Detection of exact fault quantity and its location is necessary for smooth functioning of a plant or industry and safety of the environment.
Therefore, a rural wireless communication architecture must provide some minimum level of quality of service assurance for smooth functioning of real-time applications.
The repair rate of the failed operating machines and spare machines should be kept higher for smooth functioning of the system.
Here we have followed the methods of the American Medicare Air Pollution Study [ 28] and the National Morbidity, Mortality and Air Pollution Study [ 29] by using over-dispersed Poisson generalized linear models with natural cubic splines for smoothed functions of time and meteorological variables.
We considered several variations of our primary mortality risk model: adding a linear term for dew point temperature, increasing the degrees of freedom for both smooth functions of temperature, and including different degrees of freedom for the smooth function of time (4, 6, 10, or 12 df/year).
The estimates are slightly more sensitive to the choice of degrees of freedom per year for the smooth function of time, particularly those relating to the respiratory admissions.
For the smooth function of calendar time, 6 df per year was chosen so that we could filter the information at time scales of 2 months (24).
We modeled the predictors as smooth cubic spline functions given 3 degrees of freedom (df) each, with exception for the smooth function of trend that was allowed 6 df.
The degrees of freedom per year for the smooth function of time were chosen so that longer-term and seasonal fluctuations in PM10 2.5 and hospitalizations were removed, leaving only shorter-term fluctuations for estimating health effects.
In the final confounder models [see Supplemental Material, Table 1 (http://www.ehponline.org/members/2008/11711/suppl.pdf)], we readjusted the number of degrees of freedom (df) for the smooth function of time trend, because many of the meteorologic variables exhibit seasonal patterns themselves and hence capture part of the observed seasonal trends in the outcome (Touloumi et al. 2004).
