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1. InSight: A Bluetooth Beacon-based Ad-hoc Emergency Alert System for Smart Cities

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC49032.2021.9369621  

   Hasan, Raiful ; Hasan, Ragib ; Islam, Tanveer ( January 2021 , 2021 IEEE 18th Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC),)

   null (Ed.)

   The purpose of alerts and warnings is to provide necessary information to the public that will lead to their safety in emergencies. The nation’s alerting capabilities need to evolve and progress with the extensive use of smartphones, and newer technologies become available, especially to be more precisely targeted to sub-populations at risk. Historically, this has been a challenge as the delivery of alerts and warning messages to the public is primarily through broadcast media and signs. However, deploying such signs takes time and may not be visible to people imminent of natural hazards. Especially for road closing, marking hazards, emergency evacuation, etc., it would be beneficial to have an easy-to-deploy and automated alert/warning system that requires no line of sight. To this end, we have developed Insight – a Bluetooth beacon-based system that uses a smartphone application to sense signals from beacons marking hazard zones. The system does not require any Internet or communication infrastructure and therefore, it is resilient to breakdowns in communications during disasters. To demonstrate the feasibility of Insight, we conducted a study in an urban university campus location. The system demonstrated adequate usability and feasibility. 

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2. Bounding Network-Induced Delays of Wireless PRP Infrastructure for Industrial Control Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICC.2019.8761893  

   Yang, Huan ; Cheng, Liang ( May 2019 , ICC 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC))

   Recently, wireless communication technologies, such as Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), have gained increasing popularity in industrial control systems (ICSs) due to their low cost and ease of deployment, but communication delays associated with these technologies make it unsuitable for critical real-time and safety applications. To address concerns on network-induced delays of wireless communication technologies and bring their advantages into modern ICSs, wireless network infrastructure based on the Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP) has been proposed. Although application-specific simulations and measurements have been conducted to show that wireless network infrastructure based on PRP can be a viable solution for critical applications with stringent delay performance constraints, little has been done to devise an analytical framework facilitating the adoption of wireless PRP infrastructure in miscellaneous ICSs. Leveraging the deterministic network calculus (DNC) theory, we propose to analytically derive worst-case bounds on network- induced delays for critical ICS applications. We show that the problem of worst-case delay bounding for a wireless PRP network can be solved by performing network-calculus-based analysis on its non-feedforward traffic pattern. Closed-form expressions of worst-case delays are derived, which has not been found previously and allows ICS architects/designers to compute worst- case delay bounds for ICS tasks in their respective application domains of interest. Our analytical results not only provide insights into the impacts of network-induced delays on latency- critical tasks but also allow ICS architects/operators to assess whether proper wireless RPR network infrastructure can be adopted into their systems. 

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3. Work-in-Progress: Enabling Secure Boot for Real-Time Restart-Based Cyber-Physical Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/RTSS52674.2021.00056  

   Hounsinou, Sena ; Banerjee, Vijay ; Peng, Chunhao ; Hasan, Monowar ; Bloom, Gedare ( December 2021 , 2021 IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS))

   Several cyber-physical systems use real-time restart-based embedded systems with the Simplex architecture to provide safety guarantees against system faults. Some approaches have been developed to protect such systems from security violations too, but none of these approaches can prevent an adversary from modifying the operating system or application code to execute an attack that persists even after a reboot. In this work, we present a secure boot mechanism to restore real-time restart-based embedded systems into a secure computing environment after every restart. We analyze the delay introduced by the proposed security feature and present preliminary results to demonstrate the viability of our approach using an open-source bootloader and real-time operating system. 

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4. iCASM: An Information-Centric Network Architecture for Wide Area Measurement Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/tsg.2020.2971429  

   Ravikumar, Gelli ; Ameme, Dan ; Misra, Satyajayant ; Brahma, Sukumar ; Tourani, Reza ( February 2020 , IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid)

   Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS) use an underlying communication network to collect and analyze data from devices in the power grid, aimed to improve grid operations. For WAMS to be effective, the communication network needs to support low packet latency and low packet losses. Internet Protocol (IP), the pervasive technology used in today’s communication networks uses loop-free best-paths for data forwarding, which increases the load on these paths causing delays and losses in delivery. Information-Centric Networking (ICN), a new networking paradigm, designed to enable a data-centric information sharing, natively supports the concurrent use of multiple transmission interfaces, in-networking caching, as well as per-packet security and can provide better application support. In this paper, we present , an ICN-based network architecture for wide area smart grid communications. We demonstrate through simulations that achieves low latency and 100% data delivery even during network congestion by leveraging multiple available paths; thus significantly improving communication resiliency in comparison to an IP-based approach. can be used immediately on today’s Internet as an overlay. 

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5. Interactive museum exhibits with embedded systems: A use‐case scenario

   https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.4141  

   Wong, Lok ; Shimojo, Shinji ; Teranishi, Yuuichi ; Yoshihisa, Tomoki ; Haga, Jason H. ( April 2017 , Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience)

   The feasibility of using embedded systems in real‐life applications is becoming more widespread. These applications have grown from do‐it‐yourself projects of computer enthusiasts or robotics projects to larger scale efforts and deployments. This paper describes a scenario that deployed a prototype application that allows the public to interact with features of a model and view videos from a first‐person perspective on the train. Through testing the embedded systems and their usage in a public setting, it was demonstrated that interactive features could be implemented in model train exhibits, which are featured in traditional museum environments that lack technical infrastructure. Specifically, the Arduino and Raspberry Pi provide the necessary linkages between the Internet and hardware, allowing for a greater interactive experience for museum visitors. These results provide an important use‐case scenario and lessons learned that cultural heritage institutions can use when implementing embedded systems on a larger scale, for the purpose of increasing visitors' experience through greater interaction and engagement.

    

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