Enabling Frameworks for Autonomic Adaptation of Protocols in Future Internet Systems

The emergence of several networking standards has been continuous over the last decade. Engineering creativity spawned a wide gamut of innovative technologies for wireless and wireline communications. This increase in technological portfolios, in combination with the requirement to migrate legacy systems and to maximize the use of large investments in network installations, resulted in the design of multiple network evolution paths. Combined with the increasing sophistication of networking technologies, this variety of choice in design has run counter to the simplification – and the efficiency – of management procedures. The task of managing network infrastructures is confronted with an increasingly disharmonious Babel of standards involving interfaces, protocols, topologies, and versions. As a result, there has been a turn of research interest towards an autonomous mode of management where the elements of the managed system display individualistic proactive behavior that strives to maintain their modus operandi within specific bounds. The umbrella term autonomic computing and communications refers to a capability set that includes a system’s ability to monitor selected aspects of its own operation, collect, and record any data resulting from these observations, evaluate its performance under the light of its own operational history, possibly also identifying trends and recurring patterns in the process, and, in the case of subpar performance, undertaking corrective actions targeted to achieve a satisfactory level of performance. To this end, dynamically adaptable protocol stack offer a systemic capacity for change during runtime according to current operational requirements, thus providing an essential framework feature of autonomic systems.

Privacy in Participatory Sensing Systems

Participatory sensing is a revolutionary new paradigm where ordinary citizens voluntarily sense their environment using readily available sensor devices such as mobile phones and systematically study, and then reflect on and share this information using existing wireless networks. It provides data collection, processing, and dissemination opportunities for socially-responsible applications spanning environmental monitoring, intelligent transportation, and public health, which are often not cost-viable using dedicated sensing infrastructure. The uniqueness of the participatory sensing system lies in its data communication infrastructure which is constituted by the deliberate participation of community people. However, the potential lack of privacy of the participants in such system makes it harder to ensure their voluntary contribution. Thus preserving privacy of the individuals contributing data has introduced a key challenge in this area. On the other hand, data integrity is desired imperatively to make the service trustworthy and user-friendly. Different interesting approaches have been proposed so far to protect privacy that will encourage participation of the owners of data sources in turn.

Strategies for Agent-Based Negotiation in E-Trade

E-negotiation handles negotiation over the Internet without human supervision and has shown effectiveness in concluding verifiable and more favorable agreements in a reasonably short time. In this chapter, the authors discuss the negotiation system and its components with particular emphasis on negotiation strategies. A negotiation strategy defines strategic tactics, which advise on the proper action to select from a set of possible actions that optimizes negotiation outcomes. A strategy should integrate negotiation goals and reactive attitudes. Usually, a fixed strategy is implemented during the course of negotiation regardless of significant decision-making factors including market status, opponent’s profile, or eagerness for a negotiated goods/service. The chapter presents the main negotiation strategies and outlines the different decision-making factors that should be considered. A strategy uses a utility function to evaluate the offer of an opponent and advises on the generation of a counter offer or the best interaction. The authors finally discuss different utility functions presented in the literature.

Management of Service Level Agreement for Service-Oriented Content Adaptation Platform

It is paramount to provide seamless and ubiquitous access to rich contents available online to interested users via a wide range of devices with varied characteristics. Recently, a service-oriented content adaptation scheme has emerged to address this content-device mismatch problem. In this scheme, content adaptation functions are provided as services by third-party providers. Clients pay for the consumed services and thus demand service quality. As such, negotiating for the QoS offers, assuring negotiated QoS levels and accuracy of adapted content version are essential. Any non-compliance should be handled and reported in real time. These issues elevate the management of service level agreement (SLA) as an important problem. This chapter presents prior work, important challenges, and a framework for managing SLA for service-oriented content adaptation platform.

Energy Efficient Data Query, Processing and Routing Techniques for Green Wireless Sensor Networks

While wireless sensor networking plays a critical role in many important applications, it also contributes to the energy footprint - which continues to increase with the proliferation of wireless devices and networks worldwide. Energy-efficiency becomes a major concern in the development of next generation sensor systems and networks. This chapter discusses data management techniques from energy efficiency point of view for green wireless sensor networks.

Managing Network Quality of Service in Current and Future Internet

In this chapter, the authors discuss the motivation, challenges, and solutions for network and Internet quality of service management. While network and Internet service providers traditionally ensured sufficient quality by simply overprovisioning their internal infrastructure, more economic solutions are required to adapt the network infrastructures and their backbones to current and upcoming traffic characteristics and quality requirements with sustained success. The chapter outlines real-world scenarios to analyze both the requirements and the related research challenges, discusses the limitations of existing solutions, and goes into the details of practitioners’ current best practices, promising research results, and the upcoming paradigm of service level management aware network connections. Special emphasis is put on the presentation of the various facets of the quality assurance problem and of the alternative solutions elaborated with respect to the technical heterogeneity, restrictive information sharing policies, and legal obligations encountered in international service provider cooperation.

Workflow Scheduling with Fault Tolerance

This chapter describes a study on workflow scheduling with fault tolerance. It starts with an understanding on workflow scheduling and fault tolerance technologies independently. Next, the chapter surveys the related works on the combination field of workflow scheduling and fault tolerance technologies. Generally, these works are classified into six categories corresponding to the six fault tolerance technologies: workflow scheduling with primary/backup, primary/backup with multiple backups, checkpoint, rescheduling, active replication, and active replication with dynamic replicas. An in-depth study on these six topics illustrates the challenge issues explored so far, e.g. overloading conditions, tradeoffs among scheduling criteria, et cetera, and some future research directions are also identified. As applications are increasingly complex, and failures become a severe problem in the large scale systems, the authors expect to provide a comprehensive review on the problem of workflow scheduling with fault tolerance through this work.

SCAMSTOP

In traditional telecommunication networks, fraud accounts for significant annual losses at an average up of 5% of the operators’ revenue and still increasing. The current shift towards Voice-over-IP (VoIP) networks increases to exposure to fraud due to the lack of strong built-in security mechanisms and the full usage of the open Internet. In this book chapter, the authors discuss an anti-fraud framework they are currently developing within the SCAMSTOP project. Although a short description of the framework is provided, the focus of this chapter is mainly on the methods used to detect fraudulent activity. In particular the authors focus on unsupervised methods including signature and clustering based techniques. Preliminary testing results are also discussed.

A Computation Migration Approach to Elasticity of Cloud Computing

Code mobility is the capability to dynamically change the bindings between code fragments and the location where they are executed. While it is not a new concept, code mobility has reentered the limelight because of its potential uses for cloud computing—a megatrend in recent years. The strongest form of mobility allows the execution state of a computational component to be captured and restored on another node where execution is seamlessly continued. Computation migration can achieve dynamic load balancing, improve data access locality, and serve as the enabling mechanism for auto-provisioning of cloud computing resources. Therefore, it is worthwhile to study the concepts behind computation migration and its performance in a multi-instance cloud platform. This chapter introduces a handful of migration techniques working at diverse granularities for use in cloud computing. In particular, this chapter highlights an innovative idea termed stack-on-demand (SOD), which enables ultra-lightweight computation migrations and delivers a flexible execution model for mobile cloud applications.

A Comparative Study of SIP Overload Control Algorithms

Recent collapses of SIP servers in the carrier networks indicates two potential problems of SIP: (1) the current SIP design does not easily scale up to large network sizes, and (2) the built-in SIP overload control mechanism cannot handle overload conditions effectively. In order to help carriers prevent widespread SIP network failure effectively, this chapter presents a systematic investigation of current state-of-the-art overload control algorithms. To achieve this goal, this chapter first reviews two basic mechanisms of SIP, and summarizes numerous experiment results reported in the literatures which demonstrate the impact of overload on SIP networks. After surveying the approaches for modeling the dynamic behaviour of SIP networks experiencing overload, the chapter presents a comparison and assessment of different types of SIP overload control solutions. Finally it outlines some research opportunities for managing SIP overload control.