arXiv subjects

Samarjit Chakraborty

Publications and source records attributed to Samarjit Chakraborty.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Performance Limits of Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Networks

Neighbor Discovery (ND) is the process employed by two wireless devices to discover each other. There are many different ND protocols, both in the scientific literature and also those employed in practice. All ND protocols involve devices sending beacons, and also listening for them. Protocols differ in terms of how the beacon transmissions and reception windows are scheduled, and the device sleeps in between consecutive transmissions and reception windows in order to save energy. A successful discovery constitutes a sending device's beacon overlapping with a receiving device's reception window. The goal of all ND protocols is to minimize the discovery latency. In spite of the ubiquity of ND protocols and active research on this topic for over two decades, the basic question "Given an energy budget, what is the minimum guaranteed ND latency?", however, still remains unanswered. Given the different kinds of protocols that exist, there has also been no standard way of comparing them and their performance. This paper, for the first time, answers the question on the best-achievable ND latency for a given energy budget. We derive discovery latencies for different scenarios, e.g., when both devices have the same energy budgets, and both devices have different energy budgets. We also show that some existing protocols can be parametrized such that they perform optimally. The fact that the parametrizations of some other protocols were optimal was not known before, and can now be established using our technique. Our results are restricted to the case when a few devices discover each other at a time, as is the case in most real-life scenarios. When many devices need to discover each other simultaneously, packet collisions play a dominant role in the discovery latency and how to analyze such scenarios need further study.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

An investigation on gravitational entropy of cosmological models

In this paper, we investigate the entropy of the free gravitational field for a given epoch for some well-known isotropic and anisotropic cosmologies. We use the definition of gravitational entropy proposed by Clifton, Ellis, and Tavakol, where the 2-index square root of the 4-index Bel-Robinson tensor is taken to be the energy momentum tensor for the free gravity. We examine whether, in the vicinity of the initial singularity, the ratio of the energy density of free gravity to that of matter density goes to zero, validating Penrose's conjecture on Weyl curvature. Whenever this is true, the gravitational entropy increases monotonically with time, leading to structure formation. For the models considered by us, we identify the conditions for which the Weyl curvature hypothesis is valid, and the assumptions under which it is validated, or otherwise.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2020

Optimizing BLE-Like Neighbor Discovery

Neighbor discovery (ND) protocols are used for establishing a first contact between multiple wireless devices. The energy consumption and discovery latency of this procedure are determined by the parametrization of the protocol. In most existing protocols, reception and transmission are temporally coupled. Such schemes are referred to as \textit{slotted}, for which the problem of finding optimized parametrizations has been studied thoroughly in the literature. However, slotted approaches are not efficient in applications in which new devices join the network gradually and only the joining devices and a master node need to run the ND protocol simultaneously. For example, this is typically the case in IoT scenarios or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) piconets. Here, protocols in which packets are transmitted with periodic intervals (PI) can achieve significantly lower worst-case latencies than slotted ones. For this class of protocols, optimal parameter values remain unknown. To address this, we propose an optimization framework for PI-based BLE-like protocols, which translates any specified duty-cycle (and therefore energy budget) into a set of optimized parameter values. We show that the parametrizations resulting from one variant of our proposed scheme are optimal when one receiver discovers one transmitter, and no other parametrization or ND protocol - neither slotted nor slotless - can guarantee lower discovery latencies for a given duty-cycle in this scenario. Since the resulting protocol utilizes the channel more aggressively than other ND protocols, beacons will collide more frequently. Hence, due to collisions, the rate of successful discoveries gracefully decreases for larger numbers of devices discovering each other simultaneously. We also propose a scheme for configuring the BLE protocol (and not just BLE-\textit{like} protocols).

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

How Reliable is Smartphone-based Electronic Contact Tracing for COVID-19?

Smartphone-based electronic contact tracing is currently considered an essential tool towards easing lockdowns, curfews, and shelter-in-place orders issued by most governments around the world in response to the 2020 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) crisis. While the focus on developing smartphone-based contact tracing applications or apps has been on privacy concerns stemming from the use of such apps, an important question that has not received sufficient attention is: How reliable will such smartphone-based electronic contact tracing be? This is a technical question related to how two smartphones reliably register their mutual proximity. Here, we examine in detail the technical prerequisites required for effective smartphone-based contact tracing. The underlying mechanism that any contact tracing app relies on is called Neighbor Discovery (ND), which involves smartphones transmitting and scanning for Bluetooth signals to record their mutual presence whenever they are in close proximity. The hardware support and the software protocols used for ND in smartphones, however, were not designed for reliable contact tracing. In this paper, we quantitatively evaluate how reliably can smartphones do contact tracing. Our results point towards the design of a wearable solution for contact tracing that can overcome the shortcomings of a smartphone-based solution to provide more reliable and accurate contact tracing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that quantifies, both, the suitability and also the drawbacks of smartphone-based contact tracing. Further, our results can be used to parameterize a ND protocol to maximize the reliability of any contact tracing app that uses it.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

The Time-Triggered Wireless Architecture

Wirelessly interconnected sensors, actuators, and controllers promise greater flexibility, lower installation and maintenance costs, and higher robustness in harsh conditions than wired solutions. However, to facilitate the adoption of wireless communication in cyber-physical systems (CPS), the functional and non-functional properties must be similar to those known from wired architectures. We thus present Time-Triggered Wireless (TTW), a wireless architecture for multi-mode CPS that offers reliable communication with guarantees on end-to-end delays among distributed applications executing on low-cost, low-power embedded devices. We achieve this by exploiting the high reliability and deterministic behavior of a synchronous transmission based communication stack we design, and by coupling the timings of distributed task executions and message exchanges across the wireless network by solving a novel co-scheduling problem. While some of the concepts in TTW have existed for some time and TTW has already been successfully applied for feedback control and coordination of multiple mechanical systems with closed-loop stability guarantees, this paper presents the key algorithmic, scheduling, and networking mechanisms behind TTW, along with their experimental evaluation, which have not been known so far. TTW is open source and ready to use: ttw.ethz.ch

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Vehicle Position Estimation with Aerial Imagery from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The availability of real-world data is a key element for novel developments in the fields of automotive and traffic research. Aerial imagery has the major advantage of recording multiple objects simultaneously and overcomes limitations such as occlusions. However, there are only few data sets available. This work describes a process to estimate a precise vehicle position from aerial imagery. A robust object detection is crucial for reliable results, hence the state-of-the-art deep neural network Mask-RCNN is applied for that purpose. Two training data sets are employed: The first one is optimized for detecting the test vehicle, while the second one consists of randomly selected images recorded on public roads. To reduce errors, several aspects are accounted for, such as the drone movement and the perspective projection from a photograph. The estimated position is comapared with a reference system installed in the test vehicle. It is shown, that a mean accuracy of 20 cm can be achieved with flight altitudes up to 100 m, Full-HD resolution and a frame-by-frame detection. A reliable position estimation is the basis for further data processing, such as obtaining additional vehicle state variables. The source code, training weights, labeled data and example videos are made publicly available. This supports researchers to create new traffic data sets with specific local conditions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Unsupervised and Supervised Learning with the Random Forest Algorithm for Traffic Scenario Clustering and Classification

The goal of this paper is to provide a method, which is able to find categories of traffic scenarios automatically. The architecture consists of three main components: A microscopic traffic simulation, a clustering technique and a classification technique for the operational phase. The developed simulation tool models each vehicle separately, while maintaining the dependencies between each other. The clustering approach consists of a modified unsupervised Random Forest algorithm to find a data adaptive similarity measure between all scenarios. As part of this, the path proximity, a novel technique to determine a similarity based on the Random Forest algorithm is presented. In the second part of the clustering, the similarities are used to define a set of clusters. In the third part, a Random Forest classifier is trained using the defined clusters for the operational phase. A thresholding technique is described to ensure a certain confidence level for the class assignment. The method is applied for highway scenarios. The results show that the proposed method is an excellent approach to automatically categorize traffic scenarios, which is particularly relevant for testing autonomous vehicle functionality.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

Thermodynamics of FRW Universe With Chaplygin Gas Models

In this paper we have examined the validity of the generalized second law of thermodynamics (GSLT) in an expanding Friedmann Robertson Walker (FRW) universe filled with different variants of Chaplygin gases. Assuming that the universe is a closed system bounded by the cosmological horizon, we first present the general prescription for the rate of change of total entropy on the boundary. In the subsequent part we have analyzed the validity of the generalised second law of thermodynamics on the cosmological apparent horizon and the cosmological event horizon for different Chaplygin gas models of the universe. The analysis is supported with the help of suitable graphs to clarify the status of the GSLT on the cosmological horizons. In the case of the cosmological apparent horizon we have found that some of these models always obey the GSLT, whereas the validity of GSLT on the cosmological event horizon of all these models depend on the choice of free parameters in the respective models.

physics.gen-ph↗

arXiv2019

On the gravitational entropy of accelerating black holes

In this paper we have examined the validity of a proposed definition of gravitational entropy in the context of accelerating black hole solutions of the Einstein field equations, which represent the realistic black hole solutions. We have adopted a phenomenological approach proposed in Rudjord et al [20] and expanded by Romero et al [21], in which the Weyl curvature hypothesis is tested against the expressions for the gravitational entropy. Considering the $C$-metric for the accelerating black holes, we have evaluated the gravitational entropy and the corresponding entropy density for four different types of black holes, namely, non-rotating black hole, non-rotating charged black hole, rotating black hole and rotating charged black hole. We end up by discussing the merits of such an analysis and the possible reason of failure in the particular case of rotating charged black hole and comment on the possible resolution of the problem.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2019

On Optimal Neighbor Discovery

Mobile devices apply neighbor discovery (ND) protocols to wirelessly initiate a first contact within the shortest possible amount of time and with minimal energy consumption. For this purpose, over the last decade, a vast number of ND protocols have been proposed, which have progressively reduced the relation between the time within which discovery is guaranteed and the energy consumption. In spite of the simplicity of the problem statement, even after more than 10 years of research on this specific topic, new solutions are still proposed even today. Despite the large number of known ND protocols, given an energy budget, what is the best achievable latency still remains unclear. This paper addresses this question and for the first time presents safe and tight, duty-cycle-dependent bounds on the worst-case discovery latency that no ND protocol can beat. Surprisingly, several existing protocols are indeed optimal, which has not been known until now. We conclude that there is no further potential to improve the relation between latency and duty-cycle, but future ND protocols can improve their robustness against beacon collisions.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

Challenges in IT Operations Management at a German University Chair -- Ten Years in Retrospect

Over the last two decades, the majority of German universities adopted various characteristics of the prevailing North-American academic system, resulting in significant changes in several key areas that include, e.g., both teaching and research. The universities' internal organizational structures, however, still follow a traditional, decentralized scheme implementing an additional organizational level -- the Chair -- effectively a "mini department" with dedicated staff, budget and infrastructure. Although the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has been establishing a more centralized scheme for many administrative tasks over the past decade, the transition from its distributed to a centralized information technology (IT) administration and infrastructure is still an ongoing process. In case of the authors' chair, this migration so far included handing over all network-related operations to the joint compute center, consolidating the Chair's legacy server system in terms of both hardware architectures and operating systems and, lately, moving selected services to replacements operated by Department or University. With requirements, individuals and organizations constantly shifting, this process, however, is neither close to completion nor particularly unique to TUM. In this paper, we will thus share our experiences w.r.t. this IT migration as we believe both that many of the other German universities might be facing similar challenges and that, in the future, North-American universities - currently not implementing the chair layer and instead relying on a centralized IT infrastructure - could need a more decentralized solution. Hoping that both benefit from this journey, we thus present the design, commissioning and evolution of our infrastructure.

cs.GL↗

arXiv2019

Evolution of FRW universe in variable modified Chaplygin gas model

In this paper we study the evolution of the FRW universe filled with variable modified Chaplygin gas (VMCG). We begin with a thermodynamical treatment of VMCG described by the equation of state $P = Aρ-Bρ^{-α}$, and obtain its temperature as a function of redshift $z$. We show that the results are consistent with similar works on other types of Chaplygin gas models. In addition to deriving the exact expression of temperature of the fluid in terms of the boundary conditions and redshift, we also used observational data to determine the redshift at the epoch of transition from the decelerated to the accelerated phase of expansion of the universe. The values of other relevant parameters like the Hubble parameter, the equation-of-state parameter and the speed of sound are obtained in terms of the redshift parameter, and these values are compared with the results obtained from previous works on MCG and other Chaplygin gas models for the various values of $n$ permitted by thermodynamic stability. We assume the present value of temperature of the microwave background radiation to be given by $ T_0 = 2.7 K $, and the parameter $ A $ in the equation of state is taken as $ 1/3 $ since it corresponds to the radiation-dominated phase of the universe. The value of the parameter $Ω_x$ has been assumed to be $0.7$ in our calculation. Since it is known that the redshift of photon decoupling is $ z\simeq 1100 $, we used this value to calculate the temperature of decoupling.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2019

Cost-effective Energy Monitoring of a Zynq-based Real-time System including dual Gigabit Ethernet

The ongoing integration of fine-grained power management features already established in CPU-driven Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) enables both traditional Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and, more recently, hybrid Programmable SoCs (pSoCs) to reach more energy-sensitive application domains (such as, e.g., automotive and robotics). By combining a fixed-function multi-core SoC with flexible, configurable FPGA fabric, the latter can be used to realize heterogeneous Real-time Systems (RTSs) commonly implementing complex application-specific architectures with high computation and communication (I/O) densities. Their dynamic changes in workload, currently active power saving features and thus power consumption require precise voltage and current sensing on all relevant supply rails to enable dependable evaluation of the various power management techniques. In this paper, we propose a low-cost 18-channel 16-bit-resolution measurement (sub-)system capable of 200 kSPS (kilo-samples per second) for instrumentation of current pSoC development boards. To this end, we join simultaneously sampling analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and analog voltage/current sensing circuitry with a Cortex M7 microcontroller using an SD card for storage. In addition, we propose to include crucial I/O components such as Ethernet PHYs into the power monitoring to gain a holistic view on the RTS's temporal behavior covering not only computation on FPGA and CPUs, but also communication in terms of, e.g., reception of sensor values and transmission of actuation signals. We present an FMC-sized implementation of our measurement system combined with two Gigabit Ethernet PHYs and one HDMI input. Paired with Xilinx' ZC702 development board, we are able to synchronously acquire power traces of a Zynq pSoC and the two PHYs precise enough to identify individual Ethernet frames.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

Highway traffic data: macroscopic, microscopic and criticality analysis for capturing relevant traffic scenarios and traffic modeling based on the highD data set

This work provides a comprehensive analysis on naturalistic driving behavior for highways based on the highD data set. Two thematic fields are considered. First, some macroscopic and microscopic traffic statistics are provided. These include the traffic flow rate and the traffic density, as well as velocity, acceleration and distance distributions. Additionally, the dependencies to each other are examined and compared to related work. The second part investigates the distributions of criticality measures. The Time-To-Collision, Time-Headway and a third measure, which couples both, are analyzed. These measures are also combined with other indicators. Scenarios, in which these measures reach a critical level, are separately discussed. The results are compared to related work as well. The two main contributions of this work can be stated as follows. First, the analysis on the criticality measures can be used to find suitable thresholds for rare traffic scenarios. Second, the statistics provided in this work can also be utilized for traffic modeling, for example in simulation environments.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

A Valgrind Tool to Compute the Working Set of a Software Process

This paper introduces a new open-source tool for the dynamic analyzer Valgrind. The tool measures the amount of memory that is actively being used by a process at any given point in time. While there exist numerous tools to measure the memory requirements of a process, the vast majority only focuses on metrics like resident or proportional set sizes, which include memory that was once claimed, but is momentarily disused. Consequently, such tools do not permit drawing conclusions about how much cache or RAM a process actually requires at each point in time, and thus cannot be used for performance debugging. The few tools which do measure only actively used memory, however, have limitations in temporal resolution and introspection. In contrast, our tool offers an easy way to compute the memory that has recently been accessed at any point in time, reflecting how cache and RAM requirements change over time. In particular, this tool computes the set of memory references made within a fixed time interval before any point in time, known as the working set, and captures call stacks for interesting peaks in the working set size. We first introduce the tool, then we run some examples comparing the output from our tool with similar memory tools, and we close with a discussion of limitations

cs.PF↗

arXiv2018

Measuring Software Performance on Linux

Measuring and analyzing the performance of software has reached a high complexity, caused by more advanced processor designs and the intricate interaction between user programs, the operating system, and the processor's microarchitecture. In this report, we summarize our experience about how performance characteristics of software should be measured when running on a Linux operating system and a modern processor. In particular, (1) We provide a general overview about hardware and operating system features that may have a significant impact on timing and how they interact, (2) we identify sources of errors that need to be controlled in order to obtain unbiased measurement results, and (3) we propose a measurement setup for Linux to minimize errors. Although not the focus of this report, we describe the measurement process using hardware performance counters, which can faithfully reflect the real bottlenecks on a given processor. Our experiments confirm that our measurement setup has a large impact on the results. More surprisingly, however, they also suggest that the setup can be negligible for certain analysis methods. Furthermore, we found that our setup maintains significantly better performance under background load conditions, which means it can be used to improve software in high-performance applications.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2018

Packing Sporadic Real-Time Tasks on Identical Multiprocessor Systems

In real-time systems, in addition to the functional correctness recurrent tasks must fulfill timing constraints to ensure the correct behavior of the system. Partitioned scheduling is widely used in real-time systems, i.e., the tasks are statically assigned onto processors while ensuring that all timing constraints are met. The decision version of the problem, which is to check whether the deadline constraints of tasks can be satisfied on a given number of identical processors, has been known ${\cal NP}$-complete in the strong sense. Several studies on this problem are based on approximations involving resource augmentation, i.e., speeding up individual processors. This paper studies another type of resource augmentation by allocating additional processors, a topic that has not been explored until recently. We provide polynomial-time algorithms and analysis, in which the approximation factors are dependent upon the input instances. Specifically, the factors are related to the maximum ratio of the period to the relative deadline of a task in the given task set. We also show that these algorithms unfortunately cannot achieve a constant approximation factor for general cases. Furthermore, we prove that the problem does not admit any asymptotic polynomial-time approximation scheme (APTAS) unless ${\cal P}={\cal NP}$ when the task set has constrained deadlines, i.e., the relative deadline of a task is no more than the period of the task.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2018

Fast Collision Simulation for Cyclic Wireless Protocols

With most modern smartphones supporting wireless protocols such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or ANT+, the number of networks are growing rapidly. Therefore, collisions among multiple networks need to be considered for choosing the appropriate protocol parameters. With growing numbers of networks, simulations for estimating the collision rate become computationally very complex and lengthy. The large simulation times therefore constitute a major limitation in the analysis of complex cases. In this paper, we present a novel simulation technique which can speed up collision simulations by one order of magnitude in realistic situations. Whenever the transmission of a packet is simulated, the cyclic nature of protocols like BLE is exploited to predict the next packet that has a chance of colliding. All transmissions in between can be skipped without affecting the simulation results. Based on the transmission intervals of the networks, one can compute a certain shrinkage per cycle of the time offset between their packets. Using this shrinkage and the current offset between the starting times of any two packets, our proposed simulation model can accurately predict the next pair of packets that needs to be simulated. Whereas our proposed technique aims at the BLE protocol, the theory is generic and can be used for many other cyclic protocols such as ANT/ANT+ as well.

cs.NI↗