Improving the efficiency and reliability of wearable based mobile eHealth applications

In this paper we address the support of wearable mHealth applications in LTE and future 5G networks following a holistic approach that spans across the elements of a mobile network. The communication requirements change from one application to another so we propose a measurement methodology to facilitate the selection of the user equipment to fulfil these requirements. We also discuss a new network architecture to support traffic prioritization, RAN programmability, low latency and group communications to over-the-top applications. Our proposal is validated using several realistic experimentation platforms and the results show that mHealth systems can benefit from our approach.     

Linux下WMV高性能IPTV流媒体服务器的设计与开发

流媒体点播技术定位于提供实时的文件点播服务,而WMV则是一种IPTV常用的文件格式。为了解决Linux或类Unix环境下对WMV文件格式的支持,设计了一个具有完全自主知识产权的支持WMV格式的Linux环境下的流媒体点播系统。该流媒体服务器采用创新的主从式架构设计,并设计了RTSP连接队列调度等算法,用来完善服务器的功能和提高服务器的性能。     

SPINE: a domain‐specific framework for rapid prototyping of WBSN applications

Wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) enable a broad range of applications for continuous and real‐time health monitoring and medical assistance. Programming WBSN applications is a complex task especially due to the limitation of resources of typical hardware platforms and to the lack of suitable software abstractions. In this paper, SPINE (signal processing in‐node environment), a domain‐specific framework for rapid prototyping of WBSN applications, which is lightweight and flexible enough to be easily customized to fit particular application‐specific needs, is presented. The architecture of SPINE has two main components: one implemented on the node coordinating the WBSN and one on the nodes with sensors. The former is based on a Java application, which allows to configure and manage the network and implements the classification functions that are too heavy to be implemented on the sensor nodes. The latter supports sensing, computing and data transmission operations through a set of libraries, protocols and utility functions that are currently implemented for TinyOS platforms. SPINE allows evaluating different architectural choices and deciding how to distribute signal processing and classification functions over the nodes of the network. Finally, this paper describes an activity monitoring application and presents the benefits of using the SPINE framework. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A semantic enriched data model for sensor network interoperability

One of the main open issues in the development of applications for sensor network management is the definition of interoperability mechanisms among the several monitoring systems and heterogeneous data. Interesting researches related to integration techniques have taken place, they are primary based on the adoption of sharing data mechanisms. In the last years, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach has become predominant in many sensor network projects as it enables the cooperation and interoperability of different sensor platforms at an higher level of abstraction. In this paper we propose a novel architecture for the interoperability of sensor networks, which is based on web services technologies and on a common data model enriched with semantic concepts and annotations. The proposed architecture allows the development of complex decision support system applications by integration of heterogeneous data, accessible through services, according to standard data format and standard protocols.     

Network-based multicomputers: a practical supercomputerarchitecture

Multicomputers built around a general network are an attractive architecture for a wide class of applications. The architecture provides many benefits compared with special-purpose approaches, including heterogeneity, reuse of application and system code, and sharing of resources. The architecture also poses new challenges to both computer system implementers and users. First, traditional local-area networks do not have enough bandwidth and create a communication bottleneck, thus seriously limiting the set of applications that can be run effectively. Second, programmers have to deal with large bodies of code distributed over a variety of architectures, and work in an environment where both the network and nodes are shared with other users. Our experience in the Nectar project shows that it is possible to overcome these problems. We show how networks based on high-speed crossbar switches and efficient protocol implementations can support high bandwidth and low latency communication while still enjoying the flexibility of general networks, and we use three applications to demonstrate that network-based multicomputers are a practical architecture. We also show how the network traffic generated by this new class of applications poses severe requirements for networks     

An approach based on the domain perspective to develop WSAN applications

As wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) can be used in many different domains, WSAN applications have to be built from two viewpoints: domain and network. These different viewpoints create a gap between the abstractions handled by the application developers, namely the domain and network experts. Furthermore, there is a coupling between the application logic and the underlying sensor platform, which results in platform-dependent projects and source codes difficult to maintain, modify, and reuse. Consequently, the process of developing an application becomes cumbersome. In this paper, we propose a model-driven architecture (MDA) approach for WSAN application development. Our approach aims to facilitate the task of the developers by: (1) enabling application design through high abstraction level models; (2) providing a specific methodology for developing WSAN applications; and (3) offering an MDA infrastructure composed of PIM, PSM, and transformation programs to support this process. Our approach allows the direct contribution of domain experts in the development of WSAN applications, without requiring specific knowledge of programming WSAN platforms. In addition, it allows network experts to focus on the specific characteristics of their area of expertise without the need of knowing each specific application domain.     

A framework for adaptive collective communications for heterogeneous hierarchical computing systems

Collective communication operations are widely used in MPI applications and play an important role in their performance. However, the network heterogeneity inherent to grid environments represent a great challenge to develop efficient high performance computing applications. In this work we propose a generic framework based on communication models and adaptive techniques for dealing with collective communication patterns on grid platforms. Toward this goal, we address the hierarchical organization of the grid, selecting the most efficient communication algorithms at each network level. Our framework is also adaptive to grid load dynamics since it considers transient network characteristics for dividing the nodes into clusters. Our experiments with the broadcast operation on a real-grid setup indicate that an adaptive framework allows significant performance improvements on MPI collective communications.     

Reliable Differentiated Services Optimization for Network Coding Cooperative Communication System

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a new network architecture with flexibility and scalability, researchers introduced the core idea of SDN into wireless network, and a cooperative communication system based on network coding is proposed. In this paper, we carry on an investigation in differentiated service strategy of network coding cooperative communication system. The meaning of differentiated services is for the different applications take different power for data transmission and the transmission power is associated with their reliability needs. In other words, transmission power control is performed in the presence of known reliability, we named the scheme Reliability-Bounded Transmission Power Control (RTPC) scheme. The RTPC scheme changes the way in which all the applications in the past have been able to maintain the power to be transmitted, but the reliability requirements of different applications will be transmitted with different transmission power. In addition, because of the nodes that far away from the sink node still exist a lot of energy when the network died, so consider to improve the transmission power of non-hotpots nodes in order to increase the reliability of data transmission. The experimental results show that the RTPC scheme can greatly improve the transmission reliability without affecting the network lifetime.     

Effectively utilizing global cluster memory for large data-intensive parallel programs

Large scientific parallel applications demand large amounts of memory space. Current parallel computing platforms schedule jobs without fully knowing their memory requirements. This leads to uneven memory allocation in which some nodes are overloaded. This, in turn, leads to disk paging, which is extremely expensive in the context of scientific parallel computing. To solve this problem, we propose a new peer-to-peer solution called parallel network RAM. This approach avoids the use of disk, better utilizes available RAM resources, and will allow larger problems to be solved while reducing the computational, communication, and synchronization overhead typically involved in parallel applications. We proposed several different parallel network RAM designs and evaluated the performance of each under different conditions. We discovered that different designs are appropriate in different situations.     

Intra domain route optimization for ubiquitous network

The main advantage of a wireless network is user mobility, which calls for efficient routing support at the network layer. An architecture combines hierarchical mobile IPv6 and network mobility for a network mobile and mobile nodes move in tandem and make a hierarchy in the wireless network to management of micro-mobility and seamless handoff. But the capability of the architecture for intra domain route optimization is impaired. So we propose functionality in domain nodes to enable intra domain path optimization for ubiquitous network. It is shown that intra domain cost effect is beneficial in every hierarchical domain that spans mesh network topology. We address the key function for our proposed scheme and analyze the usefulness of our proposed method using mathematically. We show that our proposed scheme performs much better than Network Mobility protocol, especially when the number of mobile nodes or mobile routers or correspondent nodes increases in hierarchically nested in ubiquitous networks.     

Link layer for cooperating processes on a LAN with enhanced communication services

Most local area networks support multicast and broadcast communication facilities among the network nodes. However, their use among processes has been limited by the lack of support in the distributed operating system kernel and by the limited requirements of traditional computer network applications. Some applications (e.g. operating in a multicast environment) and distributed algorithms require advanced associations among processes, whose support by the operating system kernel can take advantage of properly designed functions provided by the communication subsystem. This problem is examined in the context of an architecture for LANs, and enhanced protocols are described that can be provided by a communication subsystem based on a LAN. Virtual network protocols provide classes of service suited to a multicast environment. Their availability at communication subsystem layers offers higher layers a common framework for the implementation of a computing system with distributed control.     

Ranking enterprise application integration platforms from a performance perspective: An experience report

Enterprises turn to their software applications to support their business processes. Over time, it is common for a company to end up with a wide range of applications, which are usually developed in-house by its information technology department or purchased from third-party specialized software companies. The result is a heterogeneous software ecosystem with applications developed in different technologies and frequently using different data models, which brings challenges when two or more applications have to collaborate to support a business process. Integration platforms are specialized software tools that help design, implement, run, and monitor integration solutions that orchestrate a set of applications. The run-time system is the component of integration platforms responsible for running integration solutions, which makes its performance a critically important issue. In this paper, we report our experience in evaluating and comparing four well-known open-source integration platforms in the context of a research project where performance was a central requirement to choose an integration platform. The evaluation was conducted using a decision-making methodology to build a ranking of candidate platforms by means of subjective and objective criteria. The subjective evaluation takes into account expert preferences and compares integration platforms using the analytic hierarchy process, which has been used in many applications related with decision-making. The objective evaluation is build on top of properties distributed on three dimensions, namely, message processing, hotspot detection, and fairness execution, which compose the research methodology we used. The evaluated platforms were ranked to identify the one with the best performance.     

Designing a collector overlay architecture for fault diagnosis in video networks

To prevent subscriber churn, network service providers of VoD, SDV and IPTV have a pressing need to pro-actively detect, isolate and fix outages within an access network. Network induced degradations prove to be detrimental for streaming applications. This typically leads to a poor quality of experience (QoE) for subscribers. By monitoring key functional points of the access network for traces of degradation, service providers can devise mechanisms to mitigate the problem.In this work we propose a hierarchy of exporters, collectors and ANCON (ANalysis and CONtrol) nodes that can semi-autonomously monitor, detect and isolate impairments within an access network. Exporters on the data plane gather and disseminate statistics for individual subnets, which are streamed onto “collector” nodes on an orthogonal plane. Collector nodes aggregate traffic from various exporters, and stream them onto the root of the tree (ANCON). With an even placement of exporters, root cause analysis can now take the granularity of loss rates or delay rates in individual segments or subnets of an access network. As an extension to our architecture, we show that the overlay can support instrumentations of quality evaluation for streaming video. As an example, we use a simple MOS plugin that is in part an extension of the ITU-T Erlang model to predict the quality of a video stream much before it reaches the end user. We show that our overlay can support a wide variety of quality evaluation metrics. Through extensive simulations and an implementation, we discuss issues of engineering such an overlay, isolating impairments in access networks, instrumenting MOS plugins and predicting video quality of multimedia streams in transit.     

Reconfigurable Service Composition and Categorization for Power-Aware Mobile Computing

The requirement of agile adaptation to varying resource constraints in mobile systems motivates the use of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which can support the composition of two or more services to form a complex service. In this paper, we propose SOA-based middleware to support QoS control of mobile applications and to configure an energy-efficient service composition graph. We categorize services into two layers:functionality-centric services, which are connected to create a complex service to meet the user's intentions, and resource-centric services, which undertake distributed functionality-centric services in a way that increases the success rate of service composition while reducing contention at specific service nodes. We also present a service routing algorithm to balance the resource consumption of service providers on a service-overlay network. Through simulation of power-aware service composition using a realistic model based on ns-2 and traced data, we demonstrate that our approach can help both the mobile devices and the servers in a service-overlay network to reduce energy consumption without an increase in response time.     

一种用于VoIP的负载平衡对等网络架构

针对VoIP应用,提出了一种负载平衡的对等网络架构。该架构基于Chord对等网络,采用动态更改节点标识的方法平衡各个节点上的注册用户负载。根据两个阈值,监测节点的注册用户负载量,根据负载量使用两种方法实现节点间负载的平衡,以减少节点间负载的转移对网络带宽的额外占用。仿真实验结果表明,单个节点的最大注册用户负载量和节点负载量均方差均小于Chord对等网络。基于该架构实现的对等网络,单个节点资源占用少,适于在资源受限的嵌入式VoIP终端上实现。     

An open framework for translating portable applications into operating system‐specific wireless sensor networks applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are distributed systems integrated by tiny devices, called sensor nodes, with capabilities to monitor the environment and forward their measurements to a special node, the sink, where the results can be collected and further processed. The trend in WSN is moving towards heterogeneous networks that will contain different sensor nodes running different instances of custom operating systems. Given the growing demand of new hardware platforms and operating systems specifically designed for sensor nodes, the applications programming for sensor nodes is becoming a challenging process that needs to be alleviated. Currently, application programming for sensor nodes is a complex, ad hoc, and error‐prone process where the portability among different platforms has been sacrificed. In this paper, we propose an open framework aimed to achieve application portability in heterogeneous sensor networks. Our approach provides the programming abstractions needed to support the application development process for sensor nodes. We have implemented an open framework that provides a set of tools on top of the most popular WSN operating systems to translate portable applications to the native operating system in an automatic, simple, and transparent way for developers. We have also evaluated the applications thus generated in terms of productivity and overhead, by comparing their footprint to those originally developed in each specific operating system. The results show that the overhead is minimal—4% in the worst case—and in some cases, it was even possible to reduce the footprint by using code optimizations. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Beyond the separation of identifier and locator: Building an identity-based overlay network architecture for the Future Internet

The Internet is continuously evolving from a static, host-based, uniquely attached node model to a mobile, host-free node model with the possibility of multiple attachment points to the network. However, the current Internet was not designed to support this type of workload because of its strict addressing mechanism. Thus, the Future Internet promotes the introduction of new architectures that provide the decoupling of identification and location. Moreover, new technologies, like cloud computing and Internet of Things, raise the necessity for a finer granularity of network nodes. Furthermore, the huge number of devices connected to the Internet and their finer granularity impose the necessity of flexible naming and, thus, integrated discovery mechanisms. In this paper we present an architecture that decouples the identification and location by using identities to identify the network nodes and moving from a host-to-host to a fine-grained process-to-process view of the network. Together with the mobility and multi-homing support, it also provides integrated discovery, flexible naming, and integrated security features. Finally, we analyze the architecture to discuss its performance and compare it with other (existing) approaches.     

SARA: A service architecture for resource aware ubiquitous environments

Realizing the potential of pervasive computing will be predicated upon the availability of a flexible, mobility-aware infrastructure and technologies to support seamless service management, provisioning and delivery. Despite advances in routing and media access control technologies, little progress has been made towards large-scale deployment of services and applications in pervasive and ubiquitous environments. The lack of a fixed infrastructure, coupled with the time-varying characteristics of the underlying network topology, makes service delivery challenging. This paper addresses these challenges and presents SARA, a unified, overlay-based service architecture to support large-scale service and application deployment in pervasive and ubiquitous environments. We discuss the main functionalities of SARA and present the algorithms for object registration and discovery. SARA also considers the mobility of the nodes in the network and provides a mechanism by which this can be incorporated into the framework. Finally, the proposed architecture was evaluated using simulations and the results show that the architecture performs well under different network conditions.     

A platform for P2P agent-based collaborative applications

The operational environment can be a valuable source of information about the behavior of software applications and their usage context. Although a single instance of an application has limited evidence of the range of the possible behaviors and situations that might be experienced in the field, the collective knowledge composed by the evidence gathered by the many instances of a same application running in several diverse user environments (eg, a browser) might be an invaluable source of information. This information can be exploited by applications able to autonomously analyze how they behave in the field and adjust their behavior accordingly. Augmenting applications with the capability to collaborate and directly share information about their behavior is challenging because it requires the definition of a fully decentralized and dependable networked infrastructure whose nodes are the user machines. The nodes of the infrastructure must be collaborative, to share information, and autonomous, to exploit the available information to change their behavior, for instance, to better accommodate the needs of the users to prevent known problems. This paper describes the initial results that we obtained with the design and the development of an infrastructure that can enable the execution of collaborative scenarios in a fully decentralized way. Our idea is to combine the agent-based paradigm, which is well suited to design collaborative and autonomous nodes, and the peer-to-peer paradigm, which is well suited to design distributed and dynamic network infrastructures. To demonstrate our idea, we augmented the popular JADE agent-based platform with a software layer that supports both the creation of a fully decentralized peer-to-peer network of JADE platforms and the execution of services within that network, thus enabling JADE multiagent systems (MASs) to behave as peer-to-peer networks. The resulting platform can be used to study the design of collaborative applications running in the field.