An Infrastructure for Robotic Applications as Cloud Computing Services

Robotic applications are becoming ubiquitous. They are widely used in several areas (e.g., healthcare, disaster management, and manufacturing). However, their provisioning still faces several challenges such as cost efficiency. Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm that may aid in tackling these challenges. It has three main facets: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Virtualization is a technique that allows the abstraction of actual physical computing resources into logical units; it enables efficient usage of resources by multiple users. Its role is a key to resource efficiency. Virtualization can be performed at both node and network level. This thesis focuses on the IaaS aspects of robotic applications as cloud computing services. It starts by defining a set of requirements on the infrastructure for cost efficient robotic applications provisioning. It then reviews the state of the art. After pinpointing the shortcoming of the state of the art, it proposes an architecture that enables cost efficiency through virtualization and dynamic task delegation to robots, including robots that might belong to other clouds. Overlays and RESTful Web services are used as cornerstones. The virtualization in the IaaS is achieved by providing a coalition formation algorithm, which is the cooperation between several robots to perform a task that either cannot be solved individually or can be solved more efficiently as a group. Forming the effective coalitions is another big challenge. We adapted heuristic-based Multi Objective- Particle Swarm Optimization (MO-PSO) algorithm to solve this specific problem. As a proof of concept, a prototype is built using LEGO Mindstorms NXT as the robotic platform, and JXTA as the overlay middleware and the prototype architecture is presented along with the implemented scenario (i.e., wildfire suppression). Performance measurements have also been made to evaluate viability. To evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm, WEBOTS simulation software is used

Softwarization of Large-Scale IoT-based Disasters Management Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables objects to interact and cooperate with each other for reaching common objectives. It is very useful in large-scale disaster management systems where humans are likely to fail when they attempt to perform search and rescue operations in high-risk sites. IoT can indeed play a critical role in all phases of large-scale disasters (i.e. preparedness, relief, and recovery). Network softwarization aims at designing, architecting, deploying, and managing network components primarily based on software programmability properties. It relies on key technologies, such as cloud computing, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and Software Defined Networking (SDN). The key benefits are agility and cost efficiency. This thesis proposes softwarization approaches to tackle the key challenges related to large-scale IoT based disaster management systems. A first challenge faced by large-scale IoT disaster management systems is the dynamic formation of an optimal coalition of IoT devices for the tasks at hand. Meeting this challenge is critical for cost efficiency. A second challenge is an interoperability. IoT environments remain highly heterogeneous. However, the IoT devices need to interact. Yet another challenge is Quality of Service (QoS). Disaster management applications are known to be very QoS sensitive, especially when it comes to delay. To tackle the first challenge, we propose a cloud-based architecture that enables the formation of efficient coalitions of IoT devices for search and rescue tasks. The proposed architecture enables the publication and discovery of IoT devices belonging to different cloud providers. It also comes with a coalition formation algorithm. For the second challenge, we propose an NFV and SDN based - architecture for on-the-fly IoT gateway provisioning. The gateway functions are provisioned as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) that are chained on-the-fly in the IoT domain using SDN. When it comes to the third challenge, we rely on fog computing to meet the QoS and propose algorithms that provision IoT applications components in hybrid NFV based - cloud/fogs. Both stationary and mobile fog nodes are considered. In the case of mobile fog nodes, a Tabu Search-based heuristic is proposed. It finds a near-optimal solution and we numerically show that it is faster than the Integer Linear Programming (ILP) solution by several orders of magnitude

NFV Based Gateways for Virtualized Wireless Sensors Networks: A Case Study

Virtualization enables the sharing of a same wireless sensor network (WSN) by multiple applications. However, in heterogeneous environments, virtualized wireless sensor networks (VWSN) raises new challenges such as the need for on-the-fly, dynamic, elastic and scalable provisioning of gateways. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging paradigm that can certainly aid in tackling these new challenges. It leverages standard virtualization technology to consolidate special-purpose network elements on top of commodity hardware. This article presents a case study on NFV based gateways for VWSNs. In the study, a VWSN gateway provider, operates and manages an NFV based infrastructure. We use two different brands of wireless sensors. The NFV infrastructure makes possible the dynamic, elastic and scalable deployment of gateway modules in this heterogeneous VWSN environment. The prototype built with Openstack as platform is described