Vasile Dadarlat

Grid System Installation, Management and Monitoring Application

Computing Grid site administrators, responsible for the maintenance of the system must frequently deploy the operating system components and grid services on all the computers in the Grid. In case of huge Grid infrastructures with thousands of computers (nodes) manual deployment of the necessary software on every node is a laborious and time-consuming job. Therefore, administrators need an automated deployment tool that can fulfill (re)installation and (re)configuration tasks in an efficient and consistent way. This paper present an automated deployment tool developed for the maintenance of a gLite-based Grid infrastructure. In order to describe the entire software configuration and to develop a custom installation environment, we used the Puppet configuration management system. The installation is made over the network using the PXE protocol. By using this automated environment, the time needed for incident solving and reconfiguration requests was drastically reduced.

Benchmarking System for QoS Parameters

This paper presents the design and implementation of a benchmarking system for QoS (quality of service). The application generates traffic patterns, measures and computes the QoS parameters and stores and displays the results both in numerical and graphical form. The main advantages of this system are the traffic patterns complexity, the accuracy of the measurements and the user friendly interface. The application is developed in C# language for .NET platform and represents a part of a complex framework designed for developing QoS technologies such as traffic identification and marking, queue and congestion management, traffic shaping and policy, specific protocols.

On the (im)possibility of denial of service attacks exploiting authentication overhead in WSNs

The cryptographic operations used in security protocols like data security and authentication will always impose a certain overhead on the amount of time required to process received data. Cautious balance must be maintained between the amount of security required in an application and its overhead. Starting from the random jamming/MAC flooding Denial of Service attacks we examine the possibility of mounting an attack that exploits the overhead required to authenticate received packets. The tests show a resilient protocol and a vulnerable one.

Robot tracking in low-power visual sensor networks

The paper addresses the problem of visual tracking in low-power visual sensor networks. Accurate real-time localization and energy efficiency are key issues in such applications. A novel approach for tracking and identification of robots using 1D barcodes is proposed. The nodes in the network perform visual processing and export processed information in form of robot codes and motion vectors. The central server can turn on/off processing on either node based on the received information. Furthermore, a novel LoRa-based low-power communication protocol is designed to provide the necessary bandwidth. The proposed system yields optimized node energy consumption, which we model mathematically and compare against the energy consumption of a system of independent cameras. The experimental results prove the correctness of the formulated model and demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach. The performance of the system is practically demonstrated on LoRa-enabled Raspberry Pi cameras.

Intercloud platform for connecting and managing heterogeneous services with applications for e-health

The paper focuses on the problem of interconnecting different cloud providers with the aim of offering enhanced services. The Intercloud scenario is based on the key concept that any cloud by itself does not have infinite natural resources or stable geographic location. The paper presents a distributed architecture for interconnecting existing cloud services, from different cloud providers (Firebase, Windows Azure, Parse), in order to achieve a scalable and flexible infrastructure. To validate the proposed solution an e-health prototype (both software and hardware) for monitoring a medical device (a pulse sensor) was built.

WSeH: Proposal for an adaptive monitoring framework for WSNs, with enhanced security and QoS support

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are highly distributed self-organized systems, the associated research being growing at a tremendous pace, and targeting various application domains. The successful implementation of such networks is dependent on the enabling technologies (such as digital electronics and wireless communications), as well as the provisioning of Quality of Service (QoS) and various security features in the networks. This paper focuses on the main characteristics and the current development status of the: management and monitoring, security and QoS topics, an overview of the recent progress being given. The paper examines and discusses the challenges of an adaptive monitoring framework (WSeH framework) with enhanced security and QoS support for WSNs, proposing a generic architecture and opening research issues.

Learning, self-scheduling TDMA (LeSS-TDMA) for wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes a novel approach for scheduling TDMA activity in a sensor network, where nodes create their own schedules by learning from previous activity, called LeSS-TDMA. The protocol uses routing information to establish a schedule appropriate for periodical data gathering, which is the main traffic type in sensor networks. The schedule is determined by examining patterns that arise from data being sent in an incipient CSMA/CA, RTS/CTS phase. No extra control packets are needed, as is the case with existing TDMA solutions, so the power consumption is reduced. Our tests show a high data throughput and fast schedule establishment, in treelike topologies with relatively small neighborhoods.

Interconnecting Heterogeneous Non-smart Medical Devices using a Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) Infrastructure

Smart hospitals enhanced through the Internet and related technologies with live monitoring and interconnected devices, using wired and wireless sensors, provide better health services for patients. However, legacy (non-smart) medical devices that are not able to communicate and to be managed by a smart hospital infrastructure are still in use. Patients’ data can be collected from a wide range of non-smart medical device. The paper introduces a novel concept, called WSNaaP (WSN as a platform) and a technical solution for interconnecting heterogeneous non-smart medical devices using an existing WSN infrastructure.

MArSSeNs: A modular architecture for the security of sensor networks

With wireless sensor networks (WSNs) reaching maturity, security is becoming a greater concern. Just like traditional networks benefit from SSL or IPSec, WSNs require a security architecture that prevents basic attacks to data privacy, authenticity and integrity. There are lots of disparate solutions for these problems but nothing to actually put them together into a robust architecture. This paper presents MArSSeNs, a modular architecture for the security of WSNs, which can provide transparent security individually to all the data streams and network layers of an application. It does not require any modification of the application logic but only to its structure. It facilitates security configuration, verification (through code reuse) and reduces the probability of code errors. The tests compare MArSSeNs, an unsecured application and one that implements the same security services but hard-coded. The results show minor overhead in processing time and power consumption.

A tool for evaluating event based middleware

Abstract Notifications services are the middleware that provides information dissemination and other important features upon which publish/subscribe systems rely. Several commercial products, open source and research projects implements notification services as distributed event brokers that considerably differ each other in features and QoS that they provide. Great research efforts are concentrated in areas related to information dissemination, efficient routing algorithms, optimal location of filters for advertisements and/or subscriptions, and various optimization of resources use, scalability, fail tolerance, etc. The own nature of the notification services as distributed, large scale, big amount of concurrent messages processed, etc., as well as the diversity and complexity of the facets involved in their implementations, impact negatively on the analysis and evaluation of their behavior while they are in execution. There exist few solutions that solve this problem but they are mainly proprietary and focus on single or only partial aspects of the behavior. We presume that our solution would significantly help to the research, development and tuning of these modern distributed systems. The main motivation of this thesis is to enable the analysis of notification services implemented as distributed event brokers while they are running. This work introduces a notification service-independent analysis framework in terms of design, implementation and prototype evaluation, which allows online behavior analysis based on streamed observations, metrics and visual representations of them.