Low-level Protocol Research Articles

Jacdac: Service-Based Prototyping of Embedded Systems

The traditional approach to programming embedded systems is monolithic: firmware on a microcontroller contains both application code and the drivers needed to communicate with sensors and actuators, using low-level protocols such as I2C, SPI, and RS232. In comparison, software development for the cloud has moved to a service-based development and operation paradigm: a service provides a discrete unit of functionality that can be accessed remotely by an application, or other service, but is independently managed and updated. We propose, design, implement, and evaluate a service-based approach to prototyping embedded systems called Jacdac. Jacdac defines a service specification language, designed especially for embedded systems, along with a host of specifications for a variety of sensors and actuators. With Jacdac, each sensor/actuator in a system is paired with a low-cost microcontroller that advertises the services that represent the functionality of the underlying hardware over an efficient and low-cost single-wire bus protocol. A separate microcontroller executes the user's application program, which is a client of the Jacdac services on the bus. Our evaluation shows that Jacdac supports a service-based abstraction for sensors/actuators at low cost and reasonable performance, with many benefits for prototyping: ease of use via the automated discovery of devices and their capabilities, substitution of same-service devices for each other, as well as high-level programming, monitoring, and debugging. We also report on the experience of bringing Jacdac to commercial availability via third-party manufacturers.

Plug-and-play Physical Computing with Jacdac

Physical computing is becoming mainstream. More people than ever---from artists, makers and entrepreneurs to educators and students---are connecting microcontrollers with sensors and actuators to create new interactive devices. However, physical computing still presents many challenges and demands many skills, spanning electronics, low-level protocols, and software---road blocks that reduce participation. While USB has made connecting peripherals to a personal computing device (PC) trivial, USB components are expensive and require a PC to operate. This makes USB impractical for many physical computing scenarios where cost, size and low power operation are often important.

The influence of two photobiomodulation protocols on orthodontically induced inflammatory root resorption (a randomized controlled clinical trial)

BackgroundControversial results have been reported regarding the impact of photobiomodulation (PBM) on orthodontically induced inflammatory root resorption (OIIRR). The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of two PBM protocols, one of them requiring a high application frequency (on days 0, 3, 7, 14, then every 2 weeks), while the second requires less frequent applications (every 3 weeks), on OIIRR accompanying orthodontic treatment.MethodsTwenty female patients were recruited for this randomized controlled trial, requiring the therapeutic extraction of maxillary first premolars, and they were randomly divided into 2 equal groups. In Group A, one side of the maxillary arch randomly received PBM on days 0, 3, 7, 14, and every 2 weeks thereafter, while in Group B, one side was randomly chosen to receive PBM every 3 weeks. The laser applied was a Diode laser with a wavelength of 980 nm, in a continuous mode. Canine retraction in both groups was carried out using closed-coil springs, delivering 150 g of force, and the force level was checked every 3 weeks, over a 12-week study period. Pre-retraction and post-retraction cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) was done for the evaluation of OIIRR.ResultsNo significant differences in the amount of OIIRR have been reported between the laser and control sides in both groups A and B. Also, no significant differences have been reported between the laser sides in both groups.ConclusionsPhotobiomodulation does not affect OIIRR, whether by increasing or decreasing its occurrence, with both laser application protocols. Therefore, it can be stated that PBM does not result in root resorption less than the commonly observed range elicited with conventional orthodontic treatment, and that it has no effect on OIIRR.Trial registration Two Low-level Laser Irradiation Protocols on the Rate of Canine Retraction (NCT04926389), 15/06/2021—retrospectively registered. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04926389.

РАЗРАБОТКА СИСТЕМЫ КОНТРОЛЯ ЦЕЛОСТНОСТИ АППАРАТНОГО ОБОРУДОВАНИЯ В СРЕДЕ UEFI-BIOS

The development and production of the computer systems and computer equipment are closely related to the issues of information security and data protection. One of the directions in that area is the issue of monitoring the hardware integrity to detect and prevent the addition, removal or replacement of devices. Most existing systems that solve the problem have a number of limitations, including the need to run under an operating system, the presence of a specific BIOS version, or the need to connect special hardware components. The article proposes a method, the main idea of which is to develop a UEFI application that runs every time the computer starts before loading the operating system. While the first start it performs reading of current device configuration using the SMBIOS table and low-level protocols and stores it in the non-volatile memory of the computer. On subsequent runs it compares the current hardware configuration with the saved one and detects differences. As a hardware configuration for integrity monitoring it is suggested to use information about installed CPUs, RAM devices, PCI devices and hard drives. Such an application does not depend on the BIOS version used, the operating system or a specific version of it, and does not require additional hardware devices.

Performance of low level protocols in high traffic wireless body sensor networks

The rapid development of medical sensors has increased the interest in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications where physiological data from the human body and its environment is gathered, monitored, and analyzed to take the proper measures. In WBANs, it is essential to design MAC protocols that ensure adequate performance and Quality of Service (QoS). This paper investigates Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols used in WBAN, and compares their performance in a high traffic environment with respect to different QoS and network performance metrics. Such scenario can be induced in case of emergency for example, where physiological data collected from all sensors on human body should be sent simultaneously to take appropriate action. This study can also be extended to cover collaborative WBAN systems where information from different bodies is sent simultaneously leading to high traffic. OPNET simulations are performed to compare the performance of the different MAC protocols under the same experimental conditions. A new MAC scheme aiming to enhance the delay, throughput, and energy performance of the system is then proposed and compared to existing protocols, to evaluate its performance in high traffic environment.

Evaluation of the efficacy of a new low-level laser therapy home protocol in the treatment of temporomandibular joint disorder-related pain: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial

ABSTRACT Objective: This study analyzed a home, low-level laser therapy (LLLT) protocol to manage temporomandibular joint disorders (TMJDs)-related pain. Methods: Ninety TMJD patients (12M, 78F) between 18 and 73 years were randomly subdivided into three groups. Study group (SG) received 1-week home protocol LLLT by B-cure Dental Pro: 808 nm, 5 J/min, 250 mW, 15 KHz for 8‘, 40 J each, over pain area, twice daily. Placebo group (PG) followed the same protocol using sham devices. Drugs group (DG) received conventional drugs. Pain was evaluated by visual analog scale (VAS) before and after therapy. Results: Statistical analysis showed that treatment was effective (F(2,83) = 4.882; p = .010). Bonferroni post-hoc analysis indicated a lower pain decrease in PG. SG registered a 34-point decrease per patient, while in PG and DG, the reduction was 25.6 and 35.3, respectively. Conclusion: The study supports the efficacy of home LLLT management of TMJD related pain.

Enhanced secure low-level reader protocol based on session key update mechanism for RFID in IoT

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is at the core of the IoT (Internet-of-Things) technology. The security risks associated with RFID are also accompanied by a growing number of advantages. This paper focuses on the security of the Low Level Reader Protocol (LLRP) released by EPCglobal and designs an enhanced secure mechanism for LLRP that consists of the handshake protocol of the authentication and session key update protocols. The encryption is applied to the communication of the entire LLRP protocol; therefore, the session key should be regularly updated. Because the requirements for session key update are different under different scenarios, a two-round key update protocol and a four-round key update protocol are designed to ensure the security of the protocol. Two types of key update methods with different difficulty coefficients are developed to meet practical requirements. This paper concludes with a performance evaluation of the mechanism.

Security Framework for Managing Data Security within Point of Care Tests

Point of Care (PoC) devices and systems can be categorized into three broad classes (CAT 1, CAT 2, and CAT 3) based on the context of operation and usage. In this paper, the categories are defined to address certain usage models of the PoC device. PoC devices that are used for PoC testing and diagnostic applications are defined CAT 1 devices; PoC devices that are used for patient monitoring are defined as CAT 2 devices (PoCM); PoC devices that are used for as interfacing with other devices are defined as CAT 3 devices (PoCI). The PoCI devices provide an interface gateway for collecting and aggregating data from other medical devices. In all categories, data security is an important aspect. This paper presents a security framework concept, which is applicable for all of the classes of PoC operation. It outlines the concepts and security framework for preventing security challenges in unauthorized access to data, unintended data flow, and data tampering during communication between system entities, the user, and the PoC system. The security framework includes secure layering of basic PoC system architecture, protection of PoC devices in the context of application and network. Developing the security framework is taken into account of a thread model of the PoC system. A proposal for a low-level protocol is discussed. This protocol is independent of communications technologies, and it is elaborated in relation to providing security. An algorithm that can be used to overcome the threat challenges has been shown using the elements in the protocol. The paper further discusses the vulnerability scanning process for the PoC system interconnected network. The paper also presents a four-step process of authentication and authorization framework for providing the security for the PoC system. Finally, the paper concludes with the machine to machine (M2M) security viewpoint and discusses the key stakeholders within an actual deployment of the PoC system and its security challenges.

Improved Battery-Less Augmented RFID Tag: Application on Ambient Sensing and Control

In this letter, an improved version of a recently published battery-less augmented radio frequency identification device enabling a tag-reader cooperative approach is presented. Based on a specifically designed physical layer implementing a logical communication procedure over low-level reader protocol, the device is now capable to react to the reader solicitations by reasoning, asking for extra info, taking autonomous decisions, piloting actuators, and generating alerts. Tests performed in the building automation context demonstrate the capability of the proposed device of reasoning jointly with the reader and changing its behavior according to logical and physical events occurring in the surrounding environment.

Representing and Reasoning with the Internet of Things: a Modular Rule-Based Model for Ensembles of Context-Aware Smart Things

Context-aware smart things are capable of computational behaviour based on sensing the physical world, inferring context from the sensed data, and acting on the sensed context. A collection of such things can form what we call a thing-ensemble, when they have the ability to communicate with one another (over a short range network such as Bluetooth, or the Internet, i.e. the Internet of Things (IoT) concept), sense each other, and when each of them might play certain roles with respect to each other. Each smart thing in a thing-ensemble might have its own context-aware behaviours which when integrated with other smart things yield behaviours that are not straightforward to reason with. We present Sigma, a language of operators, inspired from modular logic programming, for specifying and reasoning with combined behaviours among smart things in a thing-ensemble. We show numerous examples of the use of Sigma for describing a range of behaviours over a diverse range of thing-ensembles, from sensor networks to smart digital frames, demonstrating the versatility of our approach. We contend that our operator approach abstracts away low-level communication and protocol details, and allows systems of context-aware things to be designed and built in a compositional and incremental manner.

MAC-Level Communication Time Modeling and Analysis for Real-Time WSNs

Low-level communication protocols and their timing behavior are essential to developing wireless sensor networks (WSNs) able to provide the support and operating guarantees required by ...

Logging Airplane Sensors Measurements to a Remote Database Using LabVIEW and FieldPoint

Using the networking features in LabVIEW (graphical programming) it is possible to perform following tasks: share live data with other VIs (virtual instruments) running on a network, publish front panel images and virtual instruments documentation on the web, build virtual instruments that communicate with other applications and virtual instruments through low-level protocols. The main task of the paper is to create a virtual instrument for acquisition, control and monitoring temperature in eight points inside of an airplane, to create storage of the data in data files and to send the files to Remote Computers, that means to log temperature data to Remote Databases.

Anonymous protocols: Notions and equivalence

Privacy protection has become a major issue in modern societies. Many efforts have been provided in the last years to catch properly the requirements that cryptographic primitives and low-level protocols should meet in order to be useful for building privacy-preserving applications. In particular, anonymity is an important property to achieve, and the notion of key privacy in public-key encryption, which guarantees that an adversary is unable to tell with which public key a certain ciphertext has been produced, plays a key-role in the design of anonymous protocols.Secret sets and anonymous broadcast encryption are two examples of useful anonymous protocols. A secret set is a representation of a subset of users of a given universe satisfying some basic membership privacy properties, and anonymous broadcast encryption is a mechanism to encrypt a broadcast message that only authorized users, whose identities are kept secret, can decrypt.In this paper we show that, even if apparently the key privacy property of an encryption scheme seems to be unrelated to the security of the encrypted content, and it looks like just an additional property the encryption scheme can enjoy, for a robust encryption scheme key privacy under chosen ciphertext attack implies non-malleability and, hence, security under chosen ciphertext attacks. This result helps to simplify the set of requirements that public key encryption schemes need to satisfy when stating and proving theorems regarding anonymous protocols in which the encryption schemes are used.Then, we provide a formal model for both secret sets and anonymous broadcast encryption and we prove that they are equivalent with respect to non-adaptive adversaries: the former can be used to design the latter and vice versa.Finally, we revisit some previous constructions for secret sets, and we analyze the security properties they enjoy within our adversarial model.

A distributed virtual hypercube algorithm for maintaining scalable and dynamic network overlays

SummaryNetwork overlays support the execution of distributed applications, hiding lower level protocols and the physical topology. This work presents DiVHA: a distributed virtual hypercube algorithm that allows the construction and maintenance of a self‐healing overlay network based on a virtual hypercube. DiVHA keeps logarithmic properties even when the number of nodes is not a power of two, presenting a scalable alternative to connect distributed resources. DiVHA assumes a dynamic fault situation, in which nodes fail and recover continuously, leaving and joining the system. The algorithm is formally specified, and the latency for detecting changes and the subsequent reconstruction of the topology is proved to be bounded. An actual overlay network based on DiVHA called HyperBone was implemented and deployed in the PlanetLab. HyperBone offers services such as monitoring and routing, allowing the execution Grid applications across the Internet. HyperBone also includes a procedure for detecting groups of stable nodes, which allowed the execution of parallel applications on a virtual hypercube built on top of PlanetLab. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Modeling and Evaluation of Wireless Sensor Network Protocols by Stochastic Timed Automata

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used in different kinds of environments. They may encounter lots of stochastic uncertainties and disturbances like message loss and node dynamics. Thus, it is critical to ensure the correctness of low level protocols in WSNs and evaluate their performance under different circumstances. In this paper, we propose a new method to analyze and evaluate WSN protocols based on stochastic timed automata and statistical model checking.For modeling, the work flow of a WSN protocol can be modeled with classical timed automata. Then, to model the uncertainties such as message loss and node dynamics, which are common in realistic circumstances, the timed automata can be extended by stochastic transitions, resulting in the stochastic timed automata. For analysis, the correctness of the protocol can be answered by classical model checking on the timed automata, while the performance of the protocol under realistic environments can be evaluated by statistical model checking on the stochastic model. To illustrate the feasibility and scalability of the modeling and verification method presented in this paper, Timing-sync Protocol for Sensor Networks (TPSN) will be studied completely throughout the paper.

基于随机时间自动机和统计模型检验技术的无线传感网络协议建模与分析

Recently, sensor technology has seen significant achievement. Meanwhile, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technique has attracted lots of attention because of its open and dynamic behaviors, and has become a very important component of the Internet-based computing. The behavior of WSN system is very complex and may encounter lots of stochastic uncertainties and disturbances like message loss and node dynamics. Furthermore, WSN system is difficult to change and maintain once it is deployed. Thus, it is critical to ensure the quality of the low level protocols of WSN system in design phase. Designers should ensure the logical correctness of a protocol, as well as evaluate the performance of the protocol under certain target environments. To handle these issues, in this paper, we propose a framework to analyze and evaluate WSN protocols based on stochastic timed automata and statistical model checking. We propose to address the modeling of the uncertainties in the realistic behaviors by weighted stochastic transitions in the timed automata model of the protocol. Furthermore, we propose that the performance of the protocol under realistic environments should be evaluated by statistical model checking which is much cheaper and more scalable. To illustrate the feasibility and detail of the modeling and verification approach presented in this paper, two well-known WSN protocols, Timing-sync Protocol for Sensor Networks (TPSN) and Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol (FTSP), are studied thoroughly throughout the paper.

Evaluation of clinical effectiveness of low-level laser, vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol) and pharmacological protocol in the management of radiation induced oral mucositis

Evaluation of clinical effectiveness of low-level laser, vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol) and pharmacological protocol in the management of radiation induced oral mucositis

Aplicación de la Arquitectura Orientada a Servicios Universal Plug-and-Play para facilitar la Integración de Robots Industriales en Líneas de Producción

The equipment integraton and devices in industrial robotic cells with Ethernet interface technologies and low cost devices such as vision systems, laser cameras, force sensors, programmable controllers, PDAs, etc. allows the development of powerful and intelligent solutions. However, the efficient programming of these devices require specific knowledge about them, their gardware architecture, specific programming languages and details of specific low-level protocol communication systems. The article describes and uses a service-oriented architecture: Universal Plug-and-Play. It is one of the most interesting and best adapted to robotic cells. Using this architecture, in this article it has been developed a test based on two industrial robots. The results show clearly that the use of schemes based on SOA reduces integration times, adapting very well to the integration of industrial robotic cells.

Role of Feature Selection in Intrusion Detection Systems for 802.11 Networks

Intrusion Detection Systems are important for protecting network and its resources from illegal penetration. For 802.11network, the features used for training and testing the intrusion detection systems consist of basic information related to the TCP/IP header, with no considerable attention to the features associated with lower level protocol frames. The resulting detectors were efficient and accurate in detecting network attacks at the network and transport layers, but unfortunately, not capable of detecting 802.11-specific attacks such as de authentication attacks or MAC layer DoS attack. IDS systems can also identify and alert to the presence of unauthorized MAC addresses on the networks. The IDS is based a novel hybrid model that efficiently selects the optimal set of features in order to detect 802.11-specific intrusions. This model for feature selection uses the information gain ratio measure as a means to compute the relevance of each feature and the k-means classifier to select the optimal set of MAC layer features that can improve the accuracy of intrusion detection systems while reducing the learning time of their learning algorithm.

Evaluating a new communication protocol for real-time distributed control

The recent trend in distributed automation and control systems has been towards event-triggered system architectures such as UML and IEC 61499. Although existing communication protocols (e.g., Ethernet) can support high-level communication within these systems, there is contention as to which low-level protocol to use, or if any exist that meet the requirements of being event-triggered and hard real-time. This paper proposes a new way to measure communication performance. The goal of the new measurement method is to stress the necessity that a real-time communication protocol needs to be both efficient and fair. This is illustrated by comparing three communication strategies: Controller Area Network (CAN), Time-Triggered CAN (TTCAN) and Escalating Priority CAN (EPCAN). The first two represent the extremes between event-triggered and time-triggered communication strategies; the third is introduced to illustrate the benefits of a new event-based communication protocol proposed by the authors.