The review provides an overview of epidemiological studies that were carried out in the field of community noise and cardiovascular risk. The studies and their characteristics are listed in the tables. Risk estimates derived from the individual studies are given for 5 dB(A) categories of the average A-weighted sound pressure level during the day. The noise sources considered in the studies are road and aircraft noise. The health endpoints are mean blood pressure, hypertension and ischaemic heart disease, including myocardial infarction. Study subjects are children and adults. The evidence of an association between transportation noise and cardiovascular risk has increased since the previous review published in Noise and Health in the year 2000.

In this paper the disturbances to sleep caused by road traffic noise are reviewed in the light of the latest published findings. First, a short presentation is made of what noise is in general. Then an exposition is made of the different characteristics of road traffic noise and how it may be measured and rated with various descriptors. In general terms, the continuous exposure of people to road traffic noise leads to suffering various kinds of discomfort, thereby reducing the number of well-being elements. However, this conclusion is made more complex to attain when non-acoustical factors such as socio-economic situation, age and gender are taken into account. In broad terms, nocturnal road traffic activity leads to difficulties in falling asleep for people and to a reduction of their sleep quality. This, however, depends strongly on physical measures of noise like for instance the intermittency of loud single noise events, their level relative to that of the background noise and the frequency and time of their occurrence. Several studies have also confirmed the fact that mood, too, is strongly affected after spending a night with significant noise exposure. Other psychological and physiological functions affected by night-time exposure to road traffic noise, such as performance the following day and cardiovascular reactivity are also reviewed.

The annoyance-reaction is one of the central variables in noise research. After an introduction to different concepts and definitions of noise annoyance different scales of how noise annoyance can be measured are shown. The question is discussed whether disturbance effects of noise at different times of day are given. To clarify this problem, the results of a series of actual German noise studies are reported. In these studies differences between day- and night­time annoyance are found depending on the sound sources. For the case of road traffic noise no differences between day and night-time annoyance were found. In contrast, annoyance reactions are related to the time of day for railway and air traffic noise. Especially for aircraft noise, above a Leq of 50 dB(A) night-time annoyance rises faster than day-time annoyance. The effects are discussed in the frame of a cognitive model of noise annoyance. It is argued that annoyance judgments are based on an internal representation of the noise situation. Part of this representation are the event characteristics of the sound sources and their estimated impacts for disturbances at different times of day.

Traffic noise (road noise, railway noise, aircraft noise, noise of parking cars), is the most dominant source of annoyance in the living environment of many European countries. This is followed by neighbourhood noise (neighbouring apartments, staircase and noise within the apartment). The subjective experience of noise stress can, through central nervous processes, lead to an inadequate neuro-endocrine reaction and finally lead to regulatory diseases. Within the context of the LARES-survey (Large Analysis and Review of European housing and health Status), noise annoyance in the housing environment was collected and evaluated in connection with medically diagnosed illnesses. Adults who indicated chronically severe annoyance by neighbourhood noise were found to have an increased health risk for the cardiovascular system and the movement apparatus, as well as an increased risk of depression and migraine. Furthermore adults with chronically strong annoyance by traffic noise additionally showed an increased risk for respiratory health problems. With regards to older people both neighbourhood and traffic noise indicated in general a lower risk of noise annoyance induced illness than in adults. It can be assumed that the effect of noise-induced annoyance in older people is concealed by physical consequences of age (with a strong increase of illnesses). With children the effects of noise-induced annoyance from traffic, as well as neighbourhood noise, are evident in the respiratory system. The increased risk of illness in the respiratory system in children does not seem to be caused primarily by air pollutants, but rather, as the results for neighbourhood noise demonstrate, by emotional stress.

Compared to other environmental issues, only a limited number of epidemiological studies is available on the relationship between traffic noise and cardiovascular diseases. The available literature provides no epidemiological evidence of a relationship between noise exposure and mean blood pressure readings in adults. However, noise-related increases in blood pressure are consistently seen in children. As far as hypertension as a clinical outcome is concerned, there is little evidence that exposure to high traffic noise levels is associated with an increased risk. With regard to ischaemic heart disease there is some evidence in the literature of an increased risk in subjects who live in noisy areas with outdoor noise levels of greater than 65-70 dBA.

Background: Air pollution due to road traffic is a serious health hazard and thus the persons who are continuously exposed, may be at an increased risk. Although several studies have confirmed the ill effects of air pollutants on the lung function of traffic policemen, only a few have investigated the relationship between respiratory health and duration of exposure in this category of occupationally exposed persons. Aim: The study was carried out with the aim of evaluating the extent of impairment in lung function in traffic policemen in respect to an unexposed control group having the same age group. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in which the spirometric parameters of a group of 100 nonsmoking traffic policemen, aged 20-55 years, working in and around Patiala city, were compared with those obtained in an age-matched control group, consisting of 100 healthy males, serving in the Punjab Police, who have never done traffic duty and are thus not exposed to traffic pollution. Lung function was done with MEDSPIROR. The data on the overall health status of the subjects was collected using the standard Respirator Medical Evaluation Questionnaire. The statistical analysis was carried out with SPSS PC software version 13. Results: Traffic policemen recorded a significant decline in various parameters, such as forced vital capacity (FVC), forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV ₁ ), and peak expiratory flow rate (PEFR) when compared with controls, and is probably due to exposure to vehicular pollution. It was also observed that in traffic policemen with >8 years of exposure, the values of FVC (2.7 L), FEV ₁ (1.8 L), and PEFR (7.5 L/s) were significantly lower than those obtained in traffic policemen with <8 years of exposure, in whom the values were 2.9 L, 2.3 L, and 7.7 L/s for FVC, FEV ₁, and PEFR, respectively. Conclusion: The effect of pollution by vehicular exhausts may be responsible for these pulmonary function impairments.

In this paper, we review some of the earlier studies on performance modeling of cellular mobile systems and their improvements proposed in some recent studies. These studies deal with a number of cellular mobile traffic models for fixed channel allocation and dynamic channel allocation, considering the cases, where user population is either infinite or finite. Further, the modeling of handoff process based on various traffic profile has also been investigated. The proposed traffic models were used for mobility modeling and performance analysis in terms of some Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. We also comment on the ­future scopes of performance analysis in the context of Green Information and Communication Technologies, which may lead to energy-efficient and environment friendly future cellular mobile systems.

Previous studies have found that chronic exposure to aircraft noise has a negative effect on children's performance on tests of episodic memory. The present study extended the design of earlier studies in three ways: firstly, by examining the effects of two noise sources, aircraft and road traffic, secondly, by examining exposure-effect relationships, and thirdly, by carrying out parallel field studies in three European countries, allowing cross-country comparisons to be made. A total of 2844 children aged between 8 years 10 months and 12 years 10 months (mean age 10 years 6 months) completed classroom-based tests of cued recall, recognition memory and prospective memory. Questionnaires were also completed by the children and their parents in order to provide information about socioeconomic context. Multilevel modeling analysis revealed aircraft noise to be associated with an impairment of recognition memory in a linear exposure-effect relationship. The analysis also found road traffic noise to be associated with improved performance on cued recall in a linear exposure-effect relationship. No significant association was found between exposure to aircraft noise and cued recall or prospective memory. Likewise, no significant association was found between road traffic noise and recognition or prospective memory. Taken together, these findings indicate that exposure to aircraft noise and road traffic noise can impact on certain aspects of children's episodic memory.

With the ever-increasing deployment and usage of gigabit networks, traditional networks' intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDSs/IPSs) have not scaled accordingly. More recently, researchers have been looking at hardware-based solutions that use field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to assist network IDSs/IPSs, and some proposed systems have been developed that can be scaled to achieve a high speed over 10 Gbps. However, these solutions have certain drawbacks. In this paper, we present a uniform high-speed traffic collection platform for intrusion detection/prevention based on sampling on FPGAs, called HSTCP. The methodology is when the proposed platform is unable to capture the whole network traffic, it will initiate elephant flow sampling rather than simple packets' drop. Meanwhile, the sampling rate is adaptive to the traffic load changes in the elephant flow. The noteworthy features of HSTCP include the following: (a) it takes the self-similarity of network traffic into account with complete mice flows' capture and elephant flow sampling; (b) it employs adaptive elephant flow sampling to retain inherent characteristics of network traffic; and (c) it provides a flexible and scalable platform for network IDSs/IPSs faced to the challenge of the future high-speed network.

The present paper provides the results from two nation-wide telephone surveys conducted in Canada on a representative sample of 5,232 individuals, 15 years of age and older. The goals of this study were to gauge Canadians' annoyance towards environmental noise, identify the source of noise that is viewed as most annoying and quantify annoyance toward this principal noise source according to internationally accepted specifications. The first survey revealed that nearly 8% of Canadians in this age group were either very or extremely bothered, disturbed or annoyed by noise in general and traffic noise was identified as being the most annoying source. A follow-up survey was conducted to further assess Canadians' annoyance towards traffic noise using both a five-item verbal scale and a ten-point numerical scale. It was shown that 6.7% of respondents indicated they were either very or extremely annoyed by traffic noise on the verbal scale. On the numerical scale, where 10 was equivalent to "extremely annoyed" and 0 was equivalent to "not at all annoyed", 5.0% and 9.1% of respondents rated traffic noise as 8 and above and 7 and above, respectively. The national margin of error for these findings is plus or minus 1.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The results are consistent with an approximate value of 7% for the percentage of Canadians, in the age group studied, highly annoyed by road traffic noise (i.e. about 1.8 million people). We found that age, education level and community size had a statistically significant association with noise annoyance ratings in general and annoyance specifically attributed to traffic noise. The use of the International Organization for Standardization/Technical Specification (ISO/TS)-15666 questions for assessing noise annoyance makes it possible to compare our results to other national surveys that have used the same questions.