Intelligent house for elderly people

Tato diplomová práce se zabývá systémem automatizace domácnosti umožňujícím ovládání domácích spotřebičů prostřednictvím běžné televize. Systém využívá standardu X10 a bezdrátové technologie ZigBee. Řídicí software staví na OS GNU/Linux a systému domácího kina MythTV. V rámci této diplomové práce byla vyvinuta aplikace zprostředkující komunikaci mezi MythTV a hardwarem. Modulární koncept postavený na dynamicky zaváděných modulech dělá tuto aplikaci snadno rozšiřitelnou a použitelnou i mimo předkládaný automatizační systém. Za účelem testování a demonstrace funkčnosti byl dále navržen bezdrátový teploměr a převodník VGA na SCART.The thesis describes author's contribution to a home automation system allowing users to control and monitor home appliances via an ordinary television. The system takes advantage of the X10 power line signalling standard and the ZigBee wireless technology. The control software is built on top of GNU/Linux OS and MythTV home theatre platform. The work focuses on a development of an application allowing MythTV to interface the hardware. A flexible modular concept based on dynamically loaded plug-ins is introduced. Since the application is self-sustainable and easily extensible, having a potential to manage several automation tasks on its own, its usage is not limited to the proposed home automation system. Finally, in order to verify a functionality of the system, a wireless thermometer and a VGA to SCART converter are designed.

Home Automation and Transparent Data Transmission Using Single-Medium Network Concept

Tämän diplomityön tarkoituksena on esitellä uusi yleiskäyttöinen tietoliikenneverkko läpinäkyvää tiedonsiirtoa ja kotiautomaation ohjaussovelluksia varten. Tietoliikennealusta nimeltään Wiseriver on ubiikki (kaikkialla läsnä oleva) langallinen parikaapeliverkko, joka on suunniteltu vastaamaan kaikenlaisiin yksittäisiin tiedonsiirtotarpeisiin kodeissa ja rakennuksissa. Teknologia perustuu konfiguroitaviin protokollariippumattomiin tiedonvälitysresursseihin, joita kutsutaan käsitteellä virtual wire (virtuaalinen johto). Opinnäyte alkoi yleiskatsauksella vastaavanlaisiin jo markkinoilla oleviin teknologioihin, jonka jälkeen seurasi tarkempi perehtyminen Wiseriver-järjestelmän toiminnassa käytettäviin tiedonvälitysperiaatteisiin. Keskeisin osuus opinnäytteen tekemisessä oli näiden Wiseriver-toimintojen implementointi FPGA:lla. Implementaatio sisälsi RTL-koodausta, simulointia ja logiikkasynteesiä. Kaksi erillistä, mutta samankaltaista FPGA-toteutusta toimivat ohjaimina Wiseriverin isäntä- ja liitäntäsolmuyksiköiden prototyyppiversioissa. Kokonainen Wiseriverin järjestelmäprototyyppi puolestaan toimii perustana kehitettäessä järjestelmää edelleen pilottikohteeseen. Simulaatio- ja testaustyön lopputuloksena syntyi perustoteutus, joka kykenee välittämään läpinäkyvästi Ethernet-pohjaista liikennettä ja hallitsemaan yksinkertaista valo-ohjaussovellusta. Simulaatiotulokset ja ajoitusraportit osoittavat että toteutus toimii myös valmisteilla olevassa prototyyppilaitteistossa. Wiseriver-järjestelmän prototyyppivaihe sisältää useita eri tahtiin eteneviä osakokonaisuuksia sisältäen esimerkiksi piirilevy- ja ohjelmistosuunnittelua. Jatkokehitystä ajatellen on myös jo olemassa suunnitelmia järjestelmän laajentamiseksi edelleen.The purpose of this thesis is to present a new universal communication network for transparent data transmission and control applications used in home automation. The communication platform called Wiseriver is a ubiquitous wired twisted-pair network that is designed to meet all kind of individual data transmission needs in homes and buildings. The technology is based on configurable protocol-independent communication resources called virtual wires. The thesis was started by a general survey to related technologies already existing in the market and then followed by a more specific introduction to transmission principles used in the operation of Wiseriver system. The main contribution of this thesis was to implement these Wiseriver functions with FPGA. The implementation included RTL coding using VHDL, functional simulations and logic syntheses. Two different but similar FPGA designs are used as controllers in master and access node prototype components of Wiseriver. A whole Wiseriver system prototype in turn will be used as groundwork for developing a pilot system. The outcome of the simulation and debugging process was a base design that permits to transmit Ethernet based traffic transparently and handle a simple light control application. Simulation results and timing analyze reports indicate that the design works in completed prototype hardware. Other related developments such as PCB layout and software designs are ongoing during the prototype phase of the whole system. Also several follow-up developments have been already considered for improving the system

Seamless multimedia delivery within a heterogeneous wireless networks environment: are we there yet?

The increasing popularity of live video streaming from mobile devices such as Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, Snapchat, etc. pressurises the network operators to increase the capacity of their networks. However, a simple increase in system capacity will not be enough without considering the provisioning of Quality of Experience (QoE) as the basis for network control, customer loyalty and retention rate and thus increase in network operators revenue. As QoE is gaining strong momentum especially with increasing users’ quality expectations, the focus is now on proposing innovative solutions to enable QoE when delivering video content over heterogeneous wireless networks. In this context, this paper presents an overview of multimedia delivery solutions, identifies the problems and provides a comprehensive classification of related state-of-the-art approaches following three key directions: adaptation, energy efficiency and multipath content delivery. Discussions, challenges and open issues on the seamless multimedia provisioning faced by the current and next generation of wireless networks are also provided

Seamless Multimedia Delivery Within a Heterogeneous Wireless Networks Environment: Are We There Yet?

The increasing popularity of live video streaming from mobile devices, such as Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, Snapchat, etc. pressurizes the network operators to increase the capacity of their networks. However, a simple increase in system capacity will not be enough without considering the provisioning of quality of experience (QoE) as the basis for network control, customer loyalty, and retention rate and thus increase in network operators revenue. As QoE is gaining strong momentum especially with increasing users' quality expectations, the focus is now on proposing innovative solutions to enable QoE when delivering video content over heterogeneous wireless networks. In this context, this paper presents an overview of multimedia delivery solutions, identifies the problems and provides a comprehensive classification of related state-of-the-art approaches following three key directions: 1) adaptation; 2) energy efficiency; and 3) multipath content delivery. Discussions, challenges, and open issues on the seamless multimedia provisioning faced by the current and next generation of wireless networks are also provided

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Mobile KNX: Design, development and analysis of a mobile network bridge for Domotic systems

In the last few years, the need to easily control the electrical devices has been manifested with more persistence. This is due to the increasing of energy consumption and the introduction of new concepts, such as green homes and building automation systems. To find a solution to this demand, several companies have focused on the development of infrastructure for remote management system of automation building applications. Based on well-defined protocols and systems for automation building structures, in the current market there are several applications that permit to clients to meet this request. However, it is still possible to improve their quality pushing on automation. Therefore, a central system for automatically processing and sharing the configuration data has been developed, leaving to mobile devices only the task to render it, in order to allow a client to control all the “smart” devices in an automation building system. This project has focused on developing an application that would provide a system of transaction between mobile and automation building world. In addition, a mobile application has been developed for several mobile operating systems and architectures. The work was completed with a testing phase, without the use of simulators, focused on ease of use and speed of access to its devices, which has shown the validity of this idea. The results obtained have given a new set of real data on which basing future developments and also a basis for a different approach to the proble

SparkFlow : towards high-performance data analytics for Spark-based genome analysis

The recent advances in DNA sequencing technology triggered next-generation sequencing (NGS) research in full scale. Big Data (BD) is becoming the main driver in analyzing these large-scale bioinformatic data. However, this complicated process has become the system bottleneck, requiring an amalgamation of scalable approaches to deliver the needed performance and hide the deployment complexity. Utilizing cutting-edge scientific workflows can robustly address these challenges. This paper presents a Spark-based alignment workflow called SparkFlow for massive NGS analysis over singularity containers. SparkFlow is highly scalable, reproducible, and capable of parallelizing computation by utilizing data-level parallelism and load balancing techniques in HPC and Cloud environments. The proposed workflow capitalizes on benchmarking two state-of-art NGS workflows, i.e., BaseRecalibrator and ApplyBQSR. SparkFlow realizes the ability to accelerate large-scale cancer genomic analysis by scaling vertically (HyperThreading) and horizontally (provisions on-demand). Our result demonstrates a trade-off inevitably between the targeted applications and processor architecture. SparkFlow achieves a decisive improvement in NGS computation performance, throughput, and scalability while maintaining deployment complexity. The paper’s findings aim to pave the way for a wide range of revolutionary enhancements and future trends within the High-performance Data Analytics (HPDA) genome analysis realm.Postprin