Ecosystems monitoring is essential to properly understand their development and the effects of events, both climatological and anthropological in nature. The amount of data used in these assessments is increasing at very high rates. This is due to increasing availability of sensing systems and the development of new techniques to analyze sensor data. The Enviro-Net Project encompasses several of such sensor system deployments across five countries in the Americas. These deployments use a few different ground-based sensor systems, installed at different heights monitoring the conditions in tropical dry forests over long periods of time. This paper presents our experience in deploying and maintaining these systems, retrieving and pre-processing the data, and describes the Web portal developed to help with data management, visualization and analysis.
Middleware software for automating control of deployments is also the focus of current research efforts, in form of architectures for integrating different network deployments @cite_46 , or Web-based interfaces for interaction with and control of wireless deployments @cite_28 . Our focus, on the other hand, is on managing the data products rather than controlling the equipment from within our system.
@cite_28 @cite_46
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Network deployments handle changing application, workload, and policy requirements via the deployment of specialized network appliances or "middleboxes". Today, however, middlebox platforms are expensive and closed systems, with little or no hooks for extensibility. Furthermore, they are acquired from independent vendors and deployed as standalone devices with little cohesiveness in how the ensemble of middleboxes is managed. As network requirements continue to grow in both scale and variety, this bottom-up approach puts middlebox deployments on a trajectory of growing device sprawl with corresponding escalation in capital and management costs. To address this challenge, we present CoMb, a new architecture for middlebox deployments that systematically explores opportunities for consolidation, both at the level of building individual middleboxes and in managing a network of middleboxes. This paper addresses key resource management and implementation challenges that arise in exploiting the benefits of consolidation in middlebox deployments. Using a prototype implementation in Click, we show that CoMb reduces the network provisioning cost 1.8-2.5× and reduces the load imbalance in a network by 2-25×. Management, allocation and scheduling of heterogeneous resources for complex distributed real-time applications is a challenging problem. Timing constraints of applications may be fulfilled by the proper use of real-time scheduling policies, admission control and enforcement of timing constraints. However, it is not easy to design basic infrastructure services that allow for easy access to the allocation of multiple heterogeneous resources in a distributed environment. In this paper, we present a middleware for providing distributed soft real-time applications with a uniform API for reserving heterogeneous resources with real-time scheduling capabilities in a distributed environment. The architecture relies on standard POSIX OS facilities, such as time management and standard TCP IP networking services, and it is designed around CORBA, in order to facilitate modularity, flexibility and portability of the applications using it. However, real-time scheduling is supported by proper extensions at the kernel-level, plugged within the framework by means of dedicated resource managers. Our current implementation on Linux supports the reservation of the CPU, disk and network bandwidth. However, additional resource managers supporting alternative real-time schedulers for these resources, as well as additional types of resources, may be easily added. We present experimental results gathered on both synthetic applications and a real multimedia video streaming case study, showing the advantages deriving from the use of the proposed middleware. Finally, overhead figures are reported, showing the sustainability of the approach for a wide class of complex, distributed, soft real-time applications. In this paper, experiences and best practices from using containerized software microservices for self-driving vehicles are shared. We applied the containerized software paradigm successfully to both the software development and deployment to turn our software architecture in the vehicles following the idea of microservices. Key enabling elements include onboarding of new developers, both researchers and students, traceable development and packaging, convenient and bare-bone deployment, and traceably archiving binary distributions of our quickly evolving software environment. In this paper, we share our experience from working one year with containerized development and deployment for our self-driving vehicles highlighting our reflections and application-specific shortcomings, our approach uses several components from the widely used Docker ecosystem, but the discussion in this paper generalizes these concepts. We conclude that the growingly complex automotive software systems in combination with their computational platforms should be rather understood as data centers on wheels to design both, (a) the software development and deployment processes, and (b) the software architecture in such a way to enable continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous experimentation. Interoperability and loose coupling requirements are pushing the next generation of distributed applications towards more decentralized and more dynamic interaction schemes, which the classic request response communication paradigm can hardly accommodate. Hence, sound foundations and mechanisms for the establishment of unanticipated peer-to-peer interactions across organizational boundaries are of significant importance to upcoming middleware platforms. The executable choreography framework (ECF) is a middleware-level framework that targets dynamic and decentralized service compositions. The ECF combines transparent context propagation with aspect-oriented software composition techniques to dynamically refine the default control and data flow of service invocations. The framework provides a ground for experimentation with dynamic and distributed workflows, and a base to assess their safety and applicability when deployed across organizational boundaries.