Showing papers on "Systems architecture published in 2014"

Towards wearable cognitive assistance

Abstract: We describe the architecture and prototype implementation of an assistive system based on Google Glass devices for users in cognitive decline. It combines the first-person image capture and sensing capabilities of Glass with remote processing to perform real-time scene interpretation. The system architecture is multi-tiered. It offers tight end-to-end latency bounds on compute-intensive operations, while addressing concerns such as limited battery capacity and limited processing capability of wearable devices. The system gracefully degrades services in the face of network failures and unavailability of distant architectural tiers.

Systems and Methods for Tracking the Status and Usage Information of a Wireless Power Transmission System

Abstract: Disclosed here are methods and systems to generate and distribute information about the status and usage of a wireless power transmission system. Specifically, the present disclosure may describe a process to generate information through various software running in different components of the wireless power transmission system. Additionally, the disclosure may also include a wireless power transmission system architecture which may include components, such as a remote information service, a remote information service manager, a remote information service database, one or more authorized computing devices, and a plurality of system information generators. System information generator may refer to components, such as wireless power transmitters, computing devices/non computing devices (coupled with power receiver devices), a system management service, and distributed system database. The aforementioned components within the wireless power transmission system may be used to automatically and autonomously generate, store, transmit, and distribute system status, usage, and statistics or metrics information in order to be edited or reported by authorized and authenticated users. The information may also be used to increase the accuracy of strategic marketing, sales focus, to alert customer service of system problems and performance issues, and for billing end users.

Data Cleaning for RFID and WSN Integration

Abstract: Today's manufacturing environments are very dynamic and turbulent. Traditional enterprise information systems (EISs) have mostly been implemented upon hierarchical architectures, which are inflexible to adapt changes and uncertainties promptly. Next-generation EISs must be agile and adaptable to accommodate changes without significant time delays. It is essential for an EIS to obtain real-time data from the distributed and dynamic manufacturing environment for decision making. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems provide an excellent infrastructure for data acquisition, distribution, and processing. In this paper, some key challenges related to the integration of WSN and RFID technologies are discussed. A five-layer system architecture has been proposed to achieve synergistic performance. For the integration of WSN and RFID, one of the critical issues is the low efficiency of communication due to redundant data as redundant data increases energy consumption and causes time delay. To address it, an improved data cleaning algorithm has been proposed; its feasibility and effectiveness have been verified via simulation and a comparison with a published algorithm. To illustrate the capacity of the developed architecture and new data cleaning algorithm, their application in relief supplies storage management has been discussed.

Adaptive Protection and Microgrid Control Design for Hailuoto Island

Abstract: Microgrids can provide various economic and environmental benefits but their implementation poses great technical challenges in control, protection and energy management. One of the most important technical aspects in microgrids is distribution system protection. This paper first demonstrates a need for and then focuses on the design aspects of the adaptive protection system addressing issues such as: selection of alternative setting groups, components and system architecture; system configuration and programmed logic. The system is based on a centralized controller running the real-time analysis of the data received from the field Intelligent Electronic Devices and communicating with them by means of IEC 61850 communications. The adaptive protection and microgrid control system has been developed and currently being installed at Hailuoto island in Finland.

System Architectures, Protocols and Algorithms for Aperiodic Wireless Control Systems

Abstract: Wide deployment of wireless sensor and actuator networks in cyber-physical systems requires systematic design tools to enable dynamic tradeoff of network resources and control performance. In this paper, we consider three recently proposed aperiodic control algorithms which have the potential to address this problem. By showing how these controllers can be implemented over the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, a practical wireless control system architecture with guaranteed closed-loop performance is detailed. Event-based predictive and hybrid sensor and actuator communication schemes are compared with respect to their capabilities and implementation complexity. A two double-tank laboratory experimental setup, mimicking some typical industrial process control loops, is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach. Experimental results show how the sensor communication adapts to the changing demands of the control loops and the network resources, allowing for lower energy consumption and efficient bandwidth utilization.

Semantic Interoperability Architecture for Pervasive Computing and Internet of Things

Abstract: Pervasive computing and Internet of Things (IoTs) paradigms have created a huge potential for new business. To fully realize this potential, there is a need for a common way to abstract the heterogeneity of devices so that their functionality can be represented as a virtual computing platform. To this end, we present novel semantic level interoperability architecture for pervasive computing and IoTs. There are two main principles in the proposed architecture. First, information and capabilities of devices are represented with semantic web knowledge representation technologies and interaction with devices and the physical world is achieved by accessing and modifying their virtual representations. Second, global IoT is divided into numerous local smart spaces managed by a semantic information broker (SIB) that provides a means to monitor and update the virtual representation of the physical world. An integral part of the architecture is a resolution infrastructure that provides a means to resolve the network address of a SIB either using a physical object identifier as a pointer to information or by searching SIBs matching a specification represented with SPARQL. We present several reference implementations and applications that we have developed to evaluate the architecture in practice. The evaluation also includes performance studies that, together with the applications, demonstrate the suitability of the architecture to real-life IoT scenarios. In addition, to validate that the proposed architecture conforms to the common IoT-A architecture reference model (ARM), we map the central components of the architecture to the IoT-ARM.

System Integration and Hierarchical Power Management Strategy for a Solid-State Transformer Interfaced Microgrid System

Abstract: This paper investigates, and for the first time presents, the system integration of a novel solid-state transformer (SST) interfaced microgrid system Accordingly, a hierarchical power management strategy is proposed for this system to enable islanding mode operation, SST enabled operation, and the seamless transfer between two modes The proposed power management strategy includes three control levels: primary control for the local controller; secondary control for the dc microgrid bus voltage recovery; and tertiary control to manage the battery state of charge The proposed system architecture and control strategies are detailed in this paper and a lab test bed is constructed to verify the system performance Finally, several typical case studies are carried out The experimental results verify the proposed system and distributed power management strategy

New Trends in Robotics for Agriculture: Integration and Assessment of a Real Fleet of Robots

Abstract: Computer-based sensors and actuators such as global positioning systems, machine vision, and laser-based sensors have progressively been incorporated into mobile robots with the aim of configuring autonomous systems capable of shifting operator activities in agricultural tasks. However, the incorporation of many electronic systems into a robot impairs its reliability and increases its cost. Hardware minimization, as well as software minimization and ease of integration, is essential to obtain feasible robotic systems. A step forward in the application of automatic equipment in agriculture is the use of fleets of robots, in which a number of specialized robots collaborate to accomplish one or several agricultural tasks. This paper strives to develop a system architecture for both individual robots and robots working in fleets to improve reliability, decrease complexity and costs, and permit the integration of software from different developers. Several solutions are studied, from a fully distributed to a whole integrated architecture in which a central computer runs all processes. This work also studies diverse topologies for controlling fleets of robots and advances other prospective topologies. The architecture presented in this paper is being successfully applied in the RHEA fleet, which comprises three ground mobile units based on a commercial tractor chassis.

Benchmarking Internet of things devices

Abstract: The use of commercial off-the-shelf components for implementing Internet of Things devices has become a common practice amongst researchers and solution providers. IOT solutions, based on the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone and BeagleBone Black, offer cost effective, versatile and uncomplicated platforms for rapid application development. The devices are treated as black box devices and little work has been done to quantify the performance of these devices when the system architecture, software components or communication channels are varied. This paper introduces micro- and macro-benchmarking methods for these devices; quantifying the performance of each device for the varying hardware architectures. Micro-benchmarking was performed using lmbench — a cross platform benchmarking framework for UNIX devices. The macro-benchmarking was implemented using a custom developed CoAP benchmarking utility created using the libCoAP library. The results showed that the selection of the platform processor is a key design requirement and has the most potential to optimise CoAP server performance. The latency associated with the communication channels was found to be a dominating factor for round-trip times associated with CoAP requests.

Simulating DRAM controllers for future system architecture exploration

Abstract: Compute requirements are increasing rapidly in systems ranging from mobile devices to servers. These, often massively parallel architectures, put increasing requirements on memory bandwidth and latency. The memory system greatly impacts both system performance and power, and it is key to capture the complex behaviour of the DRAM controller when evaluating CPU and GPU performance. By using full-system simulation, the interactions between the system components is captured. However, traditional DRAM controller models focus on modelling interactions between the controller and the DRAM rather than the interactions with the system. Moreover, the DRAM interactions are modelled on a cycle-by-cycle basis, leading to inflexibility and poor simulation performance. In this work, we present a high-level memory controller model, specifically designed for full-system exploration of future system architectures. Our event-based model is tailored to match a contemporary controller architecture, and captures the most important DRAM timing constraints for current and emerging DRAM interfaces, e.g. DDR3, LPDDR3 and WideIO. We show how our controller leverages the open-source gem5 simulation framework, and compare it to a state-of-the-art DRAM controller simulator. Our results show that our model is 7x faster on average, while maintaining the fidelity of the simulation. To highlight the capabilities of our model, we show that it can be used to evaluate a multi-processor memory system.

System Architecture Directions for Networked Sensors

Abstract: Technological progress in integrated, low-power, CMOS com-munication devices and sensors makes a rich design space of networked sensors viable.

System architecture for wireless sensor networks

Abstract: System and three generations of a hardware platform designed to address the needs of wireless sensor networks. Our operating system, called TinyOS uses an event based execution model to provide support for finegrained concurrency and incorporates a highly efficient component model. TinyOS enables us to use a hardware architecture that has a single processor time shared between both application and protocol processing. We show how a virtual partitioning of computational resources not only leads to efficient resource utilization but allows for a rich interface between application and protocol processing. This rich interface, in turn, allows developers to exploit application specific communication protocols that significantly improve system performance. The hardware platforms we develop are used to validate a generalized architecture that is technology independent. Our general architecture contains a single central controller that performs both application and protocol-level processing. For flexibility, this controller is directly connected to the RF transceiver.

Hidden Structure: Using Network Methods to Map System Architecture

Abstract: In this paper, we describe an operational methodology for characterising the architecture of complex technical systems and demonstrate its application to a large sample of software releases. Our methodology is based upon directed network graphs, which allows us to identify all of the direct and indirect linkages between the components in a system. We use this approach to define three fundamental architectural patterns, which we label core-periphery, multi-core, and hierarchical. Applying our methodology to a sample of 1,286 software releases from 17 applications, we find that the majority of releases possess a “core-periphery” structure. This architecture is characterized by a single dominant cyclic group of components (the “Core”) that is large relative to the system as a whole as well as to other cyclic groups in the system. We show that the size of the Core varies widely, even for systems that perform the same function. These differences appear to be associated with different models of development — open, distributed organizations develop systems with smaller Cores, while closed, co-located organizations develop systems with larger Cores. Our findings establish some “stylized facts” about the fine-grained structure of large, real-world technical systems, serving as a point of departure for future empirical work.

Experimental Evaluation of CAM and DENM Messaging Services in Vehicular Communications

Abstract: The Cooperative Awareness Basic Service and Decentralized Environmental Notification Basic Service have been standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to support vehicular safety and traffic efficiency applications needing continuous status information about surrounding vehicles and asynchronous notification of events, respectively. These standard specifications detail not only the packet formats for both the Cooperative Awareness Message (CAM) and Decentralized Environmental Notification Message (DENM), but also the general message dissemination rules. These basic services, also known as facilities, have been developed as part of a set of standards in which both ISO and ETSI describe the Reference Communication Architecture for future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). By using a communications stack that instantiates this reference architecture, this paper puts in practice the usage of both facilities in a real vehicular scenario. This research work details implementation decisions and evaluates the performance of CAM and DENM facilities through a experimental testbed deployed in a semi-urban environment that uses IEEE 802.11p (ETSI G5-compliant), which is a WiFi-like communication technology conceived for vehicular communications. On the one hand, this validation considers the development of two ITS applications using CAM and DENM functionalities for tracking vehicles and disseminating traffic incidences. In this case, CAM and DENM have demonstrated to be able to offer all the necessary functionality for the study case. On the other hand, both facilities have been also validated in a extensive testing campaign in order to analyze the influence in CAM and DENM performance of aspects such as vehicle speed, signal quality or message dissemination rules. In these tests, the line of sight, equipment installation point and hardware capabilities, have been found as key variables in the network performance, while the vehicle speed has implied a slight impact.

Adaptive protection and microgrid control design for Hailuoto Island

Abstract: Microgrids can provide various economic and environmental benefits but their implementation poses great technical challenges in control, protection and energy management. One of the most important technical aspects in microgrids is distribution system protection. This paper first demonstrates a need for and then focuses on the design aspects of the adaptive protection system addressing issues such as: selection of alternative setting groups, components and system architecture; system configuration and programmed logic. The system is based on a centralized controller running the real-time analysis of the data received from the field Intelligent Electronic Devices and communicating with them by means of IEC 61850 communications. The adaptive protection and microgrid control system has been developed and currently being installed at Hailuoto island in Finland.

IoT sensing framework with inter-cloud computing capability in vehicular networking

Abstract: In order to improve convenience, efficiency, and safety in vehicular networking applications (VNA), we propose a novel business model based on platform production services (PPS), design an inter-cloud architecture, and then apply this emerging scheme to vehicle maintenance services (VMS). Both internet of things (IoT) sensing framework and inter-cloud computing architecture are the crucial factors in implementing PPS business model. In the proposed scheme, implementation concept, system architecture, and scalable applications are introduced. Then we design IoT sensing framework for VNA, including cloud services and computation level scalability, inter-cloud architecture supporting telematics applications, and telematics application scenarios. After dissecting mobile cloud computing forming mechanism, we carry out the semantic modeling analysis for inter-cloud service model, and then design a VMS event processing flow to allow the management and cooperation among diverse components by means of event manager. The performance evaluation exemplified by VMS is implemented by means of probabilistic methods. The results show that convenience and efficiency increase in VNA as compared to existing schemes.

Towards a Model-Driven-Architecture Process for Smart Grid Projects

Abstract: The complexity in electrical power systems is continuously increasing due to its advancing distribution. This affects the topology of the grid infrastructure as well as the IT-infrastructure, leading to various heterogeneous systems, data models, protocols, and interfaces. This in turn raises the need for appropriate processes and tools that facilitate the management of the systems architecture on different levels and from different stakeholders’ view points. In order to achieve this goal, a common understanding of architecture elements and means of classification shall be gained. The Smart Grid Architecture Model (SGAM) proposed in context of the European standardization mandate M/490 provides a promising basis for domainspecific architecture models. The idea of following a Model-Driven-Architecture (MDA)-approach to create such models, including requirements specification based on Smart Grid use cases, is detailed in this contribution. The SGAM-Toolbox is introduced as tool-support for the approach and its utility is demonstrated by two real-world case studies.

Modeling run-time adaptation at the system architecture level in dynamic service-oriented environments

Abstract: Today, software systems are more and more executed in dynamic, virtualized environments. These environments host diverse applications of different parties, sharing the underlying resources. The goal of this resource sharing is to utilize resources efficiently while ensuring that quality-of-service requirements are continuously satisfied. In such scenarios, complex adaptations to changes in the system environment are still largely performed manually by humans. Over the past decade, autonomic self-adaptation techniques aiming to minimize human intervention have become increasingly popular. However, given that adaptation processes are usually highly system-specific, it is a challenge to abstract from system details, enabling the reuse of adaptation strategies. In this paper, we present S/T/A, a modeling language to describe system adaptation processes at the system architecture level in a generic, human-understandable and reusable way. We apply our approach to multiple different realistic contexts (dynamic resource allocation, run-time adaptation planning, etc.). The results show how a holistic model-based approach can close the gap between complex manual adaptations and their autonomous execution.

EUROSERVER: Energy Efficient Node for European Micro-Servers

Abstract: EUROSERVER is a collaborative project that aims to dramatically improve data centre energy-efficiency, cost, and software efficiency. It is addressing these important challenges through the coordinated application of several key recent innovations: 64-bit ARM cores, 3D heterogeneous silicon-on-silicon integration, and fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD SOI) process technology, together with new software techniques for efficient resource management, including resource sharing and workload isolation. We are pioneering a system architecture approach that allows specialized silicon devices to be built even for low-volume markets where NRE costs are currently prohibitive. The EUROSERVER device will embed multiple silicon "chiplets" on an active silicon interposer. Its system architecture is being driven by requirements from three use cases: data centres and cloud computing, telecom infrastructures, and high-end embedded systems. We will build two fully integrated full-system prototypes, based on a common micro-server board, and targeting embedded servers and enterprise servers.

Automated critical test result notification system: architecture, design, and assessment of provider satisfaction.

Abstract: OBJECTIVE. Communicating critical results of diagnostic imaging procedures is a national patient safety goal. The purposes of this study were to describe the system architecture and design of Alert Notification of Critical Results (ANCR), an automated system designed to facilitate communication of critical imaging results between care providers; to report providers’ satisfaction with ANCR; and to compare radiologists’ and ordering providers’ attitudes toward ANCR. MATERIALS AND METHODS. The design decisions made for each step in the alert communication process, which includes user authentication, alert creation, alert communication, alert acknowledgment and management, alert reminder and escalation, and alert documentation, are described. To assess attitudes toward ANCR, internally developed and validated surveys were administered to all radiologists (n = 320) and ordering providers (n = 4323) who sent or received alerts 3 years after ANCR implementation. RESULTS. The survey response rates were 50.4% for ...