An intelligent system for electrical energy management in buildings

Recent studies have highlighted that a significant part of the electrical energy consumption in residential and business buildings is due to an improper use of the electrical appliances. In this context, an automated power management system - capable of reducing energy wastes while preserving the perceived comfort level - would be extremely appealing. To this aim, we propose GreenBuilding, a sensor-based intelligent system that monitors the energy consumption and automatically controls the behavior of appliances used in a building. GreenBuilding has been implemented as a prototype and has been experimented in a real household scenario. The analysis of the experimental results highlights that GreenBuilding is able to provide significant energy savings

Paradigm Shift: report on the new role of design in business and society

As leading businesses and global organizations started gaining new understanding of the value of design, their internal culture and attitude towards design began to change. Financial companies and management consultancies that have never before been associated with design are now creating their in-house design teams and including design in their portfolio of services. Large corporations that in the past used design in a limited capacity now rapidly increase their in-house design capabilities and appoint designers in executive roles. Venture capitalist firms and start-up companies also started recognizing the value that designers can bring to the business development stages of their investments. Even global organizations and international foundations started placing design on their agendas. All of this is causing a paradigm shift in the field of design. This study examines some of the latest corporate investments in design and reflects on what this means for the field of design. The focus of this study is on the key trend indicators that are defining the current landscape of design and its role in business and society

Monitoring Energy Efficiency in Buildings with Wireless Sensor Networks: NRG-WiSe Building

Teoría de la Señal y Comunicacione

Campus Communications Systems: Converging Technologies

This book is a rewrite of Campus Telecommunications Systems: Managing Change, a book that was written by ACUTA in 1995. In the past decade, our industry has experienced a thousand-fold increase in data rates as we migrated from 10 megabit links (10 million bits per second) to 10 gigabit links (10 billion bits per second), we have seen the National Telecommunications Policy completely revamped; we have seen the combination of voice, data, and video onto one network; and we have seen many of our service providers merge into larger corporations able to offer more diverse services. When this book was last written, A CUT A meant telecommunications, convergence was a mathematical term, triple play was a baseball term, and terms such as iPod, DoS, and QoS did not exist. This book is designed to be a communications primer to be used by new entrants into the field of communications in higher education and by veteran communications professionals who want additional information in areas other than their field of expertise. There are reference books and text books available on every topic discussed in this book if a more in-depth explanation is desired. Individual chapters were authored by communications professionals from various member campuses. This allowed the authors to share their years of experience (more years than many of us would care to admit to) with the community at large. Foreword Walt Magnussen, Ph.D. Preface Ron Kovac, Ph.D. 1 The Technology Landscape: Historical Overview . Walt Magnussen, Ph.D. 2 Emerging Trends and Technologies . Joanne Kossuth 3 Network Security . Beth Chancellor 4 Security and Disaster Planning and Management Marjorie Windelberg, Ph.D. 5 Student Services in a University Setting . Walt Magnussen, Ph.D. 6 Administrative Services David E. O\u27Neill 7 The Business Side of Information Technology George Denbow 8 The Role of Consultants . David C. Metz Glossary Michelle Narcavag

Robust Sensor Networks in Homes via Reactive Channel Hopping

Home area networks (HANs) consisting of wireless sensors have emerged as the enabling technology for important applications such as smart energy and assisted living. A key challenge faced in deploying robust wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for home automation applications is the need to provide long-term, reliable operation in the face of the varied sources of interference found in typical residential settings. To better understand the channel dynamics in these environments, we performed an in-depth empirical study of the performance of HANs in ten real-life apartments. Our empirical study leads to several key insights into designing robust HANs for residential environments. For example, we discover that there is not always a persistently good channel over 24 hours in many apartments; that reliability is strongly correlated across adjacent channels; and that interference does not exhibit cyclic behavior at daily or weekly timescales. Nevertheless, reliability can be maintained through a small number of channel hops. Based on these insights, we propose Adaptive and Robust Channel Hopping (ARCH) protocol, a lightweight receiver-oriented protocol which handles the dynamics of residential environments by reactively channel hopping when channel conditions have degraded. We evaluate our approach through a series of simulations based on real data traces as well as a testbed deployment in real-world apartments. Our results demonstrate that ARCH can reduce the number of packet retransmissions by a median of 42.3% compared to using a single, fixed wireless channel, and can enable up to a 2.2 X improvement in delivery rate on the most unreliable links in our experiment. Due to ARCH\u27s lightweight reactive design, this improvement in reliability is achieved with an average of 6 or fewer channel hops per link per day