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

I recently returned from a ski trip to Utah.  Later in the week some storms blew into the area and this produced some great cloud formations high in the mountains.

In late December over a foot of snow fell in the Boston area.  Around dusk, the skies cleared and I was treated to the most amazing sunset.

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