Jorge Portilla

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid | UPM · Centro de Electrónica Industrial

Research on post-quantum cryptography aims to solve the problematic of modern public-key cryptography being broken by attacks coming from quantum computers in the future and, moreover, by using classical electronics. This task is so critical that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is in the final process of standardizing post...

The application of electronics, communication, and telemetry technologies in the field of sport training is a major trend today, specially with the explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. In particular, the rowing sport is one of the disciplines that could benefit from efficient, easy to integrate, and low cost IoT technologies to help...

The current trend of shifting computing from the cloud to the edge of the Internet of Things is influencing deep learning applications. Moving intelligence closer to the point of need entails advantages in terms of performance, power consumption, security, and privacy. The problem arises with data sources that generate a massive amount of informati...

LiDAR sensors are increasing in popularity due to the advantages they provide over 2D sensors in IoT object detection and classification applications, because of their ability to provide very precise distances to objects. Deep learning algorithms need a huge amount of data during training to obtain high accuracy results. When using 2D images a vast...

Object detection is an essential technology for surveillance systems, particularly in areas with a high risk of accidents such as railway level crossings. To prevent future collisions, the system must detect and track any object that passes through the monitored area with high accuracy, and this process must be performed fulfilling real-time specif...

Recent advances in wireless communication, sensing and processing technologies are fostering novel research and innovation opportunities in areas such as Industry 4.0, Smart Cities and Intelligent Transportation Systems. In particular, the railway domain is envisioned to have important breakthroughs in terms of cost-efficiency, self-management, and...

In this paper, a methodology based on machine learning for fault detection in continuous processes is presented. It aims to monitor fully distributed scenarios, such as the Tennessee Eastman Process, selected as the use case of this work, where sensors are distributed throughout an industrial plant. A hybrid feature selection approach based on filt...

The hardware of networked embedded sensor nodes is in continuous evolution, from those 8-bit MCUs-based platforms such as Mica, up to powerful Edge nodes that even include custom hardware devices, such as FPGAs in the Cookies platform. This evolution process comes up with issues related to the deployment of the Internet of Things, particularly in t...

Indra Sistemas S.A. have designed and developed a safety and secure solution system for the rail transportation environment based on a distributed architecture under the domain of the Industrial IoT that enables V2V, V2I, and I2I communications, allowing peer-to-peer data sharing. UPM has designed and implemented a HW-based security infrastructure...

Nowadays, with the huge advance of sensor technology and the increase of the amount of data generated by them, techniques have to be developed to be able to process all this amount of information in real-time applications on edge devices, close to where data is being generated. If all that information has to be sent to the cloud to be processed, it...

The ongoing era of the Internet of Things is opening up new opportunities towards the integration and interoperation of heterogeneous technologies at different abstraction layers, going from the so-called Edge Computing up to the Cloud and IoT Data Analytics level. With this evolution process the issue of efficient remote reprogramming on the Edge...

The Internet of Things is being established nowadays and the deployment of devices to be interconnected with each other and to the Internet is becoming a more common issue. The Internet of Things is structured in several levels and, in this regard, depending on the layer in which these devices are located, the complexity range and specific constrai...

The explosion of the Internet of Things has dramatically increased the data load on networks that cannot indefinitely increment their capacity to support these new services. Edge computing is a viable approach to fuse and process data on sensor platforms so that information can be created locally. However, the integration of complex heterogeneous s...

Cyber-Physical Systems are experiencing a paradigm shift in which processing has been relocated to the distributed sensing layer and is no longer performed in a centralized manner. This approach, usually referred to as Edge Computing, demands the use of hardware platforms that are able to manage the steadily increasing requirements in computing per...

The research field of wireless sensor networks has experimented an incredible growth during the last 10 years along with the progressive inclusion of the Internet of Things (IoT) as the main foundations for the future of the smart and sustainable cities. The essence of a WSN as a self-organized distributed system based on low-power autonomous senso...

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have evolved during the last decade, becoming an accessible technology in the market nowadays. Even cutting edge state of the art works are still being carried out in universities and research centers and departments, the curriculum of communication, computer science and electronic engineers lacks of contents related...

Complex computing platforms involving pipelined processors, memory hierarchies, multi-core and many-core architectures are very common nowadays. These approaches require a deep understanding of the underlying hardware and the corresponding programing model to be able to decide which alternative is more suitable, i.e. obtain the best performance at...

In this article we present the main results obtained in the ARTEMIS-JU WSN-DPCM project between October 2011 and September 2015. The first objective of the project was the development of an integrated toolset for Wireless sensor networks (WSN) application planning, development, commissioning and maintenance, which aims to support application domain...

In this work, we report a method to read-out optical biosensors that significantly enhance the Limit of Detection (LoD). In a previous work we introduced the concept of “Increased Relative Optical Power” (IROP), related to the interferometric optical signals of two interferometers as a biosensing method to measure biological species [1] (Holgado et...

The Internet of Things has emerged as one of the key aspects for the future of the Wireless Sensor Networks and their impact on new applications in real environments. This concept poses new challenges in the implementation, testing and debugging of efficient, robust and reliable technologies under this paradigm, specially in a pre-deployment stage...

In this paper, a serial port based debugging tool for the Arduino platform is presented. The tool is based on a modification of the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and libraries. It includes the basic options of debugging tools (stepping, breakpoints, variable inspection, etc.) without the need of a hardware debugging interface. Th...

The Wireless Sensor Network research field has been growing and becoming more mature during the last decade since novel technologies and research lines have emerged targeting its usability in the real world under different application scenarios. One of the key topics to assure the efficiency and effectiveness of these technologies in final applicat...

The difficulty behind Wireless Sensor Network deployments in industrial environments not only resides in the number of nodes or the communication protocols but also in the real location of the sensor nodes and the parameters to be monitored. Sensor soiling, high humidity and unreachable locations, among others, make real deployments a very difficul...

The deployment of nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) arises as one of the biggest challenges of this field, which involves in distributing a large number of embedded systems to fulfill a specific application. The connectivity of WSNs is one of the main issues to assure the efficiency of the system implementation and the quality of the service...

Cyber-Physical Systems need to handle increasingly complex tasks, which additionally, may have variable operating conditions over time. Therefore, dynamic resource management to adapt the system to different needs is required. In this paper, a new bus-based architecture, called ARTICo3, which by means of Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration, allows the...

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have shown their potentials in various applications, which bring a lot of benefits to users from different working areas. However, due to the diversity of the deployed environments and resource constraints, it is difficult to predict the performance of a topology. Besides the connectivity, coverage, cost, network long...

The way in which measures from environment are taken has changed. In the past, different sensors close to the point of interest were placed and wired to a central station where the processing was carried out. Currently, the new paradigm of massive measurement is represented by wireless sensor networks. In this new scenario, distributed tiny nodes m...

The complexity of planning a wireless sensor network is dependent on the aspects of optimization and on the application requirements. Even though Murphy's Law is applied everywhere in reality, a good planning algorithm will assist the designers to be aware of the short plates of their design and to improve them before the problems being exposed at...

Remote reprogramming capabilities are one of the major concerns in WSN platforms due to the limitations and constraints that low power wireless nodes poses, especially when energy efficiency during the reprogramming process is a critical factor for extending the battery life of the devices. Moreover, WSNs are based on low-rate protocols in which as...

En este artículo se muestra la implementación de una Wake-up radio para nodos de redes de sensores inalámbricas basada en FPGAS de ultra bajo consumo. El objetivo principal es evaluar la utilización de dispositivos de lógica programable para realizar el procesamiento de los mensajes y explotar su velocidad de, flexibilidad y bajo consumo comparado...

In this paper, a 64 state soft decision Viterbi Decoder (VD) system by using a high speed radix-4 Add Compare Select (ACS) architecture is presented. The proposed VD system can support different data rate (from 53.5 Mbps to 480 Mbps) for Multiband Orthogonal Frequency-division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) Ultra-Wideband (UWB) system when implemented onto...

Collaborative hardening and hardware redundancy are nowadays the most interesting solutions in terms of fault tolerance achieved and low extra cost imposed to the project budget. Thanks to the powerful and cheap digital devices that are available in the market, extra processing capabilities can be used for redundant tasks, not only in early data pr...

We propose the Route-back Delivery (RBD) protocol; a routing mechanism to create reverse routes exploiting the Collection Tree Protocol to allow unicast data dissemination from the sink. The main goal of this work is to provide a mechanism to enable bi-directional communications among the root(s) and specific sensor nodes in data gathering applicat...

While for years traditional wireless sensor nodes have been based on ultra-low power microcontrollers with sufficient but limited computing power, the complexity and number of tasks of today's applications are constantly increasing. Increasing the node duty cycle is not feasible in all cases, so in many cases more computing power is required. This...

In this paper, a novel method to simulate radio propagation is presented. The method consists of two steps: automatic 3D scenario reconstruction and propagation modeling. For 3D reconstruction, a machine learning algorithm is adopted and improved to automatically recognize objects in pictures taken from target region, and 3D models are generated ba...

In this work a complete hardware-software support platform for a WSN testbed focused on developing wireless sensor applications in a simple and intuitive way is presented, as an alternative of commercial-motes-based testbeds that can be found in the state of the art. The main target of this hardware-software platform is to provide the highest abstr...

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a prototype system of Smart Parking Services based on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) that allows vehicle drivers to effectively find the free parking places. The proposed scheme consists of wireless sensor networks, embedded web-server, central web-server and mobile phone application. In t...

In this paper, a simulation tool for assisting the deployment of wireless sensor network is introduced and simulation results are verified under a specific indoor environment. The simulation tool supports two modes: deterministic mode and stochastic mode. The deterministic mode is environment dependent in which the information of environment should...

A unified low complexity sign-bit correlation based symbol timing synchronization scheme for Multiband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) Ultra Wideband (UWB) receiver system is proposed. By using the time domain sequence of the packet/frame synchronization preamble, the proposed scheme is in charge of detecting the upcoming MB-OF...

In this work, the power management techniques implemented in a high-performance node for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) based on a RAM-based FPGA are presented. This new node custom architecture is intended for high-end WSN applications that include complex sensor management like video cameras, high compute demanding tasks such as image encoding or...

In this work, a unified algorithm-architecture-circuit co-design environment for complex FPGA system development is presented. The main objective is to find an efficient methodology for designing a configurable optimized FPGA system by using as few efforts as possible in verification stage, so as to speed up the development period. A proposed high...

In this work a novel wake-up architecture for wireless sensor nodes based on ultra low power FPGA is presented. A simple wake up messaging mechanism for data gathering applications is proposed. The main goal of this work is to evaluate the utilization of low power configurable devices to take advantage of their speed, flexibility and low power cons...

Wireless sensor networks have been a big promise during the last few years, but a lack of real applications makes difficult the establishment of this technology. In this paper a real monitoring application in an instant coffee factory is presented. This application belongs to the group of environmental solutions based on wireless sensor networks, a...

In this paper the capabilities of ultra low power FPGAs to implement Wake-up Radios (WuR) for ultra low energy Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are analysed. The main goal is to evaluate the utilization of very low power configurable devices to take advantage of their speed, flexibility and low power consumption instead of the more common approaches...

This paper discusses the target localization problem of wireless visual sensor networks. Specifically, each node with a low-resolution camera extracts multiple feature points to represent the target at the sensor node level. A statistical method of merging the position information of different sensor nodes to select the most correlated feature poin...

The use of reconfigurable hardware (HW) can improve the processing performance of many systems, including Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Moreover, reconfigurable devices permit remote and runtime HW reconfiguration, which implies benefits in WSNs deployment and maintainability and, finally, cost reduction. In this paper, WSN node runtime reconfig...

Modern FPGAs with run-time reconfiguration allow the implementation of complex systems offering both the flexibility of software-based solutions combined with the performance of hardware. This combination of characteristics, together with the development of new specific methodologies, make feasible to reach new points of the system design space, an...

Side Channel Attack (SCA) differs from traditional mathematic attacks. It gets around of the exhaustive mathematic calculation and precisely pin to certain points in the cryptographic algorithm to reveal confidential information from the running crypto-devices. Since the introduction of SCA by Paul Kocher et al [1], it has been considered to be one...

Specific features of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) like the open accessibility to nodes, or the easy observability of radio communications, lead to severe security challenges. The application of traditional security schemes on sensor nodes is limited due to the restricted computation capability, low-power availability, and the inherent low data r...

In this paper, a solution to support the run-time read back, relocation and replication of cores in embedded systems with dynamic and partial reconfiguration capabilities is presented. The proposal shows a peripheral structure that allows an easy integration and communication with the rest of the system, including an API to make the reconfiguration...

This paper analyzes two different architectures for a hybrid power source comprising a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell and a Li ion battery. The hybrid power source feeds the propulsion motor of an all-electrical aircraft, the Boeing Fuel Cell Demonstrator. Unregulated and regulated hybrid power architectures are examined. The regulation is...

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been studied deeply during the last years, but real deployments with thousands of motes are really critical in cost, time and reliability due to several problems: commissioning, debugging, etc. In this context, simulation is becoming mandatory to reduce the potential failures of the WSN before deployment, which...

Running strong cryptographic algorithms on wireless sensor nodes is extremely difficult due to their limited resources. Hardware accelerators are a suitable means to speed up the computation and reduce power consumption. The drawback of crypto ASICs is the loss of flexibility. In this paper we will shortly introduce a modular design of elliptic cur...

Most reconfigurable systems rely on FPGA technology. Among these ones, those which permit dynamic and partial reconfiguration, offer added benefits in flexibility, in-field device upgrade, improved design and manufacturing time, and even, in some cases, power consumption reductions. However, dynamic reconfiguration is a complex task, and the real b...

The inclusion of reconfigurable HW in nodes for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is not a common issue in the framework of the design of state of the art HW platforms for WSNs, mainly due to its high power consumption. But, on the other hand, reconfigurable logic as FPGAs can contribute to improve the system performance by providing not only HW acce...

Reconfigurable HW, like FPGAs, can improve the processing systems performance as it has been demonstrated by several research groups. Usually, the inclusion of such elements in HW platforms for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has been rejected by designers, mainly due to the power consumption penalization. A reconfigurable device allows not only pe...

Sensor networks have reached a great relevance during the last years. The idea is to use a large number of nodes measuring different physical parameters in several environments, which implies different research challenges (low power consumption, communication protocols, platform hardware design, etc). There is a tendency to use modular hardware nod...

A reconfigurable platform for sensor networks is presented. This platform has features that allow easy reuse of the node in several applications avoiding redesigning the system from scratch. The node includes an FPGA which is the core of the reconfiguration capabilities of the node. Several hardware interfaces for sensor standard protocols like I2C...

Sensor networks have reached a great relevance during the last years. The idea is to use a high number of nodes measuring different physical parameters in several environments, which implies different research challenges (low power consumption, communication protocols, platform hardware design, etc). There is a tendency to use modular hardware node...

The growth of sensor networks during the last years is a fact and within this field, wireless sensor networks are growing particularly as there are many applications that demand the use of many nodes, even hundreds or thousands. More and more applications are emerging to solve several problems in data acquisition and control in different environmen...

Distributed Measurement and Control (DMC) with a big amount of sensors and actuators is a trend growing in importance nowadays. There is a tendency to give intelligence to the sensors making them capable of processing and communicating. The aim is to distribute intelligence instead of to centralise it. Smart sensors and smart sensor networks appear...

Areconfigurable platform for sensornetworks ispresented. Thisplatform hasfeatures that allow easy reuseofthenode inseveral applications avoiding redesigning thesystem fromscratch. Thenodeincludes anFPGAwhich isthecore ofthereconfiguration capabilities ofthenode.Several hardware interfaces forsensorstandar protocols like 12Cor PWM havebeendeveloped...

In this demo a "musical" application using wireless sensor networks is presented. We will show how we can generate sounds and images depending on remote measures of ambient variables and acceleration.

Traditional Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications take advantage of the new low cost low power consuming integrated sensors that appear with the evolution of Micro Electromechanical Systems (MEMS). This kind of sensors is suitable for WSNs, due to the reduced size, their interfaces and their low power consumption. However, during the last ye...

La gestión de una catástrofe requiere acciones inmediatas y bien planificadas. Las personas que sufren traumas y no mueren de inmediato tienen grandes posibilidades de sobrevivir, si reciben una pronta atención médica especializada; pasado ese breve plazo, la mortalidad crece notablemente. El proyecto MERIS descrito en este artículo pretende optimi...

Esta tesis doctoral se enmarca dentro del campo de las redes de sensores inalámbricas, campo que ha experimentado un tremendo crecimiento a lo largo de la última década. Una red de sensores inalámbrica (en inglés Wireless Sensor Network, WSN) es un conjunto de nodos distribuidos en un entorno para tomar medidas del mismo, procesar la información de...