Widad Ismail

Wireless Monitoring of Household Electrical Power Meter Using Embedded RFID with Wireless Sensor Network Platform

Tracking and monitoring system using radio frequency identification (RFID) have gained a lot of improvements especially for applications that need automation with reduction in human intervention and become more interesting nowadays with the increasing market demand for internet of things (IoT) technologies. The objective of this study is to improve the machine-to-machine (M2M) communication using active RFID with wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with heterogeneous data transfer (regardless of power meter type) for monitoring and identification of household electrical consumption. M2M is a popular technology and has become a part of our daily life. WSN through ZigBee technology is applied to monitor data and to read the load consumption from the electrical household power meter by embedding a tag module into the meter. In-house built-in tag was embedded into an electrical power meter with a power management circuit communicating to a reader at an RF signal of 2.45u2009GHz based on the star network topology with the sleep mode function. The experimental results indicated that the electrical power meters with embedded tags successfully worked wirelessly with acceptable mean value of electrical consumption difference in Watts more than those without tags (standalone meter), which is in the range of 2.44u2009W to 2.5u2009W based on 10-hour measurements.

A statistical approach in designing an RF-based human crowd density estimation system

The study of human crowd density estimation (H-CDE) using radio frequency is limited due to the nature of wireless medium and the advancement of visual-based systems. There were two statistical methods, namely, One-Way Analysis of Variance and Design of Experiment applied in designing the H-CDE system. One-Way Analysis of Variance is used to investigate the difference in signal attenuation between dynamic and static crowds. The Design of Experiment is utilized to identify significant crowd properties that affect wireless signal propagation. The significant factors were later trained into the H-CDE algorithm for the purpose of estimating the human crowd density in a defined sector. A sector comprising three placements of 2.4u2009GHz ZigBee wireless nodes continuously reported the received signal strength indicator to the main node. The results showed that the H-CDE system was 75.00% and 70.83% accurate in detecting the low and medium human crowd density, respectively. A signal path loss propagation model was also proposed to assist in predicting the human crowd density. The human crowd properties verified by using the statistical approach may offer a new side of understanding and estimating the human crowd density.

Implementation of high performance advanced encryption standard-128 for WiMAX application on FPGA

Worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) which is also known as IEEE 802.16 standard for broadband wireless access continues to gain popularity as a technology with a significant market potential. This development makes wireless security a very serious concern. Advanced encryption standard (AES) has been widely used for protection in WiMAX application. This study focuses on the implementation of high performance AES-128 algorithm with 128-bit cipher key on field programmable gate array (FPGA) in terms of architectural and throughput differences as well as power consumption rates. Three different AES-128 designs, including the proposed AES-128 design, are introduced and evaluated. Xilinx Virtex5 FPGA is utilized for implementation and verification purposes. Results show that with Virtex5 FPGA, the proposed AES-128 design reduces the slices by 2% and increases the throughput by 95% compared with the reference designs. The proposed AES-128 design also reduces total power consumption by 6% with Virtex5 FPGA.

Categorical statistical approach to satellite retrieved rainfall data analysis in Nigeria

This paperwork describes a comprehensive statistical assessment of rain gauge and satellite- based monthly and annual rainfall measurements over Nigeria during the period of 2001 to 2010. Two statistical methods were empolyed for inter-comparison and validation of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission - TRMM 3B43 V7 rainfall product. TRMM was selected because of the recently developed algorithms to estimate 3D rain distribution from the visual spectrum radiance, radar and microwave sensors. The results of the continuous statistical assessment of the rainfall algorithms show good agreement with rain gauge measurement in term of correlation coefficient and improved mean error tests. The geometric mean of correlation coefficient from all the locations for annual, monthly, wet and dry period are 0.43, 0.79, 0.64, and 0.41 respectively. The categorical analysis assessment is based on the International Telecommunication Union for Radio-communication (ITU-R) recommended threshold for radio propagation. The results of Accuracy and FBI for ITU-R recommendation threshold of 1 to 10% percentage error for radio propagation applications are 0.629 and 0.901 for annual while that of monthly are 0.558 and 0.416. The overall performance of the TRMM based rainfall assessment is encouraging but more improvement is still needed for accurate and sufficient global rainfall estimation. n n Key words: TRMM 3B43 V6, satellite data, cross-validation, categorical statistics, radio propagation, ITU-R.

Development of an improved power-throughput Blowfish algorithm on FPGA

It is well-known that advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm is used for protection against various classes of wireless attacks in wireless communication standard such as WiFi, WiMAX, Zigbee and Bluetooth. However, the AES is a complex algorithm that consumes a larger design core, time, and power source. Hence, this paper presents a development of an improved power-throughput Blowfish algorithm on Zynq-7000 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) as an alternative security algorithm. The proposed memory-based method is used to optimize the performance of Blowfish. The performance is analyzed in terms of its architecture, throughput, and power consumption. Results show that the proposed Blowfish reduces slice usage by 63% and increases throughput by 29% at low power consumption.

An Enhanced ITU-R 837-6 Rain Rate Prediction Model for Tropical Region

This paper presents an enhanced rain rate model based on ITU-R 837-6 rain rate prediction. The improved model is derived from well behaved cumulative distribution function of over 100 rainfall rate samples from tropical region. The performance evaluation results show an improvement of −24.93 and 16.67 % in term of bias and root mean square of the relative estimation error respectively.