The Internet of Things (IoT) shall be able to incorporate transparently and seamlessly a large number of different and heterogeneous end systems, while providing open access to selected subsets of data for the development of a plethora of digital services. Building a general architecture for the IoT is hence a very complex task, mainly because of the extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a system. In this paper, we focus specifically to an urban IoT system that, while still being quite a broad category, are characterized by their specific application domain. Urban IoTs, in fact, are designed to support the Smart City vision, which aims at exploiting the most advanced communication technologies to support added-value services for the administration of the city and for the citizens. This paper hence provides a comprehensive survey of the enabling technologies, protocols, and architecture for an urban IoT. Furthermore, the paper will present and discuss the technical solutions and best-practice guidelines adopted in the Padova Smart City project, a proof-of-concept deployment of an IoT island in the city of Padova, Italy, performed in collaboration with the city municipality.

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Internet of Things for Smart Cities

Efficient application scheduling is critical for achieving high performance in heterogeneous computing environments. The application scheduling problem has been shown to be NP-complete in general cases as well as in several restricted cases. Because of its key importance, this problem has been extensively studied and various algorithms have been proposed in the literature which are mainly for systems with homogeneous processors. Although there are a few algorithms in the literature for heterogeneous processors, they usually require significantly high scheduling costs and they may not deliver good quality schedules with lower costs. In this paper, we present two novel scheduling algorithms for a bounded number of heterogeneous processors with an objective to simultaneously meet high performance and fast scheduling time, which are called the Heterogeneous Earliest-Finish-Time (HEFT) algorithm and the Critical-Path-on-a-Processor (CPOP) algorithm. The HEFT algorithm selects the task with the highest upward rank value at each step and assigns the selected task to the processor, which minimizes its earliest finish time with an insertion-based approach. On the other hand, the CPOP algorithm uses the summation of upward and downward rank values for prioritizing tasks. Another difference is in the processor selection phase, which schedules the critical tasks onto the processor that minimizes the total execution time of the critical tasks. In order to provide a robust and unbiased comparison with the related work, a parametric graph generator was designed to generate weighted directed acyclic graphs with various characteristics. The comparison study, based on both randomly generated graphs and the graphs of some real applications, shows that our scheduling algorithms significantly surpass previous approaches in terms of both quality and cost of schedules, which are mainly presented with schedule length ratio, speedup, frequency of best results, and average scheduling time metrics.

/pdf/performance-effective-and-low-complexity-task-scheduling-for-51tejcgo0m.pdf

Performance-effective and low-complexity task scheduling for heterogeneous computing

In the Hamadryas baboon, males are substantially larger than females. A troop of baboons is subdivided into a number of ‘one-male groups’, consisting of one adult male and one or more females with their young. The male prevents any of ‘his’ females from moving too far from him. Kummer (1971) performed the following experiment. Two males, A and B, previously unknown to each other, were placed in a large enclosure. Male A was free to move about the enclosure, but male B was shut in a small cage, from which he could observe A but not interfere. A female, unknown to both males, was then placed in the enclosure. Within 20 minutes male A had persuaded the female to accept his ownership. Male B was then released into the open enclosure. Instead of challenging male A , B avoided any contact, accepting A’s ownership.

Evolution and the Theory of Games

https://www.engr.colostate.edu/~hj/journals/71.pdf

A Comparison of Eleven Static Heuristics for Mapping a Class of Independent Tasks onto Heterogeneous Distributed Computing Systems

Multiple applications request data from multiple storage units over a computer network. The data is divided into segments and each segment is distributed randomly on one of several storage units, independent of the storage units on which other segments of the media data are stored. At least one additional copy of each segment also is distributed randomly over the storage units, such that each segment is stored on at least two storage units. This random distribution of multiple copies of segments of data improves both scalability and reliability. When an application requests a selected segment of data, the request is processed by the storage unit with the shortest queue of requests. Random fluctuations in the load applied by multiple applications on multiple storage units are balanced nearly equally over all of the storage units. This combination of techniques results in a system which can transfer multiple, independent high-bandwidth streams of data in a scalable manner in both directions between multiple applications and multiple storage units.

Computer system and process for transferring multiple high bandwidth streams of data between multiple storage units and multiple applications in a scalable and reliable manner

To implement a feasible parallel Video-on-Demand (VoD) server the first task is to build a schedule table for each new incoming client request. The table is then updated with time and/or requests are rescheduled as any client changes its play mode. We present an algorithm used to build a schedule table to accommodate interactive operations, especially fast-forward operations. Any client's request can be classified to a particular group according to its playout speed requirement and then scheduled to the corresponding time slots of that group.

Fast-forward functions on parallel video servers

In this work, we study the topology enhancement problem of wireless sensor networks. Our research focuses on reducing the path-based vulnerability. The objective is to get as much information as possible for any target moving out of the surveillance area. We study intelligent targets that have the knowledge of existing sensor distribution. Under such assumption, we find the vulnerable paths that rational targets would like to take and block these paths to enhance the network detection performance. Simulation shows that by adding only a few numbers of new sensors on specific positions, we can greatly decrease the vulnerability of a randomly deployed sensor network.

WSN09-6: Blocking Vulnerable Paths of Wireless Sensor Networks

Scheduling algorithms are used in content delivery systems to control the resource allocation rate. They not only improve system efficiency, but also increase user satisfaction. Lower renege rate and less waiting time for users are the main goals for a scheduling algorithm. Among existing algorithms, On-Demand strategy does not perform well, while rate control channel allocation policies performs much better. Pure-Rate-Control (PRC) and Multiple-Service-Class (MSC) belong to the rate control algorithms. MSC performs well, but a drawback is that it uses the Hot Index, which is hard to decide and has significant effects on the performance. In order to solve this problem and to improve the overall system performance, two new algorithms, Modified MSC(MMSC) and Adaptive Algorithm (AA), are proposed in this paper. Both of them solved the problem of MSC very well and improved the overall performance. For example, the renege rate of AA is about 5.4% less than that of MMSC, and about 9.8% less than that of MSC.

Adaptive channel allocation for large-scale streaming content delivery systems

We propose a more practical resource model for optical grid applications by extending the classic list scheduling algorithm to achieve communication contention aware scheduling of optical grid applications. An effective adaptive routing scheme is also proposed to improve the performance of the extended list scheduling. The impacts of different routing schemes on the extended list scheduling are comparatively investigated by simulations.

Extended List Scheduling for Optical Grid Applications

We consider distributed top-k processing problem in a mobile scenario. Specially, we focus on a real application of a bus network (N nodes), where buses are equipped with cameras for real-time security surveillance. Due to the limited number of screens (k, k<<N) at the traffic management center, how to select k bus nodes with most passengers to upload image data by DSRC needs to be solved. We present a novel distributed scheme BSS to handle this so-called "top-k node selection" issue in bus network, in which challenges of low time cost and high accuracy is not trivial. BSS utilizes various strategies to speed up top-k node selection facing poor network condition and application requirements. Performance evaluation is carried out on a real-trace driven simulator, which utilizes about 700 buses in Shanghai. The testing results show that BSS has an excellent performance in terms of time cost and average degree of accuracy, which shows the effectiveness of BSS scheme for real-time security surveillance.

Min-You Wu

Papers

Fast-forward functions on parallel video servers

WSN09-6: Blocking Vulnerable Paths of Wireless Sensor Networks

Adaptive channel allocation for large-scale streaming content delivery systems

Extended List Scheduling for Optical Grid Applications

BSS: A Distributed Top-k Processing in Mobile BusNet for Security Surveillance