Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is the important cereal crop grown in India, contributes 40% of total food grain production and cover 42% of the total cropped area. Food security has been a major concern in India to fulfill the nutritional desires of many people, several attempts are being made to overcome hunger. It is thought that the use of pesticides is an instant solution to enhance crop productivity, but this approach is creating an extreme environmental stress. Fungi are known to cause 55 diseases in rice, 43 of which are seed borne or seed-transmittable. The three most important pathogens in rice are Pyricularia grisea, Drechslera oryzae and Xanthomonas oryzae often kills seedlings or plants at the tillering stage and may largely destroy the panicles. The disease causes yield loss as high as 70–80% when predisposition factors (low temperature, relative humidity higher than 85–89%, presence of dew and excessive nitrogen fertilization) favor epidemic development. Therefore, In view of the need of the hour, it is very important that everything be used in harmony with nature. Various approaches such as application of Silicon (Si), new generation of broad-spectrum fungicides, resistant varieties, and adoption of biopesticides in our agricultural practices for combating various a biotic and biotic stresses. In the biotic stress situations, Silicon plays an important role in enhancing disease resistance in plants by expression of pathogenesis-induced host defense responses. The present book chapter compiles many aspects of important rice diseases, symptoms, factors influencing the diseases and control measures for effective disease management to promote sustainable development.

mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), the provision of quality of service (QoS) guarantees is much more challenging mainly due to node mobility and resource constraints. Therefore it is important that routing protocols incorporate QoS metrics in route finding and maintenance to support end-to-end QoS. The traditional AODV protocol seems less satisfactory in terms of routing data to end systems. Many revisions are done to the traditional AODV protocol to meet QoS challenges focused on bandwidth, end to end delay, Packet delivery ratio, energy and mechanism overheads. Hence , it becomes very necessary for MANETS to have an efficient routing and QoS mechanism to support various application. This article extensively and exclusively studies the issues involved with QoS routing and presents an overview and comparison of existing QoS based revisions done on AODV protocol, thus providing the reader with insight into their differences and allows to highlight trends in protocol design and identify areas for future research. Keywordsof Service, QoS metrics, MANET, AODV, Routing.

The nanocrystalline thin films of In doped CdSe are prepared by thermal vaccum evaporation technique using Inert Gas Condensation method at room temperature. The transient photoconductivity measurements are performed at two different light intensities for nanocrystalline In doped CdSe thin fims. Photocurrent decay, even after subtraction of persistent photocurrent, is found to be non–exponential in the present case, indicating the presence of continuous distribution of defect states. Differential life time of excess carriers is also calculated which supports the above argument.

Nanocrystalline thin films of CdSe:In 1% and CdSe:In 5% are prepared by thermal evaporation using the Inert Gas Condensation method. The effects of different doping concentrations of In have been investigated. X-ray diffraction, optical absorption, Photoluminescence (PL) and electrical techniques are used to characterize the films. X-ray diffraction measurements indicate that the nc-CdSe:In 1% and nc-CdSe:In 5% thin films possess hexagonal structure. The crystallinity of the films and the grain size decreases as the In doping concentration increases. The results of PL measurements indicate that the PL intensity decreases as the In doping concentration increases. The optical band gap values increase as the In doping concentration increases. The dc electrical conductivity increases from undoped nc-CdSe to nc-CdSe:In 1% and decreases for nc-CdSe:In 5%. The density of the states near Fermi level N(EF), degree of disorder (To), hopping distance (R) and hopping energy (W) near the Fermi level are calculated using dc conductivity measurements at low temperatures. The effect of In doping concentration on these parameters is discussed. Hall measurements are performed on nc-CdSe, nc-CdSe:In 1% and nc-CdSe:In 5% to calculate the carrier concentration, carrier type and mobility of charge carriers.

In a Triangulation-based coverage scheme, a group of three mobile sensor nodes (MSN) position themselves to form an equilateral triangle for a desired period of time. Such a scheme has several applications in localization, environmental monitoring and coordinated target tracking. In this work, we introduce an efficient mobile traversal algorithm (MTA) that profides a triangulation-based coverage of a field that can be approximated as a rectangle. We analyze the energy consumption of the MTA interms of the distance and time taken to complete the full coverage of the field. The bounds on the minimum total and individual energy consumption per MSN is determined. A prior knowledge about the energy consumption can be useful to charge the mobile seeds with the required amount needed for the particular application. I. I NTRODUCTION A fundamental issue in sensor network is the coverage problem, which addresses how well sensors observe or monitor a region. Due to the energy constraints of sensor nodes, an energy-efficient coverage scheme is viable for the lifetime of In this work, we propose a mobile traversal algorithm (MTA) that employs three MSNs, equipped with location devices such as GPS, to cover a field that can be approximated by a rectangle. The MSNs can be deployed at a random initial position in the field, and with the knowledge of their current location with respect to the field to be covered, they will form an equilateral triangle near the deployment site. Each side of the triangle is assumed to be r units, where r is an application dependant parameter, often limited by the sensing and communication ranges of the MSNs. After forming such a triangle for a pre-determined (constant) period of time, they will coordinate with each other, and according to the proposed MTA algorithm, move to form another triangle to cover another part of the field. A MSN(or MSNs) can enter the sleep mode to conserve energy as the new triangle is being formed. The proposed algorithm enables the MSNs to minimize their (total and individual) travel distance or time needed to provide a full coverage of the field. Note that since the MSNs spent a constant amount of time performing sensing or sending beacon signals (depending on the application) while they are positioned as a triangle, the energy consumed by the MSNs is proportional to the total distance or time taken to complete the traversal. Accordingly, the proposed algorithm and its performance bound are also useful in minimizing and bounding the energy consumption of the MSNs. This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we for- mulate the problem. The proposed mobile traversing algorithm (MTA) is presented in Section III. In Section IV, bounds on the total distance and time required to complete the traversal process is derived. The minimum and maximum distance travelled by any individual MSN to complete the traversal is determined in Section V. Section VI concludes the paper.

In this dissertation, we have studied two distinct online communities, a question-answering (QA) system based on a social network and an information technology (IT) support organization. In a QA system, a query issued to search for an individual, a piece of information or some other resources needs to be forwarded to people who have knowledge about the destination of the target. Similarly, an IT support organization needs to quickly route a problem or incident reported by a customer to the appropriately-skilled experts. The primary objective of both systems is to ensure a timely resolution of the generated queries or incidents.Prior works in augmenting the search performances in the aforementioned communities have primarily focused on designing strategies that can achieve a high success rate in identifying the right person to forward a query such that, the query is handled by as few people as possible in order to be resolved. The strategies have assumed that a query can be processed by an individual, in a constant time, as soon as it has arrived. Such assumptions seem unrealistic since repeated selections of a subset of highly knowledgeable individuals will likely overload such individuals and lead to significant delays in responding and processing the pending questions or incidents.As our first contribution in this dissertation, we have modeled the communities as a queuing system in order to assess the performance of a search strategy in the presence of queuing delays. The model also incorporates the variation in the time taken by each user of the system to process a query, based on her depth and breadth of knowledge about the query. In order to ensure the authenticity of the derived theoretical models, we have modeled the characteristics of each critical component of the systems using both proven mathematical models and empirical results from analyses of real-world communities.Our second contribution is the introduction of novel search strategies for each community. The strategies take into account historical performances and interactions of community members to make more informed search forwarding decisions for future requests. We demonstrate that the overall performances of the systems can be improved significantly if the query forwarding and expert finding process is carefully designed to balance the query-load at the users in the system. We believe our results are a positive step towards building practical and effective QA system on social networks and managing incidents in an IT support system.

In many network and IT systems, users submit loosely-defined (or fuzzy) requests to obtain answers, solutions or resources. In this paper, we focus on trouble-shooting problem tickets in an IT service management system. In such a system, problems are typically reported using vague user-generated descriptions of the symptoms (e.g., 'my email is not working!') in a ticket. IT Specialists are then responsible for identifying the troubled component from the reported symptoms. Usually, the ticket is sent to one Specialist at a time until it is resolved hence, an efficient mechanism to select the (next) potential Specialist becomes critical towards a timely resolution of the ticket. In this paper, we introduce a framework to deal with fuzzy requests in a distributed environment. We first show the importance of considering both the traditional graph-based network routing efficiency as well as social network theory to generate important ranking metrics. For each newly arrived ticket, we propose several selection and ranking policies to choose and rank IT Specialists who can potentially resolve the ticket. We evaluate the ranking system with synthetic tickets, generated by an in-depth simulated IT management model that closely mimics an operational system. Our preliminary results suggest the importance of considering both routing efficiency and social connectivity to minimize the resolution time of a ticket.

Online applications have been gaining wide acceptance among the general public. Companies like Amazon, Google, Yahoo! and NetFlicks have been doing extremely well over the last few years largely because of people becoming more comfortable and trusting of the Internet. The increasing acceptance of online products makes it increasingly important to address some of the scientific techniques involved in developing efficient 3D online systems. The topics discussed in this book broadly cover four categories: networking issues in online multimedia; joint texture-mesh simplification and view independent transmission; view dependent transmission and server-side rendering; content and background creation; and creating simple online games. Contents: Adaptive Bandwidth Monitoring for QoS Based Retrievel (A Basu et al.); Wireless Protocols (A Khan); Overview of 3D Coding and Simplification (I Cheng & L Ying); Scale-Space Filtering and LOD -- The TexMesh Model (I Cheng); Adaptive Online Transmission of Photo-Realistic Textured Mesh (I Cheng); Perceptual Issues in a 3D TexMesh Model (I Cheng); Quality Metric for Approximating Subjective Evaluation of 3D Objects (A Basu et al.); Perceptually Optimized 3D Transmission Over Wireless Networks (I Cheng & A Basu); Predictive Schemes for Remote Visualization of 3D Models (P Zanuttigh & G M Cortelazzo); A Rate Distortion Theoretic Approach to Remote Visualization of 3D Models (N Brusco et al.); 3D Content Creation by Passive Optical Methods (L Ballan et al.); 3D Visualization and Compression of Photorealistic Panoramic Backgrounds (P Zanuttigh et al.); A 3D Game -- Castles (G Xiao et al.); A Networked Version of Castles (D Lien et al.); A Networked Multiplayer Java3D Game -- Siege (E Benner et al.); Collaborative Online 3D Editing (I Cheng et al.).

In harsh outdoor terrains like disaster areas and urban toxic, regions optimal placements of static sensor nodes might not be possible, leading to possible incomplete coverage of the region. In such situations, mobile sensor nodes (MSNs) might be a better option and a significantly fewer number of nodes are required than their static counterparts. A triangulation-based coverage where, groups of three MSNs position themselves to form equilateral triangles, has several applications in localization, 3D imaging and coordinated search operation. In this paper, we present several mobile traversal algorithms (MTA) based on triangulation coverage that employs N ≥ 3 MSNs such that, up to N − 3 node failures can be tolerated. MTA achieves three objectives: (a) as N increases, the total time to cover the field decreases in the absence of a failure; (b) each MSN travels a minimum distance; (c) upon a failure, the remaining MSNs efficiently complete the coverage of the field. The bounds on the total traveling distance and time are derived and the tightness of the bounds are proven through simulations. Furthermore, we also derive the bounds on the distance traveled by an MSN to complete the coverage process. The bounds on the individual traveling distances are useful in minimizing and bounding the energy consumption of the MSNs.

A triangulation-based coverage scheme using mobile sensor nodes (MSNs) has several applications in localization, 3D imaging and coordinated search operation. In this work, we introduce an efficient failure-tolerant mobile traversal algorithm (FTMTA) that provides a triangulation-based coverage of a field. FTMTA employs N MSNs such that, upto N -- 3 node failures can be tolerated to complete the coverage. FTMTA achieves three objectives: (a) as N increases, the total time to cover the field decreases in the absence of a failure; (b) each MSN travels a minimum distance; (c) upon a failure, the remaining MSNs efficiently complete the coverage of the field.

In triangulation-based coverage, a group of three mobile sensor nodes (MSNs) position themselves to form an equilateral triangle. A larger area is covered with many such smaller triangles as three MSNs move from one triangle to another. Such a scheme has several applications in localization, 3D imaging and coordinated search operation. In this work, we introduce an efficient mobile traversal algorithm (MTA) that provides a triangulation-based coverage of a field that can be approximated as a rectangle. We analyze the MTA in terms of the MSNs' travel distance and time taken to complete the traversal process. The bounds derived are also useful in determining the amount of energy consumption by the MSNs.

On-demand multimedia applications can impose Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters on streaming data transfers performed by operating systems. For multimedia servers, high performance in the form of low latency and high throughput are also necessary. This work seeks to improve the performance of simple data streaming between hardware devices with QoS in the context of general-purpose operating systems. Simple streaming refers to moving data from one device to another without transforming (e. g. compressing) the data during the transfer. A transfer model originates data at a source device, traverses a transfer path, and delivers data to a destination device. In this work, we our interested in sources that are les on a mass storage device being served to a destination network adapter. For these transfers, the path must necessarily include the le system and network protocol stack. Streams are partitioned into burst and periodic streams. Burst streams transfer data from source to destination as quickly as possible, one packet after another. FTP and HTTP le transfers fall into this category. There are typically no QoS parameters associated with this type of stream but they will be present in a general-purpose environment. Periodic streams transfer data based on some frequency, e. g. a frame rate for video. These streams impose Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters like bounded delay and delay variance (i. e. jitter).