New electrodynamic tether technology

New Electrodynarnic Tether Technology (NETT) is an experiment we proposed to ESA as part of the Columbus Precursor Flights. It was designed to fly as an exposed payload in the Spacelab carrier. Its primary objective is performance testing for the innovative bare tether concept. The experiment also includes two scientific objectives, specific for uninsulated tethers: i) detection of artificial auroral effects produced by secondary electron emission, and ii) detection of VLF wave emission. Additional objectives of the project are space performance of an electron-emitting hollow cathode and engineering verification of an open-loop deployment strategy.

LTE as the future railway communication system: benefits and challenges

In this paper the main challenges associated with the migration process towards LTE, will be assessed. These challenges comprise, among others, the next key topics: Reliability, Availability Maintainability and Safety (RAMS) requirements, end to end Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, system performance in high speed scenarios, communication system deployment strategy, and system backward compatibility as well as the future system features for delivering railway services. The practical evaluation of the LTE system capabilities and performance in High Speed Railway (HSR) scenarios, require the development of an LTE demonstrator and an LTE system level simulator. Under this scope, the authors have developed an RF LTE demonstrator, as well as an LTE system level simulator, that will provide valuable information for the assessing of LTE performance and suitability in real HSR scenarios. This work is being developed under the framework of a research project to evaluate the feasibility of LTE to become the new railway communication system. The companies and universities involved in this project are: Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Alcatel Lucent Spain, ADIF (Spanish Railway Infrastructure Manager), Metro de Madrid, AT4 Wireless, the University of A Coruña (UDC) and University of Málaga (UMA).

A Bayesian strategy to enhance the performance of indoor localization systems

This work describes the probabilistic modelling af a Bayesian-based mechanism to improve location estimates of an already deployed location system by fusing its outputs with low-cost binary sensors. This mechanism takes advantege of the localization captabilities of different technologies usually present in smart environments deployments. The performance of the proposed algorithm over a real sensor deployment is evaluated using simulated and real experimental data.

Self-adaptive strategy based on fuzzy control systems for improving performance in wireless sensors networks

The solutions to cope with new challenges that societies have to face nowadays involve providing smarter daily systems. To achieve this, technology has to evolve and leverage physical systems automatic interactions, with less human intervention. Technological paradigms like Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are providing reference models, architectures, approaches and tools that are to support cross-domain solutions. Thus, CPS based solutions will be applied in different application domains like e-Health, Smart Grid, Smart Transportation and so on, to assure the expected response from a complex system that relies on the smooth interaction and cooperation of diverse networked physical systems. The Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN) are a well-known wireless technology that are part of large CPS. The WSN aims at monitoring a physical system, object, (e.g., the environmental condition of a cargo container), and relaying data to the targeted processing element. The WSN communication reliability, as well as a restrained energy consumption, are expected features in a WSN. This paper shows the results obtained in a real WSN deployment, based on SunSPOT nodes, which carries out a fuzzy based control strategy to improve energy consumption while keeping communication reliability and computational resources usage among boundaries.