About ME
My name is Mohammad Battah. I earned Bachelor of
Since in Electrical Engineering option Computer from Western New England
College class of 1989. I was appointed at Testbed Center for Interoperability
(TCFI), within Caltrans, New Technology and Research Program (NT&RP) in
1997.
Background:
Among other things this branch is actively involved
with funding, and participating in, university research in the area of
Interoperable High speed multimedia networks and their applications to systems
used in the communications layer of the National Intelligent Transportation
Systems (ITS) Architecture. Recently, task orders have been executed between
UCSB and Caltrans. I am currently involved in two of them. The First task order
involves the transmission of Multimedia content (packetized data images and
text, voice and video) via various landline and wireless standards-based
communications protocols. A specific area within this topic is video
segmentation and compression for use in multicast video streaming and video
conferencing. TCFI maintains a video conferencing network shown in figure (1),
which was established in 1995, for NT&RP and is involved with Caltrans,
Communications Systems Committee (CSC) effort to transmit traffic surveillance
video between traffic management centers (TMCs) using the MPEG video
segmentation and compression standard.
Second, is ITS standards testing The main goal of
the ITS standards test process is to provide objective and robust evidence that
these standards have practical value in that they lead to interoperable
systems.
Multipoint Conference Server
(MCS) Upgrade:
The goal of this project was to upgrade the
Multipoint Conference Server (MCS) available at (TCFI - UCSB) to be Y2K
compliant, improve and add additional capabilities. The following Functionality
has been added to the existing MCS:
· Allow different transmission – receiving rates between different sites.
· Allow Voice Activated Quadrant.
The Upgrade for the MCS was accomplished by
replacing an obsolete hardware and Installing the last software version. The
following Components has been changed:
· Main CPU Board was upgrade from 386 to Pentium I Microprocessor.
· Add Additional Hard disk.
· Upgrade the Bridge Processor Unit (BPU) Responsible of Mixing the Video Stream)
· Upgrade the Inverse Multiplexer Processor Unit (IMPU) this board will handle the setup and tear down call.
The
Software Has been upgraded to the latest version and more functionality has
been added to it with much easier GUI to use.
ITS Standard Testing:
While
there are more than 55 ITS standards, among them 17 critical standards which
includes the National Transportation Communications for ITS Protocol (NTCIP).
The deployment of ITS will require communications between diverse types of
systems. Transportation information and control will have to take place -- both
for freeway and road management -- between transportation management centers
(TMC’s) and field elements such as traffic signal controllers, variable message
signs, and camera controllers. NTCIP is actually a family of communications
protocols and object definitions.
Caltrans
is committed to using ITS’ standards and protocols in all future installations.
At present, none of the field elements use NTCIP compliant protocols. The main
reason is the lack of reference implementations that minimize the risk of
adopting the NTCIP standards, and provide validated and tested use cases.
My task is to subject the 170/2070 controller
software (Written in C) to development activities to Use Case analysis to
ensure that we understand the problem domain. Then A requirements object model
will be generated to document all the concepts found during analysis, and the
relationships between these concepts. Furthermore, an analysis object model
will be created that defines the architecture itself and the effort will
conclude with a set of specifications, and preparation of a plan for migrating
to an NTCIP compliant version At this stage, I was able to analyze the C code
for 2070 Controller. I started working in Implementing the Use case Diagram
using National Rose Software. I do expect to continue working In this task for
the next 9 months.
Figure
(1)