181 research outputs found
Managing distributed situation awareness in a team of agents
The research presented in this thesis investigates the best ways to manage Distributed Situation Awareness (DSA) for a team of agents tasked to conduct search activity with limited resources (battery life, memory use, computational power, etc.). In the first part of the thesis, an algorithm to coordinate agents (e.g., UAVs) is developed. This is based on Delaunay triangulation with the aim of supporting efficient, adaptable, scalable, and predictable search. Results from simulation and physical experiments with UAVs show good performance in terms of resources utilisation, adaptability, scalability, and predictability of the developed method in comparison with the existing fixed-pattern, pseudorandom, and hybrid methods. The second aspect of the thesis employs Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) to define and manage DSA based on the information obtained from the agents' search activity. Algorithms and methods were developed to describe how agents update the BBN to model the system’s DSA, predict plausible future states of the agents’ search area, handle uncertainties, manage agents’ beliefs (based on sensor differences), monitor agents’ interactions, and maintains adaptable BBN for DSA management using structural learning. The evaluation uses environment situation information obtained from agents’ sensors during search activity, and the results proved superior performance over well-known alternative methods in terms of situation prediction accuracy, uncertainty handling, and adaptability. Therefore, the thesis’s main contributions are (i) the development of a simple search planning algorithm that combines the strength of fixed-pattern and pseudorandom methods with resources utilisation, scalability, adaptability, and predictability features; (ii) a formal model of DSA using BBN that can be updated and learnt during the mission; (iii) investigation of the relationship between agents search coordination and DSA management
Seamless connectivity:investigating implementation challenges of multibroker MQTT platform for smart environmental monitoring
Abstract. This thesis explores the performance and efficiency of MQTT-based infrastructure Internet of Things (IoT) sensor networks for smart environment. The study focuses on the impact of network latency and broker switching in distributed multi-broker MQTT platforms. The research involves three case studies: a cloud-based multi-broker deployment, a Local Area Network (LAN)-based multi-broker deployment, and a multi-layer LAN network-based multi-broker deployment. The research is guided by three objectives: quantifying and analyzing the latency of multi-broker MQTT platforms; investigating the benefits of distributed brokers for edge users; and assessing the impact of switching latency at applications. This thesis ultimately seeks to answer three key questions related to network and switching latency, the merits of distributed brokers, and the influence of switching latency on the reliability of end-user applications
Intelligent seamless handover in next generation networks
Providing high quality of service (QoS) to mobile end-users, and guaranteeing resilient connectivity for healthcare wearables and other mobile devices is a critical component of Industry 5.0. However, one of the biggest difficulties that network operators encounter is the issue of mobility handover, as it can be detrimental to end-users’ safety and experience. Although various handover mechanisms have been developed to meet high QoS, achieving optimum handover performance while maintaining sustainable network operation is still an unreached goal. In this paper, random linear codes (RLC) are used to achieve seamless handover, where handover traffic is encoded using RLC and then multicasted to handover destination(s) using a mobility prediction algorithm for destination selection. To overcome the limitations of current IP core networks, we make use of a revolutionary IP-over-Information-Centric Network architecture at the network core that supports highly flexible multicast switching. The combination of the RLC, flexible multicast, and mobility prediction, makes the communication resilient to packet loss and helps to avoid handover failures of existing solutions while reducing overall packet delivery cost, hence offering sustainable mobility support. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using a realistic vehicular mobility dataset and cellular network infrastructure and compared with Fast Handover for Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PFMIPv6). The results show that our scheme efficiently supports seamless session continuity in high mobility environments, reducing the total traffic delivery cost by 44% compared to its counterpart PFMIPv6, while reducing handover delay by 26% and handover failure to less than 2% of total handovers
Technologies and Applications for Big Data Value
This open access book explores cutting-edge solutions and best practices for big data and data-driven AI applications for the data-driven economy. It provides the reader with a basis for understanding how technical issues can be overcome to offer real-world solutions to major industrial areas. The book starts with an introductory chapter that provides an overview of the book by positioning the following chapters in terms of their contributions to technology frameworks which are key elements of the Big Data Value Public-Private Partnership and the upcoming Partnership on AI, Data and Robotics. The remainder of the book is then arranged in two parts. The first part “Technologies and Methods” contains horizontal contributions of technologies and methods that enable data value chains to be applied in any sector. The second part “Processes and Applications” details experience reports and lessons from using big data and data-driven approaches in processes and applications. Its chapters are co-authored with industry experts and cover domains including health, law, finance, retail, manufacturing, mobility, and smart cities. Contributions emanate from the Big Data Value Public-Private Partnership and the Big Data Value Association, which have acted as the European data community's nucleus to bring together businesses with leading researchers to harness the value of data to benefit society, business, science, and industry. The book is of interest to two primary audiences, first, undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in various fields, including big data, data science, data engineering, and machine learning and AI. Second, practitioners and industry experts engaged in data-driven systems, software design and deployment projects who are interested in employing these advanced methods to address real-world problems
Managing Event-Driven Applications in Heterogeneous Fog Infrastructures
The steady increase in digitalization propelled by the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to a deluge of generated data at unprecedented pace. Thereby, the promise to realize data-driven decision-making is a major innovation driver in a myriad of industries. Based on the widely used event processing paradigm, event-driven applications allow to analyze data in the form of event streams in order to extract relevant information in a timely manner. Most recently, graphical flow-based approaches in no-code event processing systems have been introduced to significantly lower technological entry barriers. This empowers non-technical citizen technologists to create event-driven applications comprised of multiple interconnected event-driven processing services. Still, today’s event-driven applications are focused on centralized cloud deployments that come with inevitable drawbacks, especially in the context of IoT scenarios that require fast results, are limited by the available bandwidth, or are bound by the regulations in terms of privacy and security. Despite recent advances in the area of fog computing which mitigate these shortcomings by extending the cloud and moving certain processing closer to the event source, these approaches are hardly established in existing systems. Inherent fog computing characteristics, especially the heterogeneity of resources alongside novel application management demands, particularly the aspects of geo-distribution and dynamic adaptation, pose challenges that are currently insufficiently addressed and hinder the transition to a next generation of no-code event processing systems.
The contributions of this thesis enable citizen technologists to manage event-driven applications in heterogeneous fog infrastructures along the application life cycle. Therefore, an approach for a holistic application management is proposed which abstracts citizen technologists from underlying technicalities. This allows to evolve present event processing systems and advances the democratization of event-driven application management in fog computing. Individual contributions of this thesis are summarized as follows:
1. A model, manifested in a geo-distributed system architecture, to semantically describe characteristics specific to node resources, event-driven applications and their management to blend application-centric and infrastructure-centric realms.
2. Concepts for geo-distributed deployment and operation of event-driven applications alongside strategies for flexible event stream management.
3. A methodology to support the evolution of event-driven applications including methods to dynamically reconfigure, migrate and offload individual event-driven processing services at run-time.
The contributions are introduced, applied and evaluated along two scenarios from the manufacturing and logistics domain
Play Among Books
How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books
one6G white paper, 6G technology overview:Second Edition, November 2022
6G is supposed to address the demands for consumption of mobile networking services in 2030 and beyond. These are characterized by a variety of diverse, often conflicting requirements, from technical ones such as extremely high data rates, unprecedented scale of communicating devices, high coverage, low communicating latency, flexibility of extension, etc., to non-technical ones such as enabling sustainable growth of the society as a whole, e.g., through energy efficiency of deployed networks. On the one hand, 6G is expected to fulfil all these individual requirements, extending thus the limits set by the previous generations of mobile networks (e.g., ten times lower latencies, or hundred times higher data rates than in 5G). On the other hand, 6G should also enable use cases characterized by combinations of these requirements never seen before, e.g., both extremely high data rates and extremely low communication latency). In this white paper, we give an overview of the key enabling technologies that constitute the pillars for the evolution towards 6G. They include: terahertz frequencies (Section 1), 6G radio access (Section 2), next generation MIMO (Section 3), integrated sensing and communication (Section 4), distributed and federated artificial intelligence (Section 5), intelligent user plane (Section 6) and flexible programmable infrastructures (Section 7). For each enabling technology, we first give the background on how and why the technology is relevant to 6G, backed up by a number of relevant use cases. After that, we describe the technology in detail, outline the key problems and difficulties, and give a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in that technology. 6G is, however, not limited to these seven technologies. They merely present our current understanding of the technological environment in which 6G is being born. Future versions of this white paper may include other relevant technologies too, as well as discuss how these technologies can be glued together in a coherent system
SNAP : A Software-Defined & Named-Data Oriented Publish-Subscribe Framework for Emerging Wireless Application Systems
The evolution of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) has given rise to an emergent class of CPSs defined by ad-hoc wireless connectivity, mobility, and resource constraints in computation, memory, communications, and battery power. These systems are expected to fulfill essential roles in critical infrastructure sectors. Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) and a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV swarm) are examples of such systems. The significant utility of these systems, coupled with their economic viability, is a crucial indicator of their anticipated growth in the future. Typically, the tasks assigned to these systems have strict Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements and require sensing, perception, and analysis of a substantial amount of data. To fulfill these QoS requirements, the system requires network connectivity, data dissemination, and data analysis methods that can operate well within a system\u27s limitations. Traditional Internet protocols and methods for network connectivity and data dissemination are typically designed for well-engineering cyber systems and do not comprehensively support this new breed of emerging systems. The imminent growth of these CPSs presents an opportunity to develop broadly applicable methods that can meet the stated system requirements for a diverse range of systems and integrate these systems with the Internet. These methods could potentially be standardized to achieve interoperability among various systems of the future.
This work presents a solution that can fulfill the communication and data dissemination requirements of a broad class of emergent CPSs. The two main contributions of this work are the Application System (APPSYS) system abstraction, and a complementary communications framework called the Software-Defined NAmed-data enabled Publish-Subscribe (SNAP) communication framework. An APPSYS is a new breed of Internet application representing the mobile and resource-constrained CPSs supporting data-intensive and QoS-sensitive safety-critical tasks, referred to as the APPSYS\u27s mission. The functioning of the APPSYS is closely aligned with the needs of the mission. The standard APPSYS architecture is distributed and partitions the system into multiple clusters where each cluster is a hierarchical sub-network. The SNAP communication framework within the APPSYS utilized principles of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) through the publish-subscribe communication paradigm. It further extends the role of brokers within the publish-subscribe paradigm to create a distributed software-defined control plane. The SNAP framework leverages the APPSYS design characteristics to provide flexible and robust communication and dynamic and distributed control-plane decision-making that successfully allows the APPSYS to meet the communication requirements of data-oriented and QoS-sensitive missions. In this work, we present the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of an APPSYS through an exemplar UAV swarm APPSYS. We evaluate the benefits offered by the APPSYS design and the SNAP communication framework in meeting the dynamically changed requirements of a data-intensive and QoS-sensitive Coordinated Search and Tracking (CSAT) mission operating in a UAV swarm APPSYS on the battlefield. Results from the performance evaluation demonstrate that the UAV swarm APPSYS successfully monitors and mitigates network impairment impacting a mission\u27s QoS to support the mission\u27s QoS requirements
Security and Privacy of IP-ICN Coexistence: A Comprehensive Survey
Internet usage has changed from its first design. Hence, the current Internet
must cope with some limitations, including performance degradation,
availability of IP addresses, and multiple security and privacy issues.
Nevertheless, to unsettle the current Internet's network layer i.e., Internet
Protocol with ICN is a challenging, expensive task. It also requires worldwide
coordination among Internet Service Providers , backbone, and Autonomous
Services. Additionally, history showed that technology changes e.g., from 3G to
4G, from IPv4 to IPv6 are not immediate, and usually, the replacement includes
a long coexistence period between the old and new technology. Similarly, we
believe that the process of replacement of the current Internet will surely
transition through the coexistence of IP and ICN. Although the tremendous
amount of security and privacy issues of the current Internet taught us the
importance of securely designing the architectures, only a few of the proposed
architectures place the security-by-design. Therefore, this article aims to
provide the first comprehensive Security and Privacy analysis of the
state-of-the-art coexistence architectures. Additionally, it yields a
horizontal comparison of security and privacy among three deployment approaches
of IP and ICN protocol i.e., overlay, underlay, and hybrid and a vertical
comparison among ten considered security and privacy features. As a result of
our analysis, emerges that most of the architectures utterly fail to provide
several SP features including data and traffic flow confidentiality,
availability and communication anonymity. We believe this article draws a
picture of the secure combination of current and future protocol stacks during
the coexistence phase that the Internet will definitely walk across
Design of an UAV swarm
This master thesis tries to give an overview on the general aspects involved in the design of an UAV swarm. UAV swarms are continuoulsy gaining popularity amongst researchers and UAV manufacturers, since they allow greater success rates in task accomplishing with reduced times. Appart from this, multiple UAVs cooperating between them opens a new field of missions that can only be carried in this way. All the topics explained within this master thesis will explain all the agents involved in the design of an UAV swarm, from the communication protocols between them, navigation and trajectory analysis and task allocation
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