Deterministic Static Sensor Node Placement in Wireless Sensor Network based on Territorial Predator Scent Marking Behaviour

An optimum sensor node placement mechanism for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is desirable in ensuring the location of sensor nodes offers maximum coverage and connectivity with minimum energy consumption. This paper proposes a sensor node placement algorithm that utilizes a new biologically inspired optimization algorithm that imitates the behaviour of a territorial predator in marking their territories with their odours known as Territorial Predator Scent Marking Algorithm (TPSMA). The main objectives considered in this paper are to achieve maximum coverage and minimum energy consumption with guaranteed connectivity. A simulation study has been carried out to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm implemented in two different single objective approaches with an Integer Linear Programming based algorithm. The proposed single objective approaches of TPSMA studied in this paper are TPSMA with minimum energy and TPSMA with maximum coverage. Simulation results show that the WSN deployed using the proposed TPSMA sensor node placement algorithm is able to arrange the sensor nodes according to the objective required; TPSMA with maximum coverage offers the highest coverage ratio with fewer sensor nodes up to 100% coverage while TPSMA with minimum energy consumption utilized the lowest energy as low as around 4.85 Joules. Full connectivity is provisioned for all TPSMA approaches since the constraint of the optimization problem is to ensure the connectivity from all sensor nodes to the sink node

Integration of CompTIA Cloud+ into Universiti Teknologi MARA’s Computer Engineering Special Topics Syllabus

Cloud computing is one of the frontier technologies in computer engineering. Therefore, it is important to prepare the students with the knowledge and skills required in this field. This paper describes the integration of the renowned CompTIA Cloud+ professional training course into the ECE648: Special Topics in Computer Networking subject. The subject is a final year elective for the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia undergraduate computer engineering students. We first begin by assessing the current teaching syllabus of a variety of international universities to establish fundamental topics that should be covered in a cloud computing course. We then proceed to describe our implementation, which is done in accordance with the CompTIA Cloud+ certification syllabus. Among the items described are how the Cloud+ course contents are adjusted to be more suitable for the course, as well as additional practical elements (not originally available in the Cloud+ course) added to the course syllabus. Implementation results are described

Stems' diameter variations to detect sympodial orchids' water stress / Naimah Mat Isa … [et al.]

The measurements of stems' has played an important indicator for plant's water status. Many researches have been carried out in terrestrial plants to investigate the stems' variations of responses that had inspired to develop a precise irrigation system. Hence, the work presented in this thesis investigates the stems' variations in epiphyte plants that are sympodial orchids. A strain gauge was used as a sensor to measure the orchid's stem variation for 48 days at two stages of measurements. The Dendrobium orchid that grew from tissue culture was chosen as a sampling plant due to its popularity as a cut flower in the world's demand. The experiment was done within 30 days involving 10 samples of orchid plants growing indoor and outdoor. The measurements were recorded every 15 minutes continuously along the experiment executed. The 2 mm aluminium strain gauge and it's signal conditions that integrated with PIC produced a correlation at 0.96 between its output and the changes in displacement. The results showed that the stems' diameter variations in Dendrobium orchids could be manipulated for further analysis and it had played a significant role for triggering further researches in the developments of a precise watering system in the orchid farms

Provisioning QoS using DiffServ with hierarchical scheduling

Internet was designed mainly for data communication applications such as file transfer and electronic mail that does not guarantee any specific quality-of-service (QoS). QoS such as end-to-end delay might be important for other types of multimedia communications that involve real-time traffic such as voice and video. Differentiated Services (DiffServ) is one of the mechanisms that could provide QoS. In DiffServ, traffics are treated differently based on their QoS requirements. This paper suggests the use of hierarchical scheduling technique in DiffServ in order to provide QoS in IP network Network performance is observed based on our simulation work using Network Simulator (ns2)