Simon Winberg

Smart communication networks standards for smart energy management

This paper reports on a study focused on smart energy management using advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). The paper digs into AMI communication standards understood and proposed by power utilities and regulators. Furthermore, the paper discusses a study of different AMI communication networks architectures designed by various proprietors and compares these system architectures with requirements stated by utilities and regulators. It appears that most AMI architectures are proprietary which hinders flexible interworking of components from different vendors. Without standard AMI design principles, utilities face inflexible choice of system components. Furthermore, this inflexibility makes it harder and more costly to support this type of equipment design approach. Standardisation and collaboration is important to ensure interworking of equipment from heterogeneous manufacturers. Applying standardised principles in design of interfacing and communication technologies used to interconnect the AMI components promotes interworking of systems. For a system to be classified as an AMI system, it must meet certain functional requirements. It should provide a two-way communication between the utility and the consumer. It should have built-in automatic configuration and control. The system should run over a communication network. AMI meters have connect/disconnect functions, and quality of supply reporting system. Other services AMI systems support are load control switch for load limiting capability, fault reporting system, and tamper detection for revenue protection. At control level, load management system and vending management systems are included. This paper reports on different proprietary architectures and analyses them in terms of functional requirements and need for standardisation. The AMI system communication network architectures are compared with standards defined by utilities in countries such as South Africa, China and the United States of America.

Exploring the latency-resource trade-off for the Discrete Fourier Transform on the FPGA

This paper provides a novel way of trading increased resource utilisation for decreased latency when computing a single Discrete Fourier Transform on the FPGA. Analysis conducted on the Cooley-Tukey FFT optimisation shows that it increases the number of operations in the critical path of the transform computation. Consequentially an algorithm is proposed which allows control over the degree to which the Cooley-Tukey optimisation is utilised, trading between resource utilisation and absolute latency. The resource utilisation and latency results for the MyHDL implementation of the proposed algorithm upon the Rhino platform are provided which demonstrate that a practical Pareto curve has been established for a variety of dataset sizes. This implementation is also compared to Xilinxs FFT IP core, providing 14% better latency performance than the manufacturers implementation albeit at a greater resource cost.

The RHINO platform: charging towards innovation and skills development in software defined radio

This paper presents a pilot study on the development of a reconfigurable computing platform for use in prototyping Software Defined Radio (SDR) applications and building technical knowledge in this specialist area. SDR is becoming an increasingly popular approach for building experimental radio and radar systems, giving researchers significant flexibility in choosing bandwidths, modulation and other operational parameters traditionally fixed by front-end hardware. The SDR approach involves constructing and testing radio applications on reusable platforms, thereby reducing costs and time spent changing physical layer hardware. This paper discusses use of the Reconfigurable Hardware Interface for comptiNg and radiO (RHINO) platform as a hardware platform for novice engineers to develop SDR skills and to prototype radio systems.

IEEE 802.11 OFDM Software Defined Radio beacon frame transmission

A transmit chain test bed is used in the project presented in this paper to test an 802.11g OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) Software Defined Radio (SDR) base station beacon frame transmitter. Several prior Gnuradio test bed setups show how a Gnuradio SDR Transmitter is able to communicate with another Gnuradio SDR. This paper additionally shows how a Gnuradio SDR Transmitter is able to visibly communicate with off-the-shelf 802.11 WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) off-the-shelf chips. Results of the implementation show that a SDR base station is successfully able to communicate with traditional WLAN off-the-shelf communication chips found inside devices such as laptops, netbooks and mobile phones, which were used as the OFDM beacon frame receptors.

‘I take engineering with me': epistemological transitions across an engineering curriculum

ABSTRACT In this paper we study epistemological transitions across an intended engineering curriculum and recommend strategies to assist students in attaining the increasingly complex concepts and insights that are necessary for transition to advanced levels of study. We draw on Legitimation Code Theory [Maton, Karl. 2014, Knowledge and Knowers: Towards a Realist Sociology of Education. Abingdon: Routledge], in particular the dimensions of sematic gravity and semantic density, to explain these transitions. Data for the study was obtained from a curriculum renewal project that reveals how engineers understand engineering knowledge. We find an interdependent relationship between semantic gravity and semantic density in the intended engineering curriculum. The complexity of the context and the problems that arise from it pose strong cognitive challenges. The semantic gravity wave rises and falls across the engineering curriculum s, enabling both abstraction and a focus on ‘real world’ problems in specialised knowledge fields. Control of the semantic gravity wave is key to the provision of ‘epistemological access’ [Morrow, Wally, ed. (2003) 2009. Bounds of Democracy: Epistemological Access in Higher Education. Reprint, Pretoria: HSRC Press] to engineering knowledge.

UAV Collision Avoidance: A Specific Acceleration Matching control approach

The potential uses for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is vast. However, much of their potential can only truly be unlocked by giving them a higher level of autonomy. This paper focuses on an autonomous Collision Avoidance System using Specific Acceleration Matching, which is termed the ‘CASSAM’ in this paper. This approach is being studied as it may prove an effective means to increase the level of autonomy of UAVs. The paper presents the design of the CASSAM first by modelling the UAV dynamics and then by designing suitable control algorithms. Simulation results in 2D show that it is a viable option to address the UAV collision avoidance problem having effectively evaded threats with minimal control effort.

Fynbos leaf online plant recognition application

Computer-aided plant identification combines computer vision and pattern recognition. The Cape Floristic Kingdom is the most varied of plant kingdoms, comprising thousands of species of fynbos plants. While it is easier to classify fynbos when they are flowering, mostly flower for only a few weeks in a year. This paper concerns an image processing application for automatic identification of certain fynbos using leaf photographs. The architecture of this application is overviewed prior to focusing on the leaf recognition operations, and how these were experimentally tested using a series of experiments, culminating in a comprehensive test to measure identification accuracy, effectiveness of the online user interface, and the processing speed. Our conclusions reflect on the overall effectiveness of the application and our plans to take it further.

Software-Defined Radio FPGA Cores: Building towards a Domain-Specific Language

This paper reports on the design and implementation of an open-source library of parameterizable and reusable Hardware Description Language (HDL) Intellectual Property (IP) cores designed for the development of Software-Defined Radio (SDR) applications that are deployed on FPGA-based reconfigurable computing platforms. The library comprises a set of cores that were chosen, together with their parameters and interfacing schemas, based on recommendations from industry and academic SDR experts. The operation of the SDR cores is first validated and then benchmarked against two other cores libraries of a similar type to show that our cores do not take much more logic elements than existing cores and that they support a comparable maximum clock speed. Finally, we propose our design for a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) and supporting tool-flow, which we are in the process of building using our SDR library and the Delite DSL framework. We intend to take this DSL and supporting framework further to provide a rapid prototyping system for SDR application development to programmers not experienced in HDL coding. We conclude with a summary of the main characteristics of our SDR library and reflect on how our DSL tool-flow could assist other developers working in SDR field.

Sound source localisation on Android smartphones: A first step to using smartphones as auditory sensors for training A.I systems with Big Data

The ability to estimate positions of sound sources is one that gives animals a 360° awareness of their acoustic environment. This helps complement the visual scene which is restricted to 180° in humans. Unfortunately, deaf people are left out on this ability. Smart phones are rapidly becoming a common tool amongst mobile users in developed and emerging markets. Their processing ability has more than doubled since their introduction to mass consumer markets by Apple in 2007. Top-end smart phones such as the Samsung Galaxy Series; 3, 4, and 5 models, have two microphones with which one can acquire stereo recordings. The purpose of this research project was to establish a feasible Sound source localization algorithm for current top-end smart phones, and to recommend hardware improvements for future smart phones, to pave way for the use of smart phones as advanced auditory sensory devices capable of acting as avatars for intelligent remote systems to learn about different acoustic scenes with help of human users.

A domain-specific language to facilitate software defined radio parallel executable patterns deployment on heterogeneous architectures

In this paper, we present a domain-specific language, referred to as OptiSDR, that matches high level digital signal processing (DSP) routines for software defined radio (SDR) to their generic parallel executable patterns targeted to heterogeneous computing architectures (HCAs). These HCAs includes a combination of hybrid GPU-CPU and DSP-FPGA architectures that are programmed using different programming paradigms such as C/C++, CUDA, OpenCL, and/or VHDL. OptiSDR presents an intuitive single high-level source code and near specification-level approach for optimization and facilitation of HCAs. OptiSDR uses an optimized embedded domain-specific language (DSL) compiler framework called Delite. Our focus is on the programming language expressiveness for parallel programming and optimization of typical DSP algorithms for deployment on SDR HCAs. We demonstrate the capability of OptiSDR to express the solution to the issues of parallel DSP low-level implementation complexities in the closest way to the original parallel programming of SDR systems. This paper will achieve these by focusing on three generic parallel executable patterns suitable for DSP routines such as cross-correlation, convolution in FIR filter based Hilbert transformers, and fast Fourier transforms for spectral analysis. This paper concludes with a performance analysis using DSP algorithms that tests automatically generated code against hand-crafted solutions.