Optimization of energy efficiency in data and WEB hosting centers

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorThis thesis tackles the optimization of energy efficiency in data centers in terms of network and server utilization. For what concerns networking utilization the work focuses on Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) - IEEE 802.3az standard - which is the energy-aware alternative to legacy Ethernet, and an important component of current and future green data centers. More specifically the first contribution of this thesis consists in deriving and analytical model of gigabit EEE links with coalescing using M/G/1 queues with sleep and wake-up periods. Packet coalescing has been proposed to save energy by extending the sojourn in the Low Power Idle state of EEE. The model presented in this thesis approximates with a good accuracy both the energy saving and the average packet delay by using a few significant traffic descriptors. While coalescing improves by far the energy efficiency of EEE, it is still far from achieving energy consumption proportional to traffic. Moreover, coalescing can introduce high delays. To this extend, by using sensitivity analysis the thesis evaluates the impact of coalescing timers and buffer sizes, and sheds light on the delay incurred by adopting coalescing schemes. Accordingly, the design and study of a first family of dynamic algorithms, namely measurement-based coalescing control (MBCC), is proposed. MBCC schemes tune the coalescing parameters on-the-fly, according to the instantaneous load and the coalescing delay experienced by the packets. The thesis also discusses a second family of dynamic algorithms, namely NT-policy coalescing control (NTCC), that adjusts the coalescing parameters based on the sole occurrence of timeouts and buffer fill-ups. Furthermore, the performance of static as well as dynamic coalescing schemes is investigated using real traffic traces. The results reported in this work show that, by relying on run-time delay measurements, simple and practical MBCC adaptive coalescing schemes outperform traditional static and dynamic coalescing while the adoption of NTCC coalescing schemes has practically no advantages with respect to static coalescing when delay guarantees have to be provided. Notably, MBCC schemes double the energy saving benefit of legacy EEE coalescing and allow to control the coalescing delay. For what concerns server utilization, the thesis presents an exhaustive empirical characterization of the power requirements of multiple components of data center servers. The characterization is the second key contribution of this thesis, and is achieved by devising different experiments to stress server components, taking into account the multiple available CPU frequencies and the presence of multicore servers. The described experiments, allow to measure energy consumption of server components and identify their optimal operational points. The study proves that the curve defining the minimal CPU power utilization, as a function of the load expressed in Active Cycles Per Second, is neither concave nor purely convex. Instead, it definitively shows a superlinear dependence on the load. The results illustrate how to improve the efficiency of network cards and disks. Finally, the accuracy of the model derived from the server components consumption characterization is validated by comparing the real energy consumed by two Hadoop applications - PageRank and WordCount - with the estimation from the model, obtaining errors below 4:1%, on average.This work has been partially supported by IMDEA Networks Institute and the Greek State Scholarships FoundationPrograma Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: Marco Giuseppe Ajmone Marsan.- Secretario: Jose Luis Ayala Rodrigo.- Vocal: Gianluca Antonio Rizz

Packet Coalescing Strategies for Energy Efficient High-Speed Communications Over Plastic Optical Fibers

Many recent standards for wireline communications have included a low-power operation mode for energy efficiency purposes. The recently approved VDE standard 0885-763-1 for high-speed communication over plastic optical fibers has not been an exception. The lowpower mode is used when there is no data to be transmitted over the line, thus making consumption more proportional to network load. Furthermore, packet coalescing has been proposed in the literature to minimize the transitions between the low-power and active modes, thus reducing the energy penalties associated with such transitions. This article proposes an adapted version of packet coalescing for the periodic structure of the VDE 0885-763-1 physical layer. Such an algorithm attempts to fulfill active periods of transmission with data, showing an improved energy efficiency over conventional packet coalescing strategies. This conclusion is evaluated via simulation with both synthetic Poissonian traffic and real traces.The authors would like to thank K. Fu, G. Chesson, L. A. Barroso, and U. Holzle from Google for the anonymous traces from their data centers used in the experiment section. The authors would also like to acknowledge the Spanish-funded CRAMNET project (grant number TEC2012-38362-C03-01) for its support to the development of this work

Flow Assignment and Processing on a Distributed Edge Computing Platform

The evolution of telecommunication networks toward the fifth generation of mobile services (5G), along with the increasing presence of cloud-native applications, and the development of Cloud and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) paradigms, have opened up new opportunities for the monitoring and management of logistics and transportation. We address the case of distributed streaming platforms with multiple message brokers to develop an optimization model for the real-time assignment and load balancing of event streaming generated data traffic among Edge Computing facilities. The performance indicator function to be optimised is derived by adopting queuing models with different granularity (packet- and flow-level) that are suitably combined. A specific use case concerning a logistics application is considered and numerical results are provided to show the effectiveness of the optimisation procedure, also in comparison to a “static” assignment proportional to the processing speed of the brokers

POWAR: Power-Aware Routing in HPC Networks with On/Off Links

[EN] In order to save energy in HPC interconnection networks, one usual proposal is to switch idle links into a low-power mode after a certain time without any transmission, as IEEE Energy Efficient Ethernet standard proposes. Extending the low-power mode mechanism, we propose POWer-Aware Routing (POWAR), a simple power-aware routing and selection function for fat-tree and torus networks. POWAR adapts the amount of network links that can be used, taking into account the network load, and obtaining great energy savings in the network (55%-65%) and the entire system (9%-10%) with negligible performance overhead.This work has been supported by the Spanish MINECO and European Commission (FEDER funds) under project TIN2015-66972-C5-1-R. Francisco J. Andujar has been partially funded by the Spanish MICINN and by the ERDF program of the European Union: PCAS Project (TIN2017-88614-R), CAPAP-H6 (TIN2016-81840-REDT), and Junta de Castilla y Leon FEDER Grant VA082P17 (PROPHET Project).Andújar-Muñoz, FJ.; Coll, S.; Alonso Díaz, M.; López Rodríguez, PJ.; Martínez-Rubio, J. (2019). POWAR: Power-Aware Routing in HPC Networks with On/Off Links. ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization. 15(4):1-22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3293445S122154Abts, D., Marty, M. R., Wells, P. M., Klausler, P., & Liu, H. (2010). Energy proportional datacenter networks. Proceedings of the 37th annual international symposium on Computer architecture - ISCA ’10. doi:10.1145/1815961.1816004Adiga, N. R., Blumrich, M. A., Chen, D., Coteus, P., Gara, A., Giampapa, M. E., … Vranas, P. (2005). Blue Gene/L torus interconnection network. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 49(2.3), 265-276. doi:10.1147/rd.492.0265M. Alonso S. Coll J. M. Martínez V. Santonja and P. López. 2015. Power consumption management in fat-tree interconnection networks. Parallel Comput. 48 C (Oct. 2015) 59--80. 10.1016/j.parco.2015.03.007 M. Alonso S. Coll J. M. Martínez V. Santonja and P. López. 2015. Power consumption management in fat-tree interconnection networks. Parallel Comput. 48 C (Oct. 2015) 59--80. 10.1016/j.parco.2015.03.007Marina Alonso, Coll, S., Martínez, J.-M., Santonja, V., López, P., & Duato, J. (2010). Power saving in regular interconnection networks. Parallel Computing, 36(12), 696-712. doi:10.1016/j.parco.2010.08.003Bob Alverson Edwin Froese Larry Kaplan and Duncan Roweth. 2012. Cray XC series network. Cray Inc. White Paper WP-Aries01-1112 (2012). Bob Alverson Edwin Froese Larry Kaplan and Duncan Roweth. 2012. Cray XC series network. Cray Inc. White Paper WP-Aries01-1112 (2012).Anderson, T. E., Owicki, S. S., Saxe, J. B., & Thacker, C. P. (1993). High-speed switch scheduling for local-area networks. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 11(4), 319-352. doi:10.1145/161541.161736Andujar, F. J., Villar, J. A., Sanchez, J. L., Alfaro, F. J., & Escudero-Sahuquillo, J. (2015). VEF Traces: A Framework for Modelling MPI Traffic in Interconnection Network Simulators. 2015 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing. doi:10.1109/cluster.2015.141Barroso, L. A., & Hölzle, U. (2007). The Case for Energy-Proportional Computing. Computer, 40(12), 33-37. doi:10.1109/mc.2007.443Camacho, J., & Flich, J. (2011). HPC-Mesh: A Homogeneous Parallel Concentrated Mesh for Fault-Tolerance and Energy Savings. 2011 ACM/IEEE Seventh Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems. doi:10.1109/ancs.2011.17Chen, D., Parker, J. J., Eisley, N. A., Heidelberger, P., Senger, R. M., Sugawara, Y., … Steinmacher-Burow, B. (2011). The IBM Blue Gene/Q interconnection network and message unit. 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Proceedings of the 40th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture - ISCA ’13. doi:10.1145/2485922.2485950Derradji, S., Palfer-Sollier, T., Panziera, J.-P., Poudes, A., & Atos, F. W. (2015). The BXI Interconnect Architecture. 2015 IEEE 23rd Annual Symposium on High-Performance Interconnects. doi:10.1109/hoti.2015.15Jack Dongarra Hans W. Meuer and Erich Strohmaier. 2018. TOP500 Supercomputer Sites. Retrieved from https://www.top500.org. Jack Dongarra Hans W. Meuer and Erich Strohmaier. 2018. TOP500 Supercomputer Sites. Retrieved from https://www.top500.org.Duato, J. (1993). A new theory of deadlock-free adaptive routing in wormhole networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 4(12), 1320-1331. doi:10.1109/71.250114José Duato Sudhakar Yalamanchili and Lionel Ni. 2003. Interconnection Networks. An Engineering Approach. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc. San Francisco CA. José Duato Sudhakar Yalamanchili and Lionel Ni. 2003. Interconnection Networks. An Engineering Approach. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc. San Francisco CA.GALGO 2017. GALGO—Albacete Research Institute of Informatics Supercomputer Center homepage. Retrieved from http://www.i3a.uclm.es/galgo. GALGO 2017. GALGO—Albacete Research Institute of Informatics Supercomputer Center homepage. Retrieved from http://www.i3a.uclm.es/galgo.Greenberg, A., Hamilton, J., Maltz, D. A., & Patel, P. (2008). The cost of a cloud. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 39(1), 68-73. doi:10.1145/1496091.1496103HPCC {n.d.}. HPC Challenge Benchmark. Retrieved from http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/index.html. HPCC {n.d.}. HPC Challenge Benchmark. Retrieved from http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/index.html.Hluchyj, M. G., & Karol, M. J. (1988). Queueing in high-performance packet switching. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 6(9), 1587-1597. doi:10.1109/49.12886Koibuchi, M., Otsuka, T., Hiroki Matsutani, & Amano, H. (2009). An on/off link activation method for low-power ethernet in PC clusters. 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing. doi:10.1109/ipdps.2009.5161069Phillips, J. C., Braun, R., Wang, W., Gumbart, J., Tajkhorshid, E., Villa, E., … Schulten, K. (2005). Scalable molecular dynamics with NAMD. Journal of Computational Chemistry, 26(16), 1781-1802. doi:10.1002/jcc.20289Pronk, S., Páll, S., Schulz, R., Larsson, P., Bjelkmar, P., Apostolov, R., … Lindahl, E. (2013). GROMACS 4.5: a high-throughput and highly parallel open source molecular simulation toolkit. Bioinformatics, 29(7), 845-854. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btt055Reviriego, P., Hernandez, J., Larrabeiti, D., & Maestro, J. (2009). Performance evaluation of energy efficient ethernet. IEEE Communications Letters, 13(9), 697-699. doi:10.1109/lcomm.2009.090880K. P. Saravanan and P. Carpenter. 2018. PerfBound: Conserving energy with bounded overheads in on/off-based HPC interconnects. IEEE Trans. Comput. (2018) 1--1. 10.1109/TC.2018.2790394 K. P. Saravanan and P. Carpenter. 2018. PerfBound: Conserving energy with bounded overheads in on/off-based HPC interconnects. IEEE Trans. Comput. (2018) 1--1. 10.1109/TC.2018.2790394Saravanan, K. P., Carpenter, P. M., & Ramirez, A. (2013). Power/performance evaluation of energy efficient Ethernet (EEE) for High Performance Computing. 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS). doi:10.1109/ispass.2013.6557171Soteriou, V., & Li-Shiuan Peh. (s. f.). Dynamic power management for power optimization of interconnection networks using on/off links. 11th Symposium on High Performance Interconnects, 2003. Proceedings. doi:10.1109/conect.2003.1231472Totoni, E., Jain, N., & Kale, L. V. (2013). Toward Runtime Power Management of Exascale Networks by on/off Control of Links. 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing, Workshops and Phd Forum. doi:10.1109/ipdpsw.2013.191VEF 2017. 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Convergencia de tecnologías ópticas y Ethernet en LAN, MAN y SAN: nuevas arquitecturas, análisis de prestaciones y eficiencia energética

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorThe development of Information Technologies in the last decades, especially the last two, together with the introduction of computing devices to the mainstream consumer market, has had the logical consequence of the generalisation of the Internet access. The explosive development of the smartphone market has brought ubiquity to that generalisation, to the point that social interaction, content sharing and content production happens all the time. Social networks have all but increased that trend, maximising the diffusion of multimedia content: images, audio and video, which require high network capacities to be enjoyed quickly. This need for endless bandwidth and speed in information sharing brings challenges that affect mainly optical Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) and Wide Area Networks (WANs). Furthermore, the wide spreading of Ethernet technologies has also brought the possibility to achieve economies of scale by either extending the reach of Ethernet Local Area Networks (LANs) to the MAN and WAN environment or even integrating them with Storage Area Networks (SANs). Finally, this generalisation of telecommunication technologies in every day life has as a consequence an important rise in energy consumption as well. Because of this, providing energy efficient strategies in networking is key to ensure the scalability of the whole Internet. In this thesis, the main technologies in all the fields mentioned above are reviewed, its core challenges identified and several contributions beyond the state of the art are suggested to improve today’s MANs andWANs. In the first contribution of this thesism, the integration between Metro Ethernet and Wavelength Division Multiplexion (WDM) optical transparent rings is explored by proposing an adaptation architecture to provide efficient broadcast and multicast. The second contribution explores the fusion between transparent WDM and OCDMA architectures to simplify medium access in a ring. Regarding SANs, the third contribution explores the challenges in SANs through the problems of Fibre Channel over Ethernet due to buffer design issues. In this contribution, analysis, design and validation with FCoE traces and simulation is provided to calculate buffer overflow probabilities in the absence of flow control mechanisms taking into account the bursty nature of SAN traffic. Finally, the fourth and last contribution addresses the problems of energy efficiency in Plastic Optical Fibres (POF), a new kind of optical fibre more suitable for transmission in vehicles and for home networking. This contribution suggests two packet coalescing strategies to further improve the energy effiency mechanisms in POFs.El desarrollo de las Tecnologías de la Información en las últimas décadas, especialmente las últimas dos, junto con la introducción de dispositivos informáticos al mercado de masas, ha tenido como consecuencia lógica la generalización del acceso a Internet. El explosivo desarrollo del mercado de teléfonos inteligentes ha añadido un factor de ubicuidad a tal generalización, al extremo de que la interacción social, la compartición y producción de contenidos sucede a cada instante. Las redes sociales no han hecho sino incrementar tal tendencia, maximizando la difusión de contenido multimedia: imágenes, audio y vídeo, los cuales requieren gran capacidad en las redes para poder obtenerse con rapidez. Esta necesidad de ancho de banda ilimitado y velocidad en la compartición de información trae consigo retos que afectan principalmente a las Redes de Área Metropolitana (Metropolitan Area Networks, MANs) y Redes de Área Extensa (Wide Area Networks, WANs). Además, la gran difusión de las tecnologías Ethernet ha traído la posibilidad de alcanzar economías de escala bien extendiendo el alcance de Ethernet más allá de las Redes de Área Local (Local Area Networks, LANs) al entorno de las MAN y las WAN o incluso integrándolas con Redes de Almacenamiento (Storage Area Networks, SANs). Finalmente, esta generalización de las tecnologías de la comunicación en la vida cotidiana tiene también como consecuencia un importante aumento en el consumo de energía. Por tanto, desarrollar estrategias de transmisión en red eficientes energéticamente es clave para asegurar la escalabilidad de Internet. En esta tesis, las principales tecnologías de todos los campos mencionados arriba serán estudiadas, sus más importantes retos identificados y se sugieren varias contribuciones más allá del actual estado del arte para mejorar las actuales MANs y WANs. En la primera contribución de esta tesis, se explora la integración entre Metro Ethernet y anillos ópticos transparentes por Multiplexión en Longitud de Onda (Wavelength Division Multiplex, WDM) mediante la proposición de una arquitectura de adaptación para permitir la difusión y multidifusión eficiente. La segunda contribución explora la fusión entre las arquitecturas transparentes WDM y arquitecturas por Accesso Dividido Múltiple por Códigos Ópticos (OCDMA) para simplificar el acceso en una red en anillo. En lo referente a las SANs, la tercera contribución explora los retos en SANs a través de los problemas de Fibre Channel sobre Ethernet debido a los problemas en el diseño de búferes. En esta contribución, se provee un análisis, diseño y validación con trazas FCoE para calcular las probabilidades de desbordamiento de buffer en ausencia de mecanismos de control de flujo teniendo en cuenta la naturaleza rafagosa del tráfico de SAN. Finalmente, la cuarta y última contribución aborda los problemas de eficiencia energética en Fibras Ópticas Plásticas (POF), una nueva variedad de fibra óptica más adecuada para la transmisión en vehículos y para entornos de red caseros. Esta contribución sugiere dos estrategias de agrupamiento de paquetes para mejorar los mecanismos de eficiencia energética en POFs.Programa Oficial de Posgrado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: Luca Valcarenghi.- Secretario: Ignacio Soto Campos.- Vocal: Bas Huiszoo

Analysis, characterization and optimization of the energy efficiency on softwarized mobile platforms

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorLa inminente 5ª generación de sistemas móviles (5G) está a punto de revolucionar la industria, trayendo una nueva arquitectura orientada a los nuevos mercados verticales y servicios. Debido a esto, el 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) ha especificado una lista de Indicadores de Rendimiento Clave (KPI) que todo sistema 5G tiene que soportar, por ejemplo incrementar por 1000 el volumen de datos, de 10 a 100 veces m´as dispositivos conectados o consumos energéticos 10 veces inferiores. Con el fin de conseguir estos requisitos, se espera expandir los despligues actuales usando mas Puntos de Acceso (PoA) incrementando así su densidad con múltiples tecnologías inalámbricas. Esta estrategia de despliegue masivo tiene una contrapartida en la eficiencia energética, generando un conflicto con el KPI de reducir por 10 el consumo energético. En este contexto, la comunidad investigadora ha propuesto nuevos paradigmas para alcanzar los requisitos impuestos para los sistemas 5G, siendo materializados en tecnologías como Redes Definidas por Software (SDN) y Virtualización de Funciones de Red (NFV). Estos nuevos paradigmas son el primer paso hacia la softwarización de los despliegues móviles, incorporando nuevos grados de flexibilidad y reconfigurabilidad de la Red de Acceso Radio (RAN). En esta tesis, presentamos primero un análisis detallado y caracterización de las redes móviles softwarizadas. Consideramos el software como la base de la nueva generación de redes celulares y, por lo tanto, analizaremos y caracterizaremos el impacto en la eficiencia energética de estos sistemas. La primera meta de este trabajo es caracterizar las plataformas software disponibles para Radios Definidas por Software (SDR), centrándonos en las dos soluciones principales de código abierto: OpenAirInterface (OAI) y srsLTE. Como resultado, proveemos una metodología para analizar y caracterizar el rendimiento de estas soluciones en función del uso de la CPU, rendimiento de red, compatibilidad y extensibilidad de dicho software. Una vez hemos entendido qué rendimiento podemos esperar de este tipo de soluciones, estudiamos un prototipo SDR construido con aceleración hardware, que emplea una plataformas basada en FPGA. Este prototipo está diseñado para incluir capacidad de ser consciente de la energía, permiento al sistema ser reconfigurado para minimizar la huella energética cuando sea posible. Con el fin de validar el diseño de nuestro sistema, más tarde presentamos una plataforma para caracterizar la energía que será empleada para medir experimentalmente el consumo energético de dispositivos reales. En nuestro enfoque, realizamos dos tipos de análisis: a pequeña escala de tiempo y a gran escala de tiempo. Por lo tanto, para validar nuestro entorno de medidas, caracterizamos a través de análisis numérico los algoritmos para la Adaptación de la Tasa (RA) en IEEE 802.11, para entonces comparar nuestros resultados teóricos con los experimentales. A continuación extendemos nuestro análisis a la plataforma SDR acelerada por hardware previamente mencionada. Nuestros resultados experimentales muestran que nuestra sistema puede en efecto reducir la huella energética reconfigurando el despligue del sistema. Entonces, la escala de tiempos es elevada y presentamos los esquemas para Recursos bajo Demanda (RoD) en despliegues de red ultra-densos. Esta estrategia está basada en apagar/encender dinámicamente los elementos que forman la red con el fin de reducir el total del consumo energético. Por lo tanto, presentamos un modelo analítico en dos sabores, un modelo exacto que predice el comportamiento del sistema con precisión pero con un alto coste computacional y uno simplificado que es más ligero en complejidad mientras que mantiene la precisión. Nuestros resultados muestran que estos esquemas pueden efectivamente mejorar la eficiencia energética de los despliegues y mantener la Calidad de Servicio (QoS). Con el fin de probar la plausibilidad de los esquemas RoD, presentamos un plataforma softwarizada que sigue el paradigma SDN, OFTEN (OpenFlow framework for Traffic Engineering in mobile Network with energy awareness). Nuestro diseño está basado en OpenFlow con funcionalidades para hacerlo consciente de la energía. Finalmente, un prototipo real con esta plataforma es presentando, probando así la plausibilidad de los RoD en despligues reales.The upcoming 5th Generation of mobile systems (5G) is about to revolutionize the industry, bringing a new architecture oriented to new vertical markets and services. Due to this, the 5G-PPP has specified a list of Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that 5G systems need to support e.g. increasing the 1000 times higher data volume, 10 to 100 times more connected devices or 10 times lower power consumption. In order to achieve these requirements, it is expected to expand the current deployments using more Points of Attachment (PoA) by increasing their density and by using multiple wireless technologies. This massive deployment strategy triggers a side effect in the energy efficiency though, generating a conflict with the “10 times lower power consumption” KPI. In this context, the research community has proposed novel paradigms to achieve the imposed requirements for 5G systems, being materialized in technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). These new paradigms are the first step to softwarize the mobile network deployments, enabling new degrees of flexibility and reconfigurability of the Radio Access Network (RAN). In this thesis, we first present a detailed analysis and characterization of softwarized mobile networking. We consider software as a basis for the next generation of cellular networks and hence, we analyze and characterize the impact on the energy efficiency of these systems. The first goal of this work is to characterize the available software platforms for Software Defined Radio (SDR), focusing on the two main open source solutions: OAI and srsLTE. As result, we provide a methodology to analyze and characterize the performance of these solutions in terms of CPU usage, network performance, compatibility and extensibility of the software. Once we have understood the expected performance for such platformsc, we study an SDR prototype built with hardware acceleration, that employs a FPGA based platform. This prototype is designed to include energy-awareness capabilites, allowing the system to be reconfigured to minimize the energy footprint when possible. In order to validate our system design, we later present an energy characterization platform that we will employ to experimentally measure the energy consumption of real devices. In our approach, we perform two kind of analysis: at short time scale and large time scale. Thus, to validate our approach in short time scale and the energy framework, we have characterized though numerical analysis the Rate Adaptation (RA) algorithms in IEEE 802.11, and then compare our theoretical results to the obtained ones through experimentation. Next we extend our analysis to the hardware accelerated SDR prototype previously mentioned. Our experimental results show that our system can indeed reduce the energy footprint reconfiguring the system deployment. Then, the time scale of our analysis is elevated and we present Resource-on-Demand (RoD) schemes for ultradense network deployments. This strategy is based on dynamically switch on/off the elements that form the network to reduce the overall energy consumption. Hence, we present a analytic model in two flavors, an exact model that accurately predicts the system behaviour but high computational cost and a simplified one that is lighter in complexity while keeping the accuracy. Our results show that these schemes can effectively enhance the energy efficiency of the deployments and mantaining the Quality of Service (QoS). In order to prove the feasibility of RoD, we present a softwarized platform that follows the SDN paradigm, the OFTEN (Open Flow framework for Traffic Engineering in mobile Networks with energy awareness) framework. Our design is based on OpenFlow with energy-awareness functionalities. Finally, a real prototype of this framework is presented, proving the feasibility of the RoD in real deployments.FP7-CROWD (2013-2015) CROWD (Connectivity management for eneRgy Optimised Wireless Dense networks).-- H2020-Flex5GWare (2015-2017) Flex5GWare (Flexible and efficient hardware/software platforms for 5G network elements and devices).Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Telemática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Gramaglia , Marco.- Secretario: José Nuñez.- Vocal: Fabrizio Giulian

An OpenCL software compilation framework targeting an SoC-FPGA VLIW chip multiprocessor

Modern systems-on-chip augment their baseline CPU with coprocessors and accelerators to increase overall computational capability and power efficiency, and thus have evolved into heterogeneous multi-core systems. Several languages have been developed to enable this paradigm shift, including CUDA and OpenCL. This paper discusses a unified compilation environment to enable heterogeneous system design through the use of OpenCL and a highly configurable VLIW Chip Multiprocessor architecture known as the LE1. An LLVM compilation framework was researched and a prototype developed to enable the execution of OpenCL applications on a number of hardware configurations of the LE1 CMP. The presented OpenCL framework fully automates the compilation flow and supports work-item coalescing which better maps onto the ILP processor cores of the LE1 architecture. This paper discusses in detail both the software stack and target hardware architecture and evaluates the scalability of the proposed framework by running 12 industry-standard OpenCL benchmarks drawn from the AMD SDK and the Rodinia suites. The benchmarks are executed on 40 LE1 configurations with 10 implemented on an SoC-FPGA and the remaining on a cycle-accurate simulator. Across 12 OpenCL benchmarks results demonstrate near-linear wall-clock performance improvement of 1.8x (using 2 dual-issue cores), up to 5.2x (using 8 dual-issue cores) and on one case, super-linear improvement of 8.4x (FixOffset kernel, 8 dual-issue cores). The number of OpenCL benchmarks evaluated makes this study one of the most complete in the literature

Image Processing Using FPGAs

This book presents a selection of papers representing current research on using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for realising image processing algorithms. These papers are reprints of papers selected for a Special Issue of the Journal of Imaging on image processing using FPGAs. A diverse range of topics is covered, including parallel soft processors, memory management, image filters, segmentation, clustering, image analysis, and image compression. Applications include traffic sign recognition for autonomous driving, cell detection for histopathology, and video compression. Collectively, they represent the current state-of-the-art on image processing using FPGAs

The design and development of multi-agent based RFID middleware system for data and devices management

Thesis (D. Tech. (Electrical Engineering)) - Central University of technology, Free State, 2012Radio frequency identification technology (RFID) has emerged as a key technology for automatic identification and promises to revolutionize business processes. While RFID technology adoption is improving rapidly, reliable and widespread deployment of this technology still faces many significant challenges. The key deployment challenges include how to use the simple, unreliable raw data generated by RFID deployments to make business decisions; and how to manage a large number of deployed RFID devices. In this thesis, a multi-agent based RFID middleware which addresses some of the RFID data and device management challenges was developed. The middleware developed abstracts the auto-identification applications from physical RFID device specific details and provides necessary services such as device management, data cleaning, event generation, query capabilities and event persistence. The use of software agent technology offers a more scalable and distributed system architecture for the proposed middleware. As part of a multi-agent system, application-independent domain ontology for RFID devices was developed. This ontology can be used or extended in any application interested with RFID domain ontology. In order to address the event processing tasks within the proposed middleware system, a temporal-based RFID data model which considers both applications’ temporal and spatial granules in the data model itself for efficient event processing was developed. The developed data model extends the conventional Entity-Relationship constructs by adding a time attribute to the model. By maintaining the history of events and state changes, the data model captures the fundamental RFID application logic within the data model. Hence, this new data model supports efficient generation of application level events, updating, querying and analysis of both recent and historical events. As part of the RFID middleware, an adaptive sliding-window based data cleaning scheme for reducing missed readings from RFID data streams (called WSTD) was also developed. The WSTD scheme models the unreliability of the RFID readings by viewing RFID streams as a statistical sample of tags in the physical world, and exploits techniques grounded in sampling theory to drive its cleaning processes. The WSTD scheme is capable of efficiently coping with both environmental variations and tag dynamics by automatically and continuously adapting its cleaning window size, based on observed readings