Model-driven interoperability: engineering heterogeneous IoT systems

Interoperability remains a significant burden to the developers of Internet of Things systems. This is because resources and APIs are dynamically composed; they are highly heterogeneous in terms of their underlying communication technologies, protocols and data formats, and interoperability tools remain limited to enforcing standards-based approaches. In this paper, we propose model-based engineering methods to reduce the development effort towards ensuring that complex software systems interoperate with one another. Lightweight interoperability models can be specified in order to monitor and test the execution of running software so that interoperability problems can be quickly identified, and solutions put in place. A graphical model editor and testing tool are also presented to highlight how a visual model improves upon textual specifications. We show using case-studies from the FIWARE Future Internet Service domain that the software framework can support non-expert developers to address interoperability challenges.     

A 12-bit 80-MSample/s pipelined ADC with bootstrapped digital calibration

This paper presents a prototype analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that uses a calibration algorithm to adaptively overcome constant closed-loop gain errors, closed-loop gain variation, and slew-rate limiting. The prototype consists of an input sample-and-hold amplifier (SHA) that can serve as a calibration queue, a 12-bit 80-MSample/s pipelined ADC, a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) for calibration, and an embedded custom microprocessor, which carries out the calibration algorithm. The calibration is bootstrapped in the sense that the DAC is used to calibrate the ADC, and the ADC is used to calibrate the DAC. With foreground calibration, test results show that the peak differential nonlinearity (DNL) is -0.09 least significant bits (LSB), and the peak integral nonlinearity (INL) is -0.24LSB. Also, the maximum signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) and spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) are 71.0 and 79.6dB with a 40-MHz sinusoidal input, respectively. The prototype occupies 22.6 mm/sup 2/ in a 0.25-/spl mu/m CMOS technology and dissipates 755 mW from a 2.5-V supply.     

Enhancement of adhesion strength of Cu layer with low dielectric constant SiC:H liners in Cu interconnects

One of the primary candidates for the liner/etch stop layer in damascene process is silicon nitride (Si₃N₄). However, silicon nitride has a high dielectric constant of 7.0. To reduce the effective dielectric constant in Copper (Cu) damascene structure, dielectric SiC:H (prepared by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) using trimethylsilane source) as the Cu diffusion barrier was studied. The dielectric constant of SiC:H used is 4.2. A systematic study was made on the properties of liner material and electro-chemically plated (ECP) Cu to enhance the adhesion strength in Cu/low-dielectric constant (k) multilevel interconnects. Though the effects of as Si₃N₄ the liner have been much studied in the past, less is known about the relation between adhesion strength of ECP Cu layer and physical vapor deposited (PVD) Cu seeds, with seed thickness below 1000 Å. The annealing of Cu seed layer was carried out at 200 °C in N₂ ambient for 30 min was carried out to study the impact on adhesion strength and the microstructure evolution on the adhesion between ECP Cu and its barrier layer. In the study, our claim that SiC:H barrier/etch stop layer is essential for replacing conventional Si₃N₄ layer in enhancing adhesion strength and interfacial bonding between Cu/dielectric interconnects.     

The yield stress of fibre suspensions

Yield stresses were determined for commercial wood pulp suspensions and synthetic fibre suspensions of low and medium mass concentration. The yield stresses measured represent interfibre failure of the network rather than failure between the suspension and a solid surface. The measurements were carried out in a rotary viscometer at low yield stresses and in a concentric rotary shear tester at yield stresses in excess of 2500 Pa. The experimental results were correlated with the volumetric concentration C_v in equations of the form τ_y = aC^b_v where a and b are constant for a given fibre type. It was found that b ? 3, in agreement with the predictions of a theoretical model of fibre network strength based upon the interlocking of elastically bent fibres. The dependence of the yield stress on the fibre properties of aspect ratio and modulus of elasticity was not adequately predicted by the model, suggesting that fibre bending alone did not account for the network strength over the concentration range studied.     

Some compositional changes in malted sorghum (Sorghum vulgare) grain and its value in broiler chicken diet

Grains of two sorghum (Sorghum vulgare L) varieties were germinated at room temperature for 2, 4 and 6 days. Germination resulted in an increase in protein content due to dry matter loss; this rose with increasing time of germination. The absolute amount of tannin was unchanged until the fourth day of germination but decreased markedly by the sixth day. Fractionation of the grain protein of one variety showed that there was a large increase in the albumin-globulin fraction (rich in lysine) and a decrease in the kafirin and cross-linked kafirin fraction (low in lysine) as a result of germination. Although these changes resulted in a more than 30% increase in lysine content on the fourth and sixth days of germination, a substantial loss in dry matter occurred when germination was continued up to 6 days. When 14-day-old Hubbard chicks were fed a diet containing about 59% malted sorghum supplemented with lysine, they showed better (P < 0.05) weight gain and efficiency of feed conversion than those on malted sorghum without lysine supplementation. However, malting reduced the amount of lysine needed to supplement the diet from 0.25% for unmalted sorghum to 0.18% for malted sorghum.     

A Transmit and Receive Multi-Antenna Channel Model and Simulator for Communications from High Altitude Platforms

The interest of the scientific and industrial communities on the application of high altitude stratospheric platforms to communications is increasingly growing. Several research projects and field trials are being carried out by international consortia and specific portions of the electromagnetic spectrum have been allocated by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) for communications applications. The channel experienced by such systems plays a key role for the provision of reliable communications services but, unfortunately, its inherent characteristics are substantially different from those of other channel typologies. Therefore, in order to design and simulate effective propagation impairment mitigation techniques such as adaptive modulation and coding or adaptive beamforming and equalization algorithms, an ad hoc channel model and simulator is definitively required. In this paper a novel channel model and a related channel simulator especially tailored for HAP-based communication systems are presented. The model is conceived for link-level simulations of point-to-point communication links, wherein both the transmitter and the receiver may be equipped with an array of antennas. Peculiar physical effects of the stratospheric channel are taken into account as well as impairments due to the possible presence of scatterers and relative movement of both transmitting and receiving stations. The structure of the channel simulator has been conceived to maintain the computational burden at required by the channel simulator is kept low by an efficient tapped delay line implementation. This work is supported by the CAPANINA project (FP6 IST-2003-506745): Communications from aerial platform networks delivering broadband communications for all, http://www.capanina.org.

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On designing incentive-compatible routing and forwarding protocols in wireless ad-hoc networks

In many applications, wireless ad-hoc networks are formed by devices belonging to independent users. Therefore, a challenging problem is how to provide incentives to stimulate cooperation. In this paper, we study ad-hoc games—the routing and packet forwarding games in wireless ad-hoc networks. Unlike previous work which focuses either on routing or on forwarding, this paper investigates both routing and forwarding. We first uncover an impossibility result—there does not exist a protocol such that following the protocol to always forward others' traffic is a dominant action. Then we define a novel solution concept called cooperation-optimal protocols. We present Corsac, a cooperation-optimal protocol which consists of a routing protocol and a forwarding protocol. The routing protocol of Corsac integrates VCG with a novel cryptographic technique to address the challenge in wireless ad-hoc networks that a link’s cost (i.e., its type) is determined by two nodes together. Corsac also applies efficient cryptographic techniques to design a forwarding protocol to enforce the routing decision, such that fulfilling the routing decision is the optimal action of each node in the sense that it brings the maximum utility to the node. We evaluate our protocols using simulations. Our evaluations demonstrate that our protocols provide incentives for nodes to forward packets. Additionally, we discuss the challenging issues in designing incentive-compatible protocols in ad hoc networks. Part of this paper appeared in a conference version [49]. Sheng Zhong was supported in part by NSF grants ANI-0207399 and CNS-0524030. Yang Richard Yang was supported in part by NSF grants ANI-0207399, ANI-0238038, and CNS-0435201. This work was partly done while Sheng Zhong was at Yale University; Yanbin Liu was at University of Texas at Austin. Sheng Zhong is an assistant professor in the State University of New York at Buffalo. He received his PhD (2004) from Yale University and his ME (1999), BS (1996) from Nanjing University, China, all in computer science. His research interests include economic incentives and privacy protection, particularly incentive and privacy problems in mobile computing and data mining. Li Erran Li received his B.E. in Automatic Control from Beijing Polytechnic University in 1993, his M.E. in Pattern Recognition from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 1996, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2001 where Joseph Y. Halpern was his advisor. He is presently a member of the Networking Research Center in Bell Labs. His research interests are in networking with a focus on wireless networking and mobile computing. He has served as a program committee member for several conferences including ACM MobiCom, ACM MobiHoc, IEEE INFOCOM and IEEE ICNP. He is a guest editor for JSAC special issue on Non-Cooperative Behavior in Networking. He has published over 30 papers. Yanbin Liu received her B.E. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University (1993), Beijing, China, in 1993, and her M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin (1998), where is a Ph.D. candidate. Since 2006, he has been with IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY. Her research interests are in real-time systems, grid computing, mobile computing, and computer networks. Yang Richard Yang received his B.E. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1993, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Since 2001, he has been with the Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, where currently he is an Associate Professor. His current research interests are in computer networks, mobile computing, and sensor networks. He leads the Laboratory of Networked Systems (LANS) at Yale University.     

Experimental Study of Capture Effect for Medium Access Control with ALOHA

In this paper, we investigate the capture effect through experiments conducted with Iris nodes equipped with AT86RF230 radio transceivers. It is shown that the first arriving packet in a collision can capture the radio channel for equal power transmissions and may be decoded depending on the amount of overlap. A new 3‐packet‐capture scenario is introduced and implemented. To be able to understand the impact of capture on the throughput performance of wireless sensor networks, we present an analysis of the capture coefficient using our practical results. For real‐world implementations, the throughput of pure ALOHA considering a finite number of users is presented in analytical form. The capture coefficient is then applied to pure ALOHA as a case study. Using analytical and practical implementations of the capture effect on ALOHA, a very good match in channel throughput performance enhancement is demonstrated over the non‐capture effect case. TinyOS‐2.x is used to program the nodes and to observe data exchange on a computer through a base station.     

Improving the shelf life stability of vacuum-packed fresh-cut peaches (Prunus persica L.) by radio frequency heating in water

The present study aimed to investigate the influence of radio frequency (RF) heating at 70 and 80 °C, in comparison with the traditional conventional heating. The RF heating technology was applied for maintaining the colour and textural quality as well as inactivating the enzymatic activity of polyphenol oxidase (PPO) and reducing the Escherichia coli growth in packaged fresh-cut peach samples. To evaluate this, 120 g of freshly cut peach fruit was placed in heat-resistant plastic bags, and 50 mL of sugar solution (12°Brix) was added to each bag and vacuum-packed for conventional heating and radio frequency (RF) heating. Our results demonstrated that the RF heating process could reduce the heating time by up to 83% at 70 and 80 °C as compared to conventional heating. Moreover, RF heating at 70 and 80 °C reduced the PPO enzymatic activity, which caused enzymatic browning, up to 85.46% and 93.5%, respectively, as compared to 40.86% reduction only for conventional heating. Furthermore, RF heating completely inhibited E. coli growth. Collectively, we demonstrated that RF heating is an emerging and promising technology for improving the quality of fresh-cut fruits such as peach during various storage conditions. The present study provides relatively novel information on the effectiveness of RF heating in maintaining the quality of fresh-cut peaches. In the future, we would like to investigate the effectiveness of RF heating on other agricultural products.     

Effect of temperature on the dielectric properties of low acyl gellan gel

Gellan gum is an increasingly popular and a naturally occurring hydrocolloid. It is widely used in the food, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries as a stabilizer, emulsifier, thickener, and gelling agent. The gel is also used as a model material to study microwave heating dynamics of biological materials in the food processing industry. In this study, baseline data on dielectric properties of 1% gellan gel containing 0.17% and 0.3% CaCl₂ were collected at frequencies between 0.2 and 20 GHz and temperatures between 10 and 100 °C. These data are compared with those of distilled water containing similar ionic concentrations. Models describing the behavior of the dielectric constant, loss factor, loss tangent and the penetration depth for 0.2–3.2 GHz were developed. These models can be effectively used in microwave food processing applications of gellan gel, which will save considerable time and effort often used in empirically determining the dielectric spectra.