4,897 research outputs found
Distributed Hybrid Simulation of the Internet of Things and Smart Territories
This paper deals with the use of hybrid simulation to build and compose
heterogeneous simulation scenarios that can be proficiently exploited to model
and represent the Internet of Things (IoT). Hybrid simulation is a methodology
that combines multiple modalities of modeling/simulation. Complex scenarios are
decomposed into simpler ones, each one being simulated through a specific
simulation strategy. All these simulation building blocks are then synchronized
and coordinated. This simulation methodology is an ideal one to represent IoT
setups, which are usually very demanding, due to the heterogeneity of possible
scenarios arising from the massive deployment of an enormous amount of sensors
and devices. We present a use case concerned with the distributed simulation of
smart territories, a novel view of decentralized geographical spaces that,
thanks to the use of IoT, builds ICT services to manage resources in a way that
is sustainable and not harmful to the environment. Three different simulation
models are combined together, namely, an adaptive agent-based parallel and
distributed simulator, an OMNeT++ based discrete event simulator and a
script-language simulator based on MATLAB. Results from a performance analysis
confirm the viability of using hybrid simulation to model complex IoT
scenarios.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1605.0487
Ambient-aware continuous care through semantic context dissemination
Background: The ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff. This sensor-based approach results in a large amount of data, which can be processed by current and future applications, e. g., task management and alerting systems. Today, nurses are responsible for coordinating all these applications and supplied information, which reduces the added value and slows down the adoption rate. The aim of the presented research is the design of a pervasive and scalable framework that is able to optimize continuous care processes by intelligently reasoning on the large amount of heterogeneous care data.
Methods: The developed Ontology-based Care Platform (OCarePlatform) consists of modular components that perform a specific reasoning task. Consequently, they can easily be replicated and distributed. Complex reasoning is achieved by combining the results of different components. To ensure that the components only receive information, which is of interest to them at that time, they are able to dynamically generate and register filter rules with a Semantic Communication Bus (SCB). This SCB semantically filters all the heterogeneous care data according to the registered rules by using a continuous care ontology. The SCB can be distributed and a cache can be employed to ensure scalability.
Results: A prototype implementation is presented consisting of a new-generation nurse call system supported by a localization and a home automation component. The amount of data that is filtered and the performance of the SCB are evaluated by testing the prototype in a living lab. The delay introduced by processing the filter rules is negligible when 10 or fewer rules are registered.
Conclusions: The OCarePlatform allows disseminating relevant care data for the different applications and additionally supports composing complex applications from a set of smaller independent components. This way, the platform significantly reduces the amount of information that needs to be processed by the nurses. The delay resulting from processing the filter rules is linear in the amount of rules. Distributed deployment of the SCB and using a cache allows further improvement of these performance results
Climate Services for Resilient Development (CSRD) Partnership’s work in Latin America
The Climate Services for Resilient Development (CSRD)
Partnership is a private-public collaboration led by USAID,
which aims to increase resilience to climate change in
developing countries through the development and
dissemination of climate services. The partnership
began with initial projects in three countries: Colombia,
Ethiopia, and Bangladesh. The International Center for
Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) was the lead organization for
the Colombian CSRD efforts – which then expanded to
encompass work in the whole Latin American region
Distributed Estimation with Information-Seeking Control in Agent Network
We introduce a distributed, cooperative framework and method for Bayesian
estimation and control in decentralized agent networks. Our framework combines
joint estimation of time-varying global and local states with
information-seeking control optimizing the behavior of the agents. It is suited
to nonlinear and non-Gaussian problems and, in particular, to location-aware
networks. For cooperative estimation, a combination of belief propagation
message passing and consensus is used. For cooperative control, the negative
posterior joint entropy of all states is maximized via a gradient ascent. The
estimation layer provides the control layer with probabilistic information in
the form of sample representations of probability distributions. Simulation
results demonstrate intelligent behavior of the agents and excellent estimation
performance for a simultaneous self-localization and target tracking problem.
In a cooperative localization scenario with only one anchor, mobile agents can
localize themselves after a short time with an accuracy that is higher than the
accuracy of the performed distance measurements.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figure
A practical framework for data collection in wireless sensor networks
Optimizing energy consumption for extending the lifetime in wireless sensor networks is of dominant importance. Groups of autonomous robots and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) acting as mobile data collectors are utilized to minimize the energy expenditure of the sensor nodes by approaching the sensors and collecting their buffers via single hop communication, rather than using multihop routing to forward the buffers to the base station. This paper models the sensor network and the mobile collectors as a system-of-systems, and defines all levels and types of interactions. A practical framework that facilitates deploying heterogeneous mobiles without prior knowledge about the sensor network is presented. Realizing the framework is done through simulation experiments and tested against several performance metrics.<br /
MINDiT: A framework for media independent access to things
Deploying smart environments often implies a plethora of co-existing devices and services, each with their own set of features, requirements and interfacing characteristics. These intricate scenarios are further exacerbated when such devices are coupled with networking capabilities, globalizing their interaction opportunities to create the so-called Internet of Things. In such interconnected heterogeneous environments, the joint operation of entities requires a flexible framework that enables and simplifies interfacing between elements. In this paper, we propose MINDiT, a framework that provides a common abstract interface towards the communication support with different entities. It incorporates cross-layer mechanisms inspired on the existing IEEE 802.21 technology, suitably modified to facilitate and optimize deployment in scenarios featuring both high-level, and low-powered network-restricted entities. MINDiT was validated through a prototype built over an open-source IEEE 802.21 implementation. We further compared its signaling impact against other solutions, and evaluated its performance over a smart environment featuring a multimedia scenario with multiple devices and services
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