The increasing use of wireless networks and the constant miniaturization of electrical devices has empowered the development of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). In these networks various sensors are attached on clothing or on the body or even implanted under the skin. The wireless nature of the network and the wide variety of sensors offer numerous new, practical and innovative applications to improve health care and the Quality of Life. The sensors of a WBAN measure for example the heartbeat, the body temperature or record a prolonged electrocardiogram. Using a WBAN, the patient experiences a greater physical mobility and is no longer compelled to stay in the hospital. This paper offers a survey of the concept of Wireless Body Area Networks. First, we focus on some applications with special interest in patient monitoring. Then the communication in a WBAN and its positioning between the different technologies is discussed. An overview of the current research on the physical layer, existing MAC and network protocols is given. Further, cross layer and quality of service is discussed. As WBANs are placed on the human body and often transport private data, security is also considered. An overview of current and past projects is given. Finally, the open research issues and challenges are pointed out.

/pdf/a-survey-on-wireless-body-area-networks-f3nx5ii4yv.pdf

A survey on wireless body area networks

With the arrival of smart grid era and the advent of advanced communication and information infrastructures, bidirectional communication, advanced metering infrastructure, energy storage systems and home area networks would revolutionize the patterns of electricity usage and energy conservation at the consumption premises. Coupled with the emergence of vehicle-to-grid technologies and massive distributed renewable energy, there is a profound transition for the energy management pattern from the conventional centralized infrastructure towards the autonomous responsive demand and cyber-physical energy systems with renewable and stored energy sources. Under the sustainable smart grid paradigm, the smart house with its home energy management system (HEMS) plays an important role to improve the efficiency, economics, reliability, and energy conservation for distribution systems. In this paper, a brief overview on the architecture and functional modules of smart HEMS is presented. Then, the advanced HEMS infrastructures and home appliances in smart houses are thoroughly analyzed and reviewed. Furthermore, the utilization of various building renewable energy resources in HEMS, including solar, wind, biomass and geothermal energies, is surveyed. Lastly, various home appliance scheduling strategies to reduce the residential electricity cost and improve the energy efficiency from power generation utilities are also investigated.

Smart home energy management systems: Concept, configurations, and scheduling strategies

Innovations in the residential sector are required to reduce environmental impacts, as the sector is a contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The increasing demand for electricity and the emergence of smart grids have presented new opportunities for home energy management systems (HEMS) in demand response markets. HEMS are demand response tools that shift and curtail demand to improve the energy consumption and production profile of a dwelling on behalf of a consumer. HEMS usually create optimal consumption and productions schedules by considering multiple objectives such as energy costs, environmental concerns, load profiles and consumer comfort. The existing literature has presented several methods, such as mathematical optimization, model predictive control and heuristic control, for creating efficient operation schedules and for making good consumption and production decisions. However, the effectiveness of the methods in the existing literature can be difficult to compare due to diversity in modelling parameters, such as appliance models, timing parameters and objectives. The present chapter provides a comparative analysis of the literature on HEMS, with a focus on modelling approaches and their impact on HEMS operations and outcomes. In particular, we discuss a set of HEMS challenges such as forecast uncertainty, modelling device heterogeneity, multi-objective scheduling, computational limitations, timing considerations and modelling consumer well-being. The presented work is organized to allow a reader to understand and compare the important considerations, approaches, nomenclature and results in prominent and new literary works without delving deeply into each one.

Home energy management systems: A review of modelling and complexity

http://www.lcc.uma.es/~eat/pdf/itor2013.pdf

Parallel metaheuristics: recent advances and new trends

Current progress in wearable and implanted health monitoring technologies has strong potential to alter the future of healthcare services by enabling ubiquitous monitoring of patients. A typical health monitoring system consists of a network of wearable or implanted sensors that constantly monitor physiological parameters. Collected data are relayed using existing wireless communication protocols to a base station for additional processing. This article provides researchers with information to compare the existing low-power communication technologies that can potentially support the rapid development and deployment of WBAN systems, and mainly focuses on remote monitoring of elderly or chronically ill patients in residential environments.

A Survey on Wireless Body Area Networks for eHealthcare Systems in Residential Environments

With the exploding power consumption in private households and increasing environmental and regulatory restraints, the need to improve the overall efficiency of electrical networks has never been greater. That being said, the most efficient way to minimize the power consumption is by voluntary mitigation of home electric energy consumption, based on energy-awareness and automatic or manual reduction of standby power of idling home appliances. Deploying bi-directional smart meters and home energy management (HEM) agents that provision real-time usage monitoring and remote control, will enable HEM in “smart households.” Furthermore, the traditionally inelastic demand curve has began to change, and these emerging HEM technologies enable consumers (industrial to residential) to respond to the energy market behavior to reduce their consumption at peak prices, to supply reserves on a as-needed basis, and to reduce demand on the electric grid. Because the development of smart grid-related activities has resulted in an increased interest in demand response (DR) and demand side management (DSM) programs, this paper presents some popular DR and DSM initiatives that include planning, implementation and evaluation techniques for reducing energy consumption and peak electricity demand. The paper then focuses on reviewing and distinguishing the various state-of-the-art HEM control and networking technologies, and outlines directions for promoting the shift towards a society with low energy demand and low greenhouse gas emissions. The paper also surveys the existing software and hardware tools, platforms, and test beds for evaluating the performance of the information and communications technologies that are at the core of future smart grids. It is envisioned that this paper will inspire future research and design efforts in developing standardized and user-friendly smart energy monitoring systems that are suitable for wide scale deployment in homes.

https://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/jcnc/2012/932181.pdf

A Survey of Communications and Networking Technologies for Energy Management in Buildings and Home Automation

Wave-steering is a new design methodology that realizes high throughput circuits by embedding layout friendly synthesized structures in silicon. In the wave-steering design methodology, cir?cuits inherently utilize latches. Inside the synthesized structures they are used for signal skewing, and on the interconnects to guar?antee the correct arrival times at the inputs. Recently, we proposed a novel high-throughput FPGA architecture based on the wave-steering design principle to handle throughput-intensive applica?tions. Previously our work was focussed mainly on the Logic Block (LB) design. In this paper we discuss a pipelined intercon?nect scheme to support the strict timing requirements that is neces?sitated by the wave-steered design style. We characterize designs that best fit the new architecture and show that as technology scales down towards deep submicron (DSM), this FPGA fabric shows an increasing throughput performance.

Interconnect pipelining in a throughput-intensive FPGA architecture

Microfluidics-based biochips are soon expected to revolutionize biosensing, clinical diagnostics and drug discovery. Robust off-line and on-line test techniques are required to ensure system dependability as these biochips are deployed for safety-critical applications. Due to the underlying mixed-technology and mixed-energy domains, biochips exhibit unique failure mechanisms and defects. We first relate some realistic defects to fault models and observable errors. We next set up an experiment to evaluate the manifestations of electrode-short faults. Motivated by the experimental results, we present a testing and diagnosis methodology to detect catastrophic faults and locate faulty regions. The proposed method is evaluated using a biochip performing real-life multiplexed bioassays.

/pdf/testing-and-diagnosis-of-realistic-defects-in-digital-5ga84wzbco.pdf

Testing and Diagnosis of Realistic Defects in Digital Microfluidic Biochips

In this paper, we present a novel, high throughput field-programmable gate array (FPGA) architecture, PITIA, which combines the high-performance of application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and the flexibility afforded by the reconfigurability of FPGAs The new architecture, which targets datapath circuits, uses the concepts of wave steering and pipelined interconnects We discuss the FPGA architecture and show results for performance, power consumption, clock network performance, and routability Results for some commonly used datapath designs are encouraging with throughputs in the neighborhood of 625MHz in 025-/spl mu/m 25-V CMOS technology Results for random benchmark circuits are also shown We characterize designs according to their Rent's exponents and argue that designs with predominantly local interconnects are the best fit in PITIA We also show that as technology scales down toward deep submicron, PITIA shows an increasing throughput performance

PITIA: an FPGA for throughput-intensive applications

Microfluidics-based biochips are soon expected to revolutionize biosensing, clinical diagnostics and drug discovery. Robust off-line and on-line test techniques are required to ensure system dependability as these biochips are deployed for safety-critical applications. Due to the underlying mixed-technology and mixed-energy domains, biochips exhibit unique failure mechanisms and defects. We first relate some realistic defects to fault models and observable errors. We next set up an experiment to evaluate the manifestations of electrode-short faults. Motivated by the experimental results, we present a testing and diagnosis methodology to detect catastrophic faults and locate faulty regions. The proposed method is evaluated using a biochip performing real-life multiplexed bioassays

/pdf/defect-oriented-testing-and-diagnosis-of-digital-450w1vnfdt.pdf

Arindam Mukherjee

Papers

A Survey of Communications and Networking Technologies for Energy Management in Buildings and Home Automation

Interconnect pipelining in a throughput-intensive FPGA architecture

Testing and Diagnosis of Realistic Defects in Digital Microfluidic Biochips

PITIA: an FPGA for throughput-intensive applications

Defect-oriented testing and diagnosis of digital microfluidics-based biochips