TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010

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

Reconfigurable Antenna Systems: Platform implementation and low-power matters

Antennas are a necessary and often critical component of all wireless systems, of which they share the ever-increasing complexity and the challenges of present and emerging trends. 5G, massive low-orbit satellite architectures (e.g. OneWeb), industry 4.0, Internet of Things (IoT), satcom on-the-move, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Vehicles, all call for highly flexible systems, and antenna reconfigurability is an enabling part of these advances. The terminal segment is particularly crucial in this sense, encompassing both very compact antennas or low-profile antennas, all with various adaptability/reconfigurability requirements. This thesis work has dealt with hardware implementation issues of Radio Frequency (RF) antenna reconfigurability, and in particular with low-power General Purpose Platforms (GPP); the work has encompassed Software Defined Radio (SDR) implementation, as well as embedded low-power platforms (in particular on STM32 Nucleo family of micro-controller). The hardware-software platform work has been complemented with design and fabrication of reconfigurable antennas in standard technology, and the resulting systems tested. The selected antenna technology was antenna array with continuously steerable beam, controlled by voltage-driven phase shifting circuits. Applications included notably Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployed in the Italian scientific mission in Antarctica, in a traffic-monitoring case study (EU H2020 project), and into an innovative Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) antenna concept (patent application submitted). The SDR implementation focused on a low-cost and low-power Software-defined radio open-source platform with IEEE 802.11 a/g/p wireless communication capability. In a second embodiment, the flexibility of the SDR paradigm has been traded off to avoid the power consumption associated to the relevant operating system. Application field of reconfigurable antenna is, however, not limited to a better management of the energy consumption. The analysis has also been extended to satellites positioning application. A novel beamforming method has presented demonstrating improvements in the quality of signals received from satellites. Regarding those who deal with positioning algorithms, this advancement help improving precision on the estimated position

Development of a wireless sensor network for agricultural monitoring for Internet of Things (IoT)

Monitoring of the agricultural environment has become an important area of control and protection which provides real-time system and control communication with the physical world. This thesis focuses on Development ofa wireless Sensor Network for agricultural monitoring for Internet of things (IoT) to monitor environmental condition. Among the various technologies for Agriculture monitoring, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are perceived as an amazing one to gather and process information in the agricultural area with low-cost and low-energy consumption. WSN is capable of providing processed field data in real time from sensors which are physically distributed in the field. Agriculture and farming are one of the industries which have a late occupied their regards for WSNs, looking for this financially acute innovation to improve its production and upgrade agribusiness yield standard. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have pulled in a lot consideration in recent years.The proposed system uses WSN sensors to capture and track information pertaining to crop growth condition outside and inside greenhouses. 6LowPAN network protocol is used for low power consumption and for transmitting and receiving of data packets.This thesis introduces the agricultural monitoring system's hardware design, system architecture, and software process control. Agriculture monitoring system set-up is based on Contiki OS while device testing is carried out using real-time farm information and historical dat

Internet of Things Based Technology for Smart Home System: A Generic Framework

Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology which enables computing devices, physical and virtual objects/devices to be connected to the internet so that users can control and monitor devices. The IoT offers huge potential for development of various applications namely: e-governance, environmental monitoring, military applications, infrastructure management, industrial applications, energy management, healthcare monitoring, home automation and transport systems. In this paper, the brief overview of existing frameworks for development of IoT applications, techniques to develop smart home applications using existing IoT frameworks, and a new generic framework for the development of IoTbasedsmart home system is presented. The proposed generic framework comprises various modules such as Auto-Configuration and Management, Communication Protocol, Auto-Monitoring and Control, and Objects Access Control. The architecture of the new generic framework and the functionality of various modules in the framework are also presented. The proposed generic framework is helpful for making every house as smart house to increase the comfort of inhabitants. Each of the components of generic framework is robust in nature in providing services at any time. The components of smart home system are designed to take care of various issues such as scalability, interoperability, device adaptability, security and privacy. The proposed generic framework is designed to work on all vendor boards and variants of Linux and Windows operating system

Enabling the Virtual Phones to remotely sense the Real Phones in real-time: A Sensor Emulation initiative for virtualized Android-x86

Smartphones nowadays have the ground-breaking features that were only a figment of one’s imagination. For the ever-demanding cellphone users, the exhaustive list of features that a smartphone supports just keeps getting more exhaustive with time. These features aid one’s personal and professional uses as well. Extrapolating into the future the features of a present-day smartphone, the lives of us humans using smartphones are going to be unimaginably agile. With the above said emphasis on the current and future potential of a smartphone, the ability to virtualize smartphones with all their real-world features into a virtual platform, is a boon for those who want to rigorously experiment and customize the virtualized smartphone hardware without spending an extra penny. Once virtualizable independently on a larger scale, the idea of virtualized smartphones with all the virtualized pieces of hardware takes an interesting turn with the sensors being virtualized in a way that’s closer to the real-world behavior. When accessible remotely with the real-time responsiveness, the above mentioned real-world behavior will be a real dealmaker in many real-world systems, namely, the life-saving systems like the ones that instantaneously get alerts about harmful magnetic radiations in the deep mining areas, etc. And these life-saving systems would be installed on a large scale on the desktops or large servers as virtualized smartphones having the added support of virtualized sensors which remotely fetch the real hardware sensor readings from a real smartphone in real-time. Based on these readings the lives working in the affected areas can be alerted and thus saved by the people who are operating the at the desktops or large servers hosting the virtualized smartphones

Building Computing-As-A-Service Mobile Cloud System

The last five years have witnessed the proliferation of smart mobile devices, the explosion of various mobile applications and the rapid adoption of cloud computing in business, governmental and educational IT deployment. There is also a growing trends of combining mobile computing and cloud computing as a new popular computing paradigm nowadays. This thesis envisions the future of mobile computing which is primarily affected by following three trends: First, servers in cloud equipped with high speed multi-core technology have been the main stream today. Meanwhile, ARM processor powered servers is growingly became popular recently and the virtualization on ARM systems is also gaining wide ranges of attentions recently. Second, high-speed internet has been pervasive and highly available. Mobile devices are able to connect to cloud anytime and anywhere. Third, cloud computing is reshaping the way of using computing resources. The classic pay/scale-as-you-go model allows hardware resources to be optimally allocated and well-managed. These three trends lend credence to a new mobile computing model with the combination of resource-rich cloud and less powerful mobile devices. In this model, mobile devices run the core virtualization hypervisor with virtualized phone instances, allowing for pervasive access to more powerful, highly-available virtual phone clones in the cloud. The centralized cloud, powered by rich computing and memory recourses, hosts virtual phone clones and repeatedly synchronize the data changes with virtual phone instances running on mobile devices. Users can flexibly isolate different computing environments. In this dissertation, we explored the opportunity of leveraging cloud resources for mobile computing for the purpose of energy saving, performance augmentation as well as secure computing enviroment isolation. We proposed a framework that allows mo- bile users to seamlessly leverage cloud to augment the computing capability of mobile devices and also makes it simpler for application developers to run their smartphone applications in the cloud without tedious application partitioning. This framework was built with virtualization on both server side and mobile devices. It has three building blocks including agile virtual machine deployment, efficient virtual resource management, and seamless mobile augmentation. We presented the design, imple- mentation and evaluation of these three components and demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed mobile cloud model

IoT DEVICE MANAGEMENT AND CONFIGURATION

As the number of IoT devices grows, the management and configuration of IoT devices becomes crucial in resource constraint networks. It is hard to manage and configure a large amount of heterogeneous resource constraint IoT devices because people need to know how they connect to each other, what internet-enabled services are available to provide, and how people interact with things through the internet. The thing-centric approach focuses on user experience when engaging things, but the cloud- centric approach switch the focus to IoT services that can process data streams collected from things and applications that help get people joined in the IoT world. To manage IoT populations effectively in a centralized manner, not only does it mean that moving computational power closer to the edge is a way to reduce bandwidth and latency, but it also implies that it is necessary to build an architecture which can scale and manage tons of connected devices by a uniform interface. In particular, RESTful Web services can provide a uniform interface that operates resources by HTTP methods. For example, users can read and write data by a uniform interface, and a flowerpot can write data and be triggered to water plants by a uniform interface. Thus, in the scope of IoT, embedded middleware can implement uniform interface by REST model. Virtualizing physical things has emerged as a design pattern to build IoT systems. Resource less constraint devices are capable of being virtualized with enough CPU power, memory, networking, but they are more expensive and power consuming. However, resource highly constraint devices take advantage of low energy consumption and cheaper price, but they cannot be virtualized because they do not have ability to even run a single multi-threaded program. Therefore, it is very important to select the right platforms for the right roles. In our case, we use Raspberry Pi 3 as a middleware and Nordic nRF52832 as a BLE endpoint. In this thesis, a REST-based IoT management system based on Service-Oriented Architecture is built, and the performance of the system has been tested, including the response time of HTTP GET and POST requests of the centralized server in a Fog domain and a script engine onto a BLE-enabled endpoint

Networked Heterogeneous Systems in a ROS-Enabled Cloud Environment

It is important in the development of cloud robotics that the challenges presented by transferring computational loads to networked resources are properly addressed. The challenges include network latency, data integrity, security, and privacy. The objective of the present work is to investigate the issues of latency and data integrity in a representative cloud robotics environment. The present work involves setting up a cloud robotics network in an open-source Robot Operating System (ROS) framework and carrying out investigations on the levels of latency and reduction in data integrity as utilization of the network increases. In this study, a virtual datacenter has been set up to provide the foundation on which to build software systems to provide cloud services. Robot Operating System (ROS) framework has been used to facilitate communication among heterogeneous systems in the network. Three types of robots, including the Parrot AR.Drone2.0, the Kobuki Turtlebot 2, and the LEGO EV3 have been implemented in the system. The system has been tested for baseline connectivity and under low- and high-bandwidth conditions to determine the latency and data integrity of the network connections. Additionally, a heterogeneous system consisting of sensor feedback from the AR.Drone2.0 and motor control of the Turtlebot 2 has been built to examine the connection between the devices themselves. Through this study, it has been demonstrated that under low-bandwidth conditions, the network performs reasonably well in the areas of latency and data integrity. However, for high-bandwidth conditions involving image transmission, the network performance deteriorates considerably, both in terms of latency and data integrity. One possible reason is the wireless router used in the current setup. It is also recommended that, especially under high-bandwidth loads, it is necessary for networked systems to perform some portion of their computations on-board and high-bandwidth wireless connectivity to the cloud is facilitated. Ongoing research and future directions are also outlined