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Publications

Publications by Nuno Alexandre Pereira

2007

Exploiting a prioritized MAC protocol to efficiently compute interpolations

Authors
Andersson, B; Pereira, N; Tovar, E;

Publication
ETFA 2007: 12TH IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES AND FACTORY AUTOMATION, VOLS 1-3

Abstract
Consider a network where all nodes share a single broadcast domain such as a wired broadcast network. Nodes take sensor readings but individual sensor readings are not the most important pieces of data in the system. Instead,, we are interested in aggregated quantities of the sensor readings such as minimum and maximum values, the number of nodes and the median among a set Of sensor readings on different nodes. In this paper we show that a prioritized medium access control (MAC) protocol may advantageously be exploited to efficiently compute aggregated quantities of sensor readings. In this context, we propose a distributed algorithm that has a very low time and message-complexity for computing certain aggregated quantities. Importantly we show that if every sensor node knows its geographical location, then. sensor data can be interpolated with our novel distributed algorithm, and the message-complexity of the algorithm is independent of the number of nodes. Such an interpolation of sensor data can be used to compute any desired function; for example the temperature gradient in a room (e.g., industrial plant) densely populated with sensor nodes, or the gas concentration gradient within a pipeline or traffic tunnel.

2005

Analysing TDMA with slot skipping

Authors
Andersson, B; Tovar, E; Pereira, N;

Publication
RTSS 2005: 26th IEEE International Real-Time Systems Symposium, Proceedings

Abstract
We propose a schedulability analysis for a particular class of time division multiple access (TDAM) networks, which we label as TDAM/SS. SS stands for slot skipping, reflecting the fact that a slot is skipped whenever it is not used Hence, the next slot can start earlier in benefit of hard real-time traffic. In the proposed schedulability analysis, we assume knowledge of all message streams in the system, and that each node schedules messages in its output queue according to a rate monotonic policy (as an example). We present the analysis in two steps. Firstly, we address the case where a node is only permitted to transmit a maximum of one message per TDMA cycle. Secondly we generalise the analysis to the case where a node is assigned a budget of messages per TDMA cycle it may transmit. A simple algorithm to assign budgets to nodes is also presented.

2007

Static-priority scheduling over wireless networks with multiple broadcast domains

Authors
Pereira, N; Andersson, B; Tovar, E; Rowe, A;

Publication
RTSS 2007: 28TH IEEE INTERNATIONAL REAL-TIME SYSTEMS SYMPOSIUM, PROCEEDINGS

Abstract
We propose a wireless medium access control (AMC) protocol that provides static-priority scheduling of messages in a guaranteed collision-free manner. Our protocol supports multiple broadcast domains, resolves the wireless hidden node problem and allows for parallel transmissions across a mesh network. Arbitration of messages is achieved without the notion of a master coordinating node, global clock synchronization or out-of-band signalling. The protocol relies on bit-dominance similar to what is used in the CAN bus except that in order to operate on a wireless physical layer, nodes are not required to receive incoming bits while transmitting. The use of bit-dominance efficiently allows for a much larger number of priorities than would be possible using existing wireless solutions. A AMC protocol with these properties enables schedulability analysis of sporadic message streams in wireless multihop networks.

2008

Analyzing TDMA With Slot Skipping

Authors
Andersson, B; Pereira, N; Tovar, E;

Publication
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS

Abstract
Distributed real-time system, such as factory automation systems, require that computer nodes communicate with a known and low hound on the communication delay. This can be achieved with traditional time division multiple access (TDMA). But improved flexibility and simpler upgrades are possible through the use of TDMA with slot-skipping (TDMA/SS), meaning that a slot is skipped whenever it is not used and consequently the slot after the skipped slot starts earlier. We propose a schedulahility analysis for TDMA/SS. We assume knowledge of all message streams in the system, and that each node schedules messages in its output queue according to deadline monotonic. Firstly, we present a non-exact (but fast) analysis and then, at the cost of computation time, we also present an algorithm that computes exact queuing times.

2006

Implementation of a dominance protocol for wireless medium access

Authors
Pereira, N; Andersson, B; Tovar, E;

Publication
12th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications, Proceedings

Abstract
Consider the problem of scheduling sporadic message transmission requests with deadlines. For wired channels, this has been achieved successfully using the CAN bus. For wireless channels, researchers have recently proposed a similar solution; a collision-free medium access control (AMC) protocol that implements static-priority scheduling. Unfortunately no implementation has been reported, yet. We implement and evaluate it to find that the implementation indeed is collision-free and prioritized. This allows us to develop schedulability analysis for, the implementation. We measure the response times of messages in our implementation and find that our new response-time analysis indeed offers an upper bound on the response times. This enables a new class of wireless real-time systems with timeliness guarantees for sporadic messages and it opens-up a new research area: schedulability analysis for wireless networks.

2008

How a cyber-physical system can efficiently obtain a snapshot of physical information even in the presence of sensor faults

Authors
Andersson, B; Pereira, N; Tovar, E;

Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF THE SIXTH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON INTELLIGENT SOLUTIONS IN EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Abstract
We present a distributed algorithm for cyber-physical systems to obtain a snapshot of sensor data. The snapshot is an approximate representation of sensor data; it is an interpolation as a function of space coordinates. The new algorithm exploits a prioritized Medium Access Controll (MAC) protocol to efficiently transmit information of the sensor data. It scales to a very large number of sensors and it is able to operate in the presence of sensor faults.

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