Sharif Digital Repository

A method to setup virtual point-to-point links between the cores of a packet-switched network-on-chip is presented in this paper which aims at reducing the NoC power consumption and delay. The router architecture proposed in this paper provides packet-switching, as well as a number of virtual point-to-point, or VIP (VIrtual Point-to-point) for short, connections. This is achieved by designating one virtual channel at each physical channel of a router to bypass the router pipeline. The mapping and routing algorithm exploits these virtual channels and tries to virtually connect the source and destination nodes of high-volume communication flows during task-graph mapping and route selection... 

In this paper, a low order recursive linear prediction method and recursive least square as an adaptive filter (LP-RLS) are introduced to predict the speech and the excitation signals. In real-time packet-based communication systems, one major problem is misrouted or delayed packets which results in degraded perceived voice quality. If packets are not available on time, the packet is known as lost packet. The easiest task of a network terminal receiver is to replace silence for the duration of lost speech segments. In a high quality communication system, to avoid quality reduction due to packet loss, a suitable method and/or algorithm is needed to replace the missing segments of speech. The... 

In Phase-Change Memory (PCM), the number of writes a cell can take before wearing-out is limited and highly varied due to unbalanced write traffic and process variation. After the failure of weak cells and in presence of large number of failed lines, some techniques have been proposed to further prolong the lifetime of a PCM device by remapping failed lines to spares and salvage a PCM device with graceful degradation. Others rely on handling failures through inter-line pairing. Observations reveal that most of cells in a line are healthy when the line is marked as faulty by any of these proposals. To overcome this deficiency, we propose Intra-line Level Pairing(ILP), a technique that... 

In this paper, a Kalman filter technique which is operated in time is introduced for noise reduction on CT set of projections to reconstruct medical images. The experiments were done on medical image of kidneys and the simulated projections are captured by CT scanner. Evaluation results indicated that as the number of projections increase in the collected ray sums corrupted by noise the quality of reconstructed image becomes better in terms of contrast and transparency. However, for the comparison issue, the same conditions are applied for reconstruction of medical image in frequency domain using filter back projection technique. It observes that filter back projection technique does not... 

Rebeca is an actor-based language with formal semantics which is suitable for modeling concurrent and distributed systems and protocols. Due to its object model, partial order and symmetry detection and reduction techniques can be efficiently applied to dynamic Rebeca models. We present two approaches for detecting symmetry in Rebeca models: One that detects symmetry in the topology of inter-connections among objects and another one which exploits specific data structures to reflect internal symmetry in the internal structure of an object. The former approach is novel in that it does not require any input from the modeler and can deal with the dynamic changes of topology. This approach is... 

This paper introduces a novel scalable speech coding scheme based on embedded matrix quantization of LSF parameters in an LPC model. In the proposed quantizer, codewords are organized based on a tree structure through a cell-merging process, which leads to a fine-grain scalable coder at rates below 900 bps. Near natural sounding is achieved at very low rates by employing an efficient adaptive dual-band scheme to approximate the LPC excitation signals. Evaluation results, obtained from both overall quality measurement and intelligibility assessment, show that the proposed coder could be a reasonable choice for improving the bottom-line speech quality in low bit rates. © 2008 IEEE  

In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable NoC in which a customized topology for a given application can be implemented. In this NoC, the nodes are grouped into some clusters interconnected by a reconfigurable communication infrastructure. The nodes inside a cluster are connected by a fixed topology. From the traffic management perspective, this structure benefits from the interesting characteristics of the mesh topology (efficient handling of local traffic where each node communicates with its neighbors), while avoids its drawbacks (the lack of short paths between remotely located nodes). We then present a design flow that maps the frequently communicating tasks of a given application into... 

In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable NoC in which a customized topology for a given application can be implemented. In this NoC, the nodes are grouped into some clusters interconnected by a reconfigurable communication infrastructure. The nodes inside a cluster are connected by a fixed topology. From the traffic management perspective, this structure benefits from the interesting characteristics of the mesh topology (efficient handling of local traffic where each node communicates with its neighbors), while avoids its drawbacks (the lack of short paths between remotely located nodes). We then present a design flow that maps the frequently communicating tasks of a given application into... 

In order to guarantee the security of industrial control system (ICS) processes, the proper functioning of the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) must be ensured. In particular, cyber-attacks can manipulate the PLC control logic program and cause terrible damage that jeopardize people’s life when bringing the state of the critical system into an unreliable state. Unfortunately, no remote attestation technique has yet been proposed that can validate the PLC control logic program using a physics-based model that demonstrates device behavior. In this paper, we propose PLCDefender, a mitigation method that combines hybrid remote attestation technique with a physics-based model to preserve the... 

In this paper, we propose a packet-switched network-on-chip (NoC) architecture which can provide a number of low-power, low-latency virtual point-to-point connections for communication flows. The work aims to improve the power and performance metrics of packet-switched NoC architectures and benefits from the power and resource utilization advantages of NoCs and superior communication performance of point-to-point dedicated links. The virtual point-to-point connections are set up by bypassing the entire router pipeline stages of the intermediate nodes. This work addresses constructing the virtual point-to-point connections at run-time using a light-weight setup network. It involves monitoring... 

Performability is an important parameter in safety-critical real-time systems. This parameter is defined as the joint consideration of two other important parameters, i.e., reliability and performance. This paper proposes a schedulability condition that guarantees a desired level of performability under various working conditions for real-time systems. The basic idea underlining this condition is to select a subset of schedulable tasks and manage their slack times to satisfy a desired performability level. The proposed condition is evaluated on a hard real-time system that employs the Rate-Monotonic (RM) scheduling algorithm and uses the re-execution mechanism to improve the reliability.... 

The increasing trend in the number of smart connected devices has turned the routing procedure as one of the major challenges in IoT infrastructures. The Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) was introduced to satisfy different IoT application requirements through Objective Functions (OF). Although there have been several studies on introducing new OFs in order to fulfill specific IoT characteristics, e.g., energy and delay efficiency, reliability, and stability, but still there is a lack of novel OFs which fulfill the IoT application requirements in terms of both, the performance and the power consumption simultaneously. In this paper, we have proposed PEDAL, an OF which... 

The increasing trend in the number of smart connected devices has turned the routing procedure as one of the major challenges in IoT infrastructures. The Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) was introduced to satisfy different IoT application requirements through Objective Functions (OF). Although there have been several studies on introducing new OFs in order to fulfill specific IoT characteristics, e.g., energy and delay efficiency, reliability, and stability, but still there is a lack of novel OFs which fulfill the IoT application requirements in terms of both, the performance and the power consumption simultaneously. In this paper, we have proposed PEDAL, an OF which... 

In real-time packet-based communication systems, one major problem is misrouted or delayed packets which results in degraded perceived voice quality. If packets are not available on time, the packet is known as lost packet. The easiest task of a network terminal receiver is to replace silence for the duration of lost speech segments. In a high quality communication system, to avoid quality reduction due to packet loss, a suitable method and/or algorithm is needed to replace the missing segments of speech. In this paper, we introduce a low order recursive linear prediction method for replacement of lost speech segment. In this method a normalized least mean square (NLMS) as an adaptive filter... 

With the widespread use of Internet of Things (IoT) in every aspect of human's daily life, communications of such an enormous amount of existing embedded devices in these systems arise many new challenges from power consumption, performance, and reliability perspectives. Communications in an IoT infrastructure are managed by a set of policies which are determined by Objective Functions (OFs). Thus, OFs are the most important contributors in facing with the mentioned challenges. In this paper, due to the lack of information on how OFs affect the primary properties of an IoT infrastructure, we have compared three well-known OFs (OF0, MRHOF, and OFFL) from power consumption, performance, and... 

The noise exists in almost all environments such as cellular mobile telephone systems. Various types of noise can be introduced such as speech additive noise which is the main factor of degradation in perceived speech quality. At some applications for example at the receiver of a telecommunication system, the direct value of interfering noise is not available and there is just access to noisy speech. In these cases the noise cannot be cancelled totally but it may be possible to reduce the noise in a sensible way by utilizing the statistics of the noise and speech signal. In this paper the proposed method for noise reduction is Bayesian recursive state-space Kalman filter, which is a method... 

Static malware detection approaches are time-consuming and cannot deal with code obfuscation techniques. Dynamic malware detection approaches, on the other hand, address these two challenges, however, suffer from behavioral ambiguity, such as the system calls obfuscation. In this paper, we introduce Markhor, a dynamic and behavior-based malware detection approach. Markhor uses system call data dependency and system call control dependency sequences to create a weighted list of malicious patterns. The list is then used to determine the malicious processes. Next, the similarity of a file system call sequences to a malicious pattern is extracted based on a fuzzy algorithm and the file nature is... 

Static malware detection approaches are time-consuming and cannot deal with code obfuscation techniques. Dynamic malware detection approaches, on the other hand, address these two challenges, however, suffer from behavioral ambiguity, such as the system calls obfuscation. In this paper, we introduce Markhor, a dynamic and behavior-based malware detection approach. Markhor uses system call data dependency and system call control dependency sequences to create a weighted list of malicious patterns. The list is then used to determine the malicious processes. Next, the similarity of a file system call sequences to a malicious pattern is extracted based on a fuzzy algorithm and the file nature is... 

The Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution is an old and simple data hiding method that could almost effortlessly be implemented in spatial or transform domain over any digital media. This method can be attacked by several steganalysis methods, because it detectably changes statistical and perceptual characteristics of the cover signal. A typical method for steganalysis of the LSB substitution is the histogram attack that attempts to diagnose anomalies in the cover image's histogram. A well-known method to stand the histogram attack is the LSB + steganography that intentionally embeds some extra bits to make the histogram look natural. However, the LSB + method still affects the perceptual... 

Nowadays, leakage energy constitutes up to 80% of total cache energy consumption and tag array is responsible for a considerable fraction of static energy consumption. An approach to reduce static energy consumption is to replace SRAMs by STT-RAMs with near zero leakage power. However, a problem of an STT-RAM cell is its limited write endurance. In spite of previous studies which have targeted the data array, in this study STT-RAMs are used in the L1 tag array. To solve the write endurance problem, this paper proposes an STTRAM/SRAM tag architecture. Considering the spatial locality of memory references, the lower significant bitlines of the tag update more. The SRAM part handles the updates...