Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Context-aware collaborative storage and programming for mobile users

Since people generate and access most digital content from mobile devices, novel innovative mobile apps and services are possible. Most people are interested in sharing this content with communities defined by friendship, similar interests, or geography in exchange for valuable services from these innovative apps. At the same time, they want to own and control their content. Collaborative mobile computing is an ideal choice for this situation. However, due to the distributed nature of this computing environment and the limited resources on mobile devices, maintaining content availability and storage fairness as well as providing efficient programming frameworks are challenging. This dissertation explores several techniques to improve these shortcomings of collaborative mobile computing platforms. First, it proposes a medley of three techniques into one system, MobiStore, that offers content availability in mobile peer-to-peer networks: topology maintenance with robust connectivity, structural reorientation based on the current state of the network, and gossip-based hierarchical updates. Experimental results showed that MobiStore outperforms a state-of-the-art comparison system in terms of content availability and resource usage fairness. Next, the dissertation explores the usage of social relationship properties (i.e., network centrality) to improve the fairness of resource allocation for collaborative computing in peer-to-peer online social networks. The challenge is how to provide fairness in content replication for P2P-OSN, given that the peers in these networks exchange information only with one-hop neighbors. The proposed solution provides fairness by selecting the peers to replicate content based on their potential to introduce the storage skewness, which is determined from their structural properties in the network. The proposed solution, Philia, achieves higher content availability and storage fairness than several comparison systems. The dissertation concludes with a high-level distributed programming model, which efficiently uses computing resources on a cloud-assisted, collaborative mobile computing platform. This platform pairs mobile devices with virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud for increased execution performance and availability. On such a platform, two important challenges arise: first, pairing the two computing entities into a seamless computation, communication, and storage unit; and second, using the computing resources in a cost-effective way. This dissertation proposes Moitree, a distributed programming model and middleware that translates high-level programming constructs into events and provides the illusion of a single computing entity over the mobile-VM pairs. From programmers’ viewpoint, the Moitree API models user collaborations into dynamic groups formed over location, time, or social hierarchies. Experimental results from a prototype implementation show that Moitree is scalable, suitable for real-time apps, and can improve the performance of collaborating apps regarding latency and energy consumption

A framework for smart production-logistics systems based on CPS and industrial IoT

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has received increasing attention from both academia and industry. However, several challenges including excessively long waiting time and a serious waste of energy still exist in the IIoT-based integration between production and logistics in job shops. To address these challenges, a framework depicting the mechanism and methodology of smart production-logistics systems is proposed to implement intelligent modeling of key manufacturing resources and investigate self-organizing configuration mechanisms. A data-driven model based on analytical target cascading is developed to implement the self-organizing configuration. A case study based on a Chinese engine manufacturer is presented to validate the feasibility and evaluate the performance of the proposed framework and the developed method. The results show that the manufacturing time and the energy consumption are reduced and the computing time is reasonable. This paper potentially enables manufacturers to deploy IIoT-based applications and improve the efficiency of production-logistics systems

Hybrid client-server and P2P network for web-based collaborative 3D design

National audienceOur proposed research project is to enable 3D distributed visualization and manipulation involving collaborative effort through the use of web-based technologies. Our project resulted from a wide collaborative application research fields: Computer Aided Design (CAD), Building Information Modeling (BIM) or Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) where design tasks are often performed in teams and need a fluent communication system. The system allows distributed remote assembling in 3D scenes with real-time updates for the users. This paper covers this feature using hybrid networking solution: a client-server architecture (REST) for 3D rendering (WebGL) and data persistence (NoSQL) associated to an automatically built peer-to-peer (P2P) mesh for real-time communication between the clients (WebRTC). The approach is demonstrated through the development of a web-platform prototype focusing on the easy manipulation, fine rendering and light update messages for all participating users. We provide an architecture and a prototype to enable users to design in 3D together in real time with the benefits of web based online collaboration

Fog Computing: A Taxonomy, Survey and Future Directions

In recent years, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices/sensors has increased to a great extent. To support the computational demand of real-time latency-sensitive applications of largely geo-distributed IoT devices/sensors, a new computing paradigm named "Fog computing" has been introduced. Generally, Fog computing resides closer to the IoT devices/sensors and extends the Cloud-based computing, storage and networking facilities. In this chapter, we comprehensively analyse the challenges in Fogs acting as an intermediate layer between IoT devices/ sensors and Cloud datacentres and review the current developments in this field. We present a taxonomy of Fog computing according to the identified challenges and its key features.We also map the existing works to the taxonomy in order to identify current research gaps in the area of Fog computing. Moreover, based on the observations, we propose future directions for research