No abstract

Mobile telephony brings clear economic and social benefits to its users. As handsets have become more affordable, ownership has reached staggering numbers, even in the most remote areas of the world. However, network coverage is often lacking in low population densities and low income rural areas of the developing world, where big telecoms often defer from deploying expensive infrastructure. To solve this coverage gap, we propose VillageCell, a low-cost alternative to high-end cell phone networks. VillageCell relies on software defined radios and open-source solutions to provide free local and cheap long-distance communication for remote regions. Our architecture is simple and easy to deploy, yet robust and requires no modification to GSM handsets. Through measuring the call quality metrics and the system capacity under a realistic rural-area network load, we show that Vil-lageCell is indeed an attractive solution for rural area voice connectivity.

Cycle identification via the rainflow-algorithm is implemented online in a model predictive controller (MPC) for Li-ion batteries. This is achieved by externalization of the cycle identification from the optimization problem. The limitation for cyclic aging estimation due to short prediction horizons is overcome by updating and utilizing a State of Charge memory. Furthermore, a comprehensive plant model for Li-ion batteries is presented with novel submodels for calendric and cyclic aging. The novel MPC is implemented in the ACADO Toolkit and tested with the aforementioned plant model. Simulation results indicate that-even without tuning-the novel MPC clearly outperforms a rule-based controller and an extensively tuned MPC from literature.

No abstract