Load balancing in electricity grids becomes a more sophisticated problem by the increased availability of timevarying stochastic availability of electricity from renewable resources. Demand side management by load shifting is one attempt to cope with this problem. In this paper we discus and compare two control strategies to use the thermal storage of electrical household appliances as balancin...

This paper introduces a new approach for improving the scalability of distributed virtual environments by using a combination of visibility culling for communication and dynamic load balancing to keep the system load evenly distributed Further communication optimizations as well as some preliminary results are presented

In this paper, a home energy management (HEM) scheme based on appliances coordination has been proposed for future smart grids. This scheme is based on communication among home appliances, a central energy management unit (EMU), smart meter and the storage unit inside home. A wireless sensor home area network (WSHAN) using ZigBee protocol is employed for relaying messages among different entiti...

The paper focuses on local load balancing policies for massively parallel architectures and introduces a new scheme for load information exchange between neighbor nodes. The idea is to distort the exchanged load information to let the policy keep into account a more global view of the system and overcome the limits of the local scope. The presented scheme has been integrated into two variants o...

Preterm birth is a universal health problem that is one of the largest unmet medical needs contributing to the global burden of disease. Adding to its complexity is that there are no means to predict who is at risk when pregnancy begins or when women will actually deliver. Until these problems are addressed, there will be no interventions to reduce the risk because those who should be treated w...

The feasibility of using railroad flatcars (RRFCs) as the superstructure for bridges on lowvolume roads has been investigated in two previous research projects at Iowa State University. The results of these projects verified that RRFCs are efficient and economical alternatives for low-volume road bridges. Two county engineers involved with the RRFC project cited cost as the main factor for choo...

In this paper, we present a game theoretic framework for obtaining a user-optimal load balancing scheme in heterogeneous distributed systems. We formulate the static load balancing problem in heterogeneous distributed systems as a noncooperative game among users. For the proposed noncooperative load balancing game, we present the structure of the Nash equilibrium. Based on this structure we der...

This work starts from the analysis of the literature about the Random Access protocols with contention resolution, such as Contention Resolution Diversity Slotted Aloha (CRDSA), and introduces a possible enhancement, named Generalized Encoding Contention Resolution Diversity Slotted Aloha (GE-CRDSA). The GE-CRDSA aims at improving the aggregated throughput when the system load is less than 50%,...