Virtual Communication Stack: Towards Building Integrated Simulator of Mobile Ad Hoc Network-based Infrastructure for Disaster Response Scenarios

Responses to disastrous events are a challenging problem, because of possible damages on communication infrastructures. For instance, after a natural disaster, infrastructures might be entirely destroyed. Different network paradigms were proposed in the literature in order to deploy adhoc network, and allow dealing with the lack of communications. However, all these solutions focus only on the performance of the network itself, without taking into account the specificities and heterogeneity of the components which use it. This comes from the difficulty to integrate models with different levels of abstraction. Consequently, verification and validation of adhoc protocols cannot guarantee that the different systems will work as expected in operational conditions. However, the DEVS theory provides some mechanisms to allow integration of models with different natures. This paper proposes an integrated simulation architecture based on DEVS which improves the accuracy of ad hoc infrastructure simulators in the case of disaster response scenarios.Comment: Preprint. Unpublishe

DPA on quasi delay insensitive asynchronous circuits: formalization and improvement

The purpose of this paper is to formally specify a flow devoted to the design of Differential Power Analysis (DPA) resistant QDI asynchronous circuits. The paper first proposes a formal modeling of the electrical signature of QDI asynchronous circuits. The DPA is then applied to the formal model in order to identify the source of leakage of this type of circuits. Finally, a complete design flow is specified to minimize the information leakage. The relevancy and efficiency of the approach is demonstrated using the design of an AES crypto-processor.Comment: Submitted on behalf of EDAA (http://www.edaa.com/

Transport of video over partial order connections

A Partial Order and partial reliable Connection (POC) is an end-to-end transport connection authorized to deliver objects in an order that can differ from the transmitted one. Such a connection is also authorized to lose some objects. The POC concept is motivated by the fact that heterogeneous best-effort networks such as Internet are plagued by unordered delivery of packets and losses, which tax the performances of current applications and protocols. It has been shown, in several research works, that out of order delivery is able to alleviate (with respect to CO service) the use of end systems’ communication resources. In this paper, the efficiency of out-of-sequence delivery on MPEG video streams processing is studied. Firstly, the transport constraints (in terms of order and reliability) that can be relaxed by MPEG video decoders, for improving video transport, are detailed. Then, we analyze the performance gain induced by this approach in terms of blocking times and recovered errors. We demonstrate that POC connections fill not only the conceptual gap between TCP and UDP but also provide real performance improvements for the transport of multimedia streams such MPEG video

Computational tasks in robotics and factory automation

The design of Manufacturing Planning and Control Systems (MPCSs) — systems that negotiate with Customers and Suppliers to exchange products in return for money in order to generate profit, is discussed.\ud \ud The computational task of MPCS components are systematically specified as a starting point for the development of computational engines, as computer systems and programs, that execute the specified computation. Key issues are the overwhelming complexity and frequently changing application of MPCSs

Interaction protocols for cross-organisational workflows

Workflow technologies are widely used in industry and commerce to assist in the specification, execution and completion of well defined processes within organisations. As industrial and commercial relations have evolved, based on advances on information and communications technologies, cross-organisational workflow integration has become an important issue. Since organisations can have very different workflows, the creation of compatible workflows so that organisations can collaborate and/or carry out mutual transactions automatically in an integrated fashion can be a very complex and time consuming process. As a consequence, the development of technologies to support the creation and execution of compatible workflows is a most relevant issue. In the present article we introduce the JamSession coordination platform as a tool to implement cross-organisational workflow integration. JamSession is declarative and based on algebraic specification methods, and therefore workflow integration implemented using this platform can profit from formal behavioural analysis, based on which desired features and properties can be verified and/or obtained

STCP: Receiver-agnostic Communication Enabled by Space-Time Cloud Pointers

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Computer Engineering)During the last decade, mobile communication technologies have rapidly evolved and ubiquitous network connectivity is nearly achieved. However, we observe that there are critical situations where none of the existing mobile communication technologies is usable. Such situations are often found when messages need to be delivered to arbitrary persons or devices that are located in a specific space at a specific time. For instance at a disaster scene, current communication methods are incapable of delivering messages of a rescuer to the group of people at a specific area even when their cellular connections are alive because the rescuer cannot specify the receivers of the messages. We name this as receiver-unknown problem and propose a viable solution called SpaceMessaging. SpaceMessaging adopts the idea of Post-it by which we casually deliver our messages to a person who happens to visit a location at a random moment. To enable SpaceMessaging, we realize the concept of posting messages to a space by implementing cloud-pointers at a cloud server to which messages can be posted and from which messages can fetched by arbitrary mobile devices that are located at that space. Our Android-based prototype of SpaceMessaging, which particularly maps a cloud-pointer to a WiFi signal fingerprint captured from mobile devices, demonstrates that it first allows mobile devices to deliver messages to a specific space and to listen to the messages of a specific space in a highly accurate manner (with more than 90% of Recall)