A Cross-Layer Survey on Secure and Low-Latency Communications in Next-Generation IoT

The last years have been characterized by strong market exploitation of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in different application domains, such as Industry 4.0, smart cities, and eHealth. All the relevant solutions should properly address the security issues to ensure that sensor data and actuators are not under the control of malicious entities. Additionally, many applications should at the same time provide low-latency communications, as in the case for instance of remote control of industrial robots. Low latency and security are two of the most important challenges to be addressed for the successful deployment of IoT applications. These issues have been analyzed by several scientific papers and surveys that appeared in the last decade. However, few of them consider the two challenges jointly. Moreover, the security aspects are primarily investigated only in specific application domains or protocol levels and the latency issues are typically investigated only at low layers (e.g., physical, access). This paper addresses this shortcoming and provides a systematic review of state-of-the-art solutions for providing fast and secure IoT communications. Although the two requirements may appear to be in contrast to each other, we investigate possible integrated solutions that minimize device connection and service provisioning. We follow an approach where the proposals are reviewed by grouping them based on the reference architectural layer, i.e., access, network, and application layers. We also review the works that propose promising solutions that rely on the exploitation of the QUIC protocol at the higher levels of the protocol stack

Opposition control applied to turbulent wing sections

Opposition control (OC) is a reactive flow-control approach that mitigates the near-wall fluctuations by imposing blowing and suction at the wall, being opposite to the off-wall observations. We carried out high-resolution large-eddy simulations to investigate the effects of OC on turbulent boundary layers (TBLs) over a wing at a chord-based Reynolds number of. Two cases were considered: flow over the suction sides of the NACA0012 wing section at an angle of attack of, and the NACA4412 wing section at an angle of attack of. These cases represent TBLs subjected to mild and strong non-uniform adverse pressure gradients (APGs), respectively. First, we assessed the control effects on the streamwise development of TBLs and the achieved drag reduction. Our findings indicate that the performance of OC in terms of friction-drag reduction significantly diminishes as the APG intensifies. Analysis of turbulence statistics subsequently reveals that this is directly linked to the intensified wall-normal convection caused by the strong APG: it energizes the control intensity to overload the limitation that guarantees drag reduction. The formation of the so-called virtual wall that reflects the mitigation of wall-normal momentum transport is also implicitly affected by the pressure gradient. Control and pressure-gradient effects are clearly apparent in the anisotropy invariant maps, which also highlight the relevance of the virtual wall. Finally, spectral analyses indicate that the wall-normal transport of small-scale structures to the outer region due to the APG has a detrimental impact on the performance of OC. Uniform blowing and body-force damping were also examined to understand the differences between the various control schemes. Despite the distinct performance of friction-drag reduction, the effects of uniform blowing are akin to those induced by a stronger APG, while the effects of body-force damping exhibit similarities to those of OC in terms of the streamwise development of the TBL although there are differences in the turbulent statistics. To authors' best knowledge, the present study stands as the first in-depth analysis of the effects of OC applied to TBL subjected to non-uniform APGs with complex geometries

Semantic wikis as flexible database interfaces for biomedical applications

Several challenges prevent extracting knowledge from biomedical resources, including data heterogeneity and the difficulty to obtain and collaborate on data and annotations by medical doctors. Therefore, flexibility in their representation and interconnection is required; it is also essential to be able to interact easily with such data. In recent years, semantic tools have been developed: semantic wikis are collections of wiki pages that can be annotated with properties and so combine flexibility and expressiveness, two desirable aspects when modeling databases, especially in the dynamic biomedical domain. However, semantics and collaborative analysis of biomedical data is still an unsolved challenge. The aim of this work is to create a tool for easing the design and the setup of semantic databases and to give the possibility to enrich them with biostatistical applications. As a side effect, this will also make them reproducible, fostering their application by other research groups. A command-line software has been developed for creating all structures required by Semantic MediaWiki. Besides, a way to expose statistical analyses as R Shiny applications in the interface is provided, along with a facility to export Prolog predicates for reasoning with external tools. The developed software allowed to create a set of biomedical databases for the Neuroscience Department of the University of Padova in a more automated way. They can be extended with additional qualitative and statistical analyses of data, including for instance regressions, geographical distribution of diseases, and clustering. The software is released as open source-code and published under the GPL-3 license at https://github.com/mfalda/tsv2swm

LES and RANS calculations of particle dispersion behind a wall-mounted cubic obstacle

In the present paper, we evaluate the performances of three stochastic models for particle dispersion in the case of a three-dimensional turbulent flow. We consider the flow in a channel with a cubic wall-mounted obstacle, and perform large-eddy simulations (LESs) including passive particles injected behind the obstacle, for cases of low and strong inertial effects. We also perform Reynolds-averaged simulations of the same case, using standard turbulence models, and employ the two discrete stochastic models for particle dispersion implemented in the open-source code OpenFOAM and the continuous Lagrangian stochastic model proposed by Minier et al. (2004). The Lagrangian model is consistent with a Probability Density Function (PDF) model of the exact particle equations, and is based on the modelling of the fluid velocity seen by particles. This approach allows a consistent formulation which eliminates the spurious drifts flawing discrete models and to have the drag force in a closed form. The LES results are used as reference data both for the fluid RANS simulations and particle simulations with dispersion models. The present test case allows to evaluate the performance of dispersion models in highly non-homogeneous flow, and it used in this context for the first time. The continuous stochastic model generally shows a better agreement with the LES than the discrete stochastic models, in particular in the case of particles with higher inertia

Assignment of sensing tasks to IoT devices: Exploitation of a Social Network of Objects

The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) is a novel communication paradigm according to which the objects connected to the Internet create a dynamic social network that is mostly used to implement the following processes: route information and service requests, disseminate data, and evaluate the trust level of each member of the network. In this paper, the SIoT paradigm is applied to a scenario where geolocated sensing tasks are assigned to fixed and mobile devices, providing the following major contributions. The SIoT model is adopted to find the objects that can contribute to the application by crawling the social network through the nodes profile and trust level. A new algorithm to address the resource management issue is proposed so that sensing tasks are fairly assigned to the objects in the SIoT. To this, an energy consumption profile is created per device and task, and shared among nodes of the same category through the SIoT. The resulting solution is also implemented in the SIoT-based Lysis platform. Emulations have been performed, which showed an extension of the time needed to completely deplete the battery of the first device of more than 40% with respect to alternative approaches

Haplotype affinities resolve a major component of goat (<i>Capra hircus</i>) MtDNA D-loop diversity and reveal specific features of the Sardinian stock

Goat mtDNA haplogroup A is a poorly resolved lineage absorbing most of the overall diversity and is found in locations as distant as Eastern Asia and Southern Africa. Its phylogenetic dissection would cast light on an important portion of the spread of goat breeding. The aims of this work were 1) to provide an operational definition of meaningful mtDNA units within haplogroup A, 2) to investigate the mechanisms underlying the maintenance of diversity by considering the modes of selection operated by breeders and 3) to identify the peculiarities of Sardinian mtDNA types. We sequenced the mtDNA D-loop in a large sample of animals (1,591) which represents a non-trivial quota of the entire goat population of Sardinia. We found that Sardinia mirrors a large quota of mtDNA diversity of Western Eurasia in the number of variable sites, their mutational pattern and allele frequency. By using Bayesian analysis, a distance-based tree and a network analysis, we recognized demographically coherent groups of sequences identified by particular subsets of the variable positions. The results showed that this assignment system could be reproduced in other studies, capturing the greatest part of haplotype diversity. We identified haplotype groups overrepresented in Sardinian goats as a result of founder effects. We found that breeders maintain diversity of matrilines most likely through equalization of the reproductive potential. Moreover, the relevant amount of inter-farm mtDNA diversity found does not increase proportionally with distance. Our results illustrate the effects of breeding practices on the composition of maternal gene pool and identify mtDNA types that may be considered in projects aimed at retrieving the maternal component of the oldest breeds of Sardinia.</br

Decomposition of the mean friction drag on a NACA4412 airfoil under uniform blowing/suction

The application of drag-control strategies on canonical wall-bounded turbulence, such as periodic channel and zero- or adverse-pressure-gradient boundary layers, raises the question of how to describe control effects consistently for different reference cases. We employ the RD identity (Renard & Deck, J. Fluid Mech., 790, 2016, pp. 339-367) to decompose the mean friction drag and investigate the control effects of uniform blowing and suction applied to a NACA4412 airfoil at chord Reynolds numbers Re_c=200,000 and 400,000. The connection of the drag reduction/increase by using blowing/suction with the turbulence statistics (including viscous dissipation, turbulence-kinetic-energy production, and spatial growth of the flow) across the boundary layer, subjected to adverse or favorable pressure gradients, are examined. We found that the peaks of the statistics associated with the friction-drag generation exhibit good scaling in either inner or outer units throughout the boundary layer. They are also independent of the Reynolds number, control scheme, and intensity of the blowing/suction. The small- and large-scale structures are separated with an adaptive scale-decomposition method, i.e. empirical mode decomposition (EMD), aiming to analyze the scale-specific contribution of turbulent motions to friction-drag generation. Results unveil that blowing on the suction side of the airfoil is able to enhance the contribution of large-scale motions and to suppress that of small-scales; on the other hand, suction behaves contrarily. The contributions related to cross-scale interactions remain almost unchanged with different control strategies

Drag Assessment for Boundary Layer Control Schemes with Mass Injection

The present study considers uniform blowing in turbulent boundary layers as active flow control scheme for drag reduction on airfoils. The focus lies on the important question of how to quantify the drag reduction potential of this control scheme correctly. It is demonstrated that mass injection causes the body drag (the drag resulting from the stresses on the body) to differ from the wake survey drag (the momentum deficit in the wake of an airfoil), which is classically used in experiments as a surrogate for the former. This difference is related to the boundary layer control (BLC) penalty, an unavoidable drag portion which reflects the effort of a mass-injecting boundary layer control scheme. This is independent of how the control is implemented. With an integral momentum budget, we show that for the present control scheme, the wake survey drag contains the BLC penalty and is thus a measure for the inclusive drag of the airfoil, i.e. the one required to determine net drag reduction. The concept of the inclusive drag is extended also to boundary layers using the von Kàrmàn equation. This means that with mass injection the friction drag only is not sufficient to assess drag reduction also in canonical flows. Large Eddy Simulations and Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes simulations of the flow around airfoils are utilized to demonstrate the significance of this distinction for the scheme of uniform blowing. When the inclusive drag is properly accounted for, control scenarios previously considered to yield drag reduction actually show drag increase