Towards Hybrid Energy-Efficient Power Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are prone to highly constrained resources, as a result ensuring the proper functioning of the network is a requirement. Therefore, an effective WSN management system has to be integrated for the network efficiency. Our objective is to model, design, and propose a homogeneous WSN hybrid architecture. This work features a dedicated power utilization optimization strategy specifically for WSNs application. It is entitled Hybrid Energy-Efficient Power manager Scheduling (HEEPS). The pillars of this strategy are based on the one hand on time-out Dynamic Power Management (DPM) Intertask and on the other hand on Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS). All tasks are scheduled under Global Earliest Deadline First (GEDF) with new scheduling tests to overcome the Dhall effect. To minimize the energy consumption, the HEEPS predicts, defines and models the behavior adapted to each sensor node, as well as the associated energy management mechanism. HEEPS’s performance evaluation and analysis are performed using the STORM simulator. A comparison to the results obtained with the various state of the art approaches is presented. Results show that the power manager proposed effectively schedules tasks to use dynamically the available energy estimated gain up to 50%.

Great Expectations: The EU's Social Role as a Great Power Manager

Through the case of EU foreign and security policy we reconsider the concept of great power. According to common wisdom, the EU cannot be a great power, whatever the pronouncements of its top officials may be. We argue that ‘great power’ has been miscast in IR theory as a status rather than as a social role, and, consequently, that the EU can indeed be viewed as playing the great power role. Such a conceptual shift moves analytical attention away from questions of what the EU is – ‘big’, ‘small’, ‘great’, and so on – to what it is expected to do in international politics. We focus on the expectation that great powers engage in the management of the international system, assessing the EU as a great power manager in two senses: first, in the classical sense of ‘great power management’ of Hedley Bull – which centers on great powers’ creation of regional spheres of influence and the maintenance of the general balance of power – and second, in light of recent corrections to Bull's approach by Alexander Astrov and others, who suggest great power management has changed toward a logic of governmentality, i.e. ‘conducting the conduct’ of lesser states.