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Submit your best new product ideas for a chance at $25,000, other great prizes, and global recognition. If you already are registered, log in to access the entry form. Otherwise, click here to get started.

Help build a better tomorrow

Since Tech Briefs magazine launched the Create the Future Design contest in 2002 to recognize and reward engineering innovation, over 15,000 design ideas have been submitted by engineers, students, and entrepreneurs across six continents. You can also join the innovators who dared to dream big and build a better tomorrow by entering this year’s contest.

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Over the past 20 years, many innovators have used the recognition afforded by the contest to advance the development and marketing of their technologies. We highlight some success stories of past winners who have brought their inventions to the marketplace.

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A ‘Create the Future’ Winner Featured on ‘Here’s an Idea’

Spinal cord injury affects 17,000 Americans and 700,000 people worldwide each year. A research team at NeuroPair, Inc. won the Grand Prize in the 2023 Create the Future Design Contest for a revolutionary approach to spinal cord repair. In this Here’s an Idea podcast episode, Dr. Johannes Dapprich, NeuroPair’s CEO and founder, discusses their groundbreaking approach that addresses a critical need in the medical field, offering a fast and minimally invasive solution to a long-standing problem.

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“At COMSOL, we are very excited to recognize innovators and their important work this year. We are grateful for the opportunity to support the Create the Future Design Contest, which is an excellent platform for designers to showcase their ideas and products in front of a worldwide audience. Best of luck to all participants!”

— Bernt Nilsson, Senior Vice President of Marketing, COMSOL, Inc.

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— Kevin Hess, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Mouser Electronics

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Detection of Network Problems Using Mobile Network

Votes: 31
Views: 6173

NETWORK PERFORMANCE MONITORING DEVICE
This prototype is to enable seamless router/switch management through mobile base stations.

The set up consists of a beacon module (USB enabled), network devices in a given location, a base station tower, and beacon/keep-alive sending modules in the routers or switches.
All base stations in a specific region (city/area) are provided with a specific set of 10 digit IDs. These 10 digit IDs are similar to 10 digit mobile numbers. Each location has an area code for the first 5 digits and  router ID for next 5 digits.

As soon as a ISP or company registers their routers to the base station, the mounted device starts monitoring the health of the router similar to a user running health commands and sends a beacon to the nearest base station at the time of outage. The notification such as switch/router performance, heavy traffic, failure of cables can be sent to a mobile base station.

Monitoring servers are generally located in a WAN and in worse case sometimes the monitoring server might as well get effected in the whole process , thus causing a heartburn to the network admin. Given the real time support network admin provides, this small latency of communication can prove fatal. Hence when a beacon is sent to the base station, from the router the information is immediately passed down to the registered monitoring servers and/or registered mobile users' numbers for this service. The beacon reception is more of a subscription format where only users who have subscribed to alerts receive one.

Take the example of Switch CPU utilization going up and spanning tree loop is the root cause. The beacon device which has its own built in processor and little memory triggers an alert in the form of a beacon. As such, these beacons need to be sent a fixed number of times for a specific period to prevent any false alerts or alarams. This beacon is now sent down to the BS in format as below.

The cause ID is a set parameter in the router specifying the cause of the outage. For example 1 might represent a spanning tree loop.

Voting

Voting is closed!

  • ABOUT THE ENTRANT

  • Name:
    Vijaya Durga C
  • Type of entry:
    individual
  • Profession:
    Network Engineer
  • Number of times previously entering contest:
    never
  • Vijaya Durga's favorite design and analysis tools:
    GNS3
  • Vijaya Durga's hobbies and activities:
    Book Reading
  • Vijaya Durga belongs to these online communities:
    crazyengineers; cisco learning community
  • Patent status:
    none