Road traffic significantly impacts daily lives and consumes valuable time. This paper focuses on the detection of free parking spaces, particularly in crowded areas like campuses and malls, which typically have designated parking areas. We developed a system which utilizes an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that operates at high altitudes to avoid obstacles. The flight process comprises three steps: (a) takeoff and analysis of target coordinates, (b) navigation between designated spots with brief stops, and (c) return to the starting point for landing. The detection system operates independently of the navigation system and is trained to specify parking spaces and recognize empty or “occupied” ones. It employs deep learning techniques and YOLO-tiny algorithm that is trained on the Darknet framework. While the drone’s flight system was developed in a simulation environment, it is capable of real-world application. Real-world data were used to train and test the parking detection system and the results collected were highly encouraging.

The “Neighborhood Babysitters” project, initiated by the Greek Ministry for Social Cohesion and Family under the General Secretariat for Equality and Human Rights, aims to provide home care services for infants and toddlers aged 2 months to 2.5 years. This paper presents the design principles and architecture of a sophisticated Management Information System developed to manage the entire process, from the application of beneficiaries and curators to their payment. Leveraging interoperabilities provided by the Interoperability Center, the MIS addresses the challenges of bureaucratic hurdles in digital governance. The paper outlines the roles of users, the MIS architecture comprising six systems and nine subsystems, and the main workflow stages of the application process. Additionally, it discusses interoperability issues with other e-government MISs and presents usage statistics since 2022. The MIS, developed with event-driven architecture and utilizing state-of-the-art tools, offers a robust framework for managing the Baby and Toddler Home Care Service, providing valuable insights for developers of similar systems.

The main focus of this work is the effort to minimize the power consumption on mobile devices such as notebooks, netbooks, tablets, tablets, smartphones, etc. by adjusting the transmission power of the wireless card, thus extending the battery life. In order to achieve that, we provide a mechanism (which we call Signal Adaptation Mechanism - SAM) that optimizes the power depending on the quality of the connection. This mechanism measures the quality of the transmission and adjusts the transmission power accordingly, by utilizing an expanded array of metrics along the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI), for more accurate estimation. It also aims at easy implementation on various wireless adapters. In order to evaluate, fine-tune and improve the mechanism, a list of experiments has been performed. These experiments were conducted on a real (as opposed to simulated) ad-hoc network, where the nodes of the networks followed varying moving patterns.

In this paper we present a feedback-based adaptation mechanism that adjusts the transmission power of a wireless card on commodity PCs depending on the quality of the connection. Our purpose is to manage the available power in order to achieve lower power consumption without negatively affecting the user's perception of connection quality. We based our implementation on an existing theoretical model and focused on resolving problems and removing assumptions which made it inefficient in real life implementation. The initial model manages to minimize the power consumption in networks with exactly two nodes. In this paper, we extend the model to consider the possibility of the existence of a base station, where any number of nodes can be connected. Our objectives for the base station are to minimize the power consumption and guarantee continuous connectivity for all mobile nodes. We implement the adaptation mechanism for a specific adapter with open sources drivers thus allowing necessary modifications. We conduct a number of real world experiments. The results indicate that power consumption can be significantly reduced for nodes that are either almost stationary or slowly moving (e.g. at walking speed), without any significant increase in packet loss. The results are quite important as nowadays mobile devices with limited battery life time use tethering to become base stations for other devices like in ad-hoc networks.

This paper describes a solution to extend the managed bandwidth service (MBS), which is provided on a backbone network using MPLS VPN, to non-MPLS domains and also evaluates it. It is based on the class based weighted fair queuing mechanism (CBWFQ) and describes the way it should be implemented to provide guaranteed bandwidth connections. In particular, CBWFQ can provide assured bandwidth connections when simultaneously leads to efficient bandwidth utilization. In addition, the proposed solution is being tested on simulation environment (using the network simulator) in order to evaluate its performance characteristics. On the simulation tests had been reserved specific amount of bandwidth for specific flows and their throughput was measured in order to understand if the proposed solution works well. Finally, the results are very well and prove that this method can guarantee bandwidth for every flow in all network conditions (congested or uncongested). At last, the paper presents a technical example of router configuration for implementing the MBS service according to the basic proposed solution.

We discuss the development of virtual communities and especially e-learning communities. In particular, we are inspired by VirRAD European project, and we present the intermediate results that have raised from the definition of this virtual radiopharmacy community.

The use of Internet services has become part of everyday life. The need for more advanced applications is increasing and solutions have to be provided in order to meet it. Multimedia information is becoming more popular. The connection bandwidth is not yet ready to cope with rising expectations for applications such as video on demand (VoD). We propose a way to implement such a service over a limited bandwidth/best effort Internet based network. Our proposal consists of the implementation of algorithms and the introduction of quality of service features on a network such as the Internet that inherently does not support such features. We propose two techniques for the implementation of an Internet based video on demand service. The first deals with the distribution of video titles on several video servers and is called the Disk Manipulation Algorithm (DMA). The second gives a dynamic nature to the service, imposes a virtual routing procedure to the system and is called the Virtual Routing Algorithm (VRA).

We present a unified approach for delivering hypermedia/multimedia objects over broadband networks. Documents are stored in various multimedia servers, while the inline data may reside in their own media servers, attached to the multimedia servers. The described service consists of several multimedia servers and a set of functions that intend to present to the end user interactive information in real time. Users interact with the service requesting multimedia documents on demand. Various media streams are transmitted over different parallel connections according to their transmission requirements. The hypermedia documents are structured using a hypermedia markup language that keeps information of the spatio temporal relationships among document's media components. In order to deal with the variant network behavior, buffering manipulation mechanisms and grading of the transmitted media quality techniques are proposed to smooth presentation and synchronization anomalies.

No abstract available.