A Distributed Monitoring Framework for Opportunistic Communication Systems

Opportunistic communication systems aim at producing and sharing digital resources by means of localized wireless data exchanges among mobile nodes. The design and evaluation of systems able to exploit this emerging communication paradigm is a challenging problem. This paper presents the authors’ experience in developing U-Hopper, a middleware running over widely diffused mobile handsets and supporting the development of context-aware services based on opportunistic communications. The authors present the design of the platform, and describe the distributed monitoring framework that was set up in order to monitor and dynamically reconfigure it at run time. The paper concludes with an experimental evaluation of the framework, showing its practical utilization when monitoring an operational opportunistic communication system.

A Recovery-Oriented Approach for Software Fault Diagnosis in Complex Critical Systems

This paper proposes an approach to software faults diagnosis in complex fault tolerant systems, encompassing the phases of error detection, fault location, and system recovery. Errors are detected in the first phase, exploiting the operating system support. Faults are identified during the location phase, through a machine learning based approach. Then, the best recovery action is triggered once the fault is located. Feedback actions are also used during the location phase to improve detection quality over time. A real world application from the Air Traffic Control field has been used as case study for evaluating the proposed approach. Experimental results, achieved by means of fault injection, show that the diagnosis engine is able to diagnose faults with high accuracy and at a low overhead.

Various Extensions for the Ambient OSGi Framework

OSGi is a wrapper above the Java Virtual Machine that embraces two concepts: component approach and service-oriented programming. The component approach enables a Java run-time to host several concurrent applications, while the service-oriented programming paradigm allows the decomposition of applications into independent units that are dynamically bound at runtime. Combining component and service-oriented programming greatly simplifies the implementation of highly adaptive, constantly evolving applications. This, in turn, is an ideal match to the requirements and constraints of ambient intelligence computing, such as adaptation to changes associated with context evolution. OSGi particularly fits ambient requirements and constraints by absorbing and adapting to changes associated with context evolution. However, OSGi needs to be finely tuned in order to integrate ambient specific issues. This paper focuses on Zero-configuration architecture, Multi-provider framework, and Limited resource requirements. The authors studied many OSGi improvements that should be taken into account when building OSGi-based gateways. This paper summarizes the INRIA Amazones teamwork (http://amazones.gforge.inria.fr/) on extending OSGi specifications and implementations to cope with ambient concerns. This paper references three main concerns: management, isolation, and security.

An OMA DM Based Framework for Updating Modulation Module for Mobile Devices

Due to the rapid advancement of mobile communication technologies, the demands for managing mobile devices effectively to fulfill various functionalities are on the rise. It is well known that mobile devices make use of different kinds of modulation approaches to adapt to various channel conditions. Therefore, in this paper, the authors propose a framework of Modulation Module Update (MMU) for updating the modulation module on the mobile device based on OMA DM. The management object for updating modulation module and the parameters associated with it are defined in the framework, and three operation phases are defined in this framework as well.

Agents Network for Automatic Safety Check in Constructing Sites

Compliance with safety standards in constructing sites is a mandatory activity that helps prevent a high number of fatalities during working activities. Unfortunately, because of negligence or limited resources, safety checks are not performed with regularity and this causes a high number of accidents. This paper proposes a distributed solution for automated checking of safety rules, secure logging of violations, and real-time execution of reactions. The constructing site is modeled as a pervasive environment where software agents, executing on smart devices, can detect and interact with people, machineries, and safety equipment to check the compliance of common behaviors with the safety plan designed for that site. The design is presented as a working prototype of a three layered software/hardware architecture.

Non-Intrusive Autonomic Approach with Self-Management Policies Applied to Legacy Infrastructures for Performance Improvements

The growing complexity of large IT facilities involves important time and effort costs to operate and maintain. Autonomic computing gives a new approach in designing distributed architectures that manage themselves in accordance with high-level objectives. The main issue is that existing architectures do not necessarily follow this new approach. The motivation is to implement a system that can interface heterogeneous components and platforms supplied by different vendors in a non-intrusive and generic manner. The goal is to increase the intelligence of the system by actively monitoring its state and autonomously taking corrective actions without the need to modify the managed system. In this paper, the authors focus on modeling software and hardware architectures as well as describing administration policies using a graphical language inspired from UML. The paper demonstrates that this language is powerful enough to describe complex scenarios and evaluates some self-management policies for performance improvement on a distributed computational jobs load balancer over a grid.

A Resource-Aware Dynamic Load-Balancing Parallelization Algorithm in a Farmer-Worker Environment

This paper describes an algorithm for dynamically assigning tasks to processing entities in a world where each task has a set of resource or service requirements and each processing entity a set of resources or service capabilities. A task needs to be assigned to a node that offers all required services and the set of tasks is finished within a minimal execution time frame. Dependability and adaptability are inherent to the algorithm so that it accounts for the varying execution time of each task or the failure of a processing node. The algorithm is based on a dependable technique for farmer-worker parallel programs and is enhanced for modeling the time constraints in combination with the required configuration set in a multidimensional resources model. This paper describes how the algorithm is used for dynamically load balancing and parallelizing the nightly tests of a digital television content-processing embedded device.

A Generic Adaptation Framework for Mobile Communication

Today, technologies are providing mobile terminals with much more powerful computational abilities. Such improvement has made it possible to run many complex applications on mobile devices. However, many of these new applications are also resource demanding. Lacking sufficient resources would cause performance failures and impact negatively on the users’ quality of experience. In order to improve this, it is important to provide the users with an easy access to specifying their requirements. It is also crucial to monitor the system resources and make corresponding adaptation immediately according to the user’s specifications. In this paper, the authors propose adaptation strategies that flexibly combine the process of monitoring and adaptation, which provides an easy way to specify user’s requirements. By tuning the quality of service, the applications’ demand on system resources is reduced, thus decreasing the chances of performance failures and improving the users’ quality of experience.

Self-Adaptable Discovery and Composition of Services Based on the Semantic CompAA Approach

With the next generation of distributed systems, applications become nomad, ubiquitous or ambient. It becomes challenging to dynamically maintain or update functionalities, or to preserve non-functional properties, like the extensibility of the system and the quality of service. This paper describes the CompAA component model. The main contribution introduces the variability concept with the specification of adaptation points integrated by a mixed component/agent approach. The result is the production of self-adaptable entities, including self-discovery and self-composition mechanisms. An experiment in the area of training, based on very scalable services (e-Portfolio), validates these contributions and provides an exemplification of CompAA mechanisms.

IoT-IMS Communication Platform for Future Internet

In recent years, Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud Computing are the hottest issues of Future Internet. However, there is a lack of common fabric for integrating IoT and Cloud. In telecommunications, the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), based on the All-IP and Open Services Architecture, has been regarded as the trend for Next Generation Network (NGN). The IMS communication platform is the most suitable fabric for integrating IoT and Cloud. This paper focuses on different aspects including Cloud Service Framework, Data Sensing and Communication Technology, Collaborative Authentication and Privacy Protection Mechanism, Operation, Administration, and Maintenance (OA&M), Mobility and Energy-Saving Management, and Application Services. This paper not only provides the discussion of open challenges, but also proposes a possible solution based on the above-mentioned aspects for Future Internet.