Engineering Commons^™

Extending The Sensing Of Online Social Networks – A Healthcare Perspective, Asma’ Wasfi Fayez Mustafa

Theses

Obesity is a rising health concern in the United Arab Emirates. Obesity leads to health risks such as diabetes, heart disease, and other conditions. It may also lead to eating disorders, depression, and low self-esteem. Regular exercising helps to protect from obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and better manage stress. Despite all the benefits of exercising, people are doing less of it. In this research, an effort is made to encourage people to exercise by extending the prevalent sensing abilities of Online Social Networks (OSNs). Sensors are used to collect and generate data to be processed, clustered and …

Gaussian Beam Scattering From A Deterministic Rough Metal Surface, Qi Wang

Theses

A full-wave theory of plane wave scattering from rough surfaces called the Correction Current (CC) method was recently developed for the two-dimensional scatter problem that have a one-dimensional roughness profile. The method involves a primary field and radiation modes that are plane-wave-type fields that satisfy the boundary conditions at the rough surface. These fields do not satisfy Maxwell's source free equations, but they are forced to satisfy Maxwell's equations with distributed sources upon the introduction of fictitious volume currents distributions which correct for the field errors. Additionally, current sheet distributions are introduced which generate a radiation modal field that satisfies …

Model Predictive Control Of Timed Continuous Petri Nets, Huaiyu Zhan

Theses

This thesis addresses the optimal control problem of timed continuous Petri nets. The theory of Model Predictive Control (MPC) is first discussed. Then continuous Petri nets (PN) are introduced as a powerful tool for modelling, simulation and analysis of discrete event/continuous systems. Their useful capabilities are studied. Finally, a macroscopic model based on PN as a tool for designing control laws that improve the behavior of traffic systems is given. The goal is to find an approach that minimizes the total delay of cars in an intersection by computing the switching sequence of the traffic lights. The simulation results show …

Switched-Capacitor Voltage Doubler Design Using 0.5 Μm Technology, Hanfeng Wang

Theses

While integrated circuit (IC) power management has been an eternal topic for chip designers, inductor based DC-DC converters have been dominant in the field for years. However, because of the natures of inductors: large electro-magnetic interference, high coupling noise, and difficult silicon fabrication process, they are not favorable to on-chip solutions. Switched-capacitor (SC) DC-DC converters, which adopt capacitors for their energy storage components, have become increasingly popular among both the academia and the industry, because, apparently, they avoid the drawbacks of the inductor counterparts, and can be directly implemented on-chip without additional fabrication process.

In this paper, we will investigate …

Location Management And Hybrid Geo-Routing For Urban Vehicular Networks, Aisling O'Driscoll

Theses

In recent years the motivation for comfort applications e.g. infotainment, file exchange and vehicle to vehicle (V2V) multiplayer gaming amongst others, has emerged as an active area of vehicular communications and network research. The success of such applications relies on the ability of a geo-routing protocol to deliver communication packets in a frequently disconnected communication environment. To do this, the location of the destination vehicle must first be determined and secondly, must reliably deliver the packet from source to destination. To determine the location of a target vehicle towards which packets can be forwarded, geo-routing algorithms utilise a location service …

Service And Communication Management In Cooperative Vehicular Networks, Olivia Brickley

Theses

The concept of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) presents new R&D challenges for the transportation and ICT sectors and is currently receiving considerable interest from the research community. The primary objective of ITS is the creation of advanced road traffic systems for improved traffic safety, efficiency, and travelling comfort. Basic vehicle and roadside infrastructure collaboration allows for an increase in efficiency and safety and acts as the foundation for an extensive service set to achieve these ITS goals. Applications such as journey planning, automatic tolling and emergency warnings, among others, are envisaged in a system which can potentially reform modern transportation. …

A Novel Waveform For Emergency Services Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks : The Link Layer Perspective, Sebastian Helmle

Theses

Existing wireless communication systems of emergency services mainly enable ordinary unicast or broadcast voice communications. The increasing demand for data services such as messaging, file transfer, maps, etc requires those long-range communication systems to provide higher data rates while maintaining robustness against link failures. In this thesis, various aspects of a link layer design specifically for narrowband mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) that are targeted at emergency services are investigated.

The major aspect of this thesis is the optimisation of a time division multiple access (TDMA) design considering both efficient and reliable multicast resource reservation. An approach to mathematically describe a …

A New Algorithm For Piecewise Affine System Identification And Its Application To A Mems Switch, Niel Canty

Theses

Over the past ten years, hybrid systems, and piecewise affine (PWA) systems in particular have been viewed as viable option for modelling nonlinear systems. Many methods have been developed to cater for the identification of a PWA model from input/output data. This thesis focuses on the clustering based identification approach. This method uses a Least Squares (LS) identification algorithm which, in this thesis, is shown to perform poorly in practice. The clustering based algorithm is also limited by the number of initialisation parameters that need to be chosen. These parameters have a significant influence on the resulting PWA model accuracy, …