Critical Success Factors Influencing the Implementation of Sustainable Energy System in Uganda: A Case of Inter-University Council of East Africa Energy Project at the Head Quarters in Kampala, Uganda

The widespread usage of clean and sustainable energy sources is leading to a significant transformation of the world’s energy systems. Over-reliance on only the national grid energy system has made institutions fail to sustain energy systems. The council is only connected to the national grid electricity supply system, with diesel generators as the only alternative, which is unhealthy and unsafe. Surprisingly, even with such alternatives, power shortages have persisted despite government efforts to provide a solution to the shortages by installing numerous off-grid systems. Due to such a situation, the council would construct a sustainable energy system as a remedy. Thus, the purpose of this study was to establish critical success factors influencing the implementation of a sustainable energy system at the Inter-University Council of East Africa (IUCEA) Head Quarters, Kampala-Uganda. A cross-sectional survey design was used;a sample size of 84 participants was selected. Questionnaire survey and interview methods were utilized. The study found that the most significant (p < 0.05) critical factors in the implementation of sustainable energy in institutions are;the use of innovative technologies and infrastructure, the use of efficient zero emissions for heating and cooling, integration of renewable energy use in the existing buildings, building and renovating in an energy-efficient way, integrating regional energy systems, improving energy efficiency in the buildings, enhanced zero emission power technologies, energy efficient equipment in place and stakeholder empowerment in energy management. This study concludes that institutions like;the Inter-University Council of East Africa (IUCEA) need to clearly state policies and actions of energy management. The roles and responsibilities of each member have to be clearly stated while capturing the activities involved in energy conservation, energy security and energy efficiency.

ComplexTrans-Global Rail-Road Transportation System Economical and Clustered Individual and Individualised Public Transport also Prevents the Spread of Covid 19

Land transport can no longer meet the requirements.European transport can be described by these words−crowded motorways and cities,dangerous emissions,ubiquitous traffic accidents,delays,expensive railways.Solutions are being sought to transfer a large part of passengers and especially freight transport to(high-speed)rail,and efforts are moving towards electromobility,car-sharing,5G-connectivity,autonomous driving,MaaS(Mobility as a Service)-coordinated transport or hyperloop-type solutions.However,all these solutions have additional challenges and limitations.Solutions are not being searched where they really exist-in the mutual adaptation of road and rail vehicles and their deep cooperation.The ComplexTrans project shows that simply adapting the dimensions and functions of road and rail vehicles can eliminate(or at least significantly reduce)all the problems of existing land transport.The main features of the ComplexTrans system are sufficient parking spaces,reduction of urban and non-urban congestion,electric vehicles with unlimited range and cheaper than standard cars,cheaper and more accessible battery charging,“autonomous ride”,solving the overlap between passenger and freight rail transport and making it self-financing,transferring intercity freight transport to rail,replacing part of continental air transport and many others.The cost-effective and clustered individual transport and individualised public transport of the ComplexTrans system also bring very significant reductions in the risk of transmission of covid-19 and other contagious diseases during transport.

BLE Mesh： A Practical Mesh Networking Development Framework for Public Safety Communications

Owing to advanced storage and communication capabilities today, smart devices have become the basic interface between individuals and their surrounding environment. In particular, massive devices connect to one other directly in a proximity area, thereby enabling abundant Proximity Services（Pro Se）, which can be classified into two categories： public safety communication and social discovery. However, two challenges impede the quick development and deployment of Pro Se applications. From the viewpoint of networking, no multi-hop connectivity functionality component can be directly operated on commercially off-the-shelf devices, and from the programming viewpoint, an easily reusable development framework is lacking for developers with minimal knowledge of the underlying communication technologies and connectivity. Considering these two issues, this paper makes a twofold contribution. First, a multi-hop mesh networking based on Bluetooth Low Energy（BLE） is implemented,in which a proactive routing mechanism with link-quality（i.e., received signal strength indication） assistance is designed. Second, a Pro Se development framework called BLE Mesh is designed and implemented, which can provide significant benefits for application developers, framework maintenance professionals, and end users. Rich application programming interfaces can help developers to build Pro Se apps easily and quickly. Dependency inversion principle and template method pattern allow modules in BLE Mesh to be loosely coupled and easy to maintain and update. Callback mechanism enables modules to work smoothly together and automation processes such as registration, node discovery, and messaging are employed to offer nearly zero-configuration for end users.Finally, based on the designed Pro Se development kit, a public safety communications app called Quote Send App is built to distribute emergency information in close area without Internet access. The process illustrates the easy usability of BLE Mesh to develop Pro Se apps.

A Novel Routing Strategy to Provide Source Location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks

In order to secure the source location privacy when information is sent back to the base station in wireless sensor network, we propose a novel routing strategy which routes the packets to the base station through three stages： directional random routing, h-hop routing in the annular region and the shortest path routing. These stages provide two fold protections to prevent the source location from being tracked down by the adversary. The analysis and simulation results show that proposed scheme, besides providing longer safety period, can significantly reduce energy consumption compared with two baseline schemes.