Reconfigurable middleware architectures for large scale sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks, in an effort to be energy efficient, typically lack the high-level abstractions of advanced programming languages. Though strong, the dichotomy between these two paradigms can be overcome. The SENSIX software framework, described in this dissertation, uniquely integrates constraint-dominated wireless sensor networks with the flexibility of object-oriented programming models, without violating the principles of either. Though these two computing paradigms are contradictory in many ways, SENSIX bridges them to yield a dynamic middleware abstraction unifying low-level resource-aware task reconfiguration and high-level object recomposition. Through the layered approach of SENSIX, the software developer creates a domain-specific sensing architecture by defining a customized task specification and utilizing object inheritance. In addition, SENSIX performs better at large scales (on the order of 1000 nodes or more) than other sensor network middleware which do not include such unified facilities for vertical integration

FPGA-based smart camera mote for pervasive wireless network

International audienceSmart camera networks raise challenging issues in many fields of research, including vision processing, communication protocols, distributed algorithms or power management. The ever increasing resolution of image sensors entails huge amounts of data, far exceeding the bandwidth of current networks and thus forcing smart camera nodes to process raw data into useful information. Consequently, on-board processing has become a key issue for the expansion of such networked systems. In this context, FPGA-based platforms, supporting massive, fine grain data parallelism, offer large opportunities. Besides, the concept of a middleware, providing services for networking, data transfer, dynamic loading or hardware abstraction, has emerged as a means of harnessing the hardware and software complexity of smart camera nodes. In this paper, we prospect the development of a new kind of smart cameras, wherein FPGAs provide high performance processing and general purpose processors support middleware services. In this approach, FPGA devices can be reconfigured at run-time through the network both from explicit user request and transparent middleware decision. An embedded real-time operating system is in charge of the communication layer, and thus can autonomously decide to use a part of the FPGA as an available processing resource. The classical programmability issue, a significant obstacle when dealing with FPGAs, is addressed by resorting to a domain specific high-level programming language (CAPH) for describing operations to be implemented on FPGAs

Self organizing distributed state estimators

Distributed solutions for signal processing techniques are important for establishing large-scale monitoring and control applications. They enable the deployment of scalable sensor networks for particular application areas. Typically, such networks consists of a large number of vulnerable components connected via unreliable communication links and are sometimes deployed in harsh environment. Therefore, dependability of sensor network is a challenging problem. An efficient and cost effective answer to this challenge is provided by employing runtime reconfiguration techniques that assure the integrity of the desired signal processing functionalities. Runtime reconfigurability has thorough impact both on system design, implementation, testing/validation and deployment. The presented research focuses on the widespreaded signal processing method known as state estimation with Kalman filtering in particular. To that extent, a number of distributed state estimation solutions that are suitable for networked systems in general are overviewed, after which robustness of the system is improved according to various runtime reconfiguration techniques

Embedded Virtual Machines for Robust Wireless Control Systems

Embedded wireless networks have largely focused on open loop sensing and monitoring. To address actuation in closed loop wireless control systems there is a strong need to re-think the communication architectures and protocols for reliability, coordination and control. As the links, nodes and topology of wireless systems are inherently unreliable, such time-critical and safety-critical applications require programming abstractions where the tasks are assigned to the sensors, actuators and controllers as a single component rather than statically mapping a set of tasks to a specific physical node at design time. To this end, we introduce the Embedded Virtual Machine (EVM), a powerful and flexible programming abstraction where virtual components and their properties are maintained across node boundaries. In the context of process and discrete control, an EVM is the distributed runtime system that dynamically selects primary-backup sets of controllers to guarantee QoS given spatial and temporal constraints of the underlying wireless network. The EVM architecture defines explicit mechanisms for control, data and fault communication within the virtual component. EVM-based algorithms introduce new capabilities such as predictable outcomes and provably minimal graceful degradation during sensor/actuator failure, adaptation to mode changes and runtime optimization of resource consumption. Through the design of a natural gas process plant hardware-in-loop simulation we aim to demonstrate the preliminary capabilities of EVM-based wireless networks

Recent Advances in Embedded Computing, Intelligence and Applications

The latest proliferation of Internet of Things deployments and edge computing combined with artificial intelligence has led to new exciting application scenarios, where embedded digital devices are essential enablers. Moreover, new powerful and efficient devices are appearing to cope with workloads formerly reserved for the cloud, such as deep learning. These devices allow processing close to where data are generated, avoiding bottlenecks due to communication limitations. The efficient integration of hardware, software and artificial intelligence capabilities deployed in real sensing contexts empowers the edge intelligence paradigm, which will ultimately contribute to the fostering of the offloading processing functionalities to the edge. In this Special Issue, researchers have contributed nine peer-reviewed papers covering a wide range of topics in the area of edge intelligence. Among them are hardware-accelerated implementations of deep neural networks, IoT platforms for extreme edge computing, neuro-evolvable and neuromorphic machine learning, and embedded recommender systems

EC-CENTRIC: An Energy- and Context-Centric Perspective on IoT Systems and Protocol Design

The radio transceiver of an IoT device is often where most of the energy is consumed. For this reason, most research so far has focused on low power circuit and energy efficient physical layer designs, with the goal of reducing the average energy per information bit required for communication. While these efforts are valuable per se, their actual effectiveness can be partially neutralized by ill-designed network, processing and resource management solutions, which can become a primary factor of performance degradation, in terms of throughput, responsiveness and energy efficiency. The objective of this paper is to describe an energy-centric and context-aware optimization framework that accounts for the energy impact of the fundamental functionalities of an IoT system and that proceeds along three main technical thrusts: 1) balancing signal-dependent processing techniques (compression and feature extraction) and communication tasks; 2) jointly designing channel access and routing protocols to maximize the network lifetime; 3) providing self-adaptability to different operating conditions through the adoption of suitable learning architectures and of flexible/reconfigurable algorithms and protocols. After discussing this framework, we present some preliminary results that validate the effectiveness of our proposed line of action, and show how the use of adaptive signal processing and channel access techniques allows an IoT network to dynamically tune lifetime for signal distortion, according to the requirements dictated by the application