This work develops a toolbox called WDSchain on MATLAB that can simulate blockchain on water distribution systems (WDS). WDSchain can import data from Excel and EPANET water modelling software. It extends the EPANET to enable simulation blockchain of the hydraulic data at any intended nodes. Using WDSchain will strengthen network automation and the security in WDS. WDSchain can process time-series data with two simulation modes: (1) static blockchain, which takes a snapshot of one-time interval data of all nodes in WDS as input and output into chained blocks at a time, and (2) dynamic blockchain, which takes all simulated time-series data of all the nodes as input and establishes chained blocks at the simulated time. Five consensus mechanisms are developed in WDSchain to provide data at different security levels using PoW, PoT, PoV, PoA, and PoAuth. Five different sizes of WDS are simulated in WDSchain for performance evaluation. The results show that a trade-off is needed between the system complexity and security level for data validation. The WDSchain provides a methodology to further explore the data validation using Blockchain to WDS. The limitations of WDSchain do not consider selection of blockchain nodes and broadcasting delay compared to commercial blockchain platforms.

The emerging real-time hyper-physical system (CPS), such as autonomous vehicle and live interactive media application, requires time deterministic behaviour. This is challenging to achieve by using the traditional general purpose operating system (GPOS). This paper presents a new design of the real-time operating system (OS) scheduling mechanism called ‘time deterministic cyclic scheduling’ (TDCS) mainly for live multimedia tasks processing. This new scheduler shares a similar philosophy as classic cyclic execution but with flexibility and dynamic configuration. This hybrid design is based on both time-reserved based cyclic execution and priority-based pre-emptive scheduling for mixed criticality applications. The simulation results show that this scheduling scheme can achieve predictable timing behaviour of task delay and jitter under high CPU utilisation. This shows that the proposed scheme is promising for low latency high-performance multimedia censoring tasks that occur in a periodic manner.

Broadcast organisations need to handle both time deterministic traffic and best effort traffic. The adoption of packet networks allows a single converged network for handling both real-time (RT) media traffic as well as data traffic. Due to the historic pervasive growth of IP network, they are widely used to realise this converged network. However, they do have several drawbacks like big header size, software switching delays and inability to support multiple addressing schemes. To overcome these issues, solutions like traffic engineering, quality of service and over-provisioning are implemented in IP networks but has resulted in higher cost, power and system requirements. Flexilink network has been tested for audio payloads using simulation model and outperforms any existing RT network by providing an exceptional average end-to-end delay of microsecond range and a jitter below the audible threshold for live digital audio streaming. However, it is not tested for video payloads. A review of various networks used RT media distribution is included in this paper. The Flexilink architecture design modification to support the most widely used video formats such as MPEG-TS, MPEG-PS and SDI streams is explained. The average delay for multiple video streams over Flexilink is provided using simulation model. The recommendation for testing Flexilink using hardware is also explained in this paper. The Flexilink Mac design uses dual-buffer system to handle AF (asynchronous flow) and SF (synchronous flow) separately, with the Frame structure that supports current Ethernet frames.