Dynamic Resource Management in a Static Network Operating System

We present novel approaches to managing three key resources in an event-driven sensornet OS: memory, energy, and peripherals. We describe the factors that necessitate using these new approaches rather than existing ones. A combination of static allocation and compile-time virtualization isolates resources from one another, while dynamic management provides the flexibility and sharing needed to minimize worst-case overheads. We evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of these management policies in comparison to those of TinyOS 1.x, SOS, MOS, and Contiki. We show that by making memory, energy, and peripherals first-class abstractions, an OS can quickly, efficiently, and accurately adjust itself to the lowest possible power state, enable high performance applications when active, prevent memory corruption with little RAM overhead, and be flexible enough to support a broad range of devices and uses

A Survey of the Economic Role of Software Platforms in Computer-Based Industries

Software platforms are a critical component of the computer systems underpinning leading– edge products ranging from third– generation mobile phones to video games. After describing some key economic features of computer systems and software platforms, the paper presents case studies of personal computers, video games, personal digital assistants, smart mobile phones, and digital content devices. It then compares several economic aspects of these businesses including their industry evolution, pricing structures, and degrees of integration.software platforms, hardware platforms, network effects, bundling, multi-sided markets

Sophisticated Batteryless Sensing

Wireless embedded sensing systems have revolutionized scientific, industrial, and consumer applications. Sensors have become a fixture in our daily lives, as well as the scientific and industrial communities by allowing continuous monitoring of people, wildlife, plants, buildings, roads and highways, pipelines, and countless other objects. Recently a new vision for sensing has emerged---known as the Internet-of-Things (IoT)---where trillions of devices invisibly sense, coordinate, and communicate to support our life and well being. However, the sheer scale of the IoT has presented serious problems for current sensing technologies---mainly, the unsustainable maintenance, ecological, and economic costs of recycling or disposing of trillions of batteries. This energy storage bottleneck has prevented massive deployments of tiny sensing devices at the edge of the IoT. This dissertation explores an alternative---leave the batteries behind, and harvest the energy required for sensing tasks from the environment the device is embedded in. These sensors can be made cheaper, smaller, and will last decades longer than their battery powered counterparts, making them a perfect fit for the requirements of the IoT. These sensors can be deployed where battery powered sensors cannot---embedded in concrete, shot into space, or even implanted in animals and people. However, these batteryless sensors may lose power at any point, with no warning, for unpredictable lengths of time. Programming, profiling, debugging, and building applications with these devices pose significant challenges. First, batteryless devices operate in unpredictable environments, where voltages vary and power failures can occur at any time---often devices are in failure for hours. Second, a device\u27s behavior effects the amount of energy they can harvest---meaning small changes in tasks can drastically change harvester efficiency. Third, the programming interfaces of batteryless devices are ill-defined and non- intuitive; most developers have trouble anticipating the problems inherent with an intermittent power supply. Finally, the lack of community, and a standard usable hardware platform have reduced the resources and prototyping ability of the developer. In this dissertation we present solutions to these challenges in the form of a tool for repeatable and realistic experimentation called Ekho, a reconfigurable hardware platform named Flicker, and a language and runtime for timely execution of intermittent programs called Mayfly

An IoT-oriented fast prototyping platform for BLE-based star topology networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) is characterized by many technologies, standards, tools and devices for a wide range of application fields and often, for the end-users (makers and developers), is hard to orientate in an equally wide range of offers from various manufacturers. In recent years, the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication protocol is achieving a large portion of the market, thanks to its low-power and low-cost orientation and its pervasiveness in mobile devices, like smartphones. For these reasons, BLE is increasingly used in IoT-oriented Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN), where a small set of devices arranged in star topology network and connected to a smartphone and a Wi-Fi gateway, can cover a large number of monitoring and controlling use case scenarios. This work presents the ST’s STM32 Open Development Environment (ODE), a complete suite of hardware and software tools representing a reference point for end-users willing to create BLE-based star topology networks for a wide range of applications. Through a simple use case in a smart home context, it is shown how all provided tools can be used to fast prototype applications addressing all user requirements

Design Space Exploration in Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber physical systems (CPS) integrate a variety of engineering areas such as control, mechanical and computer engineering in a holistic design effort. While interdependencies between the different disciplines are key attributes of CPS design science, little is known about the impact of design decisions of the cyber part on the overall system qualities. To investigate these interdependencies, this paper proposes a simulation-based Design Space Exploration (DSE) framework that considers detailed cyber system parameters such as cache size, bus width, and voltage levels in addition to physical and control parameters of the CPS. We propose an exploration algorithm that surfs the parameter configurations in the cyber physical sub-systems, in order to approximate the Pareto-optimal design points with regards to the trade-os among the design objectives, such as energy consumption and control stability. We apply the proposed framework to a network control system for an inverted-pendulum application. The presented holistic evaluation of the identified Pareto-points reveals the presence of non-trivial trade-os, which are imposed by the control, physical, and detailed cyber parameters. For instance the identified energy and control optimal design points comprise configurations with a wide range of CPU speeds, sample times and cache configuration following non-trivial zig-zag patterns. The proposed framework could identify and manage those trade-os and, as a result, is an imperative rst step to automate the search for superior CSP configurations