Global Communications Newsletter • November 2012

November 2012

1

Recently, a workshop on “Antenna Design and Fabrica-tion” was held at Mehran University of Engineering andTechnology (MUET), Jamshoro, Pakistan, on 3-4 Sep 12 .However, this was no ordinary workshop because not onlywere the participants students but the organisers andinstructors for the event were also students.

Pinkesh Kumar Rajani, Ahsan Memon, Daniyal Akhtar,Anum Talpur and Natasha Baloch who are studying in thethird year of Bachelor of Telecommunication Engineeringprogram at MUET undertook an internship during thesummer vacations on the design and fabrication of anten-nae in the Department of Telecommunication Engineeringunder the supervision of Mr. Riaz Ahmed Soomro, a Lec-turer in the department. After successful completion of theinternship, IEEE Communications Society student mem-bers at MUET suggested these students to conduct aworkshop to share their knowledge with their fellow stu-dents and requested the IEEE Communication Society -Karachi Chapter (ComSoc-Khi), to support the workshop ,which the society willingly agreed to.

The workshop, organised by the Department ofTelecommunication Engineering in collaboration withComSoc-Khi, was a two day event and accommodatedfifty (50) participants. The participation fee for the

workshop was kept at only $2.5 for non-IEEE membersand $2.0 for IEEE members with a further discount of60% offered to members of Women In Engineering(WIE) in order to encourage the role of women in theengineering sector in Pakistan. The participation fee wasused to arrange in-part for the reading material andrefreshments for the participants while the remainingcosts were borne by ComSoc-Khi. The low cost for theworkshop meant that is was especially attractable for stu-dents and it was only due to logistical reasons the num-ber of participants was kept to fifty even though theorganisers received considerably greater number ofapplications for participation.

IEEE ComSoc-Khi Chairman and Dean Faculty ofElectrical, Electronics and Computer Engineering(FEECE) at MUET, Prof. Dr. Bhawani ShankarChowdhry, while addressing the participants said that theComSoc-Khi is one of the most active chapters of IEEECommunications Society and that the chapter hasexpanded from its base in Karachi in the south, toSukkur in the north of the Sindh province of Pakistan,within his current tenure. He further said that ComSoc-Khi will always encourage and support “student work-shops” because it provides students with an excellent

opportunity to learn andshare technical knowl-edge with their peers.

The Chairman, Depart-ment of Telecommunica-tion Engineering, Prof.Dr. Aftab Ahmed Memon,was at hand to presentshields and certificates astoken of appreciation toEngr. Riaz Ahmed Soom-ro and instructors. He alsopledged to support suchevents in future. The stu-dent organisers, instruc-tors and participantsthanked Prof. Dr. AftabAhmed Memon for mak-ing available to themresources from the depart-ment for use in the work-shop.

Two Day Workshop at Mehran University, Pakistan:For and by the Students

By Engr. Syed M. Zafi S. Shah, IEEE ComSoc Karachi Chapter Secretary, Pakistan

Picture (top left to bottom right): Chairman, IEEE Communications Society - Karachi Chapter & DeanFEECE Prof. Dr. Bhawani Shankar Chowdhry, and Chairman, Department of TelecommunicationEngineering Prof. Dr. Aftab Ahmed Memon addressing the participants, Faculty member, Engr. RiazAhmed Soomro receiving an appreciation shield, and student instructors receiving their certificates.

GLOBAL

NEWSLETTER

LYT-NEWSLETTER-November_LYT/NEWSLETTER/NOV 10/24/12 2:13 PM Page 19

Global Communications Newsletter • November 20122

The electricity consumption in households has beensteadily increasing during the last few years, up to the pointthat energy efficiency in the residential sector has becomea capital problem for governments and utilities. The energygeneration is also undergoing its own metamorphosis. Thepercentage of energy out of the total coming from renew-ables is increasing considerably and such renewable energysources are not being deployed only as traditional bulkgeneration but also as distributed local generation. There-fore, M2M (Machine-to-Machine) communications infras-tructures, comprising both monitoring and control networksfor the consumption and generation and core communica-tions networks for the required bidirectional bulk dataexchange, are becoming more important than ever.

At this point is where the EU FP7 project ENERsipcomes into play. The main goal of the ENERsip platformis to reduce the overall electricity consumption in house-holds while integrating the local and distributed micro-generation. How? By influencing users’ behaviors and byactively managing the demand side so that it matches thegeneration (e.g., through the so-called Demand Responseprograms). Thus, it is clear that ENERsip deals with anenergy problem in its nature and uses ICTs as enablertechnologies to solve it - as it happens in the Smart Grid ingeneral - and the ENERsip consortium (presented in Table 1)represents a good example of the multidisciplinary teamsrequired to face such new challenges.

The scope of the ENERsip platform is bounded to the dis-tribution electricity networks, i.e., it is focused on neighbor-hoods or districts with energy-positive buildings. The ENERsipsystem architecture is built on four basic pillars, namely theBuilding Domain, the Neighborhood Domain, the InformationSystem Domain, and the User Domain. At one edge of theplatform we have the Building Domain, which include themonitoring and control networks to the consumption and gen-eration infrastructures (so-called Home Area Networks orBuilding Area Networks). At the opposite edge of the plat-form we have the Information System and the web-based userinterfaces. The Information System represents the utility back-office and it can be seen as the energy “brain” of the platform,since it gathers all the consumption and generation data andtakes the appropriate decisions. The web-based interfacesallow interacting in a human-friendly way with the platform

(e.g., check from the office if we forgot the air conditioning onat home or start warming our flat when we are about to getout of the office). In between both edges, we have the Neigh-borhood Domain, which include the access and core M2M net-works that enable the required real-time bidirectionalcommunications [1]. Therefore, the ENERsip platform is capa-ble of reaching individual appliances or generation equipment,monitoring their performance and controlling them remotely.

The implementation of each of these domains was complicat-ed enough by itself, so their integration was undertaken followinga three phase approach which allowed checking the functionalityand interoperability of the developed pieces of hardware andsoftware since the very early stages and without all the compo-nents being present. Despite of taking such precautions, someflaws were detected when running the whole system together in24/7 mode, which illustrates the complexity of integrating compo-nents developed by different partners, from different countries,with different development and testing methodology and experi-ence. However, such problems were finally solved and end-to-end bidirectional connectivity through the entire ENERsipplatform proved to be successful in the real experimental sites.

Once the ENERsip system was properly debugged andtuned, it was validated in two independent stages. First, theConsumption Pilot focused on testing the consumption system

European FP7 Project ENERsip: Bringing ICT and Energy TogetherBy Gregorio López and Jose Ignacio Moreno, Universidad Carlos de III de Madrid, Spain;

Pedro Moura and Anibal de Almeida, University of Coimbra, Portugal;Boris Kantsepolsky, Motorola Solutions Israel Ltd., Israel;

Marek Sikora, Honeywell Prague Laboratory, Czech Republic

(Continued on Newsletter page 4)ENERsip Pilot Installations in Israel.

Project meeting in Asturias.

QUICK FACTS ON ENERSIP

ICT Energy

University UC3M

TECNALIA ISR-UC

Research Center VITO

Consortium AMPLIA

SME ISA

Motorola Solutions ISASTUR

IEC

Large Company Honeywell

Project Type Collaborative Project (STREP)

Area ICT for Energy Efficiency (ICT-2009.6.3)

Project Duration January 2010 – October 2012

Website http://www.enersip-project.eu/

LYT-NEWSLETTER-November_LYT/NEWSLETTER/NOV 10/24/12 2:13 PM Page 20

Global Communications Newsletter • November 2012 3

The American University of Beirut (AUB) hosted the Sec-ond IEEE Lebanon Communications Student Competition 2012(IEEE LCSC’12) on July 7th, 2012; an event that was possiblethanks to the platinum corporate support from Alfa, the firstLebanese mobile operator managed by Orascom Telecom, andsilver corporate support from National Instruments Arabia, inaddition to the collaboration of the Lebanese Association forScientific Research (LASeR). The event was organized by theIEEE Communications Society Lebanon Chapter, with the helpof the AUB IEEE Student Branch.

Thirty teams from twelve universities across Lebanon com-peted on the basis of their final year projects that included atelecommunications component. The teams were divided amongthree groups, based on their project theme: Mobile Applica-tions and Mobile Devices; Systems, Devices and Hardware; and

Algorithms, Simulationsand Software. About ahundred people attend-ed the event.

The event waskicked off with a seriesof inspirational presen-tations: Dean MakramSuidan of the Facultyof Engineering andArchitecture at AUB,focused on the meaningof “true communica-tion”; Dr. MustaphaJazar, President ofLASeR, defined theconcept of Innovation,and after establishingthe fact that Lebanonhas the highest inven-tion rate among all 22 Arab countries, concluded with a plea forLebanese engineers “not to immigrate”; Mr. Omar Christidis,founder and CEO of ARABNET, followed with a presentationon Social Media, which “brings together people that could have

Networking through theContemporary English-Thai Telecommunications Glossary

By Wannaree Wongtrairat, Kamol Kaemarungsri and Keattisak SripimanwatIEEE ComSoc Thailand Chapter & ECTI-Telecom

IEEE ComSoc Lebanon Chapter Organizes itsSecond Student Competition Event

By Natasha Maalouf, AUB IEEE Student Branch, Lebanon

Organizing committee and invited speakers.

Another portal of Thai Telecommunications KnowledgeManagement (TTKM) series called Thai TelecommunicationsGlossary (TTG) is officially released in the first quarter of 2012to reduce the digital divide and the gap of language besides the2009 edition of Thai Telecommunications Encyclopedia. Thisproject recognizes the importance of well-defined contemporarymeaning of telecommunications technical terms and their trans-lations from English to Thai language. It serves as a free-of-charge service for the general public in forms of book andelectronic version via the “Lexitron”, a Thai-English/ English-Thai online electronic dictionary.

The main goal of this project is to create a telecommunicationreference that provides common understanding on technicaldescriptions and promotes contemporary knowledge sharing viaonline social network. Historically, this project was extended fromthe material of the previous core achievement of the “ThaiTelecommunications Encyclopedia: 2009 edition”. Enhancing withthe tips of telecommunication history from another publishedbook titled “IEEE and Thai Communications History & Mile-stones 2011”, this project finally contains more than 1,100 wordsin its first edition. All descriptions were edited by a technical teamconsisting of volunteers from several academic and research insti-tutions nation-wide. Contemporary and concise background withabove mentioned ingredients for each word is the major distinc-tion of this technical glossary from other online languages transla-tors. Clearly, this project requires further improvement andaddition of new technical terms. The project embraces the powerof social networking and is opened for public suggestions andintroductions of new technical terms. The IEEE ComSoc Thai-land chapter also welcomes for new volunteers who would like toshare their knowledge and contribute to the future expansion ofthe glossary, which is now available online.

The first version of TTG 2011 is co-initiated by telecom-munications society of the Electrical Engineering/Electronics,Computer, Telecommunications, and Information Technologyassociation of Thailand (ECTI-Telecom), the National Elec-tronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC)/NSTDA,and IEEE ComSoc Thailand chapter with special thank to theNational Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission(NBTC) for financial support to publish the hard copies. Even-tually, both contemporary hard and soft versions of the currentglossary were born during the 2011 mega flood in Thailand.Now it is ready to serve and free to the public via the URLslisted below according to its original objectives on reducing thelanguage gap and the digital divide. Online information:

(Continued on Newsletter page 4)

(Continued on Newsletter page 4)

Cover Page of the Thai Telecommunications Glossary.

Students presenting their project tojury members

LYT-NEWSLETTER-November_LYT/NEWSLETTER/NOV 10/24/12 2:13 PM Page 21

4

STEFANO BREGNI

Editor

Politecnico di Milano - Dept. of Electronics and InformationPiazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 MILANO MI, Italy

Ph.: +39-02-2399.3503 - Fax: +39-02-2399.3413Email: bregni@elet.polimi.it, s.bregni@ieee.org

IEEE COMMUNICATIONS SOCIETY

NELSON FONSECA, VICE-PRESIDENT MEMBER RELATIONSPEDRO AGUILERA, DIRECTOR OF LA REGIONYIGANG CAI, DIRECTOR OF NA REGIONFAMBIRAI TAKAWIRA, DIRECTOR OF EAME REGIONKWANG BOK LEE, DIRECTOR OF AP REGIONROBERTO SARACCO, DIRECTOR OF SISTER AND RELATED SOCIETIES

REGIONAL CORRESPONDENTS WHO CONTRIBUTED TO THIS ISSUE

EWELL TAN, SINGAPORE <EWELL.TAN@IEEE.ORG>

®

A publication of the IEEE Communications Society

www.comsoc.org/gcn

Global Communications Newsletter • November 2012

LEBANON CHAPTER/continued from page 3

EUROPEAN FP7 PROJECT/continued from page 2

THAI GLOSSARY/continued from page 3

never met or became a group in any other situation”; Ms. DanaSleiman, business innovation manager at Ericsson, concludedthe presentations by introducing the concept of a NetworkedSociety, where “knowledge, devices and information are net-worked for the growth of society, life and business”.

After a relaxing coffee break, the participating teams pre-sented the main innovative features of their projects and dis-played demos to the jury members, in an atmosphere of friendlycompetition and pleasant communication. It was then time forthe respective juries to pick the winners from each group. Thewinning teams are:

Mobile Applications and Mobile Devices Group: RihamPharaoun, Mahmoud Al Ahmar and Abdulkader Rokaya(AUST) “i-Display Using Smart Phone Application”.

Systems, Devices and Hardware Group: Hassan Hawilo,Kassem Al Sabea, Tofik Ghandour and Ibrahim Hijazi (BAU)“IEEE 802.16e Mobile WiMAX Uplink PHY-Layer MatlabSimulation and FPGA Hardware Implementation”.

Algorithms, Simulations and Software Group: Nour ElMawass (LU) “Improving the Efficiency of Wireless SensorNetworks using the principles of Genomic Robustness”.

Each winning team was awarded a cash prize in addition torecognition certificates. The success of the event proved onceagain the aspiration of the Lebanese engineers in general, andthe Lebanese communications engineers in particular, forprogress and creativity, in the aim of a better life.

For more information about the IEEE CommunicationsSociety Lebanon Chapter, please check http://www.comsoc-lebanon.org.

electricity consumption, which is one of the main users’ unful-filled interests, as well as controlling their appliances remotely,which is also a feature requested by the majority of thosepolled. For the electricity providers and for the real-time oper-ation of the grid, it is important that the users are generallywilling to adjust their habits or let the operator control theirappliances in exchange of receiving some incentives, and theyare also not too reluctant to sharing their consumption data.

Therefore, as for today, deployed in the field at three dif-ferent operational sites, the ENERsip platform represents agreat step forward in demonstrating a real end-to-end plat-form for energy services such as consumption-generationmatching. This platform will stay active and will be used as thebasis for further demonstration purposes after the official pro-ject completion date. Notably, it will be used as a primary casestudy for demonstrating the capabilities of the project part-ners, as well as the outcome of the collaboration efforts of theENERsip consortium.

As a kind of conclusion, if the Smart Grid seems to give thelast push to the M2M communications market, projects likeENERsip help to pave the road to be taken.

Further Readings[1] G. López, P. Moura, J. I. Moreno, A. de Almeida, “ENERsip: M2M-based

platform to enable energy efficiency within energy-positive neighbour-hoods”, IEEE INFOCOM 2011 Workshop on M2M Communications andNetworking, Shanghai (China), April 2011.

[2] G. López, P. Moura, V. Custodio, J. I. Moreno, “Modeling the Neigh-borhodd Area Networks of the Smart Grid”, IEEE ICC 2012, Ottawa(Canada), June 2012.

[3] ENERsip Survey: http:// l imesurvey.amplia.es/index.php?sid=57793&lang=en

LEXiTRON: lexitron.nectec.or.th/telecom Project home page: www.thaitelecomkm.org/TTGThai Telecommunications Knowledge Management (TTKM):

www.thaitelecomkm.org

components in a controlled environment (namely, a laboratoryfrom the University of Coimbra). The main outcome of thisfirst stage was that the ENERsip platform is able to ensure themonitoring of energy consumption with a low average errorand the control of loads in scenarios of Demand Response andstandby consumption removal. Next, the Demonstration Pilotfocused on validating user requirements and demonstrating theENERsip platform daily operation in real environments usingreal equipment. The Demonstration Pilot is deployed and stillrunning in Israel Electric Corporation premises and involvesthree different sites, geographically located in different places,equipped with real consumption and generation equipment.

Finally, the potential benefits and performance of theENERsip platform were evaluated by means of simulations.Such evaluation was divided into two independent sets assessingthe main two aspects of the platform. On the one side, the Net-work Simulations focused on evaluating the performance of theENERsip communications infrastructures based on a modelthat considers bidirectional real-time communications in short-term and long-term scenarios [2]. On the other side, the EnergyServices Simulations focused on evaluating the energy and costsavings achieved through the automated coordination andscheduling of energy loads, taking into account different timesof the year and different locations (and thus different weatherconditions and different amounts of generated energy), differ-ent countries (with their typical tariff structures and regulatoryconditions), and different configurations (e.g., different types ofcustomers, different sets of appliances). The obtained resultsclearly show that the potential energy and cost savings withENERsip can be easily over 15% in most of the cases.

In addition to that, a survey to find out the preferences ofthe various energy market stakeholders was elaborated and isstill available for participation [3]. This survey covered ques-tions like how much information the consumers want to knowabout their consumption, how much information they want toshare with their provider, or how much they want to pay orreduce their comfort in exchange of more efficient operation.The results of the survey, although eventually focused mainlyon residential consumers, show that ENERsip can give signifi-cant value to their customers, since it allows monitoring the

GLOBAL

NEWSLETTER

LYT-NEWSLETTER-November_LYT/NEWSLETTER/NOV 10/24/12 2:13 PM Page 22