Interconnected Infrastructure Research Articles

An Asymmetric, One-To-Many Traffic-Aware mm-Wave Wireless Interconnection Architecture for Multichip Systems

Platform based computing modules such as embedded systems and micro-servers are multichip systems with in-package memory and processing chips. Such systems consist of both one-to-one (unicast) and one-to-many (broadcast/ multicast) traffic patterns. State-of-the-art wired interconnection architectures such as Network-on-Chip (NoC) are specially designed to handle on-chip unicast traffic and cannot mask the high off-chip communication latency caused by the chip-to-chip I/Os in multichip systems. Moreover, with the increase in memory-intensive applications and hence one-to-many traffic in a multichip system, this scenario gets even worse as conventionally one-to-many traffic is handled as multiple unicast traffic in a multihop NoC infrastructure. Consequently, a small proportion of such one-to-many traffic increases energy consumption and message latency significantly for chip-to-chip communication. Therefore, to support such one-to-many traffic, these multichip systems with in-package memory need one-to-many traffic-aware interconnection infrastructure. To address these issues, we propose the design of one-to-many traffic-aware Wireless Network-in-Package (WiNiP) architecture by using a novel asymmetric WiNiP topology and a traffic-aware Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism. With cycle-accurate simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed WiNiP architecture reduces the energy consumption and latency up to 46.96 and 47.08 percent respectively for multichip data transfer compared to state-of-the-art wired NiPs for application-specific traffic.

Interconnected Infrastructure for Improving Reading Instruction

AbstractDrawing on the literature on infrastructure for implementing instructional improvement, the authors explain the role of three infrastructural pillars for reading instruction. They discuss how curriculum, professional development, and leadership are mutually supportive, thus illuminating the pillars for reading reform at the classroom, school, and system levels. The authors argue that it is crucial to attend to the alignment among the pillars (e.g., professional development on curriculum, leadership linked to coaching), as well as their feasibility and transparency.

“Someone will take care of it”. Households' understanding of their responsibility to prepare for and cope with electricity and ICT infrastructure breakdowns

Extensive infrastructure breakdowns are likely to become more frequent in the future as a result of continually complex and interconnected infrastructures vulnerable to weather and climate changes as well as intended attacks. By means of ethnographic interviews with households in Norway, this article examines their engagement in preparing for and coping with such breakdowns. It focusses on the division of responsibility between households, the authorities, and industry actors, and demonstrates that households do not believe they are responsible for preparedness, saw little advantage in contacting the authorities or industry actors, and chose to wait until someone handled the outage. However seemingly unprepared, households mobilised their social networks, used skills from previous experiences, local knowledge on infrastructure and weather, and material resources. Despite low engagement in the preparedness measures suggested by the authorities, we propose households to be considered key actors in societal preparedness by calling for greater attention to the socially shared practices households engage in that are not explicit preparedness actions, and for crisis management policies in the energy sector to provide the vehicles to mobilise household resources.

A Novel Virtual-Cluster Based Architecture of Double-Layer Optical Networks-on-Chip

Optical Networks-on-Chip (ONoCs) have been proposed as the most promising solution for on-chip multi-core processors interconnection infrastructure due to its low latency, low power dissipation, and high bandwidth density. In ONoCs, the mesh topology is a typical structure that is regarded as the one of the most primary choice in ONoCs design due to its regular structure, simplicity, and divinable scalability in terms of network performance and budget. However, mesh structure has low connectivity and high insertion loss and crosstalk noise, which severely reduce the energy efficiency and signal reliability. In this paper, we first propose a novel double-layer ONoCs structure based on a partition of Virtual-Cluster in mesh, named VCmesh, which contains two candidate communication modes: inter-cluster communication and non-cluster communication. Furthermore, we design the length-optimized-routing-protocol (LORP) to select the preferred with smaller number of hops. The analyses and simulation results indicate that the performance of the VCmesh network is better than that of the typical mesh structure, especially in terms of end-to-end (ETE) latency and throughput. In physical layer performance, the VCmesh has a higher signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR), which improves the transmission quality of the optical signal. In addition, compared with the typical mesh-based ONoCs, the VCmesh-based ONoCs reduce the minimum required laser output power for 16 nodes, 25 nodes, and 36 nodes by 52.4%, 85.6%, and 94.6%, respectively.

Towards Resilient Rotterdam? Key conditions for a networked approach to managing urban infrastructure risks

AbstractCritical infrastructures are increasingly recognized to be playing important roles in urban resilience theory and practice. However, little is known about which governance challenges result from making them an integral part of urban resilience policies and what role city administrations play or could play in the resulting governance arrangements. We address these shortcomings in the scholarly literature by analysing the case of the Dutch city of Rotterdam, which has positioned itself as a front runner with regard to urban resilience. We find that the city administration is limited in its authority and depends on decisions made by other public and private actors, particularly those relating to the integrated management of interconnected infrastructure networks such as those for water and energy provision. We therefore argue that institutionalizing resilience will strongly depend on city administrations’ institutional capacity to manage networks more effectively. For this, we derive key conditions for institutional adjustments in current governance arrangements. Necessary adjustments include redefining roles and responsibilities for cross‐territorial risk management, cross‐sectoral and cross‐departmental budgeting of resilience measures, and integrating local actions and measures with those at regional and national levels of government. Our conclusions call for national and supranational legal reforms to establish uniform procedural rules for urban risk management and contingency planning to provide guidance for municipalities on how to enhance the resilience of their cities and infrastructures.

Maximal Connectivity Test with Channel-Open Faults in On-Chip Communication Networks

The networks-on-chip (NoCs) as the prevalent interconnection infrastructure have been continuously replacing the contemporary chip microprocessors (CMPs) while high performance computing is the dominant consideration. Aggressive technology scaling progressively reduces the feature size of the chips resulting in increasing susceptibility to failures and breakdowns due to open faults on communication channels. The reliability and performance issues are then becoming more critical requirement in both current and future NoC-based CMPs. This paper first presents an on-line, distributed built-in-self-test (BIST) oriented test mechanism that particularly detects open faults on communication channels and identifies faulty wires from the channels in NoCs. Next, a suitable test scheduling scheme is presented in order to reduce the overall test time and related performance overhead due the fault. Such scheduling scheme makes the present test solution scalable with large scale NoC architectures in general. Implementation of the test mechanism takes little hardware area and few clocks to detect the fault in channels. The on-line evaluation of the proposed test solution demonstrates the effect of the channel-open faults on the NoC performance characteristics at large real like synthetic traffic. In comparison to wide range of prior works on 16-bit networks, the present scheme provides many advantages, e.g., it improves hardware area overhead by 35.36–67.73% and saves the test time by 96.43%. packet latency and energy consumption by 5.83–42.79% and 6.24–46.38%, respectively on the networks, the proposed scheme becomes competitive with the existing works.

INTEGRATED ENERGY SUPPLY SYSTEM WITH THE USE OF VENTILATION SYSTEMS


 
 
 The implementation of an integrated energy supply system is an effective way to increase energy efficiency, reduce CO2 emissions and increase the use of renewable energy, as well as provide opportunities for energy production, conversion and storage in interconnected infrastructures for energy system operators and consumers. Also, increasing the level of energy efficiency of the energy supply system is one of the important strategies to slow down the growth of demand and mitigate the negative impact on health, the economy and the environment. The article considers the integrated use of energy, the introduction of energy hubs as part of future energy networks and proposes a schematic diagram of an integrated energy supply system. The article presents the results of modeling and computational experiment of ventilation and air conditioning systems in the integrated power supply system, taking into account the technical and operational characteristics of SES, regulatory and technical documents and building codes. According to the results of the study, it is established that the schedule of SES generation and the schedule of electricity consumption by ventilation and air conditioning systems are similar, which leads to a reduction in operating costs and a reduction in the load on the building's power supply system. The scientific substantiation of the integration of the energy storage system into the energy supply structure has been further developed, which will ensure the reliability of the power supply and the efficiency of the solar power plant.
 
 

Characterizing Linux-based malware: Findings and recent trends

Malware targeting interconnected infrastructures has surged in recent years. A major factor driving this phenomenon is the proliferation of large networks of poorly secured IoT devices. This is exacerbated by the commoditization of the malware development industry, in which tools can be readily obtained in specialized hacking forums or underground markets. However, despite the great interest in targeting this infrastructure, there is little understanding of what the main features of this type of malware are, or the motives of the criminals behind it, apart from the classic denial of service attacks. This is vital to modern malware forensics, where analyses are required to measure the trustworthiness of files collected at large during an investigation, but also to confront challenges posed by tech-savvy criminals (e.g., Trojan Horse Defense). In this paper, we present a comprehensive characterization of Linux-based malware. Our study is tailored to IoT malware and it leverages automated techniques using both static and dynamic analysis to classify malware into related threats. By looking at the most representative dataset of Linux-based malware collected by the community to date, we are able to show that our system can accurately characterize known threats. As a key novelty, we use our system to investigate a number of threats unknown to the community. We do this in two steps. First, we identify known patterns within an unlabeled dataset using a classifier trained with the labeled dataset. Second, we combine our features with a custom distance function to discover new threats by clustering together similar samples. We further study each of the unknown clusters by using state-of-the-art reverse engineering and forensic techniques and our expertise as malware analysts. We provide an in-depth analysis of what the most recent unknown trends are through a number of case studies. Among other findings, we observe that: i) crypto-mining malware is permeating the IoT infrastructure, ii) the level of sophistication is increasing, and iii) there is a rapid proliferation of new variants with minimal investment in infrastructure.

One-shot learning technique regression of reconfigurable learning network for generative modeling in interconnected imaging infrastructure

Learning visual models of object classes conventionally require hundreds or a large number of training samples. Conventional gradient-based approaches for target recognition require lot of data to be trained on and require exhaustive training with high computational expense. Hence, when a new condition or untrained data is encountered, such systems inadequately misconfigure newly learned feature sets in the trained model. This misconfigures the structure of re-learned features and is then carried out in subsequent recognition stages. Thus, a development in this scenario with low training time will allow us to fend of this disadvantage. This study presents a new automatic target recognition framework that gives the enhanced performance of target-recognition system when several imaging sensors are connected with one another. This is in contrast with traditional automatic target recognition frameworks, which utilizes one-on-one computational model over synthetic-aperture radar image-processing systems. The work comprises of a learning-based classifications strategy when dealing with sharing of learned parameters over the network to discern critical changes in target-recognition performance by utilizing a novel one-shot learning-based reconfigurable learning network for image processing platform. This upgrades the networked connected CCTV and multiview synthetic-aperture radar image object identification and recognition process.

Key Problems of the Critical Information Infrastructure through Scada Systems Research

In the current age, cyber security is an essential element of any information system. A key aspect is in the critical information infrastructure, where information security has become a top priority for information and network security experts. The interoperability of an ICT infrastructure with other components of it is an important aspect of its life cycle. Because Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems form part of the critical infrastructure, their cyber protection is particularly important in strategically important industrial and infrastructure sites — power plants, refineries, oil pipelines, treatment plants, manufacturing facilities, communications and transportation infrastructures. Along with the advancement of technology, the increasing number of Scada devices available online, the vulnerability of the sectors controlled by them has also increased. In the world of Internet of things (everything), the end devices cause a new wave of possible vulnerabilities in SCADA. They become the new places for attacks and breaches trough wich the system may be accessed or even compromised. There are a number of critical infrastructures in the Community whose disruption or destruction would have significant cross-border implications for more than one sector as a result of the interdependence of interconnected infrastructures. Such European critical infrastructures have been established and launched under a common procedure developed by the European Commission, with security requirements assessed according to a common minimum approach.
 The present article exposes and examines the critical infrastructures of the European Union and Bulgaria. Trough presenting the structure of a Scada system the vulnerabilities and the various possibilities of attacking it were analised. As an example, a specific case based on trees has been considered, and the obtained results were summarized and visualized. The consequences were analized and respecctive conclusion was done.

Internet of Things Infrastructure for Security and Safety in Public Places

We present the technologies and the theoretical background of an intelligent interconnected infrastructure for public security and safety. The innovation of the framework lies in the intelligent combination of devices and human information towards human and situational awareness, so as to provide a protection and security environment for citizens. The framework is currently being used to support visitors in public spaces and events, by creating the appropriate infrastructure to address a set of urgent situations, such as health-related problems and missing children in overcrowded environments, supporting smart links between humans and entities on the basis of goals, and adapting device operation to comply with human objectives, profiles, and privacy. State-of-the-art technologies in the domain of IoT data collection and analytics are combined with localization techniques, ontologies, reasoning mechanisms, and data aggregation in order to acquire a better understanding of the ongoing situation and inform the necessary people and devices to act accordingly. Finally, we present the first results of people localization and the platforms’ ontology and representation framework.

Enhanced soft‐switching strategy for flyback‐based microinverter in PV power systems

Flyback topology has been widely used to construct modular power conversion for solar photovoltaic (PV) grid-tied systems, which creates a parallel interconnection infrastructure and is considered as the most straightforward way to cope with the harmful mismatch effects among PV modules. The challenge becomes the conversion efficiency and system reliability to be competitive with traditional system configurations. This study proposes a comprehensive solution to overcome the present problem, which optimally integrates the technology of resonant circuit, adaptive modulation scheme, and active clamping to enhance soft-switching capability and system efficiency. The effectiveness of theoretical analysis, circuit design, and modulation scheme is analysed by simulation and verified by experimental evaluation. The California Energy Commission efficiency is tested and shown as 97.4%.

A different way of thinking about seismic risk

Seismic risk has traditionally been approached using probabilistic analysis. This dilutes the potential impact of low probability, extreme events that may lead to severe consequences including excessive land damage, building damage, injuries and death. The communication of risk in probabilistic terms is also not clearly understood by most audiences. Further, it is evident that few building developers, owners and users have a good understanding the implications of this and the capacity design of buildings, which may not be repairable after a severe event.
 There is also an adverse impact on planning and land use, where decisions that may affect many people are based on a limited view of adverse outcomes such as liquefaction, lateral spread and slope stability in severe earthquakes.
 A different way of thinking about seismic risk is proposed. An approach of using scenarios derived from a combination of deterministic as well as probabilistic thinking would prompt consideration of impacts over a range of events. This would allow full consideration of which outcomes are clearly not acceptable and which are. This may facilitate planning for both private and public sector, with a common understanding that is relatively easily communicated to both experts and lay people.
 This risk evaluation framework would also facilitate consideration of mitigation, by bringing focus on unacceptable outcomes of severe events that are currently obscured by pure probabilistic analysis. This was missing in Christchurch, which experienced the sort of event we can readily anticipate and should actively plan for in other parts of New Zealand.
 This would help us avoid future red zones and excessive damage and demolition. It will inform development of building codes and standards and will help us evaluate risk and provide resilience and redundancy across the range of interconnected infrastructure networks.
 Informed debate is needed with key decision makers to discuss the underlying objectives of our regulation and how these may be better met by such an approach, without engineers allowing themselves to be trapped in past thinking and assumptions.

Combined Electricity and Traffic Short-Term Load Forecasting Using Bundled Causality Engine

Urban mobility is a multidimensional characteristic of cities experienced as layers of interconnected infrastructures, places, people, and information. Therefore, the study of networks such as electricity and transportation systems should go beyond an individual network and merge with other networks. This paper proposes the bundled causality engine as a novel information theory-based approach to characterize the causal dependency between flows of electricity and transportation networks. To validate this hypothesis, electricity load forecasting is performed by combining transportation network data with the smart meter data for the City of Tallahassee, FL, USA. The results show a considerable improvement in the short-term load forecasting accuracy at the household level.

Towards Resilient Civil Infrastructure Asset Management: An Information Elicitation and Analytical Framework

It is rather difficult for the stakeholders to understand and implement the resilience concept and principles in the infrastructure asset management paradigm, as it demands quality data, holistic information integration and competent data analytics capabilities to identify infrastructure vulnerabilities, evaluate and predict infrastructure adaptabilities to different hazards, as well as to make damage restoration and resilience improvement strategies and plans. To meet the stakeholder’s urgent needs, this paper proposes an information elicitation and analytical framework for resilient infrastructure asset management. The framework is devised by leveraging the best practices and processes of integrated infrastructure asset management and resilience management in the literature, synergizing the common elements and critical concepts of the two paradigms, ingesting the state-of-the-art interconnected infrastructure systems resilience analytical approaches, and eliciting expert judgments to iteratively improve the derived framework. To facilitate the stakeholders in implementing the framework, two use case studies are given in this paper, depicting the detailed workflow for information integration and resilience analytics in infrastructure asset management. The derived framework is expected to provide an operational basis to the quantitative resilience management of civil infrastructure assets, which could also be used to enhance community resilience.

Community resilience-driven restoration model for interdependent infrastructure networks

Critical interdependent infrastructure networks such as water distribution, natural gas pipeline, electricity power, communication and transportation systems provide the essential necessities for societies and their utilization is the backbone of everyday processes such as production, health, convenience and many more. Often cascading dysfunctionality or disruption in these critical infrastructure networks triggers chain reactions of blackouts or blockages through the system of highly interconnected infrastructure networks, and the disruption of surrounding societies. For the planning of restoration processes and resilience of these, social aspects and demographics should also be considered to assign and mitigate the possible social risks associated with these disruptions. In this work, we study the restoration planning of critical interdependent infrastructure networks after a possible disruptive event by mainly emphasizing on the vulnerability indices of interacting society. We integrate (i) a resilience-driven multi-objective mixed-integer programming formulation to schedule the restoration process of disrupted network components in each network with (ii) an index of social vulnerability that is geographically distributed. We present an illustrative example of the proposed integrated model that focuses on studying the community resilience in Shelby County, TN, United States.

Enabling residential hybrid water systems through a water credit–debit system

Abstract Smart metering and data analytics enable the implementation of a range of on-site infrastructures for energy, water and waste management to demonstrate the interconnected infrastructure of future smart cities. A research project in Western Australia is integrating smart metering technology, household participation and data analytics. An improved understanding of hybrid water systems at residential scale, as socially accepted solutions to promote water efficiency and economic savings, within the traditional centralized urban water network is achieved. An integrated water model and a system of water credits and debits are developed and tested on a case study for which 10-minute logged water consumption data of its hybrid water system are available for 1 year. The model is shown to provide a full characterization of the relationship between the household and the water resources, thus assisting with improved urban water management which promotes the rollout of decentralized hybrid water systems whilst accounting for the impacts on the aquifer as an ecosystem service provider.

Diffusive behavior of multiplex networks

Diffusion describes the motion of microscopic entities from regions of high concentration to regions of low concentration. In multiplex networks, flows can occur both within and across layers, and super-diffusion, a regime where the time scale of the multiplex to reach equilibrium is smaller than that of single networks in isolation, can emerge due to the interplay of these two mechanisms. In the limits of strong and weak inter-layer couplings multiplex diffusion has been linked to the spectrum of the supra-Laplacian associated to the system. However, a general theory for the emergence of this behavior is still lacking. Here we shed light on how the structural and dynamical features of the multiplex affect the Laplacian spectral properties. For instance, we find that super-diffusion emerges the earliest in systems with poorly diffusive layers, and that its onset is independent from the presence of overlap, which only influences the maximum relative intensity of the phenomenon. Moreover, a uniform allocation of resources to enhance diffusion within layers is preferable, as highly intra-layer heterogenous flows might hamper super-diffusion. Last, in multiplex networks formed by many layers, diffusion is best promoted by strengthening inter-layer flows across dissimilar layers. Our work can turn useful for the design of interconnected infrastructures in real-world transportation systems, clarifying the determinants able to drive the system towards the super-diffusive regime.

A physics-based framework for analyzing the resilience of interdependent civil infrastructure systems: A climatic extreme event case in Hong Kong

Operationalizing resilience concepts and principles, in particular when interdependency is considered, remains a major challenge for the sustainable development of urban infrastructures and future cities. From theoretical perspective, not only does it call for sector-specific infrastructure asset management knowledge, traditional risk-based disaster analysis and emergency management techniques, but it also demands quality data and stakeholders’ competency to holistically integrate the information and analyze the data. To address these limitations, this research provides a physics-based synthesis framework for interdependent civil infrastructure system resilience analysis. The framework consists of four major components: (i) setting resilience analysis boundary through the prescribed criteria; (ii) establishing an infrastructure resilience management lifecycle; (iii) defining the physics-based modeling of infrastructure system functions; and (iv) designing the interfaces between interdependent infrastructure systems. The feasibility and applicability of the proposed framework are tested through a case study involving two interconnected infrastructure systems (i.e. stormwater drainage system and road transport system) located in Hong Kong. It incorporates relevant infrastructure information by using the ArcGIS platform which is integrated with the physics-based vulnerability analysis methods from the two distinct knowledge domains. Cascading effects of adverse events propagating through the two infrastructures are delineated using an empirical nominal damage function.

Connected infrastructure location design under additive service utilities

An infrastructure system usually contains a number of inter-connected infrastructure links that connect users to services or products. Where to locate these infrastructure links is a challenging problem that largely determines the efficiency and quality of the network. This paper studies a new location design problem that aims to maximize the total weighted benefits between users and multiple services that are measured by the amount of connectivity between users and links in the network. This problem is investigated from both analytical and computational points of view. First, analytical properties of special cases of the problem are described. Next, two integer programming model formulations are presented for the general problem. We also test intuitive heuristics including greedy and interchange algorithms, and find that the interchange algorithm efficiently yields near-optimum solutions. Finally, a set of numerical examples demonstrate the proposed models and reveal interesting managerial insights. In particular, we found that a more distance-dependent utility measure and a higher concentration of users help achieve a better total utility. As the population becomes increasingly concentrated, the optimal link design evolves from a linear path to a cluster of links around the population center. As the budget level increases, the installed links gradually sprawl from the population center towards the periphery, and in the case of multiple population centers, they grow and eventually merge into one connected component.