Marius Marcu

Polytechnic University of Timisoara · Department of Computer and Information Technology

The paper presents the estimation of the uncertainty in the measurement of the maximum surface temperature of voltaic cells exposed to specific tests for the type of intrinsic safety protection. For this purpose, equivalent test conditions using the short-circuit test stand are considered. In the first part, the risk of explosion is presented and i...

During the last decade, extensive research has been carried out on the subject of low-cost sensor platforms for air quality monitoring. A key aspect when deploying such systems is the quality of the measured data. Calibration is especially important to improve the data quality of low-cost air monitoring devices. The measured data quality must compl...

Energy efficiency aims to reduce the amount of consumed energy required to provide services and functionalities, by utilizing commonly accepted methods to reduce the losses of energy or by adopting a more efficient technology or production process. In case of a wireless network, the devices operating on battery try to follow this idea by reducing t...

Traffic optimization is a subject that has become vital for the world we live in. People these days need to get from a starting point to a destination point as fast and as safe as possible. Traffic congestion plays a key role in the frustration of people and it results in lost time, reduced productivity and wasted resources. In our study we seek to...

By using a plethora of technologies and formats, the distance learning paradigm offers access to education through a large spectrum of subjects which are situated in different geographic areas. This paper presents the successful collaboration between Politehnica University of Timisoara, Romania, and the Technical Faculty "Mihajlo Pupin" of Zrenjani...

Power and energy profiling of multi-core embedded SoC designs is a daunting task due to the lack of fine grain accurate and high sampling rate monitoring infrastructures. Furthermore, shared components used in common by multiple processing cores, make these designs difficult to analyze consumption of concurrent threads. FPGA development boards are...

This paper analyzes the reliability of a custom-made programmable thermostat using the Raspberry Pi miniature computer. The assembly uses RF sensors connected with thermistors in order to detect and send temperature information. The information is received by a base receiver connected to the GPIO port of the Raspberry board. Using a web framework a...

A large part of the data transmitted over the Internet today consists of video streaming services, mainly due to the growth of services like Youtube, Skype or WebEx. The need for an adaptive video stream arose as a mobile robot with real-time video streaming capability has been developed. ARC-ROVER is a robot that could connect to the Internet via...

The ever-growing need for energy efficient computation requires adequate support for energy-aware thread scheduling that offers insight into a systems behavior for improved application energy/performance optimizations. Runtime accurate monitoring of energy consumed by every component of a multi-core embedded system is an important feature to be con...

Chronic diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, chronic respiratory disease and diabetes are the major cause of death in the world. This paper aims at presenting a low cost, secure medical platform for mobile and desktop operating systems to monitor vital parameters, receive notifications when the pre-defined limits are out of range and foresee a...

This paper shares the results of a study on content rating and security permissions of mobile applications used by the online platform Google Play. Many questions are now raised regarding the age suitability and content for all mobile applications designed for children. More than that, do the users know the security issues they are exposed to when...

This paper investigates the possibility of creating an energy profile of a RISC processor instruction set in the prototyping phase, using FPGA implementation and physical measurements. In order to determine the power consumption at instruction-level, several programs have been developed and run on the processor implementation on FPGA. The experimen...

This paper presents the architecture of a medical platform for chronic diseases sufferers that enables specialist physicians to have a permanent overview of the patient’s health. The proposed system, HChecked, integrates the monitoring of vital parameters, reception of notification in case of any exceeding of the pre-defined limits of these paramet...

The use of the smart grid for developing intelligent applications is a current trend of great importance. One advantage lies in the possibility of direct monitoring of all devices connected to the electrical network in order to prevent possible malfunctions. Therefore, this paper proposes a method for an automatic detection of the malfunctioning of...

This paper investigates the possibility of energy profiling for FPGA based designs by means of direct board based measurement. We aim to determine how different design parameters and FPGA components usage affect the overall power and energy consumption of the device. The power and energy measurements have been performed on a Digilent Atlys board wi...

Chronic diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, chronic respiratory disease and diabetes are the leading cause of mortality in the world. In this paper, we introduce a low cost, secure medical platform for mobile and desktop operating systems able to monitor vital parameters and predict a patient's health status. The prediction on the health evolu...

Over the last decade, significant changes have occurred in area of both power systems and computing systems. Furthermore, we are witnessing the fast spreading of smart grid technology deployments, which combines applications and solutions from both these domains. Therefore with our work we aim to propose and develop applications on top of smart gri...

Many modern smart mobile devices integrate a multitude of various sensors which can enrich the usability of today mobile applications. However, collecting and analyzing data from sensors requires increased processing, storage and energy resources on mobile devices. On the other hand, context-aware mobile applications require an estimation of high-l...

Nowadays most telecommunication companies use data mining algorithms to analyze and profile their customers based on their communication behaviour. However, similar analysis can be elaborated on call data available to any organization that use any type of communication technologies (e.g. mobile, PBX, VoIP, teleconference). Therefore, in this paper...

This paper presents a hybrid fix point - floating point (FP) multiplication unit. It has as inputs a fixed point and a FP number and outputs a FP number. Algorithm and corresponding architecture are proposed. Two distinct approaches have been implemented on Xillinx Virtex 5 FPGA board: one geared towards performance whilst the second is optimized f...

Nowadays we are witnessing the fast spreading of smart grid technology deployments. An increase of smart grid services and applications is also expected. Therefore in our work we aim to propose and develop user applications on top of smart grid power infrastructures that monitor, analyze, classify and characterize different electronic devices conne...

In the last years there is a merging trend towards unified communication systems over IP protocols from desktop to handheld devices. Nowadays users have the possibility to choose from a wide range of methods of communications (mobile, text, video). This variety leads to a series of problems like the management, synchronization, updating and sharing...

Smart mobile devices like smartphones and tablets have fast penetration rates into almost all domains of our life. Frequent usage of mobile applications on such devices increases their resources usage and energy consumption, reducing thus their mobility and autonomy. Modern power management mechanisms are thus overwhelmed by today power hungry mobi...

The energy efficiency has become an important aspect in data centers and large server systems, including the ones used in infrastructure for mobile applications service providers. Virtualization is one of the main research directions for both large scale data centers and applications servers. Furthermore, virtualization is also popular on desktop s...

NOVELTY - The invention relates to a system for measuring and analyzing the energy consumption in electric devices by dynamically evaluating and processing the power consumption signatures. According to the invention, the system comprises a plug and socket network (1) for measuring the electrical quantities and for carrying out a radio wave connect...

The environment sustainability is one of the main directions of intervention for all developed countries. Domestic and office electronic devices have significant share of total energy consumption worldwide. Therefore one important goal for government and environmental institutions is to promote and increase the energy efficiency of consumer electro...

This paper introduces a relatively new concept to be used mainly in primary education to improve the overall quality of education: a learning cube, tangible, interactive and playing platform for children. Our cube is very different from other educational cubes because it has a colored display on each of its sides, making it very customizable. The c...

Mobile wireless devices continue their fast seizure of our daily lives as they become smarter, powerful and faster. However, the new features built in these devices come with an increase of resources usage and energy consumption. Therefore, prolonging the battery lifetime of mobile devices was one of the main research topics in mobile computing for...

Voice over IP and Video over IP communication services gradually replaces traditional telephony systems. Furthermore, Next Generation Network (NGN) standards define the new network services and technology meant to replace current telecommunications services. The false impression is that multimedia communication is free because it uses the existing...

The environment sustainability is one of the main directions of intervention for all developed countries. Solutions for alternative energies generation and energy reduction are already discussed. Furthermore, energy efficiency has become an important aspect in data centers and large server systems. Virtualization is one of the main research directi...

Power consumption and heat dissipation are becoming the major factors that limit the performance evolution of current state-of-the-art microprocessors. As they become key elements in the design of both high performance computers and battery powered devices, different power and thermal management strategies have been proposed and implemented during...

Application-level energy efficiency mechanisms are considered the next important step in the evolution of highly power-efficient mobile systems. The final user is also an important element to be introduced within the energy efficiency and management chain. However the normal user lacks the basic understanding of the low-level power management mecha...

In the last years there is a merging trend towards unified communication systems over IP protocols from desktop to handheld devices. However this trend brings forth the limited QoS control existing in these types of networks. The lack of cost-effective QoS strategies is felt negatively directly by the end user in terms of both communication quality...

Modern data centers and cloud platforms demand higher levels of energy consumption and better temperature control together with the increasing processing demand and storage resources. Consolidation techniques using virtualization are currently the most promising methods used in today data centers to mitigate the effects of the increasing energy con...

The work presented in this paper addresses the problem of energy wastes through irresponsible usage of computers or electrical devices, as well as wastes encouraged by companies or firms that do not implement any kind of power awareness plan. It is meant to help increase the power usage efficiency in the locations it is installed, by completing an...

Intelligent climate control consists in monitoring and controlling climate parameters (temperature, humidity, ventilation, pressure) in certain environments, conforming to certain requirements. Monitoring and controlling the temperature is important for human health, for avoiding accidents and in industrial processes. This paper presents a solution...

An access control system has the role to verify and mediate attempts made by users to access resources in a system. An access control system maps activities and resources to legitimate users. This paper presents a distributed smart card based access control system for a building. The system is Internet centered. Each door has a control access point...

The robotic domain is in a continuous and highly ascending development. Robots can be found in industry, in medicine, in the military domain, in domestic appliances, in research, in education and so on. Robots are situated at the intersection of several scientific and technological domains. Robots need mechanics (clamping systems, arms, dynamical b...

Multimedia mobile applications using wireless communication and security services become more and more demanding with respect to processing speed and power consumption. Power saving is one of the most important feature that network interface and mobile processor must provide in order to prolong battery lifetime of a mobile device. The multitude and...

The mobile robots have received considerable attention in the scientific literature. One of the fundamental problems in mobile robotics is motion planning. Motion planning has several constraints, such as: knowledge of the scene, the existence of obstacles, their dimensions, the types of obstacles (static or dynamic), and the metric under considera...

The data navigation systems became more and more present in current life. They can be divided in fixed (Internet based on desktops) and mobile. The mobile navigation systems make use of the tremendous development of smart mobile devices, such as PDAs, mobile phones or dedicated devices. They receive updated data through wireless Internet, through G...

n această lucrare încercăm să surprindem aspectele ce sunt importante pentru implementarea sau evaluarea tehnicilor de eficientizare a consumului de energie de către dispozitivele de calcul mobile. Scopul principal al lucrării este acela de a propune, implementa şi valida un set de metrici de nivel înalt pentru evaluarea eficienţei energetice a sis...

In the last years we are witnessing a merging trend towards unified communication systems over IP protocols from desktop to handheld devices. However, current IP communication protocols are based on best-effort services with limited or no QoS control. The lack of cost-effective or power-aware QoS strategies is felt negatively directly by the end us...

Multimedia applications become one of the most popular applications on mobile devices. An important current problem of multimedia applications running on battery powered devices is their power intensive profile, which entails an increase of device heat dissipation. Due to the intensive computational nature of multimedia applications and due to the...

The use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in general purpose computing has been shown to incur significant performance benefits, for applications ranging from scientific computing to database sorting and search. In this paper we try to evaluate the execution of integer arithmetic operation on CPU and GPU processors. We evaluate the execution from...

Autonomous navigation is an important problem in mobile robotics. Various solutions have been proposed part of them being sensor based. The use of the sensors offers flexibility and adaptability to the robot but has also disadvantages: it may need powerful processing units, mounted on the robot and it is difficult to represent correctly and in all...

Presently, the IEEE 802.11s task group is defining a set of specifications for a wireless mesh standard based on IEEE 802.11 standard. The mobility management is one of the critical operations of any 802.11 network. In this paper we propose an assistive system that can improve the re-association mechanism which takes place when a mobile device roam...

The environment sustainability is one of the main direction of intervention for all developed counties. Solutions for alternative energies generation and energy reduction are already discussed. Electronic domestic and office devices are an important part of energy consumers. With our work we try to achieve a very cheap and easy to implement solutio...

One of the most significant elements of context-awareness in ubiquitous environments is mobile device localization. To obtain the accurate location information for indoor environments is a challenging problem. There have been a number of attempts to design systems for indoor localization using different wireless sensing techniques. Signal strength...

Power consumption and heat dissipation are the major factors that limit the performance and mobility of battery-powered devices. As they become key elements in the design of mobile devices and their applications, different power and thermal management strategies have been proposed and implemented during the previous years in order to overcome the m...

One of the most important evolution directions of mobile computing is oriented to mobile wireless services and applications but they are limited by their battery capacity. In order to address this fact in this paper we define the requirements and we personalize the design of a software framework for mobile devices in order to optimize power consump...

The continuous expansion of modern battery powered devices with complex and resource hungry feature sets have shown that battery life time does not scale according to their evolution. The problem of supporting extended battery life time has been drawing a lot of attention in recent years, especially for mobile communication systems. Besides the adv...

In this paper we present a scalable architecture which involves different kind of 802.11 mobile devices in a manner which resembles to a wireless sensor network. Today, various wireless solutions exist for sensor networks applications. However there is no widely deployed standard to win over the market and the computational capabilities of such dev...

Localization or positioning is an important aspect of mobile applications in order to achieve context-aware applications. The main goal for localization process is estimating the position of a mobile device in its environment based on a set of sensors with known positions. Modern mobile devices produced nowadays, and almost all smartphones and PDAs...

Power consumption and heat dissipation are the major factors that limit the performance and mobility of battery powered devices. As they become key elements in the design of mobile devices and their applications, different power and thermal management strategies have been proposed and implemented during the last years in order to overcome the mobil...

The environment sustainability is one of the main directions of intervention for all developed counties. Solutions for alternative energies generation and energy reduction are already discussed. Electronic domestic and office devices are an important part of energy consumers. With our work we try to achieve a very cheap and easy to implement soluti...

The evolution of portable and mobile computation systems towards an increased feature set as well as hardware and software requirements demands, together with the significant increase of market penetration in our modern society, is raising complex problems from a reasonable energy consumption level point of view under different usage scenarios. In...

The evolution of portable and mobile computation systems towards an increased feature set and increasing hardware and software requirements demand, together with the significant increase of market penetration in our modern society, is raising complex problems from a reasonable energy consumption level point of view under different usage scenarios....

Advances in semiconductor technologies and wireless communication are contributing to the rapid growth of the mobile devices market. They have a large number of applications but all of them depend on their battery lifetime. Therefore we present in this paper how power benchmarks can be used to characterize power consumption of battery-powered devic...

Multimedia applications running on mobile devices and using wireless networks become more and more demanding with respect to processing speed and power consumption. Power saving is one of the most important feature that network interface and mobile CPU must provide in order to prolong battery lifetime. The multitude and complexity of devices that i...

One constant in computing which is true also for mobile computing is the continue requirement for greater performance. Every performance advance in mobile processors leads to another level of greater performance demands from newest mobile applications. However, on battery powered devices performanoe is strictly limited by the battery capacity, ther...

Power consumption and heat dissipation become key elements in the field of high-end integrated circuits, especially those used in mobile and high-speed applications, due to their increase of transistor count and clock frequencies. Dynamic thermal management strategies have been proposed and implemented in order to mitigate heat dissipation. However...

Ubiquitous mobile computing is a new and very interesting research topic with wide applicability in context-aware solutions and position-dependent provided services. One of the most significant elements of context-awareness in ubiquitous environments is mobile device localization. There have been a number of attempts to design systems for indoor lo...

Advances in semiconductor technologies and wireless communication have contributed to the rapid growth of the mobile device market. Battery powered mobile devices have a large number of applicatios, and all of them depend on their battery lifetime. Therefore we propose in this paper a new type of benchmark that can be used to profile power consumpt...

Ubiquitous mobile computing is a new and very interesting research topic with wide applicability in context-aware solutions and position-dependent provided services. One of the most significant elements of context-awareness in ubiquitous environments is mobile device localization. There have been a number of attempts to design systems for indoor lo...

With the advances on semiconductor technologies, wireless communication applications are an emerging class of applications on battery powered devices. The multitude and complexity of components that implement a large spectrum of communication protocols on these devices requires closer evaluation and understanding in respect to power efficiency. As...

Power consumption and heat dissipation become key elements in the field of high-end integrated circuits, especially those used in mobile and high-speed applications, due to their increase of transistor count and clock frequencies. Dynamic thermal management strategies have been proposed and implemented in order to mitigate heat dissipation. However...

Power consumption and heat dissipation become key elements in the field of high-end integrated circuits, especially those used in mobile and high-speed applications, due to their increase of transistor count and clock frequencies. Dynamic thermal management strategies have been proposed and implemented in order to mitigate heat dissipation. However...

The PC based virtual instrumentation is a dynamic and attractive alternative to the classic instrumentation. Its main advantages are: flexibility and adaptability, low cost, wide development of extension PC boards with measurements features, attractive representation of measurement results, in different forms, on the PC's monitor. The paper present...

A printed circuit board (PCB) testing method using infrared thermal signatures is presented. The concept of thermal signature for PCBs is introduced. Based on this concept, the testing method is able to classify the integrated circuits (ICs) on a PCB into a number of classes (e.g. functional - fault free, non-functional - faulty and less reliable -...

Windows operating systems (NT, 2000, XP, 2003) were not designed for real-time and time-critical applications. But, due to the market requirements, many of the monitoring and control applications are to use Windows NT based operating systems. One of the most important parameter in almost all applications is temperature. Therefore, this article addr...

A wide-spread operation founded in the monitoring, control and command applications is the data acquisition. The data from the external world is read, processed, used for decisions and, eventually, memorized by a digital system. The digital system may be a PC with dedicated interfaces or microcontroller based system. This paper describes a data acq...

A genetic based algorithm for deconvolution of Printed Circuit Board (PCB) thermal images is presented. The deconvolution of thermal images is modeled as an optimization problem, whose cost function is to be minimized based on mechanics of natural selection and genetics. The proposed algorithm can be configured with all available a-priori informati...