Traditional Access Points Research Articles

Comprehensive Analysis of the Wi-Fi Security: A Case of the National Institute of Transport, Tanzania

This study conducted a comprehensive analysis of the Wi-Fi security at the National Institute of Transport in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The study used the experimental research design. The study involved testing a variety of devices, including 30 traditional Access Points and 10 smartphones, which can act as access points for other devices. The study utilized a total of 40 devices, selected through convenient sampling. Among these devices, 30 were traditional Access Points and 10 were smartphones acting as Access Points. The primary tool used in this study was a software called Instabridge, which was employed to collect information on wireless networks. The software gathered the names of the wireless networks for further analysis. The experimental process was divided into two main phases: Password extraction and Pairing of Devices. In the Password extraction phase, a smartphone equipped with the Instabridge software was used to collect information on the wireless network which are names and assessed the security of the passwords used. The software detected active devices offering wireless services and could easily unveil the passwords with a single click. In the Pairing of Devices phase, the passwords gathered from the wireless devices were used for authentication. The devices were successfully connected to the access points using the extracted passwords. The study indicated lack of proper security measures, with a significant majority of access points using unencrypted passwords for authentication. To address the existing shortcomings, respective recommendations were made.

FineAP: Fine-Grained Access Point Deployment Strategy for 60 GHz Millimeter-Wave Wireless Networks

Traditional access point (AP) deployment is based on the principle of minimum area coverage, which takes the AP signal range as the radius and performs a geometric calculation to determine the deployment location. These methods lack support for various contexts and requirements, making them only useful in a conventional rectangular environment. As a result, we design a fine-grained AP deployment (FineAP) strategy, which first uses ray-tracing to determine the signal distribution of various locations in the environment, and then uses a hybrid swarm intelligence optimization algorithm based on the principle of signal matrix maximization to determine the AP deployment location. When compared to traditional deployment methods, FineAP can handle a variety of application scenarios with close to upbound performance and the least minimum of overhead.

Case report: transcaval impella placement in a patient with acute lv dysfunction from ethylene glycol toxicity

Introduction: Ethylene glycol is a toxic alcohol commonly found in antifreeze, or other household and industrial agents. Patients usually survive ethylene glycol toxicity when promptly treated but delay in care can cause significant morbidity and mortality. Significant metabolic acidosis can lead to multisystem organ dysfunction including Left ventricular dysfunction which can pose a unique challenge. Case report: The patient is a young female who presented with acute encephalopathy, intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH), severe metabolic acidosis, and severe left ventricular dysfunction following acute ethylene glycol toxicity. A diagnosis was quickly made due to presence of calcium oxalate crystals in the urine. The patient received timely interventions with Fomepizole and kidney replacement therapy (KRT), which failed to reverse her severe shock. The patient required mechanical circulatory support (MCS) in the form of Transcaval peripheral ventricular assist device (pVAD). Conclusion: This case showed the use of the transcaval approach to place an pVAD in a young patient suffering from ethylene glycol toxicity and severe left ventricular dysfunction. Although it remains an uncommon approach, it can be used when more traditional access points have failed, and the patient requires MCS.

Cloud-Based Wi-Fi Network Using Immediate ACK in Uplink Data Transmissions

In a cloud-based network architecture, the central unit (CU) at the cloud coordinates wireless nodes such as the remote access units (RAUs) at the edges of the network and manages most functions for providing wireless connectivity services to clients. The CU facilitates efficient communication resource management such as radio frequency or transmission power of RAUs by global resource coordination. In this paper, we propose a cloud-based Wi-Fi network architecture consisting of a CU and RAUs as an improvement on the conventional Wi-Fi architecture with traditional access points (APs). We then propose a method for uplink data transmission in a cloud-based Wi-Fi network. In a conventional Wi-Fi network with independently operating APs, APs close to each other may not be able to utilize the same frequency band efficiently because of significant amounts of interference. However, in a cloud-based Wi-Fi network, the CU coordinates RAUs so that they can operate in the same frequency band by transmitting or receiving signals through the shared wireless medium to improve spectral efficiency. For each frequency band, the proposed system utilizes a diversity combining that combines multiple signals and introduces a single improved signal with high signal-to-noise ratio for uplink transmission in the cloud-based Wi-Fi network. In our proposed uplink transmission method for a cloud-based Wi-Fi network, we utilize diversity combining with the immediate acknowledgement (ACK) transmission method that transmits the ACK frame to the client immediately before decoding. The proposed uplink data transmission method mitigates the performance degradation caused by the fronthaul propagation delay between the CU and RAUs, without significant modification of the IEEE 802.11 standard. Using an IEEE 802.11n standard-compliant simulation and experiments with software-defined radio equipment, we verify the goodput performance of the proposed method for a cloud-based Wi-Fi network architecture.

Illusions of a “Bond”: tagging cultural products across online platforms

PurposeMost studies pertaining to social tagging focus on one platform or platform type, thus limiting the scope of their findings. The purpose of this paper is to explore social tagging practices across four platforms in relation to cultural products associated with the bookCasino Royale, by Ian Fleming.Design/methodology/approachA layered and nested case study approach was used to analyse data from four online platforms: Goodreads, Last.fm, WordPress, and public library social discovery platforms. The top-level case study focuses on the bookCasino Royale, by Ian Fleming and its derivative products. The analysis of tagging practices in each of the four online platforms is nested within the top-level case study.Casino Royalewas conceptualized as a cultural product (the book), its derived products (e.g. movies, theme songs), as well as a keyword in blogs. A qualitative, inductive, and context-specific approach was chosen to identify commonalities in tagging practices across platforms whilst taking into account the uniqueness of each platform.FindingsThe four platforms comprise different communities of users, each platform with its own cultural norms and tagging practices. Traditional access points in the library catalogues focused on the subject, location, and fictitious characters of the book. User-generated content across the four platforms emphasized historical events and periods related to the book, and highlighted more subjective access points, such as recommendations, tone, mood, reaction, and reading experience. Revealing shifts occur in the tags between the original book and its cultural derivatives: Goodreads and library catalogues focus almost exclusively on the book, while Last.fm and WordPress make in addition cross-references to a wider range of different cultural products, including books, movies, and music. The analyses also yield apparent similarities in certain platforms, such as recurring terms, phrasing and composite or multifaceted tags, as well as a strong presence of genre-related terms for the book and music.Originality/valueThe layered and nested case study approach presents a more comprehensive theoretical viewpoint and methodological framework by which to explore the study of user-generated metadata pertaining to a range of related cultural products across a variety of online platforms.

Domestic and International Student Matters: The College Experiences of Black Males Majoring in Engineering at an HBCU

IntroductionThe presence of international students in the United States adds complexity to the understanding of the intersection of race and achievement. Trends in international student enrollment suggest that the changing landscape of higher education cannot be fully conveyed without delving into the unique experiences of domestic and international undergraduates. According to the Institute of International Education (2001-2012), in the 2011/2012 academic year, a record number of international students (approximately 764,495) enrolled in U.S. institutions of higher education. This nearly 6% increase from the previous year, added over 22 billion dollars to the U.S. economy (HE, 2001-2012). Moreover, immigrants boast an enrollment rate higher than White and Americans (Bennett & Lutz, 2009). The number of college-aged immigrants is approximately 13%; however, they represent more than 25% of students enrolled at selective colleges and universities in the United States (Massey et al., 2007). Despite this indicator of achievement, research on achievement, particularly in engineering education is greatly devoid of international student perspectives. The purpose of this research is to discuss the college experiences of domestic (i.e., African American or U.S.-born) and international in engineering and the factors they believe help or hinder their persistence. For the purpose of this article, Black males refers to both domestic and international males, unless noted otherwise.Race and Achievement Issues in Engineering EducationDespite White House initiatives (e.g., STEM Master Teaching Corps; Larson, 2012, and Educate to Innovate; see www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/k-12/educate-innovate) incentivizing STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education and career participation, the field of engineering remains challenged in attracting and retaining domestic college students. While once steadily increasing, the percentage of domestic engineering bachelor's degree earners has leveled off at less than five percent (National Science Foundation; NSF, 2013). This represents the lowest percentage of engineering bachelor's degrees awarded to a particular racial group (Aud, Fox, & KewalRamani, 2010), which poses a major concern for the engineering field. Engineers are needed to apply scientific concepts to advance all forms of infrastructure from transportation systems and food production to surgical tools and aesthetic accessories. Therefore, the lack of domestic participation disservices a field that, within the United States, is already greatly devoid of diverse backgrounds and lacks the rich experience, vision, and direction that African Americans can offer. Another issue of concern is that while the engineering field has long been a male stronghold (Harper et al., 2004), this is not robustly the case for males. To reverse the downward trend of male enrollment and retention in engineering, it is important to consider the college experiences of male students who are successfully persisting in engineering. Furthermore, research investigating the unique experience of being a male in the traditionally male field of engineering has promise with informing efforts to recruit and retain a diverse engineering workforce. The importance of this research is highlighted by the relatively little research available that has explored the college experiences of students who are persisting in engineering (Moore, Madison-Colmore, & Smith, 2003).Historically colleges and universities (HBCUs) represent a unique educational context in which to investigate engineering education issues because they offer valuable information on students' experiences in higher education (Crisp, Nora, & Taggart, 2009; Nelson-Laird et al., 2007). HBCUs have been a traditional access point to higher education for students and continue to top the list of the highest awarders of engineering bachelor degrees to students (NSF, 2013). …

A Group-Discrimination-Based Access Point Selection for WLAN Fingerprinting Localization

Access point (APs) selection approaches have been used in location fingerprinting systems to improve positioning accuracy and to reduce computational overhead. Although the interference between APs is unavoidable due to the overlapped channel, traditional methods treat APs individually by assuming independence among them. This paper proposes a novel group discriminant (GD)-based AP selection approach for improving location fingerprinting, in which the dependence between APs is considered. The proposed GD approach focuses on measuring the positioning capabilities of each group of APs instead of ranking APs based on their individual importance. It utilizes the risk function from support vector machines (SVMs) to estimate the GD value by maximizing the margin between reference locations. Moreover, this paper proposes a faster version, namely, recursive feature elimination (RFE-GD), to find a suboptimal solution of GD efficiently. This paper applies the proposed algorithms to realistic wireless local area networks (WLANs). Experimental results from two different test beds demonstrate that GD and RFE-GD outperform traditional AP selection schemes, reducing the mean localization error by 40.58%–41.13%. The experiments based on different fingerprinting approaches also confirm the advantages of the proposed algorithms.

Efficacy of novel sampling approaches for surveying specialised recreational fisheries

Advances in fishing technologies have increased the efficiency and diversification of recreational fisheries. This poses challenges for surveying specialised or ‘hard-to-reach’ recreational fishers (e.g. sport fishers) that may take the majority of the recreational catch for some species, but are too rare within the general population to be sampled cost-effectively using existing methods. We trialled two new methods—time-location sampling (TLS) and online diaries—for surveying specialised recreational longtail tuna (Thunnus tonggol) fishers. Results were compared with a concurrent traditional access point survey (APS). Online diaries were inexpensive but unsuitable for collecting representative data due to avidity, volunteerism, and differential recruitment bias. APS yielded high resolution data on catch, effort and size composition but was expensive and ineffective for sampling all components of the fishery. In contrast, TLS conducted at fishing tackle stores was cost-effective for accessing the breadth of fisher types due to the need for all fishers to purchase or to inspect fishing-related products at some point. Given the frequent absence of complete list frames for recreational fisheries, we suggest undertaking multiple TLS surveys to collect catch rate data and to simultaneously estimate population size using capture-recapture approaches in order to estimate the total recreational catch of species of interest.

Supplemented Access Point Sampling Designs: A Cost-Effective Way of Improving the Accuracy and Precision of Fishing Effort and Harvest Estimates Derived from Recreational Fishing Surveys

Abstract We describe a cost-effective method for improving the accuracy and precision of fishing effort and harvest estimates derived from recreational fishing surveys that include an access point method for effort estimation (e.g., traditional access point surveys and bus route designs). Validated auxiliary data that quantify recreational fishing effort at access points within the fishery are used to supplement an existing access point design. This supplemented access point survey (SAPS) method is a form of double sampling and should be viewed as an extension of an access point design. Case study data from a boat-based estuarine fishery in Australia have been used to demonstrate changes in the relative accuracy and precision between a traditional access point design and the supplemented design. We found that the traditional design provided annual effort and harvest estimates for dusky flathead Platycephalus fuscus that were about 7% and 5% lower, respectively, than those obtained with the supplemented design. Importantly, the SAPS method provided improvements in relative precision for annual estimates of effort and harvest of about 76% and 37%, respectively. The SAPS design outperforms other access point designs in terms of relative accuracy and precision because the auxiliary data provide better coverage of the temporal sampling frame for fishing effort. Improvements in relative accuracy and precision are also reflected in harvest estimates because the SAPS design calculates harvest as the product of effort and a harvest rate. The SAPS method can easily be extended to cover multiple sites and offers a cost-effective way to improve estimation procedures for any recreational fishing survey that uses an access point method for effort estimation.