Projects and Research:

MCNC creates  several opportunities for  industries and research organizations to interact and execute sponsored research and projects:

·         Sponsored Lab: A company/organization can set up a sponsored lab with MCNC.

·         Sponsored Project: A company/organization can sponsor a research/development project.

·         Consultancy: MCNC can provide technical expertise to companies for a nominal fee.

·         Incubator: Startups in the Mobile communication and Networking related areas can avail the facilities of MCNC.

Current Research Projects   at MCNC:

1. Project Title: Development of Online RSS Reader using AJAX

          -This project report describes  the development of a SKYLINE RSS Reader for web 2.0 using AJAX ( Asynchronous Java and XML). The RSS Reader lets the user to read the RSS feeds using a browser. It is accessible from any computer. It takes a list of feed URLs each of which exposes RSS. The reader then will aggregate these together and periodically polls for updates, allowing the reader to monitor content from multiple sites all at the same time.  Latest Technologies have been learnt and used in the development of the project such as : XML, AJAX, JavaScripts, PHP, Joomla

-         The project report presents the testing results and screen shots of the Skyline RSS Reader.

-         Performance Analysis of the Skyline Reader is presented. A comparison with Google and Bloglines indicates the application developed is very good.

-         The results are presented with bar charts, graphs and tables.

-         A paper “ A Novel Design of Online RSS Reader using AJAX” based on the work done has been presented at the National Conference on Web and Computer Applications (NCWEBCAP’08).

2. Project Title: Hardware and Software Co-Design for Embedded Systems

-         The project work discusses the development of Integrated Development Environment (IDE) called Dolphin for Microcontroller based Embedded Systems design and development. In Embedded Systems development IDE is one of the important and expensive development aids. The project work has innovation in combining open source IDE such as Eclipse and compilers and providing a cost effective development tool with competitive performance.

-         Dolphin IDE has been tested and compared with commercial tools such as Keil. Comparison results show that Dolphin can be competitive in terms of price, performance and features.

-         Literature survey presents the various technologies for embedded system development.

-         The plugin development for Eclipse has been done and project work has integrated the compiler for 8051 microcontroller.

-         Results have been presented with screen shots, Tables, Bar charts. The performance comparison using benchmark application  with Keil clearly shows the Dolphin compiler is good choice.

-         A paper entitled “ Dolphin: An IDE for 8051 Embedded Development” has been submitted for International Conference on Computing and Communication Technologies for High Performance application 2008.

3.  Project Title: Electronic Student Companion: Minuter

-Electronic Student Companion( MINUTER) is the embedded hand held equipment designed for the students and  includes most commonly used applications.  MINUTER involves hardware design and software development for the microcontroller based equipment.

-The firmware includes interfacing graphical Liquid Crystal Display and Keypad. The design of Electronic Student Companion includes the following components such as ARM Microcontroller, (LPC2129), Graphical Liquid Crystal Display, Keypad  The user can enter the data using the keypad which is provided externally to the system.

-Some useful applications like word processing and Quiz have been demonstrated on the MINUTER. The word processing is used to take down set of points as a note. The Quiz includes set of questions with multiple choice answers such that the student can select right answer.

- The project is well suited for future classrooms where each student’s desk will have LCD and key pads. The quiz and assignments can be uploaded and viewed through the LCD displays.

- The project report presents the literature survey, design and implementation  of the MINUTER.

- The implementation involves hardware design and software development.  Latest technologies such as ARM microcontroller and Keil compilers have been used.

- Results have presented for the application memory usage and performance. Project Report  has compared the instruction set usage, execution time, and provided bar charts, pie charts and tables to illustrate the results which have been  collected while working on the project.

- A paper entitled “ Electronic Student Companion” has been presented at the National Conference on Advances in Emerging Information Technology.

4.  Code Morphing Project:

Current day DSP technology is rapidly advancing and processor architecture is undergoing rapid changes. In this regard, the speech codec, channel codec, Audio Codec, Video Codec  and other DSP code which are optimized for one generation DSP architecture need to be repeatedly optimized for new generation. The current day compilers are inefficient in handling the C source and hence hand optimization of the assembly will be necessary to achieve high performance requirements.  This will involve huge effort in coding and testing. All the effort involved in developing the previous code  will thus go in vain. In order to rapidly optimize the code, we propose a code morphing tool which takes as input the optimized assembly code of one processor and transforms it into assembly code of the target processor.  The code morphing tool will have a parser for input assembly code. It will have internal representation of the target processor architecture and assembly translation database. The code morphing tool will read the input code, use its internal representation and transform the code to target assembly code. Because the code is transformed at assembly level, it can retain the efficiency of the original code while also improving the performance through powerful transformations rules.

5. MP3/MPEG4 Audio/Video Codec :

MP3 is a very popular audio codec. It provides a very high quality audio compression using psychoacoustics.  In this project students learn to develop the source code of MP3 decoder in C and optimize the code to run on a DSP processor. They study the codec and develop C source code from open source and test it. They build the graphical equalizer and GUI for MP3 decoder. Using the Code Composer Studio and DSP development kit, they port the MP3 decoder to DSP processor kit.  The students demonstrate this application on a DSP kit.

MPEG4 is a popular Video Codec. The MPEG4 source code and optimized DSP code are being developed in this project for multimedia applications.

6.  Mobile Phone Simulator :

This is a very interesting useful application. The simulator to be developed using C, will have all the features of mobile phone. It will have display, key pad, microphone, speaker, ringer etc. The software is organized in layers and the simulator will be easy to interface to application layer and protocol stack of mobile handset. The phone simulator runs on a PC and will serve as a mobile phone demonstration test bed. The students interface the Mobile phone simulator with J2ME( Java Micro edition)  platform of Sun.

7. Medium Access Control for WiMAX:

IEEE 802.16 also known as WiMAX defines standards for broadband wireless connectivity. Data rates close to 70 MBPS within  a distance  range of 30miles can be achieved using WiMAX network. The Medium Access control(MAC) protocol is very important and is crucial to the high data rates utilization in WiMAX  networks. The MAC layer performs the standard Medium Access Control ( MAC) layer function of providing a medium independent interface to the 802.16 Physical Layer (PHY). WiMAX MAC is designed to support Point to Multipoint (PMP) and mesh network models. 

In this project, students provide the design details of proposed MAC protocol to enhance the performance of the WiMAX network. They carry out simulation for studying  the performance enhanced MAC protocol.

8. Voice dialing and Voice Commands  using Nokia SDK

Current day mobile phones support voice dialing and voice commands. In voice dialing application, user utters the digits in a sequence and dials the numbers by a voice command. The application needs to recognize spoken digits and words. It should do speech processing, limited vocabulary speech recognition. Nokia SDK is  very popular for developing applications for mobile phones.  Voice dialing application  will be developed using Nokia Series 60 SDK for Symbian OS based Mobile Phones. The students test the application by downloading it on a mobile handset supporting Symbian OS.

9. SMS based Student Monitoring System:

This is a very interesting project useful for colleges, schools and Institutes. The parents/gurdians fo students can query the information about student marks/attendence/status etc using SMS. An SMS server consisting of PC and GSM modem is setup which connects to the college database. The SMS received at the server is processed and based on the sort codes, proper information queried from the database is automatically sent out as an SMS through using AT commands on the GSM Modem.