Traditional Operating Systems Research Articles

Operating System Design in Future Wireless Sensor Networks

Traditional operating systems do not take into consideration the limitations in space and energy of wireless sensor networks. Thus, contemporary architectural demands in terms of power, heat, size and cost will not be satisfactorily met by such uniprocessing design. Also, the transition to multithreaded, multi-core designs places a greater responsibility on programmers and software for improving performance which is becoming increasingly important as sensor nodes are migrating towards dual processor designs. By analyzing and summarizing the activity of a system, one could locate sections of code that have a potential to generate enhanced performance. First, this paper studies the differences between different operating system designs introducing a thread-driven scheduling algorithm which focuses on the value of preemption to overcome the energy tradeoff brought by event-driven systems. We then devise efficient techniques that will enable us to locate sections in OS code that could behave more efficiently when parallelized, especially in terms of energy consumption. Finally, we provide simulation results that will validate our proposed techniques.

The E3 architecture: enabling future cellular networks with cognitive and self‐x capabilities

AbstractFuture mobile networks are expected to be complex heterogeneous systems. On the one hand this will enable users to take advantage of a number of different access technologies. On the other hand it will seriously affect network management procedures since more extensive operations and decisions will have to be dealt with. To tackle these challenges a number of new dynamic mechanisms need to be designed. It is imperative that certain network management tasks have to be performed without human intervention to reduce the OPEX costs and achieve faster responses in different events. To achieve this goal, the introduction of self‐x functionalities, combined with cognitive mechanisms and the ability to reconfigure network entities and terminals, is required. Moreover, the introduction of a new pilot channel needs to be considered to assist the terminals in selecting the most suitable radio access technology according to their requirements. We present the functional architecture of an evolved network that was designed in the context of the EU‐funded IP project ‘E3: End‐to‐End Efficiency’. This architecture aims to enhance existing procedures usually performed in traditional operation and maintenance systems (e.g. spectrum management, network planning, configuration actions). We explain the rationale of our design and provide specific examples to illustrate the role of the different functional entities and their interfaces. A considerable part of this architecture has recently been approved as a feasibility study by the ETSI Committee Reconfigurable Radio System. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Construction Engineering—Reinvigorating the Discipline

Construction engineering is all about production, and producing something useful is the very reason for projects to exist. How then to explain why construction engineering has progressively fallen out of focus in construction project management education and research? For an answer, the development of the discipline of construction management since the 1950s must be understood, a development that yielded a non-production-oriented approach to project management, one that provides the currently accepted operating system for managing the work in projects. This paper first traces the history of the development of the traditional operating system and related commercial terms and organizational practices. It argues that traditional practices rest on an assumption that careful development of a project schedule, managing the critical path, and maximizing productivity within each activity will optimize project delivery in terms of cost and duration. Subsequently, an alternative operating system, developed and prop...

Reliable Operating Systems: Overview and Techniques

Traditional operating systems’ architectures are primarily focused on achieving superior performance, albeit at the expense of sacrificing reliability. This approach is clearly inadequate, given our growing dependence on computer systems for essential and critical services. Reliability should thus be considered as a first-class citizen alongside functionality and performance, while designing future operating systems. The present paper summarizes the current trends and best practices employed to improve the reliability of operating systems. We also draw attention to the limitations and drawbacks of the prevalent approaches, discuss outstanding issues and propose some promising research directions, which may be explored to build highly reliable operating systems.

Fast and Flexible Selection with a Single Switch

Selection methods that require only a single-switch input, such as a button click or blink, are potentially useful for individuals with motor impairments, mobile technology users, and individuals wishing to transmit information securely. We present a single-switch selection method, “Nomon,” that is general and efficient. Existing single-switch selection methods require selectable options to be arranged in ways that limit potential applications. By contrast, traditional operating systems, web browsers, and free-form applications (such as drawing) place options at arbitrary points on the screen. Nomon, however, has the flexibility to select any point on a screen. Nomon adapts automatically to an individual's clicking ability; it allows a person who clicks precisely to make a selection quickly and allows a person who clicks imprecisely more time to make a selection without error. Nomon reaps gains in information rate by allowing the specification of beliefs (priors) about option selection probabilities and by avoiding tree-based selection schemes in favor of direct (posterior) inference. We have developed both a Nomon-based writing application and a drawing application. To evaluate Nomon's performance, we compared the writing application with a popular existing method for single-switch writing (row-column scanning). Novice users wrote 35% faster with the Nomon interface than with the scanning interface. An experienced user (author TB, with 10 hours practice) wrote at speeds of 9.3 words per minute with Nomon, using 1.2 clicks per character and making no errors in the final text.

The OS Faces a Brave New World

Increasingly popular approaches such as virtualization, cloud computing, and application development frameworks are changing the importance of the traditional operating system. Virtualization lets a single server host slices of multiple operating systems, each of which can run different applications within virtual machines. This makes the installation of any single full-featured OS instance a choice rather than a necessity. Cloud computing features applications that run on servers spread across the Internet. Cloud providers push these applications to users' browsers. Users of cloud based software thus don't need an OS to do more than run the browser. Developers are increasingly using frameworks that enable the faster building of applications that work with multiple OSs, again making the use of a specific operating system less important. The just enough operating system (JeOS, pronounced "juice") movement focuses on packaging an application with only the parts of an OS necessary for it to work. Over time, these developments could affect what constitutes an operating system, what its roles and responsibilities will be, and how it will be installed and used.

A Hybrid Embedded Real-time Operating System for Wireless Sensor Networks

Traditional operating systems for wireless sensor networks (WSN) are based on either event-driven or multitask concept. Instead, this paper presents an embedded real-time operating system, named HEROS ‘Hybrid Embedded Real-time Operating System’, which is configurable to run in different modes: event-driven, multitask or hybrid to adapt to diverse domains of WSN applications. HEROS adopts a modular and hierarchical architecture: action (system operation), thread (component) and event (etask) and provides a predictable and deterministic scheduling mechanism: ‘non pre-emption priority based’ scheduling for events and ‘pre-emptive priority-based’ scheduling for threads. Furthermore, to ease distributed cooperative application, HEROS adopts LINDA concept by providing a simplified tuple space and a lightweight IN/OUT primitive-pair to implement system communication & synchronization. Currently, HEROS has been implemented and evaluated in different applications and on different platforms. The experimentation results show that HEROS has a small footprint and meets different real-time application requirements.

Video courseware for teaching operating systems with Windows

Operating systems, being one of the most complex pieces of source code, are often an intimidating subject for both instructors and students. Recently, Microsoft released teaching materials on Windows for operating system curricula, to complement traditional Unix-based instructional operating systems. Such materials have been reported to boost student learning by enhancing the relevance and diversity of courses, while the lack of "hands-on" guidance materials has been reported as hindrance. To complement lacking, we created video courseware to walk students through the Windows source code and help them get ready for large-scale developments on Windows kernel.

Wireless sensor network operating systems: a survey

The design of operating system for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deviates from the traditional operating system design due to their specific characteristics like constrained resources, high dynamics and inaccessible deployment environments. We provide a classification framework that surveys the state of the art in WSN Operating Systems (OS). The purpose of this survey is two-fold, one is to classify the existing operating systems according to important OS features, and the other is to suggest appropriate OSs for different categories of WSN applications, mapping the application requirements and OS features. This classification helps in understanding the contrasting differences among existing operating systems, and lays a foundation to design an ideal WSN OS. We also classified existing WSN applications, to help the application developer in choosing the appropriate OS, based on the application requirements. Summary and analysis, and discussion of future research directions in this area have been presented.

A stateless approach to connection-oriented protocols

Traditional operating system interfaces and network protocol implementations force some system state to be kept on both sides of a connection. This state ties the connection to its endpoints, impedes transparent failover, permits denial-of-service attacks, and limits scalability. This article introduces a novel TCP-like transport protocol and a new interface to replace sockets that together enable all state to be kept on one endpoint, allowing the other endpoint, typically the server, to operate without any per-connection state. Called Trickles , this approach enables servers to scale well with increasing numbers of clients, consume fewer resources, and better resist denial-of-service attacks. Measurements on a full implementation in Linux indicate that Trickles achieves performance comparable to TCP/IP, interacts well with other flows, and scales well. Trickles also enables qualitatively different kinds of networked services. Services can be geographically replicated and contacted through an anycast primitive for improved availability and performance. Widely-deployed practices that currently have client-observable side effects, such as periodic server reboots, connection redirection, and failover, can be made transparent, and perform well, under Trickles. The protocol is secure against tampering and replay attacks, and the client interface is backward-compatible, requiring no changes to sockets-based client applications.

Special section: OptIPlanet — The OptIPuter global collaboratory

The popularity of large-scale, high-resolution display walls, as visualization endpoints in eScience infrastructure, is rapidly growing. These displays can be connected to distributed computing resources over high-speed network, providing effective means for researchers to visualize, interact with, and understand large volumes of datasets. Typically large display walls are built by tiling multiple physical displays together and running a tiled display wall required a cluster of computers. With the advent of advanced graphics hardware, a single computer can now drive over a dozen displays, thereby greatly reducing the cost of ownership and maintenance of a tiled display wall system. This in turn enables a broader user base to take advantage of such technologies. Since tiled display walls are also well suited to collaborative work, users tend to launch and operate multiple applications simultaneously. To ensure that applications maintain a high degree of responsiveness to the users even under heavy use loads, the display wall must now ensure that the limited system resources are prioritized to maximize interactivity rather than thread-level fair sharing or overall job-completion throughput. In this paper, we present a new resource scheduling scheme that is specifically designed to prioritize responsiveness in collaborative large display wall environments where multiple users can interact with multiple applications simultaneously. We evaluate our scheduling scheme with a user study involving groups of users interacting simultaneously on a tiled display wall with multiple applications. Results show that our scheduling framework provided a higher frame-rate for applications, which led to a significantly higher user performance (approx. 25%) in a target acquisition test when compared against traditional operating system scheduling scheme.

Recent sojourn time results for multilevel processor‐sharing scheduling disciplines

Multilevel Processor‐Sharing (MLPS) disciplines refer to a family of age‐based scheduling disciplines introduced decades ago. A time‐discretized version of an MLPS discipline is applied in the scheduler of the traditional UNIX operating system. In recent years, MLPS disciplines have been used to study the way that packet level scheduling mechanisms impact the performance perceived at the flow level in the Internet. Inspired by this latter application, many new sojourn time results have been discovered for these disciplines in the context of the M/G/1 queue. The aim of this paper was to give a consistent overview of these new results. In addition, it points out some intriguing open problems for further research.

Overshadow

Commodity operating systems entrusted with securing sensitive data are remarkably large and complex, and consequently, frequently prone to compromise. To address this limitation, we introduce a virtual-machine-based system called Overshadow that protects the privacy and integrity of application data, even in the event of a total OScompromise. Overshadow presents an application with a normal view of its resources, but the OS with an encrypted view. This allows the operating system to carry out the complex task of managing an application's resources, without allowing it to read or modify them. Thus, Overshadow offers a last line of defense for application data. Overshadow builds on multi-shadowing, a novel mechanism that presents different views of "physical" memory, depending on the context performing the access. This primitive offers an additional dimension of protection beyond the hierarchical protection domains implemented by traditional operating systems and processor architectures. We present the design and implementation of Overshadow and show how its new protection semantics can be integrated with existing systems. Our design has been fully implemented and used to protect a wide range of unmodified legacy applications running on an unmodified Linux operating system. We evaluate the performance of our implementation, demonstrating that this approach is practical.

Overshadow

Commodity operating systems entrusted with securing sensitive data are remarkably large and complex, and consequently, frequently prone to compromise. To address this limitation, we introduce a virtual-machine-based system called Overshadow that protects the privacy and integrity of application data, even in the event of a total OScompromise. Overshadow presents an application with a normal view of its resources, but the OS with an encrypted view. This allows the operating system to carry out the complex task of managing an application's resources, without allowing it to read or modify them. Thus, Overshadow offers a last line of defense for application data. Overshadow builds on multi-shadowing, a novel mechanism that presents different views of "physical" memory, depending on the context performing the access. This primitive offers an additional dimension of protection beyond the hierarchical protection domains implemented by traditional operating systems and processor architectures. We present the design and implementation of Overshadow and show how its new protection semantics can be integrated with existing systems. Our design has been fully implemented and used to protect a wide range of unmodified legacy applications running on an unmodified Linux operating system. We evaluate the performance of our implementation, demonstrating that this approach is practical.

Overshadow

Commodity operating systems entrusted with securing sensitive data are remarkably large and complex, and consequently, frequently prone to compromise. To address this limitation, we introduce a virtual-machine-based system called Overshadow that protects the privacy and integrity of application data, even in the event of a total OScompromise. Overshadow presents an application with a normal view of its resources, but the OS with an encrypted view. This allows the operating system to carry out the complex task of managing an application's resources, without allowing it to read or modify them. Thus, Overshadow offers a last line of defense for application data. Overshadow builds on multi-shadowing, a novel mechanism that presents different views of "physical" memory, depending on the context performing the access. This primitive offers an additional dimension of protection beyond the hierarchical protection domains implemented by traditional operating systems and processor architectures. We present the design and implementation of Overshadow and show how its new protection semantics can be integrated with existing systems. Our design has been fully implemented and used to protect a wide range of unmodified legacy applications running on an unmodified Linux operating system. We evaluate the performance of our implementation, demonstrating that this approach is practical.

Teaching operating systems with Windows

Operating system is one of the largest pieces of software, which makes its understanding quite intimidating to students. This paper reports our experiences of complementing the traditional Unix-based operating system curriculum with Windows alternative. Our goals are two-fold: First , we aim at making the learning of operating system concepts more relevant to students, by using Windows which is a dominant operating system choice among students, Second , we aim at making the course more diverse , by presenting alternative design examples to Unix-based instructional materials such that students can learn from comparing and contrasting. In this poster, we will present available educational resources and our contributions to them.

SDREAM: A Super‐Small Distributed REAL‐Time Microkernel Dedicated to Wireless Sensors

Traditional embedded operation systems are resource consuming multitask, thus they are not adapted for smart wireless sensors. This paper presents a super‐small distributed real‐time microkernel (SDREAM) dedicated to wireless sensors. SDREAM is a tuple‐based message‐driven real‐time kernel. It adopts a meta language: Kernel Modeling Language to define and describe the system primitives in abstract manner. The IPC and processes synchronization are based on the LINDA concept: the tuple model implemented by two light primitives (SND: OUT & RCV: IN). In SDREAM, tasks are classified into two categories: periodic and priority. The periodic task has the highest priority level and is responsible for capturing sensor signals or actuating control signals; the priority task has various priority levels and is suitable for time‐constraints applications. A two‐level task scheduling policy scheme, named priority‐based pre‐emptive scheduling, is used for task scheduling. SDREAM is simple and efficient. It has a flexible hardware abstraction capability that enables it to be rapidly ported into different WSN platforms and other tiny embedded devices. Currently, it has been ported and evaluated in several hardware platforms. The performance results show SDREAM requires tiny resource and is suitable and efficient for hard real‐time multitask WSN applications.

HPC-Colony

Traditional full-featured operating systems are known to have properties that limit the scalability of distributed memory parallel programs, the most common programming paradigm utilized in high end computing. Furthermore, as processor counts increase with the most capable systems, the necessary activity to manage the system becomes more of a burden. To make a general purpose operating system scale to such levels, new technology is required for parallel resource management and global system management (including fault management). In this paper, we describe the shortcomings of full-featured operating systems and runtime systems and discuss an approach to scale such systems to one hundred thousand processors with both scalable parallel application performance and efficient system management.

P.R.O.S.E.

This document re-evaluates the software stack in the light of para-virtualization technology and hypervisor support within next generation processors and operating systems. We describe an infrastructure enabling the use of logical partitions (LPARs) for the execution of stand-alone applications along side traditional operating systems. The design goal is to provide an environment allowing normal users to execute, interact and manage these custom kernels in much the same way they would with typical applications. The development environment is a set of modular component libraries providing necessary system services, and a familiar debug environment provided by exposing partition memory and control interfaces to a "controller" partition. We describe the implementation of our prototype using the IBM research hypervisor along with the Linux kernel and explore potential applications that could benefit from this new environment.

기선권현망어구의 조업과정중 수중형상

This study was carried out to observe the underwater geometry of the anchovy boat seine by two fishing operation systems. One was a traditional operation system that used a fish detecting boat, another was a new operation system that used the same fishing gear with floats and sinkers in comparison with a fish detecting boat. Vertical opening of the fishing gear that used a casting net, working depth of each part of the fishing gear that used a new operation system was almost canstant, but was gradually shallow in a traditional operation system. Just before hauling net, working depth of each part of the fishing gear that used a new operation system was maintained stable, but was vertically unstable in a traditional operation system because as rear part of the fishing gear was risen up the upper layer. Just after hauling net, working depth of the fishing gear that used a new operation system was also maintained stable, and then anchovy school could be lead to bag net.