Performance analysis with network-enhanced complexities: On fading measurements, event-triggered mechanisms, and cyber attacks

Copyright © 2014 Derui Ding et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Nowadays, the real-world systems are usually subject to various complexities such as parameter uncertainties, time-delays, and nonlinear disturbances. For networked systems, especially large-scale systems such as multiagent systems and systems over sensor networks, the complexities are inevitably enhanced in terms of their degrees or intensities because of the usage of the communication networks. Therefore, it would be interesting to (1) examine how this kind of network-enhanced complexities affects the control or filtering performance; and (2) develop some suitable approaches for controller/filter design problems. In this paper, we aim to survey some recent advances on the performance analysis and synthesis with three sorts of fashionable network-enhanced complexities, namely, fading measurements, event-triggered mechanisms, and attack behaviors of adversaries. First, these three kinds of complexities are introduced in detail according to their engineering backgrounds, dynamical characteristic, and modelling techniques. Then, the developments of the performance analysis and synthesis issues for various networked systems are systematically reviewed. Furthermore, some challenges are illustrated by using a thorough literature review and some possible future research directions are highlighted.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61134009, 61329301, 61203139, 61374127, and 61374010, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

A survey on gain-scheduled control and filtering for parameter-varying systems

Copyright © 2014 Guoliang Wei et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This paper presents an overview of the recent developments in the gain-scheduled control and filtering problems for the parameter-varying systems. First of all, we recall several important algorithms suitable for gain-scheduling method including gain-scheduled proportional-integral derivative (PID) control, H 2, H ∞ and mixed H 2 / H ∞ gain-scheduling methods as well as fuzzy gain-scheduling techniques. Secondly, various important parameter-varying system models are reviewed, for which gain-scheduled control and filtering issues are usually dealt with. In particular, in view of the randomly occurring phenomena with time-varying probability distributions, some results of our recent work based on the probability-dependent gain-scheduling methods are reviewed. Furthermore, some latest progress in this area is discussed. Finally, conclusions are drawn and several potential future research directions are outlined.The National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61074016, 61374039, 61304010, and 61329301; the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China under Grant BK20130766; the Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning; the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University under Grant NCET-11-1051, the Leverhulme Trust of the U.K., the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Supporting Cyber-Physical Systems with Wireless Sensor Networks: An Outlook of Software and Services

Sensing, communication, computation and control technologies are the essential building blocks of a cyber-physical system (CPS). Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a way to support CPS as they provide fine-grained spatial-temporal sensing, communication and computation at a low premium of cost and power. In this article, we explore the fundamental concepts guiding the design and implementation of WSNs. We report the latest developments in WSN software and services for meeting existing requirements and newer demands; particularly in the areas of: operating system, simulator and emulator, programming abstraction, virtualization, IP-based communication and security, time and location, and network monitoring and management. We also reflect on the ongoing efforts in providing dependable assurances for WSN-driven CPS. Finally, we report on its applicability with a case-study on smart buildings

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future

When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

Mathematical control of complex systems

Copyright © 2013 ZidongWang et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

A parallel algorithm to calculate the costrank of a network

We developed analogous parallel algorithms to implement CostRank for distributed memory parallel computers using multi processors. Our intent is to make CostRank calculations for the growing number of hosts in a fast and a scalable way. In the same way we intent to secure large scale networks that require fast and reliable computing to calculate the ranking of enormous graphs with thousands of vertices (states) and millions or arcs (links). In our proposed approach we focus on a parallel CostRank computational architecture on a cluster of PCs networked via Gigabit Ethernet LAN to evaluate the performance and scalability of our implementation. In particular, a partitioning of input data, graph files, and ranking vectors with load balancing technique can improve the runtime and scalability of large-scale parallel computations. An application case study of analogous Cost Rank computation is presented. Applying parallel environment models for one-dimensional sparse matrix partitioning on a modified research page, results in a significant reduction in communication overhead and in per-iteration runtime. We provide an analytical discussion of analogous algorithms performance in terms of I/O and synchronization cost, as well as of memory usage