VPP

Current members of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) claim that the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the short lived Volunteer Political Party (VPP), an early incarnation of the PUP, were socialist organisations. This dissertation testS this claim and analyses the extent to which ‘the Troubles’ led to the emergence of a working-class consciousness among Protestants.

In the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks, the number of user-plane gateways has increased, and, in contrast to previous generations they can be deployed in a decentralized way and auto-scaled independently from their control-plane functions. Moreover, the performance of the user-plane gateways can be boosted with the adoption of advanced acceleration techniques such as Vector Packet Processing (VPP). However, the increased number of user-plane gateways has also made load balancing a necessity, something we find has so far received little attention. Moreover, the introduction of VPP poses a challenge to the design of the auto-scaling of user-plane gateways. In this paper, we address these two challenges by proposing a novel performance indicator for making better auto-scaling decisions, and by proposing three new dynamic load-balancing algorithms for the user plane of a VPP-based, softwarized 5G network. The novel performance indicator is estimated based on the VPP vector rate and is used as a threshold for the auto-scaling process. The dynamic load-balancing algorithms take into account the number of bearers allocated for each user-plane gateway and their VPP vector rate. We validate and evaluate our proposed solution in a 5G testbed. Our experiment results show that the scaling helps to reduce the packet latency for the user-plane traffic, and that our proposed load-balancing algorithms can give a better distribution of traffic load as compared to traditional static algorithms.

The wood plastic composites (WPCs) are made using matrices of recycled polypropyl-ene with sawdust (pine wood flour) as filler. Corresponding WPCs are also made using virgin plastics (vPP, virgin polypropylene) for comparison with the recycled plastic-based composites. All varieties of these WPCs are made through melt compounding and injection molding with varying formulations based on the plastic type (PP, polypropyl-ene), plastic form (recycled and virgin), wood flour content, and addition of maleated polypropylene-coupling agent. The melt flow index and mechanical properties of WPCs are investigated. The results clearly show that recycled PP (rPP) can be successfully used to produce stable and strong WPCs. Properties and performances of WPC made of rPP are comparable to WPC made of wood and vPP. Therefore, WPCs based on both rPP and vPP matrices have potential to be used as construction materials with wood flour.