Nitrate reductases NIA1 and NIA2 determine NO production in plants and are critical to abscisic acid (ABA)-induced stomatal closure. However, the role for NIA1 and NIA2 in ABA signaling has not been paid much attention in nitrate reductase loss-of-function mutant nia1nia2. Recently, we have demonstrated that ABA-inhibited K(+)in current and ABA-enhanced slow anion current were absent in nia1nia...

It has beenmy pleasure to act as Guest Editor for this Focus Issue about calcium signaling. Ca is the fifth most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, yet high concentrations are cytotoxic because of precipitation of phosphates, proteins, and DNA. Homeostatic mechanisms to maintain low cellular Ca evolved early, with the ability to pump Ca ions out of the cytosol into the extracellular space b...

The paper proposes a GUARD (GUide, Alarm, Recovery, and Detection) system for the blind. The main goal of the GUARD system is to construct an obstacle-aware wireless sensor network and provide guide, alarm, recovery, as well as detection functions for the blind to guarantee his safety and convenience at Tamkang University. Some hardware components as well as communication and management protoco...

In this paper model of integrated voice/data cellular wireless networks (CWN) are investigated. The unified approximate approach to calculate the desired Quality of Service (QoS) metrics in an isolated cell of such networks under two multi-parametric call admission control (CAC) strategies is developed. One of them is based on the guard channels scheme while the second is based on a threshold s...

Conventional orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing receivers disregard the guard interval in channels with small dispersion even though its unconsumed portion can be exploited for improved demodulation by applying a Nyquist-shaped window in the receiver. The transmitter does not need to be modified, subcarrier orthogonality in the receiver is preserved, and the receiver discrete Fourier tr...

The performance of nowadays cellular mobile networks can be enhanced considerably by using more e cient call handling mechanisms. This paper discusses two advanced schemes, namely guard channels and the retry of blocked handovers. Furthermore, a more detailed customer model is presented in this study in order to obtain a more acccurate cell con guration: instead of the usual Poisson input, we a...

One way of improving the performance of cellular networks is to build a second layer of macrocells on top of the microcell level. The system performance can further be increased by using guard channels and allowing calls to overflow to the upper layer when needed. In this study, we used simulated annealing (SA) to determine the design parameters of two-tier cellular networks for which the cost ...