Abstract

The radiant systems consume less energy and provide better thermal comfort as compared to the Conventional system, but the main drawback of this technology is condensation and inability to cater the latent load. These challenges have directed many researchers to move their emphasis towards Personalized Conditioning System which aims to generate a microclimate zone near the vicinity of occupant according to need. This study is focused on Personalized Conditioning System when it is combined with a radiant system. The objectives of this study are 1) Evaluate the performance analysis of the system in cooling mode and, 2) Evaluate the performance of PRCS for cooling mode on different radiant cooling systems. An experimental setup of an office cubicle has been designed and fabricated using radiant panels at MNIT Jaipur, India. Three cases of the experiment were designed to evaluate and compare the performance of the system which are: Only Radiant Cooled Ceiling System (RCCS), Only Personalized Radiant Cooling System (PRCS), and both PRCS and RCCS coupled. It was observed that PRCS alone is sufficient to reach the thermal comfort criteria with low energy consumption, but it was unable to maintain the background temperature. When PRCS coupled with RCCS, it gives maximum thermal comfort for high supply water temperature ranging from 17 °C to 21 °C.

Abstract

This paper describes a software system for automatically generating a reference (baseline) building energy model from the proposed (as-designed) building energy model. This system is built using the OpenStudio Software Development Kit (SDK) and is designed to operate on building energy models in the OpenStudio file format.

Abstract

Unplanned large scale developmental projects in recent times have been causing alterations in land use land cover [LULC] at spatial and temporal scales with the substantial changes in the landscape. Uttara Kannada district has the distinction of having highest forest cover in India.Forest ecosystems in the district have witnessed major transformations due to industrialization during the post-independence. Impact of developmental activities during the post-independence era, is evident from barren hill tops due to deforestation. The analysis of temporal spatial data acquired through space borne sensors highlights the decline of evergreen-semi evergreen forest cover from 67.73% (1973) to 32.08% (2013). The ad-hoc approaches adopted in the implementation of developmental projects in the ecologically sensitive regions has impaired the ecosystem services affecting the people’s livelihood. The changes in the landscape structure with LULC changes have altered the functional abilities of an ecosystem evident from lowered hydrological yield, disappearing perennial streams, higher instances of human–animal conflicts, declined ecosystem goods, etc. About 64355 Ha of forest land is diverted for various non-forestry activities during the last four decades by the government apart from encroachment of 7072 Ha of forest area for agriculture, horticulture activities, etc. Encroachment of forest land has resulted in the land degradation leading to reduce dproductivity. Alterations in bio-geo chemical and hydrological cycles have necessitated the restoration of native forests in the region to ensure water and food security, and livelihood of the local people. Monitoring and visualization of landscape dynamics helps in evolving appropriate manage-ment strategies. LULC dynamics analyses considering agents (developmental projects) through fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) integrated with Markov cellular automata (CA) indicate the developmental projects such as West Coast Paper Mill (WCPM) and Kaiga Nuclear PowerHouse (KNPH) will lead to further fragmentation of forests with spurt in urbanization by 2022.This necessitates framing appropriate policy measures to sustain natural resources focusing on the landscape’s ecological, hydrological, economic and social factors.

Abstract

Cognitive radio offers a novel solution to over-come the problem of spectrum underutilization by providing spectral access to secondary users. The television (TV) bands are of particular interest for secondary usage due to their high penetration power and greater coverage. These licensed bands are occupied only in few regions while in most of the other regions they are unoccupied and are termed asTV white space(TVWS). The estimation of TVWS has mostly been done by usingthe statistical and empirical propagation models. In this paper,terrain data is incorporated into the estimation of TVWS and shown to improve the quantitative estimation of TVWS. Using the relevant transmitter information and terrain data in the Indian state of Telangana, the efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated. The performance of the proposed approach is compared to that of widely used H at a propagation model. It is shown that the accuracy in TV coverage estimation increases onan average by 45% while incorporating terrain data as compared to using only empirical propagation model. As area outside theTV coverage is TVWS, the increased accuracy in the estimation of TV coverage directly translates to improved accuracy in the estimation of TVWS, which in turn translates into more efficient use of spectrum and better interference management

Abstract

A switching converter (dc-dc) cascaded with parallel low-dropout (LDO) regulators gives the best tradeoff in terms of high system efficiency and low output ripple for automotive power management ICs (PMICs). The minimum dc-dc output voltage is dependent on the highest LDO output and its corresponding dropout voltage. An adaptive LDO dropout technique based on maximum load current selector circuit has been proposed to improve the moderate and light load system efficiency of the hybrid PMIC with dc-dc supplying three independent LDO regulators. The circuit has been fabricated in AMS 0.35-μm high-voltage CMOS process and tested across wide supply voltage of 6-18 V, wide temperature range of -40 °C to 150 °C, and maximum load of 450 mA to meet the harsh automotive application requirements. The adaptive dropout circuit has minimal overhead (<;2%) in terms of area compared to fixed dropout architectures and negligible current consumption overhead. The overall system efficiency improvement of about 3%-10% is achieved with adaptive dropout scheme as per the experimental results. The concept is independent of dc-dc and LDO architecture and can be extended to many system-on-a-chip-based power supplies with dc-dc and LDO combination.

Abstract

Development of ultra-wide band(UWB) technology is a major area in the present day technological developments in the radars and allied applications. They have a special application in the field of Intentional Electromagnetic Interference(IEMI). High Power Electromagnetic (HPEM) technology was developed particularly to achieve this IEMI. Generation and radiation are two major sub-technologies that fulfill the requirement of HPEM. This paper deals with the development of efficient and simple radiating elements to accomplish this requirement. The facts are experimentally proved for the two well-known structures, bi-cone and dipole, with a voltage of 50kV in the air dielectric medium. The measurement methodology is also discussed in brief. Dipole would be a first option to be adopted for this type of applications due to its simple structure and easily accommodate itself in the system.

Abstract

An All Programmable System-on-Chip (SoC) solution consisting of a hardened processor and a programmable fabric solution has been identified as a growing heterogeneous programmable platform catering to variety of application areas including communication, remote radio head, and software-defined radio and so on. The process to boot such a SoC with embedded processor and programmable fabric has been a challenge considering the complexity involved in multiple stages of booting. The boot sequence typically involves loading of first stage loader, configuring the programmable fabric with configuration bitstream followed by loading of user boot loader. Booting with typical boot devices like Quad Serial Peripheral Interface (QSPI), NAND or NOR flash results in increased boot time. The embedded PCI Express block in such SoC can be used as a carrier for the boot image including the user boot loader and the bitstream. The boot loader can be transferred from a remote host PC to the SoC's on chip memory over PCle link. Such boot process imparts significant improvement in boot time and ensures boot image security since the boot images can be stored in a secure processing system. Using boot over PCIe methodology, the authors have experimentally found 20x improvement in boot time over the state-of-the-art boot mechanisms.

Abstract

High-speed serial communication protocols are widely used in modern communication systems. High-speed serial protocols enable bandwidth scalability and system cost reduction. Full duplex serial communication involves a bi-directional data transfer from the link partners. A simplex communication channel enables one-way data transmission from one link partner to the other. Simplex channels are used in systems where uni-directional data transfer is required, for example a display device. Simplex channels further reduce the overall system cost. Initializing the simplex communication channel is challenging because of the lack of a back channel to communicate the link status from the receiver to the transmitter. Most of the protocols include a simplex sideband channel to communicate the link status. A sideband channel adds to the overall system cost. In this paper, the authors have discussed about a novel initialization methodology to initialize the high-speed simplex communication link to achieve 2x saving in logic area and 1.5x increase in latency.

Abstract

The popularity of digital currencies, especially cryptocurrencies, has been continuously growing since the appearance of Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s security lies in a proof-of-work scheme, which requires high computational resources at the miners. Despite advances in mobile technology, existing cryptocurrencies cannot be maintained by mobile devices due to their low processing capabilities. Mobile devices can only accommodate mobile applications (wallets) that allow users to exchange credits of cryptocurrencies. In this work, we propose LocalCoin, an alternative cryptocurrency that requires minimal computational resources, produces low data traffic and works with off-the-shelf mobile devices. LocalCoin replaces the computational hardness that is at the root of Bitcoin’s security with the social hardness of ensuring that all witnesses to a transaction are colluders. Localcoin features (i) a lightweight proof-of-work scheme and (ii) a distributed blockchain. We analyze LocalCoin for double spending for passive and active attacks and prove that under the assumption of sufficient number of users and properly selected tuning parameters the probability of double spending is close to zero. Extensive simulations on real mobility traces, realistic urban settings, and random geometric graphs show that the probability of success of one transaction converges to 1 and the probability of the success of a double spending attempt converges to 0.

Abstract

There are numerous situations when a service requester wishes to expertsourcea series of identical but non-trivial tasks from a pool of experts so as to achieve an assured accuracy level for each task, in a cost optimal way. The experts available are typically heterogeneous with unknown but fixed qualities and different service costs. The service costs are usually private to the experts and the experts could be strategic about their costs. The problem is to select for each task an optimal subset of experts so that the outcome obtained after aggregating the opinions from the selected experts guarantees a target level of accuracy. The problem is a challenging one even in a non-strategic setting since the accuracy of an aggregated outcome depends on unknown qualities. We develop a novel multi-armed bandit (MAB) mechanism for solving this problem. First, we propose a framework, Assured Accuracy Bandit (AAB)framework, which leads to a MAB algorithm, Constrained Confidence Bound for Non-Strategic Setting (CCB-NS). We derive an upper bound on the number of time steps this algorithm chooses a sub-optimal set, which depends on the target accuracy and true qualities. A more challenging situation arises when the requester not only has to learn the qualities of the experts but has to elicit their true service costs as well. We modify the CCB-NS algorithm to obtain an adaptive exploration separated algorithm Constrained Confidence Bound for Strategic Setting (CCB-S). The CCB-S algorithm produces an ex-post monotone allocation rule that can then be transformed into an ex-post incentive compatible and ex-post individually rational mechanism. This mechanism learns the qualities of the experts and guarantees a given target accuracy level in a cost optimal way. We also provide a lower bound on the number of times any algorithm must select a sub-optimal set and we see that the lower bound matches our upper bound up to a constant factor. We provide insights on a practical implementation of this framework through an illustrative example and demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms through simulations