468,965 research outputs found
PhyNetLab: An IoT-Based Warehouse Testbed
Future warehouses will be made of modular embedded entities with
communication ability and energy aware operation attached to the traditional
materials handling and warehousing objects. This advancement is mainly to
fulfill the flexibility and scalability needs of the emerging warehouses.
However, it leads to a new layer of complexity during development and
evaluation of such systems due to the multidisciplinarity in logistics,
embedded systems, and wireless communications. Although each discipline
provides theoretical approaches and simulations for these tasks, many issues
are often discovered in a real deployment of the full system. In this paper we
introduce PhyNetLab as a real scale warehouse testbed made of cyber physical
objects (PhyNodes) developed for this type of application. The presented
platform provides a possibility to check the industrial requirement of an
IoT-based warehouse in addition to the typical wireless sensor networks tests.
We describe the hardware and software components of the nodes in addition to
the overall structure of the testbed. Finally, we will demonstrate the
advantages of the testbed by evaluating the performance of the ETSI compliant
radio channel access procedure for an IoT warehouse
The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services
As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed
Software-Defined Cloud Computing: Architectural Elements and Open Challenges
The variety of existing cloud services creates a challenge for service
providers to enforce reasonable Software Level Agreements (SLA) stating the
Quality of Service (QoS) and penalties in case QoS is not achieved. To avoid
such penalties at the same time that the infrastructure operates with minimum
energy and resource wastage, constant monitoring and adaptation of the
infrastructure is needed. We refer to Software-Defined Cloud Computing, or
simply Software-Defined Clouds (SDC), as an approach for automating the process
of optimal cloud configuration by extending virtualization concept to all
resources in a data center. An SDC enables easy reconfiguration and adaptation
of physical resources in a cloud infrastructure, to better accommodate the
demand on QoS through a software that can describe and manage various aspects
comprising the cloud environment. In this paper, we present an architecture for
SDCs on data centers with emphasis on mobile cloud applications. We present an
evaluation, showcasing the potential of SDC in two use cases-QoS-aware
bandwidth allocation and bandwidth-aware, energy-efficient VM placement-and
discuss the research challenges and opportunities in this emerging area.Comment: Keynote Paper, 3rd International Conference on Advances in Computing,
Communications and Informatics (ICACCI 2014), September 24-27, 2014, Delhi,
Indi
The management of academic workloads: full report on findings
The pressures on UK higher education (from explicit
competition and growth in student numbers, to severe
regulatory demands) are greater than ever, and have
resulted in a steady increase in measures taken by
universities to actively manage their finances and overall
quality. These pressures are also likely to have impacted on staff and, indeed, recent large surveys in the sector have indicated that almost half of respondents find their
workloads unmanageable. Against this background it would
seem logical that the emphasis on institutional interventions to improve finance and quality, should be matched by similar attention given to the allocation of workloads to staff, and a focus on how best to utilise peopleâs time - the single biggest resource available within universities.
Thus the aim of this piece of research was to focus on the
processes and practices surrounding the allocation of staff
workloads within higher education. Ten diverse organisations were selected for study: six universities in the UK, two overseas universities and two non higher education (but knowledge-intensive) organisations. In each, a crosssection of staff was selected, and in-depth interviews carried out. A total of 59 such interviews were carried out across the ten organisations. By identifying typical practices, as well as interesting alternatives, views on the various strengths and weaknesses of each of their workload allocation approaches was collated; and associated factors requiring attention identified. Through an extensive process of analysis, approaches which promoted more equitable loads for individuals, and which might provide synergies for institutions were also investigated
Introducing Energy Efficiency into SQALE
Energy Efficiency is becoming a key factor in software development, given the sharp growth of IT systems and their impact on worldwide energy consumption. We do believe that a quality process infrastructure should be able to consider the Energy Efficiency of a system since its early development: for this reason we propose to introduce Energy Efficiency into the existing quality models. We selected the SQALE model and we tailored it inserting Energy Efficiency as a sub-characteristic of efficiency. We also propose a set of six source code specific requirements for the Java language starting from guidelines currently suggested in the literature. We experienced two major challenges: the identification of measurable, automatically detectable requirements, and the lack of empirical validation on the guidelines currently present in the literature and in the industrial state of the practice as well. We describe an experiment plan to validate the six requirements and evaluate the impact of their violation on Energy Efficiency, which has been partially proved by preliminary results on C code. Having Energy Efficiency in a quality model and well verified code requirements to measure it, will enable a quality process that precisely assesses and monitors the impact of software on energy consumptio
Towards a middleware for generalised context management
It is widely accepted in the Pervasive Computing community that contextual interactions are the key to the delivery of truly calm technology. However, there is currently no easy way to incorporate contextual data into an application. If contextual data is used, it is generally in an ad hoc manner, which means that developers have to spend time on low-level details. There have been many projects investigating this area, however as yet none of them provide support for all of the key issues of dynamic composition and flexible representation of contextual information as well as the problems of scalability and adaptability to environmental changes. In this paper we present the Strathclyde Context Infrastructure (SCI), a middleware infrastructure for discovery, aggregation, and delivery of context information
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