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Zahid Iqbal successfully defended his PhD thesis at FEUP

15, May, 2018

Zahid Iqbal successfully defended his PhD thesis titled “Dynamic Hierarchical Bandwidth Reservations for Switched Ethernet” at FEUP in Porto.His work addressed the case of distributed Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) with a complex networking infrastructure, such as found in vehicles, buildings and industries, and aimed at providing technical, analytical and design tools to support composability and timeliness in dynamic settings. For this purpose, his thesis claimed that a multi-level Hierarchical Scheduling Framework (HSF) could provide a solution, when applied to the most common communication technology in data-intensive CPS, namely Ethernet. A HSF provides hierarchical bandwidth reservations that enforce temporal isolation between different data streams intra and inter applications. To support his thesis, Zahid made use of the Flexible Time-Triggered Switched Ethernet (FTT-SE) protocol, which allows deploying any traffic scheduling policy efficiently, including a HSF, in a dynamic manner. On one hand, he provided a new worst-case network delay analysis for sporadic reservations associated with asynchronous messages, called flat reservations, and assessed its efficiency through extensive simulation. On the other hand, he implemented multi-level HSFs using both polling and sporadic servers, verifying the strong partitioning capabilities of this approach and providing a novel method to generate polling server interfaces that minimizes the servers bandwidth requirement.