Robust Energy Management for Green and Survivable IP Networks

Despite the growing necessity to make Internet greener, it is worth pointing out that energy-aware strategies to minimize network energy consumption must not undermine the normal network operation. In particular, two very important issues that may limit the application of green networking techniques concern, respectively, network survivability, i.e. the network capability to react to device failures, and robustness to traffic variations. We propose novel modelling techniques to minimize the daily energy consumption of IP networks, while explicitly guaranteeing, in addition to typical QoS requirements, both network survivability and robustness to traffic variations. The impact of such limitations on final network consumption is exhaustively investigated. Daily traffic variations are modelled by dividing a single day into multiple time intervals (multi-period problem), and network consumption is reduced by putting to sleep idle line cards and chassis. To preserve network resiliency we consider two different protection schemes, i.e. dedicated and shared protection, according to which a backup path is assigned to each demand and a certain amount of spare capacity has to be available on each link. Robustness to traffic variations is provided by means of a specific modelling framework that allows to tune the conservatism degree of the solutions and to take into account load variations of different magnitude. Furthermore, we impose some inter-period constraints necessary to guarantee network stability and preserve the device lifetime. Both exact and heuristic methods are proposed. Experimentations carried out with realistic networks operated with flow-based routing protocols (i.e. MPLS) show that significant savings, up to 30%, can be achieved also when both survivability and robustness are fully guaranteed

Delay-Optimal Relay Selection in Device-to-Device Communications for Smart Grid

The smart grid communication network adopts a hierarchical structure which consists of three kinds of networks which are Home Area Networks (HANs), Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs), and Wide Area Networks (WANs). The smart grid NANs comprise of the communication infrastructure used to manage the electricity distribution to the end users. Cellular technology with LTE-based standards is a widely-used and forward-looking technology hence becomes a promising technology that can meet the requirements of different applications in NANs. However, the LTE has a limitation to cope with the data traffic characteristics of smart grid applications, thus require for enhancements. Device-to-Device (D2D) communications enable direct data transmissions between devices by exploiting the cellular resources, which could guarantee the improvement of LTE performances. Delay is one of the important communication requirements for the real-time smart grid applications. In this paper, the application of D2D communications for the smart grid NANs is investigated to improve the average end-to-end delay of the system. A relay selection algorithm that considers both the queue state and the channel state of nodes is proposed. The optimization problem is formulated as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) and a linear programming method is used to find the optimal policy for the CMDP problem. Simulation results are presented to prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme

An evaluation framework for stereo-based driver assistance

This is the post-print version of the Article - Copyright @ 2012 Springer VerlagThe accuracy of stereo algorithms or optical flow methods is commonly assessed by comparing the results against the Middlebury database. However, equivalent data for automotive or robotics applications rarely exist as they are difficult to obtain. As our main contribution, we introduce an evaluation framework tailored for stereo-based driver assistance able to deliver excellent performance measures while circumventing manual label effort. Within this framework one can combine several ways of ground-truthing, different comparison metrics, and use large image databases. Using our framework we show examples on several types of ground truthing techniques: implicit ground truthing (e.g. sequence recorded without a crash occurred), robotic vehicles with high precision sensors, and to a small extent, manual labeling. To show the effectiveness of our evaluation framework we compare three different stereo algorithms on pixel and object level. In more detail we evaluate an intermediate representation called the Stixel World. Besides evaluating the accuracy of the Stixels, we investigate the completeness (equivalent to the detection rate) of the StixelWorld vs. the number of phantom Stixels. Among many findings, using this framework enables us to reduce the number of phantom Stixels by a factor of three compared to the base parametrization. This base parametrization has already been optimized by test driving vehicles for distances exceeding 10000 km

A state-of-the-art review on torque distribution strategies aimed at enhancing energy efficiency for fully electric vehicles with independently actuated drivetrains

© 2019, Levrotto and Bella. All rights reserved. Electric vehicles are the future of private passenger transportation. However, there are still several technological barriers that hinder the large scale adoption of electric vehicles. In particular, their limited autonomy motivates studies on methods for improving the energy efficiency of electric vehicles so as to make them more attractive to the market. This paper provides a concise review on the current state-of-the-art of torque distribution strategies aimed at enhancing energy efficiency for fully electric vehicles with independently actuated drivetrains (FEVIADs). Starting from the operating principles, which include the "control allocation" problem, the peculiarities of each proposed solution are illustrated. All the existing techniques are categorized based on a selection of parameters deemed relevant to provide a comprehensive overview and understanding of the topic. Finally, future concerns and research perspectives for FEVIAD are discussed