Low-level Communication Research Articles

TWO-LEVEL CONCEPT FOR SIMULATING UNIFORM INTERFERENCE-RESISTANT DIGITAL DATA TRANSMISSION

The article formalizes, creates and provides for consideration the concept of a single secure interference-resistant data transmission channel. In modern cybersecurity theory and practice, there is the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which is a set of recommendations for reducing risks for organizations. In order for high-level data to be secure, there are requirements for the SIA triad, namely confidentiality, integrity and availability of information. Therefore, in the future, the expediency of the work and its result will directly depend on the satisfaction of the SIA conditions. As you know, high-level data: such as e-mail, visual data in the GUI of various applications, etc., are transmitted over low-level communication channels: such as cables, wireless radio communication channels, and others. At each of the levels for safe transmission of information, there are specific pests. At high levels, the main threat to information is man and the human factor. The lower the level of information transmission becomes, the more nature, natural obstacles and random short phenomena begin to influence. In order for the user to be able to use various devices without a threat to the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information, it is necessary to actively and continuously develop, improve and improve the existing methods of data protection, restoration, transmission and storage. Each aspect in this struggle for security is both an advantage and a disadvantage: excessive security is not appropriate for mass traffic, complexity does not always provide adequate security, and so on. Therefore, the optimality and expediency of the methods used becomes an important factor. For these reasons, the paper proposes a relatively simple, but no less effective approach to maintaining SIA requirements.

Enabling Time-Synchronized Hybrid Networks With Low-Cost IoT Modules

Precisely synchronized communication is a major precondition for many industrial applications. At the same time, hardware cost and power consumption need to be kept as low as possible in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm. While many wired solutions on the market achieve these requirements, wireless alternatives are an interesting field for research and development. This paper presents a novel IEEE802.11n/ac wireless solution, exhibiting several advantages over state-of-the-art competitors. It is based on a market-available wireless System on a Chip with modified low-level communication firmware combined with a low-cost field-programmable gate array. By achieving sub-microsecond synchronization accuracy, our solution outperforms the precision of low-cost products by almost four orders of magnitude. Based on inexpensive hardware, the presented wireless module is up to 20 times cheaper than Software-Defined-Radio solutions with comparable timing accuracy. Moreover, it consumes three to five times less power. To back up our claims, we report data that we collected with a high sampling rate (2000 samples per second) during an extended measurement campaign of more than 120 hours, which makes our experimental results far more representative than others reported in the literature. Additional support is provided by the size of the testbed we used during the experiments, composed of a hybrid network with nine nodes divided into two independent wireless segments connected by a wired backbone. In conclusion, we believe that our novel Industrial IoT module architecture will have a significant impact on the future technological development of high-precision time-synchronized communication for the cost-sensitive industrial IoT market.

A Survey of Graph Comparison Methods with Applications to Nondeterminism in High-Performance Computing

The convergence of extremely high levels of hardware concurrency and the effective overlap of computation and communication in asynchronous executions has resulted in increasing nondeterminism in High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Nondeterminism can manifest at multiple levels: from low-level communication primitives to libraries to application-level functions. No matter its source, nondeterminism can drastically increase the cost of result reproducibility, debugging workflows, testing parallel programs, or ensuring fault-tolerance. Nondeterministic executions of HPC applications can be modeled as event graphs, and the applications’ nondeterministic behavior can be understood and, in some cases, mitigated using graph comparison algorithms. However, a connection between graph comparison algorithms and approaches to understanding nondeterminism in HPC still needs to be established. This survey article moves the first steps toward establishing a connection between graph comparison algorithms and nondeterminism in HPC with its three contributions: it provides a survey of different graph comparison algorithms and a timeline for each category’s significant works; it discusses how existing graph comparison methods do not fully support properties needed to understand nondeterministic patterns in HPC applications; and it presents the open challenges that should be addressed to leverage the power of graph comparisons for the study of nondeterminism in HPC applications.

Assessing the usefulness of a visual programming IDE for large-scale automation software

Industrial control applications are usually designed by domain experts instead of software engineers. These experts frequently use visual programming languages based on standards such as IEC 61131-3 and IEC 61499. The standards apply model-based engineering concepts to abstract from hardware and low-level communication. Developing industrial control software is challenging due to the fact that control systems are usually unique and need to be maintained for many years. The arising challenges, together with the growing complexity of control software, require very usable model-based development environments for visual programming languages. However, so far only little empirical research exists on the practical usefulness of such environments, i.e., their usability and utility. In this paper, we discuss common control software maintenance tasks and tool capabilities based on existing research and show the realization of these capabilities in the 4diac IDE. We performed a walkthrough of the demonstrated capabilities using the cognitive dimensions of notations framework from the field of human–computer interaction. We then improved the tool and conducted a user study involving ten industrial automation engineers, who used the 4diac IDE in a realistic control software maintenance scenario. Based on lessons learnt from this study, we adapted the 4diac IDE to better handle large graphical models. We evaluated these changes in a reassessment study with automation engineers from seven industrial enterprises. We derive general implications with respect to large-scale applications for developers of IDEs that we deem applicable in the context of (visual) model-based engineering tools.

A study to assess the communication and level of anxiety among mechanically ventilated conscious patients in intensive care units of sree mookambika medical college hospital at kanyakumari district

Mechanical Ventilation is widely used to treat patients who are in critical condition. The aim of using mechanical ventilation is to protect the patient's lungs by providing ventilation until the underlying causes are eliminated. Although the use of assisted ventilation devices has unique benefits for patients, it also causes stress, sleep disturbance, isolation, and prevents them from communicating verbally. The primary objective of the study was to assess the communication and level of anxiety among patients on mechanical ventilators admitted to the ICUs. The secondary objective of the study was to determine the association between communication and level of anxiety with the selected demographic variables. A non-experimental descriptive research design was used in this study. The study was conducted at Sree Mookambika Medical College Hospital, Kulasekharam, Tamil Nadu, India. 30 samples were selected using the convenience sampling technique. The tools used for the data collection were demographic variables, clinical variables, communication scales, and hospital anxiety and depression scales. Findings of the study show that 10% of the sample has medium-level communication difficulties, and 90% of the sample has low-level communication difficulties. 10% of the sample has moderate-level anxiety, and 90% of the sample has severe anxiety. There is a significant association between the level of communication, demographic variables such as source of finance, and clinical variables such as history of previous hospitalization. There is a significant association between the level of anxiety, demographic variables such as gender, and clinical variables, such as duration of ventilator support.

Notes to the Financial Statements: Current State and Improvement

Abstract Background: Prior studies have revealed a disclosure problem in financial statements, primarily in narrative reports. Three main problem areas have been identified: insufficient relevant information, too much irrelevant information, and low-level communication. Micro and small entities face the most difficulties. Objectives: The main objective of this research is to propose a solution to existing disclosure problems to contribute towards improving the quality of financial reporting of smaller entities. Methods/Approach: To improve the reporting model for smaller entities, a survey has been conducted using a structured questionnaire on a sample of non-financial entities registered in Croatia. Based on results interpretations, standardized notes have been proposed. Results: 167 respondents have shared their thoughts about current disclosure issues and possible improvements, showing their awareness of disclosure problems and willingness for change. Given their opinions, the proposal has been made. Conclusions: The main contribution of the paper is the creation of a proposal for standardized, integrated, and digitalized notes to the financial statements based on the principle of materiality, primarily addressed to micro but also small entities from the non-financial sector. The paper extends previous proposals which did not focus on their structure and digitalization.

Distributed Intelligence in the Internet of Things: Challenges and Opportunities

Widespread adoption of smart IoT devices is accelerating research for new techniques to make IoT applications secure, scalable, energy-efficient, and capable of working in mission-critical use cases, which require an ability to function offline. In this context, the novel combination of distributed ledger technology (DLT) and distributed intelligence (DI) is seen as a practical route towards the decentralisation of IoT architectures. This paper surveys DI techniques in IoT and commences by briefly explaining the need for DI, by proposing a comprehensive taxonomy of DI in IoT. This taxonomy is then used to review existing techniques and to investigate current challenges that require careful attention and consideration. Based on the taxonomy, IoT DI techniques can be classified into five categories based on the factors that support distributed functionality and data acquisition: cloud-computing, mist-computing, distributed-ledger-technology, service-oriented-computing and hybrid. Existing techniques are compared and categorized mainly based on related challenges, and the level of intelligence supported. We evaluate more than thirty current research efforts in this area. We define many significant functionalities that should be supported by DI frameworks and solutions. Our work assists system architects and developers to select the correct low-level communication techniques in an integrated IoT-to-DLT-to-cloud system architecture. The benefits and shortcomings of different DI approaches are presented, which will inspire future work into automatic hybridization and adaptation of DI mechanisms. Finally, open research issues for distributed intelligence in IoT are discussed.

Assessing Insider Attacks and Privacy Leakage in Managed IoT Systems for Residential Prosumers

The transition towards the massive penetration of Renewable Energy Resources (RESs) into the electricity system requires the implementation of the Smart Grid (SG) paradigm with innovative control systems and equipment. In this new context, Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), including renewable sources and responsive loads, should be redesigned to enable aggregators to provide ancillary services. In fact, by using the Internet of Things (IoT) systems, aggregators can explore energy usage patterns from residential users, also known as prosumers and predict their services. This is undoubtedly important especially for SGs facing the presence of several RESs, where understanding the optimal match between demand and production is desirable from several points of view. However, revealing energy patterns and information can be of concern for privacy if the entire system is not properly designed. In this article, by assuming that the security of low-level communication protocols is guaranteed, we focus our attention at higher levels, in particular at the application level of managed IoT systems used by aggregators. In this regard, we provide an overview of the best practices and outline possible privacy leakages risks along with a list of correlated attacks.

Modelling Multimodal Dialogues for Social Robots Using Communicative Acts.

Social Robots need to communicate in a way that feels natural to humans if they are to effectively bond with the users and provide an engaging interaction. Inline with this natural, effective communication, robots need to perceive and manage multimodal information, both as input and output, and respond accordingly. Consequently, dialogue design is a key factor in creating an engaging multimodal interaction. These dialogues need to be flexible enough to adapt to unforeseen circumstances that arise during the conversation but should also be easy to create, so the development of new applications gets simpler. In this work, we present our approach to dialogue modelling based on basic atomic interaction units called Communicative Acts. They manage basic interactions considering who has the initiative (the robot or the user), and what is his/her intention. The two possible intentions are either ask for information or give information. In addition, because we focus on one-to-one interactions, the initiative can only be taken by the robot or the user. Communicative Acts can be parametrised and combined in a hierarchical manner to fulfil the needs of the robot’s applications, and they have been equipped with built-in functionalities that are in charge of low-level communication tasks. These tasks include communication error handling, turn-taking or user disengagement. This system has been integrated in Mini, a social robot that has been created to assist older adults with cognitive impairment. In a case of use, we demonstrate the operation of our system as well as its performance in real human–robot interactions.

Low Frequency Injection as a Method of Low-Level DC Microgrid Communication

This paper provides a simple low-level unidirectional global communication method for DC microgrids, and requires no hardware modifications to the microgrid and interfacing power electronic converters. The underlying premise to this communication method is injecting low-frequency low-voltage sinusoidal components into the DC microgrid power lines. This method deviates from the common bit-level communication scheme by relating parameters and commands with certain frequency components. Communication structures are included as a basis for communication protocols, and a detection method is proposed for detecting the injected frequencies. The injection method, communication structure, and detection method are implemented on a live-scale DC microgrid.

Integration of custom DAQ Electronics in a SCADA Framework

LHCb is one of the 4 experiments at the LHC accelerator at CERN. During the upgrade phase of the experiment, several new electronic boards and Front End chips that perform the data acquisition for the experiment will be added by the different sub-detectors. These new devices will be controlled and monitored via a system composed of GigaBit Transceiver (GBT) chips that manage the bi-directional slow control traffic to the Slow Control Adapter(s) (SCA) chips. The SCA chips provide multiple field buses to interface the new electronics devices (I2C, GPIO, etc). These devices will need to be integrated in the Experiment Control System (ECS) that drives LHCb. A set of tools was developed that provide an easy integration of the control and monitoring of the devices in the ECS. A server (GbtServ) provides the low level communication layer with the devices via the several user buses in the GBT-SCA chip and exposes an interface for control to the experiment SCADA (WinCC OA), the fwGbt component provides the interface between the SCADA and the GbtServ and the fwHw component, a tool that allows the abstraction of the devices models into the ECS. Using the graphical User Interfaces or XML files describing the structure and registers of the devices it creates the necessary model of the hardware as a data structure in the SCADA. It allows then the control and monitoring of the defined registers using their name, without the need to know the details of the hardware behind. The fwHw tool also provides the facility of defining and applying recipes named sets of configurations which can be used to easily configure the hardware according to specific needs.

Introduction to the Computation Offloading from Mobile Devices to the Edge of Mobile Network

This paper introduces the concept of Small Cell Cloud (SCC) composed of multiple Cloud-enabled Small Cells (CeSCs), which provide radio connection for mobile User Equipment (UE) such as smart-phones or wearables such as smart glasses. Moreover, CeSCs host computations offloaded from UEs in a way similar to centralized cloud, yet different in its proximity to users. Proposed client-server architecture of SCC conveys mechanisms for moving offloaded computations from the UEs to CeSCs. Real-life implementation of the SCC architecture relies on custom-developed Offloading Framework which is responsible for low-level communication between the UE and the SCC. The Offloading Framework is accompanied by an Augmented Reality (AR) app, which employs intensive computations for discovery of places of interest. Such app is latency-sensitive, a~criterion which makes computation offloading beneficial due to its ability to decrease latency. The combination of the Offloading Framework and the AR app makes up an SCC testbed used for further performance evaluation. Numerous measurements are carried out to examine the impact of various parameters. Based on Proof-of-concept implementation and thorough measurements, it has been revealed that computation offloading can decrease overall latency as much as to 47% and energy consumption on the UE side to 56%.

Development of Applications for Humanoid Robots Using Multiple Platforms, Tools, and Cloud Data Sharing

This paper describes the procedure followed for using third-party tools and applications, avoiding the development of complex communication software modules for data sharing. A common practice in robotics is the use of middlewares to interconnect different software applications, hardware components, or even complete systems. It allows code and tool reuse minimizing the development effort. In this way, applications developed for one middleware can be shared with others by means of establishing communication bridges among them. The most extended procedure is the development of software modules that use the low-level communication resources that middlewares provide. This procedure has many advantages but a clear disadvantage: the complexity of development. The procedure proposed is based on the use of cloud technologies for data sharing without the development of middleware bridges. The way of inter-relate different middlewares is by means of the development of a compatible robot model. This procedure has enabled the use of the ArmarX middleware tools and the application of the results obtained to the humanoid robot TEO, that uses the YARP middleware, in an easy and fast way.

Parallel selection on GPUs

We present a novel parallel selection algorithm for GPUs capable of handling single rank selection (single selection) and multiple rank selection (multiselection). The algorithm requires no assumptions on the input data distribution, and has a much lower recursion depth compared to many state-of-the-art algorithms. We implement the algorithm for different GPU generations, always leveraging the respectively-available low-level communication features, and assess the performance on server-line hardware. The computational complexity of our SampleSelect algorithm is comparable to specialized algorithms designed for – and exploiting the characteristics of – “pleasant” data distributions. At the same time, as the proposed SampleSelect algorithm does not work on the actual element values but on the element ranks of the elements only, it is robust to the input data and can complete significantly faster for adversarial data distributions. We also address the use case of approximate selection by designing a variant that radically reduces the computational cost while preserving high approximation accuracy.

Mitigating network-layer security attacks on authentication-enhanced openICE

Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) is a standardized framework for achieving medical device interoperability. It utilizes high-level supervisory and medical apps and low-level communication middle-ware to coordinate medical devices to accomplish a shared clinical mission. With the potential to significantly improve healthcare productivity and reduce medical errors, the interoperability of medical devices also subjects ICE systems to unprecedented security threats. In this paper, we present a set of security attacks, namely interception, tampering, and replay attack, to the network level of ICE systems, which we identify through a threat modeling analysis on OpenICE, the best-known instantiation of ICE system. For these security attacks, we devise corresponding defense mechanisms on top of OpenICE. Our experiments demonstrate that these defense mechanisms can effectively protect OpenICE from the identified attacks with acceptable computational overhead.

Machina.NET: A Library for Programming and Real-Time Control of Industrial Robots

Machina is a .NET library for programming and control of industrial robots. It is designed to build applications that interface with robotic devices in real time. The library features a high-level API of simple, device-agnostic action verbs to issue motion requests to robots, and translates them to device-specific instructions using low-level communication protocols and managing priority queues. It also features a set of execution-related events to notify users of changes in the asynchronous state of the robot, fostering programming styles that are reactive rather than prescriptive. These features promote an enactive approach to robotics, and provide an immediate and intuitive entry point to real-time robot control, making Machina particularly suitable for controlling systems that require concurrent responsiveness to sensory or user input. While Machina currently supports mostly six-axis industrial robotic arms, it can be easily extended to any actuable device that moves in three-dimensional space, such as 3D printers, CNC machines, drones, robotic toys, etc. Machina is geared towards users in the creative fields, like designers, artists, makers and creative coders, and promotes features such as interactivity, intuitiveness, feedback, concurrency and cross-platform compatibility, over performance or feature-fullness. We hope this framework will help ease access for novice users to the field of robotics.

An SOA-Based Design of JUNO DAQ Online Software

The Online Software, manager of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) data acquisition (DAQ) system, is composed of many distributed components working coordinately. It takes the responsibility of configuring, processes management, controlling, and information sharing. The design of service-oriented architecture (SOA) makes the Online Software lightweight, loosely coupled, reusable, modular, self-contained, and easy to be extended. All the services in the SOA distributed Online Software system will send messages to each other without an intermediate broker. Hence, the services can operate independently. ZeroMQ is chosen but not the only technical choice as the low-level communication middleware because of its high performance and convenient communication model while using Google Protobuf as a marshaling library to unify the pattern of message contents. The partitioning of the JUNO detector into smaller subdetectors and segments ensures that these subsystems can either be readout together or independently. All running data except the raw physics events will be transmitted, processed, and recorded to the database. High availability (HA) mechanisms are foreseen to reduce single points of failure (SPOF) in the distribution system. This paper will introduce all the core services' functionality and techniques in detail.

A Technology Roadmap to Uncontested Market Space Using Autonomous Vehicles in the Transportation Industry

This paper presents a conceptual technology roadmap for autonomous vehicles. The roadmap analysis results indicate that standardization and computerization of business processes continues from previous years. Deeply connecting organizations allow for fast economic development. Hyper-competition begins when development reaches a plateau. The escape from this situation is a breakthrough in knowledge, requiring operations to become knowledge intensive. There is continuing development of inexpensive machine-to-machine communication that facilitates the exchange of vital data. This data enables machines to make good business decisions and execute them in various spaces. We also forecast that standards will continue to be created and implemented, enabling new autonomic and organic computing processes to be tested and integrated with other systems. After these systems are released for widespread use, emergent patterns will be revealed where humans will utilize them to create value by connecting these patterns to other spaces. None of these technologies are possible without inexpensive and instantaneous machine-to-machine communication. Standard technologies from the beginning of the twenty-first century will serve as a low-level communication and decision making a layer for holonic systems and organic computing.

Distributed system development with ScalaLoci

Distributed applications are traditionally developed as separate modules, often in different languages, which react to events, like user input, and in turn produce new events for the other modules. Separation into components requires time-consuming integration. Manual implementation of communication forces programmers to deal with low-level details. The combination of the two results in obscure distributed data flows scattered among multiple modules, hindering reasoning about the system as a whole. The ScalaLoci distributed programming language addresses these issues with a coherent model based on placement types that enables reasoning about distributed data flows, supporting multiple software architectures via dedicated language features and abstracting over low-level communication details and data conversions. As we show, ScalaLoci simplifies developing distributed systems, reduces error-prone communication code and favors early detection of bugs.

VoltageIDS: Low-Level Communication Characteristics for Automotive Intrusion Detection System

The proliferation of computerized functions aimed at enhancing drivers' safety and convenience has increased the number of vehicular attack surfaces accordingly. The fundamental vulnerability is caused by the fact that the controller area network protocol, a de facto standard for in-vehicle networks, does not support message origin authentication. Several methods to resolve this problem have been suggested. However, most of them require modification of the CAN protocol and have their own vulnerabilities. In this paper, we focus on securing in-vehicle CAN networks, proposing a novel automotive intrusion detection system (so-called VoltageIDS). The system leverages the inimitable characteristics of an electrical CAN signal as a fingerprint of the electronic control units. The noteworthy contributions are that VoltageIDS does not require any modification of the current system and has been validated on actual vehicles while driving on the road. VoltageIDS is also the first automotive intrusion detection system capable of distinguishing between errors and the bus-off attack. Our experimental results on a CAN bus prototype and on real vehicles show that VoltageIDS detects intrusions in the in-vehicle CAN network. Moreover, we evaluate VoltageIDS while a vehicle is moving.