Ali Jamoos

The study aimed to propose an educational administrative perspective to enhance the role of governmental school principals in reinforcing students’ digital citizenship skills in Palestine. A synthetic analytical methodology was employed to achieve the study’s objectives. The study concluded with an understanding of the conceptual framework of digital citizenship. It also revealed that school principals face various challenges in promoting digital citizenship skills among students in public schools. An administrative perspective was proposed, and it was recommended that the Ministry of Education implement it.

The evaluation of mobile network performance involves assessing various key performance indicators (KPIs) that gauge the efficiency and effectiveness of these networks. The key performance indicators of the Palestinian mobile networks are usually monitored by the mobile network operators (MNOs) through their operation support subsystems and the carried-out drive tests. This include the received signal level, received signal quality, drop rate, handover success rate, packet loss, latency, throughput, etc. The Palestinian ministry of telecommunications and information technology (MTIT) together with the Palestinian Telecom Regulatory Authority (PTRA) also conduct performance measurements for the mobile networks through drive tests to monitor the quality of service (QoS) measurements delivered by each mobile operator and compare them with the standard KPIs benchmark limits. They aim to enhance user experience and network efficiency. However, these performance measurements either from the MNOs or the regulation agency are limited and do not reflect the exact end user experience. Therefore, in this paper, we address the performance evaluation of the Palestinian MNOs based on a large community of connected people smartphone crowdsourcing technique. Here, using smartphone crowdsourcing can collect continuous real-time data on network performance from a large number of smartphone users with various locations. Thus, the quality of experience (QoE) can be evaluated from the end user perspective with a bigger data set. In this paper, we have developed and implemented a smartphone application called “Signal Sense” for crowdsourced mobile network measurements. The performed measurements include location information, signal level, signal quality and throughput for 3G mobile networks in Palestine. The evaluation of these measurements reflects the relative performance of the Palestinian MNOs.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a new direction for future internet, where anything embedded with sensors, software, and transceiver can access the Internet. The applications of IoT technology include home automation, smart city, smart grid, smart industry, E-health, environmental monitoring, and geologic disaster forecasting, to name a few. As the demand for high data rate increases due to the huge number of IoT devices, the so-called Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) have emerged. These LPWAN are designed to cover wide terrestrial areas. Nevertheless, in open areas such deserts, forests and coastal waters of seas, rivers and oceans, there are cost and practical limitation in constructing LPWAN. Therefore, to enable LPWAN in such remote areas, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications for IoT have recently attracted considerable interest from researchers. Among the open research issues are interference mitigation, Doppler spread estimation, LEO satellite constellation structure, efficient spectrum allocation, and access and routing protocols. In particular, as the satellite IoT system shares the same frequency band with the existing terrestrial IoT networks and other wireless systems, this results in multiple access interference issue. In addition, the high speed motion of LEO satellites induce a Doppler shift, resulting in inter-carrier interference problem.

In this paper, we have studied the terrestrial microwave links operated by the Palestinian mobile network operator (JAWWAL). Particularly, we have analyzed the path loss power measurements from 90 active terrestrial microwave links at three different frequencies which are 15GHz, 18GHz and 23GHz covering all geographical locations in the West Bank. The length of these microwave links varies from about 0.174Km to 33.864Km. The path loss power measurements were compared with that of the theoretical free-space propagation model as well as with the results obtained from Mentum Ellipse software simulation tool. The root mean square error results show that the free-space model is far away (7.64 dB) from the measured data. Therefore, we have suggested to tune the free-space propagation model based on linear least squares method. The proposed tuned free-space model yields better fit to the measured data with reduced root mean square error of 5.84 dB. In addition, the suggested tuned model yields comparable results to that obtain by Mentum Ellipse simulation.

In this study, the authors study binary decision fusion over a shared Rayleigh fading channel with multiple antennas at the decision fusion centre (DFC) in wireless sensor networks. Three fusion rules are derived for the DFC in the case of distributed M ‐ary hypothesis testing, where M is the number of hypothesis to be classified. Namely, the optimum maximum a posteriori (MAP) rule, the augmented quadratic discriminant analysis (A‐QDA) rule and MAP observation bound. A comparative simulation study is carried out between the proposed fusion rules in‐terms of detection performance and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, where several parameters are taken into account such as the number of antennas, number of local detectors, number of hypothesis and signal‐to‐noise ratio. Simulation results show that the optimum (MAP) rule has better detection performance than A‐QDA rule. In addition, increasing the number of antennas will improve the detection performance up to a saturation level, while increasing the number of the hypothesis will deteriorate the detection performance.

CONSUMER BEHAVIOR TOWARDS INTRODUCING 3G MOBILE IN PALESTINE: THE CASE OF BETHLEHEM GOVERNORATE

Cognitive radio (CR) has been proposed as a technology to improve the spectrum efficiency. We consider an overlay CR consisting of a primary macro-cell and cognitive small cells of cooperative secondary base stations (SBS). We suggest studying a CR where an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is used for both the primary users (PU) and the secondary users (SU). In order to cancel the interferences, zero forcing beamforming (ZFBF) is considered. However, applying ZFBF depends on the channels between the SBS and the PU. A channel estimation is hence necessary. For this purpose, we propose to approximate the channel by an autoregressive process (AR) and to consider the channel estimation issue by using a training sequence. In that case, the AR parameters and the channel can be jointly estimated from the received noisy signal by using a recursive approach. Nevertheless, the corresponding state space representation of the system is non-linear. Then, we propose to carry out a complementary study by compare non-linear Kalman filter based approaches.

Universal filtered multi-carrier (UFMC) modulation is a very powerful candidate to be employed for future 5G mobile systems. It overcomes the limitations and restrictions in current modulation techniques employed in 4G mobile systems and supports future applications, such as machineto-machine (M2M), device-to-device (D2D), and vehicle-tovehicle (V2V) communications. In this paper, we address the estimation of UFMC fading channels based on the comb-type pilot arrangement in the frequency domain. The basic solution is to estimate the fading channel based on the mean square error (MSE) or least square (LS) criteria with adaptive implementation using least mean square (LMS) or recursive least square (RLS) algorithms. However, these adaptive filters seem not to be effective, as they cannot fully exploit fading channel statistics, particularly at high Doppler rates. To take advantage of these statistics, time-variations of the fading channel are modeled by an autoregressive process (AR), and are tracked by an H∞ filter. This, however, requires that AR model parameters be known, which are estimated by solving the Yule-Walker equation (YWE), based on the Bessel autocorrelation function (ACF) of the fading channel with a known Doppler rate. Results of Matlab simulations show that the proposed H∞ filter-based channel estimator is more effective when compared with existing estimators