On Delays in Management Frameworks: Metrics, Models and Analysis

Management performance evaluation means assessment of scalability, complexity, accuracy, throughput, delays and resources consumptions. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of management frameworks delays through a set of specific metrics. We investigate the statistical properties of these metrics when the number of management nodes increases. We show that management delays measured at the application level are statistically modeled by distributions with heavy tails, especially the Weibull distribution. Given that delays can substantially degrade the capacity of management algorithms to react and resolve problems it is useful to get a finer model to describe them.We suggest theWeibull distribution as a model of delays for the analysis and simulations of such algorithms

Adaptable Service Oriented Infrastructure Provisioning with Lightweight Containers Virtualization Technology

Modern computing infrastructures should enable realization of converged provisioning and governance operations on virtualized computing, storage and network resources used on behalf of users' workloads. These workloads must have ensured sufficient access to the resources to satisfy required QoS. This requires flexible platforms providing functionality for construction, activation and governance of Runtime Infrastructure which can be realized according to Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) paradigm. Implementation of the SOI management framework requires definition of flexible architecture and utilization of advanced software engineering and policy-based techniques. The paper presents an Adaptable SOI Provisioning Platform which supports adaptable SOI provisioning with lightweight virtualization, compliant with the structured process model suitable for construction, activation and governance of IT environments. The requirements, architecture and implementation of the platform are all discussed. Practical usage of the platform is presented on the basis of a complex case study for provisioning JEE middleware on top of the Solaris 10 lightweight virtualization platform

Management of Dynamic Networks and Services

Colloque sur invitation. internationale.International audienceWhen the first management standards were established, about 20 years ago, they where designed for the management of highly static elements (e.g. backbone switches, core routers, mainframes) and statically provisioned network services (e.g. virtual circuits, virtal paths, ...). This situation has drastically changed over the recent years with the increasing support for dynamics at all levels of a networked service: element, infrastructure, middleware and service. This is achieved mainly by the advent of wireless infrastructures (especially WiFi), Home Networks, programmable elements, component based and extensible service infrastructures and novel service models such as the P2P one. This dynamics has an enormous impact on the management plane which needs to adapt to the conditions imposed by these novel infrastructures. This tutorial addresses this issue by (1) identifying the management need and the new requirements, (2) presenting in detail the potential to address these requirements by 2 industrial deployed approaches: JMX in the Java world and SyncML-DM in the Device management world, (3) providing an up-to-date vision of research proposals addressing advanced dynamics of managed infrastructure

An adaptive communication model for mobile agents in highly dynamic networks based on forming flexible regions via swarming behabiour

Im letzten Jahrzehnt gilt die mobile Agententechnologie als eines der wichtigsten Forschungsgebiete der Informatik. Mobile Agenten sind Software, die Aufträge im Namen ihrer Besitzer erfüllen können (ZK02). Mobile Agenten können selbstbestimmend von Server zu Server migrieren, sie können ihren Arbeitsstand speichern und dann ihre Arbeit am neuen Aufenthaltsort fortsetzen. Ihre wichtigsten Merkmale sind: autonom, reaktiv, opportunistisch und zielgerichtet. Diese genannten Merkmale sind für verteilte Anwendungen geeignet, z. B: Ressourcenverteilung (TYI99), Netzwerkmanagement (MT99), E-Commerce (BGP05), Fernüberwachung CMCV02), Gesundheitssysteme (Mor06), um nur einige zu nennen. Es ist die Mobilität der Agenten, die mobile Agenten zu einer guten Computing Technologie macht (Pau02). Kommunikation ist wesentlich in verteilten Systemen, und dies gilt auch für mobile Agentensysteme (LHL02). Neben den eher technischen Aspekten mobiler Agententechnologien, wie Migration (Bra03) und Kontrollmechanismen (Bau00), wurde die Kommunikation zwischen den Agenten als eine der wichtigsten Komponenten in der mobilen Agententechnologie identifiziert (FLP98). Es ist diskutiert worden, ob Agentenkommunikation ausschließlich lokal sein sollte, angesichts der Tatsache, dass mobile Agenten erfunden wurden, weil man die Verarbeitung zu den Daten tragen möchte, anstatt umgekehrt (SS97). Allerdings hat es sich gezeigt, dass es in vielen Fällen lohnt, wenn die mobilen Agenten kommunizieren anstatt migrieren (BHR+97),(FLP98),(ea02). Kommunikation hilft mobilen Agenten, eine bessere Leistung zu erreichen (Erf04). Kommunikation ist daher aus unserer Sicht die Basis mobiler Agentensysteme. An der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena ist das interdisziplinäre Projekt SpeedUp seit April 2009 durchgeführt worden (FSU11). Das Projekt entwickelt ein Unterstützungssystem für Rettungs- und Einsatzkräfte bei einem Massenanfall von Verletzten (MANV). Im Projekt ist das Konzept mobiler Agenten als eine der Basistechnologien ausgesucht worden. Die hohe Netzwerkdynamik stellt neue Herausforderungen für mobile Agentensysteme dar, die in MANV Rettungsszenarien arbeiten. Es wird erwartet, dass die Kommunikation sich an die dynamische Umgebung zur Ausführungszeit anpassen kann. Dazu fehlen heute tragfähige Konzepte. In dieser Arbeit wird daher ein Ansatz zur adaptiven Kommunikation mobiler Agenten in hochdynamischen Netzwerken des SpeedUp-Typs vorgestellt. Nach unserer Beurteilung sollte die Kommunikation zwischen den mobilen Agenten nicht nur Interoperabilität und Standortunabhängigkeit, sondern auch Anpassungsfähigkeit aufweisen. Wir schlagen ein Kommunikationsmodell vor, das sich auf den koordinierenden Aspekt und das Zusammenspiel der Agenten konzentriert, sowie die Zuverlässigkeit und die Fehlertoleranz unterstützt. Um die Netzwerkdynamik zu managen, planen wir einen selbstorganisierten Mechanismus zu verwenden, der sich ”honey bee” inspiriertes Verfahren nennt. Wir werden dazu eine Software für ein adaptives Kommunikationsmodell mobiler Agenten, basierend auf das mobile Agentensystem Ellipsis gestalten, implementieren, und evaluieren.In the last decade, mobile agent technology has been considered as one of the most active research fields in computer science. Mobile agents are software agents which run on behalf of their owner to fulfil jobs that have been ordered (ZK02). They have the ability to migrate from location to location in the network, they can temporarily save their work state at the time of migrating and then restore their tasks when arriving at the new location. Their outstanding characteristics are to be autonomous, reactive, opportunistic, and goal-oriented. Those characteristics are suitable for distributed applications, such as resource allocation (TYI99), network management (MT99), remote supervision (CMCV02), e-commerce (BGP05), health care systems (Mor06), to name but a few. It is the mobility of mobile agents that makes them to be a powerful computing technique, especially for pervasive computing (Pau02). Communication is an essential component of distributed systems and this is no exception for multiagent systems (LHL02). Besides technical aspects of mobile agent technology, such as migrations (Bra03) and control mechanisms (Bau00), communication between mobile agents has been identified as an important issue in mobile agent technology (FLP98). It has been argued whether agent communication should be remote or restricted to local, considering that the main reason for the birth of mobile agents was to move computation to the data instead of moving the data to the computation. Therefore, remote communication could be avoided completely (SS97). However, it has been shown that in many cases mobile agent systems can benefit from performing communication instead of sending agents to remote platforms (BHR+97),(FLP98),(ea02). The communication between agents helps to increase the chance that an agent attains its objectives (Erf04). Communication is one of the bases of multi-agent systems; it is difficult, if not impossible for a group of agents to solve tasks without communication (Hel03). At Friedrich Schiller University Jena, an interdisciplinary project, named SpeedUp, for the support of handling mass casualty incidents (MCI) has been in development since April 2009 (FSU11). In the project the mobile agent concept has been selected as one of the main technologies on the communication infrastructure level. The dynamic nature of MCI networks poses new challenges to mobile systems working in a rescue scenario. For mobile agent systems working in highly dynamic networks, communication between mobile agents is expected to adapt easily to environmental stimuli which occur at execution time. Much research has been done into the design of an appropriate, highly flexible model for mobile agent communication in dynamic networks. However, to the best of our knowledge none of the suggested solutions has been able to achieve the necessary performance and quality attributes to count as a practical solution. In most cases, these existing approaches seem to neglect the inherent dynamics of modern networks. In this dissertation, we present our approach for an adaptive communication model for mobile agent systems in highly dynamic networks of the SpeedUp type. In our opinion, communication in mobile agent systems should deal not only with interoperability and location-transparency, but also with adaptability. To achieve industrial strength, we propose a model for agent communication that focuses on the cooperation aspect of agent interaction and supports reliability and fault tolerance as the key qualities, while keeping up an acceptable overall performance at the same time. For the management of highly dynamic communication domains we use a self-organizing mechanism, a so-called honey bee inspired algorithm. In order to ensure message delivery, we propose a resilient mechanism for the management of a mobile agent’s location. Based on this thesis, we will design, implement and evaluate a software prototype for an adaptive model for mobile agent communication based on the Ellipsis mobile agent system

Dependable distributed OSGi environment

As the concept of Service Oriented Computing matures the need for well defined architectures and protocols to address this trend is essential if IT is going to properly embrace SOC. The SOC paradigm has several requirements to work properly such as service composition and cooperation in a loosely coupled fashion, ability to adapt autonomously to environmental and business changes and address concerns such as modularity, dynamicity and proper integration between services. The popularization of the OSGi platform its another effort towards the SOC paradigm by issuing key aspects such as modularity and dynamicity in its service oriented design. However there is much room for improvement namely on the creation of architectures and mechanisms to improve the dependability of the overall solution by strengthening key properties such as the availability, reliability, integrity, safety and maintainability of the platform. In this work we propose a middleware layer that offers the strong modular and dynamic properties required in an SOC environment by relying on OSGi while addressing dependability concerns. The starting point to achieve this is by instrumenting an OSGi implementation and providing means to monitor and manage it accordingly to business and environmental requirements. By relying on group communication facilities and some properties from the OSGi specification we are able to migrate OSGi environments between nodes thus minimizing service delivery disruption in the presence of faults and addressing, at the same time SLA properties by migrating (or shutting down) services that are consuming more resources than agreed/expected.(undefined

Network management using active networks

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Towards automated composition of convergent services: a survey

A convergent service is defined as a service that exploits the convergence of communication networks and at the same time takes advantage of features of the Web. Nowadays, building up a convergent service is not trivial, because although there are significant approaches that aim to automate the service composition at different levels in the Web and Telecom domains, selecting the most appropriate approach for specific case studies is complex due to the big amount of involved information and the lack of technical considerations. Thus, in this paper, we identify the relevant phases for convergent service composition and explore the existing approaches and their associated technologies for automating each phase. For each technology, the maturity and results are analysed, as well as the elements that must be considered prior to their application in real scenarios. Furthermore, we provide research directions related to the convergent service composition phases

Web-Based Network Device Monitoring Tool Using Simple Network Management Protocol (Snmp)

The Internet enables different computer networks to join together into one network in which many different models of network devices can co-exist with each other. Standard management protocol is necessary for the purpose of managing these networks. SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), one of the standard protocols, is designed for this open-class management function and is successfully implemented. This thesis suggests a monitoring of network device statistical data from a remote place. This approach reduced the complexity of existing techniques, which are basically operable in specific operating system and having no standard Graphical User Interface (GUI). To address this problem, a system based on WWW standard tool is developed which is SNMP compatible as well as operable with any network device. The network device monitoring tool is a client program, which is managed and could be contacted with the server program. A web server and a browser are to provide static, dynamic, and interactive management information. A web server, which plays a managing role, offers a variety of types of information. An SNMP agent, which cooperates with a web server, uses SNMP protocol and provides access to management information of network devices/agents. The implementation of the user interface using the web-based technique of Java Applet makes it possible for a manager to easily search and manage agent Management Information Base (Mill) through a browser. Java SNMP class files and SNMP Applet Server (SAS) classes are used inside the Web-server to communicate with network devices. The network device monitoring tool is configured to collect network statistical data. It can monitor the real time graph on the basis of MIB variable from remote place and shows more efficient than the existing tool