Web Services for Quality of Service Based Charging

Parlay X is a set of Web Service interfaces. These interfaces are designed to provide open access to telecommunication network functions in order to hide underlying network technology, and its control protocol complexity, from application developers. The Parlay X “intelligence” is concentrated in a node called Parlay X Gateway which converts interfaces methods in protocol messages and vice versa. An inherent constraint on any implementation requires the Parlay X Gateway to govern the interface to the underlying network i.e., to provide a single point of contact at which vertical signaling is received from the network. This chapter presents a study on alternatives for Parlay X Web Service deployment in Internet Protocol based multimedia networks (IMS). The focus is set on Parlay X Web Services for application-driven quality of service (QoS) management and charging control. It is presented as an analysis of the interfaces. Particularly the discussion is about their applicability to Policy and Charging Control architecture in IMS. Going further, the Web Service interfaces are mapped onto network protocols that they affect, namely Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Diameter. On that base an improvement is suggested concerning Parlay X interfaces for QoS management without violating the specified interface functionality. The usage of Web Services is exemplified with an application for charging control based on the provided QoS.

Mobile Web Services for P2P Computing

The Information Technology (IT) and Telecommunication (TelCo) sectors face enormous integration challenges, due to the prominent heterogeneity in existing systems. Service-oriented computing tackles such challenges by providing a fundamental platform that facilitates the convergence of distinct domains based on Web Services (WSs). With the mobility and technological advancements, service-oriented computing has been pushed towards the mobile sector enabling P2P Mobile Web Services (MobWSs) provisioning. In this work, we investigate the interaction, architecture and design characteristics of MobWSs for P2P computing. Here, the two MobWS interaction strategies are presented followed by the architectural discussion, enfolding server and client side components, of a resource-oriented MobWS framework. We follow REST design principles to propose an efficient way of architecting P2P MobWS systems, as an alternative to SOAP, enabling significant payload reduction and performance optimization in mobile servers. The detailed performance evaluation is also presented and compared to SOAP based on real-time measurements. By analyzing performance characteristics, we show that REST is a promising technique to architect P2P MobWS systems for resource-constraint mobile nodes.

Adaptive Ensemble Multi-Agent Based Intrusion Detection Model

The system that monitors the events occurring in a computer system or a network and analyzes the events for sign of intrusions is known as intrusion detection system. The performance of the intrusion detection system can be improved by combing anomaly and misuse analysis. This chapter proposes an ensemble multi-agent-based intrusion detection model. The proposed model combines anomaly, misuse, and host-based detection analysis. The agents in the proposed model use rules to check for intrusions, and adopt machine learning algorithms to recognize unknown actions, to update or create new rules automatically. Each agent in the proposed model encapsulates a specific classification technique, and gives its belief about any packet event in the network. These agents collaborate to determine the decision about any event, have the ability to generalize, and to detect novel attacks. Empirical results indicate that the proposed model is efficient, and outperforms other intrusion detection models.

Distributed Libraries Management for Remote Compilation and Execution on Grid Platforms with JaDiMa

In distributed environments (e.g. grid platform) it is common to find pieces of reusable code distributed among multiple sites. The possibilities of compilation and execution with remote libraries have a great potential to facilitate the integration of pieces of software developed among different organizations. This chapter describes JaDiMa (Java Distributed Machine), a collaborative framework to construct Java applications on grid platforms. JaDiMa automatically manages library repositories to allow users to compile and execute applications which use distributed libraries, without keeping these libraries locally. JaDiMa services are implemented as Web Services following the SOA approach; library repositories are modeled as a JXTA P2P network; and semantic annotations of libraries assist developers on the tasks of discovering libraries. We describe an implementation of JaDiMa as part of SUMA/G, a Globus-based grid environment. We show experiences and an empirical evaluation of JaDiMa execution and compilation processes for an application which uses remote libraries for managing graph and network data.

Towards Automatic Service Composition within ARGUGRID

Workflow systems play an important role in service-oriented computing as they provide an intuitive mechanism for orchestrating the execution of remote services. Constructing new workflows from raw services however, is not always a straight-forward task. It requires resolving many decisions including locating available services, determining which of them match the user requirements and also deciding how to compose them together into valid applications. Workflow construction activities can be simplified, or possibly even automated, by using a combination of semantic annotations and delegation of the decision making tasks to intelligent agents. Two key challenges arise when developing a practical system that attempts to address this vision. The first is elaborating the key properties of service workflows and the decisions that agents are required to assist in. This information is needed for designing and implementing the internals of the agent mind. The second is designing and implementing the run-time interfaces between the workflow system and the agent system to enable the exchange of information between them. This chapter describes our experience in addressing these two challenges and in developing a framework that simplifies the workflow creation process within the ARGUGRID project.

Personalized Web Services Selection

Web services have gained an increasing popularity over the Internet. Because of today’s wide variety of services offered to perform a specific task. The task of finding selected Web services to perform a specific task becomes very hard, and it is essential that users are supported in the eventual selection of appropriate services. Web services are a great application area for agent techniques and a great substrate for developing serious autonomous agent-based systems to support a personalized Web services selection. In this chapter, we present a Collaborative Autonomous Interface Agent (CAIA) that collaborates with the Internet search engines and supports the user in finding exactly the Web services consistent with his/her needs. CAIA system has been designed, fully implemented and tested. As a case study, the testing results show a big improvement in the relevancy of the retrieved results and of the user’s satisfaction by using CAIA+Google compared to using Google only.

Request-Driven Cross-Media Content Adaptation Technique

Devices, standards and software develop rapidly, but still often independently of each other. This creates problems in terms of content suitability on various devices. Also, in mobile environment, user and system-level applications must execute subject to a variety of resource constraints. In order to deal with these constraints, content adaptation is required. In this chapter, we justify the need of distributed cross media content adaptation and the potential of utilizing Web Services as the adaptation providers. We introduce request-driven context to complement constraint-driven and utility-driven approaches. We describe the request context mapping and propose a novel path’s determination scheme for determining the optimal service proxies to facilitate the adaptation tasks. To better illustrate the disjoint portions in content passing between service proxies, two communication models were associated. Then, within Web Services, we explain the related protocols and socket connection between adaptation’s services. We conclude with discussion regarding the strengths of the proposed architecture.

Extending the JADE Framework for Semantic Peer-To-Peer Service Based Applications

One of the main challenges of multi-agent systems is to become the main means to support legacy systems interoperability and to make the realization of scalable distributed systems easy. In the last years, however, two technologies, peer-to-peer and service-oriented, have made an impressive progress and seem to have good chances of competing with multi-agent systems for the realization of scalable and interoperable systems. Conversely, neither of these two technologies is able to provide by themselves the autonomy and social and proactive capabilities of agents and thus the development of flexible adaptive distributed systems may be difficult. This chapter shows how JADE, one of the most known and used software framework for the development of multi-agent systems, has been extended with these technologies both to support the realization of multi-agent systems and to facilitate the interoperability with peer-to-peer and service-oriented systems.

Web Services Integration in Multi-Agent Systems

The development of distributed systems is influenced by several paradigms. For example, in the last few years, great emphasis has been placed on Service Orientation. In addition, technologies such as Web services are now considered standard, deployed in common development tools and widely used. However, despite this recent trend, the constantly growing number of powerful personal devices will inevitably revitalize the interest in another paradigm known as Autonomous Agents. Agents are in fact considered one of the main building blocks of the emerging next generation Web infrastructure. Web services are very important resources for agents. Agents should be able to retrieve, execute and compose Web services, providing an intelligent and personalized support to users. On the other hand, agents should also be able to export their functionalities as Web services in order to be fully integrated in the Service Oriented paradigm. In this chapter we present a survey of the current state of the art about Web services integration in open Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Considering these approaches, we identify a set of requirements needed to achieve full integration and we present a communication infrastructure, which satisfies these requirements.

A Self-Organized Structured Overlay Network for Video Streaming

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file downloading and streaming applications have recently attracted a large number of users on the Internet. Currently, several P2P video streaming systems have been deployed to reduce the cost at server. They are classified into two categories live and on-demand streaming systems. The live streaming systems disseminate live video contents to all peers in real time. On the other hand, the on-demand video (VoD) streaming system enables peers to enjoy the flexibility of watching video. It realizes the goal of watch whatever you want, whenever you want. The current P2P-VoD systems cannot realize such goals efficiently. This chapter proposes a self-organized structured overlay network of peers to realize that goal and improve performance. Each peer is able to cache some video minutes associated with the current media being played. The proposed overlay network is organized into clusters. Each cluster contains peers with overlapped buffer windows where their playing points are located between lower and upper play point limits. When a peer in the cluster moves its play point within the limits, for example by performing a seek operation, it then can rapidly discover and fetch the required blocks for the playback buffer from peers in the same cluster. Clusters improve both discovery and fetch overheads. However, it needs cluster management overhead.