ELEC210P Example Paper

Answer the one question in section A. This question is worth 50% of the paper.
Answer any two questions from section B. Each question is worth 25% of the total mark.

SECTION A
Answer the question from this section. This question is worth 50% of the paper.

1. For a sensing application of your choice - detail a design of a wireless sensing system with
cloud based data storage/processing. In your design you should give details of the following
key areas.

a) Give a short overview of application served by the connected system in your design
[4 Marks]

b) Describe what physical phenomena are to be monitored or controlled by the sensing system
[4 Marks]

c) What will the outputs of the system be and how will users interact with the system?
[4 Marks]

d) Who are the target users of your system?

[2 Marks]

e) Present a design for the complete system in the form of a block diagram.
[6 Marks]

f) For each of the key blocks of the design provide specific detail of their key function
[5 Marks]

g) For each of the following elements of your design give an estimation of the specification
required for your application and where possible, provide examples of appropriate
technologies.
.
i) Network architecture
ii) Sensor devices
iii) Microprocessor
iv) Wireless standard
v) Cloud Platform
[25 Marks]

Page 1 of 3 TURN OVER

ELEC210P Example Paper
SECTION B
Answer two questions from this section. Each question is worth 25% of the total mark.

2. a) Describe the key features of a wireless standard used for wide area networking.
[7 Marks]

b) Describe two applications where wide area networking wireless standards would be
appropriate.
[8 Marks]

c) A WLAN wireless chip sends and received a beacon from the base-station every 500ms. The
beacon packet duration is 50s. Every 5s the node is required to send a data packet of duration
200s. In response to this packet it receives an acknowledge of 5s. The current drawn from
the 3v supply during transmission is 20mA and during reception 30mA. The device has a low-
power mode. In this mode the current drawn is 10A.

Estimate the average energy consumption due to wireless transmission of this device and
provide an approximation for the lifetime if a 1000mAh capacity, 3v battery is used to power
the device.

State any assumptions that you have to make in your estimate.

[10 Marks]

3. a) Explain the advantages of MQTT as a protocol for Internet of Things Applications over the
use of standard HTTP.
[8 Marks]

b) Explain what is meant by connectionless datagrams and why UDP is often preferred over TCP
for real-time IoT applications.
[7 Marks]

c) Why may the use of Network Address Translation (NAT) cause problems to IoT devices and
what solutions are available?
[6 Marks]

d) Give an example of what an HTTP GET request to a weather forecasting API, for example
(Forecast IO - forecastio.com) might look like for a specific location and time.

[4 Marks]

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ELEC210P

4 a) Consider a home security monitoring system. Give five examples of different types of sensors
that you might be included in such a system, giving a brief description of the function of each
of them.
[5 Marks]

b) A specific microcontroller is listed as having the following attributes in its data sheet. For each
one, define the term, give a brief description of what this function is and describe how it might
feature in the design of an IoT device.

i) ADC
ii) Watchdog Timer
iii) AES
iv) GPIO
v) I2C Bus
vi) PWM Output
vii) SLEEP and HIBINATE modes

[14 Marks]

c) An accelerometer sensor is specified as having a range of 2g.

i) What is the sensing resolution, in terms of g, of the sensor for each case if versions of the
device with ADC outputs of 8 bits, 12 bits and 14 bits were used?
ii) For a system that was required to sense a sudden movement, given an estimate of the
sampling frequency needed. Explain and justify your assumptions.

[6 Marks]

Page 3 of 3 END OF PAPER