OSCAR: A Collaborative Bandwidth Aggregation System

The exponential increase in mobile data demand, coupled with growing user expectation to be connected in all places at all times, have introduced novel challenges for researchers to address. Fortunately, the wide spread deployment of various network technologies and the increased adoption of multi-interface enabled devices have enabled researchers to develop solutions for those challenges. Such solutions aim to exploit available interfaces on such devices in both solitary and collaborative forms. These solutions, however, have faced a steep deployment barrier. In this paper, we present OSCAR, a multi-objective, incentive-based, collaborative, and deployable bandwidth aggregation system. We present the OSCAR architecture that does not introduce any intermediate hardware nor require changes to current applications or legacy servers. The OSCAR architecture is designed to automatically estimate the system's context, dynamically schedule various connections and/or packets to different interfaces, be backwards compatible with the current Internet architecture, and provide the user with incentives for collaboration. We also formulate the OSCAR scheduler as a multi-objective, multi-modal scheduler that maximizes system throughput while minimizing energy consumption or financial cost. We evaluate OSCAR via implementation on Linux, as well as via simulation, and compare our results to the current optimal achievable throughput, cost, and energy consumption. Our evaluation shows that, in the throughput maximization mode, we provide up to 150% enhancement in throughput compared to current operating systems, without any changes to legacy servers. Moreover, this performance gain further increases with the availability of connection resume-supporting, or OSCAR-enabled servers, reaching the maximum achievable upper-bound throughput

08141 Abstracts Collection -- Organic Computing - Controlled Self-organization

From March 30th to April 4th 2008, the Dagstuhl Seminar 08141 "Organic Computing - Controlled Self-organization"\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Real-time software for mobile robot simulation and experimentation in cooperative environments

Trabajo presentado al 1st SIMPAR celebrado en Venecia del 3 al 6 de noviembre de 2008.This paper presents the software being developed at IRI (Institut de Robotica i Informatica Industrial) for mobile robot autonomous navigation in the context of the European project URUS (Ubiquitous Robots in Urban Settings). In order that a deployed sensor network and robots operating in the environment cooperate in terms of information sharing, main requirements are real-time performance and the integration of information coming from remote machines not onboard the robot. Moreover, the project involves a group of eleven industrial and academic partners, therefore software integration issues are critical. The proposed software framework is based on the YARP middleware and has been tested in real and simulated experiments.This work was supported by projects: 'Ubiquitous networking robotics in urban settings' (E-00938), 'CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 Multimodal interaction in pattern recognition and computer vision' (V-00069), 'Robotica ubicua para entornos urbanos' (J-01225). Partially supported by Consolider Ingenio 2010, project CSD2007-00018, CICYT project DPI2007-61452, and IST-045062 of the European Community Union.Peer Reviewe

A framework for safe composition of heterogeneous SOA services in a pervasive computing environment with resource constraints

The Service Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm, defines services as software artifacts whose implementations are separated from their specifications. Application developers rely on services to simplify the design, reduce the development time and cost. Within the SOC paradigm, different Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have been developed. These different SOAs provide platform independence, programming-language independence, defined standards, and network support. Even when different SOAs follow the same SOC principles, in practice it is difficult to compose services from heterogeneous architectures. Automatic the process of composition of services from heterogeneous SOAs is not a trivial task. Current composition tools usually focus on a single SOA, while others do not provide mechanisms for ensuring safety of composite services and their interactions. Given that some services might perform critical operations or manage sensitive data, defining safety for services and checking for compliance is crucial. This work proposes and workflow specification language for composite services that is SOA-independent. It also presents a framework for automatic composition of services of heterogeneous SOAs, supporting web services (WS) and OSGi services as an example. It integrates formal software analysis methods to ensure the safety of composite services and their interactions. Experiments are conducted to study the performance of the composite service generated automatically by the framework with composite services using current composition methods. We use as an example a smart home composite service for the management of medicines, deployed in a regular and in a resource-constrained network environment

Runtime variability for dynamic reconfiguration in wireless sensor network product lines

Runtime variability is a key technique for the success of Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPLs), as certain application demand reconfiguration of system features and execution plans at runtime. In this emerging research work we address the problem of dynamic changes in feature models in sensor networks product families, where nodes of the network demand dynamic reconfiguration at post-deployment time

Towards rapid modeling and prototyping of indoor and outdoor monitoring applications

Nowadays, the capability to remotely monitor indoor and outdoor environments would allow to reduce energy consumption and improve the overall management and users’ experience of network application systems. The most known solutions adopting remote control are related to domotics (e.g., smart homes and industry 4.0 applications). An important stimulus for the development of such smart approaches is the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and the increasing investment in the development of green houses, buildings, and, in general, heterogeneous environments. While the benefits for the humans and the environment are evident, a pervasive adoption and distribution of remote monitoring solutions are hindered by the following issue: modeling, designing, prototyping, and further developing the remote applications and underlying architecture require a certain amount of time. Moreover, such systems must be often customized on the basis of the need of the specific domain and involved entities. For such reasons, in this paper, we provide the experience made in addressing some relevant indoor and outdoor case studies through IoT-targeted tools, technologies and protocols, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of the considered solutions as well as insights that can be useful for future practitioners