Exciting Students for Systems Programming Through the Use of Mobile Robots

In this paper we present our experience teaching Systems Program- ming in C to undergraduate students. Additionally to traditional Unix-like operating system approach, we employed a robotic plat- form - the e-puck mobile robot - to increase the students moti- vation and improve their learning experience. A robotic platform provides high attraction for students, making the class stand-out compared to other courses. Yet it is not only a playground, rather, the platform allows to present very challenging and sophisticated real-life programming problems in a tangible way. The chosen robot provides an open-source operating system with a well struc- tured programming interface and thus o ers a real-world, complex example of systems programming to the students. We describe the overall curriculum and the syllabus of the course itself. Emphasis is put on the design of the in-class and homework assignments, but the robotic platform is brie y described as well. Our success is con rmed by the end-of-semester evaluation by the students, who ranked our course among the top of all bachelor-level courses

Using LoRa communication for Urban VANETs: Feasibility and Challenges

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) were introduced mainly to increase vehicular safety by enabling communication between vehicles and infrastructure to improve overall awareness. The vehicles in a VANET are expected to exchange numerous messages generated by multiple applications, but mainly, these applications can be subdivided into safety and non-safety. The main communication technologies designed for VANETs, DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communication) and C-V2X (Cellular V2X), mainly focus on delay-sensitive safety-related applications. However, sharing the same bandwidth for safety and non-safety applications will increase the burden on the communication channel and can cause an increase in the overall latencies. Therefore, this work analyses the feasibility of using LoRa communication for non-safety-related urban VANET applications. We conducted multiple real-world experiments to analyse the performance of LoRa communication in various urban VANET scenarios. Our results show that LoRa communication handles the Dopper shifts caused by the urban VANET speeds with both Spreading Factor (SF) 7 and 12. However, higher SF was more vulnerable to Doppler shifts than lower SF. Furthermore, the results illustrate that the Line-of-Sight (LoS) condition significantly affects the LoRa communication, especially in the case of lower SF

Empowering IoT Applications with Flexible, Energy-Efficient Remote Management of Low-Power Edge Devices

In the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), reliable and energy-efficient provision of IoT applications has become critical. Equipping IoT systems with tools that enable a flexible, well-performing, and automated way of monitoring and managing IoT edge devices is an essential prerequisite. In current IoT systems, low-power edge appliances have been utilized in a way that can not be controlled and re-configured in a timely manner. Hence, conducting a trade-off solution between manageability, performance and design requirements are demanded. This paper introduces a novel approach for fine-grained monitoring and managing individual micro-services within low-power edge devices, which improves system reliability and energy efficiency. The proposed method enables operational flexibility for IoT edge devices by leveraging a modularization technique. Following a review of existing solutions for remote-managed IoT services, a detailed description of the suggested approach is presented. Also, to explore the essential design principles that must be considered in this approach, the suggested architecture is elaborated in detail. Finally, the advantages of the proposed solution to deal with disruptions are demonstrated in the proof of concept-based experiments.Comment: 4 pages, Proceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Network

A feedback-enhanced learning approach for routing in WSN

Much research in sensor networks focuses on optimizing traffic originating at multiple sources destined for a single, base station sink. Our work reverses this assumption, targeting scenarios where individual sensor data is sent to multiple destinations. In this case, the data path that produces the least network cost is unlikely to overlap completely with any of the optimal routes between the individual pairs of source/destination nodes. If the entire topology is known, an offline approach can likely find this minimum path. However this is an unrealistic assumption. Instead, our approach uses only local information and converges toward optimal. The novelty of our approach is a technique for actively exploring alternate data routes, sharing feedback regarding route fitness, and learning better routes. While non-optimal choices are made during the discovery phase, the resulting, learned path has lower cost than the initial path. Further, our protocol identifies multiple paths with equal cost, providing additional opportunities for saving energy by switching among alternate routes throughout the lifetime of the application. This paper describes our feedbackbased protocol, shows simulation results demonstrating its benefits and explores the future opportunities of the learning technique presented

Demo: Simulation-as-a-Service to Benchmark Opportunistic Networks

Repeatability, reproducibility, and replicability are essential aspects of experimental and simulation-driven research. Use of benchmarks in such evaluations further assists corroborative performance evaluations. In this work, we present a demonstrator of a simulation service, called ”OPS on the bench” which tackles these challenges in performance evaluations of opportunistic networks

MoleNet: An Underground Sensor Network for Soil Monitoring

With the increasing digitalization worldwide, the demand of information also increases in all areas. MoleNet is a low-power sensing platform which is easy to assemble and use. It offers several options to monitor, for example, the soil moisture and temperature and visualize the data. Several researchers from different countriesare currently working and improving MoleNet for different applications. This demoshows the main application of MoleNet: Monitoring soil conditions in a remote area,transmitting the data and visualizing the current status