PEC 2016 Abstracts

Area 1 - Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing
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Area 2 - Pervasive Computing
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Area 3 - Embedded Systems Design
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Area 1 - Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 10
Title:

Analytical Models for Evaluating Effectiveness of Compressed File Transfers in Mobile Computing
Authors:

Armen Dzhagaryan and Aleksandar Milenković
Abstract: The importance of optimizing data transfers between mobile computing devices and the cloud is increasing with an exponential growth of mobile data traffic. Lossless data compression can be essential in increasing communication throughput, reducing communication latency, achieving energy-efficient communication, and making effective use of available storage. In this paper we introduce analytical models for estimating effective throughput and energy efficiency of uncompressed data transfers and compressed data transfers that utilize common compression utilities. The proposed analytical models are experimentally verified using state-of-the-art mobile devices. These models are instrumental in developing a framework for seamless optimization of data file transfers.
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Area 2 - Pervasive Computing

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Paper Nr: 7
Title:

An Environment for Automated Measuring of Energy Consumed by Android Mobile Devices
Authors:

Armen Dzhagaryan, Aleksandar Milenković, Mladen Milosevic and Emil Jovanov
Abstract: Mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, and e-readers have become the dominant type of computing platforms. Energy-efficiency has become a key design and operating requirement for applications running on mobile devices. It is further underscored by a growing reliance of consumers on services delivered through mobile devices and their growing complexity and sophistication. A detailed measurement-based characterization of energy needs of mobile applications is important for both device manufacturers and application developers, as it may identify energy-demanding activities and guide optimizations. In this paper, we describe an environment for automated energy measurements of applications running on Android mobile devices. We discuss hardware and software aspects of the environment and several approaches to runtime capturing and timestamping of activities of interest. Finally, we demonstrate the use of the environment in several case studies conducted on Google’s Nexus 4 smartphone.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 1
Title:

A Distributed and Cooperative Verification Mechanism to Defend against DODAG Version Number Attack in RPL
Authors:

Firoz Ahmed and Young-Bae Ko
Abstract: To design a routing protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs), the IETF developed RPL (Routing Protocol for Low-power and lossy network) which is novel, standard and light weight routing protocol standardized for constrained environment and does not have the functionality like of traditional routing protocols. Providing security in RPL is still challenging as the devices are connected to the vulnerable Internet, limited resources, and the communication links are lossy. Therefore, an attacker can easily exploit the functionalities of RPL protocol. RPL exposed to a variety of attacks. One of the most inconsistency topological attacks is DODAG version number attack. In this paper, we proposed a distributed and cooperative verification mechanism to securely defend against the DODAG version number attack with low control overhead and high reliability. Simulation results show that the proposed approach defends DODAG version number attack reliably and reduces control overhead significantly.
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Paper Nr: 5
Title:

Wearable Monitoring for the Detection of Nocturnal Agitation in Dementia
Authors:

Ana Cristina Marcén, Jesús Carro and Violeta Monasterio
Abstract: Nocturnal agitation is one of the symptoms exhibited by dementia patients. Diagnosing and monitoring the evolution of agitation is difficult because patient monitoring requires a doctor, nurse or caregiver observing patients for extended periods of time. In this work, we propose to use an automatic monitoring system based on wearable technology that complements the caregiver’s work. The proposed system uses a wrist wearable device to record agitation data, which are subsequently classified through machine learning techniques as quantifiable indexes of nocturnal agitation. Preliminary tests performed with volunteers showed that the classification of recorded movements between nocturnal agitation or quiet periods was successful in 78.86% of the cases. This proof of concept demonstrates the feasibility of using wearable technology to monitor nocturnal agitation.
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Paper Nr: 16
Title:

Feature Engineering for Activity Recognition from Wrist-worn Motion Sensors
Authors:

Sumeyye Konak, Fulya Turan, Muhammad Shoaib and Ozlem Durmaz Incel
Abstract: With their integrated sensors, wrist-worn devices, such as smart watches, provide an ideal platform for human activity recognition. Particularly, the inertial sensors, such as accelerometer and gyroscope can efficiently capture the wrist and arm movements of the users. In this paper, we investigate the use of accelerometer sensor for recognizing thirteen different activities. Particularly, we analyse how different sets of features extracted from acceleration readings perform in activity recognition. We categorize the set of features into three classes: motion related features, orientation-related features and rotation-related features and we analyse the recognition performance using motion, orientation and rotation information both alone and in combination. We utilize a dataset collected from 10 participants and use different classification algorithms in the analysis. The results show that using orientation features achieve the highest accuracies when used alone and in combination with other sensors. Moreover, using only raw acceleration performs slightly better than using linear acceleration and similar compared with gyroscope.
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Area 3 - Embedded Systems Design

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 4
Title:

BiPS – A Real-time-capable Protocol Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks
Authors:

Dennis Christmann, Tobias Braun, Markus Engel and Reinhard Gotzhein
Abstract: Distributed real-time systems present a particular challenge, because two key problems have to be solved during their development: First, deployed protocols must provide deterministic behavior to enable a predictable outcome. Second, the implementations of the protocols have to be in compliance with the stringent timing constraints stated by the protocols to ensure that their runtime behavior remains deterministic. This, particularly, requires an adequate isolation of time-critical protocols from less preferential applications installed on the same node. In this paper, we present the protocol framework BiPS, which tackles these challenges for wireless sensor networks and Imote 2 hardware platforms. Besides summarizing the various MAC protocols – both best effort and real-time-capable protocols – and operating system functionalities provided by BiPS, this paper presents comparative evaluations with TinyOS, a state-of-the-practice operating system for wireless sensor networks, and the real-time operating system RIOT. The results show that protocols realized with BiPS outperforms these solutions w.r.t. predictability of execution times, thereby providing evidence of the advantages of BiPS for real-time systems.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 13
Title:

Automatic Testbench Generation for Simulation-based Verification of Safety-critical Systems in UML
Authors:

Ralph Weissnegger, Markus Pistauer, Christian Kreiner, Markus Schuß, Kay Römer and Christian Steger
Abstract: The increasing amount of new assistance features in today’s vehicles to ensure safe and reliable operations, imply increasingly complex systems. Since millions of test kilometers have to be driven to ensure a reliable system, simulation-based verification is becoming more important to reduce costs and time-to-market. Furthermore requirements, design and verification have to follow the stringent specifications from standards such as ISO26262 for functional safety. To overcome the complexity issues of safety-critical systems, a modelbased approach helps to unites all stakeholder, and helps non safety specialists to understand problems in the design. In this paper, we present a novel methodology to automatically generate testbenches for simulation based verification from a first safety analysis. Through early simulation with constraint random stimuli and parameters we are able to derive further requirements for real-time applications. Furthermore, these testbenches can be used through the whole safety-lifecycle. Our approach allows a tight and seamless integration of requirements, design and verification into the safety-lifecycle of ISO26262.
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