A Lesson in Scaling 6LoWPAN -- Minimal Fragment Forwarding in Lossy Networks

This paper evaluates two forwarding strategies for fragmented datagrams in the IoT: hop-wise reassembly and a minimal approach to directly forward fragments. Minimal fragment forwarding is challenged by the lack of forwarding information at subsequent fragments in 6LoWPAN and thus requires additional data at nodes. We compared the two approaches in extensive experiments evaluating reliability, end-to-end latency, and memory consumption. In contrast to previous work and due to our alternate setup, we obtained different results and conclusions. Our findings indicate that direct fragment forwarding should be deployed only with care, since higher packet transmission rates on the link-layer can significantly reduce its reliability, which in turn can even further reduce end-to-end latency because of highly increased link-layer retransmissions.Comment: If you cite this paper, please use the LCN reference: M. S. Lenders, T. C. Schmidt, M. W\"ahlisch. "A Lesson in Scaling 6LoWPAN - Minimal Fragment Forwarding in Lossy Networks." in Proc. of IEEE LCN, 201

Public Policy and Diet Quality: Impact of Prices on Nutrient Adequacy using French Expenditure Data from 1996 to 2005

This paper aims at simulating optimal prices satisfying public health recommendations in terms of nutrient adequacy. This implies to estimate a complete food demand system in order to compute price elasticities. Food consumption behaviors are described by an AI functional form [Deaton and Muellbauer(1980)] augmented to control for habit persistence. The demand system is estimated using the Iterated Least Square Estimator developed by Blundell and Robin (1999). We use French household expenditure data drawn from TNS Worldpanel covering 130 periods of 4 weeks from 1996 to 2005. Given the nature of our data, households are split into 8 cohorts based on two socio-demographic variables: date of birth and social status. A revised aggregation into 27 food groups is proposed in this paper. More precisely, commodities are grouped into homogeneous categories in terms of nutritional content and consumer preferences. Nutrient adequacy is defined using the MAR (Mean Adequacy Ratio), a nutrient only-based indicator. We calculate nutrient adequacy for 12 essential nutrients. Optimal prices are derived following Ramsey's approach to optimal taxation; Maximizing social welfare under nutritional constraints results in 27 optimal price variations or tax rates, each defined as a nonlinear function of all direct and cross price elasticities and the above mentioned indicator for all food groups.Household survey data, cohort, AI demand system, nutrient adequacy, diet quality, fat tax policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Health Economics and Policy, D12, C33,

Alcohol advertising: the last chance saloon

Research has established that alcohol advertising,1-3 like that for tobacco4 and fast food,5-7 influences behaviour. It encourages young people to drink alcohol sooner and in greater quantities. From a public health perspective, advertising of alcohol should clearly be limited. The United Kingdom has opted for a system of self regulatory controls that focuses primarily on the content of advertisements, with some limitations on the channels that can be used. This is overseen by the Advertising Standards Authority, through the Committee of Advertising Practice, which represents the interests of advertisers, agencies, and media owners.As part of its alcohol inquiry, the House of Commons health select committee wanted to explore the success of self regulation. It obtained a large number of internal marketing documents from alcohol producers and their communications agencies in order to examine the thinking and strategic planning that underpin alcohol advertising and hence show not just what advertisers are saying, but why they are saying it. Here we present the key insights to emerge

'Finding beauty' in French rural prisons. How prison officers operate rurality

The literature on rural criminology and rural prisons has so far essentially focused on debunking myths about rurality and rural crimes, and on the economic and social impacts of building prisons in rural areas. Typically, such rural prisons are recent. Conversely, due to its long history, France's rural prisons have in some cases been built during the 19th century within former convents from the Middle Ages or monasteries confiscated from the church during the 1789 Revolution. Missing from this literature, therefore, is, on the one hand, a focus on historic rural prison settings and, on the other hand, attention to individuals and professionals who work there. This paper focuses on a high security prison set in a middle-ages abbey in the middle of nature. In our interviews with its prison officers (POs) we used appreciative inquiry in order to better uncover the positive dimensions of rurality. We find that rurality is used to reinforce safety and the 'right distance' with prisoners, and to better cut off from the prison environment when they finish their shift. We also find that POs are bound by strong (rural) family ties that in turn contribute to their professional identity and values, and to their feelings of safety

Elements of methodology for designing Participative Document Spaces

International audienceThis paper presents the first elements of a methodology for designing Participative Document Spaces (PDS), as well as the initial results produced by this methodology within an industrial project aiming at designing a radioactive waste disposal. We define PDS as networked digital settings (such as blogs, forums, wikis) which enable their users to build documents and converse at the same time. Designing a PDS in a given situation thus implies modeling the links between existing settings for building documents and conversing, as well as the costs generated by replacing all or parts of these settings with a PDS. The analysis of our model project shows (a) that numerous settings, both for building documents and conversing, are being used to discuss document content, (b) that improving tracking those discussions could improve the “memory” of the project evolution. In this context, a wiki seems an appropriate tool in the extent that it would allow to directly attach to the documents most of the conversations related to them, thus fostering readability of those conversations and the “memory” of the project. Further studies remain to be conducted to determine the proper functions of the wiki, the rules applying to its use and the diverse costs generated by its deployment within this particular project

A carboxylesterase, Esterase-6, modulates sensory physiological and behavioral response dynamics to pheromone in Drosophila

Conclusions: Our study presents evidence that Est-6 plays a role in the physiological and behavioral dynamics of sex pheromone response in Drosophila males and supports a role of Est-6 as an odorant-degrading enzyme (ODE) in male antennae. Our results also expand the role of Est-6 in Drosophila biology, from reproduction to olfaction, and highlight the role of ODEs in insect olfaction

Security for the Industrial IoT: The Case for Information-Centric Networking

Industrial production plants traditionally include sensors for monitoring or documenting processes, and actuators for enabling corrective actions in cases of misconfigurations, failures, or dangerous events. With the advent of the IoT, embedded controllers link these `things' to local networks that often are of low power wireless kind, and are interconnected via gateways to some cloud from the global Internet. Inter-networked sensors and actuators in the industrial IoT form a critical subsystem while frequently operating under harsh conditions. It is currently under debate how to approach inter-networking of critical industrial components in a safe and secure manner. In this paper, we analyze the potentials of ICN for providing a secure and robust networking solution for constrained controllers in industrial safety systems. We showcase hazardous gas sensing in widespread industrial environments, such as refineries, and compare with IP-based approaches such as CoAP and MQTT. Our findings indicate that the content-centric security model, as well as enhanced DoS resistance are important arguments for deploying Information Centric Networking in a safety-critical industrial IoT. Evaluation of the crypto efforts on the RIOT operating system for content security reveal its feasibility for common deployment scenarios.Comment: To be published at IEEE WF-IoT 201

Connecting the World of Embedded Mobiles: The RIOT Approach to Ubiquitous Networking for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly evolving based on low-power compliant protocol standards that extend the Internet into the embedded world. Pioneering implementations have proven it is feasible to inter-network very constrained devices, but had to rely on peculiar cross-layered designs and offer a minimalistic set of features. In the long run, however, professional use and massive deployment of IoT devices require full-featured, cleanly composed, and flexible network stacks. This paper introduces the networking architecture that turns RIOT into a powerful IoT system, to enable low-power wireless scenarios. RIOT networking offers (i) a modular architecture with generic interfaces for plugging in drivers, protocols, or entire stacks, (ii) support for multiple heterogeneous interfaces and stacks that can concurrently operate, and (iii) GNRC, its cleanly layered, recursively composed default network stack. We contribute an in-depth analysis of the communication performance and resource efficiency of RIOT, both on a micro-benchmarking level as well as by comparing IoT communication across different platforms. Our findings show that, though it is based on significantly different design trade-offs, the networking subsystem of RIOT achieves a performance equivalent to that of Contiki and TinyOS, the two operating systems which pioneered IoT software platforms