Browsing by Author "Erasmus, Zenville"

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    Evaluating energy consumption on low-end smartphones
    (2015) Om, Shree; Tucker, William David; Rey-Moreno, Carlos; Erasmus, Zenville
    The relationship between battery consumption in smartphones and the usage statistics of a phone is direct. Modern smartphones, even low-end, are equipped with multiple wireless technologies, e.g. GSM, 3G, WiFi and Bluetooth. Each of these technologies has a different energy consumption profile. A wireless mesh project in the Mankosi community in rural South Africa is about to introduce low-end smartphones onto the network. The mesh network is powered with solar-charged batteries because the community at present does not have electricity. Local residents also use these batteries to recharge cell phones at a nominal cost. Introduction of smartphones will increase the recharge frequency as phone usage will increase; thus draining a phone battery more quickly, as well as escalate recharge costs. Thus, the smartphones must be chosen and used effectively in order for batteries to last longer. Related work identifies WiFi wireless technology as the most battery efficient way of transfer when compared to GSM, 3G and Bluetooth. This research proposes experiments to further investigate energy efficiency of WiFi in low-end smartphones that we intend to use for local and breakout voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) calls and data services, on a rural wireless mesh network.
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    Smart renewable energy : architectures, dimensioning and monitoring
    (University of the Western Cape, 2017) Erasmus, Zenville; Bagula, Antoine
    The Smart Renewable Energy project at the University of The Western Cape, under the guidance of the Intelligent Systems and Advanced Telecommunication (ISAT) group, aims at developing a dynamic system that enables users to (1) design smart architectures for next generation wind and solar systems to meet African power challenges (2) use these architectures to dimension the underlying solar and wind power systems and (3) simulate, implement and evaluate the performance of such power systems. The project's existing web and mobile monitoring system will undergo a much needed upgrade to cater for monitoring of the existing system's environmental and battery bank parameters. This will be implemented by allowing users to monitor input, storage and output trends over various time frames. These time frames would include hourly, daily, weekly and monthly readings. The visual evaluation of the system will be generated by mathematical, statistical and machine learning techniques. Trends will be discovered that will allow users to optimize the system's efficiency and their usage patterns. The accompanied dimensioning system will allow users to cater for their needs in a two way fashion. Users will be able to specify the number of devices that they want to run from a solar or wind based system and their power needs will be generated. They will also be able to determine what a given system is capable of producing and the number of devices that can be used simultaneously, as a result.