Space Shuttle program communication and tracking systems interface analysis

The Space Shuttle Program Communications and Tracking Systems Interface Analysis began April 18, 1983. During this time, the shuttle communication and tracking systems began flight testing. Two areas of analysis documented were a result of observations made during flight tests. These analyses involved the Ku-band communication system. First, there was a detailed analysis of the interface between the solar max data format and the Ku-band communication system including the TDRSS ground station. The second analysis involving the Ku-band communication system was an analysis of the frequency lock loop of the Gunn oscillator used to generate the transmit frequency. The stability of the frequency lock loop was investigated and changes to the design were reviewed to alleviate the potential loss of data due the loop losing lock and entering the reacquisition mode. Other areas of investigation were the S-band antenna analysis and RF coverage analysis

An Improved Active Network Concept and Architecture for Distributed and Dynamic Streaming Multimedia Environments with Heterogeneous Bandwidths

A problem in todays Internet infrastructure may occur when a streaming multimedia application is to take place. The information content of video and audio signals that contain moving or changing scenes may simply be too great for Internet clients with low bandwidth capacity if no adaptation is performed. In order to satisfactorily reach clients with various bandwidth capacities some works such as receiver-driven multicast and resilient overlay networks (RON) have been developed. However these efforts mainly call for modification on router level management or place additional layer to the Internet structure, which is not recommended in the nearest future due to the highly acceptance level and widely utilization of the current Internet structure, and the lengthy and tiring standardization process for a new structure or modification to be accepted. We have developed an improved active network approach for distributed and dynamic streaming multimedia environment with heterogeneous bandwidth, such as the case of the Internet. Friendly active network system (FANS) is a sample of our approach. Adopting application level active network (ALAN) mechanism, FANS participants and available media are referred through its universal resource locator (url). The system intercepts traffic flowing from source to destination and performs media post-processing at an intermediate peer. The process is performed at the application level instead of at the router level, which was the original approach of active networks. FANS requires no changes in router level management and puts no additional requirement to the current Internet architecture and, hence, instantly applicable. In comparison with ALAN, FANS possesses two significant differences. From the system overview, ALAN requires three minimum elements: clients, servers, and dynamic proxy servers. FANS, on the other hand, unifies the functionalities of those three elements. Each of peers in FANS is a client, an intermediate peer, and a media server as well. Secondly, FANS members tracking system dynamically detects the existence of a newly joined computers or mobile device, given its url is available and announced. In ALAN, the servers and the middle nodes are priori known and, hence, static. The application level approach and better performance characteristics distinguished also our work with another similar work in this field, which uses router level approach. The approach offers, in general, the following improvements: FANS promotes QoS fairness, in which clients with lower bandwidth are accommodated and receive better quality of service FANS introduces a new algorithm to determine whether or not the involvement of intermediate peer(s) to perform media post-processing enhancement services is necessary. This mechanism is important and advantageous due to the fact that intermediate post-processing increases the delay and, therefore, should only be employed selectively. FANS considers the size of media data and the capacity of clients bandwidth as network parameters that determine the level of quality of service offered. By employing the above techniques, our experiments with the Internet emulator show that our approach improves the reliability of streaming media applications in such environment

Earth imaging with microsatellites: An investigation, design, implementation and in-orbit demonstration of electronic imaging systems for earth observation on-board low-cost microsatellites.

This research programme has studied the possibilities and difficulties of using 50 kg microsatellites to perform remote imaging of the Earth. The design constraints of these missions are quite different to those encountered in larger, conventional spacecraft. While the main attractions of microsatellites are low cost and fast response times, they present the following key limitations: Payload mass under 5 kg, Continuous payload power under 5 Watts, peak power up to 15 Watts, Narrow communications bandwidths (9.6 / 38.4 kbps), Attitude control to within 5°, No moving mechanics. The most significant factor is the limited attitude stability. Without sub-degree attitude control, conventional scanning imaging systems cannot preserve scene geometry, and are therefore poorly suited to current microsatellite capabilities. The foremost conclusion of this thesis is that electronic cameras, which capture entire scenes in a single operation, must be used to overcome the effects of the satellite's motion. The potential applications of electronic cameras, including microsatellite remote sensing, have erupted with the recent availability of high sensitivity field-array CCD (charge-coupled device) image sensors. The research programme has established suitable techniques and architectures necessary for CCD sensors, cameras and entire imaging systems to fulfil scientific/commercial remote sensing despite the difficult conditions on microsatellites. The author has refined these theories by designing, building and exploiting in-orbit five generations of electronic cameras. The major objective of meteorological scale imaging was conclusively demonstrated by the Earth imaging camera flown on the UoSAT-5 spacecraft in 1991. Improved cameras have since been carried by the KITSAT-1 (1992) and PoSAT-1 (1993) microsatellites. PoSAT-1 also flies a medium resolution camera (200 metres) which (despite complete success) has highlighted certain limitations of microsatellites for high resolution remote sensing. A reworked, and extensively modularised, design has been developed for the four camera systems deployed on the FASat-Alfa mission (1995). Based on the success of these missions, this thesis presents many recommendations for the design of microsatellite imaging systems. The novelty of this research programme has been the principle of designing practical camera systems to fit on an existing, highly restrictive, satellite platform, rather than conceiving a fictitious small satellite to support a high performance scanning imager. This pragmatic approach has resulted in the first incontestable demonstrations of the feasibility of remote sensing of the Earth from inexpensive microsatellites

Video-based Estimation of Activity Level for Assisted Living

The continual increase in the population of older adults in the next 50 years envisages an increase of dependants on the family and the Government. Assisted Living technologies are information and communication technologies to assist, improve and monitor the daily living of the old and vulnerable population by promoting greater independence and providing a safe and secure environment at a reduced cost. Most of the assisted living technologies are passive sensor-based solutions where a number of embedded or body-worn sensors are employed or connected over a network to recognize activities. Often the sensors are obtrusive and are extremely sensitive to the performance of the sensors. Visual data is contextually richer than sensor triggered firings. Visual data along with being contextual is also extremely sensitive. Since visual data is intrusive, a qualitative study among older adults within the community was carried out to get a context of the privacy concerns of having a camera within an assisted living environment. Building on the outcomes of the focus group discussions, a novel monitoring framework is proposed. Following the framework, Activity Level, as an effective metric to measure the amount of activity undertaken by an individual is proposed. Activity Level is estimated by extracting and classifying pixel-based and phase-based motion features. Experiments reveal that phase-based features perform better than pixel-based features. Experiments are carried out using the novel Sheffield Activities of Daily Living Dataset, which has been developed and made available for further computer vision research for assisted living

Digital television system design study

The use of digital techniques for transmission of pictorial data is discussed for multi-frame images (television). Video signals are processed in a manner which includes quantization and coding such that they are separable from the noise introduced into the channel. The performance of digital television systems is determined by the nature of the processing techniques (i.e., whether the video signal itself or, instead, something related to the video signal is quantized and coded) and to the quantization and coding schemes employed

Dynamic Resource Allocation in Embedded, High-Performance and Cloud Computing

The availability of many-core computing platforms enables a wide variety of technical solutions for systems across the embedded, high-performance and cloud computing domains. However, large scale manycore systems are notoriously hard to optimise. Choices regarding resource allocation alone can account for wide variability in timeliness and energy dissipation (up to several orders of magnitude). Dynamic Resource Allocation in Embedded, High-Performance and Cloud Computing covers dynamic resource allocation heuristics for manycore systems, aiming to provide appropriate guarantees on performance and energy efficiency. It addresses different types of systems, aiming to harmonise the approaches to dynamic allocation across the complete spectrum between systems with little flexibility and strict real-time guarantees all the way to highly dynamic systems with soft performance requirements. Technical topics presented in the book include: Load and Resource Models Admission Control Feedback-based Allocation and Optimisation Search-based Allocation Heuristics Distributed Allocation based on Swarm Intelligence Value-Based Allocation Each of the topics is illustrated with examples based on realistic computational platforms such as Network-on-Chip manycore processors, grids and private cloud environments.Note.-- EUR 6,000 BPC fee funded by the EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilo

Dynamic Resource Allocation in Embedded, High-Performance and Cloud Computing

The availability of many-core computing platforms enables a wide variety of technical solutions for systems across the embedded, high-performance and cloud computing domains. However, large scale manycore systems are notoriously hard to optimise. Choices regarding resource allocation alone can account for wide variability in timeliness and energy dissipation (up to several orders of magnitude). Dynamic Resource Allocation in Embedded, High-Performance and Cloud Computing covers dynamic resource allocation heuristics for manycore systems, aiming to provide appropriate guarantees on performance and energy efficiency. It addresses different types of systems, aiming to harmonise the approaches to dynamic allocation across the complete spectrum between systems with little flexibility and strict real-time guarantees all the way to highly dynamic systems with soft performance requirements. Technical topics presented in the book include: • Load and Resource Models• Admission Control• Feedback-based Allocation and Optimisation• Search-based Allocation Heuristics• Distributed Allocation based on Swarm Intelligence• Value-Based AllocationEach of the topics is illustrated with examples based on realistic computational platforms such as Network-on-Chip manycore processors, grids and private cloud environments

Low power data-dependent transform video and still image coding

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-144).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.This work introduces the idea of data dependent video coding for low power. Algorithms for the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and its inverse are introduced which exploit statistical properties of the input data in both the space and spatial frequency domains in order to minimize the total number of arithmetic operations. Two VLSI chips have been built as a proof-of-concept of data dependent processing implementing the DCT and its inverse (IDCT). The IDCT core processor exploits the presence of a large number of zerovalued spectral coefficients in the input stream when stimulated with MPEG-compressed video sequences. Adata-driven IDCT computation algorithm along with clock gating techniques are used to reduce the number of arithmetic operations for video inputs. The second chip is a DCT core processor that exhibits two innovative techniques for arithmetic operation reduction in the DCT computation context along with standard voltage scaling techniques such as pipelining and parallelism. The first method reduces the bitwidth of arithmetic operations in the presence of data spatial correlation. The second method trades off power dissipation and image compression quality (arithmetic precision.) Both chips are fully functional and exhibit the lowest switched capacitance per sample among past DCT/IDCT chips reported in the literature. Their power dissipation profile shows a strong dependence with certain statistical properties of the data that they operate on, according to the design goal.by Thucydides Xanthopoulos.Ph.D

Dynamic Resource Allocation in Embedded, High-Performance and Cloud Computing

The availability of many-core computing platforms enables a wide variety of technical solutions for systems across the embedded, high-performance and cloud computing domains. However, large scale manycore systems are notoriously hard to optimise. Choices regarding resource allocation alone can account for wide variability in timeliness and energy dissipation (up to several orders of magnitude). Dynamic Resource Allocation in Embedded, High-Performance and Cloud Computing covers dynamic resource allocation heuristics for manycore systems, aiming to provide appropriate guarantees on performance and energy efficiency. It addresses different types of systems, aiming to harmonise the approaches to dynamic allocation across the complete spectrum between systems with little flexibility and strict real-time guarantees all the way to highly dynamic systems with soft performance requirements. Technical topics presented in the book include: • Load and Resource Models• Admission Control• Feedback-based Allocation and Optimisation• Search-based Allocation Heuristics• Distributed Allocation based on Swarm Intelligence• Value-Based AllocationEach of the topics is illustrated with examples based on realistic computational platforms such as Network-on-Chip manycore processors, grids and private cloud environments