<p>The parts of buildings most susceptible to light and heat are the windows, which are necessary for basic cooling and heating. A huge amount of electrical energy is used to power air conditioners to adjust the inside temperature of residential buildings, while appropriate glazing techniques and materials can be used to reduce energy consumption. There are classic techniques used for tinting glass in buildings and cars, but they all continue to use fixed techniques with one degree of glazing. Users cannot adjust the glazing of these glasses in response to the intensity of sunlight either automatically or by hand. In this research, a modern technique is proposed to allow users to automatically control a glass’s glazing through sensors and Android application with a microcontroller. Arduino microcontroller is used along with a special film polymer dispersed liquid crystals (PDLC) material coating the glasses to enable tinting. The results show adjustable levels of tinting with PDLC film being enabled.</p>

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Predicting future locations of mobile objects has received a lot of attention in research due to its importance in mobile ad hoc networks. The precise location of a mobile node is essential in determining the location of the destination node for the purpose of communication. High mobility of nodes and delay in sending current location affect the accuracy of mobile nodes’ locations. Providing accurate location needs well-designed location prediction technique considers a number of factors that assist in retrieving up-to-date locations. This paper reviews available models: mathematical models and models with neural network and address the problems in location prediction techniques and provides a deep analysis of the good features for improved prediction techniques.

The existing location service protocols used in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) environments suffer from poor scalability, and do not consider load distribution on location servers while the usage of unrealistic information for selecting location servers affects the efficiency of the protocols. This paper presents a Vehicular Quorum Location Service (VQLS) protocol, which is designed for an urban area topology. VQLS uses Fuzzy Inference Engine (FIE) in selecting the most stable node to be a Main Location Server (MLS) based on the distance of a node to intersection centre point and its speed. The server constructs a quorum group, which consists of the nominated nodes that passing through the intersection in order to distribute the load on quorum members. VQLS shows superior performance in reducing overhead of control packets, and balance the load on dense intersection vicinity. Additional achievement is low end-to-end delay for routing packets.Keywords: location service; VANET; vehicular ad hoc network; quorum-based protocols.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Zaki, S.M., Ngadi, M.A., Kamat, M. and Razak, S.A. (2013) 'Quorum-based location service protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks in urban environment', Int.

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