A convenient approach to the deterministic routing of MIDI messages

This research investigates the design and development of a Wireless MIDI Connection Management solution in order to create a deterministic MIDI transmission system. A investigation of the MIDI protocol show it to have certain limitation that can be overcome through the use of transmission solutions. These solutions can be used to improve on the versatility of MIDI while overcoming the MIDI's notorious cable length limitation. XMOS's deterministic XS1 microcontrollers are used to enable the design of a real-time system. The MIDINet system is investigated to identify both the strengths and weaknesses of such a connection management system, while other systems for network transmission of MIDI messages are reviewed. These investigations lead to a design concept for a new network MIDI transmission system that allows for the remote management of connections. The design and subsequent implementation of both the transmission system and the connection management system are then detailed. A testing methodology is then devised to allow for the newly created connection management system to be compared to the MIDINet system. The findings show the deterministic system to have lower latency than that of the MIDINet system, while utilising more compact and power efficient hardware

Design of a Wearable Ultrasound System

Ultrasound imaging is a safe and powerful tool for providing detailed still and moving images of the human body. Most of today’s ultrasound systems are housed on a movable cart and designed for use within a clinical setting, such as in a hospital or doctor’s office. This configuration hinders its use in locations lacking controlled environments and stable power sources. Example locations include ambulances, disaster sights, war zones and rural medicine. A wearable ultrasound system, in the form of a vest worn by a sonographer, has been developed as a complete solution for performing untethered ultrasound examinations. The heart of the system is an enclosure containing an embedded computer running the Windows XP operating system, and a custom power supply. The power supply integrates a battery charger, a switching regulator, two linear regulators, a variable speed fan controller and a microcontroller providing an interface for monitoring and control to the embedded computer. Operation of the system is generally accomplished through the use of voice commands, but it may also be operated using a hand-held mouse. It is capable of operating for a full day, using two batteries contained in the vest. In addition, the system has the capability to wirelessly share live images with remote viewers in real-time, while also permitting full duplex voice communication. An integrated web-server also provides for the wireless retrieval of stored images, image loops and other information using a web-browser

Deliverable D6.4: Assessment report: Experimenting with CONNECT in Systems of Systems, and Mobile Environments

The core objective of WP6 is to evaluate the CONNECT technologies under realistic situations. To achieve this goal, WP6 concentrated a significant amount of its 4th year effort on the finalization of the implementation of the GMES scenario defined during the 3rd year. The GMES scenario allows the consortium to assess the validity of CONNECT claims and to investigate the exploitation of CONNECT technologies to deal with the integration of real systems. In particular, GMES requires the connection of highly heterogeneous and independently built systems provided by the industry partners. WP6 contributed also in providing mobile collaborative applications and case studies showing the exploitation of CONNECTORs on mobile devices

Design of a Wearable Ultrasound System

Ultrasound imaging is a safe and powerful tool for providing detailed still and moving images of the human body. Most of today’s ultrasound systems are housed on a movable cart and designed for use within a clinical setting, such as in a hospital or doctor’s office. This configuration hinders its use in locations lacking controlled environments and stable power sources. Example locations include ambulances, disaster sights, war zones and rural medicine. A wearable ultrasound system, in the form of a vest worn by a sonographer, has been developed as a complete solution for performing untethered ultrasound examinations. The heart of the system is an enclosure containing an embedded computer running the Windows XP operating system, and a custom power supply. The power supply integrates a battery charger, a switching regulator, two linear regulators, a variable speed fan controller and a microcontroller providing an interface for monitoring and control to the embedded computer. Operation of the system is generally accomplished through the use of voice commands, but it may also be operated using a hand-held mouse. It is capable of operating for a full day, using two batteries contained in the vest. In addition, the system has the capability to wirelessly share live images with remote viewers in real-time, while also permitting full duplex voice communication. An integrated web-server also provides for the wireless retrieval of stored images, image loops and other information using a web-browser

An improved medium access control protocol for real-time applications in WLANs and its firmware development

The IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), commonly known as Wi-Fi, has emerged as a popular internet access technology and researchers are continuously working on improvement of the quality of service (QoS) in WLAN by proposing new and efficient schemes. Voice and video over Internet Protocol (VVoIP) applications are becoming very popular in Wi-Fi enabled portable/handheld devices because of recent technological advancements and lower service costs. Different from normal voice and video streaming, these applications demand symmetric throughput for the upstream and downstream. Existing Wi-Fi standards are optimised for generic internet applications and fail to provide symmetric throughput due to traffic bottleneck at access points. Performance analysis and benchmarking is an integral part of WLAN research, and in the majority of the cases, this is done through computer simulation using popular network simulators such as Network Simulator ff 2 (NS-2) or OPNET. While computer simulation is an excellent approach for saving time and money, results generated from computer simulations do not always match practical observations. This is why, for proper assessment of the merits of a proposed system in WLAN, a trial on a practical hardware platform is highly recommended and is often a requirement. In this thesis work, with a view to address the abovementioned challenges for facilitating VoIP and VVoIP services over Wi-Fi, two key contributions are made: i) formulating a suitable medium access control (MAC) protocol to address symmetric traffic scenario and ii) firmware development of this newly devised MAC protocol for real WLAN hardware. The proposed solution shows signifocant improvements over existing standards by supporting higher number of stations with strict QoS criteria. The proposed hardware platform is available off-the-shelf in the market and is a cost effective way of generating and evaluating performance results on a hardware system

Evaluating the Performance of the AES70/AES 67-based Network Architectures for Audio Streaming

O consumo de mutimédia via streaming tornou-se um aspecto central da vida moderna. Tal papel acarreta enormes desafios para garantir geral satisfação com a qualidade dos serviços, o que naturalmente tende a acelerar o seu desenvolvimento, isto é, tende a traduzir-se em sucessivos aperfeiçoamentos. O utilizador tem tremenda facilidade em avaliar a qualidade de um destes serviços: não pode apresentar latência e deve apresentar a maior fidelidade possível. São precisamente estes parâmetros que o presente projeto pretende avaliar na performance do protocolo AES70 e do standard AES67, constituindo assim o seu principal objetivo. Esta avaliação está contextualizada dentro daquilo que são as opções de transmissão de áudio sobre uma rede local Ethernet, principalmente quando aplicada a micro-controladores embutidos. Para tal, o trabalho realizado para esta dissertação prendeu-se inicialmente por dominar o controlador disponibilizado para testagem, no caso, uma placa STM com um micro-controlador ARM Cortex-M7. Durante este processo foi possível analisar sobretudo a idiossincrasia do controlador, descobrindo-se lacunas que põem em causa não só o processo de avaliação dos referidos protocols, mas antes ainda, a sua implementação no sistema embutido. Contudo, foi possível implementar uma aplicação de áudio streaming sobre Ethernet, a qual se espera ser útil para trabalho futuro. Este é, na verdade, o factor que esta dissertação mais acaba por desempenhar, uma sucinta explicação para entender todas as vertentes do controlador disponibilizado, nomeadamente as mais relevantes a aplicações de áudio e Ethernet, deixando-o perparado para cenários de teste e posterior comparação com abordagens semelhantes.The consumption of multimedia services via streaming has become a core aspect of modern life. Such a role brings enormous challenges to ensure general satisfaction with the quality of those services, which naturally tends to accelerate their development, i.e., it reflects in a tendency for successive improvements. Their quality, for an user, is measured quite elementally: the service must not present any discernible latency and must deliver the highest possible fidelity. These parameters are precisely the ones this project intends to evaluate in the performance of the AES70 protocol and the AES67 standard, thus constituting the project's main objective. This evaluation is contextualized within the available options for audio transmission over an Ethernet local area network, especially when applied to embedded microcontrollers. As such, the work that comprises this dissertation was initially concerned with mastering the testing environment, i.e., the controller provider for that role, in this case, an STM board with an ARM Cortex-M7 microcontroller. During this process, the analysis of the controller's idiosyncrasies was the main object of focus, contributing to the uncovering of important shortcomings which further challenged not only the evaluation process of these protocols, but particularly, their implementation in the embedded system. However, an implementation of an audio streaming over Ethernet application was accomplished and it is expected to be useful for future work. This is, in fact, the most valuable factor of this dissertation: it incorporates a precise explanation for understanding all key aspects of the STM controller, namely those most relevant to audio and Ethernet applications, rendering it ready for test scenarios and, subsequently, for the comparison of results with similar audio streaming approaches

Modeling of High Pressure Confined Inflatable Structures

Safety of transportation tunnels is a top priority among transportation agencies and public administrators and a very important aspect in the daily operation of a tunnel system. However, it is always a challenge to create and integrate protection systems in existing tunnels to prevent or at least mitigate the occurrence of hazardous events such as spread of smoke or noxious fumes, flooding, among others. Typically there two ways for preventing or mitigating the occurrence of hazardous events: one is the implementation of permanent solutions and, the second one, is the use of temporary solutions. Permanent solutions usually have relatively high sealing efficiency due to their solid and rigid sealing mechanisms such as bulkheads and floodgates. However, they can be extremely expensive and sometimes difficult to build or install due to physical, economical or operational constraints. On the other hand, temporary solutions, which can be relatively low cost and easy to install, offer a temporary countermeasure while permanent repairs are implemented. The development of flexible structures, such as inflatable plugs for temporary solutions is becoming a viable alternative for protection of transportation tunnels and other similar critical civil infrastructure.;The Resilient Tunnel System (RTS) is a passive tunnel protection system developed at West Virginia University (WVU). This system is intended to prevent or minimize the damage induced by hazardous events by creating a compartment to contain the threat. The Resilient Tunnel System implements inflatable structures at specific locations of the tunnel to seal up the tunnel and create a compartment to isolate the compromised region. WVU has conducted several validation tests on full scale inflatable structures designed to mitigate flooding in an actual rail transportation tunnel and in specially built testing facilities. However, testing at full scale either in an actual tunnel or in specially built testing facilities, is a very complex and resource demanding task. It can take several iterations to achieve desired results which cannot be accurately predicted in advance. Therefore, the development of numerical models using Finite Element Analysis becomes imperative in order to: first, reproduce experimental work done at WVU using different prototypes at different scales; and then use the calibrated models as predicting tool that can anticipate the outcome of experiments and eventually reduce its number due to the intrinsic complexity and cost.;This dissertation aims to present the results of the development of Finite Element Models of confined inflatable structures designed to withstand flooding pressures. Models of different prototypes were created and analyzed in order to reproduce experimental results. Numerical results show that the adjusted models can reproduce experimental results, ranging from deployment, full pressurization and induced failure, with a great degree of accuracy providing a reliable predicting tool for evaluation of alternative configurations and parametric studies

QoS Contract Negotiation in Distributed Component-Based Software

Currently, several mature and commercial component models (for e.g. EJB, .NET, COM+) exist on the market. These technologies were designed largely for applications with business-oriented non-functional requirements such as data persistence, confidentiality, and transactional support. They provide only limited support for the development of components and applications with non-functional properties (NFPs) like QoS (e.g. throughput, response time). The integration of QoS into component infrastructure requires among other things the support of components’ QoS contract specification, negotiation, adaptation, etc. This thesis focuses on contract negotiation. For applications in which the consideration of non-functional properties (NFPs) is essential (e.g. Video-on-Demand, eCommerce), a component-based solution demands the appropriate composition of the QoS contracts specified at the different ports of the collaborating components. The ports must be properly connected so that the QoS level required by one is matched by the QoS level provided by the other. Generally, QoS contracts of components depend on run-time resources (e.g. network bandwidth, CPU time) or quality attributes to be established dynamically and are usually specified in multiple QoS-Profiles. QoS contract negotiation enables the selection of appropriate concrete QoS contracts between collaborating components. In our approach, the component containers perform the contract negotiation at run-time. This thesis addresses the QoS contract negotiation problem by first modelling it as a constraint satisfaction optimization problem (CSOP). As a basis for this modelling, the provided and required QoS as well as resource demand are specified at the component level. The notion of utility is applied to select a good solution according to some negotiation goal (e.g. user’s satisfaction). We argue that performing QoS contract negotiation in multiple phases simplifies the negotiation process and makes it more efficient. Based on such classification, the thesis presents heuristic algorithms that comprise coarse-grained and fine-grained negotiations for collaborating components deployed in distributed nodes in the following scenarios: (i) single-client - single-server, (ii) multiple-clients, and (iii) multi-tier scenarios. To motivate the problem as well as to validate the proposed approach, we have examined three componentized distributed applications. These are: (i) video streaming, (ii) stock quote, and (iii) billing (to evaluate certain security properties). An experiment has been conducted to specify the QoS contracts of the collaborating components in one of the applications we studied. In a run-time system that implements our algorithm, we simulated different behaviors concerning: (i) user’s QoS requirements and preferences, (ii) resource availability conditions concerning the client, server, and network bandwidth, and (iii) the specified QoS-Profiles of the collaborating components. Under various conditions, the outcome of the negotiation confirms the claim we made with regard to obtaining a good solution