Arbab Waheed Ahmad

Implementation of ZigBee-GSM based home security monitoring and remote control system

Home security and control is one of the basic needs of mankind from early days. But today it has to be updated with the rapidly changing technology to ensure vast coverage, remote control, reliability, and real time operation. Deploying wireless technologies for security and control in home automation systems offers attractive benefits along with user friendly interface. In this paper, implementation of a novel security and control system for home automation is presented. The proposed system consists of a control console interfaced with different sensors using ZigBee. Suspected activities are conveyed to remote user through SMS (Short Message Service) or Call using GSM (Global System for Mobile communication) technology. Upon reply, the remote user can control his premises again through GSM-ZigBee combination. Besides, traditional burglar alarm enhances security in case of no acknowledgment from remote user. This system offers a low cost, low power consumption and user friendly way of a reliable portable monitoring and control of the secured environment. Using the concept of serial communication and mobile phone AT-commands (Attention Telephone/Terminal commands), the software is programmed using C-language. The design has been implemented in the hardware using ZigBee EM357 module, Atmega128 MCU (microcontroller unit) and Sony Ericsson T290i mobile phone set.

Energy-Efficient Intelligent Street Lighting System Using Traffic-Adaptive Control

Lighting, both indoor and outdoor, consumes a substantial amount of energy, making improved efficiency a significant challenge. A promising approach to address outdoor lighting is the smart control of public lighting. Smart lighting using electronically controlled light-emitting diode (LED) lights for adaptable illumination and monitoring is being used to achieve an energy efficient system. However, the traffic engineering integrated with smart control for energy optimization has not been widely used. In this paper, a novel concept of traffic-flow-based smart (LED) street lighting for energy optimization is proposed. The developed smart grid architecture-based system uses low power ZigBee mesh network to provide maximum energy efficiency in response to adaptive traffic on the road. Moreover, the scalable wireless network of smart LED lights offers improved reliability, reduced cost, and more user satisfaction. In order to validate the performance, the proposed system was implemented and tested in a real environment inside a university campus. Experimental results show that in comparison with the replaced conventional metal halide lighting, our system is capable of 68%-82% energy savings depending on the variations in daylight hours between summer and winter. A significant reduction in greenhouse gases, improved overall system reliability, and reduced maintenance due to smart control suggests promising results for future wide-area deployment.

Maximizing throughput with wireless spectrum sensing network assisted cognitive radios

In a cognitive radio network (CRN), secondary users (SUs) utilize primary users (PUs) licensed spectrum in an opportunistic manner. Spectrum sensing is of the utmost importance in CRN to find and use the available spectrum without harmful interference to the PUs. Conventionally, to implement spectrum utilization, SUs are required to sense the primary spectrum first and then transmit data on the available spectrum. In this paper, we propose a dedicated wireless spectrum sensing network (WSSN), eliminating sensing overhead from SUs with the aim of improving achievable throughput. With WSSN assistance, we eliminate sensing time from the SUs frame, hence increasing the transmission time, which maximizes the achievable throughput. Additionally, the sensing duration is increased by deploying a dedicated WSSN, decreasing the probability of false alarm and achieving a targeted high probability of detection. A low probability of false alarm increases the spectrum utilization, improving the achievable throughput, while a high detection probability ensures PUs protection. Moreover, the proposed technique also addresses hidden and exposed terminal problems along with smooth spectrum mobility. Finally, we provide simulation results to demonstrate the proposed techniques, effectiveness. In the results, we have compared the achievable throughput of the proposed scheme with that of conventional CRN.

Macrocells-User Protected Interference-Aware Transmit Power Control for LTE-A Heterogeneous Networks

In Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) heterogeneous networks (HetNets), small cells are deployed within the coverage area of macrocells having 1 : 1 frequency reuse. The coexistence of small cells and a macrocell in the same frequency band poses cross-tier interference which causes outage for macrocells users and/or small cell users. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose two algorithms that consider the received interference level at the evolved NodeB (eNB) while allocating transmit power to the users. In the proposed algorithm, the transmit power of all users is updated according to the target and instantaneous signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratio (SINR) condition as long as the effective received interference at the serving eNB is below the given threshold. Otherwise, if the effective received interference at the eNB is greater than the threshold, the transmit power of small cell users is gradually reduced in order to guarantee the target SINR for all macrocells users, aiming for zero-outage for macrocells users at the cost of an increased outage ratio for small cell users. Further, in the second algorithm, the transmit power of all users is additionally controlled by the power headroom report that considers the current channel condition while updating the transmit power which results in the outage ratio decreasing for small cell users. The extensive system-level simulations show significant improvements in the average throughput and outage ratio when compared with the conventional transmit power control technique.

Sensor fusion based energy efficient and sustainable smart parking system

With the rapid increase in urban population and hence the automobiles, parking has emerged as a resource with fair amount of energy consumption, air pollution and traffic congestion in almost every major city around the globe. Therefore, its efficient management in terms of both energy and space is not only necessitated to save a lot of energy, but also plays a pivotal role to obtain environment friendly green cities. In this article, we proposed a smart energy efficient parking system, which integrates the image recognition techniques for license plate recognition, infrared sensor for group control and wireless sensor network (WSN) for intelligent light emitting diode (LED) lighting. The system offers better guidance to parking position, controls LED lights based on traffic distribution for maximum energy efficiency, and offers enhanced security as compared to its counterpart conventional system. The system is built on ZigBee based Wireless Mesh network (WMN) nodes equipped with image sensor and RF module. The vehicles in the parking lot are detected and recognized using the grid based algorithm and license plate image recognition. The concept of zoning or lighting group control algorithm is integrated with moving object tracking algorithm to control the array of lights to attain the maximum energy efficiency and reduced Greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. In comparison to conventional parking and normal lighting, the proposed system presents the substantial amount of energy savings, less environmental pollution and enhanced surveillance. Moreover, the embedded advantage of improved reliability, reduced maintenance and low cost due to smart control suggests very satisfactory and optimistic results for future implementation of the system as an integrated part of smart cities.

Location Awareness in 5G Networks Using RSS Measurements for Public Safety Applications

One of the notable aspects of public safety applications in 5G networks is location awareness, which is a feature of contemporary technology that imparts details about a user’s geographical location to another user or application. Mobile users take their cell phones and other gadgets with them almost everywhere. Thus, integrating location awareness in mobile applications gives users a much more real experience. Therefore, this paper presents an algorithm to predict user location in 5G networks by using received signal strength measurements. Initially, the relative coordinates of users are computed using Isomap. Then the relative coordinates of users are transformed by Procrustes analysis. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, the Cramer–Rao lower bound is derived, which is the lower bound on error variance. It can be concluded from our results that the proposed approach outperforms those found in the existing literature.

Real time bidirectional wireless digital multiplexer (WiDMX512)

Digital multiplexers 12 (DMX 512) is a standard for digital data transmission mainly to control stage lighting. Conventional DMX512 employs bus topology in a daisy chain network. The network consists of one master and one or more slave devices connected through wires. Although wired connection validates reliable data transfer, yet it increases network complexity, specifically, where wires can be prohibitively lengthy. Additionally, wired connected DMX512 devices limits mobility and scalability while on other hand it increases labor and cost. Hence, there exists a need to replace the wired DMX512 with the wireless one. In this paper, we propose a wireless DMX512 system. Keeping in consideration the characteristics given by the DMX512 standard, we propose a novel design where master and slave can transfer DMX512 packets wirelessly. Simulation results and successful implementation validated the performance of the system.