Low Latency Reliable Data Sharing Mechanism for UAV Swarm Missions

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms is increasing in many commercial applications as well as military applications (such as reconnaissance missions, search and rescue missions). Autonomous UAV swarm systems rely on multi-node interhost communication, which is used in coordination for complex tasks. Reliability and low latency in data transfer play an important role in the maintenance of UAV coordination for these tasks. In these applications, the control of UAVs is performed by autonomous software and any failure in data reception may have catastrophic consequences. On the other hand, there are lots of factors that affect communication link performance such as path loss, interference, etc. in communication technology (WIFI, 5G, etc.), transport layer protocol, network topology, and so on. Therefore, the necessity of reliable and low latency data sharing mechanisms among UAVs comes into prominence gradually. This paper examines available middleware solutions, transport layer protocols, and data serialization formats. Based on evaluation results, this research proposes a middleware concept for mobile wireless networks like UAV swarm systems

Design and Performance of Configurable Endsystem Scheduling Mechanisms

This paper describes a scheduling abstraction, called group scheduling, that emphasizes fine grain configurability of scheduling system semantics. The group scheduling approach described and evaluated in this paper is an extremely flexible framework within which a wide range of scheduling semantics can be expressed. The paper describes both the OS and middleware based implementations of the framework, and shows through evaluation that they produce the same behavior from a non-trivial set of application computations. Further, the evaluation shows that the framework can easily support application-aware scheduling algorithms to improve performance

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Runtime reconfiguration of physical and virtual pervasive systems

Today, almost everyone comes in contact with smart environments during their everyday’s life. Environments such as smart homes, smart offices, or pervasive classrooms contain a plethora of heterogeneous connected devices and provide diverse services to users. The main goal of such smart environments is to support users during their daily chores and simplify the interaction with the technology. Pervasive Middlewares can be used for a seamless communication between all available devices and by integrating them directly into the environment. Only a few years ago, a user entering a meeting room had to set up, for example, the projector and connect a computer manually or teachers had to distribute files via mail. With the rise of smart environments these tasks can be automated by the system, e.g., upon entering a room, the smartphone automatically connects to a display and the presentation starts. Besides all the advantages of smart environments, they also bring up two major problems. First, while the built-in automatic adaptation of many smart environments is often able to adjust the system in a helpful way, there are situations where the user has something different in mind. In such cases, it can be challenging for unexperienced users to configure the system to their needs. Second, while users are getting increasingly mobile, they still want to use the systems they are accustomed to. As an example, an employee on a business trip wants to join a meeting taking place in a smart meeting room. Thus, smart environments need to be accessible remotely and should provide all users with the same functionalities and user experience. For these reasons, this thesis presents the PerFlow system consisting of three parts. First, the PerFlow Middleware which allows the reconfiguration of a pervasive system during runtime. Second, with the PerFlow Tool unexperi- enced end users are able to create new configurations without having previous knowledge in programming distributed systems. Therefore, a specialized visual scripting language is designed, which allows the creation of rules for the commu- nication between different devices. Third, to offer remote participants the same user experience, the PerFlow Virtual Extension allows the implementation of pervasive applications for virtual environments. After introducing the design for the PerFlow system, the implementation details and an evaluation of the developed prototype is outlined. The evaluation discusses the usability of the system in a real world scenario and the performance implications of the middle- ware evaluated in our own pervasive learning environment, the PerLE testbed. Further, a two stage user study is introduced to analyze the ease of use and the usefulness of the visual scripting tool

Research challenges in applying intelligent wireless sensors in the oil, gas and resources industries

The monitoring of oil, gas and resources plant performance and the operational environment through sensors allows for greater insight into potential safety problems and operational requirements. Such solutions promote a safe and healthy work environment for all stakeholders and optimized operations. Intelligent techniques and the monitoring of key historical operational properties can be used to realize certain characteristics and patterns in operation data. Such solutions may enhance operational visualization, foresight, forecasting and maintenance schedules for effective and efficient operation and maintenance. This optimizes plant safety, production, turnarounds, shutdowns and maintenance and improves error tolerance and recovery.However, the development of robust devices that are able to perform in these remote and hostile requirements along with the intelligent solutions to structure, store, process and retrieve this information are difficult to realize. This paper investigates the use of wireless sensors and the related intelligent solutions in the oil, gas and resource industries

A grid-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval

In large-scale distributed retrieval, challenges of latency, heterogeneity, and dynamicity emphasise the importance of infrastructural support in reducing the development costs of state-of-the-art solutions. We present a service-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval which blends middleware facilities and a design framework to ‘lift’ the resource sharing approach and the computational services of a European Grid platform into the domain of e-Science applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the DILIGENT Search Framework and illustrate its exploitation in the field of Earth Science