OpenKnowledge at work: exploring centralized and decentralized information gathering in emergency contexts

Real-world experience teaches us that to manage emergencies, efficient crisis response coordination is crucial; ICT infrastructures are effective in supporting the people involved in such contexts, by supporting effective ways of interaction. They also should provide innovative means of communication and information management. At present, centralized architectures are mostly used for this purpose; however, alternative infrastructures based on the use of distributed information sources, are currently being explored, studied and analyzed. This paper aims at investigating the capability of a novel approach (developed within the European project OpenKnowledge1) to support centralized as well as decentralized architectures for information gathering. For this purpose we developed an agent-based e-Response simulation environment fully integrated with the OpenKnowledge infrastructure and through which existing emergency plans are modelled and simulated. Preliminary results show the OpenKnowledge capability of supporting the two afore-mentioned architectures and, under ideal assumptions, a comparable performance in both cases

Performance Analysis of Blockchain Platforms

Blockchain technologies have drawn massive attention to the world these past few years mostly because of the burst of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Etherium, Ripple and many others. A Blockchain, also known as distributed ledger technology, has demonstrated huge potential in saving time and costs. This open-source technology which generates a decentralized public ledger of transactions is widely appreciated for ensuring a high level of privacy through encryption and thus sharing the transaction details only amongst the participants involved in the transactions. The Blockchain is used not only for cryptocurrency but also by various companies to meet their business ends, such as efficient management of supply chains and logistics. The rise and fall of numerous crypto-currencies based on blockchain technology have generated debate among tech-giants and regulatory bodies. There are various groups which are working on standardizing the blockchain technology. At the same time, numerous groups are actively working, developing and fine-tuning their own blockchain platforms. Platforms such as etherium, hyperledger, parity, etc. have their own pros and cons. This research is focused on the performance analysis of blockchain platforms which gives a comparative understanding of these platforms

JXTA-Overlay: a P2P platform for distributed, collaborative, and ubiquitous computing

With the fast growth of the Internet infrastructure and the use of large-scale complex applications in industries, transport, logistics, government, health, and businesses, there is an increasing need to design and deploy multifeatured networking applications. Important features of such applications include the capability to be self-organized, be decentralized, integrate different types of resources (personal computers, laptops, and mobile and sensor devices), and provide global, transparent, and secure access to resources. Moreover, such applications should support not only traditional forms of reliable distributing computing and optimization of resources but also various forms of collaborative activities, such as business, online learning, and social networks in an intelligent and secure environment. In this paper, we present the Juxtapose (JXTA)-Overlay, which is a JXTA-based peer-to-peer (P2P) platform designed with the aim to leverage capabilities of Java, JXTA, and P2P technologies to support distributed and collaborative systems. The platform can be used not only for efficient and reliable distributed computing but also for collaborative activities and ubiquitous computing by integrating in the platform end devices. The design of a user interface as well as security issues are also tackled. We evaluate the proposed system by experimental study and show its usefulness for massive processing computations and e-learning applications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs