TMS-RFID: Temporal management of large-scale RFID applications

In coming years, there will be billions of RFID tags living in the world tagging almost everything for tracking and identification purposes. This phenomenon will impose a new challenge not only to the network capacity but also to the scalability of event processing of RFID applications. Since most RFID applications are time sensitive, we propose a notion of Time To Live (TTL), representing the period of time that an RFID event can legally live in an RFID data management system, to manage various temporal event patterns. TTL is critical in the “Internet of Things” for handling a tremendous amount of partial event-tracking results. Also, TTL can be used to provide prompt responses to time-critical events so that the RFID data streams can be handled timely. We divide TTL into four categories according to the general event-handling patterns. Moreover, to extract event sequence from an unordered event stream correctly and handle TTL constrained event sequence effectively, we design a new data structure, namely Double Level Sequence Instance List (DLSIList), to record intermediate stages of event sequences. On the basis of this, an RFID data management system, namely Temporal Management System over RFID data streams (TMS-RFID), has been developed. This system can be constructed as a stand-alone middleware component to manage temporal event patterns. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TMS-RFID on extracting complex temporal event patterns through a detailed performance study using a range of high-speed data streams and various queries. The results show that TMS-RFID has a very high throughput, namely 170,000–870,000 events per second for different highly complex continuous queries. Moreover, the experiments also show that the main structure to record the intermediate stages in TMS-RFID does not increase exponentially with the number of events. These results demonstrate that TMS-RFID not only supports high processing speeds, but is also highly scalable.     

A survey and taxonomy on energy efficient resource allocation techniques for cloud computing systems

In a cloud computing paradigm, energy efficient allocation of different virtualized ICT resources (servers, storage disks, and networks, and the like) is a complex problem due to the presence of heterogeneous application (e.g., content delivery networks, MapReduce, web applications, and the like) workloads having contentious allocation requirements in terms of ICT resource capacities (e.g., network bandwidth, processing speed, response time, etc.). Several recent papers have tried to address the issue of improving energy efficiency in allocating cloud resources to applications with varying degree of success. However, to the best of our knowledge there is no published literature on this subject that clearly articulates the research problem and provides research taxonomy for succinct classification of existing techniques. Hence, the main aim of this paper is to identify open challenges associated with energy efficient resource allocation. In this regard, the study, first, outlines the problem and existing hardware and software-based techniques available for this purpose. Furthermore, available techniques already presented in the literature are summarized based on the energy-efficient research dimension taxonomy. The advantages and disadvantages of the existing techniques are comprehensively analyzed against the proposed research dimension taxonomy namely: resource adaption policy, objective function, allocation method, allocation operation, and interoperability.     

Evaluating IPv6 on Windows and Solaris

IPv6 might solve several of IPv4's shortcomings, but the longer headers and address space add overhead that affects a range of performance metrics for both TCP and UDP. We established a test bed to compare the two protocol stacks along a set of six performance metrics. We also compared two IPv6 implementations running on Windows 2000 and Solaris 8 using identical hardware and settings. We performed additional tests using different configurations, including a pair of commercial routers that support dual IPv4-IPv6 stacks. While the majority of those results are beyond this article's scope, some of our experiences with the routers raised points that we address here.     

Ubiquitous RFID: Where are we?

After over a half century of development, radio-frequency identification (RFID) is beginning to move into mainstream applications for automatic identification. RFID is widely seen today as one of the key enabling technologies of the “Internet of Things”. However, many challenges still need to be addressed before we can fully benefit from this nascent and ubiquitous technology. In this paper, we present the state of the art of RFID technology and discuss the challenges and open issues in developing next generation RFID applications.     

Improving End System Performance for Multimedia Applications over High Bandwidth Networks

Digital video services, scientific visualization and other multimedia applications require delivery of high network throughput to end user applications. In this paper we identify bottlenecks in the data path between high-speed networks and applications. Using performance of multimedia applications as a metric, the effectiveness of solutions to reduce network, operating system, and user bottlenecks is explored experimentally.     

A tutorial survey on vehicle-to-vehicle communications

Telecommunication Systems - The automotive industry is undergoing major transformation, with the emergence of vehicular networks, intelligent transportation systems, and autonomous cars over the...     

On Linux starvation of CPU-bound processes in the presence of network I/O

Process starvation is a critical and challenging design problem in operating systems. A slight starvation of processes can lead to undesirable response times. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate that Linux can starve CPU-bound processes in the presence of network I/O-bound processes. Surprisingly, the starvation of CPU-bound processes can be encountered at only a particular range of traffic rates being received by network processes. Lower or higher traffic rates do not exhibit starvation. We have analyzed it under different network applications, system settings and network configurations. We show that such starvation may exist for the two Linux scheduler, namely the 2.6 O(1) scheduler and the more recent 2.6 Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS). We instrumented and profiled the Linux kernel to investigate the underlying root causes of such starvation. In addition, we suggest possible mitigation solutions for both schedulers.     

Design,implementation, and evaluation of a Programmable Bandwidth Aggregation System for home networks

Bandwidth aggregation is a promising technology that can speed up access to the Internet by bandwidth sharing and multi-path communication. Current Bandwidth Aggregation Systems (BASs) deployed in public networks provide limited performance and flexibility when they are directly used in home networking environments. To reap the full performance benefits of BASs in home networks, they need to be easily and dynamically programmable by home network users. We present the design and implementation of a Programmable Bandwidth Aggregation System (PBAS) that can provide home network users improved performance when sharing bandwidth for activities that access the Internet. We also present an empirical performance evaluation of the system and we demonstrate the superior efficiency of our proposed PBAS over a traditional BAS in terms of computational overheads, loadable code, throughput performance, and programmability.