PRAXI Network

ATRACO is an EU funded R&D project that considers ambient ecologies consisting of people, context-aware artefacts and digital commodities (e.g., services and content). Members of the ecology are able to adapt to each other and form trusted ad hoc collaborations to achieve specific tasks resulting from the need to serve specific human goals. Our aim is to research the factors and develop the technologies that will lead to the realisation of such ecologies, following an interdisciplinary effort which involves Computer Science, HCI, AI, Control Theory and Sociology. Keyfactors of the ATRACO problem space to be examined include adaptation, interoperability, user interaction and dynamicity of trust. We focus our efforts on seeking abstractions and mechanisms for establishing trust relationships between its members and on devising adaptation mechanisms based on system behaviour modelling, supervisory control theory of discrete event systems and type-2 fuzzy systems.

Context-aware systems are an emerging genre of computer systems that help add some forms of intelligence to our surroundings. The ATRACO project uses the ambient ecology metaphor to conceptualize a space populated by connected devices and services that are interrelated with each other, the environment and the people, supporting the users' everyday activities in a meaningful way. Everyday appliances, devices, and context aware artifacts are part of the ATRACO ambient ecologies. In this paper we present the connected home platform adopted by ATRACO and its evolution to provide network adaptation and context-aware services. A flexible and distributed context-aware service model is introduced using the OSGi and UPnP frameworks. UPnP is used to converge the existing network infrastructure comprising of heterogeneous technologies and protocols at the IP level. Furthermore, we introduce a context-aware service model and provide paradigms of context aware services that build upon perceptual and context aware components of the platform.

In high-speed network processors, data queueing has to allow real-time memory (de)allocation, buffering, retrieving, and forwarding of incoming data packets. Its implementation must be highly optimized to combine high speed, low power, large data storage, and high memory bandwidth. In this paper, such data queueing is used as case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of a new system-level exploration method for optimizing the memory performance in dynamic memory management. Assuming that a multi-bank memory architecture is used for data storage, the method trades off bank conflicts against memory accesses during real-time memory (de)allocation. It has been applied to the data queueing module of the PRO/sup 3/ system. Compared with the conventional memory management technique for embedded systems, our exploration method can save up to 90% of the bank conflicts, which allows to improve worst-case memory performance of data queueing operations by 50% too.

The utilisation of personal data by mobile apps is often hidden behind vague Privacy Policy documents, which are typically lengthy, difficult to read (containing legal terms and definitions) and frequently changing. This paper discusses a suite of tools developed in the context of the CAP-A project, aiming to harness the collective power of users to improve their privacy awareness and to promote privacy-friendly behaviour by mobile apps. Through crowdsourcing techniques, users can evaluate the privacy friendliness of apps, annotate and understand Privacy Policy documents, and help other users become aware of privacy-related aspects of mobile apps and their implications, whereas developers and policy makers can identify trends and the general stance of the public in privacy-related matters. The tools are available for public use in: https://cap-a.eu/tools/.

Consumers are largely unaware regarding the use being made to the data that they generate through smart devices, or their GDPR-compliance, since such information is typically hidden behind vague privacy policy documents, which are often lengthy, difficult to read (containing legal terms and definitions) and frequently changing. This paper describes the activities of the CAP-A project, whose aim is to apply crowdsourcing techniques to evaluate the privacy friendliness of apps, and to allow users to better understand the content of Privacy Policy documents and, consequently, the privacy implications of using any given mobile app. To achieve this, we developed a set of tools that aim at assisting users to express their own privacy concerns and expectations and assess the mobile apps’ privacy properties through collective intelligence.

The XG-PON standard for Passive Optical Networks (PONs) has imposed requirements for high performance processing in the architectures of network equipment. Especially, the designs of the 10Gbps receiver terminals and the network units (ONTs and ONUs) can become quite demanding. The current paper focuses on the XG-PON ONT/ONU receiver and presents an FPGA design realizing the decoding functions of the XG-PON physical adaptation layer: The scrambling, the RS(248,216) decoding and the Hybrid Error Correction (HEC) architectures, which are designed to communicate through a 64-bit bus. This work describes the components' features and validates the results by showing the design's performance on a Xilinx Kintex 7 FPGA.

3GPP aims to leverage the flexibility and robustness of the Internet Protocol in the 3G telecommunication networks. The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is founding element in the process of 3GPP migration from the traditional audio/video platforms to more flexible multi-modal environments. The IMS, further embraced by ETSI and other telecommunication standardization bodies, extends its application not only to the cellular world, but also to wire-line telephony and broadband Internet services. In this paper we introduce a media gateway (MG) between the conventional telephony infrastructure and the 3GPP-IMS plane. Our approach was to extend the capabilities of an existing PBX system to meet the signalling and media requirements of the 3GPP-IMS. Our 3GPP-IMS media gateway is a major element of the IMPULSE platform and integrates the IMS with the residential telecommunication environment.

The XG-PON standard for Passive Optical Networks (PONs) imposed high performance requirements for network equipment. Especially, the 10G transmitter designs of the office equipment (OLT), the terminals and the network units (ONTs and ONUs) become quite demanding because of the real-time requirements for preparing a frame. The current paper introduces a three layer architecture, scalable with respect to the bandwidth and suitable to realize the transmitter of the XG-PON OLT/ONT/ONU elements. The architecture's upper layer decides what data packets will be transmitted. The second layer's microsequencer commands the lowest layer's modules, which produce and locally store all the data packets to be transmitted. The three layer approach allows the architecture to be configured and organized as either an OLT transmitter or an ONU/ONT transmitter; and to be scalable and perform the functions of the OLT at 10 Gbps and those of an ONU/ONT at 2.5 Gbps. The implementation of a XG-PON ONU transmitter on Xilinx Virtex7 verifies the approach.

The concept of soft clipping control is applied to the class of blind QAM receivers. This approach performs real time optimisation of the receiver's quantization dynamic range and guarantees in a deterministic way a desired level of reliability for the soft signal clipping condition. Steady state and transient performance analysis provide effective insight on the proposed path-gain control technique, which is further evaluated by means of computer simulation.

The telephony world is consistently moving to the transmission of voice through packet networks, so as to unify data and voice and to enable the provisioning of new services in a less costly manner. Service providers are offloading the task of converting analog voice to VoIP to the end-points. This allows the ISPs and ITSPs to reduce their costs and increase the uniformity of their interfaces with their clients. In this paper we present an IP-PBX/VoIP Gateway system based on a single SoC that performs all the required processing. This SoC includes a CPU for hosting a full-fledged operating system and user applications, as well as a DSP subsystem for voice processing. The system targets the low density market of home gateways and SME IP-PBXs, where cost is the main factor. We prove it is feasible to implement a 2-4 channel IP-PBX/VoIP gateway on a SoC based purely on both software and hardware provided by the open-source community, reducing both upfront and final product costs thus allowing new players into the market.