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Multicore systems were developed to provide a substantial performance increase over monocore systems. But shared hardware resources are a problem as they add unpredictable delays that affect the schedulability of multicore hard real-time systems. In recent years much effort has been put into modelling interference and proposing scheduling techniques to mitigate its negative effect. Using one of these models, we propose a scheduling technique, based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP) that, in combination with a task to core allocator, not only achieves a feasible schedule but also reduces the interference produced by shared hardware resources in the context of hard real-time multicore systems. The evaluation shows how interference is reduced ( $\approx 83.47$ %) and schedulability is increased ( $\approx 12.25$ %) compared to traditional heuristics.

Among the classes of wireless personal area networks, a wireless sensor network typically refers to a versatile and densely distributed sensing platform that enables the support of a wide variety of application domains. Among the various technical challenges addressed by more than one decade of research in wireless sensor networks, security across wireless links is by far one of the most critical ones and relates to the need of guaranteeing reliability and trustiness of the collected data. This article deals with the cryptographic aspects involved in securing wireless sensor networks, in terms of confidentiality and authentication. In particular, moving from some results previously achieved in our research activity, this article extends a cryptography scheme in order to better comply with the security requirements that arise from real-world wireless sensor network installations. The proposed scheme, called topology-authenticated key scheme 2, takes advantage of hybrid cryptography to provide security in the presence of resource-constrained sensor nodes using topology-authenticated keys to provide increased robustness to the scheme itself. The proposed extensions provide full practical support to star-topology wireless sensor networks and the article presents also some experimental results obtained by implementing the scheme on two different wireless sensor network platforms available for protocol stacks compliant with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.

Advances in technology call for a parallel evolution in the software. New techniques are needed to support this dynamism, to track and guide its evolution process. This applies especially in the field of embedded systems, and certainly in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), where hardware platforms and software environments change very quickly. Commonly, operating systems play a key role in the development process of any application. The most used operating system in WSNs is TinyOS, currently at its TinyOS 2.1.2 version. The evolution from TinyOS 1.x and TinyOS 2.x made the applications developed on TinyOS 1.x obsolete. In other words, these applications are not compatible out-of-the-box with TinyOS 2.x and require a porting action. In this paper, we discuss on the porting of embedded system (i.e., Wireless Sensor Networks) applications in response to operating systems’ evolution. In particular, using a model-based approach, we report the porting we did of Agilla, a Mobile-Agent Middleware (MAMW) for WSNs, on TinyOS 2.x, which we refer to as Agilla 2. We also provide a comparative analysis about the characteristics of Agilla 2 versus Agilla. The proposed Agilla 2 is compatible with TinyOS 2.x, has full capabilities and provides new features, as shown by the maintainability and performance measurement presented in this paper. An additional valuable result is the architectural modeling of Agilla and Agilla 2, missing before, which extends its documentation and improves its maintainability.

We here present a new PLC-POWERLINK industrial solution for Industry 4.0 applications. The proposed solution provides the capability to separate the sensing functionality from the PLC-side, in demand for the reconfigurable FPGA implementation. In particular, we here provide a framework that supports the interfacing between the POWERLINK protocol and commonly used standards, such as I2C, SPI, and UART. This has been obtained by using a framework built around a soft IP-core Application Processor, which manages the interfacing with several POWERLINK slaves, able to support the data exchange with the POWERLINK Communication Processor. A practical application example and related implementation details are presented in the paper.

Cooperative Cyber-Physical Systems (Co-CPSs) can be enabled using wireless communication technologies, which in principle should address reliability and safety challenges. Safety for Co-CPS enabled by wireless communication technologies is a crucial aspect and requires new dedicated design approaches. In this paper, we provide an overview of five Co-CPS use cases, as introduced in our SafeCOP EU project, and analyze their safety design requirements. Next, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the main existing wireless communication technologies giving details about the protocols developed within particular standardization bodies. We also investigate to what extent they address the non-functional requirements in terms of safety, security and real time, in the different application domains of each use case. Finally, we discuss general recommendations about the use of different wireless communication technologies showing their potentials in the selected real-world use cases. The discussion is provided under consideration in the 5G standardization process within 3GPP, whose current efforts are inline to current gaps in wireless communications protocols for Co-CPSs including many future use cases.