The Application of Axiomatic Design to Complex Wi-Fi Systems

Axiomatic Design is a technique that has been applied to multiple disciplines for enabling design, analysis, and troubleshooting of complex systems. In this paper, the principles of Axiomatic Design are applied to Wi-Fi networking. Wi-Fi is the information backbone for numerous applications, including Internet connectivity, video surveillance, data collection and inventory tracking in manufacturing and warehouse environments, patient location and health status monitoring in assisted living and hospital environments, along with numerous others. A Wi-Fi system consists of multiple access points working in tandem to provide seamless, high-speed, and high-quality wireless coverage to one or more wireless client devices. To implement such a network effectively, the Wi-Fi engineer must understand and control the interactions between multiple engineering disciplines, most notably information technology, network engineering, radio frequency physics, antenna design, and materials science. Technology development in this field is fast-paced, with new standards and capabilities being introduced into the market every couple of years. Additionally, the customer expectations (i.e. requirements) are changing as well once the Wi-Fi network is installed, as data demands from new types of devices like smartphones, tablets, and network appliances are introduced long after the original network was implemented. This paper shows that there are three primary functional requirements for a Wi-Fi network, namely client usage type, coverage area, and client capacity. When designing, implementing, or troubleshooting a Wi-Fi network, there are four primary design parameters that can be controlled, namely AP antenna / model, location, channel, and transmission power. Axiomatic Design demonstrates that these four design parameters are coupled, and thus cannot be manipulated independently. Nevertheless, by effectively implementing Axiomatic Design techniques to define a set of best practices, these four key parameters can be decoupled and properly linked back to the requirements and constraints of the system to simplify the design, implementation, and troubleshooting of a Wi-Fi network.

An Improved Smart Home System Based on an Open Platform Model

Smart home generally creates a communication network for the family to provide necessary information accesses in the home network operating system. Under the controls of the hardware and the corresponding implemental agency, all the home network appliances control and monitoring are achieved. As the smart home becomes more advanced and complex, its urgent to search for an effective management model. In this paper, we propose a compatible smart home system management model and make some future development assumptions.

Universal Multimedia Access

The diffusion of network appliances such as cellular phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and handheld computers creates a new challenge for multimedia content delivery: how to adapt the media transmission to various device capabilities, network characteristics, and user preferences. Each device is characterized by certain display capabilities and processing power. Moreover, such appliances are connected through different types of networks with diverse bandwidths. Finally, users with different preferences access the same multimedia content. To cope with the challenge of delivering content to such a variety of conditions while maximizing user satisfaction, multimedia content needs to be adapted to the needs of the specific application, to the capabilities of the connected terminal and network, and to the preferences of the user (Mohan, Smith, & Li, 1999a; Van Beek, Smith, Ebrahimi, Suzuki, & Askelof, 2003). This adaptation enabling seamless access to multimedia content anywhere and anytime is known as universal multimedia access (UMA). The UMA framework is depicted in Figure 1. Three main strategies for adaptive multimedia content delivery have been proposed, namely, the info pyramid, scalable coding, and transcoding. These strategies, emerging trends in UMA and standardization activities, are discussed in the following sections.