Intelligent low-cost micro-hydro power emulator for domestic applications

Microgeneration of hydropower for domestic applications is emerging as a promising technology. However, the amount of energy that can be harvested is still modest. The lack of experimental evaluation systems which emulate the power characteristics of such generators for professional development and research has challenged the growth of micro-hydropower generation. This paper describes a laboratory micro-hydropower emulator for research purposes. The core novelty of the system lies in the use of a 2×2 serial/parallel combination of micro-hydro generators. The system features hydro generation with electronically-controllable water flow rates and allows emulation of different household usages

Towards ternary optical communication by soft decoding

Unlike the conventional 2M level soft decision, a new soft decoding technique is proposed on optical ternary system. It is shown that (852,742,6) code improves at 10 dB coding gain whilst increasing the code efficiency

Service differentiated drop code unit for metro ring optical networks

The authors demonstrate using both simulation and experiment, a drop code unit for metro ring optical networks with service differentiation capability. This is achieved by means of a spectral amplitude coding technique whereby the code weight in a particular channel is varied to provide different signal quality levels. Transmission of three channels with different weights operating at 10 Gbps per channel was simulated over a 68 km unamplified and 185 km amplified links of dispersion compensated fibre. Services are perfectly dropped at bit error rates from 10−9 to 10−3, leaving the through service free from accumulated noise. The authors also present a 2.5 Gbps per channel proof-of-concept experiment over 40 km of single-mode fibre (SMF)

Smart city solutions to water management using self-powered, low-cost, water sensors and apache spark data aggregation

We describe a Smart City, self-powered, water monitoring solution that uses low-cost water turbines. These can generate up to ∼ 4 W electrical power whilst reporting flow rates at UK domestic water pressure levels. This permits the novel use of stand-alone, remote Apache Spark Streaming as a distributed alternative to the conventional hierarchical Smart Grid. A future Smart City will have innovative features such as high-frequency monitoring of water flows, automated leak detection and shutdown with no requirement for utility electrical power

Auditory Temporal Resolution in Normal-Hearing Preschool Children Revealed by Word Recognition in Continuous and Interrupted Noise

The purpose of this study was to examine temporal resolution in normal-hearing preschool children. Word recognition was evaluated in quiet and in spectrally identical continuous and interrupted noise at signal-to-noise ratios (S/Ns) of 10, 0, and −10dB−10dB−10dB. Sixteen children 4to5years4to5years4to5yearsof age and eight adults participated. Performance decreased with decreasing S/N. At poorer S/Ns, participants demonstrated superior performance or a release from masking in the interrupted noise. Adults performed better than children, yet the release from masking was equivalent. Collectively these findings are consistent with the notion that preschool children suffer from poorer processing efficiency rather than temporal resolution per se

Self-service infrastructure container for data intensive application

Cloud based scientific data management - storage, transfer, analysis, and inference extraction - is attracting interest. In this paper, we propose a next generation cloud deployment model suitable for data intensive applications. Our model is a flexible and self-service container-based infrastructure that delivers - network, computing, and storage resources together with the logic to dynamically manage the components in a holistic manner. We demonstrate the strength of our model with a bioinformatics application. Dynamic algorithms for resource provisioning and job allocation suitable for the chosen dataset are packaged and delivered in a privileged virtual machine as part of the container. We tested the model on our private internal experimental cloud that is built on low-cost commodity hardware. We demonstrate the capability of our model to create the required network and computing resources and allocate submitted jobs. The results obtained shows the benefits of increased automation in terms of both a significant improvement in the time to complete a data analysis and a reduction in the cost of analysis. The algorithms proposed reduced the cost of performing analysis by 50% at 15 GB of data analysis. The total time between submitting a job and writing the results after analysis also reduced by more than 1 hr at 15 GB of data analysis

Energy-effcient master-slave edge-router upgrade paths in active remote nodes of next-generation optical access

Our design rules offers maximally energy-efficient Gb/s -> Tb/s edge-router upgrade paths. One path assumes 10% average traffic intensity with 68% energy-efficiency gains over 5 upgrades, while 30% traffic load enables 45% energy-efficiency gains over 9 generations