Late last week when Sprint-Nextel announced their 3G femtocell, I was taken back.  Sprint decided to change its strategy from charging for femtocells access to instead giving these devices away for free.  Providing free femtocells was the viewpoint I believed was most beneficial for wireless carriers when I discussed this topic in depth in my femtocell research paper.  When the retention of a subscriber cost along with the cost due to additional mobile usage is factored into the equation, in many situations the cost savings to a wireless carriers easily pays for the femtocell hardware.  While Sprint-Nextel probably didn’t use my research, it is good to know that others agree with my findings.  Keeping with similar viewpoints, a recent survey on the Wireless Industry website, FierceWireless.com, asked viewers which technology they believed would be used to offload data traffic in the future.  In my paper I argued that Wi-Fi offloading was the ideal solution once 4G networks were launched, and that femtocells were only a temporarily solution due to their complexity and cost.  Only 24% of respondents believed that femtocells were the solution, further bolstering my findings in my paper.  Until 4G networks are widespread, femtocells are the solution and it will be interesting if other wireless carriers follow in Sprint’s footsteps.

I have been working on the wind turbine Wi-Fi repeater and communication node for several years now, and I am proud to say that the project is finalized. During 2009, the emphasis was making sure that the turbine would work reliably regardless of the weather that blew through Rochester. This was easier said than done, but by the end of the 2009 school year all aspects of the project were working correctly. In fact the turbine even charged an electric bicycle for the RIT Innovation Festival Green Vehicle challenge.

For 2010, the next phase of the project was to incorporate a power monitoring device and to improve the performance of the wind turbine. For the past year my friend David Brenner, and I have been working on an Arduino based power meter which would remotely measure the power the turbine was producing and then send the data through the Internet back to a server. Work progressed slowly since this was a side project for David and I, and we were both busy with school work and clubs. We eventually got everything working in the lab, but when we moved the power meter to the field we ran into a few software bugs. We needed to incorporate an auto reconnect function for the Arduino as occasionally the wireless link would stop working for a couple of seconds, closing the data connection. Additionally, the idle power readings would fluctuate slightly since the battery voltage would change over time. An improvement would be to use voltage regulators to power the circuitry instead of running it directly off the batteries. Luckily we came up with some software solutions and everything worked correctly. Once everything was up and running it was really cool to remotely see the power output of the wind turbine.

Earlier in the year, a bearing in the first motor died and I just replace the motor with a smaller Ametek 30v motor that I had lying around. The Ametek performed fine, but it didn’t produce as much power as the first motor. When spring came around and the wind died down, the batteries started to lose their charge. To fix this issue I upgraded to a much larger motor, which practically doubled the power output during windy days. Additionally, I added a 30W solar panel to help produce power during the summer when there is little wind in Rochester. The wind turbine and solar panel complement each other great in Rochester, as it is cloudy and windy in the winter while the summers are sunny with little wind. With the new motor and solar panel, the battery issue was totally resolved.

This past May, David and I entered the Wind and Solar Powered Communication Node into the annual RIT IEEE Design Contest. There were many impressive student projects and David and I were fortunate to win the award for “Most Innovative Project.” We were extremely pleased with the award, especially since we had devoted so much of our free time working on the project, most of it outside in the freezing cold. Sadly, a week after David and I won our award, RIT notified us that we would have to relocate the wind turbine as a parking lot was going to be built where the turbine stood. Since I was graduating and no longer would live in Rochester, I decided to dismantle the project and focus on some other priorities. While the wind turbine project is no longer standing at RIT, no all is lost. Dave and I documented all aspects of the project and created a great website: www.turbinehotspot.com which explains the project and contains numerous pictures and videos.

Every night at RIT I would walk by closed computers labs, but to my amazement the computer and monitors remained powered on. As an institution that promoted its sustainable practices, not turning the computers off when the labs were closed seemed hypocritical. Every year students would complain about this issue, but nothing was ever done. My roommate, Ian Mikutel, and I decided that we would do something about RIT not having a computer power policy.

Ian and I met with the Chief Technology Officer of RIT, and she agreed that the idea of either turning computers off or having them sleep when they were not utilized was a great idea. We pursued the idea further and started meeting with ITS, the organization that managed a majority of the RIT computer labs and FMS, which was responsible for providing electricity to the buildings. Ian and I decided to implement an actually computer lab trial to demonstrate that a computer power policy could be successfully implemented and to measure the power savings. After many meetings we decided that putting the computers into S3 sleep mode after 20 minutes was the best way to maximize student productivity while minimizing power consumption. Having the computers sleep instead of turning them off ensured that computers would still receive security updates and patches in the middle of the night.

FMS installed a power meter to monitor the power consumption of the 16 Dell desktop computers in the lab. This allowed us to quantize the power savings of having the computers automatically sleep after 20 minutes. After modifying some files and fixing a couple configuration issues the computers automatically went to sleep and automatically awoke in the middle of the night to install security updates. We monitored the power consumption for around 10 weeks, and discovered that having the computers sleep reduced the labs power consumption by 66%! Everyone working on the project was amazed at the results, and when we extrapolated this to the thousands of computers at RIT, the environmental and monetary impacts are massive. Ian and I presented to the RIT’s Committee on Sustainable Practices which was very impressed with our presentation and decided to begin implementing computer sleep mode across campus. Ian and I have both recently graduated so we will not see the end results of our work, but we are both extremely proud to have made such a difference in reducing the power consumption across RIT.

I have spent the last six months working on my RIT Graduate Project involving Femtocells.  After a great deal of research and writing over 80 pages, I have come to the conclusion that femtocells will not be the magical solution to capacity and coverage issues for wireless carriers.  This was a very surprising conclusion as numerous experts and companies supporting the technology have a much different viewpoint.  In my paper I discuss how I came to my conclusion and outlined that femtocells are a temporary solution until Wi-Fi chipsets are universal to all cell phones.   In the current market place, wireless carriers don’t seem to be pushing femtocells, but instead Wi-Fi based solutions which not only offer greater capacity but are also cheaper to deploy.  AT&T Wireless has had great success with offloading data usage by deploying Wi-Fi access point, something that femtocells have yet to deliver.  I could be completely wrong in my analysis, but I believe that Wi-Fi will be the perfect companion to 4G networks.    Until 4G coverage is widespread femtocells will be play an important role in expanding coverage, but I believe their deployments will be limited.

Click Here to Download my Femtocell Paper

The last month has been extremely busy with my MPLS project, remote power meter for the wind turbine, and skiing four days a week.  I thought it would be a good idea to provide some project updates:

The MPLS project is almost complete and everything is working correctly in emulation.  In the next couple of weeks I will transfer the configs to the actual hardware, rewire the telecom lab, and then add MPLS traffic engineering to the network.

Finalized MPLS Configuration

The remote power meter is also coming along nicely.  Everything is working correctly, but there is some small things that still have to be finished such as converting the values from the Arduino into actual power values in Watts.  I also designed a dedicated website for the wind turbine project and it should launch shortly.

Data from the Remote Power Meter

Skiing for the RIT Ski Team has been a blast!  Everyone on the team has had a great attitude and this has made every race enjoyable, even if the team didn’t perform well on race day.

Racing without a GS Suite