Anca Hangan

eHealth solutions in the context of Internet of Things

The article analyzes the impact of “IoT - Internet of Things” on the design of new eHealth solutions. The authors aim to illustrate that the communication models, protocols and technologies promoted under the IoT concept have a great potential in the implementation of Internet-based healthcare systems. The experiments performed by the authors in the field of eHealth reveal some possible solutions, but also some open questions.

A Prototype for the Remote Monitoring of Water Parameters

Continuous real-time water parameters monitoring is a necessity in the context of contemporary water resources management. There is an important research direction towards the development of monitoring systems, which make use of wireless sensor networks for water parameters acquisition. In this paper, we present our on-going work and preliminary findings on the development of a water parameters monitoring system. We propose a prototype for monitoring water parameters that uses wireless sensor networks for data acquisition. Moreover, we describe a usage scenario for the proposed prototype that is aimed at detecting accidental pollution in rivers.

Human activity recognition and monitoring for elderly people

Statistics show that the population in Europe is aging and in the near future human assistance for elderly persons will be prohibitive. This paper analyses the possibilities to implement a supervision system, which is capable of monitoring a persons activity in his/her home without violating intimacy. The main idea is to collect information from various sensors placed in house and on mobile devices and infer a most probable sequence of activities performed by the supervised person. A Hidden Markov chain method is adapted for the activity chain recognition.

Real-time Java and multi-core architectures

This paper presents some of the issues related to the use of multi-core architectures for real-time systems, in particular for real-time Java. Currently, the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) does not account for aspects of parallel computing, but the widespread use of multi-core architectures advocates for the need of a change in this regard. Some of these aspects relate closely to architectural features that need to be properly exported to the application level. We discuss the impact of multi-core processors, both symmetric and asymmetric, on process/thread scheduling. We also analyze the changes needed for some of the important features of RTSJ, such as the priority inversion avoidance, in the new context of multi-core processing. Also, locking and fairness issues are discussed with respect to the use of multi-core processors for real-time Java.

Reservation-Based Data Flow Scheduling in Distributed Control Applications

Remote process control and supervision applications developed over the Internet require special communication models and techniques, which can guarantee the real-time and safety restrictions inherent to automation systems. This paper presents a communication model based on dataflow analysis and bandwidth reservation that offers a good control over the transmission time of critical data. As part of the model, an analytical method is proposed that allows a-priory evaluation of the required minimum bandwidth necessary to assure the fulfillment of real-time transmission restrictions. The model is based on the QoS facilities offered by the IPv6 protocol.

Self-tuning Multimedia Streaming System on Cloud Infrastructure☆

Abstract In this paper we present an automatic performance tuning solution for the optimization of a high-demand multimedia streaming service built on a dedicated private cloud architecture. The optimization focuses mainly on two aspects: energy efficiency and quality assurance of streaming services. As QoS factors we take into consideration the minimum initial waiting time and the cumulative disruption time of continuous playing at the client side. To achieve the best performance, a cloud-based architecture is proposed with on-demand dynamic allocation of resources and a multi-level data flow with caching capabilities.

Simulation-based schedulability tests for multiprocessor real-time systems

The assimilation of multiprocessor programming into the real-time applications domain is limited because there are not enough theoretical and pragmatic tools for proving the feasibility of such systems. Theoretical results are few and tend to be too complex for a practical implementation. In this paper, we combine theoretical analysis results with simulation to obtain a tool, which can assess the multiprocessor real-time schedulability of periodic task sets. We performed simulations on different scenarios in order to determine the features that influence schedulability of a multiprocessor real-time system.

Water Parameters Monitoring on a Cyberwater Platform

With the raise of global concerns about climate changes and pollution in general, water monitoring became a major topic of interest in geospatial applications. There are a significant number of parameters that need to be monitored in a watershed, and varieties of sensors are used for this purpose. In modern sensor networks, sensors are not just simple data collectors, but also actuators that need complex programming. This paper presents a monitoring system for water parameters, based on a wireless sensors network (WSN) and the process of measuring several water quality parameters, aiming to detect pollutants. The experimental results, obtained using the Cyber water platform for monitoring pollution on rivers, confirm the quality of the approach.

Providing water parameters monitoring data through interoperable web services

The paper describes the design and development of a water parameters monitoring system for rivers. The system exposes a set of web services that can act as support for decision making in pollution control or as data provider for a wide range of informational, educational or research applications. A prototype based on the proposed system design was build and experiments were made on Somes River in Romania. Our prototype contains web based and mobile applications that provide access to the measurements made by the sensors and to the historical information as well.The subject of the article concerns a constrained predictive control with feedback linearization (FBL) applied for multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) system. It relies on finding a compromise in every step between feasible and optimal linear quadratic (LQ) control by minimization of one variable. Behaviour of model signals in function of minimized variable is investigated, in order to assure the optimality of the solution. LQ control based applications for feedback linearized models do not meet the problem of choosing weights in linear quadratic cost function. That important problem is solved here by comparison of the cost function with that obtained for the linear approximated system in the operating point. That provides satisfactory behaviour and also justifies the simplified approach relied on minimization of only one variable for MIMO system.

Digital Content Management on GRID Structures

This paper analyses the issues concerning the implementation of a digital content management system on a GRID infrastructure. The authors propose an implementation model that benefits from the services offered by a GRID middleware. Experiments made in two cases of digital content management (multimedia streaming and digital library) demonstrated the advantages and drawbacks of the proposed model.