Optimizing the Performance of an Unpredictable UAV Swarm for Intruder Detection

in Optimization and Learning - Third International Conference, OLA 2020, Cádiz, Spain, February 17-19, 2020, Proceedings (2020)

Internet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles—A Multilayer Low-Altitude Airspace Model for Distributed UAV Traffic Management

in Sensors (2019), 19(21), 22

The rapid adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) has encouraged the integration of new connected devices such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to the ubiquitous network. UAVs promise a pragmatic solution ... [more ▼]

The rapid adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) has encouraged the integration of new connected devices such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to the ubiquitous network. UAVs promise a pragmatic solution to the limitations of existing terrestrial IoT infrastructure as well as bring new means of delivering IoT services through a wide range of applications. Owning to their potential, UAVs are expected to soon dominate the low-altitude airspace over populated cities. This introduces new research challenges such as the safe management of UAVs operation under high traffic demands. This paper proposes a novel way of structuring the uncontrolled, low-altitude airspace, with the aim of addressing the complex problem of UAV traffic management at an abstract level. The work, hence, introduces a model of the airspace as a weighted multilayer network of nodes and airways and presents a set of experimental simulation results using three UAV traffic management heuristics. [less ▲]

Trustworthiness in IoT - A Standards Gap Analysis on Security, Data Protection and Privacy

in Samir Labib, Nader; Brust, Matthias R.; Danoy, Grégoire (Eds.) et al Trustworthiness in IoT - A Standards Gap Analysis on Security, Data Protection and Privacy (2019, October)

With the emergence of new digital trends like Internet of Things (IoT), more industry actors and technical committees pursue research in utilising such technologies as they promise a better and optimised ... [more ▼]

With the emergence of new digital trends like Internet of Things (IoT), more industry actors and technical committees pursue research in utilising such technologies as they promise a better and optimised management, improved energy efficiency and a better quality living through a wide array of value-added services. However, as sensing, actuation, communication and control become increasingly more sophisticated, such promising data-driven systems generate, process, and exchange larger amounts of security-critical and privacy-sensitive data, which makes them attractive targets of attacks. In turn this affirms the importance of trustworthiness in IoT and emphasises the need of a solid technical and regulatory foundation. The goal of this paper is to first introduce the concept of trustworthiness in IoT, its main pillars namely, security, privacy and data protection, and then analyse the state-of-the-art in research and standardisation for each of these subareas. Throughout the paper, we develop and refer to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as a promising value-added service example of mobile IoT devices. The paper then presents a thorough gap analysis and concludes with recommendations for future work. [less ▲]

Crowdsensed Data Learning-Driven Prediction of Local Businesses Attractiveness in Smart Cities

in IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC), Barcelona, Spain, 2019 (2019, July)

Urban planning typically relies on experience-based solutions and traditional methodologies to face urbanization issues and investigate the complex dynamics of cities. Recently, novel data-driven ... [more ▼]

Urban planning typically relies on experience-based solutions and traditional methodologies to face urbanization issues and investigate the complex dynamics of cities. Recently, novel data-driven approaches in urban computing have emerged for researchers and companies. They aim to address historical urbanization issues by exploiting sensing data gathered by mobile devices under the so-called mobile crowdsensing (MCS) paradigm. This work shows how to exploit sensing data to improve traditionally experience-based approaches for urban decisions. In particular, we apply widely known Machine Learning (ML) techniques to achieve highly accurate results in predicting categories of local businesses (LBs) (e.g., bars, restaurants), and their attractiveness in terms of classes of temporal demands (e.g., nightlife, business hours). The performance evaluation is conducted in Luxembourg city and the city of Munich with publicly available crowdsensed datasets. The results highlight that our approach does not only achieve high accuracy, but it also unveils important hidden features of the interaction of citizens and LBs. [less ▲]

A GP Hyper-Heuristic Approach for Generating TSP Heuristics

in 33rd IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2019) (2019, May 20)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) versus In-House HPC Platform: A Cost Analysis

in IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (2019), 7(2), 456-468

Abstract—While High Performance Computing (HPC) centers continuously evolve to provide more computing power to their users, we observe a wish for the convergence between Cloud Computing (CC) and High ... [more ▼]

Abstract—While High Performance Computing (HPC) centers continuously evolve to provide more computing power to their users, we observe a wish for the convergence between Cloud Computing (CC) and High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms, with the commercial hope to see Cloud Computing (CC) infrastructures to eventually replace in-house facilities. If we exclude the performance point of view where many previous studies highlight a non-negligible overhead induced by the virtualization layer at the heart of every Cloud middleware when running a HPC workload, the question of the real cost-effectiveness is often left aside with the intuition that, most probably, the instances offered by the Cloud providers are competitive from a cost point of view. In this article, we wanted to assert (or infirm) this intuition by analyzing what composes the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of an in-house HPC facility operated internally since 2007. This Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model is then used to compare with the induced cost that would have been required to run the same platform (and the same workload) over a competitive Cloud IaaS offer. Our approach to address this price comparison is three-fold. First we propose a theoretical price-performance model based on the study of the actual Cloud instances proposed by one of the major Cloud IaaS actors: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Then, based on the HPC facility TCO analysis we propose a hourly price comparison between our in-house cluster and the equivalent EC2 instances. Finally, based on the experimental benchmarking on the local cluster and on the Cloud instances we propose an update of the former theoretical price model to reflect the real system performance. The results obtained advocate in general for the acquisition of an in-house HPC facility, which balances the common intuition in favor of Cloud Computing platforms, would they be provided by the reference Cloud provider worldwide. [less ▲]

Transforming Collaboration Data into Network Layers for Enhanced Analytics

Scientific Conference (2019, February 25)

We consider the problem of automatically generating networks from data of collaborating researchers. The objective is to apply network analysis on the resulting network layers to reveal supplemental ... [more ▼]

We consider the problem of automatically generating networks from data of collaborating researchers. The objective is to apply network analysis on the resulting network layers to reveal supplemental patterns and insights of the research collaborations. In this paper, we describe our data-to-networks method, which automatically generates a set of logical network layers from the relational input data using a linkage threshold. We, then, use a series of network metrics to analyze the impact of the linkage threshold on the individual network layers. Moreover, results from the network analysis also provide beneficial information to improve the network visualization. We demonstrate the feasibility and impact of our approach using real-world collaboration data. We discuss how the produced network layers can reveal insights and patterns to direct the data analytics more intelligently. [less ▲]

Security, reliability and regulation compliance in Ultrascale Computing System

in Zomaya, A. Y.; Carretero, J.; Jeannot, E. (Eds.) Ultrascale Computing Systems (2019)

Ultrascale Computing Systems (UCSs) are envisioned as large-scale complex systems joining parallel and distributed computing systems that will be two to three orders of magnitude larger than today’s ... [more ▼]

Ultrascale Computing Systems (UCSs) are envisioned as large-scale complex systems joining parallel and distributed computing systems that will be two to three orders of magnitude larger than today’s systems (considering the number of Central Process Unit (CPU) cores). It is very challenging to find sustainable solutions for UCSs due to their scale and a wide range of possible applications and involved technologies. For example, we need to deal with heterogeneity and cross fertilization among HPC, large-scale distributed systems, and big data management. One of the challenges regarding sustainable UCSs is resilience. Another one, which attracted less interest in the literature but becomes more and more crucial with the expected convergence with the Cloud computing paradigm, is the notion of regulation in such system to assess the Quality of Service (QoS) and Service Level Agreement (SLA) proposed for the use of these platforms. This chapter covers both aspects through the reproduction of two articles: [1] and [2]. [less ▲]

Configurable Cost-Quality Optimization of Cloud-based VoIP

in Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (2019), 133

In this paper, we formulate configurable cloud-based VoIP call allocation problem as a special case of dynamic multi-objective bin-packing. We consider voice quality influenced by CPU stress, cost ... [more ▼]

In this paper, we formulate configurable cloud-based VoIP call allocation problem as a special case of dynamic multi-objective bin-packing. We consider voice quality influenced by CPU stress, cost contributed by the number of billing hours for Virtual Machines (VMs) provisioning, and calls placed on hold due to under-provisioning resources. We distinguish call allocation strategies by the type and amount of information used for allocation: knowledge-free, utilization-aware, rental-aware, and loadaware. We propose and study a variety of strategies with static and dynamic policies of VM provisioning. To study realistic scenarios, we consider startup delays for VM provisioning, and three configurable parameters: utilization threshold, rental threshold, and prediction interval. They can be configured and dynamically adapted to cope with different objective preferences, workloads, and cloud properties. We conduct comprehensive simulation on the real workload of the MIXvoip company and show that the proposed strategies outperform ones currently in-use. [less ▲]

Cloud Brokering with Bundles: Multi-objective Optimization of Services Selection

in Foundations of Computing and Decision Sciences (2019)