CITI is hiring a PhD Student

Une bourse de thèse à pourvoir sur la télé alimentation d’objets communicants

Title: Nouvelles stratégies de télé alimentation d’objets communicants en utilisant des techniques de formation de faisceau distribuée
Keywords: Communications radio, formation de faisceau, transmission de puissance sans fil, synchronisation, automatique
Location: CITI laboratory, INSA Lyon, France
Funding: 3-year
Contact: Florin Doru HUTU <florin-doru.hutu@insa-lyon.fr>

Summary
Cette thèse adresse le problème de la synchronisation et de la mise en cohérence de phase des sources distribuées géographiquement. L’application envisagée est celle de la transmission de puissance sans fil en mettant en place des stratégies de type formation de faisceau distribuée. Ce projet souhaite aborder la problématique de la transmission de puissance sans fil vers un objet communicant à faible ressources énergétiques aussi bien de point de vue système de communication mais aussi du point de vue automatique. En automatique, le problème traité ici s’apparente à celui de la synchronisation d’un réseau de systèmes à retard ou bien à celui du suivi de trajectoire de référence. Les outils théoriques appliquées à ce scénario concret seront la commande de systèmes multi-agents, la commande de système à retard et l’observation de retard. Ces stratégies seront adaptées pour répondre aux contraintes matérielles des instruments de génération et d’analyse des signaux du laboratoire CITI. En effet, les « transcepteurs » vectoriels de signaux (VST) PXI-5646 de Nationals Instruments sont ciblés dans un premier temps pour ensuite passer à une échelle supérieure en utilisant la plateforme CorteXlab.

More information here.

PhD Defence: “Déploiement et ordonnancement de réseaux de capteurs sans fil pour le suivi de la pollution de l’air”, Ahmed BOUBRIMA, Chappe Amphitheater, CITI, 12th of March 2019, at 10h00

Title

Déploiement et ordonnancement de réseaux de capteurs sans fil pour le suivi de la pollution de l’air

Abstract

Les réseaux de capteurs sans fil (RCSF) sont largement utilisés dans les applications environnementales où l’objectif est de détecter un phénomène physique tel que la température, l’humidité, la pollution de l’air, etc. Dans ce contexte d’application, l’utilisation de RCSF permet de comprendre les variations du phénomène et donc être en mesure de prendre des décisions appropriées concernant son impact. En raison des limitations de ses méthodes de suivi traditionnelles et de sa grande variabilité spatiale et temporelle, la pollution de l’air est considérée comme l’un des principaux phénomènes physiques qui restent à étudier et à caractériser. Dans cette thèse, nous considérons trois applications concernant l’utilisation de RCSF pour le suivi de la pollution de l’air : la cartographie en temps réel de la qualité de l’air, la détection de dépassements de seuils des polluants et la correction de modèles physiques qui simulent le phénomène de dispersion de la pollution. Toutes ces applications nécessitent de déployer et d’ordonnancer minutieusement les capteurs afin de mieux comprendre la pollution atmosphérique tout en garantissant un coût de déploiement minimal et en maximisant la durée de vie du réseau. Notre objectif est de résoudre les problèmes de déploiement et d’ordonnancement tout en tenant compte des caractéristiques spécifiques du phénomène de la pollution de l’air. Nous proposons pour chaque cas d’application une approche efficace pour le déploiement de noeuds capteurs et puits. Nous proposons également une approche d’ordonnancement adaptée au cas de la correction de modèles physiques. Nos approches d’optimisation prennent en compte la nature physique de la pollution atmosphérique et intègrent les données réelles fournies par les plateformes existantes de suivi de la qualité de l’air. Dans chacune de nos approches d’optimisation, nous utilisons la programmation linéaire en nombres entiers pour concevoir des modèles d’optimisation adaptés à la résolution de petites et moyennes instances. Pour traiter les grandes instances, nous proposons des heuristiques en utilisant des techniques de relaxation linéaire. Outre nos travaux théoriques sur le suivi de la pollution atmosphérique, nous avons conçu et déployé dans la ville de Lyon un réseau de capteurs de pollution économe en énergie. Sur la base des caractéristiques de notre système et des jeux de données de la pollution atmosphérique, nous avons évalué l’efficacité de nos approches de déploiement et d’ordonnancement. Nous présentons et discutons dans cette thèse les résultats d’évaluation de performances ainsi que des lignes directrices pour la conception de systèmes de suivi de la pollution de l’air. Parmi nos principales conclusions, nous soulignons le fait que la taille optimale du réseau de capteurs dépend du degré de variation des concentrations de pollution dans la région de déploiement.

Jury

Marcelo DIAS DE AMORIM, Directeur de recherche, CNRS, Rapporteur
Andrzej DUDA, Professeur des universités, Grenoble INP-ENSIMAG, Rapporteur
Aline CARNEIRO VIANA, Chargée de recherche HDR, INRIA, Examinatrice
Isabelle GUERIN-LASSOUS, Professeur des universités, Univ. Lyon 1, Examinatrice
Thomas NOEL, Professeur des universités, Université de Strasbourg, Examinateur
Hervé RIVANO, Professeur des universités, INSA de Lyon, Directeur de thèse
Walid BECHKIT, Maitre de conférences, INSA de Lyon, Co-directeur de thèse
Claire CHAPPAZ, Atmo Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Invitée

CITI Seminar of Eddy Caron (LIP, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon) on March 19 at 11am

Title: Once upon a time … the deployment

Date and Place: 19/03/ 2019 11:00 in TD-C

Host: Jean-Marie Gorce and Florent de Dinechin

Abstract:

In large distributed systems the resource managements is one key of the efficient. And the deployment of the elements on resources are hidden everywhere, across the network, across the virtualization, across many infrastructures, etc. Through 6 stories we will discover many points of view of the deployment. First adventure, we will see how to deploy a middleware with self-stabilization skill. In the second story, be afraid, we will see how to deploy a secure Cloud Infrastructure. In the following story, we will introduce a deployment tool for reproducibility. The licenses deployment is another weird story with a lot of mysteries. An unbelievable story to deploy a data-driven microservices infrastructure. And finally, we will try to clear up the Fog deployment.

Biography:

Eddy Caron is an Associate Professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and holds a position with the LIP laboratory (ENS Lyon, France). He is a member of AVALON project from INRIA and Technical Manager for the DIET software package. He received his PhD in C.S. from University de Picardie Jules Verne in 2000 and his HDR (Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches) from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in 2010. His research focuses on distributed computing environment, from P2P to Grid, Cloud and Edge computing. At the middleware level, he deals with a large scope of subjects (scheduling, workflow management, data management, energy management, security, software management, etc.) with the same point of view of the resource magement in heterogeneous environments.

He is involved in many program committees (as HCW, IPDPS, ISPA, CloudTech, etc.). Since 2000, he contributed to more than 30 articles in journal or book chapter and more than 80 publications in international conferences. He was co-chair of the GridRPC working group in OGF. He was coordinator of two french ANR project (LEGO and SPADES). He was workpackage leader in the European project Seed4C around the security. He is the supervisor of 15 Phd (4 in progress). He teaches Distributed system, Architecture Operating System and Network, Grid and Cloud, etc. Moreover he was the Co-funder and Scientific Consultant of a company (SysFera). Deputy Director in charge of call for projects, research transfert and international affairs for the LIP Laboratory. See http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~ecaron for further information.

CITI Seminar of Alain Tchana (I3S, Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis) on February 22 at 11AM

Title: Blablabla Virtualisation

Date and Place: 22/02/2019 at 11:00 in TD-C

Host: Jean-Marie Gorce and Florent de Dinechin

Abstract:

This talk will focus on virtualized infrastructure filed. In this domain, I aim at minimizing electricity consumption while improving application performance. To achieve the first goal, I work both at the entire datacenter level (by providing better VM placement strategies) and at the physical machine level (by providing better power management policies). Concerning the second goal, I work both at the VM monitor level (for minimizing its overhead) and at the VM’s operating system (OS) level (for making it aware of the fact that it is virtualized).

Biography:

Alain Tchana received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2011 at Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse. The research topic of his Ph.D. was autonomic computing applied to cloud environments. He then spent two yeas as a postdoc at Université Joseph Fourier. During that time, he worked on building benchmarking systems. From September 2013 to September 2018, he was Associate Professor at Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse. He was member of SEPIA research group at IRIT laboratory. His main research domain is virtualization. Since September 2018, he is full professor at Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis. He is member of Scale research group at I3S. He continues to work in the virtualization domain.

CITI Talk: “Wired team presentation and discussions about blockchain”, Stéphane Frenot (INSA-Lyon, CITI) on February 15th at 11am

Title

Wired team presentation and discussions about blockchain

Summary

La blockchaines sont des technologies de stockage et de transmission d’informations, permettant la constitution de registres répliqués et distribués, sans organe central de contrôle, sécurisées grâce à la cryptographie, et structurées par des blocs liés les uns aux autres, à intervalles de temps réguliers. Elles sont utilisées par un certain nombre d’acteurs et suscitent de très nombreux débats aussi bien au coin café qu’à l’organisation mondiale du commerce.

En tant que membre du laboratoire de recherche CITI, je me sens concerné par ces technologies, et me demande de ce que nous devons en faire.
Je propose dans ce séminaire de vous présenter ma compréhension des systèmes blockchaines et de vous partager mon point de vue de concepteur d’applications distribuées et pair-à-pair sur le Web.

Bio

Stéphane Frénot a participé à la création du CITI en 2001. Il est spécialisé dans le génie logiciel et les application distribuées. Il a été responsable du thème middleware et de l’équipe INRIA Amazones au laboratoire. Puis il a participé au projet exploratoire INRIA Dice sur les plateformes d’intermédiations. Depuis 1an il est directeur du département Télécommunications Service et Usages de l’INSA où il enseigne le génie logiciel, les systèmes distribués et l’innovation.

Il a travaillé sur les architectures à composants logiciels, les systèmes pairs-à-pairs pour le déploiement de composants et sur un modèle de programmation orienté flux pour Javascript. Il a participé au dépôt de trois brevets : dans l’iot domestique, dans les flux javascript et dans un protocole de vote. Enfin il est responsable du développement de la plateforme Jumplyn de gestion de projets étudiants actuellement en test sur l’INSA pour la gestion des stages.

CITI Talk: “Wireless Networks Design in the Era of Deep Learning: Model-Based, AI-Based, or Both?”, Marco Di RENZO (CR CNRS, L2S) on February 13th at 11am

Title

Wireless Networks Design in the Era of Deep Learning: Model-Based, AI-Based, or Both?

Summary

This work addresses the use of emerging data-driven techniques based on deep learning and artificial neural networks in future wireless communication networks. In particular, a key point that will be made and supported throughout the work is that data-driven approaches should not replace traditional design techniques based on mathematical models. On the contrary, despite being seemingly mutually exclusive, there is much to be gained by merging data-driven and model-based approaches. To begin with, a detailed presentation is given for the reasons why deep learning based on artificial neural networks will be an indispensable tool for the design and operation of future wireless communications networks, as well as a description of the recent technological advances that make deep learning practically viable for wireless applications. Our vision of how artificial neural networks should be integrated into the architecture of future wireless communication networks is presented, explaining the main areas where deep learning provides a decisive advantage over traditional approaches. Afterwards, a thorough description of deep learning methodologies is provided, starting with presenting the general machine learning paradigm, followed by a more in-depth discussion about deep learning. Artificial neural networks are introduced as the peculiar feature that makes deep learning different and more performing than other machine learning techniques. The most widely-used artificial neural network architectures and their training methods will be analyzed in detail. Moreover, bridges will be drawn between deep learning and other major learning frameworks such as reinforcement learning and transfer learning. After introducing the deep learning framework, its application

to wireless communication is addressed. This part of the work first provides the state-of-the-art of deep learning for wireless communication networks, and then moves on to address several novel case-studies wherein the use of deep learning proves extremely useful for network design. In particular, the connection between deep learning and model-based approaches is emphasized, proposing several novel techniques for cross-fertilization between these two paradigms. For each case-study, it will be shown how the use of (even approximate) mathematical models can significantly reduce the amount of live data that needs to be acquired/measured to implement data-driven approaches. For each application, the merits of the proposed approaches will be demonstrated by a numerical analysis in which the implementation and training of the artificial neural network used to solve the problem is discussed. Finally, concluding remarks describe those that in our opinion are the major directions for future research in this field.

CITI Talk: “Some good linear codes from functions over finite fields and their applications”, Sihem Mesnager (Univ. Paris VIII) on January 28th at 2pm

Title

Some good linear codes from functions over finite fields and their applications

Summary

This talk is divided in two parts: the first part is a contribution on the construction of new linear p-ary codes (from bent functions and plateaued functions in any characteristic) for secret sharing and two-party computation. The second part is a contribution on the construction of new locally recoverable codes (LRC codes) for storage. Below, more details.

Part 1: The first part of this talk is devoted to minimal linear codes from bent/plateaued functions in any characteristic. We will present two generic constructions of linear codes involving special functions and investigate constructions of good linear codes based on the generic constructions involving bent and plateaued functions over finite fields. More specifically, we present new minimal linear codes with few weights from weakly regular bent/plateaued functions based on generic constructions.

Part 2: In 2014, a family of optimal linear locally recoverable codes (LRC codes) that attain the maximum possible distance (given code length, cardinality, and locality) is presented by Tamo and Barg. The key ingredient for constructing such optimal linear LRC codes is the so-called r-good polynomials, where r-1 is equal to the locality of the LRC code. However, given a prime p, known constructions of r-good polynomials on some extension field of GF p exist only for some special integers r, and the problem of constructing optimal LRC codes over small field for any given locality is still open. We present in the second part of this talk general methods of designing good polynomials, which lead to new constructions of r-good polynomials. Such polynomials bring new constructions of optimal LRC codes.

PhD Defence: “Study and development of wireless sensor network architecture tolerant to delays”, Yosra Zguira, Est Amphitheater, Humanities Building, 20th of December 2018, at 14h00

Title

Study and development of wireless sensor network architecture tolerant to delays

Abstract

Transport has become fundamental in the cities to the well functioning of the economy and the welfare of the city population. For several years, transportation faces many issues such as traffic jamming, high accidents rate, unhealthy life due to smoke and dust, air pollution as a result of carbon emission, etc. To deal with these matters, researches integrate digital technologies to ground transportation which is known as Intelligent Transport System (ITS). ITS can sense, analyze, collect, control and communicate different data. This thesis investigates and proposes a new protocol for data collection applications in an urban environment.

We make three main contributions: firstly, we propose a new protocol denoted the “Internet of Bikes” IoB-DTN protocol which applies Delay/Disruption Tolerant Network (DTN) paradigm to the Internet of Things (IoT) applications running a data collection application on urban bike sharing system based sensor network. The protocol is evaluated on a realistic scenario by assessing the buffer management policies, the number of copies sprayed in the network as well as the number of bicycles used. Secondly, a comparative evaluation of the performance of the multi-hop IoB-DTN protocol with a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technology, LoRa/LoRaWAN type is investigated. LPWAN have been designed to provide cost-effective wide area connectivity for small throughput IoT applications: multiyear lifetime and multikilometer range for battery-operated mobile devices. This part of our work aims at providing network designers and managers insights on the most relevant technology for their urban applications that could run on bike sharing systems. Finally, we propose an efficient IoB-DTN protocol based on data aggregation mechanism. We propose three variants of IoB-DTN: IoB based on spatial aggregation (IoB-SA), IoB based on temporal aggregation (IoB-TA) and IoB based on spatio-temporal aggregation (IoB-STA). We compare the three variants with the multi-hop IoB-DTN protocol without aggregation and the low-power long-range technology, LoRa type. Comparison results verify that the three variants of IoB-DTN based on data aggregation improve several metrics such as the delivery rate, energy consumption and throughput.

Jury

Nathalie MITTON, Directrice de recherche Inria, Rapporteure
Mohamed MOSBAH, Professeur des Universités, Bordeaux INP, Rapporteur
Bertrand DUCOURTHIAL, Professeur des Universités, UTC, Examinateur
Alexandre GUITTON, Professeur des Universités, Clermont Auvergne, Examinateur
Hervé RIVANO, Professeur des Universités, INSA Lyon, Co-directeur de thèse
Aref MEDDEB, Professeur des Universités, ENISO Sousse, Directeur de thèse

CITI is hiring an intern

Déploiement d’un laboratoire 6lowpan

Ce stage a pour objectif la mise en place et l’administration d’un réseau d’objets connectés (IoT) ainsi que le développement d’applications qui seront utilisées au sein du réseau. Les objets reposeront sur le protocole 6lowpan (802.15.4 pour la couche PHY et MAC) pour communiquer. Enfin les objets déployés seront majoritairement des Raspberry PI 2 et 3 équipés de dongles pour émettre et recevoir les paquets. Un dernier objectif consistera à écouter de manière discrète le trafic ainsi généré par les applications.

Fiche complète ici : stage-6lowpan-citi

CITI Talk: “On combining Networking with Computing and Research with Innovation”, Pascale Vicat-Blanc (INRIA-Agora) on December 12th at 2pm

Title:

On combining Networking with Computing and Research with Innovation

Summary:

Integrating virtualised network, caching and computing into one system is becoming a natural trend to support very demanding emerging mobile applications.
I have been exploring and contributing to these ideas since many years in the context of high-performance computing (HPC), DataGrids, Cloud infrastructures, Software as a service and the Internet of Things. In this talk, I propose to articulate the researches and developments I had the chance to conduct on this topic in academic, start-up and industrial environments, and to summarise the lessons learned from these experiences. I will then briefly present my new perspectives in the field of augmented intelligence for analysing and optimising fog systems integrating tightly networking and computing.

Short Bio:

Pascale Vicat-Blanc is senior scientist at Inria. After a career as Assistant Professor at Ecole Centrale de Lyon, she joined INRIA at ENS Lyon. As the head of the RESO project team she has supervised a dozen of thesis on advanced networking and Internet protocols and co-authored 150+ articles. She had a leading role in many national and EU initiatives like eToile with EDF and CEA, DataGrid with CERN, Geysers with SAP or SAIL with Ericsson and Orange. She helped with the creation of the national Grid5000 instrument as well as of the INRIA-Bell Labs with Nokia. She received the Joliot-Curie Award from the Ministry of Research in 2011 and the Innovation Award from Académie des Sciences, INRIA and Dassault Systems in 2013. In 2010, with a team of four PhD students she launched the Lyatiss startup for valorising their research results in the domain of IT infrastructure virtualisation and orchestration. Then, they launched a SaaS (Software as a Service) company in USA, CloudWeaver, extending the technology developed by Lyatiss with TCP sensors and machine learning tools to provide network performance insights to AWS and GCE customers. Then, acquired by F5 networks (FFIV), they integrated CloudWeaver analytics pipeline with the F5’s MANO platform. After that, Pascale was appointed as the F5 IoT initiative leader to define the IoT strategy and products of the company. Since September 2018, Pascale Vicat-Blanc is back to France and INRIA. Member of the Agora team, CITI lab at INSA, she is starting new researches in the domain of fog computing and networking for smart cities.