Paulo Bartolomeu

B-Live - A Home Automation System for Disabled and Elderly People

This paper describes the architecture, operation and implementation of the B-Live home automation system. This system has been developed at Micro I/O for assisting elderly and disabled people in their homes. The paper also discusses the demonstrator deployed at the CMRRC Rovisco Pais and proposes an improved information exchange mechanism for the B-Live system.

Enforcing flexibility in real-time wireless communications: A bandjacking enabled protocol

Wireless communications are being applied in heterogeneous domains ranging from healthcare to industrial manufacturing. However, as wireless channels are highly unreliable, the support of applications having tight hard real-time and fault-tolerance requirements has been provided by dedicated wired communications. Recently, a technique named bandjacking has been evaluated as a feasible solution to mitigate the unreliability associated with wireless channels in contention-based communications environments. This paper builds on this technique to propose an FTT inspired protocol aiming to provide deterministic, reliable and flexible wireless communications.

Challenges in Health Smart Homes

This paper presents an overview of the challenges in developing health smart homes targeting, in particular, elderly and impaired people. As such, it identifies the current endeavors as well as the main areas of research.

Enforcing the timing behavior of real-time stations in legacy bus-based industrial Ethernet networks

This paper proposes a virtual token-passing mechanism, which allows the coexistence of legacy industrial Ethernet devices with enhanced (real-time) devices in the same bus network. The VTPE mechanism allows the implementation of real-time (RT) applications upon legacy bus-based industrial networks, enforcing the adequate timing behavior of the supported applications. It enables the traffic separation between legacy Ethernet stations and enhanced (RT) stations. A set of experiments has been performed, which allowed to measure the message access delay and the token rotation time. The achieved results clearly demonstrate that the VTPE architecture enables the support of RT communication upon legacy bus-based industrial Ethernet networks, even when the communication medium is shared with uncontrolled traffic sources.

Implementing the wireless FTT protocol: A feasibility analysis

Low-power wireless communication protocols have been shown to experience a significant timeliness and reliability degradation under certain interference profiles. Provided that this impairment has hindered their wide adoption in demanding real-time scenarios, the Wireless Flexible Time Triggered (WFTT) protocol has been recently proposed targeting applications with stringent timeliness requirements. This protocol builds on the medium access determinism granted by the bandjacking technique in open environments, where different technologies may contend for the medium. Besides providing a deeper definition of the WFTT architecture and protocol operation, this paper presents a thorough analysis addressing its implementation feasibility.

Channel capture in noisy wireless contention-based communication environments

Nowadays, as in many other domains, wireless communications are a hot topic in Industrial Automation. Nevertheless, their deployment in real-time applications has been mostly conducted in tightly controlled environments, given the potential threats posed by Denial of Service attacks resulting from interference. Hence, the support of communications providing timeliness guarantees in open wireless environments is an important research topic, not only for soft real-time applications, in general, but mainly for real-time applications with demanding timeliness requirements. This paper addresses the challenge of providing real-time communications in open wireless environments, specifically in the 2.4 GHz ISM band encompassing contention-based interference sources. It presents a novel MAC technique named bandjacking, which allows capturing and maintaining a communication medium with bound delay and jitter in the presence of interference produced by contention-based communication technologies. Furthermore, a proof of concept addressing the proposed technique is experimentally validated through a set of trials, demonstrating the feasibility of bandjacking for the support of real-time wireless communications in open environments.

Delay measurement system for real-time serial data streams

This paper presents a low cost, flexible and customizable delay measurement system developed to assess the performance of the VTPE-hBEB protocol. The proposed system can be used to evaluate other communication protocols as well as to measure the delay between two repetitive events.

Wireless parking lot monitoring and guidance

Currently, energy saving policies are fueling a broad research effort to reduce power consumption and increase energy usage efficiency. Private cars are a key energy consumer and constitute a significant source of greenhouse effect gas emissions. The advent of information technologies and the proliferation of wireless low-power communication technologies have allowed the appearance of several energy saving solutions. One example is parking assistance systems for large parking lots, which allows user guidance to the free parking places. This paper describes one of these systems implemented with an IEEE 802.15.4 network.

Towards flexible time triggered wireless communications

The adoption of established fieldbus technologies in demanding scenarios has been supported by the lack of reliability of wireless communications, for example, under the influence of interference. In the last few years, new methods such as channel hoping and blacklisting have been proposed to cope with these vulnerabilities, but their effectiveness is limited. This paper proposes a wireless protocol featuring a novel approach to real-time medium access building on features provided by the bandjacking technique to support deterministic, reliable and flexible communications.

Evaluating severe noise interference in IEEE 802.15.4 based location systems

This paper studies the impact of severe ISM noise interference in IEEE 802.15.4 based location systems, in particular the LOPES project. The architecture and operation of the location system are presented as well as the underneath physical mechanisms supporting the IEEE 802.15.4 noise immunity. A test-bed is proposed and the assessment scenario is described by focusing on the trial parameters. Results show that this technology is able to operate in extreme harsh environments. However, this has a significant impact in the location systempsilas performance.