Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Testing Embedded System Applications, Tingting Yu

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Embedded systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, controlling a wide variety of popular and safety-critical devices. Testing is the most commonly used method for validating software systems, and effective testing techniques could be helpful for improving the dependability of these systems. However, there are challenges involved in developing such techniques. Embedded systems consist of layers of software – application layers utilize services provided by underlying system service and hardware support layers. A typical embedded application consists of multiple user tasks. Interactions between application layers and lower layers, and interactions between the various user tasks that are initiated by the application layer, …

Experimental Evaluation Of Transmission Link Characteristics In Body Area Networks, Apoorva Kiran Pandya

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Recent advances in digital electronics, embedded systems, and wireless communications have led the way to a new class of distributed Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). A Body Area Network (BAN) is a WSN consisting of miniaturized, low-power, autonomous, wireless biosensors, which are seamlessly placed or implanted in the human body to provide an adaptable and smart health care system. The possible applications of BAN are in health care services and medicine, assisting persons with disabilities, and entertainment and sports. The nodes in a BAN generally use IEEE 802.15.4 radios which have low- power consumption and are relatively immune to interference. In …

Tree-Based Algorithms For Computing K-Combinations And K-Compositions, Shant Karakashian, Berthe Y. Choueiry

CSE Technical Reports

In this document, we describe two tree-based algorithms for computing all k-combinations and k-compositions of a finite set.

We have developed two algorithms for solving the following combinatorial tasks:

• Given a finite set S and a natural number k, find all subsets of S of size k. In the literature, this problem is called k-subsets and k-combinations.

• Given two natural numbers k, n where k [less than or equal to] n, find all k-compositions of n where a k-composition is an ordered combination of k nonzero natural numbers whose sum is n. Note that in the literature, a …

Agent Sensing With Stateful Resources, Adam D. Eck

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In many real-world applications of multi-agent systems, agent reasoning suffers from bounded rationality caused by both limited resources and limited knowledge. When agent sensing also requires resource use, the agent’s knowledge revision is affected due to its inability to always sense when and as accurately as needed, further leading to poor decision making. In this research, we consider what happens when sensing activities require the use of stateful resources, which we define as resources whose state-dependent behavior changes over time based on usage. Specifically, sensing itself can change the state of a resource, and thus its behavior, which affects both …

Is Competition Making A Comeback? Discovering Methods To Keep Female Adolescents Engaged In Stem: A Phenomenological Approach, Kathryn B. Notter

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The decreasing number of women who are graduating in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields continues to be a major concern. Despite national support in the form of grants provided by National Science Foundation, National Center for Information and Technology and legislation passed such as the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 that encourages women to enter the STEM fields, the number of women actually graduating in these fields is surprisingly low. This research study focuses on a robotics competition and its ability to engage female adolescents in STEM curricula. Data have been collected to help explain why young …

Managing Large Data Sets Using Support Vector Machines, Ranjini Srinivas

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Hundreds of Terabytes of CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) data are being accumulated for storage day by day at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which is one of the eight US CMS Tier-2 sites. Managing this data includes retaining useful CMS data sets and clearing storage space for newly arriving data by deleting less useful data sets. This is an important task that is currently being done manually and it requires a large amount of time. The overall objective of this study was to develop a methodology to help identify the data sets to be deleted when there is a requirement for …

Simsight: A Virtual Machine Based Dynamic Call Graph Generator, Xueling Chen

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

One problem with using component-based software development approach is that once software modules are reused over generations of products, they form legacy structures that can be challenging to understand, making validating these systems difficult. Therefore, tools and methodologies that enable engineers to see interactions of these software modules will enhance their ability to make these software systems more dependable. To address this need, we propose SimSight, a framework to capture dynamic call graphs in Simics, a widely adopted commercial full-system simulator. Simics is a software system that simulates complete computer systems. Thus, it performs nearly identical tasks to …

Jvm-Based Techniques For Improving Java Observability, Peng Du

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Observability measures the support of computer systems to accurately capture, analyze, and present (collectively observe) the internal information about the systems. Observability frameworks play important roles for program understanding, troubleshooting, performance diagnosis, and optimizations. However, traditional solutions are either expensive or coarse-grained, consequently compromising their utility in accommodating today’s increasingly complex software systems. New solutions are emerging for VM-based languages due to the full control language VMs have over program executions. Existing such solutions, nonetheless, still lack flexibility, have high overhead, or provide limited context information for developing powerful dynamic analyses. In this thesis, we present a VM-based infrastructure, called …

A Framework For Automatically Repairing Gui Test Suites, Si Huang

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Testing is an effective means for assuring the quality of software. In programs with Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), event sequences serve as test cases for executing system tests. To aid in the test generation process, researchers have developed methods that automatically derive graph models from GUIs, which can then be traversed to create sequences for testing. Recent advances using these graph models incorporate combinatorial interaction testing sampling techniques to generate longer GUI test cases, which exercise more event interactions and have been shown to improve fault detection. However, because the models extracted are only approximations of the actual event interactions, …

A First Practical Algorithm For High Levels Of Relational Consistency, Shant Karakashian, Robert J. Woodward, Christopher Reesons, Berthe Y. Choueiry, Christian Bessiere

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Consistency properties and algorithms for achieving them are at the heart of the success of Constraint Programming. In this paper, we study the relational consistency property R(∗,m)C, which is equivalent to m-wise consistency proposed in relational databases. We also define wR(∗,m)C, a weaker variant of this property. We propose an algorithm for enforcing these properties on a Constraint Satisfaction Problem by tightening the existing relations and without introducing new ones. We empirically show that wR(∗,m)C solves in a backtrack-free manner all the instances of some CSP benchmark classes, thus hinting at the tractability of those classes.

Designing Software Product Lines For Testability, Isis Cabral

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Software product line (SPL) engineering offers several advantages in the development of families of software products such as reduced costs, high quality and a short time to market. A software product line is a set of software intensive systems, each of which shares a common core set of functionalities, but also differs from the other products through customization tailored to fit the needs of individual groups of customers. The differences between products within the family are well-understood and organized into a feature model that represents the variability of the SPL. Products can then be built by generating and composing features …

Analysis And Transformation Of Pipe-Like Web Mashups For End User Programmers, Kathryn T. Stolee

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Mashups are becoming increasingly popular as end users are able to easily access, manipulate, and compose data from several web sources. To support end users, communities are forming around mashup development environments that facilitate sharing code and knowledge. We have observed, however, that end user mashups tend to suffer from several deficiencies, such as inoperable components or references to invalid data sources, and that those deficiencies are often propagated through the rampant reuse in these end user communities.

In this work, we identify and specify ten code smells indicative of deficiencies we observed in a sample of 8,051 pipe-like web …

Automated Extraction Of Structures From Sketches Of Biological Specimens, Jamie J. Schirf

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The goal of this study was to develop automated techniques to extract biological structures from sketches of biological specimens. This will form the basis for a searchable database of information about the specimens. Having such a database enables researchers to efficiently search for specimens with particular qualities or identify unknown specimens.

After some preprocessing of the images, the important internal organs of the specimen are extracted using image analysis techniques. The shape, size, and organization of the organs are used to categorize and then to reorganize them in the image. Results using a large database of sketches of trematodes, in …

Rapport: Semantic-Sensitive Namespace Management In Large-Scale File Systems, Yu Hua, Hong Jiang, Yifeng Zhu, Dan Feng

CSE Technical Reports

Explosive growth in volume and complexity of data exacerbates the key challenge to effectively and efficiently manage data in a way that fundamentally improves the ease and efficacy of their use. Existing large-scale file systems rely on hierarchically structured namespace that leads to severe performance bottlenecks and renders it impossible to support real-time queries on multi-dimensional attributes. This paper proposes a novel semantic-sensitive scheme, called Rapport, to provide dynamic and adaptive namespace management and support complex queries. The basic idea is to build files’ namespace by utilizing their semantic correlation and exploiting dynamic evolution of attributes to support namespace management. …

Channel Characterization For Wireless Underground Sensor Networks, Agnelo R. Silva

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Wireless Underground Sensor Networks (WUSNs) are natural extensions of the established Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) phenomenon and consist of sensors buried underground which communicate through soil. WUSNs have the potential to impact a wide variety of applications including precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, border patrol, and infrastructure monitoring. The main difference between WUSNs and traditional wireless networks is the communication medium. However, a comprehensive wireless underground channel model for WUSNs has not been developed so far. In this thesis, the Soil Subsurface Wireless Communication (SSWC) channel model is developed based on an extensive empirical study in a large agriculture field. The …

Dsfs: Decentralized Security For Large Parallel File Systems, Zhongying Niu, Hong Jiang, Ke Zhou, Dan Feng, Tianming Yang, Dongliang Lei, Anli Chen

CSE Technical Reports

This paper describes DSFS, a decentralized security system for large parallel file system. DSFS stores global access control lists (ACLs) in a centralized decisionmaking server and pushes pre-authorization lists (PALs) into storage devices. Thus DSFS allows users to flexibly set any access control policy for the global ACL or even change the global ACL system without having to upgrade the security code in their storage devices. With pre-authorization lists, DSFS enables a networkattached storage device to immediately authorize I/O, instead of demanding a client to acquire an authorization from a centralized authorization server at a crucial time. The client needs …

Service-Differentiated And Reliable Communication In Event-Based Wireless Sensor Networks, Yuyan Xue

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of low-power embedded devices with integrated sensing, computing and wireless communication capabilities. These devices, called sensor nodes or motes, are often battery-powered and deployed in a distributed manner to provide observations on the physical world. Reliably and promptly collecting the sensing data to convey the features of a surveillance area, especially the events of interest, to the sink is one of the most critical requirements of WSN design. However, dynamic wireless channel conditions and the constrained energy resources make it a challenging task to provide the end-to-end performance guarantees in multi-hop WSNs.

The objective of …

New Integrated Data Analyses Software Components, Ronald Conze, Frank Krysiak, Josh Reed, Yu-Chung Chen, Hans-Joachim Wallrabe-Adams, Colin Graham, New Jersey Shallow Shelf Science Team, Volker Wennrich, Lake El’Gygytgyn Science Team

ANDRILL Research and Publications

Data management in scientific drilling programs such as the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP), and the Antarctic Drilling Program (ANDRILL) performs two functions: firstly, the capture of drilling and scientific data during an expedition, and secondly, the long-term storage and dissemination of these data. Here we describe the progress in linking data management with stand-alone data capture and visualization applications. This provides a two-way flow of data between the database and the applications, and a more integrated data environment for scientists. The new system has been tested, so far, with cores from the …

Coset: Cooperative Set Last Level Caches, Dongyuan Zhan, Hong Jiang, Sharad Seth

CSE Technical Reports

The speed gap between processors and DRAM remains a crit-ical performance bottleneck for contemporary computer systems, which necessitates an effective management of last level caches (LLC) to minimize expensive off-chip accesses. However, because all sets in a conventional set-associative cache design are statically assigned an equal number of blocks, the LLC capacity utilization can drastically diminish when the cache actually exhibits non-uniform capacity demands across the sets. To reveal the wide exis-tence of set-level non-uniformity of capacity demand in real appli-cations, this technical report first establishes an accurate metric for measuring individual sets’ capacity demands by developing a group of …

Mechanical Sensorless Maximum Power Tracking Control For Direct-Drive Pmsg Wind Turbines, Xu Yang, Xiang Gong, Wei Qiao

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Wind turbine generators (WTGs) are usually equipped with mechanical sensors to measure wind speed and rotor position for system control, monitoring, and protection. The use of mechanical sensors increases the cost and hardware complexity and reduces the reliability of the WTG systems. This paper proposes a mechanical sensorless maximum power tracking control for wind turbines directly driving permanent magnetic synchronous generators (PMSGs). In the proposed algorithm, the PMSG rotor position is estimated from the measured stator voltages and currents by using a sliding mode observer (SMO). The wind turbine shaft speed is estimated from the PMSG back electromotive force (EMF) …

Communication With Aboveground Devices In Wireless Underground Sensor Networks: An Empirical Study, Agnelo R. Silva, Mehmet C. Vuran

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Wireless Underground Sensor Networks (WUSNs) consist of wirelessly connected underground sensor nodes that communicate untethered through soil. WUSNs have the potential to impact a wide variety of novel applications including intelligent irrigation, environment monitoring, border patrol, and assisted navigation. Although its deployment is mainly based on underground sensor nodes, a WUSN still requires aboveground devices for data retrieval, management, and relay functionalities. Therefore, the characterization of the bi-directional communication between a buried node and an aboveground device is essential for the realization of WUSNs. In this work, empirical evaluations of underground-to-aboveground (UG2AG) and aboveground-to-underground (AG2UG) communication are presented. More specifically, …

A First Practical Algorithm For High Levels Of Relational Consistency, Shant Karakashian, Robert J. Woodward, Christopher Reeson, Berthe Y. Choueiry, Christian Bessiere

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

•Introduction

•Relational Consistency R(*,m)C :

–Definition, Naïve algorithm, Properties

•Preliminaries: Dual CSP

•Our Approach

–Algorithm

–Index-Tree Data Structure

–Advantages

•A weakened version of R(*,m)C: wR(*,m)C

•Experimental Evaluations

•Conclusions & Future Work

A First Practical Algorithm For High Levels Of Relational Consistency, Shant Karakashian, Robert J. Woodward, Christopher Reeson, Berthe Y. Choueiry, Christian Bessiere

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Consistency properties and algorithms for achieving them are at the heart of the success of Constraint Programming. In this paper, we study the relational consistency property R(*,m)C, which is equivalent to m-wise consistency proposed in relational databases. We also define wR(*,m)C, a weaker variant of this property. We propose an algorithm for enforcing these properties on a Constraint Satisfaction Problem by tightening the existing relations and without introducing new ones. We empirically show that wR(*,m)C solves in a backtrackfree manner all the instances of some CSP benchmark classes, thus hinting at the tractability …

A Partial Taxonomy Of Substitutability & Interchangeability, Shant Karakashian, Robert J. Woodward, Berthe Y. Choueiry, Steven D. Prestwich, Eugene C. Freuder

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

•Introduction

–Basic form & extensions

–Features & use

–Further developments

•Taxonomy using a partial order

–One example

•Relation to

–General forms of symmetry

–Symmetry breaking during search

•Future research & conclusions

A Partial Taxonomy Of Substitutability And Interchangeability, Shant Karakashian, Robert J. Woodward, Berthe Y. Choueiry, Steven D. Prestwich, Eugene C. Freuder

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Substitutability, interchangeability and related concepts in Constraint Programming were introduced approximately twenty years ago and have given rise to considerable subsequent research. We survey this work, classify, and relate the different concepts, and indicate directions for future work, in particular with respect to making connections with research into symmetry breaking. This paper is a condensed version of a larger work in progress.

A Unified Solution To Scan Test Volume, Time, And Power Minimization, Zhen Chen, Sharad C. Seth, Dong Xiang, Bhargab B. Bhattacharya

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

The double-tree scan-path architecture, originally proposed for low test power, is adapted to simultaneously reduce the test application time and test data volume under external testing. Experimental results show significant performance improvements over other existing scan architectures.

Linear Programming Models For Multi-Channel P2p Streaming Systems, Miao Wang, Lisong Xu, Byrav Ramamurthy

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Most of the commercial P2P video streaming deployments support hundreds of channels and are referred to as multichannel systems. Measurement studies show that bandwidth resources of different channels are highly unbalanced and thus recent research studies have proposed various protocols to improve the streaming qualities for all channels by enabling cross-channel cooperation among multiple channels. However, there is no general framework for comparing existing and potential designs for multi-channel P2P systems. The goal of this paper is to establish tractable models for answering the fundamental question in multi-channel system designs: Under what circumstances, should a particular design be used to …

Spatio-Temporal Soil Moisture Measurement With Wireless Underground Sensor Networks, Xin Dong, Mehmet C. Vuran

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

In this paper, the estimation distortion of distributed soil moisture measurement using Wireless Underground Sensor Networks (WUSNs) is investigated. The main focus of this paper is to analyze the impact of the environment and network parameters on the estimation distortion of the soil moisture.More specifically, the effects of rainfall, soil porosity, and vegetation root zone are investigated by exploiting a rainfall model, in addition to the effects of sampling rate, network topology, and measurement signal noise ratio. Spatio-temporal correlation is characterized to develop a measurement distortion model with respect to these factors. The evaluations reveal that with porous soil and …

Cost Efficiency Of Anycast-Based Forwarding In Duty-Cycled Wsns With Lossy Channel, Yuyan Xue, Mehmet C. Vuran, Byrav Ramamurthy

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Anycasting has been proposed recently as an efficient communication method for asynchronous duty-cycled wireless sensor networks. However, the interdependencies between end-toend communication cost and the anycasting design parameters have not been systematically studied. In this paper, a statistical endtoend cost model is presented to capture the end-to-end latency and energy consumption of anycasting operation under a realistic wireless channel model. By exploring the relationship between the end-to-end cost efficiency and the forwarding decision dependent anycasting design parameters, two anycasting forwarding metrics are proposed for fully distributed forwarding decision. By exploring the relationship among the preamble length, the size of the …

Stochastic Analysis Of Energy Consumption In Wireless Sensor Networks, Yunbo Wang, Mehmet C. Vuran, Steve Goddard

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Limited energy resources in increasingly sophisticated wireless sensor networks (WSNs) call for a comprehensive crosslayer analysis of energy consumption in a multi-hop network. For reliability analysis in such networks, the statistical information about energy consumption and lifetime is required. However, traditional energy analysis approaches only focus on the average energy consumed. In this paper, instead, we provide a stochastic analysis of the energy consumption in a random network environment. Accordingly, a comprehensive cross-layer analysis framework, which employs a stochastic queueing model, is developed. Using this framework, the distribution of energy consumption for nodes in WSNs during a given time period …