. We found that students in the DBL group gave more prominence in the individual competencies, such as system-thinking, multidisciplinary applications, and collaboration. These findings suggest that applying the DBL approach to train sustainability competency in engineering education is beneficial for promoting students’ abilities in dealing with challenges involved in sustainability practice.

This paper develops an instruction method for promoting design innovation capability through a design-based program with identification, modeling, simulation, and prototyping (IMSP). The computational thinking and conceptualization of sustainability were incorporated. The interaction between instruction treatment and participants' personality was investigated. Eighty-six engineering undergraduates participated in this experimental study for exploring the effectiveness of the IMSP program. The findings indicate that 1) the IMSP program promoted undergraduates' computational thinking, and further enhanced their design innovation ability; 2) the program that integrated the conceptualization of sustainability has better teaching effects than that without the conceptual integration; 3) the personal characters of innovation proaction and emotional intelligence acted as moderators in the ISMP program. This study presents a practical method for improving design innovation capability, and supports the feasibility and necessity of emphasizing computational thinking and sustainability in the innovation training program for engineering education.

System synchronization between the user equipment (UE) and the base station (eNodeB) is a fundamental physical layer procedure in the cellular system and performed by synchronization signal. New Radio (NR) synchronization signal is expected to have the wider band reserved, which enables the use of the longer sequence than that in Long Term Evolution (LTE). This paper simulates the downlink (DL) initial synchronization procedure for NR in 5G and evaluates the NR primary synchronization signal (NR-PSS) design with various lengths. To accomplish the DL initial synchronization at the UE, the NR-PSS is firstly detected in the time domain using a matched filter, and then the carrier frequency offset (CFO) is the sum of the integer frequency offset (IFO) and the sum of the fractional frequency offset (FFO). After compensating the CFO of the received signal, we detect the NR second synchronization signal (NR-SSS) in the frequency domain. To evaluate the NR-PSS design with various lengths, the performance of the residual timing offset and residual frequency offset is considered. The simulation results show that the performance of the residual timing offset with the longer sequences is better and the length of the NR-PSS has no impact on the performance of the residual frequency offset. Thus we propose longer sequences in the NR-PSS design when the performance of the residual timing offset and the residual frequency offset is only considered.

Acquisition of instantaneous channel state information (CSI) is essential in cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) to achieve advanced technologies. However, the overhead to obtain CSIs by traditional schemes is sufficiently large, which will degrade the spectrum efficiency. To handle this problem, a two-phase based pilot allocation scheme is proposed in this paper, where both the wireless fronthaul link and radio access link are considered. In particular, the pilot allocation for RRH is derived based on the angular resolution characteristics in phase I. In phase II, an inter-cluster and intra-cluster pilot allocation algorithm for users is proposed to mitigate the pilot contamination. Numerical results are shown to demonstrate the performance of our proposed pilot allocation scheme in C-RANs.