Unified radio and network control across heterogeneous hardware platforms

Experimentation is an important step in the investigation of techniques for handling spectrum scarcity or the development of new waveforms in future wireless networks. However, it is impractical and not cost effective to construct custom platforms for each future network scenario to be investigated. This problem is addressed by defining Unified Programming Interfaces that allow common access to several platforms for experimentation-based prototyping, research, and development purposes. The design of these interfaces is driven by a diverse set of scenarios that capture the functionality relevant to future network implementations while trying to keep them as generic as possible. Herein, the definition of this set of scenarios is presented as well as the architecture for supporting experimentation-based wireless research over multiple hardware platforms. The proposed architecture for experimentation incorporates both local and global unified interfaces to control any aspect of a wireless system while being completely agnostic to the actual technology incorporated. Control is feasible from the low-level features of individual radios to the entire network stack, including hierarchical control combinations. A testbed to enable the use of the above architecture is utilized that uses a backbone network in order to be able to extract measurements and observe the overall behaviour of the system under test without imposing further communication overhead to the actual experiment. Based on the aforementioned architecture, a system is proposed that is able to support the advancement of intelligent techniques for future networks through experimentation while decoupling promising algorithms and techniques from the capabilities of a specific hardware platform

A Dynamic Application Partitioning and Offloading Framework to Enhance the Capabilities of Transient Clouds Using Mobile Agents

Mobile cloud computing has emerged as a prominent area of research, a natural extension of cloud computing that proposes to offer solutions for enhancing the capabilities of smart mobile devices commonly plagued by resource constraints. As one of its promising models, transient clouds aim to address the internet connectivity shortfall inherent in most solutions through the formation of ad hoc networks by devices in close proximity, then the offloading some computations (Cyber Foraging) to the created cloud. However, transient clouds, at their current state, have several limitations, concerning their expansion on a local network having a large number of devices and the management of the instability of the network due to the constant mobility of the devices. Another issue is the fact code partitioning and offloading are not addressed to fit the need of such networks, thereby rendering the distributed computing mechanism barely efficient for the Transient Cloud. In this study, we propose a transient cloud-based framework that exploits the use of multi-agent systems, enabling a dynamic partitioning and offloading of code, and facilitating the movement and the execution of code partition packets in a multi-hop ad-hoc mesh network. When created and deployed, these intelligent mobile agents operate independently or collaboratively and adapt to the continual entry and exit of devices in the neighbourhood. The integration of these trending concepts in distributed computing within a framework offers a new architecture for resource-sharing among cooperating devices that addresses the varied issues that arise in dynamic environments