Systems and Communications Commons^™

An Empirical Evaluation Of Communication Technologies And Quality Of Delivery Measurement In Networked Microgrids, Ruairí De Fréin, Yasin Emir Kutlu

Articles

Networked microgrids (NMG) are gaining popularity as an example of smartgrids (SG), where power networks are integrated with communication technologies. Communication technologies enable NMGs to be monitored and controlled via communication networks. However, ensuring that communication networks in NMGs satisfy quality of delivery (QoD) metrics such as the round trip time (RTT) of NMG control data is necessary. This paper addresses the communication network types and communication technologies used in NMGs. We present various NMG deployments to demonstrate real-life applicability in different contexts. We develop a real-time NMG testbed using real hardware such as Cisco 4331 Integrated Services Routers (ISR). …

Sustainable Mobility: Machine Learning-Driven Deployment Of Ev Charging Points In Dublin, Ruairí De Fréin, Alexander Mutiso Mutua Mr

Articles

Electric vehicle (EV) drivers in urban areas face range anxiety due to the fear of running out of charge without timely access to charging points (CPs). The lack of sufficient numbers of CPs has hindered EV adoption and negatively impacted the progress of sustainable mobility. We propose a CP distribution algorithm that is machine learning-based and leverages population density, points of interest (POIs), and the most used roads as input parameters to determine the best locations for deploying CPs. The objects of the following research are as follows: (1) to allocate weights to the three parameters in a $6$ km …

Energy Efficiency And Fault Tolerance In Open Ran And Future Internet, Saish Urumkar, Byrav Ramamurthy, Sachin Sharma

Conference papers

Open Radio Access Networks (Open RAN) repre- sent a promising technological advancement within the realm of the future internet. Research efforts are currently directed towards enhancing energy efficiency and fault tolerance, which are critical aspects for both Open RAN and the future internet landscape. In the context of energy saving in Open RAN, there exists a spectrum of methods for achieving energy efficiency. These methods include the toggling of on/off states for different hardware resources such as base station units, distributed units, and radio units. Conversely, for enhancing fault tolerance in Open RAN, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and OpenFlow based techniques …

Improving Energy Efficiency In Open Ran Through Dynamic Cpu Scheduling, Saish Urumkar, Byrav Ramamurthy, Sachin Sharma

Conference papers

Open RAN is a promising cellular technology that is currently undergoing extensive research for future wireless radio access networks. Achieving optimal energy efficiency in Open RAN poses a significant challenge. This paper introduces a CPU scheduling algorithm that specifically targets this chal- lenge by optimizing energy consumption at the base station while maintaining optimal performance levels. With the goal of minimizing energy consumption, the proposed algorithm dynamically adjusts the CPU core states, seamlessly switching between active and sleep modes based on the load conditions. To evaluate the algorithm’s effectiveness in terms of energy saving and performance, experimental testing is conducted …

Poster: Round Trip Time Measurement Over Microgrid Power Network, Yasin Emir Kutlu, Ruairí De Fréin, Malabika Basu, Ali Malik

Conference papers

A focus of the Power Systems and Networking communities is the design and deployment of Microgrid (MG) integration systems that ensure that quality of service targets are met for load sharing systems at different endpoints. This paper presents an integrated Microgrid testbed that allows Microgrids endpoints to share their current, voltage and power values using a Network Published Shared Variable (NPSV) approach. We present Round Trip Time (RTT) measurements for time sensitive Microgrid control traffic in the presence of varying background traffic as an example quality of service measurement. Numerical results are presented using a range of different background traffic …

Integrated Dc Microgrid Testbed For Qos Evaluation, Yasin Emir Kutlu, Ruairí De Fréin, Malabika Basu, Ali Malik

Conference papers

This poster describes the development of an integrated Direct Current (DC) Microgrid (MG) testbed, consisting of power system and computer networking hardware, e.g. Cisco 4331 Integrated Services Routers (ISR) and 500W AC/DC power supplies, to test the Quality of Service (QoS) of MG control packets which are delivered over Layer-2 and Layer-3 networking topologies. It facilitates an examination of control packets between MG end-points, that enable real-time power load sharing, in the presence of background computer network traffic such as video streaming. The effects of difference levels of background traffic on the round trip time of control packets are demonstrated.

Pvpbc: Privacy- And Verifiability-Preserving E-Voting Based On Permissioned Blockchain, Muntadher Sallal, Ruairí De Fréin, Ali Malik

Articles

Privacy and verifiability are crucial security requirements in e-voting systems and combining them is considered to be a challenge given that they seem to be contradictory. On one hand, privacy means that cast votes cannot be traced to the corresponding voters. On the other hand, linkability of voters and their votes is a requirement of verifiability which has the consequence that a voter is able to check their vote in the election result. These two contradictory features can be addressed by adopting privacy-preserving cryptographic primitives, which at the same time as achieving privacy, achieve verifiability. Many end-to-end schemes that support …

Exploiting Multimode Antennas For Mimo And Aoa Estimation In Size-Constrained Iot Devices, Abel Zandamela, Alessandro Chiumento Alessandro Chiumento, Alessandro Chiumento, Nicola Marchetti, Max Ammann, Adam Narbudowicz

Articles

This work proposes compact multimode Multiple-Input–Multiple-Output (MIMO) antennas for Angle of Arrival (AoA) estimation in miniaturized Internet of Things (IoT) systems. The method excites different orthogonal radiating modes (TM 21 , TM 02 , and TM 31 modes) for beamforming capabilities, and the AoA performance is investigated using the Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) algorithm, executed using numerical and experimental data. The technique is tested at 2.238GHz , while using an antenna diameter

Survey Of Routing Techniques-Based Optimization Of Energy Consumption In Sd-Dcn, Mohammed Nsaif, Gergely Kovásznai, Ali Malik, Ruairí De Fréin

Articles

The increasing power consumption of Data Center Networks (DCN) is becoming a major concern for network operators. The object of this paper is to provide a survey of state-of-the-art methods for reducing energy consumption via (1) enhanced scheduling and (2) enhanced aggregation of traffic flows using Software-Defined Networks (SDN), focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches. We tackle a gap in the literature for a review of SDN-based energy saving techniques and discuss the limitations of multi-controller solutions in terms of constraints on their performance. The main finding of this survey paper is that the two classes of …

Evaluating Large Delay Estimation Techniques For Assisted Living Environments, Swarnadeep Bagchi, Ruairí De Fréin

Articles

Abstract Phase wraparound due to large inter-sensor spacings in multi-channel demixing limits the range of relative delays that many time–frequency relative delay estimators can estimate. The performance of a large relative delay estimation method, called the elevatogram, is evaluated in the presence of significant phase wraparound. This paper compares the elevatogram with the popular relative delay estimator used in DUET and the brute-force approach in D-AdRess and analyses its computational efficiency. The elevatogram can accurately estimate relative delays of speech signals of up to 800 samples, whereas DUET and D-AdRess were limited to delays of 7 and 35 samples, given …

An Empirical Comparison Of The Security And Performance Characteristics Of Topology Formation Algorithms For Bitcoin Networks, Muntadher Sallal, Ruairí De Fréin, Ali Malik, Benjamin Aziz

Articles

There is an increasing demand for digital crypto-currencies to be more secure and robust to meet the following business requirements: (1) low transaction fees and (2) the privacy of users. Nowadays, Bitcoin is gaining traction and wide adoption. Many well-known businesses have begun accepting bitcoins as a means of making financial payments. However, the susceptibility of Bitcoin networks to information propagation delay, increases the vulnerability to attack of the Bitcoin network, and decreases its throughput performance. This paper introduces and critically analyses new network clustering methods, named Locality Based Clustering (LBC), Ping Time Based Approach (PTBC), Super Node Based Clustering …

Load-Adjusted Prediction For Proactive Resource Management And Video Server Demand Profiling, Obinna Izima, Ruairí De Fréin

Articles

To lower costs associated with providing cloud resources, a network manager would like to estimate how busy the servers will be in the near future. This is a necessary input in deciding whether to scale up or down computing requirements. We formulate the problem of estimating cloud computational requirements as an integrated framework comprising of a learning and an action stage. In the learning stage, we use Machine Learning (ML) models to predict the video Quality of Delivery (QoD) metric for cloud-hosted servers and use the knowledge gained from the process to make resource management decisions during the action stage. …

Soft-Mask De-Mixing For Anechoic Mixtures, Swarnadeep Bagchi, Ruairí De Fréin

Articles

This paper extends a computationally efficient, soft-mask based source separation (SS) technique called Redress, to anechoic mixing scenarios. SS methods are an integral part of hearing aid research. We call the resulting method D-Redress. In its original form, Redress was intended for instantaneous mixing scenarios. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that soft-mask based techniques reduce the level of artifacts in the separated speech. Monte Carlo trials on 1000 real speech mixtures demonstrate that the D-Redress successfully extends Redress in terms of Overall-Perceptual (OPS), Target-Perceptual (TPS) scores and Human-Ear Intelligibility (HEI).

Graph-Based Heuristic Solution For Placing Distributed Video Processing Applications On Moving Vehicle Clusters, Kanika Sharma, Bernard Butler, Brendan Jennings

Articles

Vehicular fog computing (VFC) is envisioned as an extension of cloud and mobile edge computing to utilize the rich sensing and processing resources available in vehicles. We focus on slow-moving cars that spend a significant time in urban traffic congestion as a potential pool of onboard sensors, video cameras, and processing capacity. For leveraging the dynamic network and processing resources, we utilize a stochastic mobility model to select nodes with similar mobility patterns. We then design two distributed applications that are scaled in real-time and placed as multiple instances on selected vehicular fog nodes. We handle the unstable vehicular environment …

Ml-Based Online Traffic Classification For Sdns, Mohammed Nsaif, Gergely Kovasznai, Mohammed Abboosh, Ali Malik, Ruairí De Fréin

Articles

Traffic classification is a crucial aspect for Software-Defined Networking functionalities. This paper is a part of an on-going project aiming at optimizing power consumption in the environment of software-defined datacenter networks. We have developed a novel routing strategy that can blindly balance between the power consumption and the quality of service for the incoming traffic flows. In this paper, we demonstrate how to classify the network traffic flows so that the quality of service of each flow-class can be guaranteed efficiently. This is achieved by creating a dataset that encompasses different types of network traffic such as video, VoIP, game …

Detecting Iot Attacks Using An Ensemble Machine Learning Model, Vikas Tomar, Sachin Sharma

Articles

Malicious attacks are becoming more prevalent due to the growing use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in homes, offices, transportation, healthcare, and other locations. By incorporating fog computing into IoT, attacks can be detected in a short amount of time, as the distance between IoT devices and fog devices is smaller than the distance between IoT devices and the cloud. Machine learning is frequently used for the detection of attacks due to the huge amount of data available from IoT devices. However, the problem is that fog devices may not have enough resources, such as processing power and memory, …

Measurement Of Orientation And Distance Change Using Circularly Polarized Uwb Signals, Janusz Przewocki, Max Ammann, Adam Narbudowicz

Articles

The article proposes methodology to use circularly polarized (CP) ultra-wideband (UWB) signals for simultaneous measurement of orientation and distance changes between transmitter and receiver. The proposed technique uses the rotational Doppler effect on CP pulsed communication. The amplitude of a CP signal is immune to polarization misalignment in the presence of rotation; however, the phase is subjected to a frequency-invariant shift proportional to the rotation angle. This significantly distorts the pulse shape in the time domain and can be used for the measurement of the rotated angle. By combining the technique with the well-known localization capability of UWB systems, one …

Rss-Based Indoor Localization System With Single Base Station, Samir Salem Al-Bawri, Mohammad Tariqul Islam, Mandeep Jit Singh, Mohd Faizal Jamlos, Adam Narbudowicz, Max Ammann, Dominique M.M.P. Schreurs

Articles

The paper proposes an Indoor Localization System (ILS) which uses only one fixed Base Station (BS) with simple non-reconfigurable antennas. The proposed algorithm measures Received Signal Strength (RSS) and maps it to the location in the room by estimating signal strength of a direct line of sight (LOS) signal and signal of the first order reflection from the wall. The algorithm is evaluated through both simulations and empirical measurements in a furnished open space office, sampling 21 different locations in the room. It is demonstrated the system can identify user’s real-time location with a maximum estimation error below 0.7 m …

Energy-Efficient Dynamic Directional Modulation With Electrically Small Antennas, Adam Narbudowicz, Abel Zandamela, Nicola Marchetti, Max Ammann

Articles

This letter proposes a compact and energy-efficient directional modulation scheme for small and power constrained devices (e.g., Internet of Things wireless sensors). The scheme uses a uniform circular array of monopole antennas, with a single radiofrequency chain and antenna active at a time. The antennas can be located in close proximity, offering significant size reduction. Furthermore, the schemewas demonstrated to operate successfully with an array of 0.6 λ diameter. The system does not generate additional artificial noise, limiting interference to other systems. Finally, the antenna switching sequence can be randomly generated and without fine-tuned synchronization with the transmitter.

Bayesian Adaptive Path Allocation Techniques For Intra-Datacenter Workloads, Ali Malik, Ruairí De Fréin, Chih-Heng Ke, Hasanen Alyasiri, Obinna Izima

Conference papers

Data center networks (DCNs) are the backbone of many cloud and Internet services. They are vulnerable to link failures, that occur on a daily basis, with a high frequency. Service disruption due to link failure may incur financial losses, compliance breaches and reputation damage. Performance metrics such as packet loss and routing flaps are negatively affected by these failure events. We propose a new Bayesian learning approach towards adaptive path allocation that aims to improve DCN performance by reducing both packet loss and routing flaps ratios. The proposed approach incorporates historical information about link failure and usage probabilities into its …

Grammatical Evolution For Detecting Cyberattacks In Internet Of Things Environments, Hasanen Alyasiri, John Clark, Ali Malik, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionising nearly every aspect of modern life, playing an ever greater role in both industrial and domestic sectors. The increasing frequency of cyber-incidents is a consequence of the pervasiveness of IoT. Threats are becoming more sophisticated, with attackers using new attacks or modifying existing ones. Security teams must deal with a diverse and complex threat landscape that is constantly evolving. Traditional security solutions cannot protect such sys- tems adequately and so researchers have begun to use Machine Learning algorithms to discover effective defence systems. In this paper, we investigate how one approach from the …

Virtual Network Function Embedding Under Nodal Outage Using Deep Q-Learning, Swarna Bindu Chetty, Hamed Ahmadi, Sachin Sharma, Avishek Nag

Articles

With the emergence of various types of applications such as delay-sensitive applications, future communication networks are expected to be increasingly complex and dynamic. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) provides the necessary support towards efficient management of such complex networks, by virtualizing network functions and placing them on shared commodity servers. However, one of the critical issues in NFV is the resource allocation for the highly complex services; moreover, this problem is classified as an NP-Hard problem. To solve this problem, our work investigates the potential of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) as a swift yet accurate approach (as compared to integer linear …

Near-Field Propagation Analysis For Vivaldi Antenna Design: Insight Into The Propagation Process For Optimizing The Directivity, Integrity Of Signal Transmission, And Efficiency, Ha Hoang, Matthias John, Patrick Mcevoy, Max Ammann

Articles

Refined optimization of complex curve–linear-shaped radiators, such as traveling-wave Vivaldi antennas, can be achieved by considering simulated near fields to interpret in detail the structural influences of a design. The relationships between the space and time distributions of electromagnetic (EM) energy clusters and the geometric features are revealed with appropriate use of impulse response analysis combined with the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm. This article reports a deeper approach when applied to the adjustment of the geometric features of a traveling-wave antenna based on an analysis of near-field propagation features.

A Two-Level Information Modelling Translation Methodology And Framework To Achieve Semantic Interoperability In Constrained Geoobservational Sensor Systems, Paul Stacey

Doctoral

As geographical observational data capture, storage and sharing technologies such as in situ remote monitoring systems and spatial data infrastructures evolve, the vision of a Digital Earth, first articulated by Al Gore in 1998 is getting ever closer. However, there are still many challenges and open research questions. For example, data quality, provenance and heterogeneity remain an issue due to the complexity of geo-spatial data and information representation.

Observational data are often inadequately semantically enriched by geo-observational information systems or spatial data infrastructures and so they often do not fully capture the true meaning of the associated datasets. Furthermore, data …

Power-Weighted Lpc Formant Estimation, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

A power-weighted formant frequency estimation procedure based on Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) is presented. It works by pre-emphasizing the dominant spectral components of an input signal, which allows a subsequent estimation step to extract formant frequencies with greater accuracy. The accuracy of traditional LPC formant estimation is improved by this new power-weighted formant estimator for different classes of synthetic signals and for speech. Power-weighted LPC significantly and reliably outperforms LPC and variants of LPC at the task of formant estimation using the VTR formants dataset, a database consisting of the Vocal Tract Resonance (VTR) frequency trajectories obtained by human experts …

Predicting Quality Of Delivery Metrics For Adaptive Video Codec Sessions, Obinna Izima, Ruairí De Fréin, Mark Davis

Conference papers

Predicting video quality will continue to be an active area of research given the dominance of video traffic for years to come. Network service practitioners that are poised to handle the strain on the existing limited bandwidth constraints are better placed to be SLA-compliant. The dynamic and time-varying nature of cloud-hosted services require improved techniques to realize accurate models of the systems. To address this challenge: (1) we propose Codec-aware Network Adaptation Agent (cNAA), an online light-weight data learning engine that achieves accurate and correct predictions of quality of delivery (QoD) metrics, namely jitter for video services. cNAA achieves this …

A Proactive-Restoration Technique For Sdns, Ali Malik, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

Failure incidents result in temporarily preventing the network from delivering services properly. Such a deterioration in services called service unavailability. The traditional fault management techniques, i.e. protection and restoration, are inevitably concerned with service unavailability due to the convergence time that is required to achieve the recovery when a failure occurs. However, with the global view feature of software-defined networking a failure prediction is becoming attainable, which in turn reduces the service interruptions that originated by failures. In this paper, we propose a proactive restoration technique that reconfigure the vulnerable routes which are likely to be affected if the …

Remedying Sound Source Separation Via Azimuth Discrimination And Re-Synthesis, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

Commercially recorded music since the 1950s has been mixed down from many input sound sources to a two-channel reproduction of these sources. The effect of this approach is to assign sources to locations in a stereo field using a pan-position for each source. The Adress algorithm is a popular way of extracting individual music sound sources from a stereo mixture. A drawback of the Adress algorithm is that when time-frequency components in the stereo mixture are shared between two or more sources, calculating the inter-aural intensity scaling parameter for each source for that time-frequency component is challenging. We show how …

Rapid Restoration Techniques For Software-Defined Networks, Ali Malik, Ruairí De Fréin, Benjamin Aziz

Articles

There is increasing demand in modern day business applications for communication networks to be robust and reliable due to the complexity and critical nature of such applications. As such, data delivery is expected to be reliable and secure even in the harshest of environments. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is gaining traction as a promising approach for designing network architectures which are robust and flexible. One reason for this is that separating the data plane from the control plane, increases the controller’s ability to configure the network rapidly. When network failure events occur, the network manager may trade-off the optimality of the …

Calibration To Mitigate Near-Field Antennas Effects For A Mimo Radar Imaging System, Ha Hoang, Matthias John, Patrick Mcevoy, Max Ammann

Articles

A calibration method for a high-resolution hybrid MIMO turntable radar imaging system is presented. A line of small metal spheres is employed as a test pattern in the calibration process to measure the position shift caused by undesired antenna effects. The unwanted effects in the antenna near-field responses are analysed, modelled and significantly mitigated based on the symmetry and differences in the responses of the MIMO configuration.