Earticle

In this paper, a Dual Channel Allocation (DCA) Scheme for UWB (Ultra Wide Band) with D-MAC (Distributed Medium Access Control) is proposed. Since distributed characteristic of the WiMedia D-MAC supporting DRP (Distributed Reservation Protocol) scheme may cause lots of conflicts, overall performances of the WiMedia D-MAC can be deteriorated. Such DRP termination and renegotiation time delays due to the DRP conflicts can be a critical problem to the mobile devices transceiving real-time QoS traffic streams. Therefore, we propose a DCA mechanism to avoid DRP conflicts by providing a cooperative relay transmission scheme and demonstrate its performance improvements via simulation results.

Clustering is an effective topology control approach, which can prolong the lifetime and increase scalability for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The popular criteria for clustering technique are to select cluster heads with more residual energy and to rotate them periodically. However, hot spots will emerge in real network environment at locations where they have heavy traffic load to transfer. Sensors at such locations quickly deplete their energy resources and die much faster, lending to energy hole and network partition. In this paper, we proposed our Reselection-based Energy Efficient Routing Algorithm (REERA) for WSNs, which determines proper cluster size based on the distance to the base station. After all clusters are formed, cluster heads can be reselected according to the ratio of residual energy of each node to their distance from base station. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can be more efficient in saving energy consumption and prolonging lifetime of WSNs than traditional LEACH algorithm.

The importance of location based service has been recently addressed in many literatures and thus various positioning schemes for outdoors as well as indoors have been introduced. However, there has been a practical issue of implementation over various positioning schemes, although accurate positioning performance can be achieved. In this paper, a practical indoor positioning scheme that effectively locates a pedestrian holding a laptop computer equipped with two commonly used sensors is proposed1, and the performance of proposed scheme is evaluated with experiments for a simple path as well as a real route in indoor of general building at university. According to the experiment results, the positioning error was less than 1m in simple path, while the average error was 1.61m for a real route.

WiFi networks, which have been widely used along with the explosive increases in the supply of smartphones, can provide high network speeds but cannot prevent user information spills though rogue Access Points (APs). Therefore, the present paper proposes a method to exchange SSL session keys through more secure 3G networks to be used in WiFi networks in order to prevent such spills. In the proposed method, only those session keys to be used in SSLs are exchanged through 3G networks, and the remaining application data is transferred through WiFi networks. Therefore, attacks by rogue APs can be prevented with sufficient use of the speedy and efficient WiFi networks.

The fast development in computer and various mobile devices have bought changes to our living environment. Pressing a button to open the door of flat when we are in office is no longer purely imagination in cartoons or films. More importantly, home automation as such provides us an alternative solution to reduce the usage of energy, save costs and conven-ience. This paper reviews the advantages of home automation smart home in Hong Kong and Australia from industry perspective with the help of content analysis.

To extract the direction of arrival of multiple sensors from analysis data by a sensor array is a multiple parameter estimation problem. Some important algorithms for spatial temporal processing have been developed in the past decades. A new direction of arrival estimation method using effects of model errors and sensitivity analysis is proposed. Two subspace are used to form a signal space whose phase shift between the reference signal and its effects of model error signal. Since a desired signal is obtained after interference rejection through correction effects of model error, the effect of channel interference on the estimation is significantly reduced. The proposed method in the number of signal sources detectable is not bounded by the number of antenna elements used. Through simulation, we show that the proposed method offers significantly improved estimation resolution and accuracy relative to existing method.

The self-localization for a mobile robot is very important at indoor environments. In this paper, we propose a relative self-localization estimation algorithm based on relative locations and orientation changes of image features. We also analyze errors caused by a variety of factors to estimate the relative self-localization of a mobile robot and discuss a few techniques to remove them. The proposed relative self-localization algorithm is based on the facts that the global orientation and location of image features are not altered by changing of images. We show that the proposed algorithm is valuable through some simulation examples.

This paper proposes a simple programming language that is a kind of functional concise script for creating a simulation environment with mobile robots as a 3D software toolkit for education. Most robotics simulation toolkits require professional knowledge regarding development language and their APIs, and these prerequisites present a significant obstacle in implementing robotics simulations. In order to resolve these problems, we adopted a functional concise script composed of simplified service commands and minimum options to build a simulation environment. In experiments, we educated high school students and teachers on how to use the proposed robot simulation creation toolkit, and then verified that they could build a robotics simulation environment and control simulated robots easily in a two-day training course.

Carrier Aggregation (CA) is one of the important features of Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-Advanced), which is being standardized in Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) as part of LTE Release 10. This study also presents throughput results based on different parameters; Beyond 20 MHz, the only reasonable way to achieve LTE-Advanced highest target peak-throughput rate is to increase the transmission bandwidth, relative to Release 8. This paper presents a novel LTE-Advanced depending on carrier aggregation to get better performance of the system; the simulation is applied with 8X8 Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) LTE- Advanced using different modulation techniques such as: QPSK, 64QAM (Quadrature amplitude modulation) in order to determine the higher throughput to depend it in design; the maximum throughput result is based on assuming 64QAM data modulation, maximum bandwidth 120 MHz and 5/6 code rates.

Recently, BEMS(Building Energy Management System) are emerging in the field of energy savings. Energy management approaches for Unmanned Building often become unreliable in complex building controls due to False detection, lighting changes, and other factors. We present a new framework to robustly and efficiently to detect people staying and going out based on background subtraction and foreground analysis with complement of tracking to reduce false positives. In our proposed system, the foreground is modeled by Adaptive Gaussian mixtures. In order to handle complex situations, several improvements are implemented for quick lighting change adaptation, shadow removal, fragment reduction, and keeping a stable update rate for video streams with different frame rates. Furthermore, the types of the people staying and going out are determined by using a method that exploits context information about the foreground masks, which significantly outperforms previous edge-based techniques. Lights dimming controls is also integrated to control multiple lights via a single system. The test and evaluation demonstrate our method is efficient to run in real-time while being robust to quick lighting changes and occlusions in real office environments.

Real-time continuous provision of information on the field of the monitoring of water environment with wireless communication technology is a method to monitor the sources of water pollution in a systematical way. In particular, an unattended measurement device on the water environment information collects the data that can be obtained from a remote place in real time and enables significant improvement in reliability and communicability. Therefore, in this paper designed a sensor robot to recognize location with GPS and control it from a remote place and then transmit the measured water quality information in real time with wireless communication.

The development of agriculture has led to the development of civilization. In other words, the development of agriculture is one of the most important factors to the development of human life. So, many studies for the recent agricultural environments focus on the IT-agricultural convergence to aim for smart and ubiquitous agricultural services. However, most of existing IT-agricultural technologies for smart services in agricultural environments are less flexible or less real time because they tend to be dependent on particular systems and use a few of fixed environmental data. And also they always need a human intervention about a variety of exceptional situations. To resolve the limitations and disadvantages, this paper designs the vertical farm ontology that is defined as the environmental, control factors and relationship between each factor for the crop growth using OWL based on RDF. The defined factors in the vertical farm ontology can be extended continuously, and its knowledge can be shared and reused in a various domains of agricultural environment.

With advances in Location-Based Services(LBSs), the motivation for indoor LBSs is becoming stronger since the complexity of indoor spaces. Semantic location model is becoming a pervasive data model to face with this challenge. The hybrid semantic methods and theories are used into this model to define and manage semantic information and location information. In this paper, we analyze some semantic location models based on math and ontology methods including brief description and comparison. We also extract the characteristics of semantic information in the multilayered location model and depict their significances for indoor space LBSs. Finally, we discuss the possible directions of semantic location models for indoor space LBSs.

This paper proposes a real-time livestock monitoring system that could use a mobile platform to diagnose the livestock’s estrus and livestock diseases in early stages. The proposed system enables users to monitor livestock's biometric and image information, which is collected from sensor nodes and CCTV, via smart phones anytime and anywhere in real time, and abnormal conditions of livestock are determined to inform users about them based on such collected livestock-related information, so that users could quickly cope with livestock’s estrus and livestock diseases. It could provide convenience to users through the proposed system, and detect livestock’s estrus and livestock diseases in advance by livestock information to improve productivity resulting from realizing timely fertilization and to cope with livestock diseases beforehand, so that damage could be minimized.

The damage caused by malignant domestic animal infectious disease including AI and FMD has been on the rise throughout the world and in line with increasingly growing trade of livestock products, the need for early monitoring and epidemic prevention at early stage is more than important. This paper is intended to propose the ontology model which will detect the domestic animal infectious disease at early stage using context information and prevent the spread of disease. This study thus is aimed at designing the structure of situational awareness system to which ontology-based context model is applied in a bid to provide the service which will prevent the spreading of epidemic as well as apply through the experimental scenario.

The need for identifying the estrum cycle has been increased in livestock industry as it has the direct effect on productivity and earnings. If failed to detect in timely manner, it may cause a huge loss. In this study, RFID-based estrum detection system on a real-time using RFID tag is proposed. The system is to measure the frequency of approaching by cow to ox using RFID tag and when the frequency reached to certain level, it’s considered estrum and notifies the users of the data using alarm service. Fertilizing in timely manner after detecting the estrum through this system is expected to improve the productivity and income of the farmers.

Expert system is a computer program that is different from other conventional computer programs in that it incorporates specific knowledge, which can be human judgment, experience, and expertise, in order to provide knowledgeable advice to users. The main difference is caused from the structure of an expert system that contains the two loosely coupled parts: knowledge inference engine and knowledge base, instead of one tightly integrated structure. The loose coupling allows knowledge base contents to be dynamically added, removed, modified, or even completely changed to another subject area, whereas the inference engine remains intact and needs no modification. We refer to the knowledge inference engine as an expert system shell because it can be viewed as an outer layer program to infer knowledge advice from the inner knowledge base core. The development of expert system shell can be efficiently achieved through the support of logic-based language such as Prolog. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a different scheme of expert system shell development using a constraint-based paradigm with the ECLiPSe constraint system. Comparisons of the two paradigms have been done in terms of computational time, memory usage, and lines of code. The experimental results reveal that the difference in lines of code of the two paradigms is insignificance, but the constraint-based paradigm uses less memory during execution and provides more concise form of knowledge representation.

Students of a university in Korea have been surveyed in an effort to verify the usage status of smart phone. Based on survey data from 135 participants, the most preferred usage and usual usages of the smartphone are evaluated. Perceived and relative significance of satisfaction to usages of the smartphone according to demographic variables such as sex and academic year have been evaluated. The results indicate that the most important usage of smartphone is ‘REAL-TIME COMMUNICATION’ rather than ‘TELEPHONE’ or ‘INTERNET SEARCH’. ‘STUDY’ usage gets the least response in usual usage and the most important usage of smartphone. ‘REAL-TIME COMMUNICATION’ usage received the most affirmative response in serviceability too. The worst serviceable usage is ‘DMB TV WATCHING’ followed by ‘SHOPPING’ which requires payment function. We found that there is no statistical difference in the most frequent usage of smartphone not only between males and females but also among school year of participants. We found significant differences in perceived satisfaction to ‘DATE BOOK’ usage and ‘DMB TV WATCHING’ according to gender. However, we found that there is no statistical difference in perceived satisfaction to usages of smartphone among school year of participants.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships among creativity, intrinsic/extrinsic motivation and creative home environment. For this study there were 127 young children subjects under age five from 10 kindergarten classes. Data gathered were analyzed for the verification of the hypothesis of this subject for using SPSS 18.0 program. The results of this study were as follows: First, there were significant positive relationships between the intrinsic motivation and the creative personality of the young children but there were no statistically significant relations between the intrinsic/extrinsic motivation and the creative thinking ability. Second, the intrinsic-high/extrinsic-high motivation group was higher than any other types of motivation groups in creative personality. Third, there were significant relationships between the creative thinking ability and creative personality with the creative home environment.

A smartphone is a mobile phone built on a mobile operating system, with more advanced computing capability and connectivity than a feature phone. The mobile operating systems (OS) used by modern smartphones are too diverse such as Google's Android, Apple's iOS, Microsoft's Windows Phone, and so on. Such operating systems can be installed on many different phone models. In these circumstances, smartphone application development is done using native platform such as iPhone using Objective-C, Android using Java, Windows Mobile using C# and so on. Therefore, a cross-platform framework which supports 'Write once and deploy everywhere' is required to support the development of smartphone applications that operate on various modern smartphones. The cross-platform framework should be able to support native device features as well as use new HTML5 Web technologies. This paper presents the HTML5-based cross platform framework which uses PhoneGap and Webkit to support the development of smartphone applications that are written as Web applications, run locally on the smartphone and can leverage native phone capabilities. This paper also shows the development of a sample smartphone application using the cross platform framework.

Gesture based natural human-robot interface is an important function of robot teleoperation system. Such interface not only enables users to manipulate a remote robot by demonstration, but also ensures user-friendly interaction and software reusability in developing a networked robot system. In this paper, an application of gesture-based remote human-robot interaction is proposed using a Kinect sensor. The gesture recognition method combines depth information with traditional Camshift tracking algorithm by using Kinect and employs HMM in dynamic gesture classification. A Client/Server structured robot teleoperation application system is developed, which provides a favorable function of remotely controlling a dual-arm robot by gestural commands. Experiment results validate the practicability and effectiveness of the application system.

This paper describes the development of remote measurement system for smart plug test-bed using the internet. Currently, various remote and virtual laboratories are introduced using the multimedia technologies but the Internet based remote test-bed using the electrical power measurement hardware system is not present. In this paper, we developed the remote electrical power measurement system for smart plug test-bed by combining the GPIB program which controls the hardware with the web programming which controls the internet. The high power load and programmable AC power source were considered as the measurement devices. The client program includes the user-interface and IP camera which carry out power measurement and report remotely. Several electrical measurements were set up to verify the test process. It has been found that the virtual measurements are feasible and valid.

Visual Merchandising Design covers every space, environment, and visually stimulating factor. This includes not only the architectural appearance but interior, graphic sign boards, window display, layout, store appliances, lighting, and even the looks and service attitude that sales employees have and show to customers. Even if good quality merchandise and design hit the shelf of the store, but customers don’t visit the store, those merchandise are not sold. V.M.D aims to display merchandise in multiple ways; to heighten brand images; to steadily lure many customers to the store. One of the characteristics that V.M.D has is, that this abandons the previous design concept which solely puts stress on luxurious interior-focused display; that this displays merchandise in a rational and systemic way and induces customers to buy products. Furthermore, V.M.D intends to provide customers with information; to design the environment of store; to inspire customers to establish an impressive brand image. In this regard, the objective of this study is to study brand perception and effect of V.M.D displayed in the stores, on customers, and thereby to present the concepts of V.M.D, suitable for display in the stores, which can be used continuously in the future.

Dimming system using the wire or wireless communication method is used for the LED light dimming. This system requires a separate communication lines and modem. Such requirements have problems that installation cost increase and compatibility is low. Therefore, these methods are not suitable to apply indoor light. In this paper, we describe the dimming controller to solve problems in conventional dimming system. Also, we present experimental results that show proposed dimming controller is valid.

Single phase induction motors are the most widely used motors for home appliances. The AC induction motor has a simple rugged design. Other advantages include low cost, low maintenance and can be connected directly to an AC power source. When power is supplied to an induction motor at the recommended specifications, it runs at its rated speed [1]. However, many applications need variable speed operation. One of them is a fan. This paper presents a design of a microcontroller based motor controller with heat sensor which is used to vary the speed of a motor in a smart home. The discussion includes the design of a controller that varies the speeds of the motor with respect to the ambient temperature in a smart home environment. The controller is embedded as an addition to a stand fan. A phase control method is selected to be implemented in this design. The power delivery to the motor is controlled by the firing angle of a Triac where it controls the AC power supply. With the firing time controlled by the Triac, the input power to the motor can be controlled accordingly. In addition, a hand-clap circuit is also introduced which acts as a switch to activate or deactivate the motor.

This study aims to create the U-City generation based on the future M2M technology, which has recently been evolved. To this end, we introduce the concept of ‘u-Riverfront’ along Sincheon River flowing through the center of Daegu to create the future urban waterfront space and propose a urban regeneration method through natural connection to the adjacent old towns. To achieve this ‘u-Riverfront’ considering city generation, first, we need to improve the facility management along the current riverside, since pedestrians are less accessible to this area in terms of connection with adjacent areas. Second, we need to induce the IT infrastructures to the public city planning facilities in order to build infrastructures for urban restoration and development projects. Third, we need to provide citizens who use this Sincheon River with various portal service, culture, amenity, and security to lead to a substantial activation of waterfront.

In this paper, for efficient energy consumption through the residential demand response in the smart grid, an optimization algorithm, which can provide a schedule plan for the home appliance usages, is proposed. In order to minimize the average electricity price based on the time-varying electricity price in conjunction with the peak hourly load, which decides the capacity of the electric supply facilities, we establish a mixed integer linear programming problem considering various energy consumption patterns of home appliances. In addition, a photovoltaic system and an energy storage are added to the residential side to achieve further efficient schedule plans. By measuring the power consumptions of the home appliances with respect to the time, we constructed the power consumption patterns of each appliance and numerically analyzed the performance of our algorithm by using a real time-varying electricity price and the solar cell power profile obtained through a mathematical model.

Mobile communication companies choose different mobile platforms from each other so that developers have to create contents for each of the platforms according to their different characteristics or undergo a converting process to provide the game contents to consumers. However, existing mobile game contents require large amounts of time and expenses when converting to be used on different platforms. This is one of the reasons why a variety of contents are not provided on such platforms. In this paper, in order to resolve such problems the game contents of the existing mobile platform, WIPI (Wireless Internet Platform for Interoperability), will be analyzed. Then a resource converter, a source translator and a platform mapping engine will be implemented in order to convert the game contents for use on a smart phone platform, Windows Mobile. A mobile game contents converter system has enabled contents to be transferred into smart phone platforms within a short time, so that the time and money it takes to launch services for different mobile communication companies can be reduced. Furthermore, contents developed for use on feature phones can also be converted and used on smart phone platforms to increase reusability of contents and also new contents creation processes can heighten productivity to consequently provide a more diverse range of mobile game contents to users.

A Smart home provides living environment with comfortable, convenient, energy saving, safety and health care place to people live in. From technology viewpoint, its core is information system with physical manipulation capability which is referred as cyber physical system. Most of such systems available currently are proprietary products which put end users in risk of some issues such as long term support, system compatibility and cost. To address such issues, an approach with emerging open source solutions was discussed. The core of the proposed open source system is Arduino platform. A module for performing functions to implement smart homes also proposed in this paper. It is a typical cyber physical system and consists of input, output and energy monitoring functions. The detail of this module is presented and discussed.

Mobile agents provide an attractive conceptual framework for mobile device-based computing – small threads migrating from server to server, performing their functions, there are still many difficulties that must be addressed. These difficulties are currently preventing the widespread adoption of the technology. Some of the key problems include: security, user and provider psychological resistance, infrastructure integration, interoperability and reliability. Mobile computers and devices may operate in a variety of environments with different security schemes. In this paper, we present a mobile agent for convergence applications model. The model supports the flexible and extensible application specific convergence applications measures required by mobile computers and devices in distributed system. We gave a full description of mobile agent and its migration modes, after discussing the possible convergence applications, the model is explained at length and security analysis is also given in the way of collaboration requirements, mobility requirements and execution requirements.