Assessing the hydromorphological condition of the Sub-Himalayan Mahananda-Balason system using the hydromorphological quality Index

An evaluation of the hydromorphological condition of the Mahananda-Balason River system of the sub-Himalayan foothills, West Bengal, India was attempted using a multiparameter-based Hydromorphological Quality Index (HQI). After segmenting these rivers based on continuity, bed material and channel planform, a total of 18 indicators, divided into 3 subgroups Continuity (C), Planform (P), and Floodplain Morphology (FM), were quantified reach-wise and scaled upon the level of alteration (1 for highly altered and 5 for no alteration). The derived overall HQI (3.6) exhibited a moderate hydromorphological quality of the system, however, significant differences between the HQIs of confined and unconfined reaches were witnessed. Students ‘t-test and Multiple Correspondence Analysis both portrayed vast dissimilarities among the confined and unconfined reaches and the clustering was depending on their confinement. The deviations measured from the system’s mean and least altered conditions portrayed that the confined reaches with lesser human interventions were in comparatively more pristine hydromorphological conditions. Conversely, unconfined reaches showed moderate to very poor hydromorphological conditions chiefly due to intense human-induced alterations regarding urbanization, embanking and sediment extraction. Restorations on these aspects should initiate with immediate effect to avoid a shortage of riverine resources such as fluvial sediment, fish and groundwater. Overall, this methodology was found suitable for continuous monitoring of the river systems along with the precise identification of areas and aspects to be restored for upgrading the hydromorphological quality. More testing of this methodology would eventually help in validating the hydromorphological quality assessment protocol for Indian rivers.     

Tight integration of BDS-3/BDS-2/GPS/Galileo observations considering the new overlapping DISBs and its application in obstructed environments

Tight integration can enhance the model strength and positioning performance by considering the characteristic of differential inter-system bias (DISB), especially in obstructed environments. However, limited work emphasizes the comprehensive analysis of five-frequency DISBs between BDS-3 and other systems considering the receiver type, receiver configuration, and antenna type. In addition, the overlapping DISBs between BDS-3 and BDS-2 are also in great demand for further investigation since they are often regarded as one system. In this study, one DISB-float model is introduced to estimate the DISBs, and one DISB-fixed model and one DISB-free model are formulated to enhance the model strength of tight integration. Four dedicated datasets were collected to estimate the DISBs, which are also comprehensively analyzed considering the receiver type, receiver configuration, and antenna type. The results show that the DISBs between BDS-3 and other systems are rather stable over a certain period and are related to the receiver type and receiver configuration, whereas are not related to the antenna type. More interestingly, the B1I code DISB between BDS-3 and BDS-2 exhibits significant magnitude with a mean value of ?1.44 m for the baseline composed of two different receivers. In this case, the B1I code DISB must be considered and the tight integration between BDS-3 and BDS-2 considering its calibration can improve the positioning performance. Besides, the tight integration of the DISB-fixed model can significantly improve the positioning accuracy between multiple GNSS. Compared to the loose integration, the improvement of 60.6 %, 56.6 %, and 61.2 % can be obtained in the E, N, and U directions, when only two satellites are available for each system. In real obstructed environments, the tight integration of the DISB-free model can also improve the positioning performance in terms of positioning availability and accuracy, as well as the ambiguity resolution performance.     

Distortion minimization for multimedia transmission in NOMA HAP-UAV integrated aerial access networks

Aerial access networks have been envisioned as a promising 6G solution to enhance the ground communication systems in both coverage and capacity. To better utilize the spectrum and fully explore different channel characteristics, this paper constructs an integrated network comprising the High Altitude Platform (HAP) and Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) with the Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) technology. In order to improve the transmission quality of images and videos, a power management scheme is proposed to minimize the distortion of the transmissions from the HAP and UAVs to the terminals. The power control is formulated as a non-convex problem constrained by the maximal transmit power and the minimal terminal rate requirements. The variable substitution and the first-order Tailor’s expansion is used to transform it into a sequence of convex problems, which are subsequently solved through the gradient projection method. Simulation demonstrates the signal distortion and error rate improvement achieved by the proposed algorithm.