Passively harmonic dissipative soliton generation in normal dispersion erbium-doped fiber laser using SMS fiber as artificial saturable absorber.

Passively harmonic mode-locking has been experimentally demonstrated in an erbium-doped fiber laser with large normal dispersion using single-multi-single mode structure as artificial saturable absorber. By increasing the pump power under the same polarization setting, the mode-locking operation can switch from fundamental mode-locked to 5th order harmonic mode-locked. Highest repetition rate of 4.26 MHz (5th order harmonic) is observed, with pulse width and pulse energy ascertained at 290 fs and 3.0 nJ, respectively. Excellent signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of above 50 dB is observed for all harmonic orders. The findings validated that SMS structure can be used to generate stable and switchable high order of harmonic mode-locked. The low-cost SMS fiber for harmonic mode-locked generation technique could lay the groundwork for future sustainable industrial growth.

Domain-wall dark pulse generation with SMF-GIMF-SMF structure as artificial saturable absorber.

We experimentally demonstrated the generation of domain-wall dark pulse in an Erbium-doped fiber laser using the combination of a 10 cm graded index multimode fiber sandwiched by single mode fibers as artificial saturable absorber. The interaction of phase difference in grade index multimode fiber allowed the stable dual-wavelength oscillation in the cavity. The dual-wavelength centered at 1567.2 nm and 1569.4 nm produces the topological defect in temporal domain and achieved a dark pulse formation with repetition rate of 21.5 MHz. The highest average pulse energy is calculated as 769.6 pJ with pulse width of 5 ns. Throughout the operating pump power range, the average pulse energy and output power increase linearly, with R2 of 0.9999 and achieved the laser efficiency of 9.33%. From the measurement in frequency domain, the signal-to-noise ratio is measured as 49 dB. As compared to reported DW dark pulse works, the proposed structure only required a short length of multimode fiber, which allowed the domain-wall dark pulse to achieve higher pulse repetition rate. The venture of domain wall dark pulse is potentially to pave the foundation toward sustainable industrial growth.

Employing an Energy Harvesting Strategy to Enhance the Performance of a Wireless Emergency Network.

Establishing a wireless communication network (WCN) is critical to saving people's lives during disasters. Since the user equipment (UE) must transfer their information to the functioning area, their batteries will be significantly drained. Thus, technologies that can compensate for battery power consumption, such as the energy harvesting (EH) strategy, are highly required. This paper proposes a framework that employs EH at the main cluster head (MCH) selected by the enhanced clustering technique (CFT) and simultaneously transmits information and power wirelessly to prolong the lifetime of the energy-constrained network. MCH harvests energy from the radio frequency signal via the relay station (RS) and uses the harvested energy for D2D communications. The suggested framework was evaluated by analyzing the EH outage probability and estimating the energy efficiency performance, which is expected to improve the stability of the network. Compared to the UAV scenario, the simulation findings show that when RS is in its optimal location, it enhances the network EH outage probability performance by 26.3%. Finally, integrating CFT with wireless communications links into cellular networks is an effective technique for maintaining communication services for mission-critical applications.

Self-starting triple-wavelength vector dark soliton with a bismuth-doped fiber saturable absorber.

We report on the generation of a triple-wavelength vector dark soliton in an all-fiber ring cavity of erbium-doped fiber laser mode-locked with a bismuth-doped fiber saturable absorber. The formation of the triple-wavelength vector dark soliton is due to the cross-phase coupling derived from the cavity birefringence. The mode-locked laser operated at a 1.89 MHz repetition rate with a 335 ns pulse width, and its robustness is confirmed.

Q-switched ytterbium-doped fiber laser via a thulium-doped fiber saturable absorber.

We demonstrated a reliable and stable Q-switched ytterbium-doped fiber laser centered at 1069 nm by employing a segment of 11 cm thulium-doped fiber (TDF) as a saturable absorber (SA) in the ring cavity. The fiber SA has an optical absorption of 1.35 dB at the Q-switched operating regime. As we increased the pump power from 109 mW to the maximum available pump power of 206 mW, a consistent Q-switched laser with output power ranging from 1.8 to 4.8 mW was attained. The pulse width narrowed from 4.9 to 2.87 µs, whereas the repetition rate increased from 40 to 60.2 kHz. In addition, maximum pulse energy of 80.7 nJ and a maximum peak power of 28.1 mW were obtained at the maximum pump power. The signal to noise ratio (SNR) was around 47 dB. Our experimental study shows that a segment of TDF can be used as a Q-switcher in the 1 µm fiber laser cavity to facilitate a reliable and robust microsecond pulse generation.

A novel utility function for energy-efficient power control game in cognitive radio networks.

Spectrum scarcity is a major challenge in wireless communications systems requiring efficient usage and utilization. Cognitive radio network (CRN) is found as a promising technique to solve this problem of spectrum scarcity. It allows licensed and unlicensed users to share the same licensed spectrum band. Interference resulting from cognitive radios (CRs) has undesirable effects on quality of service (QoS) of both licensed and unlicensed systems where it causes degradation in received signal-to-noise ratio (SIR) of users. Power control is one of the most important techniques that can be used to mitigate interference and guarantee QoS in both systems. In this paper, we develop a new approach of a distributed power control for CRN based on utility and pricing. QoS of CR user is presented as a utility function via pricing and a distributed power control as a non-cooperative game in which users maximize their net utility (utility-price). We define the price as a real function of transmit power to increase pricing charge of the farthest CR users. We prove that the power control game proposed in this study has Nash Equilibrium as well as it is unique. The obtained results show that the proposed power control algorithm based on a new utility function has a significant reduction in transmit power consumption and high improvement in speed of convergence.

A new SIR-based sigmoid power control game in cognitive radio networks.

Interference resulting from Cognitive Radios (CRs) is the most important aspect of cognitive radio networks that leads to degradation in Quality of Service (QoS) in both primary and CR systems. Power control is one of the efficient techniques that can be used to reduce interference and satisfy the Signal-to-Interference Ratio (SIR) constraint among CRs. This paper proposes a new distributed power control algorithm based on game theory approach in cognitive radio networks. The proposal focuses on the channel status of cognitive radio users to improve system performance. A new cost function for SIR-based power control via a sigmoid weighting factor is introduced. The existence of Nash Equilibrium and convergence of the algorithm are also proved. The advantage of the proposed algorithm is the possibility to utilize and implement it in a distributed manner. Simulation results show considerable savings on Nash Equilibrium power compared to relevant algorithms while reduction in achieved SIR is insignificant.

S-band multiwavelength Brillouin/Raman distributed Bragg reflector fiber lasers.

A multiwavelength Brillouin/Raman distributed Bragg reflector fiber laser operating in the S-band region is proposed and demonstrated. The laser uses a 7.7 km long dispersion-shifted fiber with an effective mode area of 15 µm(2) as the Brillouin and Raman gain media simultaneously. Two 1420 nm laser diodes with a combined power of 372 mW are used as pump sources, while a fiber Bragg grating with a center wavelength of 1500 nm is used as a reflector in the cavity. The setup is capable of generating 6 clearly defined Stokes lines at the highest pump power, spanning from 1499.8 to 1500.3 nm with the even Stokes having relatively higher peak powers, between 1.4 and 3.5 dBm as compared to the odd Stokes, which have peak powers between -4.7 and -5.0 dBm. The output of the laser is very stable and shows little to no fluctuations over a monitoring period of 50 min.

A new blood vessel extraction technique using edge enhancement and object classification.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is increasing progressively pushing the demand of automatic extraction and classification of severity of diseases. Blood vessel extraction from the fundus image is a vital and challenging task. Therefore, this paper presents a new, computationally simple, and automatic method to extract the retinal blood vessel. The proposed method comprises several basic image processing techniques, namely edge enhancement by standard template, noise removal, thresholding, morphological operation, and object classification. The proposed method has been tested on a set of retinal images. The retinal images were collected from the DRIVE database and we have employed robust performance analysis to evaluate the accuracy. The results obtained from this study reveal that the proposed method offers an average accuracy of about 97 %, sensitivity of 99 %, specificity of 86 %, and predictive value of 98 %, which is superior to various well-known techniques.

Diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy: automatic extraction of optic disc and exudates from retinal images using marker-controlled watershed transformation.

Due to increasing number of diabetic retinopathy cases, ophthalmologists are experiencing serious problem to automatically extract the features from the retinal images. Optic disc (OD), exudates, and cotton wool spots are the main features of fundus images which are used for diagnosing eye diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma. In this paper, a new algorithm for the extraction of these bright objects from fundus images based on marker-controlled watershed segmentation is presented. The proposed algorithm makes use of average filtering and contrast adjustment as preprocessing steps. The concept of the markers is used to modify the gradient before the watershed transformation is applied. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using the test images of STARE and DRIVE databases. It is shown that the proposed method can yield an average sensitivity value of about 95%, which is comparable to those obtained by the known methods.