Consumer Credit in the Affluent Society

This thesis is a proof-of-concept project that aims at modify and reuse existing communication protocols of wireless vehicle to vehicle communication in order to build a prototype of a real time graphical application that runs in an embedded environment. The application is a 2D visualization of the flow of material at a quarry and is built on top of existing communication protocols that enable wireless vehicle to vehicle communication according to the 802.11p standard for intelligent transport solutions. These communication protocols have already been used within the Volvo group in other research rojects, but not in a context of a real-time graphical 2D visualization. The application runs on an ALIX embedded motherboard and combined with the necessary hardware represent one node that makes the communication network. The visualization monitors the position of every active node in the network and the flow of material between material locations and crusher that process the material at the quarry. The visualization is implemented in C/C++ using Qt 4.6.2 Graphics View framework

IREEL: remote experimentation with real protocols and applications over emulated network (extended version)

In the context of education, experimenting with networking protocols is a very important step in the learning process. These experiments are usually achieved using either simulation or real test bed. Progresses in high speed processing and networking enable the development of network emulators. These emulators use both real protocol implementations and network models that allow a controlled communication environment to be created

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

An Analysis Framework for Network-Code Programs

Distributed real-time systems require a predictable and verifiable mechanism to control the communication medium. Current real-time communication protocols are typically independent of the application and have intrinsic limitations that impede customizing or optimizing them for the application. Therefore, either the developer must adapt her application and work around these subtleties or she must limit the capabilities of the application being developed. Network Code, in contrast, is a more expressive and flexible model that specifies real-time communication schedules as programs. By providing a programmable media access layer on the basis of TDMA, Network Code permits creating application-specific protocols that suit the particular needs of the application. However, this gain in flexibility also incurrs additional costs such as increased communication and run-time overhead. Therefore, engineering an application with network code necessitates that these costs are analyzed, quantified, and weighted against the benefits. In this work, we propose a framework to analyze network code programs for commonly used metrics such as overhead, schedulability, and average waiting time. We introduce Timed Tree Communication Schedules, based on timed automata to model such programs and define metrics in the context of deterministic and probabilistic communication schedules. To demonstrate the utility of our framework, we study an inverted pendulum system and show that we can decrease the cumulative numeric error in the model’s implementation through analyzing and improving the schedule based on the presented metrics