Riverbed (United States)

The customer domain of the smart grid naturally blends with smart home and smart building systems, but typical proposed approaches are “distributor-centric” rather than “customer-centric,” undermining user acceptance, and are often poorly scalable. To solve this problem, we propose a detailed architecture and an implementation of a “last-meter” smart grid—the portion of the smart grid on customer premises—embedded in an internet-of-things (IoT) platform. Our approach has four aspects of novelty and advantages with respect to the state of the art: 1) seamless integration of smart grid with smart home applications in the same infrastructure; 2) data gathering from heterogeneous sensor communication protocols; 3) secure and customized data access; and 4) univocal sensor and actuator mapping to a common abstraction layer on which additional concurrent applications can be built. A demonstrator has been built and tested with purposely-developed ZigBee smart meters and gateways, a distributed IoT server, and a flexible user interface.

In wireless communications, improving bandwidth efficiency is a necessity in the presence of limited spectrum resources and increasing demand. This is especially true in satellite communications where resources are shared amongst many of users. The Joint IP Modem (JIPM) is a satellite modem system that will enable extension of Global Information Grid (GIG) services to remote war fighters. One method to improve SATCOM bandwidth efficiency is header compression, which reduces the size of the packet header and the overall packet size. In this paper, we examine applying Robust Header Compression (ROHC) to the JIPM system and evaluate its performance over various scenarios. We show that ROHC is a promising technique for improving SATCOM bandwidth efficiency, reducing link load with equal or better end-to-end performance. Additionally, we discuss some implications of applying header compression to SATCOM systems.