Creating a Worldwide Network For the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) and Related Experimental Environments

Many important societal activities are global in scope, and as these activities continually expand world-wide, they are increasingly based on a foundation of advanced communication services and underlying innovative network architecture, technology, and core infrastructure. To continue progress in these areas, research activities cannot be limited to campus labs and small local testbeds or even to national testbeds. Researchers must be able to explore concepts at scale—to conduct experiments on world-wide testbeds that approximate the attributes of the real world. Today, it is possible to take advantage of several macro information technology trends, especially virtualization and capabilities for programming technology resources at a highly granulated level, to design, implement and operate network research environments at a global scale. GENI is developing such an environment, as are research communities in a number of other countries. Recently, these communities have not only been investigating techniques for federating these research environments across multiple domains, but they have also been demonstration prototypes of such federations. This chapter provides an overview of key topics and experimental activities related to GENI international networking and to related projects throughout the world

Recording behaviour of indoor-housed farm animals automatically using machine vision technology: a systematic review

Large-scale phenotyping of animal behaviour traits is time consuming and has led to increased demand for technologies that can automate these procedures. Automated tracking of animals has been successful in controlled laboratory settings, but recording from animals in large groups in highly variable farm settings presents challenges. The aim of this review is to provide a systematic overview of the advances that have occurred in automated, high throughput image detection of farm animal behavioural traits with welfare and production implications. Peer-reviewed publications written in English were reviewed systematically following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. After identification, screening, and assessment for eligibility, 108 publications met these specifications and were included for qualitative synthesis. Data collected from the papers included camera specifications, housing conditions, group size, algorithm details, procedures, and results. Most studies utilized standard digital colour video cameras for data collection, with increasing use of 3D cameras in papers published after 2013. Papers including pigs (across production stages) were the most common (n = 63). The most common behaviours recorded included activity level, area occupancy, aggression, gait scores, resource use, and posture. Our review revealed many overlaps in methods applied to analysing behaviour, and most studies started from scratch instead of building upon previous work. Training and validation sample sizes were generally small (mean±s.d. groups = 3.8±5.8) and in data collection and testing took place in relatively controlled environments. To advance our ability to automatically phenotype behaviour, future research should build upon existing knowledge and validate technology under commercial settings and publications should explicitly describe recording conditions in detail to allow studies to be reproduced

Optimized Parallel Transmission in Elastic Optical Networks to Support High-Speed Ethernet

The need for optical parallelization is driven by the imminent optical capacity crunch, where the spectral efficiency required in the coming decades will be beyond the Shannon limit. To this end, the emerging high-speed Ethernet services at 100 Gbps have already standardized options to utilize parallel optics for data transmission, referred to as multi-lane distribution. OFDM-based optical network is a promising transmission option towards the goal of Ethernet parallelization. It can allocate optical spectrum resource tailored for a variety of bandwidth requirements in a fundamentally parallel fashion, with each sub-carrier utilizing a frequency slot at a lower rate than if serial transmission is used. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel transmission framework designed for elastic (OFDM-based) optical networks to support high-speed Ethernet services, in-line with IEEE and ITU-T standards. We formulate an optimization model based on integer linear programming, with consideration of various constraints, including spectrum fragmentation, differential delay and guard-band constraints. We also propose a heuristic algorithm which can be applied when the optimization model becomes intractable. The numerical results show the effectiveness and high suitability of elastic optical networks to support high-speed Ethernet parallel transmission, especially for connections with high bandwidth requirements. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to model parallel transmission in elastic optical networks in support of a standardized high-speed Ethernet system

A novel node architecture for light-trail provisioning in mesh WDM metro networks

We propose an efficient node architecture to support light-trails (intelligent-shared-wavelength bus) in mesh WDM metro networks. Simulation results and performance benefits as compared to legacy technologies are shown. (c) 2008 Optical Society of America

Architectural Requirements for Cloud Computing Systems: An Enterprise Cloud Approach

Cloud Computing is a model of service delivery and access where dynamically scalable and virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. This model creates a new horizon of opportunity for enterprises. It introduces new operating and business models that allow customers to pay for the resources they effectively use, instead of making heavy upfront investments. The biggest challenge in Cloud Computing is the lack of a de facto standard or single architectural method, which can meet the requirements of an enterprise cloud approach. In this paper, we explore the architectural features of Cloud Computing and classify them according to the requirements of end-users, enterprises that use the cloud as a platform, and cloud providers themselves. We show that several architectural features will play a major role in the adoption of the Cloud Computing paradigm as a mainstream commodity in the enterprise world. This paper also provides key guidelines to software architects and Cloud Computing application developers for creating future architectures