Real-time computing provides insightful ways to explore the optimization in resource usages, especially from the time point of view. Nevertheless, real-time task scheduling is recognized by its high complexity when there are non-preemptive shared resources and multiple processors. When more and more practical factors in system designs are considered, such as energy consumption and memory allocation, even some sub-problems in real-time task scheduling become intractable. Although people often criticize various artificial assumptions in real-time task scheduling, they have to admit that ideas in real-time computing and their extensions, such as tradeoff in cost, performance, energy, and even the quality of service, can be applied to multi-dimensional optimization in system designs. In this direction, we witness the rapid development of the embedded system industry and join the task force in system designs, especially mobile devices and non-volatile memory systems. Resource management on mobile devices, with a special emphasis on user experience, should not only consider the response time but also the visual perception of users. Non-volatile memory has also blurred the boundary between the memory and the storage. It enables certain unified considerations of the main memory and storage and also in-memory computing. It shows the ways to break the boundaries between hardware and software layers and have better integration of computing and memory/storage units. The advances in mobile systems and memory innovations inspire the evolution of embedded system designs and have also brought us insights to solutions regarding how systems should be restructured and how computing should be done. They might also provide their feedback to real-time computing and even shape the future direction of real-time computing in various innovative ways.
Owing to high cell density caused by the advanced manufacturing process, the reliability of flash drives turns out to be rather challenging in flash system designs. To enhance the reliability of flash drives, error-correcting code (ECC) has been widely utilized in flash drives to correct error bits during programming/reading data to/from flash drives. Although ECC can effectively enhance the reliability of flash drives by correcting error bits, the capability of ECC would degrade while the program/erase (P/E) cycles of flash blocks is increased. Finally, ECC could not correct a flash page, because a flash page contains too many error bits. As a result, reducing error bits is an effective solution to further improve the reliability of flash drives when a specific ECC is adopted in the flash drive. This work focuses on how to reduce the probability of producing error bits in a flash page. Thus, we propose a pattern-aware write strategy for flash reliability enhancement. The proposed write strategy considers both the P/E cycle of blocks and the pattern of written data while a flash block is allocated to store the written data. Since the proposed write strategy allocates young blocks (respectively, old blocks) for hot data (respectively, cold data) and flips the bit pattern of the written data to the appropriate bit pattern, the proposed strategy can effectively improve the reliability of flash drives. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy can reduce the number of error pages by up to 50%, compared with the well-known DFTL solution. Moreover, the proposed strategy is orthogonal with all ECC mechanisms so that the reliability of the flash drives with ECC mechanisms can be further improved by the proposed strategy.
Users roaming cellular signal coverage with their mobile devices essentially form a mobile cyber-physical system (CPS). By modeling cyber human mentality and physical signal coverage, as well as their interplay, user mobility can be leveraged to improve users' mobile experience with limited wireless bandwidth. Through a real-world case study, we observed that numerous ``null zones'' and ``hot zones'' exist in cellular signal coverage areas, where mobile devices cannot obtain sufficiently high data rates for delay-sensitive applications. Over one-third of the locations in a crowded area could have weak signal coverage and low bandwidth shares, resulting in poor mobile connectivity experience. This paper considers the practicality of a mobile CPS called Oasis, which guides users to leave those zones and move to nearby locations with better mobile experience. To realize the system, we model and maximize a user's willingness to travel to another location, where the willingness involves the compound impact of the travel distance and the improved perceptual quality. We also develop a prototype system that creates a feedback control loop to allow self-adaptation to users' needs. To evaluate the efficacy, we conducted a series of experiments based on the real data collected in downtown Taipei. The results demonstrate that our mobile CPS can further reduce the average distance per unit of quality improvement achieved with OpenSignalMaps by about 80\\%, and motivate further research.
With the large expected demand of wireless communication, Device-to-Device (D2D) communication has been proposed as a promising technology to enhance network performance. Nevertheless, the selfish nature of potential D2D users may impale the performance of D2D-enabled network. In this paper, we propose a D2D-enabled cellular network framework, which support a novel group D2D mode under overlay D2D communication. The group-based design is derived from the discussions of two common D2D modes, divided and shared D2D modes, regarded as special cases. The proposed framework provides a pricing-based dynamic Stackelberg game for optimal mode selection and spectrum partitioning. We propose the incentive compatible pricing strategy to provide proper incentive for these selfish potential D2D pairs to make optimal choices in mode selection. Our results show that the pricing and spectrum partition strategy effectively prevents selfish potential D2D users from harming the system performance while fully exploits the potential of D2D communication.
This letter investigates the source and relay precoder design for full-duplex multiple-input multiple-output relay systems, where simultaneous wireless information and power transfer is enabled at the destination. The objective is to design the precoders such that the end-to-end performance can be optimized. Different from existing schemes, a novel dual-objective function is adopted in this work. The proposed precoders yield closed-form solutions and avoid iterative algorithms. Moreover, our design is applicable when the system suffers from the residual loop-interference. Simulations show that the proposed scheme enables an efcient way to optimize information-decoding and energy-harvesting performances.
Mobile devices running augmented reality applications consume considerable energy for graphics-intensive workloads. This paper presents a scheme for the differentiated handling of camera-captured physical scenes and computer-generated virtual objects according to different perceptual quality metrics.We propose online algorithms and their realtime implementations to reduce energy consumption through dynamic frame rate adaptation while maintaining the visual quality required for augmented reality applications. To evaluate system efficacy, we integrate our scheme into Android and conduct extensive experiments on a commercial smartphone with various application scenarios. The results show that the proposed scheme can achieve energy savings of up to 39.1% in comparison to the native graphics system in Android while maintaining satisfactory visual quality.
We consider rescue missions in postdisaster scenarios with particularly difficult environments where no infrastructure is available. Given the increasing popularity of smartphones and wearable devices, this paper proposes a rescue system which uses the Doppler effect to determine the direction of Wi-Fi signals emitted from disaster survivors' mobile devices to help rescuers quickly locate the survivors. First, we investigate the impact of the search and rescue environment on the direction-finding accuracy of Doppler effect to identify the major challenge and several implementation issues of the system. Then, to address the major challenge of Doppler shifts being too small, we propose an algorithm, which consists of three mechanisms, to solve the problem with the objective of maximizing the direction-finding accuracy. These mechanisms improve the direction-finding accuracy via eliminating the frequency fluctuation as much as possible and improving the sensitivity on small frequency shifts. Also, an active detection scheme is proposed to ensure that the survivors' devices emit steady and continuous Wi-Fi signals, along with a decision logic to minimize energy consumption by the active scheme. We implement the rescue system as a mobile application on Android smartphones and conduct extensive experiments in real-world environments. Results show that the proposed system can reduce rescue times by up to half while consuming reasonable amounts of energy from survivor smartphones.
Mobile social networks (MSNs) enable users to discover and share contents with each other, especially at ephemeral events such as exhibitions and conferences where users could be strangers. Nevertheless, the incentive of users to actively share their contents in MSNs may be lacking if the corresponding cost is high. Besides, as users in MSN share contents in an impromptu way as they move, it makes them vulnerable to malicious users who may want to disseminate false contents. This is because users may not have knowledge about the peers they are socially connecting with in the network. In this paper, we propose MCoST, a mechanism that motivates content sharing in MSN and ensures that only trustworthy contents are shared. The mechanism is built on users' collective bidding, content cost sharing, and trust evaluation while guaranteeing individual rationality. MCoST enables content providers to share contents with multiple users simultaneously by utilizing the broadcast nature of wireless transmission. The cost of the content is collectively compensated by the content receivers through the content bidding mechanism in MCoST. In ensuring that users can establish the trustworthiness of their encounters' contents, MCoST incorporates a robust trust evaluation framework that guarantees that content reviews are immutable and tamper-proof, resistive to sybil, and rejection attacks, and that users cannot have multiple and fake identities in the network or reject negative reviews about their contents. This is achieved by integrating a distributed cryptographic hash-chained content review mechanism in the design of MCoST. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed mechanism efficiently evaluates contents' trustworthiness by detecting and discriminating review-chains under sybil or rejection attacks and reduces the time and cost to collect the desired contents by 86% and 40%, respectively, and improves network utilization by 50%.
Self-powered intermittent systems featuring nonvolatile processors (NVPs) allow for accumulative execution in unstable power environments. However, frequent power failures may cause incorrect NVP execution results due to invalid data generated intermittently. This paper presents a HW/SW co-design, called HomeRun, to guarantee atomicity by ensuring that an uninterruptible program section can be run through at one execution. We design a HW module to ensure that a power pulse is sufficient for an atomic section, and develop a SW mechanism for programmers to protect atomic sections. The proposed design is validated through the development of a prototype pattern locking system. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed design can completely guarantee atomicity and significantly improve the energy utilization of self-powered intermittent systems.
The increasingly high display resolution of mobile devices imposes a further burden on energy consumption. Existing schemes manage either OLED or GPU power to save energy. This paper presents the design, algorithm, and implementation of a co-managing scheme called Duet, which automatically trades off perceptual quality for energy efficiency in accordance with static and dynamic visual acuity when users interact with mobile applications. The results of experiments conducted on a commercial smartphone with popular interactive apps show that Duet saves more energy while retaining better visual quality, compared with a joint scheme that simultaneously uses dynamic pixel disabling and dynamic resolution scaling to save OLED and GPU energy in isolation.