A Survey of Techniques For Improving Energy Efficiency in Embedded Computing Systems

Recent technological advances have greatly improved the performance and features of embedded systems. With the number of just mobile devices now reaching nearly equal to the population of earth, embedded systems have truly become ubiquitous. These trends, however, have also made the task of managing their power consumption extremely challenging. In recent years, several techniques have been proposed to address this issue. In this paper, we survey the techniques for managing power consumption of embedded systems. We discuss the need of power management and provide a classification of the techniques on several important parameters to highlight their similarities and differences. This paper is intended to help the researchers and application-developers in gaining insights into the working of power management techniques and designing even more efficient high-performance embedded systems of tomorrow

Involving External Stakeholders in Project Courses

Problem: The involvement of external stakeholders in capstone projects and project courses is desirable due to its potential positive effects on the students. Capstone projects particularly profit from the inclusion of an industrial partner to make the project relevant and help students acquire professional skills. In addition, an increasing push towards education that is aligned with industry and incorporates industrial partners can be observed. However, the involvement of external stakeholders in teaching moments can create friction and could, in the worst case, lead to frustration of all involved parties. Contribution: We developed a model that allows analysing the involvement of external stakeholders in university courses both in a retrospective fashion, to gain insights from past course instances, and in a constructive fashion, to plan the involvement of external stakeholders. Key Concepts: The conceptual model and the accompanying guideline guide the teachers in their analysis of stakeholder involvement. The model is comprised of several activities (define, execute, and evaluate the collaboration). The guideline provides questions that the teachers should answer for each of these activities. In the constructive use, the model allows teachers to define an action plan based on an analysis of potential stakeholders and the pedagogical objectives. In the retrospective use, the model allows teachers to identify issues that appeared during the project and their underlying causes. Drawing from ideas of the reflective practitioner, the model contains an emphasis on reflection and interpretation of the observations made by the teacher and other groups involved in the courses. Key Lessons: Applying the model retrospectively to a total of eight courses shows that it is possible to reveal hitherto implicit risks and assumptions and to gain a better insight into the interaction...Comment: Abstract shortened since arxiv.org limits length of abstracts. See paper/pdf for full abstract. Paper is forthcoming, accepted August 2017. Arxiv version 2 corrects misspelled author nam

Adopting Free/Libre/Open Source Software Practices, Techniques and Methods for Industrial Use

Today’s software companies face the challenges of highly distributed development projects and constantly changing requirements. This paper proposes the adoption of relevant Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) practices in order to improve software development projects in industry. Many FLOSS projects have proven to be very successful, producing high quality products with steady and frequent releases. This study aims to identify FLOSS practices that can be adapted for the corporate environment. To achieve this goal, a framework to compare FLOSS and industrial development methodologies was created. Three successful FLOSS projects were selected as study targets (the Linux Kernel, the FreeBSD operating system, and the JBoss application server), as well as two projects from Ericsson, a large telecommunications company. Based on an analysis of these projects, FLOSS best practices were tailored to fit industrial development environments. The final results consisted of a set of key adoption opportunities that aimed to improve software quality and overall development productivity by importing best practices from the FLOSS environment. The adoption opportunities were then validated at three large corporations

Securing Real-Time Internet-of-Things

Modern embedded and cyber-physical systems are ubiquitous. A large number of critical cyber-physical systems have real-time requirements (e.g., avionics, automobiles, power grids, manufacturing systems, industrial control systems, etc.). Recent developments and new functionality requires real-time embedded devices to be connected to the Internet. This gives rise to the real-time Internet-of-things (RT-IoT) that promises a better user experience through stronger connectivity and efficient use of next-generation embedded devices. However RT- IoT are also increasingly becoming targets for cyber-attacks which is exacerbated by this increased connectivity. This paper gives an introduction to RT-IoT systems, an outlook of current approaches and possible research challenges towards secure RT- IoT frameworks

Risk across design domains

Design processes involve risk: to life and limb if the product is unsafe, to the financial health of the company if the product is late, unsuccessful or simply the wrong product, as well as to the emotions and careers of the designers. Many of the risks are shared universally by all designers, but each different industry and each different project faces its own spectrum of serious and minor risks. Different industries have put their methodological effort into finding ways to mitigate the risks they recognise as important. As part of the Across Design project exploring similarities and differences between design processes in different industries, this paper examines how risks are perceived and handled in different types of design process, and proposes that designers and managers can usefully look to other industries for ways to handle risks that are more central for those other industries

A Survey and Comparative Study of Hard and Soft Real-time Dynamic Resource Allocation Strategies for Multi/Many-core Systems

Multi-/many-core systems are envisioned to satisfy the ever-increasing performance requirements of complex applications in various domains such as embedded and high-performance computing. Such systems need to cater to increasingly dynamic workloads, requiring efficient dynamic resource allocation strategies to satisfy hard or soft real-time constraints. This article provides an extensive survey of hard and soft real-time dynamic resource allocation strategies proposed since the mid-1990s and highlights the emerging trends for multi-/many-core systems. The survey covers a taxonomy of the resource allocation strategies and considers their various optimization objectives, which have been used to provide comprehensive comparison. The strategies employ various principles, such as market and biological concepts, to perform the optimizations. The trend followed by the resource allocation strategies, open research challenges, and likely emerging research directions have also been provided

Real Time Event Management and Coordinating System

Analysis and prediction of real time event managing is very important and interesting as this helps experts in managing events , making decisions and working more efficiently . This thesis Event Managing And Coordinating system (RT-EMaCS) model is initially considered for proper managing of time and task, and resulted in funtioning in both system field as well as practical world. A EMaCS model can fit into any Java based platform such as laptops, desktops and any mobile device supporting Java, specially like android phones or tablets. The link between them can be done via Wi-Fi. In this thesis, the event organizers and the event coordinators communcate with better facilities in event management. It provides an easy, simple and better means of communication among one another. It prevents loss of time

Exploring Alternatives to use Master/Slave Full Duplex Switched Ethernet for Avionics Embedded Applications

The complexity of distributed real-time systems, including military embedded applications, is increasing due to an increasing number of nodes, their functionality and higher amounts of exchanged data. This higher complexity imposes major development challenges when nonfunctional properties must be enforced. On the other hand, the current military communication networks are a generation old and are no longer effective in facing such increasingly complex requirements. A new communication network, based on Full Duplex Switched Ethernet and Master/slave approach, has been proposed previously. However, this initial approach is not efficient in terms of network bandwidth utilization. In this paper we propose two new alternative approaches that can use the network bandwidth more efficiently. In addition we provide a preliminary qualitative assessment of the three approaches concerning different factors such as performance, scalability, complexity and flexibility