A Data-Driven Approach to Disaster Resilience in Communication Networks

Communication networks are critical in business, government, and even our day-to-day life. A prolonged communication outage can have devastating effects, particularly during and after a disaster. Unfortunately, our communication infrastructure is still vulnerable to natural disasters and other events that damage multiple network components...

Enabling low-latency applications using programmable networks

Throughout the last decades, communication networks have become embedded into almost every aspect of our day-to-day lives (e.g., watching movies, online shopping, sharing moments with friends and family). Moreover, as the support for the transport of audio and video became the norm, new application domains have kept emerging every day. One of...

Towards Ubiquitous and Efficient LoRaWAN: MAC-Layer Protocols and APP-Layer Coding Mechanisms for Scalable and Energy-Efficient Long-Range Wide-Area Networks (LoRaWAN)

Self-Organizing Multi-Agent Systems

In this thesis I research the ability of groups of agents to organize their collective behavior, without any human intervention. Using a framework for gathering information of the behavior, analyzing the performance, and updating the behavior, the agents can adapt to changing environments or user requirements. In my thesis I use different...

Capturing Agents in Security Models: Agent-based Security Risk Management using Causal Discovery

Airports are important transportation hubs that reside in the heart of modern civilizations.They are of major economic and symbolic value for countries but are thereforealso attractive targets for adversaries. Over the years we have observed successful andunsuccessful terrorist attacks at airports, of which the recent Brussels Airport attack...

Continuous Sensing on Intermittent Power

Battery-free energy-harvesting devices have the potential to operate for decades, since they draw power fromvirtually unlimited energy sources, such as sunlight. However, ambient energy sources are volatile, and tiny harvesters can extract only weak power from them. Thus, small energy-harvesting devices operate intermittently: first, they charge...

Personalized Energy Services: A Data-Driven Methodology towards Sustainable, Smart Energy Systems

The rapid pace of urbanization has an impact on climate change and other environmental issues. Currently, 54% of the global population lives in cities accounting for two-thirds of global energy demand. Sustainable energy generation and consumption is the top humanity’s problem for the next 50 years. Faced with rising urban population and the...

Self-organizing energy-autonomous systems

With the rapid development of mobile technology, more and more devices connect to the Internet of Things (IoT). The management of such large-scale networks becomes a challenge. Firstly, a large number of heterogeneous devices are distributed over a wide area, leading to a variation of the requirements of users, the performance of mobile devices,...

Virtualizing The Internet of Things

Computers were invented to automate the labour-intensive computing process. The advancement of semiconductor technology has reduced the form-factor and cost of computers, and increased their usability. This has gradually introduced computers in various control and automation systems. The further rise of miniatuarized computing devices paves the...

Opportunistic Communication in Extreme Wireless Sensor Networks: A step back towards the smart dust dream

Sensor networks can nowadays deliver 99.9% of their data with duty cycles below 1%. This remarkable performance is, however, dependent on some important underlying assumptions: low traffic rates, medium size densities and static nodes. In this thesis, we investigate the performance of these same resource-constrained devices, but under scenarios...

Distributed Graph Filters

We have recently seen a surge of research focusing on the processing of graph data. The emerging field of signal processing on graphs focuses on the extension of classical discrete signal processing techniques to the graph setting. Arguably, the greatest breakthrough of the field has been the extension of the Fourier transform from time signals...

Removing roadblocks for mobile phone sensing

The increasing ubiquity of the modern smartphone, coupled with its technical capabilities in terms of processing power, internet connectivity, and sensor richness, make it an ideal platformfor sensing all kinds of information about ourselves and the world around us. The emerging field of Mobile Phone Sensing (MPS) is taking advantage of this new...

Computing in Large-Scale Dynamic Systems

Software applications developed for large-scale systems have always been difficult to de- velop due to problems caused by the large number of computing devices involved. Above a certain network size (roughly one hundred), necessary services such as code updating, topol- ogy discovery and data dissemination are challenging to operate and thus...

Adaptability in dynamic wireless networks

Software for networked embedded systems faces several challenges when the deployed network is subject to changing circumstances during operation. Typically, inter-node communication and network connectivity are two crucial aspects that are directly affected by dynamics such as failing wireless links and node mobility. Therefore, the embedded...

MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks and their evaluation

The advent of small, and cheap sensors provides a wide range of measuring options. By making these sensors operate wirelessly we can now measure more than ever. However, wireless operation also provides new challenges. For example, how can we make these wireless sensors communicate effectively, i.e. without all the sensors trying to talk at the...

Rewriting the Sensor Network Abstraction Stack