A Pilot Program in Internet-of-things with University and Industry Collaboration: Introduction and Lessons Learned

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is one of the most prominent technological eco-systems and an engine of growth with an estimated market size of $14 Trillion to$33 Trillion by 2025 (McKinsey Global Institute). The IoT eco-system uses well-established technologies in many fields; and it adds new and often challenging requirements on extant techniques. For example, many wireless schemes are or being redesigned to address battery life and cost of solution issues. At the same time, the industry needs to hire and retrain many technical personnel to address these issues and support this newly evolving eco-system in many different markets. These facts culminate in the need for engineering students to be skilled to handle the new challenges and match the hiring market needs. As importantly, the more experienced technical personnel need to be retrained to understand this evolving eco-system. In this light, we have taken parallel symbiotic steps to address these challenges. We have piloted a course in IoT covering the most critical technologies in a typical end-to-end IoT system, including various access technologies and higher layer protocols and standards as well as prominent cloud services. Our industry partner has developed new measurement equipment to address more accurate and sensitive current draw of circuits to assist with power-frugal designs for long battery life. They have also developed a programmable board along with several experiments geared towards IoT applications. Last summer a small group of graduate students, with the guidance of a senior faculty member, used the IoT board to assess its efficacy for less experienced engineering students. The board and the associated experiments were found to be very useful and a good addition to the program. The experiments are also valuable for continuing education purposes for developing specific skills in the development of IoT systems. The team created an updated and tailored user’s manual to better serve the needs of less experienced engineering students and to alleviate the initial frustration associated with setting up the system. In this paper, we will present the experiences of the pilot program and the key points that present the enhancements of technical manual for a teaching environment. We will present the value that the IoT board and its experiments bring to the students in order to enhance their experience when learning about the IoT eco-system

Cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, and diabetes mortality burden of cardiometabolic risk factors from 1980 to 2010: A comparative risk assessment

Background: High blood pressure, blood glucose, serum cholesterol, and BMI are risk factors for cardiovascular diseases and some of these factors also increase the risk of chronic kidney disease and diabetes. We estimated mortality from cardiovascular diseases, chronic kidney disease, and diabetes that was attributable to these four cardiometabolic risk factors for all countries and regions from 1980 to 2010. Methods: We used data for exposure to risk factors by country, age group, and sex from pooled analyses of population-based health surveys. We obtained relative risks for the effects of risk factors on cause-specific mortality from meta-analyses of large prospective studies. We calculated the population attributable fractions for each risk factor alone, and for the combination of all risk factors, accounting for multicausality and for mediation of the effects of BMI by the other three risks. We calculated attributable deaths by multiplying the cause-specific population attributable fractions by the number of disease-specific deaths. We obtained cause-specific mortality from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors 2010 Study. We propagated the uncertainties of all the inputs to the final estimates. Findings: In 2010, high blood pressure was the leading risk factor for deaths due to cardiovascular diseases, chronic kidney disease, and diabetes in every region, causing more than 40% of worldwide deaths from these diseases; high BMI and glucose were each responsible for about 15% of deaths, and high cholesterol for more than 10%. After accounting for multicausality, 63% (10·8 million deaths, 95% CI 10·1-11·5) of deaths from these diseases in 2010 were attributable to the combined effect of these four metabolic risk factors, compared with 67% (7·1 million deaths, 6·6-7·6) in 1980. The mortality burden of high BMI and glucose nearly doubled from 1980 to 2010. At the country level, age-standardised death rates from these diseases attributable to the combined effects of these four risk factors surpassed 925 deaths per 100 000 for men in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia, but were less than 130 deaths per 100 000 for women and less than 200 for men in some high-income countries including Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, and Spain. Interpretation: The salient features of the cardiometabolic disease and risk factor epidemic at the beginning of the 21st century are high blood pressure and an increasing effect of obesity and diabetes. The mortality burden of cardiometabolic risk factors has shifted from high-income to low-income and middle-income countries. Lowering cardiometabolic risks through dietary, behavioural, and pharmacological interventions should be a part of the global response to non-communicable diseases. Funding: UK Medical Research Council, US National Institutes of Health. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd

A Digital Transmitter Architecture with Enhanced Delay, Power and Noise Performance for Sensors and IoT Applications

Many communication systems require very low power usage, low latency or both. Examples are sensor networks, IoT applications, extremely delay sensitive communications (e.g., equity trading), etc. In this paper, we propose a baseband transmitter architecture based on Look-Up Tables (LUT) that achieves better SQNR performance with considerably less processing delay with all other parameters being equal. We show the effect of bit-width resolution on the performance. This architecture lends itself well to all forms of transmitter realization, such as hardware (ASIC or FPGA), firmware or software, providing faster processing at lower cycles or hardware resources

ADAPTIVE MULTIPLE ACCESS STRATEGY FOR A CHANNEL WITH POWER CAPTURE.

The authors consider a communication channel which is shared by two classes of stations, the dominating class (DC) and the nondominating class (NDC). The DC stations transmit at a higher power than the NDC stations. Due to the capture effect, a transmission will be received successfully if no other transmissions at the same or higher power is transmitted at the same time. It was found that, in order to maximize the total channel throughput, the DC stations have to send at a rate which is lower than the optimal rate (in the absence of the NDC stations). However, if the NDC stations use the channel at a time-varying rate, due to changes in their traffic requirements, the DC stations will adjust their rates accordingly. The authors have studied this problem under three different assumptions for the arrival process of the NDC stations. The model is illustrated by an example, and it is shown that the strategy increased the total channel throughput.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

STABLE MULTIPLE ACCESS SCHEME FOR SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS.

The authors develop a multiple-access scheme for satellite communications networks under which newly generated traffic is transmitted as in the ALOHA scheme, but retransmissions, if necessary, are preassigned to specific time slots. This new algorithm is relatively simple to implement, is stable, and offers throughput in the 0. 5 to 0. 6 range with bounded maximum average delay. A modification of this basic algorithm which exploits power capture is also developed. This modified algorithm outperforms slotted ALOHA and TDMA, as well as most of the existing algorithms, under all traffic situations, in terms of both throughput and delay.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

CARRIER-SENSE MULTIPLE ACCESS WITH FIXED RETRANSMISSION ASSIGNMENT.

A fixed assignment retransmission ALOHA (FARA) multiple-access algorithm was previously described and analyzed. Under this scheme, collided packets are retransmitted in assigned slots. This ensures that collided packets will not collide with each other again. It was shown that FARA had superior performance when compared with slotted-ALOHA and many other existing contension-based schemes. However, carrier-sensing was not considered in FARA. A fixed assignment retransmission scheme with carrier-sensing capability (FARCS) is developed and analyzed using a Markov model. The performance of FARCS is shown to be superior to carrier-sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD). The degree of improvement depends on the maximum propagation delay between a pair of nodes in the network.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Fast Power-Efficient Techniques for Collision Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently a lot of research effort has been focused on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) due to its various applications. Over the last few years, several techniques have been proposed for investigating the power consumption which represents one of the most challenges and main concerns in designing WSNs. Power consumption of nodes in WSNs has a great effect on the lifetime of network nodes which are difficult to replace or recharge their batteries. In this context, this paper represents a receiver approach for alleviating power consumption of WSNs. Unlike other power consumption techniques, instead of decoding every received signal at the receiver which consume too much power our approach studies the histograms of sensors’ transmitted signals to detect collisions, so the receiver can determine when the transmitted signals can be decoded without wasting precious power decoding transmitted signals suffering from collisions. We also present a complexity and power-saving comparison between our novel approach and a conventional full-decoding algorithm in order to demonstrate the significant power and complexity saving advantage of our approach