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open access

Networking and Decentralized Control in Layered Networks: a Theoretical Study and Test-bed Development

Description: Layered structures are commonly used in communication systems, but their roles in decentralized control are not understood well. In the first part of this thesis, a theoretical study of consensus (a typical decentralized control task) in layered structures is conducted. The unique graph topology approach permits explicit characterization of consensus performance based on simple graphical characteristics of MLMG structures. In the second part of this thesis, a generic LEGO test-bed to mimic mult… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Sheth, Vardhman Jayeshkumar
open access

Optimal Sensor Placement for Structural Health Monitoring

Description: In large-scale civil structures, a limited number of sensors are placed to monitor the health of civil structures to reduce maintenance, communication and energy costs. In this thesis, the problem of optimal sensor location placement to infer the health of civil structures is explored. First, a comparative study of approaches from the fields of control engineering and civil engineering is conducted . The widely used civil engineering approaches such as effective independence (EI) and modal assu… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Movva, Gopichand
open access

Reliability of Electronics

Description: The purpose of this research is not to research new technology but how to improve existing technology and understand how the manufacturing process works. Reliability Engineering fall under the category of Quality Control and uses predictions through statistical measurements and life testing to figure out if a specific manufacturing technique will meet customer satisfaction. The research also answers choice of materials and choice of manufacturing process to provide a device that will not only m… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Wickstrom, Larry E.
open access

An Application of Digital Video Recording and Off-grid Technology to Burrowing Owl Conservation Research

Description: Through this research, engineering students and conservation biologists constructed an off-grid video system for observing western burrowing owls in El Paso, Texas. The burrowing owl has a declining population and their range decreasing, driving scientists' interest to see inside the den for observing critical nesting behavior. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) biologists wanted videos from inside the dark, isolated hillside owl burrows. This research yielded a replicable multi-camera … more
Date: August 2014
Creator: Williams, Jennifer M.
open access

Design Space Exploration of Domain Specific CGRAs Using Crowd-sourcing

Description: CGRAs (coarse grained reconfigurable array architectures) try to fill the gap between FPGAs and ASICs. Over three decades, the research towards CGRA design has produced number of architectures. Each of these designs lie at different points on a line drawn between FPGAs and ASICs, depending on the tradeoffs and design choices made during the design of architectures. Thus, design space exploration (DSE) takes a very important role in the circuit design process. In this work I propose the design spa… more
Date: August 2014
Creator: Sistla, Anil Kumar
open access

Dynamic WIFI Fingerprinting Indoor Positioning System

Description: A technique is proposed to improve the accuracy of indoor positioning systems based on WIFI radio-frequency signals by using dynamic access points and fingerprints (DAFs). Moreover, an indoor position system that relies solely in DAFs is proposed. The walking pattern of indoor users is classified as dynamic or static for indoor positioning purposes. I demonstrate that the performance of a conventional indoor positioning system that uses static fingerprints can be enhanced by considering dynamic… more
Date: August 2014
Creator: Reyes, Omar Costilla
open access

The Effect of Mobility on Wireless Sensor Networks

Description: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained attention in recent years with the proliferation of the micro-electro-mechanical systems, which has led to the development of smart sensors. Smart sensors has brought WSNs under the spotlight and has created numerous different areas of research such as; energy consumption, convergence, network structures, deployment methods, time delay, and communication protocols. Convergence rates associated with information propagations of the networks will be ques… more
Date: August 2014
Creator: Hasir, Ibrahim
open access

An Interactive Framework for Teaching Fundamentals of Digital Logic Design and VLSI Design

Description: Integrated Circuits (ICs) have a broad range of applications in healthcare, military, consumer electronics etc. The acronym VLSI stands for Very Large Scale Integration and is a process of making ICs by placing millions of transistors on a single chip. Because of advancements in VLSI design technologies, ICs are getting smaller, faster in speed and more efficient, making personal devices handy, and with more features. In this thesis work an interactive framework is designed in which the fundame… more
Date: August 2014
Creator: Battina, Brahmasree
open access

Teaching Fundamentals of Digital Logic Design and VLSI Design Using Computational Textiles

Description: This thesis presents teaching fundamentals of digital logic design and VLSI design for freshmen and even for high school students using e-textiles. This easily grabs attention of students as it is creative and interesting. Using e-textiles to project these concepts would be easily understood by students at young age. This involves stitching electronic circuits on a fabric using basic components like LEDs, push buttons and so on. The functioning of these circuits is programmed in Lilypad Arduino… more
Date: August 2014
Creator: Inampudi, Sivateja
open access

Design and Application of a New Planar Balun

Description: The baluns are the key components in balanced circuits such balanced mixers, frequency multipliers, push–pull amplifiers, and antennas. Most of these applications have become more integrated which demands the baluns to be in compact size and low cost. In this thesis, a new approach about the design of planar balun is presented where the 4-port symmetrical network with one port terminated by open circuit is first analyzed by using even- and odd-mode excitations. With full design equations, the p… more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Mohamed, Younes
open access

Design of Tunable/Reconfigurable and Compact Microwave Devices

Description: With the rapid development of the modern technology, radio frequency and microwave systems are playing more and more important roles. Since the time the first microwave device was invented, they have been leading not only the military but also our daily life to a new era. In order to make the devices have more practical applications, more and more strict requirements have been imposed. For example, good adaptability, reduced cost and shrank size are highly required. In this thesis, three devic… more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Zhou, Mi
open access

Development of a Cost Effective Wireless Sensor System for Indoor Air Quality Monitoring Applications

Description: Poor air quality can greatly affect the public health. Research studies indicate that indoor air can be more polluted than the outdoor air. An indoor air quality monitoring system will help to create an awareness of the quality of air inside which will eventually help in improving it. The objective of this research is to develop a low cost wireless sensor system for indoor air quality monitoring. The major cost reduction of the system is achieved by using low priced sensors. Interface circuits … more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Abraham, Sherin
open access

Development of High Gain Ultraviolet Photo Detectors Based on Zinc Oxide Nanowires

Description: Semiconductor nanowires acts as an emerging class of materials with great potential for applications in future electronic devices. Small size, large surface to volume ratio and high carrier mobility of nanowires make them potentially useful for electronic applications with high integration density. In this thesis, the focus was on the growth of high quality ZnO nanowires, fabrication of field effect transistors and UV- photodetectros based on them. Intrinsic nanowire parameters such as carrier … more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Mallampati, Bhargav
open access

Dual-band Microwave Device Design

Description: This thesis presents a brief introduction to microwave components and technology. It also presents two novel dual-band designs, their analysis, topology, simulation and fabrication. In chapter 2, a novel dual-band bandpass filter using asymmetric stub-loaded stepped-impedance resonators (SLSIRs) operating at 1 and 2.6 GHz is shown. This type of design applies suitable arrangements to improve the filter’s performance. Then, in chapter 3, a novel dual-band balun (transforms unbalanced input sign… more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Li Shen, Andres E.
open access

An Implementation of Consensus Through Bluetooth Communication

Description: This thesis provides an implementation of consensus of multi-agent networked systems. Consensus problem is an important issue of distributed computing and has various algorithms and applications in the field of electronical and computer science. The consensus requests all nodes of a network reach an agreement over a certain measurement. An algorithm of convergent consensus problem is implemented through a small network of Bluetooth communication in the thesis. The connections of the Bluetooth d… more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Wang, Yinan
open access

A Lego Mindstorms Nxt Based Test Bench for Multiagent Exploratory Systems and Distributed Network Partitioning

Description: Networks of communicating agents require distributed algorithms for a variety of tasks in the field of network analysis and control. For applications such as swarms of autonomous vehicles, ad hoc and wireless sensor networks, and such military and civilian applications as exploring and patrolling a robust autonomous system that uses a distributed algorithm for self-partitioning can be significantly helpful. A single team of autonomous vehicles in a field may need to self-dissemble into multiple… more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Patil, Riya Raghuvir
open access

A Low-cost Wireless Sensor Network System Using Raspberry Pi and Arduino for Environmental Monitoring Applications

Description: Sensors are used to convert physical quantity into numerical data. Various types of sensors can be coupled together to make a single node. A distributed array of these nodes can be deployed to collect environmental data by using appropriate sensors. Application of low powered short range radio transceivers as a communication medium between spatially distributed sensor nodes is known as wireless sensor network. In this thesis I build such a network by using Arduino, Raspberry Pi and XBee. My goa… more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Ferdoush, Sheikh Mohammad
open access

Low Leakage Asymmetric Stacked Sram Cell

Description: Memory is an important part of any digital processing system. On-chip SRAM can be found in various levels of the memory hierarchy in a processor and occupies a considerable area of the chip. Leakage is one of the challenges which shrinking of technology has introduced and the leakage of SRAM constitutes a substantial part of the total leakage power of the chip due to its large area and the fact that many of the cells are idle without any access. In this thesis, we introduce asymmetric SRAM cell… more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Ahrabi, Nina
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