In critical real-time systems, any faulty behavior may endanger lives. Hence, system verification and validation is essential before their deployment. In fact, safety authorities ask to ensure deterministic guarantees. In this thesis, we are interested in offering temporal guarantees; in particular we need to prove that the end-to-end response time of every flow present in the network is bounded. This subject has been addressed for many years and several approaches have been developed. After a brief comparison between the existing approaches, the Trajectory Approach sounded like a good candidate due to the tightness of its offered bound. This method uses results established by the scheduling theory to derive an upper bound. The reasons leading to a pessimistic upper bound are investigated. Moreover, since the method must be applied on large networks, it is important to be able to give results in an acceptable time frame. Hence, a study of the method's scalability was carried out. Analysis shows that the complexity of the computation is due to a recursive and iterative processes. As the number of flows and switches increase, the total runtime required to compute the upper bound of every flow present in the network understudy grows rapidly. While based on the concept of the Trajectory Approach, we propose to compute an upper bound in a reduced time frame and without significant loss in its precision. It is called the Scalable Trajectory Approach. After applying it to a network, simulation results show that the total runtime was reduced from several days to a dozen seconds.

The rapid growth of the Internet and the proliferation of its new applications pose a serious challenge in network performance management and monitoring. The current Internet has no mechanism for providing feedback on network congestion to the end-systems at the IP layer. For applications and their end hosts, end-to-end measurements may be the only way of measuring network performance. Understanding the packet delay and loss behavior of the Internet is important for proper design of network algorithms such as routing and flow control algorithms, for the dimensioning of buffers and link capacity, and for choosing parameters in simulation and analytic studies. In this thesis, round trip time (RTT), one-way network delay and packet loss in the Internet are measured at different times of the day, using a Voice over IP (VoIP) device. The effect of clock skew on one-way network delay measurements is eliminated by a Linear Programming algorithm, implemented in MATLAB. Distributions of one-way network delay and RTT in the Internet are determined. It is observed that delay distribution has a gamma-like shape with heavy tail. It is tried to model delay distribution with gamma, lognormal and Weibull distributions. It is observed that most of the packet losses in the Internet are single packet losses. The effect of firewall on delay measurements is also observed.

L'évolution de la technologie VLSI permet aux systèmes sur puce (SoCs) d'intégrer de nombreuses fonctions hétérogènes dans une seule puce et demande, en raison de contraintes économiques, une unique mémoire externe partagée (SDRAM). Par conséquent, la conception du système de mémoire principale, et plus particulièrement l'architecture du contrôleur de mémoire, est devenu un facteur très important dans la détermination de la performance globale du système. Le choix d'un contrôleur de mémoire qui répond aux besoins de l'ensemble du système est une question complexe. Cela nécessite l'exploration de l'architecture du contrôleur de mémoire, puis la validation de chaque configuration par simulation. Bien que l'exploration de l'architecture du contrôleur de mémoire soit un facteur clé pour une conception réussite d'un système, l'état de l'art sur les contrôleurs de mémoire ne présente pas des architectures aussi flexibles que nécessaire pour cette tâche. Même si certaines d'entre elles sont configurables, l'exploration est restreinte à des ensembles limités de paramètres tels que la profondeur des tampons, la taille du bus de données, le niveau de la qualité de service et la distribution de la bande passante. Plusieurs classes de trafic coexistent dans les applications réelles, comme le trafic de service au mieux et le trafic de service garanti qui accèdent à la mémoire partagée d'une manière concurrente. En conséquence, la considération de l'interaction entre le système de mémoire et la structure d'interconnexion est devenue vitale dans les SoCs actuels. Beaucoup de réseaux sur puce (NoCs) fournissent des services aux classes de trafic pour répondre aux exigences des applications. Cependant, très peu d'études considèrent l'accès à la SDRAM avec une approche système, et prennent en compte la spécificité de l'accès à la SDRAM dans les systèmes sur puce à base de réseaux intégrés. Cette thèse aborde le sujet de l'accès à la mémoire dynamique SDRAM dans les systèmes sur puce à base de réseaux intégrés. Nous introduisons une architecture de contrôleur de mémoire totalement configurable basée sur des blocs fonctionnels configurables, et proposons un modèle de simulation associé relativement précis temporellement et à haut niveau d'abstraction. Ceci permet l'exploration du sous-système de mémoire grâce à la facilité de configuration de l'architecture du contrôleur de mémoire. En raison de la discontinuité de services entre le réseau sur puce et le contrôleur de mémoire, nous proposons également dans le cadre de cette thèse un protocole de contrôle de flux de bout en bout pour accéder à la mémoire à travers un contrôleur de mémoire multiports. L'idée, simple sur le principe mais novatrice car jamais proposée à notre connaissance, se base sur l'exploitation des informations sur l'état du contrôleur de mémoire dans le réseau intégré. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent qu'en contrôlant l'injection du trafic de service au mieux dans le réseau intégré, notre protocole augmente les performances du trafic de service garanti en termes de bande passante et de latence, tout en préservant la bande passante moyenne du trafic de service au mieux. / The ongoing advancements in VLSI technology allow System-on-Chip (SoC) to integrate many heterogeneous functions into a single chip, but still demand, because of economical constraints, a single and shared main off-chip SDRAM. Consequently, main memory system design, and more specifically the architecture of the memory controller, has become an increasingly important factor in determining the overall system performance. Choosing a memory controller design that meets the needs of the whole system is a complex issue. This requires the exploration of the memory controller architecture, and then the validation of each configuration by simulation. Although the architecture exploration of the memory controller is a key to successful system design, state of the art memory controllers are not as flexible as necessary for this task. Even if some of them present a configurable architecture, the exploration is restricted to limited sets of parameters such as queue depth, data bus size, quality-of-service level, and bandwidth distribution. Several classes of traffic co-exist in real applications, e.g. best effort traffic and guaranteed service traffic, and access the main memory. Therefore, considering the interaction between the memory subsystem and the interconnection system has become vital in today's SoCs. Many on chip networks provide guaranteed services to traffic classes to satisfy the applications requirements. However, very few studies consider the SDRAM access within a system approach, and take into account the specificity of the SDRAM access as a target in NoC-based SoCs. This thesis addresses the topic of dynamic access to SDRAM in NoC-based SoCs. We introduce a totally customizable memory controller architecture based on fully configurable building components and design a high level cycle approximate model for it. This enables the exploration of the memory subsystem thanks to the ease of configuration of the memory controller architecture. Because of the discontinuity of services between the network and the memory controller, we also propose within the framework of this thesis an Extreme End to End flow control protocol to access the memory device through a multi-port memory controller. The simple yet novel idea is to exploit information about the memory controller status in the NoC. Experimental results show that by controlling the best effort traffic injection in the NoC, our protocol increases the performance of the guaranteed service traffic in terms of bandwidth and latency, while maintaining the average bandwidth of the best effort traffic.

Peer to peer networks are becoming increasingly popular among Internet users as the downloading peers share the storage and upload bandwidth load of the system. This makes it possible for a large number of users to share a data file available at a server without the server upload bandwidth becoming a bottleneck. The P2P technology is being widely used not only for file sharing but also for video on demand, live streaming and IPTV. The delay deadlines are more stringent in live streaming and IPTV than those in file sharing as the traffic is real time. The performance perceived by a user depends upon whether the video stream is being downloaded at the streaming rate. Coolstreaming is the first large scale P2P IPTV system. We model the multi-channel Coolstreaming system via an open queueing network. The peer dynamics at a channel is modelled by a closed queueing network working at a faster rate. We compute the expected number of substreams in the overlay of New Coolstreaming which are not being received at the proper rate. The computation of the Markov chain with a very large state space is handled using the two time scale decomposition. Further we characterize the end to end delay encountered by a video stream originating from the server and received at a user of New Coolstreaming. Three factors contribute towards the delay. The first factor is the mean path length in terms of overlay hops of the partnership graph. The second factor is the mean number of routers between any two overlay peers in the network layer and the third factor is the queueing delay at a router in the Internet. The mean shortest path length in terms of overlay peers in the New Coolstreaming graph is shown to be O(logn)where nis the number of peers in the overlay. This is done by modelling the overlay by a random graph. The mean shortest path in terms of routers in the Internet’s router level topology is seen to be at most O(logNI)where NIis the number of routers in the Internet. We also discuss a method by which we can get the mean delay at a router in the Internet. Thus, the mean end to end delay in New Coolstreaming is shown to be upper bounded by O(lognlogNIE[W])where E[W]is the mean delay at a router in the Internet.

Software systems in the automotive domain are generally safety critical and subject to strict timing requirements. Systems of this character are often constructed utilizing periodically executed tasks, that have a hard deadline. In addition, these systems may have additional deadlines that can be specified on cause-effect chains, or simply task chains. They are defined by existing tasks in the system, hence the chains are not stand alone additions to the system. Each chain provide an end-to-end timing constraint targeting the propagation of data through the chain of tasks. These constraints specify the additional timing requirements that need to be fulfilled, when searching for a valid schedule. In this thesis, an offline non-preemptive scheduling method is presented, designed for single core systems. The scheduling problem is defined and formulated utilizing Constraint Programming. In addition, to ensure that end-to-end timing requirements are met, job-level dependencies are considered during the schedule generation. Utilizing this approach can guarantee that individual task periods along with end-to-end timing requirements are always met, if a schedule exists. The results show a good increase in schedulability ratio when utilizing job-level dependencies compared to the case where job-level dependencies are not specified. When the system utilization increases this improvement is even greater. Depending on the system size and complexity the improvement can vary, but in many cases it is more than double. The scheduling generation is also performed within a reasonable time frame. This would be a good benefit during the development process of a system, since it allows fast verification when changes are made to the system. Further, the thesis provide an overview of the entire process, starting from a system model and ending at a fully functional schedule executing on a hardware platform.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is seen as one of the next Internet revolutions. In a near future the majority of all connected devices to the Internet will be IoT devices. These devices will connect previously offline constrained systems, thus it is essential to ensure end-to-end security for such devices. Object Security is a concept where the actual packet or sensitive parts of the packet are encrypted instead of the radio channel. A compromised node in the network will with this mechanism still have the data encrypted ensuring full end-to-end security. This paper proposes an architecture for using the object security format COSE in a typical constrained short-range radio based IoT platform. The IoT platform utilizes Bluetooth Low Energy and the Constrained Application Protocol for data transmission via a capillary gateway. A proof-of-concept implementation based on the architecture validates that the security solution is implementable. An overhead comparison between current channel security guidelines and the proposed object security solution results in a similar size for each data packet. The thesis concludes that object security should be seen as an alternative for ensuring end-to-end security for the Internet of Things.

Enterprise Systems like customer-billing systems or financial transaction systems are required to process large volumes of data in a fixed period of time. Those systems are increasingly required to also provide near-time processing of data to support new service offerings. Common systems for data processing are either optimized for high maximum throughput or low latency. This thesis proposes the concept for an adaptive middleware, which is a new approach for designing systems for bulk data processing. The adaptive middleware is able to adapt its processing type fluently between batch processing and single-event processing. By using message aggregation, message routing and a closed feedback-loop to adjust the data granularity at runtime, the system is able to minimize the end-to-end latency for different load scenarios. The relationship of end-to-end latency and throughput of batch and message-based systems is formally analyzed and a performance evaluation of both processing types has been conducted. Additionally, the impact of message aggregation on throughput and latency is investigated. The proposed middleware concept has been implemented with a research prototype and has been evaluated. The results of the evaluation show that the concept is viable and is able to optimize the end-to-end latency of a system. The design, implementation and operation of an adaptive system for bulk data processing differs from common approaches to implement enterprise systems. A conceptual framework has been development to guide the development process of how to build an adaptive software for bulk data processing. It defines the needed roles and their skills, the necessary tasks and their relationship, artifacts that are created and required by different tasks, the tools that are needed to process the tasks and the processes, which describe the order of tasks.

D’après Cisco, le trafic mobile de données augmentera d’un facteur 7 entre 2016 et 2021. Pour faire face à l’augmentation du trafic, les opérateurs mobile dimensionnent le réseau, ce qui s’accompagne d’une augmentation de sa consommation d’énergie et de son empreinte Carbonne. En outre, les marges financières des opérateurs baissent. Ainsi, le revenu global généré par le secteur des télécommunications a connu une baisse de 4% entre 2014 et 2015 d’après l’union internationale des télécommunications (UIT). Ces préoccupations ont suscité l’intérêt de la communauté scientifique pour la réduction de la consommation électrique des réseaux. Des études dans la littérature estiment l’énergie consommée par les services sur les équipements réseaux en se focalisant sur la consommation variable. La consommation énergétique d’un équipement réseau est composée d’une composante fixe et d’une composante variable. Dans cette thèse, nous partageons la responsabilité des catégories de service dans la consommation fixe du réseau en utilisant la valeur de Shapley. Dans un premier temps, nous considérons un réseau d’accès mobile et partageons la responsabilité des catégories de service qu’il fournit dans la consommation fixe. Nous définissons 5 catégories de service, à savoir, le «Streaming», le Web, le téléchargement, la voix et les autres services de données. En outre, nous traitons le cas de figure où certaines catégories de service sont obligatoires. Etant donné la complexité algorithmique de la valeur de Shapley, nous en proposons une forme approchée qui permet d’en réduire considérablement le temps de calcul. Ensuite, nous considérons le réseau de bout-en-bout, c’est-à-dire, l’accès mobile, l’accès fixe, la collecte, le coeur IP, le coeur mobile, les registres et les plateformes de service. Pour chaque segment, nous partageons la responsabilité des catégories de service dans la consommation fixe en appliquant notre modèle de partage basé sur la valeur de Shapley. L’analyse des résultats montre que le service «Streaming» consomme le plus d’énergie quel que soit le segment de réseau considéré, à l’exception des registres. Pour finir, nous traitons de la modélisation de l’efficacité énergétique des catégories de service. Dans un premier temps, nous calculons l’efficacité énergétique des catégories de service étant donné une station de base avec et sans «sleep mode». Ensuite, nous calculons l’efficacité énergétique des catégories de service étant donné un réseau d’accès mobile et considérant les cas avec et sans catégories de service obligatoires. Aussi étudions-nous les conditions pour ne pas détériorer l’efficacité énergétique du réseau au cours du temps en fonction des scénarios de dimensionnement / Internet traffic is growing exponentially. According to Cisco, mobile data traffic will increase sevenfold between 2016 and 2021, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 47%. In order to improve or keep up with users quality of experience (QoE), mobile carriers upgrade the network with additional equipment. As a consequence, the network carbon footprint increases over time, alongside with its energy consumption. In addition, mobile carriers margins are decreasing. Global telecommunication revenues declined by 4% between 2014 and 2015 based on the international telecommunication union (ITU) figures. These concerns fostered a great interest in the research community for reducing networks energy consumption. In this regard, many works in the literature investigate the energy consumed by services on network equipment for optimization purposes notably, focusing on the variable component of energy consumption. Energy consumption of a network equipment is composed of a variable and a fixed components. The variable component is consumed to serve traffic. The fixed component is consumed irrespective of traffic. In this thesis, our objective is to share the responsibility of service categories in the fixed energy consumption. To do so, we use the Shapley value. First, we consider a radio access network and share the responsibility of the service categories it delivers in the fixed energy consumption. The services are classified into five categories, namely, Streaming, Web, Download, Voice and other data services. In addition, we consider the case when some service categories are mandatory to be provided, such as Voice due to legal constraints for instance. Because the Shapley value has a huge computational complexity, we introduce closed-form expressions in order to significantly reduce it. Next, we consider the end-to-end network and all its segments, that is, the mobile access, the fixed access, the collect, the mobile core, the registers, the IP core and the service platforms. For each segment, we share the responsibility of the service categories in the fixed energy consumption with the Shapley-based model introduced in the preceding chapter. We find that Streaming is the service that consumes the most whatever the network segment, except for registers, as it represents the vast majority of Internet traffic. Eventually, we focus on the service categories energy efficiency. First, we consider a base station and compute the services energy efficiency for the cases with and without sleep mode. Then, we consider a radio access network and compute the services energy efficiency with and without a mandatory player. Moreover, we discuss the conditions to not deteriorate the network energy efficiency over time following different upgrade scenarios

Digitalization has led to the development of electronic voting systems, which in turn influences electoral integrity. Since the fairness of elections plays such an important part for democracy, the security aspects that keep an election's integrity and fairness are of great importance and thus, is the objective of this research. The research question this study aims to answer is “What security differences and / or similarities can be identified between End-to-End and blockchain-based voting systems?”. A comparative systematic literature review was done in order to answer the research question, which started by finding relevant literature needed for the analysis. After identifying the necessary articles, advantages and disadvantages for End-to-End and blockchain-based voting systems were outlined and then compared in a truth table (table 5). The results showed that the two systems share similar characteristics such as: verifiability, voter anonymity / ballot secrecy, integrity and the lack of scalability. Whereas the main differences are found in relation to how susceptible each system is to attacks. This leads to the conclusion that the biggest difference identified between blockchain-based and End-to-End systems is their susceptibility to attacks.

Task-oriented chatbots can be used to automate a specific task, such as finding a restaurant and making a reservation. Implementing such a conversational system can be difficult, requiring domain knowledge and handcrafted rules. The focus of this thesis was to evaluate the possibility of using a neural network-based model to create an end-to-end trainable chatbot that can automate a restaurant reservation service. For this purpose, a sequence-to-sequence model was implemented and trained on dialog data. The strengths and limitations of the system were evaluated and the prediction accuracy of the system was compared against several baselines. With our relatively simple model, we were able to achieve results comparable to the most advanced baseline model. The evaluation has shown some promising strengths of the system but also significant flaws that cannot be overlooked. The current model cannot be used as a standalone system to successfully conduct full conversations with the goal of making a restaurant reservation. The review has, however, contributed with a thorough examination of the current system, and shown where future work ought to be focused. / Chatbotar kan användas för att automatisera enkla uppgifter, som att hitta en restaurang och boka ett bord. Att skapa ett sådant konversationssystem kan dock vara svårt, tidskrävande, och kräva mycket domänkunskap. I denna uppsats undersöks om det är möjligt att använda ett neuralt nätverk för att skapa en chatbot som kan lära sig att automatisera en tjänst som hjälper användaren hitta en restaurang och boka ett bord. För att undersöka detta implementerades en så kallad ``sequence-to-sequence''-modell som sedan tränades på domänspecifik dialogdata. Systemets styrkor och svagheter utvärderades och dess förmåga att generera korrekta svar jämfördes med flera andra modeller. Vår relativt enkla modell uppnådde liknande resultat som den mest avancerade av de andra modellerna. Resultaten visar modellens styrkor, men påvisar även signifikanta brister. Dessa brister gör att systemet, i sig självt, inte kan användas för att skapa en chatbot som kan hjälpa en användare att hitta en passande restaurang. Utvärderingen har dock bidragit med en grundlig undersökning av vilka fel som görs, vilket kan underlätta framtida arbete inom området.