Internet Communication Engine Research Articles

Pre-Earthquake Ionospheric Anomalies of the Wenchuan Earthquake Studied with DEMETER Satellite

The pre-earthquake ionospheric anomalies in Wenchuan, China (21°-41°N, 93°-113°E) are studied and analyzed using the summer nighttime data from 2005 to 2008 measured by DEMETER (Detection of Electro-Magnetic Emission Transmitted from Earthquake Regions) satellite detectors ICE (Internet Communications Engine), IAP (In Application Programming), and ISL (Interior Switching Link). In this paper, we take the 12 May 2008 Wenchuan earthquake as an example, use the spatial gridding method to construct the background field over the epicenter, analyze the background characteristics of very low frequency (VLF) electric field components, low-energy particle parameters, and plasma parameters, and define the perturbation intensity index of each parameter before the earthquake to extract each parameter anomaly in both space and time dimensions. The results show that the background values of some ionospheric parameters in the Wenchuan area are related to spatial distribution. Moreover, anomalous enhancement of low-frequency electric field power spectral density, H+ concentration, He+ concentration and ion concentration with different intensities and anomalous weakening of ion temperature were extracted in the fifteen days before the Wenchuan earthquake. After filtering the data to exclude external interference, such as solar activity, this paper concludes that there is some connection between these anomalies and the Wenchuan earthquake.

Measuring performance of middleware technologies for medical systems

After decades of design, development and usage of distributed application technologies, there are numerous communication middleware architectures and implementations in the market that have reached a considerable maturity level. A large number of them are open source initiatives that have shown efficiency and good performance in a broad range of domains, from banking to gaming. These are low cost solutions, easily programmable and of high interest to be explored in areas such as cyber-physical medical systems that have special requirements for safety, availability, communication latency, real-time operation, and fault tolerance. This paper analyzes the suitability of two open source communication middleware technologies, Ice (Internet Communication Engine) and AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol), as software elements suitable for developing audio transmission and reception systems for low cost medical applications. The paper simulates an audio application with both technologies, made of a server (nurse central) that receives and processes audio media from several clients (patients); communication can be triggered concurrent from multiple patients and in both directions. Stress tests with high load conditions are simulated in the experiments to show the behavior of both technologies mainly with respect to their stability and overhead.

Design and Implementation of A-SMGCS Based on ICE

This paper aims at the problems of safety and efficiency of airport, designs and implements an Advanced Surface Movement Guidance and Control System (A-SMGCS) terminal, discusses the goals and key technologies about the system, including communication module design based on Internet Communications Engine, cache design of aircraft targets, and efficiency improvement of a large number of targets on the aerodrome. Finally, we give the test and conclusions of the system at a international airport in China.

An integrated metadata access infrastructure for a network of federated curated data repositories

Purpose – This paper aims to study integrated metadata access infrastructure for a network of federated curated data repositories. With the increase in collaborative initiatives among diverse scientific discipline, infrastructure should be in place to facilitate effective information sharing. Scientific data sharing involves provisioning, curation and dissemination of information about the various datasets for discovery and access by other peers, which is achieved using metadata services. The heterogeneous nature of various distributed dataset repositories has resulted in the use of heterogeneous metadata services. This poses some challenges in efficient dataset sharing and information retrieval. To allow for universal accessibility of these autonomous curated data repositories, it is important to establish cross-integration on these data repositories for information sharing. Design/methodology/approach – The authors address this problem through provisioning of a universal metadata interface design that can be integrated with some popular metadata services such as integrated rule-oriented data system (iRODS), OpenDap/THREDDS and MERCURY. Given a network of federated heterogeneous distributed metadata services over autonomous curated data repositories, the authors present an implementation of a universal interface system that can probe and query different metadata databases to access the essential information provided for data discovery and enable data migration. Findings – The authors present the architecture that integrates and allows communication between our interface and the various autonomous data repositories. The authors show how they can integrate their system with THREDDS and iRODS to accomplish data discovery and access operations without altering the implementations of the metadata services at their remote locations. Originality/value – Their system provides unique architecture for information discovery and metadata searches which employs the application programming interfaces for the respective metadata services and communicates using the Zero C Internet communication engine (ICE) protocol.

A DAQ processing system for the KM3NeT shore station

The framework for the KM3NeT shore DAQ system is based on the Internet Communications Engine, ICE. The task of the system includes control, data acquisition and processing, pre-selection of events for storage and further processing and on-line monitoring of the KM3NeT neutrino telescope. We describe the overall shore DAQ system and discuss in particular the processing, storing and monitoring tasks. We present our experience with implementations for the DAQ systems which have been built to support the foreseen demonstrator of the KM3NeT shore station.

Performance Comparison of ICE, HORB, CORBA and Dot NET Remoting Middleware Technologies

Distributed computing systems are designed to solve computationally intensive problems with the help of convergence of computing resources scattered across the network. Distributed computing object middleware technologies have bring revolutionary concepts in the world of distributed computing and also made the building of distributed computing applications more efficient and nearer to real world. But the selection of most efficient distributed computing object middleware technology on the basis of different performance metrics is an important research issue. In this paper we are presenting the performance evaluation and comparison of distributed computing object middleware technologies which include Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Internet Communication Engine (ICE), HORB, and TCP based Dot NET Remoting. Because these distributed computing object middleware technologies have not been evaluated and compared collectively on the basis of performance metrics which include overhead generation and round trip latency. The results that we have gathered showed that ICE is showing better performance in terms of overhead generation. And HORB has showed reduced round trip latency as compared to other middleware’s.

A Surgical Assistant Workstation (SAW) Application for Teleoperated Surgical Robot System

The Surgical Assistant Workstation (SAW) modular software framework provides integrated support for robotic devices, imaging sensors, and a visualization pipeline for rapid prototyping of telesurgical research systems. Subsystems of a telesurgical system, such as the master and slave robots and the visualization engine, form a distributed environment that requires an efficient inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism. This paper describes the extension of the component-based framework provided by the cisst libraries, on which the SAW depends, from a multi-threaded (local) to a multi-process (networked) environment. The current implementation uses the Internet Communication Engine (ICE) middleware package, but the design does not depend on ICE and can accomodate other middleware choices. A telesurgical robot system based on the da Vinci hardware platform is used as a test case, with a research application that requires coordination between the left and right robot arms (a bimanual knot tying task). Performance measurements on this platform indicate minimal overhead due to the networking.

NETWORK DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENT FOR MACHINING OPERATIONS IN SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES

AbstractSmall and medium enterprises (SME's) have similar characteristics in developing countries. They have facilities for their administration but limited resources in manufacturing technology. In an environment in which market dynamics and production patterns are changing, enterprises try to improve their performance related to the production velocity of manufactured items with reduced costs in their operations. Under this scenario, SMEs need low cost manufacturing automation in order to be able to compete. This paper describes an architecture that allows the integration of engineering applications on a network, with emphasis in machining functions. The proposed approach is based on the Internet Communications Engine (ICE) technology for machining applications integration.