Distributed Kafka Clusters: A Novel Approach to Global Message Ordering

In contemporary distributed systems, logs are produced at an astounding rate, generating terabytes of data within mere seconds. These logs, containing pivotal details like system metrics, user actions, and diverse events, are foundational to the system's consistent and accurate operations. Precise log ordering becomes indispensable to avert potential ambiguities and discordances in system functionalities. Apache Kafka, a prevalent distributed message queue, offers significant solutions to various distributed log processing challenges. However, it presents an inherent limitation while Kafka ensures the in-order delivery of messages within a single partition to the consumer, it falls short in guaranteeing a global order for messages spanning multiple partitions. This research delves into innovative methodologies to achieve global ordering of messages within a Kafka topic, aiming to bolster the integrity and consistency of log processing in distributed systems. Our code is available on GitHub.Comment: 6 Pages, 6 Figure

An autoregressive estimator for overhead reduction in Substitution Networks

International audienceA substitution network is a temporary networkthat self-deploys to dynamically replace a portion of a damagedinfrastructure by means of a fleet of mobile routers. Someefficient solutions deploy robots based on active measurements.A robot/node in the network may use active link monitoring toassess the link quality towards its neighbors through the useof probe packets. Such probe packets are sent periodically at agiven rate, and so, the accuracy of the measurements depends onthe number and the frequency of exchanged packets. However,exchanging probe packets is energy and bandwidth consuming,thus active monitoring is considered as a costly mechanism.Even so, active link monitoring is a technique widely used onmany network protocols. In this paper, we focus on an adaptivepositioning algorithm (APOLO) to self-deploy a network. APOLOis based on active monitoring to gather essential information fromnodes. Therefore, we show how autoregressive estimation maybe used to reduce the overhead caused by the active measuringtechnique. Moreover, it is possible to use surrogate data ratherthan real data to feed APOLO without impacting its performance

The survey on Near Field Communication

PubMed ID: 26057043Near Field Communication (NFC) is an emerging short-range wireless communication technology that offers great and varied promise in services such as payment, ticketing, gaming, crowd sourcing, voting, navigation, and many others. NFC technology enables the integration of services from a wide range of applications into one single smartphone. NFC technology has emerged recently, and consequently not much academic data are available yet, although the number of academic research studies carried out in the past two years has already surpassed the total number of the prior works combined. This paper presents the concept of NFC technology in a holistic approach from different perspectives, including hardware improvement and optimization, communication essentials and standards, applications, secure elements, privacy and security, usability analysis, and ecosystem and business issues. Further research opportunities in terms of the academic and business points of view are also explored and discussed at the end of each section. This comprehensive survey will be a valuable guide for researchers and academicians, as well as for business in the NFC technology and ecosystem.Publisher's Versio

Privacy in the Smart City - Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions

Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this, we believe that a better understanding of smart cities and their privacy implications is needed. We therefore systematize the application areas, enabling technologies, privacy types, attackers and data sources for the attacks, giving structure to the fuzzy term “smart city”. Based on our taxonomies, we describe existing privacy-enhancing technologies, review the state of the art in real cities around the world, and discuss promising future research directions. Our survey can serve as a reference guide, contributing to the development of privacy-friendly smart cities

Improving Performance of Opportunistic Routing Protocol using Fuzzy Logic for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks in Highways

Vehicular ad hoc networks are an emerging technology with an extensive capability in various applications including vehicles safety, traffic management and intelligent transportation systems. Considering the high mobility of vehicles and their inhomogeneous distributions, designing an efficient routing protocol seems necessary. Given the fact that a road is crowded at some sections and is not crowded at the others, the routing protocol should be able to dynamically make decisions. On the other hand, VANET networks environment is vulnerable at the time of data transmission. Broadcast routing, similar to opportunistic routing, could offer better efficiency compared to other protocols. In this paper, a fuzzy logic opportunistic routing (FLOR) protocol is presented in which the packet rebroadcasting decision-making process is carried out through the fuzzy logic system along with three input parameters of packet advancement, local density, and the number of duplicated delivered packets. The rebroadcasting procedures use the value of these parameters as inputs to the fuzzy logic system to resolve the issue of multicasting, considering the crowded and sparse zones. NS-2 simulator is used for evaluating the performance of the proposed FLOR protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio, the end-to-end delay, and the network throughput compared with the existing protocols such as: FLOODING, P-PERSISTENCE and FUZZBR. The performance comparison also emphasizes on effective utilization of the resources. Simulations on highway environment show that the proposed protocol has a better QoS efficiency compared to the above published methods in the literature

Congestion control in multi-serviced heterogeneous wireless networks using dynamic pricing

Includes bibliographical references.Service providers, (or operators) employ pricing schemes to help provide desired QoS to subscribers and to maintain profitability among competitors. An economically efficient pricing scheme, which will seamlessly integrate users’ preferences as well as service providers’ preferences, is therefore needed. Else, pricing schemes can be viewed as promoting social unfairness in the dynamically priced network. However, earlier investigations have shown that the existing dynamic pricing schemes do not consider the users’ willingness to pay (WTP) before the price of services is determined. WTP is the amount a user is willing to pay based on the worth attached to the service requested. There are different WTP levels for different subscribers due to the differences in the value attached to the services requested and demographics. This research has addressed congestion control in the heterogeneous wireless network (HWN) by developing a dynamic pricing scheme that efficiently incentivises users to utilize radio resources. The proposed Collaborative Dynamic Pricing Scheme (CDPS), which identifies the users and operators’ preference in determining the price of services, uses an intelligent approach for controlling congestion and enhancing both the users’ and operators’ utility. Thus, the CDPS addresses the congestion problem by firstly obtaining the users WTP from users’ historical response to price changes and incorporating the WTP factor to evaluate the service price. Secondly, it uses a reinforcement learning technique to illustrate how a price policy can be obtained for the enhancement of both users and operators’ utility, as total utility reward obtained increases towards a defined ‘goal state’

A Regression Study of Salary Determinants in Indian Job Markets for Entry Level Engineering Graduates

The economic liberalisation of Indian markets in early 90s boosted the economic growth of the nation in various sectors over the next two decades. One such sector that has seen a massive growth in this time is Information Technology (IT). The IT industry has played a very crucial role in transforming India from a slow moving economy to one of the largest exporters of IT services. This growth created a huge demand in the labour markets for skilled labour, which in turn made engineering one of the top choices of study after high school over the years. In addition, the earning potential and an opportunity to contribute to technology advancements after engineering, makes it a popular choice of study. These growth dynamics along with the diversified education and labour markets demands gives insight into the factors affecting the employment outcomes of engineering students. This research study focuses on studying the key salary determinants for entry-level engineering graduates in India Labour Markets. The research examined the impact of demographics, academic performance, personality traits and standardised test scores on the starting salary. The research findings indicated that the academic performance in school and college, college reputation, school affiliation and engineering major are key predictors for starting salary. The findings also revealed that Cognitive skills English and Quantitative ability along with a desire to do a task well are significant contributors to the starting salary of engineering graduates in Indian Labour Markets

High Speed Rail in Greece : methods for evaluating economic impacts

Thesis (S.M. in Transportation)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 127-136).High Speed Rail is a mode that gains popularity every day. Many countries have such a network and others are on the way to adopting one. Greece, which is part of the European Union, is one of those countries that are looking forward to such a network. This thesis will investigate the transportation sector of Greece, its governance and funding issues. Moreover, it will go into depth regarding the mode of High Speed Rail. The projects and issues related to this mode will be presented. Another issue of concern will be the evaluation of economic impacts of transportation investments and high speed rail specifically. A thorough literature review regarding the different methods and software packages that exist will be presented. Also, a method suitable to the Greek standards and characteristics will be proposed. Last, we create a screening model for High Speed Rail. This model aims to be used from countries similar to Greece, in order to realize whether it is worth it to start thinking of constructing such a network or not. HSR possibilities in Greece and Portugal are compared using the screening model.by Stefania Christina Radopoulou.S.M.in Transportatio