Flexibility and energy efficiency are considered two principal requirements of future fifth generation (5G) systems. From an architectural point of view, centralized processing and a dense deployment of small cells will play a vital role in enabling the efficient and dynamic operation of 5G networks. In this context, reconfigurable hotspots will provide on-demand services and adapt their operation in accordance to traffic re quirements, constituting a vital element of the heterogeneous 5G network infrastructure. In this paper we present a reconfigurable hotspot which is able to flexibly distribute its underlying communication functions across the network, as well as to adapt various parameters affecting the generation of the transmitted signal. The reconfiguration of the hotspot focuses on minimizing its energy footprint, while accounting for the current operative requirements. A real-time hotspot prototype has been developed to facilitate the realistic evaluation of the energy saving gains of the proposed scheme. The development flexibly combines software (SW) and hardware (HW) accelerated (HWA) functions in order to enable the agile reconfiguration of the hotspot. Actual power consumption measurements are presented for various relevant 5G networking scenarios and hotspot configurations. This thorough characterization of the energy footprint of the different subsystems of the prototype allows to map reconfiguration strategies to different use cases. Finally, the energy-aware design and implementation of the hotspot prototype is widely detailed in an effort to underline its importance to the provision of the flexibility and energy efficiency to future 5G systems. ; This work was supported by the European Commission in the framework of the H2020-ICT-2014-2 project Flex5Gware (Grant agreement no. 671563). The work of CTTC was also partially supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 891) and by the Spanish Government under project TEC2014-58341-C4-4-R.
This paper presents the Flex5Gware project, whose goal is to deliver highly reconfigurable hardware (HW) platforms and HW-agnostic software (SW) platforms for 5G network elements and terminal devices. Flex5Gware will enable 5G HW/SW platforms to meet the requirements imposed by the growth in mobile traffic and the diversity of applications by increasing their capacity, reducing their energy footprint and enhancing their scalability and modularity. To put in place this vision in this early stage of 5G PPP research, Flex5Gware is designing and prototyping key building blocks of 5G HW/SW platforms. In particular, the developed technologies will be evaluated and demonstrated with proofs-of-concept by the end of the project. ; Grant numbers : The first and fourth authors would also like to acknowledge the support from the Catalan government to their research group 2014 SGR 1551.
Because technology pushed product development projects are risky and failure rates are high, the success factors are valuable knowledge for the management of development-intensive firms. This paper provides a comparison of success factor weighting between hardware and software product development projects in the ICT industry improving existing success factor research. We analyze qualitatively interview data from nine intentionally selected start-up firms and identify which success factors were clearly supported by HW and SW firms, and in which area different types of firms could benchmark each other. The practical aim of this paper is that it helps management to recognize the real actions needed to reduce product development risks in HW and SW projects.
Concern for the security of embedded systems that implement IoT devices has become a crucial issue, as these devices today support an increasing number of applications and services that store and exchange information whose integrity, privacy, and authenticity must be adequately guaranteed. Modern lattice-based cryptographic schemes have proven to be a good alternative, both to face the security threats that arise as a consequence of the development of quantum computing and to allow efficient implementations of cryptographic primitives in resource-limited embedded systems, such as those used in consumer and industrial applications of the IoT. This article describes the hardware implementation of parameterized multi-unit serial polynomial multipliers to speed up time-consuming operations in NTRU-based cryptographic schemes. The flexibility in selecting the design parameters and the interconnection protocol with a general-purpose processor allow them to be applied both to the standardized variants of NTRU and to the new proposals that are being considered in the post-quantum contest currently held by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as to obtain an adequate cost/performance/security-level trade-off for a target application. The designs are provided as AXI4 bus-compliant intellectual property modules that can be easily incorporated into embedded systems developed with the Vivado design tools. The work provides an extensive set of implementation and characterization results in devices of the Xilinx Zynq-7000 and Zynq UltraScale+ families for the different sets of parameters defined in the NTRUEncrypt standard. It also includes details of their plug and play inclusion as hardware accelerators in the C implementation of this public-key encryption scheme codified in the LibNTRU library, showing that acceleration factors of up to 3.1 are achieved when compared to pure software implementations running on the processing systems included in the programmable devices. ; European Union 952622 ; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación PID2020-116664RB100, 10.13039/501100011033
La tecnologia che amplifica la realtà come pure i mezzi tecnologici di acquisizione dei dati, stanno continuando ad avere uno svilup - po difficilmente controllabile o prevedibile. Progetti di un certo interesse, nascono, si sviluppano e muoiono talvolta senza produrre risultati significativi, ma costituendosi come fasi di un processo fluido e dinamico, sul quale vengono costruite nuove applicazioni software e sistemi hardware. Allo stesso tempo, il ruolo dell'accademia sembra venire spesso scavalcato da ciò che viene sviluppato dalla citizen science: ai ricercatori non sembra più spettare esclusivamente il compito della "scoperta", quanto piuttosto la crea - zione di protocolli scientificamente affidabili sulla base di tecnologie spesso utilizzate dalle diverse comunità di citizen scientists in maniera non conforme alle specifiche per le quali erano state progettate. Il contributo propone una riflessione su questi temi prendendo come spunto due sperimentazioni dall'alto contenuto innovativo che abbracciano varie fasi del processo definito con il termine rilievo. Esse riguardano infatti da un lato un sistema hw/sw di acquisizione dati, elaborazione e comunicazione sviluppato per dispositivi mobili ( Progetto Tango ) e una piattaforma mista ROV/UAV multi - sensore dotata di sistema LIDAR e fotocamera digitale per l'acquisizione di dati in luoghi non accessibili ( Progetto Heritagebot ). ; The technology that 'amplifies' the real world as well as the technological means of data capturing, are continuing to have a development difficult to control or predict. Projects of a certain interest are born, develop and die sometimes without producing significant results nevertheless becoming phases of a fluid and dynamic process, on which new software applications and hardware systems are built. At the same time, the role of the academy seems to be often overtaken by what is developed by the citizen science. Researchers no longer seem to exclusively explore the 'discovery' domain, but rather work at the setup of scientifically reliable protocols for technologies often used by different communities of citizens in a way that does not conform to the specifications for which they were originally designed. This paper focuses on these issues taking as its starting point two experiments with high innovative content that cover various stages of the process defined by the term Survey. They pertain on the one hand to a hw/sw system of data capturing, processing and communication developed for mobile devices (Tango Project) and on the other to a mixed ROV/UAV multisensor platform equipped with a LIDAR system and digital camera for data acquisition in inaccessible places (Heritagebot Project).
Publicat en accés amb el permís de l'editor / Published in open access with the permission of the publisher. ; The space domain demands increased performance, reliable and easy to verify and validate platforms tomatch the requirements of highly autonomous missions and systems that need to undergo qualification and certification against safety guidelines, and be commercialized worldwide minimizing export restrictions. Unfortunately, commercial platforms either fail to match domainspecific requirements for space (e.g. safety requirements), are limited by US export regulations, or simply fail both sets of requirements. This paper introduces De-RISC, a novel HW/SW platform meeting space requirements for safety- and mission-critical applications by construction, with explicit support to ease performance validation and diagnosis, and based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. The De-RISC platform, which builds upon fentISS' XtratuM hypervisor and a Cobham Gaisler (CG) NOEL-V based MPSoC, will reach commercial maturity in 2022, and will be assessed against a space use case. ; This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under Grant Agreement EIC-FTI 869945. ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (published version)
Individuals have received support from the Marie-Curie program and the European Research Council and EPLANET (European Union); the Leventis Foundation; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office; the Fonds pour la Formation à la Recherche dans l'Industrie et dans l'Agriculture (FRIA-Belgium); the Agentschap voor Innovatie door Wetenschap en Technologie (IWT-Belgium); the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MEYS) of the Czech Republic; the Council of Science and Industrial Research, India; the HOMING PLUS program of the Foundation for Polish Science, cofinanced from European Union, Regional Development Fund, the Mobility Plus program of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the National Science Center (Poland), contracts Harmonia 2014/14/M/ST2/00428, Opus 2013/11/B/ST2/04202, 2014/13/B/ST2/02543 and 2014/15/B/ST2/03998, Sonata-bis 2012/07/E/ST2/01406; the Thalis and Aristeia programs cofinanced by EU-ESF and the Greek NSRF; the National Priorities Research Program by Qatar National Research Fund; the Programa Clarín-COFUND del Principado de Asturias; the Rachadapisek Sompot Fund for Postdoctoral Fellowship, Chulalongkorn University and the Chulalongkorn Academic into Its 2nd Century Project Advancement Project (Thailand); and the Welch Foundation, contract C-1845.
