Real-time image streaming over a low-bandwidth wireless camera network

In this paper we describe the recent development of a low-bandwidth wireless camera sensor network. We propose a simple, yet effective, network architecture which allows multiple cameras to be connected to the network and synchronize their communication schedules. Image compression of greater than 90% is performed at each node running on a local DSP coprocessor, resulting in nodes using 1/8th the energy compared to streaming uncompressed images. We briefly introduce the Fleck wireless node and the DSP/camera sensor, and then outline the network architecture and compression algorithm. The system is able to stream color QVGA images over the network to a base station at up to 2 frames per second. © 2007 IEEE

Baseband analog front-end and digital back-end for reconfigurable multi-standard terminals

Multimedia applications are driving wireless network operators to add high-speed data services such as Edge (E-GPRS), WCDMA (UMTS) and WLAN (IEEE 802.11a,b,g) to the existing GSM network. This creates the need for multi-mode cellular handsets that support a wide range of communication standards, each with a different RF frequency, signal bandwidth, modulation scheme etc. This in turn generates several design challenges for the analog and digital building blocks of the physical layer. In addition to the above-mentioned protocols, mobile devices often include Bluetooth, GPS, FM-radio and TV services that can work concurrently with data and voice communication. Multi-mode, multi-band, and multi-standard mobile terminals must satisfy all these different requirements. Sharing and/or switching transceiver building blocks in these handsets is mandatory in order to extend battery life and/or reduce cost. Only adaptive circuits that are able to reconfigure themselves within the handover time can meet the design requirements of a single receiver or transmitter covering all the different standards while ensuring seamless inter-interoperability. This paper presents analog and digital base-band circuits that are able to support GSM (with Edge), WCDMA (UMTS), WLAN and Bluetooth using reconfigurable building blocks. The blocks can trade off power consumption for performance on the fly, depending on the standard to be supported and the required QoS (Quality of Service) leve

Acoustical Ranging Techniques in Embedded Wireless Sensor Networked Devices

Location sensing provides endless opportunities for a wide range of applications in GPS-obstructed environments; where, typically, there is a need for higher degree of accuracy. In this article, we focus on robust range estimation, an important prerequisite for fine-grained localization. Motivated by the promise of acoustic in delivering high ranging accuracy, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of acoustic (both ultrasound and audible) ranging systems.We distill the limitations of acoustic ranging; and present efficient signal designs and detection algorithms to overcome the challenges of coverage, range, accuracy/resolution, tolerance to Doppler’s effect, and audible intensity. We evaluate our proposed techniques experimentally on TWEET, a low-power platform purpose-built for acoustic ranging applications. Our experiments demonstrate an operational range of 20 m (outdoor) and an average accuracy 2 cm in the ultrasound domain. Finally, we present the design of an audible-range acoustic tracking service that encompasses the benefits of a near-inaudible acoustic broadband chirp and approximately two times increase in Doppler tolerance to achieve better performance

Design of Low-Voltage Digital Building Blocks and ADCs for Energy-Efficient Systems

Increasing number of energy-limited applications continue to drive the demand for designing systems with high energy efficiency. This tutorial covers the main building blocks of a system implementation including digital logic, embedded memories, and analog-to-digital converters and describes the challenges and solutions to designing these blocks for low-voltage operation

RF Power Amplifier Linearization in Professional Mobile Radio Communications Using Artificial Neural Networks

This paper is focused on the linearization of the radio frequency power amplifier of a professional digital handheld by means of an artificial neural network. The simplicity of the neural network that is used, together with the fact that a feedback path is unnecessary, makes this solution ideal to reduce both the cost of a handheld and its hardware complexity, while fully maintaining its performance. A compensation system is also needed to keep the linearization characteristics of the neural network stable against frequency, temperature, and voltage variations. The whole solution that comprises both the neural network and the compensation system has been implemented in the digital signal processor of a real handheld and afterward fully tested. It has proved to be satisfactory to meet the telecommunication standard requirements in all frequency, temperature, and voltage ranges under consideration while efficient to lower the computational cost of the handheld and to make its internal hardware simpler in comparison with other traditional linearization techniques. The results obtained demonstrate that a neural network can be used to linearize the power amplifiers that are used in transmitters of telecommunication equipment, leading to a significant reduction of both their hardware cost and complexity

Alone Self-Excited Induction Generators

In recent years, some converter structures and analyzing methods for the voltage regulation of stand-alone self-excited induction generators (SEIGs) have been introduced. However, all of them are concerned with the three-phase voltage control of three-phase SEIGs or the single-phase voltage control of single-phase SEIGs for the operation of these machines under balanced load conditions. In this paper, each phase voltage is controlled separately through separated converters, which consist of a full-bridge diode rectifier and one-IGBT. For this purpose, the principle of the electronic load controllers supported by fuzzy logic is employed in the two-different proposed converter structures. While changing single phase consumer loads that are independent from each other, the output voltages of the generator are controlled independently by three-number of separated electronic load controllers (SELCs) in two different mode operations. The aim is to obtain a rated power from the SEIG via the switching of the dump loads to be the complement of consumer load variations. The transient and steady state behaviors of the whole system are investigated by simulation studies from the point of getting the design parameters, and experiments are carried out for validation of the results. The results illustrate that the proposed SELC system is capable of coping with independent consumer load variations to keep output voltage at a desired value for each phase. It is also available for unbalanced consumer load conditions. In addition, it is concluded that the proposed converter without a filter capacitor has less harmonics on the currents

Design and Analysis of Binary Driven Coherent M-ary Qam Transmitter for Next Generation Optical Networks

This work presents a design for a binary driven optical square M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) transmitter for high speed optical networks. The transmitter applies tandem quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulators to eliminate the need for linear broadband amplifiers and high-resolution digital to analog converters (DACs), which are both required by conventional transmitters. The transmitter design could be scaled to any order of square M-ary QAM by simply adding more QPSK modulators in tandem. It also provides a Gray coded symbol constellation, insuring the lowest bit error rate possible during symbol recovery. We also provide the design for the coupling ratios of the optical couplers that take into account the insertion loss of the optical components, in order to generate a proper 16-QAM and 64-QAM symbol constellation with equally-spaced symbols. Additionally, we analyze the impact of coupling ratio errors as well as phase errors on the bit error rate (BER) performance and constellation diagrams. The performance is tested using the OptiSystem simulation at 50 Gbaud and under presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), which demonstrated high quality symbol constellation and a BER performance similar to theoretical expectations. For 16-QAM, a BER better than 10-4 and power penalty of about 2 dB are achieved for coupling ratio errors less than 10 %, or phase errors within ±7 degrees. The 64-QAM transmitter, on the other hand, demonstrated a BER better than 10-4 and power penalty of about 1 dB for coupling ratio errors less than 4%, or phase errors within ±2 degrees. Adviser: Lim Nguye

Comprehensive Survey on the Techniques used in Weighing and Recording Systems

Today farmers are facing more problems about fruit’s weight measuring and recording at the time of their final cost calculation while selling to the agents. Now a day, weighing issues are the most important in concern with the issues of farmers everywhere in the agriculture field, so weighing of everything from farm gains higher and higher importance in recent years. Here in this paper, trying to introduce the comprehensive literature study related to the various measuring systems that are necessary in the fields such as agriculture, industries and market. Weighing and measuring where possibilities of incursion are increasing day by day. In past days, the research is gone on various weighing and measuring systems, which provided the solution to manual methods. Due to the advancement in recent techniques, some weighing systems are based on microcontroller, ARM11, dynamic, fuzzy-logic, force-sensing, image-processing, filter, online, sensor network, and LVDT based etc. Every system has its own advantages and disadvantages. In most of systems, strain gauge technique is used for weighing so the system will become cost effective, more reliable and it will take less time to stores the many reading for continuous measuring process. The weight measuring systems today needs to make use of the latest technology. In some papers, the authors have presented weighing systems based on embedded and PLC and sometimes the load sensors is connected by online and sensor network. Hence, it could not easily hack the data of weighing records by hackers. A lot of modification takes places in various weighing and recording systems from the last few years, in next coming years many changes will takes place