الفهرس 
Chapter 1: INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Nowadays, operation of wide variety of applications depends on employing divergent or convergent group of Sensors and/or Actuators. Sensors are used to perceive and collect required data knowledge about the environment of any application. Actuators are employed to do required actions into such environment. Sensors/Actuators group of any application are expected to work and evolve into long-lived, open, ubiquitous, and multi-purpose networked system which will lead to the prominence and diffusion of what is called Sensors/actuators Network (SANet). SANet was regulated by the IEEE 1451 standards. Ultimate aims of IEEE 1451 standards are to provide standard guide which helps researchers of SANet area, to develop and explore various standard solutions (hardware and software) for three key components of SANet. Three components of SANet are Smart Transducer Interface Module (STIM), Transducer Independent Interface (TII), and Network Capable Application Processor (NCAP). STIM functionality is performing periodic or on-demand measurement /control functions of a single or array of sensors and actuators. TII refers to the type of communication technologies and methodologies which can be used for low-level communication between STIM and NCAP. NCAP is the centralized device that can perform three main and important tasks. The first task is related to collect sensory data knowledge from sensor-based STIMs. The second task refers to the analysis and processing of these sensory data knowledge to take proper decisions. The last task refers to convert these decisions into control commands and to distribute such control commands to their corresponding actuator-based STIMs. Three tasks of NCAP are congruent with phases of accumulative intelligence model. Accumulative intelligence represents a type of human intelligence characteristics which enables any application or embedded agent to interact with its environment. The thesis presents and proposes USANet system which consists of five STIMs. These STIMs are Speed Measurement Module (SMM), Motor Controller Module (MCM), three Distance Measurement Modules (DMMs). They are connected to a laptop NCAP host via five USB 2.0 interface cards. Each USB 2.0 interface card ID dedicated for only one STIM to exchange messages of sensory or control instructions with NCAP host. USB 2.0 interface card represents TII of such USANet. NCAP host run a program called ”Collect-Process-Decide-Deliver-Instructions” model (CPDDI). CPDDI is an open source model that represents software implementation of phases of accumulative intelligence model. CPDDI is employed to collect sensory data from SMM, and 3 DMMs. Also, CPDDI sends control instructions to MCM. There are two reasons behind choosing STIMs of such SMM and DMM rather than other types of sensors with in this thesis. The first reason is that the STIMs are tailored to be the main physical parts during building Alike-Car Robot (ACR) in future. ACR is expected to have the ability of Auto-Self navigation over structured or unstructured environments. The second reason is that the effectiveness of SMM or DMM can be compared with real and exact measurements of speed or distance respectively. For example, real measurements of speed are realized by connecting SMM to an Oscilloscope. Two performance metrics are used to validate and verify if USANet is a real-time and scalable system, or not. They are Acknowledgement Receiving Time (ART) and Sensory Data Message Time (SDMT). ART refers to the sum of time that a message takes to be constructed by CPDDI and consumed time between sending such message which contain control instructions to MCM until receiving and acknowledgement from MCM. SDMT represents consumed time between sending sensory data request from CPDDI until receiving the message that contains such sensory data. In addition, this thesis discusses effectiveness and feasibility of both SMM and DMM. Results of SDMT and ART, within this thesis, prove that proposed USANet system, including CPDDI backbone platform, is a real-time and scalable system. Also, it is proved that maximum SDMT response time is faster than maximum ART response time. The reason behind this behavior is which firmware part replies CPDDI. In case of sensor-based STIM (such as SMM and DMM), USB 2.0 interface card (i.e. TII) take the responsibility of replying CPDDI on behalf of this sensor-based STIM. On the other side, actuator-based STIM (such as MCM) is responsible of replying CPDDI by itself without mediators.