This dissertation focuses on fountain codes under maximum likelihood (ML) decoding. Fountain codes are a class of erasure correcting codes that can generate an endless amount of coded symbols and were conceived to deliver data files over data networks to a potentially large population of users. First Luby transform (LT) codes are considered, which represent the first class of practical fountain...

The adaptive humoral immune system of vertebrates functions by evolving a huge repertoire of binding proteins, which target potentially all molecules that come into contact with developing B cells. The key to endowing these binders with immunological activity is the adjustment of antibody structure and affinity against molecular targets. As a result, antibodies with a wide range of affinities a...

The proliferation of video streaming applications that distribute data to a large number of clients motivates the design of fast and reliable multimedia delivery systems capable to adapt effectively to diverse transmission conditions. Receiver-driven layered multicast (RLM) efficiently addresses the issue of heterogeneity in clients’ available bandwidths and packet loss rates by shifting rate c...

Background: The healing aspects of natural sounds therapy including water sound are beginning to get a lot of interest in the medical fields. Numerous studies conducted on the value of natural sounds as a therapy for various psychological treatments. Objective: to observe the influence of water fountain melodies on anxiety level among the experimental groups before undergoing dental chec kup an...

Opportunistic networks can increase network capacity, support collaborative downloading of content and offload traffic from a cellular to a cellular-assisted, device-to-device network. They can also support communication and content exchange when the cellular infrastructure is under severe stress and when the network is down or inaccessible. Fountain coding has been considered as especially sui...

The adaptive humoral immune system of vertebrates functions by evolving a huge repertoire of binding proteins, which target potentially all molecules that come into contact with developing B cells. The key to endowing these binders with immunological activity is the adjustment of antibody structure and affinity against molecular targets. As a result, antibodies with a wide range of affinities a...

Fountain codes were introduced to provide higher reliability, lower complexities, and more scalability for networks such as the Internet. In this thesis, we study LubyTransform (LT) codes which are the first realization of Fountain codes. In the LT codes, a sparse random factor graph is dynamically generated on both the encoder and decoder sides of the communications channel. The graph is gener...

The Time and Frequency Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is developing a miniature laser-cooled Cs-fountain frequency standard. We anticipate that this device will be useful as a transportable reference for comparison of frequency standards at other laboratories. Additionally, it could be useful for measuring the gravitational clock shift at various locations...

In this paper, we investigate the existence of infinitely many solutions for a class of biharmonic equations where the nonlinearity involves a combination of superlinear and asymptotically linear terms. The solutions are obtained from a variant version of Fountain Theorem.