Model-based provisioning and management of adaptive distributed communication in mobile cooperative systems

Adaptation of communication is required to maintain the reliable connection and to ensure the minimum quality in collaborative activities. Within the framework of wireless environment, how can host entities be handled in the event of a sudden unexpected change in communication and reliable sources? This challenging issue is addressed in the context of Emergency rescue system carried out by mobile devices and robots during calamities or disaster. For this kind of scenario, this book proposes an adaptive middleware to support reconfigurable, reliable group communications. Here, the system structure has been viewed at two different states, a control center with high processing power and uninterrupted energy level is responsible for global task and entities like autonomous robots and firemen owning smart devices act locally in the mission. Adaptation at control center is handled by semantic modeling whereas at local entities, it is managed by a software module called communication agent (CA). Modeling follows the well-known SWRL instructions which establish the degree of importance of each communication link or component. Providing generic and scalable solutions for automated self-configuration is driven by rule-based reconfiguration policies. To perform dynamically in changing environment, a trigger mechanism should force this model to take an adaptive action in order to accomplish a certain task, for example, the group chosen in the beginning of a mission need not be the same one during the whole mission. Local entity adaptive mechanisms are handled by CA that manages internal service APIs to configure, set up, and monitors communication services and manages the internal resources to satisfy telecom service requirements

Domain specific language for deployment of parallel applications on parallel computing platforms

To increase the computing performance the current trend is towards applying parallel computing in which parallel tasks are executed on multiple nodes. The deployment of tasks on the computing platform usually impacts the overall performance and as such needs to be modelled carefully. In the architecture design community the deployment viewpoint is an important viewpoint to support this mapping process. In general the derived deployment views are visual notations that are not amenable for run-time processing, and do not scale well for deployment of large scale parallel applications. In this paper we propose a domain specific language (DSL) for modeling the deployment of parallel applications and for providing automated support for the deployment process. The DSL is based on a metamodel that is derived after a domain analysis on parallel computing. We illustrate the application of the DSL for a traffic simulation system and provide a set of important scenarios for using the DSL. © 2014 ACM

Internet of Things Software Modules Marketplace

The project developed is a centralised repository of software packages to be used in cyber-physical systems. It is composed by a central database, an http api, an ftp client to serve files and a web application to manage the repository. The system also communicates via OPCUA protocol with the embed-system for real time monitoring.The advent of the Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), a physical system representation through a vir-tual model, usually used to control a system or a process comes from the growing democratizationof the computational power. Nowadays, virtually anything can be equipped with some kind ofembedded processor to automate tasks, generate or consume some kind of data. In addition, thecontinuous development and improvement of the communication networks has helped leveragethe concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) in which things are now, themselves, connected to theInternet, exchanging data with each other and with people.In the industrial sector, CPS, also called Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) and theIoT are the main technological advances that lead to the industry fourth revolution, common des-ignated as Industry 4.0 in which the factory floor is no longer a centralized model where all thecomputation is done centrally but is now a decentralized model where industrial equipment haveembedded devices to control, automate tasks and react in a dynamic and intelligent manner to thesensed physical environment.Thereby, one of the keywords around the CPPSs is software. Software is no longer centralizedand is now distributed through several devices that comprises the system. This new approachcomes with significant changes and one of them is the reuse and distribution of the software. Itis not viable to manual deploy and install software in hundreds or thousands of devices and nothaving a way of reusing the existing software. If, on the one hand, the desire is to develop a moreintelligent process control system, on the other, flexibility, adaptability and simplicity are alsoconvenient capabilities or else intelligent manufacturing process control systems are built upon alot of resources debt. Hence, the solution is to build standards, tools and frameworks that allowthe reuse of software and its rapid deployment in the distributed devices.One option, in the Industry 4.0 field, to cope with the software reuse issue in this kind of sys-tems is the encapsulation of software in functional blocks, the Function Blocks (FBs) and their usein the function block programming paradigm, described in IEC 61499 standard. The functionalityis abstracted away in the FBs and can be reused by just deploying the them to the devices. Thisway, it is easier to manage a network by dragging and dropping these blocks, building complexapplications centrally and deploy everything to the distributed embedded devices. However, theimplementation of this standard to address the aforementioned problem brings, itself, other neces-sities such as managing the FBs, monitoring them and their previous download by the embeddeddevices.This dissertation main goal is the development of a marketplace to manage and monitor of FBs in a IEC 61499 network envisioning the filling of the previous mentioned gaps in this kindof networks. The marketplace, integrated in a IEC 61499 global solution will not only enable thedistribution of FBs among the embedded devices in a IEC 61499 compliant CPPS but also manageFBs versions, functioning as a central repository of software components, having also monitoringand statistical features, allowing the detection of flaws or malfunctions and collect statistical datai iiabout FBs usage

Developing resource consolidation frameworks for moldable virtual machines in clouds

This paper considers the scenario where multiple clusters of Virtual Machines (i.e., termed Virtual Clusters) are hosted in a Cloud system consisting of a cluster of physical nodes. Multiple Virtual Clusters (VCs) cohabit in the physical cluster, with each VC offering a particular type of service for the incoming requests. In this context, VM consolidation, which strives to use a minimal number of nodes to accommodate all VMs in the system, plays an important role in saving resource consumption. Most existing consolidation methods proposed in the literature regard VMs as “rigid” during consolidation, i.e., VMs’ resource capacities remain unchanged. In VC environments, QoS is usually delivered by a VC as a single entity. Therefore, there is no reason why VMs’ resource capacity cannot be adjusted as long as the whole VC is still able to maintain the desired QoS. Treating VMs as “moldable” during consolidation may be able to further consolidate VMs into an even fewer number of nodes. This paper investigates this issue and develops a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to consolidate moldable VMs. The GA is able to evolve an optimized system state, which represents the VM-to-node mapping and the resource capacity allocated to each VM. After the new system state is calculated by the GA, the Cloud will transit from the current system state to the new one. The transition time represents overhead and should be minimized. In this paper, a cost model is formalized to capture the transition overhead, and a reconfiguration algorithm is developed to transit the Cloud to the optimized system state with low transition overhead. Experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the GA and the reconfiguration algorithm

Context awareness and related challenges: A comprehensive evaluation study for a context-based RAT selection scheme towards 5G networks

Ο αποτελεσματικός σχεδιασμός των δικτύων είναι απαραίτητος για να αντιμετωπιστεί ο αυξανόμενος αριθμός των συνδρομητών κινητού διαδικτύου και των απαιτητικών υπηρεσιών δεδομένων, που ανταγωνίζονται για περιορισμένους ασύρματους πόρους. Επιπλέον, οι βασικές προκλήσεις για τα συνεχώς αναπτυσσόμενα δίκτυα LTE είναι η αύξηση των δυνατοτήτων των υφιστάμενων μηχανισμών, η μείωση της υπερβολικής σηματοδότησης (signaling) και η αξιοποίηση ενός αποτελεσματικού μηχανισμού επιλογής τεχνολογίας ασύρματης πρόσβασης (RAT). Υπάρχουν ποικίλες προτάσεις στην βιβλιογραφία σχετικά με αυτές τις προκλήσεις, μερικές από τις οποίες παρουσιάζονται εδώ. Ο σκοπός της εργασίας αυτής είναι να ερευνήσει τις τρέχουσες εξελίξεις στα δίκτυα LTE σχετικά με την ενσωμάτωση EPC και WiFi και την επίγνωση πλαισίου (context awareness) στην διαχείριση κινητικότητας, και να προτείνει τον αλγόριθμο COmpAsS, έναν μηχανισμό που χρησιμοποιεί ασαφή λογική (fuzzy logic) για να επιλέξει την πιο κατάλληλη τεχνολογία ασύρματης πρόσβασης για τα κινητά. Επιπλέον, έχουμε ποσοτικοποιήσει το κόστος σηματοδότησης του προτεινόμενου μηχανισμού σε σύνδεση με τις σημερινές προδιαγραφές του 3GPP και εκτελέσαμε μια ολοκληρωμένη ανάλυση. Τέλος, αξιολογήσαμε τον αλγόριθμο μέσω εκτεταμένων προσομοιώσεων σε ένα πολύπλοκο και ρεαλιστικό σενάριο χρήσης 5G, που απεικονίζονται τα σαφή πλεονεκτήματα της προσέγγισής μας όσον αφορά τη συχνότητα μεταπομπών (handover) και τις μετρήσεις βασικών QoS τιμών, όπως ρυθμός μετάδοσης και καθυστέρηση.Effective network planning is essential to cope with the increasing number of mobile internet subscribers and bandwidth-intensive services competing for limited wireless resources. Additionally, key challenges for the constantly growing LTE networks is increasing capabilities of current mechanisms, reduction of signaling overhead and the utilization of an effective Radio Access Technology (RAT) selection scheme. There have been various proposals in literature regarding these challenges, some of which are discussed here. The purpose of this work is to research the current advances in LTE networks regarding EPC - WiFi integration and context awareness in mobility management, and propose the COmpAsS algorithm, a mechanism using fuzzy logic to select the most suitable Radio Access Technology. Furthermore, we quantify the signaling overhead of the proposed mechanism by linking it to the current 3GPP specifications and performing a comprehensive analysis. Finally, we evaluate the novel scheme via extensive simulations in a complex and realistic 5G use case, illustrating the clear advantages of our approach in terms of handover frequency and key QoS metrics, i.e. the user-experienced throughput and delay

Adaptive Traffic Control System: Design and Simulation

Traditional traffic control infrastructures have not changed much in the last several decades, while the volume of traffic has increased disproportionably to infrastructure improvement. A solution to mobility cannot be addressed by simply improving the technology of a single vehicle any further. A solution is to enable people to reach their destinations safely and in optimal time, given the topology of road networks. This thesis offers such a solution based on an adaptive traffic control algorithm which takes the road network topology and dynamically varying traffic streams as input, and guarantees dependable and optimal mobility for vehicles. The algorithm calculates dependable passages for vehicles to cross road intersections, and enables point-to-point travel by minimizing travel time and maximizing fuel consumption. The adaptive algorithm is embedded in the Arbiter, managed by an Intersection Manager at every road intersection. A distributed traffic management architecture, consisting of a hierarchy of road managers, is proposed in the thesis. Extensions to the adaptive algorithm and the architecture are given. The extended algorithm will efficiently function under exceptional situations, such as bad weather, road repairs, and emergency vehicle mobility. The extended architecture is expected to have autonomic computing properties, such as self-healing, self-recovery, and self-protection, and Cyber-physical system properties, such as tightly-coupled feed-back loops with all entities in its environment. A simulator has been implemented, and simulated results reveal that the adaptive algorithm is far superior in performance to fixed-time control systems

Context-based confidentiality analysis in dynamic Industry 4.0 scenarios

In Industry 4.0 environments highly dynamic and flexible access control strategies are needed. State of the art strategies are often not included in the modelling process but must be considered afterwards. This makes it very difficult to analyse the security properties of a system. In the framework of the Trust 4.0 project the confidentiality analysis tries to solve this problem using a context-based approach. Thus, there is a security model named context metamodel. Another important problem is that the transformation of an instance of a security model to a wide-spread access control standard is often not possible. This is also the case for the context metamodel. Moreover, another transformation which is very interesting to consider is one to an ensemble based component system which is also presented in the Trust 4.0 project. This thesis introduces an extension to the beforementioned context metamodel in order to add more extensibility to it. Furthermore, the thesis deals with the creation of a concept and an implementation of the transformations mentioned above. For that purpose, at first, the transformation to the attribute-based access control standard XACML is considered. Thereafter, the transformation from XACML to an ensemble based component system is covered. The evaluation indicated that the model can be used for use cases in Industry 4.0 scenarios. Moreover, it also indicated the transformations produce adequately accurate access policies. Furthermore, the scalability evaluation indicated linear runtime behaviour of the implementations of both transformations for respectively higher number of input contexts or XACML rules

Design, concept and implementation for an electronic and mobile patient health record of tinnitus affected patients using the iOS platform

Tinnitus is increasingly affecting individuals who report that they hear a whistilng or other noise without any external sound source. Currently, there is no treatment that completely eliminates tinnitus. However, there are ways to allay this, for example by questionnaires or therapies. On the basis of auditory tests changes can be documented in the perception of tinnitus. Through observation of event triggers and amplifiers, appropriate actions can be taken. For all of these approaches, the TinnitusNavigator app has been developed which supports the patient in dealing with tinnitus and brings the patient closer to a relief of symptoms. Users will find an easy navigation since the iOS-ware Guidelines were considered in the design. Using the Core Data framework of Apple supported the realisation of the model from the Model View Controller pattern. At the end the outcome of this work is a working application

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