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
2133577607 2100592677
The fifth generation mobile networks will be developed to improve area spectral and energy efficiency, and provide uniform user experience. Hyper-dense small cell deployment can move devices closer to the wireless network and satisfy 5G system requirements. The main challenge of this network deployment results from the random deployment, dynamic on-off, flexible connection to cellular core networks, and flat system architecture of 5G systems. Therefore, conventional network planning and radio resource management, which depend on a central control node, cannot be applied to small cell networks. In this article some cooperative distributed radio resource management algorithms for time synchronization, carrier selection, and power control are discussed for hyper-dense small cell deployment. Abstract The need for integrating business and technical information systems, allowing partners to collaborate effectively in creating innovative products, has motivated the design and deployment of a novel integration framework for product lifecycle management. The time is ripe for such an integration framework because of the convergence of three important developments, almost in a perfect storm: (1) maturity of standardized product data and meta-data models, and standardized engineering and business processes; (2) emergence of service-oriented architecture for information sharing; and (3) availability of robust middleware to implement them. These developments allow engineering and business objects and processes to be built or composed as modular pieces of software in the form of services that can communicate with each other and be used across different parts of a business. These modular software pieces can be reused and reconfigured in new ways as business conditions change, thereby saving time and money for companies. This paper describes the business and technical aspects of an integration framework for product lifecycle management using open standards and service-oriented architecture. An important part of software engineering (SE) research is to develop new analysis techniques and to integrate these techniques into software development practice. However, since access to developers is non-trivial and research tool adoption is slow, new analyses are typically evaluated as follows: a prototype tool that embeds the analysis is implemented, a set of projects is identified, their revisions are selected, and the tool is run in a controlled environment, rarely involving the developers of the software. As a result, research artifacts are brittle and it is unclear if an analysis tool would actually be adopted. In this paper, we envision harnessing the rich interfaces provided by popular social coding platforms for automated deployment and evaluation of SE research analysis. We propose that SE analyses can be deployed as analysis bots. We focus on two specific benefits of such an approach: (1) analysis bots can help evaluate analysis techniques in a less controlled, and more realistic context, and (2) analysis bots provide an interface for developers to "subscribe" to new research techniques without needing to trust the implementation, the developer of the new tool, or to install the analysis tool locally. We outline basic requirements for an analysis bots platform, and present research challenges that would need to be resolved for bots to flourish. The JADE Platform and Experiences with Mobile MAS Applications.- A-globe: Agent Development Platform with Inaccessibility and Mobility Support.- Supporting Agent Development in Erlang through the eXAT Platform.- Living Systems(R) Technology Suite.- Multi Agent System Development Kit.- An Integrated Development Environment for Electronic Institutions.- Jadex: A BDI-Agent System Combining Middleware and Reasoning.- Component Agent Framework for Non-Experts (CAFnE) Toolkit.- The WSDL2Agent Tool.- WS2JADE: A Tool for Run-time Deployment and Control of Web Services as JADE Agent Services.- A System for Analysis of Multi-Issue Negotiation.- FuzzyMAN: An Agent-based E-Marketplace with a Voice and Mobile User Interface.- Efficient Agent Communication in Wireless Environments.- AMETAS - the Asynchronous MEssage Transfer Agent System.- Tracy: An Extensible Plugin-Oriented Software Architecture for Mobile Agent Toolkits.- The Packet-World: A Test Bed for Investigating Situated Multi-Agent Systems.- Decommitment in a Competitive Multi-Agent Transportation Setting.- TeamWorker: An Agent-Based Support System for Mobile Task Execution. The tremendous growth in communication technology is shaping a hyper-connected network where billions or connected devices are producing a huge volume of data. Cellular and mobile network is a major contributor towards this technology shift and require new architectural paradigm to provide low latency, high performance in a resource constrained environment. 5G technology deployment with fully IP-based connectivity is anticipated by 2020. However, there is no standard established for 5G technology and many efforts are being made to establish a unified 5G stander. In this context, variant technology such as Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function virtualization (NFV) are the best candidate. SDN dissociate control plane from data plane and network management is done on the centralized control plane. In this paper, a survey on state of the art on the 5G integration with the SDN is presented. A comprehensive review is presented for the different integrated architectures of 5G wireless network and the generalized solutions over the period 2010–2016. This comparative analysis of the existing solutions of SDN-based cellular network (5G) implementations provides an easy and concise view of the emerging trends by 2020. Internet-of-Things and cyber-pyhsical systems are gaining ongoing importance in the field of industrial automation. At the same time, the production becomes more and more flexible. Therefore, the main parts, such as Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) need to be flexible as well. However, today's PLCs are monolithic and distributed as a single deployable piece of software. In this paper we propose an architecture that uses containers to modularize real-time control applications, messaging for communication and a hardware abstraction layer to improve maintainability, re-usability and flexibility. Using a prototypical implementation of the architecture, we validate the feasibility of this approach through a benchmark The correct and prompt definition of priorities at intersections is one of the key issues for vehicular safety and efficient traffic management. Traffic lights currently control only a limited number of intersections and increasing their number is clearly infeasible due to the high costs of deployment and maintenance. A new solution will be possible in a near future, when vehicles will be equipped with wireless technologies. Their capability of communicating and coordinating to each other will create the conditions for the implementation of a virtual traffic light (VTL) architecture, where priorities are autonomously defined by the involved vehicles. With this scenario in mind, we describe a novel VTL algorithm aiming at defining the priorities of the intersections in a distributed and controlled way. Besides the algorithm description, the main related issues are thoroughly discussed. In addition, a real implementation is detailed and the validation of the algorithm is provided. The testbed, based on the IEEEź802.11p short range wireless technology, has been reproduced in a controlled laboratory environment and in a field trial with equipped vehicles. As the spectral efficiency of a point-to-point link in cellular networks approaches its theoretical limits, with the forecasted explosion of data traffic, there is a need for an increase in the node density to further improve network capacity. However, in already dense deployments in today's networks, cell splitting gains can be severely limited by high inter-cell interference. Moreover, high capital expenditure cost associated with high power macro nodes further limits viability of such an approach. This article discusses the need for an alternative strategy, where low power nodes are overlaid within a macro network, creating what is referred to as a heterogeneous network. We survey current state of the art in heterogeneous deployments and focus on 3GPP LTE air interface to describe future trends. A high-level overview of the 3GPP LTE air interface, network nodes, and spectrum allocation options is provided, along with the enabling mechanisms for heterogeneous deployments. Interference management techniques that are critical for LTE heterogeneous deployments are discussed in greater detail. Cell range expansion, enabled through cell biasing and adaptive resource partitioning, is seen as an effective method to balance the load among the nodes in the network and improve overall trunking efficiency. An interference cancellation receiver plays a crucial role in ensuring acquisition of weak cells and reliability of control and data reception in the presence of legacy signals. Industrial systems always prefer to reduce their operational expenses. To support such reductions, they need solutions that are capable of providing stability, fault tolerance, and flexibility. One such solution for industrial systems is cyber physical system (CPS) integration with the Internet of Things (IoT) utilizing cloud computing services. These CPSs can be considered as smart industrial systems, with their most prevalent applications in smart transportation, smart grids, smart medical and eHealthcare systems, and many more. These industrial CPSs mostly utilize supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems to control and monitor their critical infrastructure (CI). For example, WebSCADA is an application used for smart medical technologies, making improved patient monitoring and more timely decisions possible. The focus of the study presented in this paper is to highlight the security challenges that the industrial SCADA systems face in an IoT-cloud environment. Classical SCADA systems are already lacking in proper security measures; however, with the integration of complex new architectures for the future Internet based on the concepts of IoT, cloud computing, mobile wireless sensor networks, and so on, there are large issues at stakes in the security and deployment of these classical systems. Therefore, the integration of these future Internet concepts needs more research effort. This paper, along with highlighting the security challenges of these CI’s, also provides the existing best practices and recommendations for improving and maintaining security. Finally, this paper briefly describes future research directions to secure these critical CPSs and help the research community in identifying the research gaps in this regard. With the explosive growth of mobile data demand, the fifth generation (5G) mobile network would exploit the enormous amount of spectrum in the millimeter wave (mmWave) bands to greatly increase communication capacity. There are fundamental differences between mmWave communications and existing other communication systems, in terms of high propagation loss, directivity, and sensitivity to blockage. These characteristics of mmWave communications pose several challenges to fully exploit the potential of mmWave communications, including integrated circuits and system design, interference management, spatial reuse, anti-blockage, and dynamics control. To address these challenges, we carry out a survey of existing solutions and standards, and propose design guidelines in architectures and protocols for mmWave communications. We also discuss the potential applications of mmWave communications in the 5G network, including the small cell access, the cellular access, and the wireless backhaul. Finally, we discuss relevant open research issues including the new physical layer technology, software-defined network architecture, measurements of network state information, efficient control mechanisms, and heterogeneous networking, which should be further investigated to facilitate the deployment of mmWave communication systems in the future 5G networks. Software defined networking (SDN) and OpenFlow as the outcome of recent research and development efforts provided unprecedented access into the forwarding plane of networking elements. This is achieved by decoupling the network control out of the forwarding devices. This separation paves the way for a more flexible and innovative networking. While SDN concept and OpenFlow find their ways into commercial deployments, performance evaluation of the SDN concept and its scalability, delay bounds, buffer sizing and similar performance metrics are not investigated in recent researches. In spite of usage of benchmark tools (like OFlops and Cbench), simulation studies and very few analytical models, there is a lack of analytical models to express the boundary condition of SDN deployment. In this work we present a model based on network calculus theory to describe the functionality of an SDN switch and controller. To the best of our knowledge, this is for the first time that network calculus framework is utilized to model the behavior of an SDN switch in terms of delay and queue length boundaries and the analysis of the buffer length of SDN controller and SDN switch. The presented model can be used for network designers and architects to get a quick view of the overall SDN network deployment performance and buffer sizing of SDN switches and controllers. Network architectures such as Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) move the control logic off packet processing devices and onto external controllers. These network architectures with decoupled control planes open many unanswered questions regarding reliability, scalability, and performance when compared to more traditional purely distributed systems. This paper opens the investigation by focusing on two specific questions: given a topology, how many controllers are needed, and where should they go? To answer these questions, we examine fundamental limits to control plane propagation latency on an upcoming Internet2 production deployment, then expand our scope to over 100 publicly available WAN topologies. As expected, the answers depend on the topology. More surprisingly, one controller location is often sufficient to meet existing reaction-time requirements (though certainly not fault tolerance requirements). Cyber-physical systems and the Internet-of-Things are getting more and more traction in different application areas. Boosted by initiatives such as Industrie 4.0 in Germany or the Industrial Internet Consortium in the US, they are enablers for innovation in industrial automation. To provide the advanced flexibility in production envisioned for future automation systems, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), as one of their main building blocks, also need to become more flexible. However, the conservative nature of this domain prohibits changes in the controller architecture impacting the installed base. Currently there exist various approaches that evolve control architectures to the next level, but none of them address flexible function deployment at the same time with legacy support. In this paper, we present a an architecture for a multi-purpose controller that is inspired by the virtualization trend in cloud systems which moves from heavyweight virtual machines to lightweight containers solutions such as LXC or Docker. Our solution includes the support for multiple PLC execution engines and adds support for the emulation of legacy engines as well. We evaluate this architecture by executing performance measurements that analyze the impact of container technologies to the real-time aspects of PLC engines. Abstract Cyber-physical systems and the Internet-of-Things are getting more and more traction in different application areas. Boosted by initiatives such as Industrie 4.0 in Germany or the Industrial Internet Consortium in the US, they are enablers for innovation in industrial automation. To provide the advanced flexibility in production envisioned for future automation systems, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), as one of their main building blocks, also need to become more flexible. However, the conservative nature of this domain prohibits changes in the controller architecture impacting the installed base. Currently there exist various approaches that evolve control architectures to the next level, but none of them address flexible function deployment at the same time with legacy support. In this paper, we present an architecture for a multi-purpose controller that is inspired by the virtualization trend in cloud systems which moves from heavyweight virtual machines to lightweight containers solutions such as LXC or Docker. Our solution includes the support for multiple PLC execution engines and adds support for the emulation of legacy engines as well. We evaluate this architecture by executing performance measurements that analyze the impact of container technologies to the real-time aspects of PLC engines. Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized mobile cloud computing toward mobile edge computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also discuss a set of issues, challenges, and future research directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios. In the past, networks have been mainly optimized for good system throughput but recently achieving low delay has also gained notable traction. Active Queue Management (AQM) has long been recognized necessary for operating Internet routers with shorter standing queues but only limited deployment has occurred. The recent interest in AQM has resulted in new AQM proposals. In this paper we evaluate CoDel (Controlled Delay) and PIE (Proportional Integral controller Enhanced), both being new AQM proposals, and compare the performance against an aggressive RED (Random Early Detection) variant called HRED (Harsh RED). We focus on AQM behavior during load transients typically occurring at the network edge with the common traffic types of today such as Web transactions. We discover that CoDel auto-tuning does not scale well with the load. With the high-end delays experienced, HRED is better than PIE and CoDel when more than a few simultaneous flows share the bottleneck. Large-scale, self-organizing wireless sensor and mesh network deployments are being driven by recent technological developments such as The Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Grids and Smart Environment applications. Efficient use of the limited energy resources of wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes is critically important to support these advances, and application of topology control methods will have a profound impact on energy efficiency and hence battery lifetime. In this survey, we focus on the energy efficiency issue and present a comprehensive study of topology control techniques for extending the lifetime of battery powered WSNs. First, we review the significant topology control algorithms to provide insights into how energy efficiency is achieved by design. Further, these algorithms are classified according to the energy conservation approach they adopt, and evaluated by the trade-offs they offer to aid designers in selecting a technique that best suits their applications. Since the concept of "network lifetime" is widely used for assessing the algorithms' performance, we highlight various definitions of the term and discuss their merits and drawbacks. Recently, there has been growing interest in algorithms for non-planar topologies such as deployments in underwater environments or multi-level buildings. For this reason, we also include a detailed discussion of topology control algorithms that work efficiently in three dimensions. Based on the outcomes of our review, we identify a number of open research issues for achieving energy efficiency through topology control. Wireless 802.11 hotspots have grown in an uncoordinated fashion with highly variable deployment densities. Such uncoordinated deployments, coupled with the difficulty of implementing coordination protocols, has often led to conflicting configurations (e.g., in choice of transmission power and channel of operation) among the corresponding Access Points (APs). Overall, such conflicts cause both unpredictable network performance and unfairness among clients of neighboring hotspots. In this paper, we focus on the fairness problem for uncoordinated deployments. We study this problem from the channel assignment perspective. Our solution is based on the notion of channel-hopping, and meets all the important design considerations for control methods in uncoordinated deployments - distributed in nature, minimal to zero coordination among APs belonging to different hotspots, simple to implement, and interoperable with existing standards. In particular, we propose a specific algorithm called MAXchop, which works efficiently when using only non-overlapping wireless channels, but is particularly effective in exploiting partially-overlapped channels that have been proposed in recent literature. We also evaluate how our channel assignment approach complements previously proposed carrier sensing techniques in providing further performance improvements. Through extensive simulations on real hotspot topologies and evaluation of a full implementation of this technique, we demonstrate the efficacy of these techniques for not only fairness, but also the aggregate throughput, metrics.We believe that this is the first work that brings into focus the fairness properties of channel hopping techniques and we hope that the insights from this research will be applied to other domains where a fair division of a system's resources is an important consideration. The paper validates the feasibility of automating the setting of common pilot power in a WCDMA radio network. The pilot automation improves operability of the network and it is implemented with a control software aiming for load and coverage balancing. The control applies measurements of base station total transmission power of neighboring cells and terminal reports of received pilot signal level to determine the pilot qualification. The pilot power of a cell is periodically updated with simple heuristic rules in order to improve the load and coverage balance. The approach was validated using a dynamic WCDMA system simulator with a deployment of macro and micro cells on a city region whose measured propagation characteristics were incorporated into the model. The results showed that the proposed control method balanced load and coverage and improved the air interface performance measured as a function of packet throughput. We developed UAVNet, a framework for the autonomous deployment of a flying Wireless Mesh Network using small quadrocopter-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The flying wireless mesh nodes are automatically interconnected to each other and building an IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh network. The implemented UAVNet prototype is able to autonomously interconnect two end systems by setting up an airborne relay, consisting of one or several flying wireless mesh nodes. The developed software includes basic functionality to control the UAVs and to setup, deploy, manage, and monitor a wireless mesh network. Our evaluations have shown that UAVNet can significantly improve network performance.