In the automotive industry today, embedded systems have reached a level of complexity which is not maintainable with the traditional approach of design- ing automotive embedded systems. For this purpose, many of the worlds leading automotive manufacturers have formed an alliance to apprehend this problem. This has resulted in AUTOSAR, an open standardized architecture for automotive embedded systems, which strives for increased flexibility and safety regulations. This thesis will explore the possibilities of implementing a CAN Communication stack using the AUTOSAR architecture and its corresponding methodology. As a result of this thesis, a complete AUTOSAR CAN communication stack has been implemented, as well has a simulator application with the purpose of testing its functionality.

Roadway illumination is a vital component of safety while driving during the night. There are regulations in place to ensure all publicly maintained roads are properly lit, but the validation process is too time consuming, costly, and dangerous for adequate data collection studies. The work in this thesis is aimed toward remedying this problem by creating an Advanced Lighting Measurement System (ALMS) capable of recording illumination readings while traveling at normal driving speeds. This solution is based on the Arduino Uno development board, a cost effective yet powerful embedded platform. This thesis involves collecting data along 100 centerline miles of Florida roadways and converting the resulting illumination readings into GIS format, allowing them to be included in the roadway database of the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT). By including this data FDOT will be able to repair poorly lit corridors and will be aware of possible safety concerns. The illumination values recorded by the ALMS have been validated and verified as an accurate replacement for conventional lighting measurement system.

The time consuming, tedious, and, sometimes, never ending search for a parking spot is a matter of common experience. We present an innovative approach to parking monitoring systems that only requires sensors at the entry and exit points of a street segment in an open environment such as a city downtown (as opposed to a closed environment such as a parking garage/lot). It can be trivially understood that using this set-up we can determine the number of vehicles present in a given street segment at any given time. However, the bigger issue is to closely estimate how many of those vehicles are parked or en route. We present an algorithm by which we can have a practical estimate of parked cars without introducing any more sensors. We further present a self-stabilizing system that can be implemented for fault tolerance and a few other methods to mitigate errors that may accrue over time. Our approach is based on the assumption that drivers do not care about the exact location of the parking spot, as long as they know the “street segment” where parking is available. For example, just letting the users know of available parking on 7th street between Red River and Brazos gives them enough information to easily find a parking spot. This type of information would most likely be shown on a map. Once the driver reaches the correct street area, it is easy to locate an empty parking spot. Finally, to test and evaluate our approach, we developed and deployed an embedded system using ultra-sonic sensors, and a Microsoft Bing Map application with the said user interface, along with an interoperable web service that can provide parking information to any third party application. / text

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of job-embedded professional development, with coaching, on teachers' of ELLs content knowledge and instructional practice in the area of reading and how teachers perceived this type of professional development. Professional development in reading was provided to first grade teachers of English Language Learners at one urban elementary school. The following research questions guided this study: (a) How does job-embedded professional development in reading influence individual teacher's knowledge about reading instruction for English Language Learners? (b) How does job-embedded professional development in reading influence individual teacher's reading instruction for English Language Learners? (c) How do teachers perceive a job-embedded approach to professional development in reading instruction? This study employed a mixed methods design using both quantitative and qualitative data to allow for a comprehensive examination of the phenomenon from various perspectives. Results indicate that teachers changed their content knowledge and instructional practices, and perceived the training as beneficial. Job-embedded professional development offers an effective method for delivery of professional development to teachers of ELLs that meets their diverse learning needs and varying levels of content knowledge and experience. / text

This paper is intended to be a resource for programmers needing to optimize a DSP’s power consumption strictly through software. The paper will provide a basic introduction into power consumption background, measurement techniques, and then go into the details of power optimization, focusing on three main areas: algorithmic optimization, taking advantage of hardware features (low power modes, clock control, and voltage control), and data flow optimization with a discussion into the functionality and power considerations when using fast SRAM type memories (common for cache) and DDR SDRAM. This work includes examples and results as tested on Freescale’s current state of the art Digital Signal Processors. / text

With increasing complexity and software content, modern embedded platforms employ a heterogeneous mix of multi-core processors along with hardware accelerators in order to provide high performance in limited power budgets. Due to complex interactions and highly dynamic behavior, static analysis of real-time performance and other constraints is challenging. As an alternative, full-system simulations have been widely accepted by designers. With traditional approaches being either slow or inaccurate, so-called host-compiled simulators have recently emerged as a solution for rapid evaluation of complete systems at early design stages. In such approaches, a faster simulation is achieved by natively executing application code at the source level, abstracting execution behavior of target platforms, and thus increasing simulation granularity. However, most existing host-compiled simulators often focus on application behavior only while neglecting effects of hardware/software interactions and associated speed and accuracy tradeoffs in platform modeling. In this dissertation, we focus on host-compiled operating system (OS) and processor modeling techniques, and we introduce novel dynamic timing model management approaches that efficiently improve both accuracy and speed of such models via automatically calibrating the simulation granularity. The contributions of this dissertation are twofold: We first establish an infrastructure for efficient host-compiled multi-core platform simulation by developing (a) abstract models of both real-time OSs and processors that replicate timing-accurate hardware/software interactions and enable full-system co-simulation, and (b) quantitative and analytical studies of host-compiled simulation principles to analyze error bounds and investigate possible improvements. Building on this infrastructure, we further propose specific techniques for improving accuracy and speed tradeoffs in host-compiled simulation by developing (c) an automatic timing granularity adjustment technique based on dynamically observing system state to control the simulation, (d) an out-of-order cache hierarchy modeling approach to efficiently reorder memory access behavior in the presence of temporal decoupling, and (e) a synchronized timing model to align platform threads to run efficiently in parallel simulation. Results as applied to industrial-strength platforms confirm that by providing careful abstractions and dynamic timing management, our models can achieve full-system simulations at equivalent speeds of more than a thousand MIPS with less than 3% timing error. Coupled with the capability to easily adjust simulation parameters and configurations, this demonstrates the benefits of our platform models for early application development and exploration. / text

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After the performance improvement rate in single-core processors decreased in 2000s, most CPU manufacturers have steered towards parallel computing. Parallel computing has been in the spotlight for a while now. Several hardware and software innovations are being examined and developed, in order to improve the efficiency of parallel computing. Signal processing is an important application area of parallel computing, and this makes parallel computing interesting for Ericsson AB, a company that among other business areas, is mainly focusing on communication technologies. The Ericsson baseband research team at Lindholmen, has been developing a small, experimental basic operating system (BOS) for research purposes within the area of parallel computing. One major overhead in parallel applications, which increases the latency in applications, is the communication overhead between the cores. It had been observed that in some signal processing applications, it is common for some tasks of the parallel application to have a large data size but a small code size. The question was risen then, could it be beneficial to move code instead of data in such cases, to reduce the communication overhead. In this thesis work the gain and practical difficulties of moving code are investigated through implementation. A method has been successfully developed and integrated into BOS to move the code between the cores on a multi-core architecture. While it can be a very specific class of applications in which it is useful to move code, it is shown that it is possible to move the code between the cores with zero extra overhead.

The growing connectivity of cyber-physical systems (CPSes) has led to an increased concern over the ability of cyber-attacks to inflict physical damage. Current cybersecurity measures focus on preventing attacks from penetrating control supervisory networks. These reactive techniques, however, are often plagued with vulnerabilities and zero-day exploits. Embedded processors in CPS field devices often possess little security of their own, and are easily exploited once the network is penetrated. In response, researchers at Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech have proposed a Trustworthy Autonomic Interface Guardian Architecture (TAIGA), which monitors communication between the embedded controller and physical process. This autonomic architecture provides the physical process with a last line of defense against cyber-attacks by switching process control to a trusted backup controller if an attack causes a system specification violation. This thesis focuses on classifying the effects of cyberattacks on embedded controllers, evaluating TAIGA’s resilience against these attacks, and determining the applicability of TAIGA to other CPSes. This thesis identifies four possible outcomes of a cyber-attack on a CPS embedded processor. We then evaluate TAIGA’s mechanisms to defend against those attack outcomes, and verify TAIGA satisfies the listed trust requirements. Next, we discuss an implementation and the experimental results of TAIGA on a hazardous cargo transportation robot. Then, by making various modifications to the setup configuration, we are able to explore TAIGA’s ability to provide security and process protection to other CPSes with varying levels of autonomy or distributed components.