Slice Size Research Articles

Network slicing: Is it worth regulating in a network neutrality context?

Network slicing is a key component of 5G-and-beyond networks but induces many questions related to an associated business model and its need to be regulated due to its difficult co-existence with the network neutrality debate. We propose in this paper a slicing model in the case of heterogeneous users/applications where a service provider may purchase a slice in a wireless network and offer a “premium” service where the improved quality stems from higher prices leading to less demand and less congestion than the basic service offered by the network owner, a scheme known as Paris Metro Pricing. We obtain thanks to game theory the economically-optimal slice size and prices charged by all actors. We also compare with the case of a unique “pipe” (no premium service) corresponding to a fully-neutral scenario and with the case of vertical integration to evaluate the impact of slicing on all actors and identify the “best” economic scenario and the eventual need for regulation.

Modelling and Research on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Goal-Based Attack and Defence Game for Infrastructure Networks.

Network attack and defence games are gradually becoming a new approach through which to study the protection of infrastructure networks such as power grids and transportation networks. Uncertainty factors, such as the subjective decision preferences of attackers and defenders, are not considered in existing attack and defence game studies for infrastructure networks. In this paper, we introduce, respectively, the attacker's and defender's expectation value, rejection value, and hesitation degree of the target, as well as construct an intuitionistic fuzzy goal-based attack and defence game model for infrastructure networks that are based on the maximum connectivity slice size, which is a network performance index. The intuitionistic fuzzy two-player, zero-sum game model is converted into a linear programming problem for solving, and the results are analysed to verify the applicability and feasibility of the model proposed in this paper. Furthermore, different situations, such as single-round games and multi-round repeated games, are also considered. The experimental results show that, when attacking the network, the attacker rarely attacks the nodes with higher importance in the network, but instead pays more attention to the nodes that are not prominent in the network neutrality and median; meanwhile, the defender is more inclined to protect the more important nodes in the network to ensure the normal performance of the network.

Heuristic Radio Access Network Subslicing with User Clustering and Bandwidth Subpartitioning

In 5G and beyond, the network slicing is a crucial feature that ensures the fulfillment of service requirements. Nevertheless, the impact of the number of slices and slice size on the radio access network (RAN) slice performance has not yet been studied. This research is needed to understand the effects of creating subslices on slice resources to serve slice users and how the performance of RAN slices is affected by the number and size of these subslices. A slice is divided into numbers of subslices of different sizes, and the slice performance is evaluated based on the slice bandwidth utilization and slice goodput. A proposed subslicing algorithm is compared with k-means UE clustering and equal UE grouping. The MATLAB simulation results show that subslicing can improve slice performance. If the slice contains all UEs with a good block error ratio (BLER), then a slice performance improvement of up to 37% can be achieved, and it comes more from the decrease in bandwidth utilization than the increase in goodput. If a slice contains UEs with a poor BLER, then the slice performance can be improved by up to 84%, and it comes only from the goodput increase. The most important criterion in subslicing is the minimum subslice size in terms of resource blocks (RB), which is 73 for a slice that contains all good-BLER UEs. If a slice contains UEs with poor BLER, then the subslice can be smaller.

Hardware Accelerated Design of a Dual-Mode Refocusing Algorithm for SAR Imaging Systems.

The use of satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for moving target imaging has gained popularity recently. Researchers are focused on improving its imaging quality. To achieve high-quality and fast imaging, we have developed a dual-mode refocusing algorithm. We optimized the algorithm's target speed estimation and carried out data enhancement and quantization design for SAR image refocusing. The design is implemented on a Xilinx XC5VFX130T FPGA. The dual-mode image data are based on a slice size of 512 × 512 for slice mode and 256 × 256 for scan mode in a time-series function simulation. The serial-parallel conversion and pipeline design balances the operating speed and logic resources for optimal performance. Experiment results on slice data of real SAR images show that the system's processing speed can reach two frames per second, utilizing 69633 LUTs, 255 RAMs, and 296 DSPs.

Reduced volume of diabetic pancreatic islets in rodents detected by synchrotron X-ray phase-contrast microtomography and deep learning network

The pancreatic islet is a highly structured micro-organ that produces insulin in response to rising blood glucose. Here we develop a label-free and automatic imaging approach to visualize the islets in situ in diabetic rodents by the synchrotron radiation X-ray phase-contrast microtomography (SRμCT) at the ID17 station of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. The large-size images (3.2mm×15.97mm) were acquired in the pancreas in STZ-treated mice and diabetic GK rats. Each pancreas was dissected by 3000 reconstructed images. The image datasets were further analysed by a self-developed deep learning method, AA-Net. All islets in the pancreas were segmented and visualized by the three-dimension (3D) reconstruction. After quantifying the volumes of the islets, we found that the number of larger islets (=>1500 μm3) was reduced by 2-fold (wt 1004±94 vs GK 419±122, P<0.001) in chronically developed diabetic GK rat, while in STZ-treated diabetic mouse the large islets were decreased by half (189±33 vs 90±29, P<0.001) compared to the untreated mice. Our study provides a label-free tool for detecting and quantifying pancreatic islets in situ. It implies the possibility of monitoring the state of pancreatic islets in vivo diabetes without labelling.

THE INFLUENCE OF POTATO SLICE SIZE ON THE ACRYLAMIDE LEVEL OF POTATOES FRIED UNDER FAST FOOD CONDITIONS

The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of potato slices (7, 9, 11 mm- Queen Anne variety) fried in palm oil in a fryer set at 190°C, for different periods of time (6, 8, 11 min) on the acrylamide level and color parameters of French fries. The experimental samples were prepared by the SPE technique and analyzed in terms of acrylamide content by GC-MS/MS. Results showed that the acrylamide content is significantly affected by the size of the potato slices and by the frying times: for 6 min of frying it varied from 222.90 µg/kg (7 mm) to 217.81 µg/kg (9 mm) and 192.36 µg/kg (11 mm), respectively; for 8 min of frying it ranged from: 842.44 µg/kg (7 mm) to 416.23 µg/kg (9 mm) and 343.19 µg/kg (11 mm); for 11 min of frying it was between 2636.06 µg/kg (7 mm), 1114.41 µg/kg (9 mm) and 906.70 µg/kg (11 mm), respectively. A reduction in the acrylamide level was obtained by about 14%, 59%, 66% for 6, 8, 11 min of frying at the size of 11 mm, compared to those divided at the size of 7 mm. The acrylamide formation in French fries was significantly reduced with larger the size of the potato slices and with shorter periods of frying. When increasing the potato slice size, positive linear correlations were obtained between the acrylamide level and the color parameters a* and b* (R² = 0.54 - 0.99) and negative linear correlations with the color parameter L* (R² = 0.684- 0.998).

Design of Versatile Cassava Shredding Machine for Food Processing Industries

Manual processing of cassava tubers into its derivatives like tapioca, starch is tedious and time-consuming; this drudgery has led to this study. The purpose of this study is to enhance agricultural performance via the design and fabrication of an improved cassava shredding machine that is capable of producing different sizes of cassava slices for further processing. The essence is to reduce processing time through increased surface area. This design produces different sizes for tapioca, ijapu, abacha, lafu and for other uses. The sizes range from 8-20mm in diameter. The machine consists essentially of a hopper where peeled cassava roots are put, beneath the hopper is the shredding plate with varied cutting blades coupled to a horizontal shaft which when in operation undergoes reciprocating motion. The horizontal shaft derives its motion through a slider crank mechanism coupled to an electric motor via a belt drive with a pulley for primary speed reduction and regulation. A rugged framework is provided for mounting of the machine and electric motor. The capacity of the machine is 320kg/hr. Maximum shredding efficiency of 82% was obtained with a shred aperture ranging from 5-12mm at a shredding speed of 1200rpm.

Spatially Consistent Transformer for Colorization in Monochrome-Color Dual-Lens System.

We study the colorization problem in monochrome-color dual-lens camera systems, i.e. colorizing the gray image from the monochrome camera using the color image from the color camera as reference. In related methods, cost volume based CNN methods achieve the state-of-the-art results, but they are costly in GPU memory due to building the 4D cost volume. Recently, some slice-wise cross-attention based methods are proposed for related problems. The slice-wise cross-attention has much less costs in GPU memory but directly using them for this colorization problem cannot generate competing results. We make use of the non-local computation property of cross-attention to propose a transformer based method. To overcome the limitations of straight-forward slice-wise cross-attention, we propose the spatially consistent cross-attention (SCCA) block to encourage pixels of slices across different epipolar lines in the gray image to find spatially consistent correspondence with pixels of the reference color image. And, to further reduce the memory cost while keeping the colorization accuracy, we design a pyramid processing strategy to cascade a series of SCCA blocks with smaller slice size and perform the colorization from coarse to fine. To extract more powerful image features, we use several regional self-attention (RSA) blocks with U-style connections. Experimental results show that we outperform the state-of-the-art methods largely on the synthesized datasets of Cityscapes, Sintel, and SceneFlow, and the real monochrome-color dual-lens dataset.

Device Hopping

Existing OS techniques for homogeneous many-core systems make it simple for single and multithreaded applications to migrate between cores. Heterogeneous systems do not benefit so fully from this flexibility, and applications that cannot migrate in mid-execution may lose potential performance. The situation is particularly challenging when a switch of language runtime would be desirable in conjunction with a migration. We present a case study in making heterogeneous CPU + GPU systems more flexible in this respect. Our technique for fine-grained application migration, allows switches between OpenMP, OpenCL, and CUDA execution, in conjunction with migrations from GPU to CPU, and CPU to GPU. To achieve this, we subdivide iteration spaces into slices, and consider migration on a slice-by-slice basis. We show that slice sizes can be learned offline by machine learning models. To further improve performance, memory transfers are made migration-aware. The complexity of the migration capability is hidden from programmers behind a high-level programming model. We present a detailed evaluation of our mid-kernel migration mechanism with the First Come, First Served scheduling policy. We compare our technique in a focused evaluation scenario against idealized kernel-by-kernel scheduling, which is typical for current systems, and makes perfect kernel to device scheduling decisions, but cannot migrate kernels mid-execution. Models show that up to 1.33× speedup can be achieved over these systems by adding fine-grained migration. Our experimental results with all nine applicable SHOC and Rodinia benchmarks achieve speedups of up to 1.30× (1.08× on average) over an implementation of a perfect but kernel-migration incapable scheduler when migrated to a faster device. Our mechanism and slice size choices introduce an average slowdown of only 2.44% if kernels never migrate. Lastly, our programming model reduces the code size by at least 88% if compared to manual implementations of migratable kernels.

Mass Transfer Behavior During Osmotic Dehydration and Vacuum Impregnation of “Phulae” Pineapple and the Effects on Dried Fruit Quality

The influence of osmotic dehydration (OD) in combination with vacuum impregnation (VI) technique on the mass transfer behavior of “Phulae” pineapple was investigated. Pineapple slices of 10 mm thick were immersed in sucrose solution at concentrations of 55 and 65oBrix under atmospheric pressure or vacuum pressures at 250 mmHg (VOD-250) and 450 mmHg (VOD-450). The results deduced that 65o Brix of sucrose solution for 300 min and the vacuum pressure of VI at 450 mmHg were necessitated to increase solute uptake to 14.79 g/100 g when compared to other treatments. Surprisingly, the effect of OD and VI on water loss was not much different. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) showed that the pore sizes of pineapple slices were decreased when the impregnation period increased implying the higher adsorption of sucrose into the fruit structure. Subsequently, calcium lactate (Ca-L) at 2, 4 and 6% (w/w) was incorporated in sucrose solution prior to drying at 60oC in a conventional hot air dryer. It was observed that increasing concentration of Ca-L led to a significant decrease in moisture content (17.74 to 15.53%) and water activity (0.58 to 0.56) whereas calcium content was increased (24.472 to 676.317 mg/100g). However, it should be noted that high concentration of Ca-L had adverse effect on sensory property where overall actability decreased from 7.09 to 5.65 as well as total phenolic content (TPC) (17.74 to 15.53 gGAE/100g), DPPH (223.51 to 159.7 µmol Trolox/100g) and FRAP (380.65 to 291.57 µmol ascorbic acid/100g) values.

MINIMAL PROCESSING OF ORGANIC APPLES BY DRYING - CONSUMER ACCEPTANCE

Sensory attributes like colour, flavour and texture are makers in the consumer's purchasing decision of minimally processed organic apples. Drying using low temperatures represent a simple and easy way for minimally processing of organic fruits, moreover this procedure is accepted in organic agriculture. The aim of this study is to establish the consumer acceptance of organic apples dried using two different temperatures and how they characterize the final product. In order to accomplish the proposed purpose, three organic apples cultivars ‘Rubinola’, ‘Topaz’ and ‘Gemini’ were sliced and dried in a professional dryer with air distribution, using temperatures like 35°C and 50°C. Consumer general impression regarding obtained dried organic apples was based on a questionnaire, which contain several questions about colour, flavour, texture and size, in two sessions organized during two different scientific events. Dried organic apples were tasted and evaluated by consumers of both genders with ages between 22 and 66 years old. The slice size of organic dried apples was preferred by over 50% of consumers for all apple varieties. Consumers preferred more the taste of ‘Gemini’ cv. apples dried at 50°C compared to those dried at 35°C. The consumer’s acceptance of minimally processed organic apples was oriented towards those dried at 50°C. Obtained results suggest that sensory attributes are very important in consumer acceptance of a minimally processed product by drying technology and more studies are required.

Effect of Slice Priority for admission control in 5G Wireless Networks: A comparison study for two Fuzzy-based systems considering Software-Defined-Networks

The Fifth Generation (5G) networks are expected to be flexible to satisfy demands of high-quality services such as high speed, low latencies and enhanced reliability from customers. Also, the rapidly increasing amount of user devices and high user’s requests becomes a problem. Thus, the Software-Defined Network (SDN) will be the key function for efficient management and control. To deal with these problems, we propose a Fuzzy-based SDN approach. This paper presents and compares two Fuzzy-based Systems for Admission Control (FBSAC) in 5G wireless networks: FBSAC1 and FBSAC2. The FBSAC1 considers for admission control decision three parameters: Grade of Service (GS), User Request Delay Time (URDT) and Network Slice Size (NSS). In FBSAC2, we consider as an additional parameter the Slice Priority (SP). So, FBSAC2 has four input parameters. The simulation results show that the FBSAC2 is more complex than FBSAC1, but it has a better performance for admission control.

CPU: Cross-Rack-Aware Pipelining Update for Erasure-Coded Storage

Erasure coding is widely used in distributed storage systems (DSSs) to efficiently achieve fault tolerance. However, when the original data need to be updated, erasure coding must update every encoded block, resulting in long update time and high bandwidth consumption. Exiting solutions are mainly focused on coding schemes to minimize the size of transmitted update information, while ignoring more efficient utilization of bandwidth among update racks. In this article, we propose a parallel Cross-rack Pipelining Update scheme ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CPU</i> ), which divides the update information into small-size units and transmits these units in parallel along with an update pipeline path among multiple racks. The performance of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CPU</i> is mainly determined by slice size and update path. More slices bring finer-grained parallel transmissions over cross-rack links, but also introduces more overheads. An update path that traverses all racks with large-bandwidth links provide short update time. We formulate the proposed pipelining update scheme as an optimization problem, based on a new theoretical pipelining update model. We prove the optimization problem is NP-hard and develop a heuristic algorithm to solve it based on the features of practical DSSs and our implementations, including <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Big chunk</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Small overhead</i> . Specifically, we determine the best update path first by solving a max-min problem and then decide the slice size. We further simplify the slice size selection by offline learning a range of interesting ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">RoI</i> ), in which all slice sizes provide similar performance. We implement <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CPU</i> and conduct experiments on Amazon EC2 under a variety of scenarios. The results show that <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CPU</i> can reduce the average update time by 48.2 percent, compared with the state-of-the-art update schemes.

Temperature and slice size dependences of acrylamide in potato fries

In this paper, two varieties of potato (Ranger Russet and Van Gogh) with various slice size (9, 6, and 3 mm) were deep fried at various temperatures and time combinations (150, 170, and 190°C for 10, 20, and 30 min) and contents and kinetic parameters of acrylamide were investigated. Formation of acrylamide for both potato varieties followed zero-order reaction models. As the frying temperature and time increased, formation of acrylamide increased in both potato varieties. Moreover, acrylamide formation significantly reduced by increasing slice size of samples. The most appropriate frying temperature, time, and slice size for the lowest acrylamide formation at 150°C, for 10 min and 9 mm slice size, respectively. The consequences of this study will be helpful for the industry of potato products. Practical applications Potato is one of the most cultivated crops worldwide and potato-based product have been mostly consumed as fast food such as french fries, chips, etc. Among the potato-based products, French fries have been considered as one of acrylamide main source in foods because of high content of asparagine, reducing sugars, and deep-oil frying. This paper aims to provide new knowledge to potato industry in terms of potato slice size's effect on acrylamide formation and to facilitate predicting probable acrylamide contents that can form at the end of frying process. In the current study, acrylamide formation increased as slice size decreased. This means that it should be avoid from low slice size in the commercial production of French fries to decrease the content of acrylamide in the final product. The results of this paper may enable to determine optimum process conditions for products containing low acrylamide.

Moisture Diffusivity and Activation Energy Estimation of White Yam (Dioscorea rotundata) Slices Using Drying Data from a Refractance WindowTM Dryer

The objective of this study was to estimate the moisture diffusivity of different sizes of white yam slices at different temperatures using a Refractance WindowTM dryer. To achieve this objective, dehydration of 1.5, 3.0 and 4.5 mm thick yam slices was performed with water temperatures of 65, 75, 85 and 95 oC in the flume of a Refractance WindowTM dryer. Variation of moisture content with dehydration time data were obtained during the dehydration operations. The activation energies of dehydration for different sizes of yam slices were estimated for the temperatures considered. For the process conditions studied, the effective moisture diffusivities varied from 5.35 x 10-08 to 1.45 x 10-07 m2/s. The effective moisture diffusivity, Deff, at a specified temperature was observed to increase with increasing yam slice size. The effective moisture diffusivity, Deff, at a specified yam slice size is observed to increase with increasing dehydrating temperature. The activation energy, Ea, for the yam slices, ranged from 23.21 to 28.30 (kJ/mol) and it was observed to increase with increasing thickness of the yam slices. The activation energy values estimated were within the range observed for other equipment. This study is important in that, the moisture diffusivities and activation energy parameters estimated will be useful in the design, modelling, and optimization of such dryers. Keywords: Yams; Moisture Diffusivity; Activation Energy; Refractance WindowTM Dryer

A Survey of Petri Nets Slicing

Petri nets slicing is a technique that aims to improve the verification of systems modeled in Petri nets. Petri nets slicing was first developed to facilitate debugging, but then was used for the alleviation of the state space explosion problem for the model checking of Petri nets. In this article, different slicing techniques are studied along with their algorithms introducing: (i) a classification of Petri nets slicing algorithms based on their construction methodology and objective (such as improving state space analysis or testing); (ii) a qualitative and quantitative discussion and comparison of major differences such as accuracy and efficiency: (iii) a syntactic unification of slicing algorithms that improve state space analysis for easy and clear understanding; and (iv) applications of slicing for multiple perspectives. Furthermore, some recent improvements to slicing algorithms are presented, which can certainly reduce the slice size even for strongly connected nets. A noteworthy use of this survey is for the selection and improvement of slicing techniques for optimizing the verification of state event models.

SAVE: Robust or not?

Sliced average variance estimation (SAVE) is one of the best methods for estimating central dimension-reduction subspace in semi parametric regression models when covariates are normal. In recent days SAVE is being used to analyze DNA microarray data especially in tumor classification but most important drawback is normality of covariates. In this article, the asymptotic behavior of estimates of CDR space under varying slice size is studied through simulation studies when covariates are non normal but follows linearity condition as well as when covariates slightly perturbed from normal distribution and we observed that serious error may occur under violation normality assumption.

Effects of high-molecular-weight glutenin subunit combination in common wheat on the quality of crumb structure.

High-molecular-weight glutenin subunits (HMW-GSs) have important effects on bread-making quality. Allelic variations of HMW-GS in bread wheat varieties contribute in different ways to dough properties and bread volume. However, no systematic analysis has been done on the effects of allelic variation on bread-crumb structure, an important parameter when evaluating bread-making quality. In this study, seven Glu-1 deletion lines and one intact line harboring different encoding loci and derived from a cross between two spring wheat cultivars were used to investigate the contribution of a single Glu-1 locus, or combination of Glu-1 loci, to the crumb structure. Deletion of HMW-GS locus combinations resulted in a decline in slice size, brightness, and fineness of the bread crumb. A desirable crumb structure correlated well with preferred subunit combinations: high levels of GMPs, superior dough properties, and loaf volume. The effects of the HMW-GS combinations were ranked as Dx5 + Dy10 > Bx17 + By18 > Ax1 + Null. The Ax1 + Null allele affected the crumb structure by interacting with the Bx17 + By18 or Dx5 + Dy10. High-molecular-weight glutenin subunits had significant effects on the loaf volume and crumb structure; varying effects from different subunit combinations were observed. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry.

Impact of the natural resource of UVB on the content of vitamin D2 in oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) under subtropical settings.

Vitamin D deficiency is a pandemic problem. Non-animal source of vitamin D is obtained from edible mushrooms. Oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) was sliced into the size of 1 cm3, 4 cm3 and 9 cm3, and treated with the sun as a natural resource of UVB under subtropical settings in Ethiopia. The content of vitamin D was measured by using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). After sun treatment, there was a significant increment in the content of vitamin D2 from nil to 67.4 ± 28.0 µg/g dry weight (DW). Based on the results of the overall pairwise comparisons, 1 cm3 size of slice group had the highest content of vitamin D2. Duration of sun exposure, sizes of mushroom slices and moisture content were identified as determining factors for vitamin D2 synthesis. Exposing slices of oyster mushroom to the sunlight for <30 min provides the amount that satisfies the current recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of vitamin D without any visible change in color and texture. Thus, sun treatment of oyster mushroom is an effective and economically cheap strategy in the fight against vitamin D deficiency.

Textural, physical and sensory impacts of the use of green banana puree to replace fat in reduced sugar pound cakes

Green banana puree (GBP) was used to replace fat at different levels (0%–100%) in pound cakes, followed by sugar reduction (0%–50%). Sensory profile by Check-All-That-Apply (CATA) tests and acceptance were applied to settle the best formulation in each step. The cakes with the best acceptances were characterized by physical and textural analyses. GPB cakes with sugar reductions of 20% and 40% showed the highest acceptance. According to CATA, replacing fat with GBP causes changes in color, slice size, compaction, and some attributes of odor, flavor, and texture. Sugar reduction impaired the appearance acceptance and led to a higher proportion of big alveoli, beige or dark beige color, mild taste, and wheat flour flavor. The reduction of sugar led to the increase of the cake cooking factors. The control cake sample had the lower specific volume. The cakes with GBP presented higher firmness (20%: 9.4 N; 40%: 11.2 N) and springiness (20%: 51%; 40%: 51%) than the control (6.6 N, 44.1%). GBP replacement and reduction of sugar increased luminosity, color saturation and hue angle in the crust of the product. Results indicate that GBP replacing fat is feasible at 25% with a reduction of 20% and 40% of sugar.