USEM: A ubiquitous smart energy management system for residential homes

With the ever-increasing worldwide demand for energy, and the limited available energy resources, there is a growing need to reduce our energy consumption whenever possible. Therefore, over the past few decades a range of technologies have been proposed to assist consumers with reducing their energy use. Most of these have focused on decreasing energy consumption in the industry, transport, and services sectors. In more recent years, however, growing attention has been given to energy use in the residential sector, which accounts for nearly 30% of total energy consumption in the developed countries. Here we present one such system, which aims to assist residential users with monitoring their energy usage and provides mechanisms for setting up and controlling their home appliances to conserve energy. We also describe a user study we have conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this system in supporting its users with a range of tools and visualizations developed for ubiquitous devices such as mobile phones and tablets. The findings of this study have shown the potential benefits of our system, and have identified areas of improvement that need to be addressed in the future

Power Management Techniques for Data Centers: A Survey

With growing use of internet and exponential growth in amount of data to be stored and processed (known as 'big data'), the size of data centers has greatly increased. This, however, has resulted in significant increase in the power consumption of the data centers. For this reason, managing power consumption of data centers has become essential. In this paper, we highlight the need of achieving energy efficiency in data centers and survey several recent architectural techniques designed for power management of data centers. We also present a classification of these techniques based on their characteristics. This paper aims to provide insights into the techniques for improving energy efficiency of data centers and encourage the designers to invent novel solutions for managing the large power dissipation of data centers.Comment: Keywords: Data Centers, Power Management, Low-power Design, Energy Efficiency, Green Computing, DVFS, Server Consolidatio

TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2009

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Fostering energy awareness in residential homes using mobile devices

There is considerable global effort being made towards identifying ways of reducing energy consumption to cope with growing demands. Although there is potential for energy saving in many sectors, our focus is on reducing energy consumption in residential homes. We have developed a system which combines home automation and energy usage monitoring technologies. The system offers a range of tools designed for mobile devices to assist users with monitoring their energy usage and provides mechanisms for setting up and controlling home appliances to conserve energy. In this paper we describe our system and a user study we have conducted to evaluate its effectiveness. The findings of the study show the potential benefits of this type of mobile technology

A Survey of Techniques For Improving Energy Efficiency in Embedded Computing Systems

Recent technological advances have greatly improved the performance and features of embedded systems. With the number of just mobile devices now reaching nearly equal to the population of earth, embedded systems have truly become ubiquitous. These trends, however, have also made the task of managing their power consumption extremely challenging. In recent years, several techniques have been proposed to address this issue. In this paper, we survey the techniques for managing power consumption of embedded systems. We discuss the need of power management and provide a classification of the techniques on several important parameters to highlight their similarities and differences. This paper is intended to help the researchers and application-developers in gaining insights into the working of power management techniques and designing even more efficient high-performance embedded systems of tomorrow

Design techniques for low-power systems

Portable products are being used increasingly. Because these systems are battery powered, reducing power consumption is vital. In this report we give the properties of low-power design and techniques to exploit them on the architecture of the system. We focus on: minimizing capacitance, avoiding unnecessary and wasteful activity, and reducing voltage and frequency. We review energy reduction techniques in the architecture and design of a hand-held computer and the wireless communication system including error control, system decomposition, communication and MAC protocols, and low-power short range networks

Gender equity in disaster early warning systems

Capacities of societies, communities and individuals or a social-ecological system to deal with adverse consequences and the impacts of hazard events define the resilience. New and innovative Emergency Communications, Warning Systems (ECWS) technologies and solutions improve resilience of the nations. Research shows that different types of systems (e.g. decision support, resource management, early warning, communications, and inter-agency) are highly valued in emergency and disaster events reducing live losses. As many individuals have online access today and young women have increased their online communication and young men tend to explore technology resources, the potential of using user friendly third revolution digital technology such as semantic features and devices (e.g. SMART phones) have the potential to improve the access to early warning/risk in-formation supporting community decision making saving lives. These personal and social relations that reflect gender dimensions can certainly be examined improving resilience making communities more prepared for disasters with proactive decision making for early warning. Fostering awareness about gender equity which is the recognition of women and men as active participants in development can tailor made within the context of resilience and more specifically within early warning systems saving lives of the people at immediate risk including the dependence of mother’s care (children and older people). In this context, this paper attempts to synthesis literature on the topic of gender equity within disaster early warning systems

Lessons learned from the design of a mobile multimedia system in the Moby Dick project

Recent advances in wireless networking technology and the exponential development of semiconductor technology have engendered a new paradigm of computing, called personal mobile computing or ubiquitous computing. This offers a vision of the future with a much richer and more exciting set of architecture research challenges than extrapolations of the current desktop architectures. In particular, these devices will have limited battery resources, will handle diverse data types, and will operate in environments that are insecure, dynamic and which vary significantly in time and location. The research performed in the MOBY DICK project is about designing such a mobile multimedia system. This paper discusses the approach made in the MOBY DICK project to solve some of these problems, discusses its contributions, and accesses what was learned from the project

A survey of energy saving techniques for mobile computers

Portable products such as pagers, cordless and digital cellular telephones, personal audio equipment, and laptop computers are increasingly being used. Because these applications are battery powered, reducing power consumption is vital. In this report we first give a survey of techniques for accomplishing energy reduction on the hardware level such as: low voltage components, use of sleep or idle modes, dynamic control of the processor clock frequency, clocking regions, and disabling unused peripherals. System- design techniques include minimizing external accesses, minimizing logic state transitions, and system partitioning using application-specific coprocessors. Then we review energy reduction techniques in the design of operating systems, including communication protocols, caching, scheduling and QoS management. Finally, we give an overview of policies to optimize the code of the application for energy consumption and make it aware of power management functions. Applications play a critical role in the user's experience of a power-managed system. Therefore, the application and the operating system must allow a user to control the power management. Remarkably, it appears that some energy preserving techniques not only lead to a reduced energy consumption, but also to more performance