Abstract

Abstract
A metrological assessment of grating-based optical fiber sensors is proposed with the aim of providing an objective evaluation of the performance of this sensor category. Attention was focused on the most common parameters, used to describe the performance of both optical refractometers and biosensors, which encompassed sensitivity, with a distinction between volume or bulk sensitivity and surface sensitivity, resolution, response time, limit of detection, specificity (or selectivity), reusability (or regenerability) and some other parameters of generic interest, such as measurement uncertainty, accuracy, precision, stability, drift, repeatability and reproducibility. Clearly, the concepts discussed here can also be applied to any resonance-based sensor, thus providing the basis for an easier and direct performance comparison of a great number of sensors published in the literature up to now. In addition, common mistakes present in the literature made for the evaluation of sensor performance are highlighted, and lastly a uniform performance assessment is discussed and provided. Finally, some design strategies will be proposed to develop a grating-based optical fiber sensing scheme with improved performance.

Abstract
A botnet consists of a network of computers that run a special software that allows a third-party to remotely control them. This characteristic presents a major issue regarding security in the Internet. Although common malicious software infect the network with almost immediate visible consequences, there are cases where that software acts stealthy without direct visible effects on the host machine. This is the normal case of botnets. However, not always the bot software is created and used for illicit purposes. There is a need for further exploring the concepts behind botnets and network security. For this purpose, this paper presents and discusses an educational tool that consists of an open-source botnet software kit with built-in functionalities. The tool enables anyone with some computer technical knowledge, to experiment and find out how botnets work and can be changed and adapted to a variety of useful applications, such as introducing and exemplifying security and distributed systems' concepts. Copyright

Abstract
With the increasing number of connected devices, it becomes essential to find novel data management solutions that can leverage their computational and storage capabilities. However, developing very large scale data management systems requires tackling a number of interesting distributed systems challenges, namely continuous failures and high levels of node churn. In this context, epidemic-based protocols proved suitable and effective and have been successfully used to build DataFlasks, an epidemic data store for massive scale systems. Ensuring resiliency in this data store comes with a significant cost in storage resources and network bandwidth consumption. Deduplication has proven to be an efficient technique to reduce both costs but, applying it to a large-scale distributed storage system is not a trivial task. In fact, achieving significant space-savings without compromising the resiliency and decentralized design of these storage systems is a relevant research challenge. In this paper, we extend DataFlasks with deduplication to design DDFlasks. This system is evaluated in a real world scenario using Wikipedia snapshots, and the results are twofold. We show that deduplication is able to decrease storage consumption up to 63% and decrease network bandwidth consumption by up to 20%, while maintaining a fullydecentralized and resilient design. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2017.

Abstract

Abstract