The fate of seasonal river ecosystem habitats under climate change essentially depends on the changes in annual recharge of the river, which are related to alterations in precipitation and evaporation over the river basin. Therefore, the change in climate conditions is expected to significantly affect hydrological and ecological components, particularly in fragmented ecosystems. This study aims to assess the impacts of climate change on the streamflow in the Dinder River basin (DRB) and to infer its relative possible effects on the Dinder National Park (DNP) ecosystem habitats in Sudan. Four global circulation models (GCMs) from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 and two statistical downscaling approaches combined with a hydrological model (SWAT – the Soil and Water Assessment Tool) were used to project the climate change conditions over the study periods 2020s, 2050s, and 2080s. The results indicated that the climate over the DRB will become warmer and wetter under most scenarios. The projected precipitation variability mainly depends on the selected GCM and downscaling approach. Moreover, the projected streamflow is quite sensitive to rainfall and temperature variation, and will likely increase in this century. In contrast to drought periods during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the predicted climate change is likely to affect ecosystems in DNP positively and promote the ecological restoration for the habitats of flora and fauna.

In recent years, there has emerged applications of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) towards security, safety, rescue, exploration, military and communication redundancy systems in non-populated areas, besides its ordinary use in urban environments as an essential part of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). This paper proposes a novel algorithm for the process of organizing a cluster structure and cluster head election (CHE) suitable for VANETs. Moreover, it presents a robust clustering-based routing protocol, which is appropriate for deserts and can achieve high communication efficiency, ensuring reliable information delivery and optimal exploitation of the equipment on each vehicle. A comprehensive simulation is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed CHE and routing algorithms.

Computer-aided detection (CAD) systems provide useful tools and an advantageous process to physicians aiming to detect lung nodules. This paper develops a method composed of four processes for lung nodule detection. The first step employs image acquisition and pre-processing techniques to isolate the lungs from the rest of the body. The second stage involves the segmentation process using a 2D algorithm to affect every layer of a scan eliminating non-informative structures inside the lungs, and a 3D blob algorithm associated with a connectivity algorithm to select possible nodule shape candidates. The combinations of these algorithms efficiently eliminate the high rates of false positives. The third process extracts eight minimal representative characteristics of the possible candidates. The final step utilizes a support vector machine for classifying the possible candidates into nodules and non-nodules depending on their features. As the objective is to find nodules bigger than 4mm, the proposed approach demonstrated quite encouraging results. Among 65 computer tomography (CT) scans, 94.23% of sensitivity and 84.75% in specificity were obtained. The accuracy of these two results was 89.19% taking into consideration that 45 scans were used for testing and 20 for training. The rate of false positives was 0.2 per scan.

This paper presents a novel timing synchronization scheme for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing communication systems by leveraging the phase shift caused by the timing error and the power difference between subcarriers. The proposed scheme is applied in the physical layer of vehicular ad hoc networks using the IEEE 802.11p standard. The proposed work joints three different estimators to present a robust synchronizer. The results demonstrate that the proposed estimators greatly improve the performance of the communication system and outperform other approaches in terms of the mean square error and the bit error rate. The estimators can either work as totally blind or data-aided using the preamble field of the IEEE 802.11p.

The broadcast nature of wireless communication systems makes wireless transmission extremely susceptible to eavesdropping and even malicious interference. Physical layer security technology can effectively protect the private information sent by the transmitter from being listened to by illegal eavesdroppers, thus ensuring the privacy and security of communication between the transmitter and legitimate users. Thus, the main design goal of physical layer security is to increase the performance difference between the link of the legitimate receiver and that of the eavesdropper using well-designed transmission schemes. The development of mobile communication presents new challenges to physical layer security research. This paper provides a survey of the physical layer security research on various promising mobile technologies from secure key generation and keyless techniques, including secure key generation, directional modulation (DM), spatial modulation (SM), covert communication, and intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided communication. Finally, the future topics and the unresolved technical challenges are presented in physical layer security for mobile communications.