Systems and Communications Commons^™

Experimental Investigation Of Reading Passive Uhf Tags In A Multi-Tag Environment, Yi Zhou

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Recently, the Internet of things (IoT) has emerged as a promising solution for several industrial applications. One of the key components in IoT is passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags which do not require a power source for operations. Specifically, ultra-high frequency (UHF) tags are studied in this paper. However, due to factors such as tag-to-tag interference and inaccurate localization, RFID tags that are closely spaced together are difficult to detect and program accurately with unique identifiers. This thesis investigates several factors that affect the ability to encode a specific tag with unique information in the presence of other tags, …

Contributions To Edge Computing, Vernon K. Bumgardner

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Efforts related to Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Machine to Machine (M2M) technologies, Industrial Internet, and Smart Cities aim to improve society through the coordination of distributed devices and analysis of resulting data. By the year 2020 there will be an estimated 50 billion network connected devices globally and 43 trillion gigabytes of electronic data. Current practices of moving data directly from end-devices to remote and potentially distant cloud computing services will not be sufficient to manage future device and data growth.

Edge Computing is the migration of computational functionality to sources of data generation. The importance of …

Power Budgets For Cubesat Radios To Support Ground Communications And Inter-Satellite Links, Otilia Popescu

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

CubeSats are a class of pico-satellites that have emerged over the past decade as a cost-effective alternative to the traditional large satellites to provide space experimentation capabilities to universities and other types of small enterprises, which otherwise would be unable to carry them out due to cost constraints. An important consideration when planning CubeSat missions is the power budget required by the radio communication subsystem, which enables a CubeSat to exchange information with ground stations and/or other CubeSats in orbit. The power that a CubeSat can dedicate to the communication subsystem is limited by the hard constraints on the total …

Hovercam, Kevin Rauh, Ross Palenik

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Quadcopters are widely used in recreational areas and often have video cameras mounted to them. The Hovercam increases the range of usefulness of quadcopters and allow the user to record him or herself while performing any task. The Hovercam will use GPS to track and follow a target. A smartphone application will be used to control the Hovercam in its basic functions of taking off, hovering, and landing.

Packmule, Jared M. Alexander, Jared J. Ford, Timothy J. Griffiths, Andray Pennington

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

People face demands of hauling equipment and belongings with them every day, whether it be for work or leisure. This design report discusses and details a product that would allow people to overcome the struggles of this. The Packmule is an autonomous following robot that has the capability of carrying a load up to 30 pounds. The design involves two independently controlled motors operating two drive wheels so that the Packmule will be flexible in the directions it can move. There are also two more steering wheels for support of the base and the load inside. The way in which …

System For Workout Information Management, Mark Archual, Ethan E. Schweinsberg

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Power racks are a weight machine used by swimmers to provide resistance while they swim away from a wall toward the center of the pool. The objective of this project is to build a modular data system that can be added to these machines to record and log quantitative information during their use. This information will be stored on a web server, and made available to the user for analysis and visualization through a web application. Workout data can also be downloaded and interpreted at a later time, independent of the web application. The data system should be water resistant, …

Indoor Mapping Drone, Benjamin J. Plevny, Andrew Armstrong, Miguel Lopez, Davidson Okpara

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project addresses the need for an autonomous indoor mapping system that will create a 3D map of an unknown physical environment in real time. The aerial system moves and avoids obstacles autonomously, without the need for human remote control or observation. An aerial system produces a map of an unknown indoor environment by transmitting data received from the aerial device’s sensors. The transmission occurs over a wireless channel from the aerial device to a remote server for processing and storage of the data. As the transmission is done in real time, the aerial system does not require hardware for …

Smart Underground Antenna Arrays: A Soil Moisture Adaptive Beamforming Approach, Abdul Salam, Mehmet C. Vuran

School of Computing: Technical Reports

In this paper, a novel framework for underground beamforming using adaptive antenna arrays is presented. Based on the analysis of propagation in wireless underground channel, a theoretical model is developed which uses soil moisture information and feedback mechanism to improve performance wireless underground communications. Array element in soil has been analyzed empirically and impacts of soil type and soil moisture on return loss and resonant frequency are investigated. Beam patterns are investigated to communicate with both underground and above ground devices. Depending on the incident angle, refraction from soil-air interface has the adverse effects in the UG communications. It is …

A Hybrid State/Event Driven Communication-Based Control For Dc Microgrids, Yusef Esa

Dissertations and Theses

The U.S. electric power industry is undergoing unprecedented changes triggered by the growing electricity demand, and the national efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, there is a call for increased power grid resiliency, survivability and self-healing capabilities. As a result of these challenges, the smart grid concept emerged. One of the main pillars of the smart grid is microgrids. In this thesis, the technical merits of clustering multiple microgrids during blackouts on the overall stability and supply availability have been investigated.

We propose to use the existing underground distribution grid infrastructure, if applicable, during blackouts to form microgrid clusters. …

A Host Board Design For An Experiment System Of Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks, He Huang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Evaluation of theoretical innovation in field experiments plays an important role for research in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs). During the experiments, the problems of power consumption, costs, and assembly of underwater nodes concern researchers all the time. This project develops a host board for an UWSNs field experiment system. This host board solves the above problems by deploying power management module, utilizing cheap and low power consumption chips (Raspberry Pi and MSP430), and rationalizing layout.

The main functions of the host board include battery monitoring, on-board DC converters, remotely power supply control, data ports bridge, and pluggable module for …

Secure Cloud Controlled Software Defined Radio Network For Bandwidth Allocation, Isaac J. Cushman

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of mobility of wireless devices for opportunistic spectrum access and communications using National Instrument Universal Software Radio Peripherals devices. The overall system utilizes software defined radio networks for frequency allocation, cloud connectivity to maintain up-to-date information, and moving target defense as a security mechanism. Each USRP device sends its geolocation to query the spectrum database for idle channels. The cloud cluster was designed for complex data storage and allocation using a smart load balancer to offer ultra-security to users. This project also explores the advantages of data protection and security …

Magneto Inductive Communication System For Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks, Niaz Ahmed

Doctoral Dissertations

"Underwater wireless sensor networks have found a number of applications in underwater environment monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, military applications and ocean exploration. Among the four possible means of underwater wireless communication, namely acoustic, electromagnetic (EM), magneto-inductive (MI) and optics communication, MI communication enjoys the advantages of being low cost and robust equally in air, water and soil. This dissertation presents design and implementation of a low-power and low-cost MI sensor network node that is suited for long-term deployment of underwater and underground infrastructure monitoring, such as bridge scour and levee scour monitoring. The designed MI sensor node combat the directionality of …

Node Localization In Underwater Sensor Networks (Uwsn), Huai Huang

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation focuses on node localization in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) where anchor nodes have knowledge of their own locations and communicate with sensor nodes in acoustic or magnetic induction (MI) means. The sensor nodes utilize the communication signals and the locations of anchor nodes to locate themselves and propagate their locations through the network.

For UWSN using MI communications, this dissertation proposes two localization methods: rotation matrix (RM)-based method and the distance-based method. Both methods require only two anchor nodes with arbitrarily oriented tri-directional coils to locate one sensor node in the 3-D space, thus having advantages in …

Omni-Directional Infrared 3d Reconstruction And Tracking Of Human Targets, Emrah Benli

Theses and Dissertations

Omni-directional (O-D) infrared (IR) vision is an effective capability for mobile systems in robotics, due to its advantages: illumination invariance, wide field-of-view, ease of identifying heat-emitting objects, and long term tracking without interruption. Unfortunately, O-D IR sensors have low resolution, low frame rates, high cost, sensor noise, and an increase in tracking time. In order to overcome these disadvantages, we propose an autonomous system application in indoor scenarios including 1) Dynamic 3D Reconstruction (D3DR) of the target view in real time images, 2) Human Behavior-based Target Tracking from O-D thermal images, 3) Thermal Multisensor Fusion (TMF), and 4) Visual Perception …

Accurate Acoustic Ranging System Using Android Smartphones, Mohammadbagher Fotouhi

Theses and Dissertations

ACCURATE ACOUSTIC RANGING SYSTEM USING ANDROID SMARTPHONES

By Mohammadbagher Fotouhi, Master of Science

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science at Virginia Commonwealth University

Virginia Commonwealth University 2017

Major Director: Dr. Ruixin Niu, Associate Professor of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

In this thesis, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of an android ranging system, a high-accuracy acoustic-based ranging system which allows two android mobile phones to learn their physical distance from each other.

In this system we propose a practical solution for accurate ranging based on acoustic communication …

Smart Connector Helmet & Automatic Gps Inovasi Alat Bantu Komunikasi Antar Pengemudi Dan Penunjuk Arah Berbasis Internet, Nur Hasanah

Elinvo (Electronics, Informatics, and Vocational Education)

Perancangan smart connector helm dan automatic GPS bertujuan untuk membantu komunikasi antar pengemudi dan sebagai penunjuk arah yang berbasis internet. Alat bantu komunikasi ini terpasang di helm dan terkoneksi dengan smartphone. User dapat berkomunikasi antar Helm dengan Helm yang lain melalui jaringan wireless sinyal radio dari HT. Helm juga terhubung pada smartphone menggunakan bluetooth. Smartphone berfungsi sebagai penunjuk arah dengan adanya GPS dan aplikasi pendukung yang dibuat. Selain itu, pengemudi juga dapat menerima telfon dan mendengarkan musik dengan helm tanpa harus memegang smartphone. Metode perancangan menggunakan pendekatan water fall. Hasil rancangan diperoleh: (a) kerangka Helm yang …

Smart Door Locks Based On Internet Of Things Concept With Mobile Backend As A Service, Muhammad Izzuddin Mahali

Elinvo (Electronics, Informatics, and Vocational Education)

Smart Door Locks System Based on Internet of Things Concept with Mobile Backend as s Service is the smart door locks development are supported by cloud computing technology as data storage. Methods of development that exist in this system is to combine technology (1) ESP8266 (2) Firebase and (3) Android Apps. Firebase is one of cloud-based services that are used to store data online. ESP8266 able to communicate with firebase well to process the read and write data directly using internet communication channels. Android application used to direct communication to the firebase for monitoring and controlling simultaneously to the system. …

Data Logging System For A Synthetic Aperture Radar Unit, Nicholas J. Testin, Philip Davis, Ian Dorell, Alexander Gillespie

KSU Journey Honors College Capstones and Theses

A small, existing radar unit lacked the ability to automatically store the data it was receiving, which made its use clunky and cumbersome. A system was constructed to allow an on-board microprocessor to track distance traveled, and automatically store the data output from the radar unit to a portable memory unit for later data processing. Distance traveled is determined using a specially designed mobile cart, which electronically converts the rotation of a wheel into an electrical signal while also providing stability for taking accurate radar measurements. The output data from the radar unit is stored as a properly-formatted sound file …

Identity‐Based Schemes For A Secured Big Data And Cloud Ict Framework In Smart Grid System, Feng Ye, Yi Qian, Rose Qingyang Hu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Smart grid is an intelligent cyber physical system (CPS). The CPS generates a massive amount of data for efficient grid operation. In this paper, a big data‐driven, cloud‐based information and communication technology (ICT) framework for smart grid CPS is proposed. The proposed ICT framework deploys hybrid cloud servers to enhance scalability and reliability of smart grid communication infrastructure. Because the data in the ICT framework contains much privacy of customers and important data for automated controlling, the security of data transmission must be ensured. In order to secure the communications over the Internet in the system, identity‐based schemes are proposed …

Identity-Based Schemes For A Secured Big Data And Cloud Ict Framework In Smart Grid System, Feng Ye, Yi Qian, Rose Qingyang Hu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Smart grid is an intelligent cyber physical system (CPS). The CPS generates a massive amount of data for efficient grid operation. In this paper, a big data-driven, cloud-based information and communication technology (ICT) framework for smart grid CPS is proposed. The proposed ICT framework deploys hybrid cloud servers to enhance scalability and reliability of smart grid communication infrastructure. Because the data in the ICT framework contains much privacy of customers and important data for automated controlling, the security of data transmission must be ensured. In order to secure the communications over the Internet in the system, identity-based schemes are proposed …