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In this paper, a smart home electric energy saving system is built up by combining smart devices (smart meter and smart plug), communication modules, and smart mobile phones. The functions of the smart meter include display and storage of total power consumption, electric energy parameters, and abnormal operation conditions, etc. Besides, user can check power consumption information remotely, and the electric energy saving of appliance is implemented by smart plug under the control of smart phone. The smart plug consists of different communication modules, load control unit, and LCD display. Home members can use smart phone to check the power consuming information via internetwork, and the control of electric appliance can be implemented by the App on the smart phone through the WiFi interfaces. Moreover, the power information at the smart plug can be transmitted to the smart meter by ZigBee modules. Finally, to confirm the performance of the smart home electric energy saving system, a prototype was built up and tested at lab, and the test results validate the feasibility of the proposed system.

Apache Hadoop system is a software framework with the capability to process large-scale datasets across a cluster of distributed machines using MapReduce programming model. However, there are two main challenges for system administrators to manage the Hadoop system, (1) system administrators are difficult to tune the parameters appropriately since the behaviors and characteristics of large-scale distributed systems are too complicated, (2) there are dozens of configuration parameters affecting the system performance which makes the configuration parameters tuning task becomes troublesome. In this paper, we focus on optimizing the Hadoop MapReduce job performance by tuning configuration parameters, and then we propose an analytical method to help system administrators choose approximately optimal configuration parameters depending on the characteristics of each application. Our approach has two key phases: prediction and optimization phase. The prediction phase is to estimate the performance of a MapReduce job, whereas the optimization phase is to search the approximately optimal configuration parameters strategically by invoking the predictor repeatedly. In our evaluation results, our work can help system administrators to improve the performance about 2X to 8X better than traditional methods.

This paper proposes a home electric energy saving network which consists of a smart meter and a smart plug. The smart meter can not only measure electric power parameters of a load also identify the operation status of a device which is connected to the smart plug. Therefore, the standby power consumption of the device can be reduced to the minimum through the electric energy management algorithm. Besides, real time electric energy consumption and standby power information will be delivered to the assigned user through the communication network of the smart meter; so, the reliability and the effectiveness of home electric energy management can be improved. For the hardware structure, the system includes digital signal processors (DSPs), a power energy IC, a smart plug and a communication module. Regarding software development, the system has the following functions: energy recording, standby power consumption management, electric billing, and power information collection. The system prototype is installed at a personal residence, and the performance is validated by the test results.

For the synthesis of white-light phosphor, red Eu3+ with different concentrations was co-doped into the blue LaPO 4 :Tm phosphor. It was found that the luminance at wavelength of 454 nm decreased gradually; on the contrary, reddish-orange emission at wavelength 594 nm was strengthened when the Eu3+ concentration was increased. The maximum red luminescent intensity was obtained when 7 mol% of Eu3+ was doped. Obviously, energy transfer between Tm3+ and Eu3+ occurred. Consequently, white-light emission was observed.

Due to the flourishing development of mobile communications, Internet businesses, and mobile broadband, handheld mobile communications equipment is commonplace and the number of mobile phone users and fixed-line broadband users is growing rapidly every day. As the telecom industry stores massive amounts of users' personal Information, operators need to uphold users' trust in them, so users can enjoy the telecommunication services worry-free! Personal information security is of major concern in society today and also a social responsibility of enterprises. In response to the new Personal Information Protection Act in Taiwan, how carriers with imported information security management system can integrate the new Personal Information Protection Act to achieve their custodial responsibility must be discussed. Through the key management elements of ISO27001 & ISO27011 that correspond to the norms set to the appropriate security maintenance measures in Article 12 of the new Personal Information Protection Act Enforcement Rules in Taiwan, how carriers can strengthen management and educational training in compliance with the Act also requires discussion in Taiwan.

An all-digital polar transmit (TX) architecture exhibits advantages of low cost, low power, as well as reconfigurability with full usage of digital computational power. The design challenge is the need for continuous innovation to further enhance power efficiency and minimize silicon area while achieving the best-in-class RF performance. The design must also meet the increasing demand of concurrent operation for multi-radio SoC integration. The presented Bluetooth TX demonstrates advancements in this direction with over 30% power and 66% area reduction.

In this paper two low-cost microprocessors are employed to build up a internet-based instrument system for remote monitoring of power quality, the instrument system can collect various types of power quality disturbances in interactive or automatic mode. Besides, an SD data storage device is used to save raw data which can be also uploaded to a database server via internet, users can access the server by an ordinary browser to effectively realize the information of power quality conditions at a certain location. The built-up prototype of the system is tested in different ways, and the test results validate the performance and feasibility of the instrument system.

A compliant two-fingered microgripper was designed, fabricated, and demonstrated. To accommodate objects of various sizes and weights, the gripper is distributively actuated by shape memory alloy (SMA) wires so that high gripping range to gripper length ratio and mechanical advantage are achieved. A SMA actuated gripper model is presented to predict SMA strain and gripper deflection by using measurements from force sensors. Based on this model, design of finger shape and specification of SMA wire dimension are facilitated. Two grippers with different stiffness are prototyped and their motion characteristics demonstrated. Due to the large stress provided by SMA wires, high gripping force can be obtained. The SMA contraction force to deflect gripper and produce gripping force may be adjusted by changing the input power to SMA wire. We further investigate the feasibility of self-sensing contraction force by using SMA resistance signal. With the capabilities of the gripper shown, we expect that it can be applied for miniature robotic manipulations.

The scalable video coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC was designed to support bandwidth efficient and loss resilient video streaming. Its multilayer predictive encoding enables user devices to adapt their video reception by extracting and decoding selected code layers according to device display capability and network throughput. However, this desirable feature is much harder to realize in practice as the reduction of coding efficiency causes inflation of SVC bitstreams. Consequently, an SVC multicast session among clusters of heterogeneous devices may consume more bandwidth than an AVC simulcasting session. In this paper, we propose a bandwidth efficient scheme for conducting heterogeneous SVC multicasting. The proposed scheme employs a combination of three transport techniques: (1) broadcasting of SVC layers in local service subnets, (2) multipath transport of SVC layers over long- haul networks and (3) aggregation of data flows along transport paths. This scheme is particularly suited for delivering SVC bitstreams to different user devices scattered over geographically dispersed local subnets. Preliminary simulation experiments performed over lossless networks showed that the scheme can introduce from 2:1 to 6:1 reduction of up-stream bandwidth for SVC layer transport. It can also maintain 85% transport efficiency while minimizes PSNR loss of most user devices even under heavy traffic. We expect the proposed scheme will achieve better rate- distortion performance than AVC simulcasting over lossy networks if unequal erasure protection (UEP) will be applied to the lower SVC layers. Further investigation of its potential is currently underway.

some of the most challenging scenarios for peer-to-peer multimedia applications arise when the applications require real-time interactions among their users. In those cases, the expectation of sub-second responses prohibits the use of popular P2P IPTV software because those programs invariably use large video buffers to amortize the propagation delays of individual frames and thus cause notable and dispersed viewing latencies among their users. The performance of these programs degrade even further if the users are connected to home networks that offer narrow uplink channels or through wireless links that experience frequent throughput fluctuations. In order to overcome these shortcomings, we develop Trickle, a peer-to-peer real-time media streaming system that can transport H.264 video streams with low link stresses (less than 250Kb/s) and stable sub-second frame delays through the use of erasure correction codes along with the clever construction of multiple multicast trees and the recruitment of many peer helpers. This paper presents the first fruits of our work including the principles and mechanisms of Trickle, its simulated performance based on H.264 video traces and its merit comparisons against SplitStream, the first application layer multicasting protocol for video streaming, and CoolStreaming, a news-making P2P IPTV program that works like BitTorrent.