Peter Cole

Street furniture such as bins, seats and bus shelters can become “smart” with the inclusion of wireless sensor nodes, which consist of environmental sensors, wireless modules, processors and microcontrollers. One of the most crucial challenges for smart street furniture is how to manage power consumption efficiently without affecting data freshness. In this work, we propose a novel Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)architecture for smart street furniture. Unlike existing WSNs which are based on a one-way communication model between wireless sensor nodes and the server, the proposed architecture employs a two-way communication model and a dynamic adaptation of the time interval of measurements to balance between power consumption and data updates. Our approach also provides a real-time low-power design for wireless sensor nodes which efficiently communicate the updated data instead of sending the same data on a regular basis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the relevant literature which extends the functionality of the wireless module in wireless sensor nodes to act not only as a station sending environmental data but also as soft Access Point (AP), sensing MAC addresses and WiFi signal strengths from surrounding WiFi-enabled devices. We have conducted experiments on the Murdoch University campus and our results show that our proposal improves lifetime of wireless sensor nodes up to 293% compared to static architectures similar to the ones that have been proposed in the literature. Moreover, network bandwidth is improved up to 38% without affecting data freshness. Finally, storage space for the database at the server is reduced up to 99%.

Top-down sanitation programs that promote a specific sanitation technology based on the presumptions of 'outside experts' have been criticised for endorsing unsustainable, expensive and inappropriate technologies. In response to these failings, a new era of demand-led sanitation programs (including community-led total sanitation and sanitation marketing) encourage greater participation of users to create appropriate sanitation technologies. This paper examines the use of participatory design sessions with local builders and householders in three rural districts in Malawi. The paper provides an account of the participatory design methodology and critically reflects on the processes and challenges in relation to power, creativity and ownership. The designs created during the sessions are presented with recommendations for further testing and structural refinement.

Mobile phones nowadays are equipped with multiradio interfaces which allow radio link connections to an array of wireless networks. The presence of these interfaces however, introduces serious concerns. These interfaces consume huge amounts of energy thus can quickly drain their batteries and reduce the length of usage of the mobile phones. In this paper, a new activation service is proposed to reduce the energy consumption in mobile phones. The basic idea behind this proposal is to introduce an auxiliary receiver that is able to receive a special signal from the access point and activate the wireless interfaces on the mobile phone. During idle times, the wireless interfaces are switched off to reduce its idle power - the energy a device consumes in `standby' state. When call or data arrives, the auxiliary receiver will receive notification from an access point and activate the relevant wireless interface on the mobile phone to receive the data or call. Through this activation service, we believe that power consumption can be reduced thus increase the longevity of mobile phone usage.

Indoor Wireless sensor networks require a highly dynamic, adaptive routing scheme to deal with the high rate of topology changes due to fading of indoor wireless channels. Besides that, energy consumption rate needs to be consistently distributed among sensor nodes and efficient utilization of battery power is essential. If only the link reliability metric is considered in the routing scheme, it may create long hops routes, and the high quality paths will be frequently used. This leads to shorter lifetime of such paths; thereby the entire network's lifetime will be significantly minimized. This paper briefly presents a reliable load-balanced routing (RLBR) scheme for indoor ad hoc wireless sensor networks, which integrates routing information from different layers. The proposed scheme aims to redistribute the relaying workload and the energy usage among relay sensor nodes to achieve balanced energy dissipation; thereby maximizing the functional network lifetime. RLBR scheme was tested and benchmarked against the TinyOS-2.x implementation of MintRoute on an indoor testbed comprising 20 Mica2 motes and low power listening (LPL) link layer provided by CC1000 radio. RLBR scheme consumes less energy for communications while reducing topology repair latency and achieves better connectivity and communication reliability in terms of end-to-end packets delivery performance.

As the increasing reliance on electronic mail (email) continues, unsolicited bulk email (SPAM) also continues to grow because it is a very cheap way for advertising. These unwanted emails are now causing a serious problem in clogging the Internet traffic and filling up the email inboxes thereby leaving no space for legitimate emails to pass through. In addition, dealing with SPAM messages is costly to the users as it requires time and effort to examine them individually. In this paper, we propose an intelligent and trainable SPAM filter called GetEmail5. We have also evaluated the proposed filter against two commercial filters, EmailProtect and SpamEate.

The conventional way of teaching IT is increasingly not attractive to students of today. For example, covering the various topics in Computer Science is not exactly exciting when students are taught the theory and then asked to practice by coming up with solutions to "made-up" problems. These solutions then get discarded when they move on to a new topic. A computer game can involve most and possibly all topics in Computer Science. When working on computer games, instead of discarding solutions that students worked on earlier, students learn to incorporate solutions to previous problems into newer solutions. The final product is a lot more sophisticated and students can actually feel proud of what they have achieved. They can also have enjoyed themselves along the way. They would have learnt that topics they have studied had a purpose. This is useful, as quite often, students cannot figure out why they need to study a particular topic, especially if they are finding it hard. In this paper, we suggest that game construction can be an effective learning tool.

Modern Rural Energy Service (MRES) has been developed and implemented for years. It offers lots of advantage such as efficient energy and clean environment. However, MRES is used only in a particular group due to the lack of knowledge and promotion. This paper proposes the design and development of a Knowledge Management platform for promotion of MRES in ASEAN countries. The proposed system will employ web service technologies for enhancing and distribution the utilization of MRES.

The issues of bandwidth availability and propagation delay as applied to (inter)networking are not, in themselves, particularly exciting. The authors are of the opinion however, that these issues attract great importance when applied to multimedia internet communications, particularly in the context of the increasing withdrawal of regional and rural services. These services, that have previously been provided on a 'face-to-face' basis, may be replaced at some stage by computer mediated communication. This paper presents a proposed research project that aims to investigate what levels of bandwidth availability and propagation delay can provide adequate levels of multimedia internet communications.