Conception d’un support de communication opportuniste pour les services pervasifs

The vision of pervasive computing of building interactive smart spaces in the physical environment is gradually heading from the research domain to reality. Computing capacity is moving beyond personal computers to many day-to-day devices, and these devices become, thanks to multiple interfaces, capable of communicating directly with one another or of connecting to the Internet.In this thesis, we are interested in a kind of pervasive computing environment that forms what we call an Intermittently Connected Hybrid Network (ICHN). An ICHN is a network composed of two parts: a fixed and a mobile part. The fixed part is formed of some fixed infostations (potentially connected together with some fixed infrastructure, typically the Internet). The mobile part, on the other hand, is formed of smartphones carried by nomadic people. While the fixed part is mainly stable, the mobile part is considered challenging and form what is called an Opportunistic Network. Indeed, relying on short-range communication means coupled with the free movements of people and radio interferences lead to frequent disconnections. To perform a network-wide communication, the "store, carry and forward" approach is usually applied. With this approach, a message can be stored temporarily on a device, in order to be forwarded later when circumstances permit. Any device can opportunistically be used as an intermediate relay to facilitate the propagation of a message from one part of the network to another. In this context, the provisioning of pervasive services is particularly challenging, and requires revisiting important components of the provisioning process, such as performing pervasive service discovery and invocation with the presence of connectivity disruptions and absence of both end-to-end paths and access continuity due to user mobility. This thesis addresses the problems of providing network-wide service provisioning in ICHNs and proposes solutions for pervasive service discovery, invocation and access continuity. Concerning service discovery challenge, we propose TAO-DIS, a service discovery protocol that performs an automatic and fast service discovery mechanism. TAO-DIS takes into account the hybrid nature of an ICHN and that the majority of services are provided by infostations. It permits mobile users to discover all the services in the surrounding environment in order to identify and choose the most convenient ones. To allow users to interact with the discovered services, we introduce TAO-INV. TAO-INV is a service invocation protocol specifically designed for ICHNs. It relies on a set of heuristics and mechanisms that ensures performing efficient routing of messages (both service requests and responses) between fixed infostations and mobile clients while preserving both low values of overhead and round trip delays. Since some infostations in the network might be connected, we propose a soft handover mechanism that modifies the invocation process in order to reduce service delivery delays. This handover mechanism takes into consideration the opportunistic nature of the mobile part of the ICHN. We have performed various experiments to evaluate our solutions and compare them with other protocols designed for ad hoc and opportunistic networks. The obtained results tend to prove that our solutions outperform these protocols, namely thanks to the optimizations we have developed for ICHNs. In our opinion, building specialized protocols that benefit from techniques specifically designed for ICHNs is an approach that should be pursued, in complement with research works on general-purpose communication protocolsLa vision de l'informatique ubiquitaire permettant de construire des espaces intelligents interactifs dans l'environnement physique passe, peu à peu, du domaine de la recherche à la réalité. La capacité de calcul ne se limite plus à l'ordinateur personnel mais s'intègre dans de multiples appareils du quotidien, et ces appareils deviennent, grâce à plusieurs interfaces, capables de communiquer directement les uns avec les autres ou bien de se connecter à Internet.Dans cette thèse, nous nous sommes intéressés à un type d'environnement cible de l'informatique ubiquitaire qui forme ce que nous appelons un réseau hybride à connexions intermittentes (ICHN). Un ICHN est un réseau composé de deux parties : une partie fixe et une partie mobile. La partie fixe est constituée de plusieurs infostations fixes (potentiellement reliées entre elles avec une infrastructure fixe, typiquement l'Internet). La partie mobile, quant à elle, est constituée de smartphones portés par des personnes nomades. Tandis que la partie fixe est principalement stable, la partie mobile pose un certain nombre de défis propres aux réseaux opportunistes. En effet, l'utilisation de moyens de communication à courte portée couplée à des déplacements de personnes non contraints et à des interférences radio induit des déconnexions fréquentes. Le concept du "store, carry and forward" est alors habituellement appliqué pour permettre la communication sur l'ensemble du réseau. Avec cette approche, un message peut être stocké temporairement sur un appareil avant d'être transféré plus tard quand les circonstances sont plus favorables. Ainsi, n'importe quel appareil devient un relai de transmission opportuniste qui permet de faciliter la propagation d'un message dans le réseau. Dans ce contexte, la fourniture de services est particulièrement problématique, et exige de revisiter les composants principaux du processus de fourniture, tels que la découverte et l'invocation de service, en présence de ruptures de connectivité et en l'absence de chemins de bout en bout. Cette thèse aborde les problèmes de fourniture de service sur l'ensemble d'un ICHN et propose des solutions pour la découverte de services, l'invocation et la continuité d'accès. En ce qui concerne le défi de la découverte de services, nous proposons TAO-DIS, un protocole qui met en œuvre un mécanisme automatique et rapide de découverte de services. TAO-DIS tient compte de la nature hybride d'un ICHN et du fait que la majorité des services sont fournis par des infostations. Il permet aux utilisateurs mobiles de découvrir tous les services dans l'environnement afin d'identifier et de choisir les plus intéressants. Pour permettre aux utilisateurs d'interagir avec les services découverts, nous introduisons TAO-INV. TAO-INV est un protocole d'invocation de service spécialement conçu pour les ICHN. Il se fonde sur un ensemble d'heuristiques et de mécanismes qui assurent un acheminement efficace des messages (des requêtes et des réponses de services) entre les infostations fixes et les clients mobiles tout en conservant un surcoût et des temps de réponses réduits. Puisque certaines infostations dans le réseau peuvent être reliées entre elles, nous proposons un mécanisme de continuité d'accès (handover) qui modifie le processus d'invocation pour réduire les délais de délivrance. Dans sa définition, il est tenu compte de la nature opportuniste de la partie mobile de l'ICHN. Nous avons mené diverses expérimentations pour évaluer nos solutions et les comparer à d'autres protocoles conçus pour des réseaux ad hoc et des réseaux opportunistes. Les résultats obtenus tendent à montrer que nos solutions surpassent ces autres protocoles, notamment grâce aux optimisations que nous avons développées pour les ICHN. À notre avis, construire des protocoles spécialisés qui tirent parti des techniques spécifiquement conçues pour les ICHN est une approche à poursuivre en complément des recherches sur des protocoles de communication polyvalent

Adaptive Middleware for Resource-Constrained Mobile Ad Hoc and Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks: MANETs) and wireless sensor networks: WSNs) are two recently-developed technologies that uniquely function without fixed infrastructure support, and sense at scales, resolutions, and durations previously not possible. While both offer great potential in many applications, developing software for these types of networks is extremely difficult, preventing their wide-spread use. Three primary challenges are: 1) the high level of dynamics within the network in terms of changing wireless links and node hardware configurations,: 2) the wide variety of hardware present in these networks, and: 3) the extremely limited computational and energy resources available. Until now, the burden of handling these issues was put on the software application developer. This dissertation presents three novel programming models and middleware systems that address these challenges: Limone, Agilla, and Servilla. Limone reliably handles high levels of dynamics within MANETs. It does this through lightweight coordination primitives that make minimal assumptions about network connectivity. Agilla enables self-adaptive WSN applications via the integration of mobile agent and tuple space programming models, which is critical given the continuously changing network. It is the first system to successfully demonstrate the feasibility of using mobile agents and tuple spaces within WSNs. Servilla addresses the challenges that arise from WSN hardware heterogeneity using principles of Service-Oriented Computing: SOC). It is the first system to successfully implement the entire SOC model within WSNs and uniquely tailors it to the WSN domain by making it energy-aware and adaptive. The efficacies of the above three systems are demonstrated through implementation, micro-benchmarks, and the evaluation of several real-world applications including Universal Remote, Fire Detection and Tracking, Structural Health Monitoring, and Medical Patient Monitoring

Context Aware Service Oriented Computing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

These days we witness a major shift towards small, mobile devices, capable of wireless communication. Their communication capabilities enable them to form mobile ad hoc networks and share resources and capabilities. Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is a new emerging paradigm for distributed computing that has evolved from object-oriented and component-oriented computing to enable applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Services are autonomous computational elements that can be described, published, discovered, and orchestrated for the purpose of developing applications. The application of the SOC model to mobile devices provides a loosely coupled model for distributed processing in a resource-poor and highly dynamic environment. Cooperation in a mobile ad hoc environment depends on the fundamental capability of hosts to communicate with each other. Peer-to-peer interactions among hosts within communication range allow such interactions but limit the scope of interactions to a local region. Routing algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks extend the scope of interactions to cover all hosts transitively connected over multi-hop routes. Additional contextual information, e.g., knowledge about the movement of hosts in physical space, can help extend the boundaries of interactions beyond the limits of an island of connectivity. To help separate concerns specific to different layers, a coordination model between the routing layer and the SOC layer provides abstractions that mask the details characteristic to the network layer from the distributed computing semantics above. This thesis explores some of the opportunities and challenges raised by applying the SOC paradigm to mobile computing in ad hoc networks. It investigates the implications of disconnections on service advertising and discovery mechanisms. It addresses issues related to code migration in addition to physical host movement. It also investigates some of the security concerns in ad hoc networking service provision. It presents a novel routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks and a novel coordination model that addresses space and time explicitly

Discovery and Push Notification Mechanisms for Mobile Cloud Services

Viimase viie aasta jooksul on mobiilsed seadmed nagu sülearvutid, pihuarvutid, nutitelefonid jmt. tunginud peaaegu kõigisse inimeste igapäevaelu tegevustesse. Samuti on põhjalik teadus- ja arendustegevus mobiilsete tehnoloogiate vallas viinud märkimisväärsete täiustusteni riistvara, tarkvara ja andmeedastuse alal. Tänapäeval on mobiilsed seadmed varustatud sisseehitatud sensorite, kaamera, puutetundliku ekraani, suurema hulga mäluga, kuid ka tõhusamate energiatarbemehhanismidega. Lisaks on iOS ja Android operatsioonisüsteemide väljalaske tõttu suurenenud nii mobiilirakenduste arv kui keerukus, pakkudes arvukamalt kõrgetasemelisi rakendusi. Sarnaselt on toimunud olulised arengud ja standardiseerimisele suunatud jõupingutused veebiteenusete valdkonnas ja elementaarsetele veebiteenuste ligipääsu kasutatakse laialdaselt nutitelefonidest. See on viinud loogilise järgmise sammuna veebiteenuste pakkumiseni nutitelefonidest. Telefonidest veebiteenuste pakkumise kontseptsioon ei ole uus ning seda on põhjalikult uurinud Srirama, kes pakkus välja Mobile Host (Mobiilne Veebiteenuse Pakkuja) kontseptsiooni. Algne realisatsioon kasutas aga aegunud tehnoloogiaid nagu JMEE, PersonalJava, SOAP arhitektuur jne. See töö uuendab Mobile Host'i kasutades uusimaid tehnoloogiad, nagu Android OS ja REST arhitektuur, ning pakub välja teenusemootori, mis põhineb Apache Felix'il - OSGi platvormi realisatsioonil piiratud ressurssidega seadmetele. Hämmastava kiirusega toimunud arengud mobiilsete arvutuste vallas võimaldavad uue põlvkonna veebirakenduste loomist valdkondades nagu keskkonnateadlikkus, sotsiaalvõrgustikud, koostöövahendid, asukohapõhised teenused jne. Sellised rakendused saavad ära kasutada Mobile Host'i võimalusi. Selle tulemusena on klientidel ligipääs väga suurele hulgale teenustele, mistõttu tekib vajadus efektiivse teenuste avastamise mehhanismi järele. See töö pakub välja kataloogipõhise avastusmehhanismi võrgu ülekatte toega suurtele, kõrge liikuvusega võrgustikele. See mehhanism toetub OWL-S'le, mis on ontoloogia veebiteenuseid pakkuvate ressursside avastamiseks, väljakutseks, koostamiseks ja jälgimiseks. Töö kirjeldab ka Srirama välja pakutud algupärast teenuste avastamise mehhanismi, mis toetub peer-to-peer võrkudele ja Apache Lucene võtmesõna otsingumootorile. Uurimuse käigus uuendatakse teenuseotsing kasutama Apache Solr'i, Apache Lucene'i viimast versiooni. Teenuste avastust testiti põhjalikult ja tulemused on töös kokkuvõtvalt välja toodud. Mobiilsete tehnoloogiate vallas uuritakse ka võimalust kasutada pilvetehnolologiat laiendamaks mobiilseadmete salvestusmahtu ja töökoormust edastades pilve andme- ja arvutusmahukad ülesanded. See soodustab keerulisemate ja võimalusrohkemate mobiilirakenduste arendust. Pilve delegeeritavate toimingute aeganõudva iseloomu tõttu aga on vajalik asünkroonne mehhanism teavitamaks kasutajat, millal töömahukad tegevused on lõpetatud. Mobiilsete pilveteenuste pakkujad ja vahevara lahendused võivad kasu saada Mobile Host'ist ja selle asünkroonsete teavituste võimekusest. Uurimus esitleb nelja teavitusmehhanismi: AC2DM, APNS, IBM MQTT ja Mobile Host'i põhine teavitus. Töö võtab kokku kvantitatiivse analüüsi tulemused ja toob välja nelja teavitamise lähenemise tugevused ja nõrkused. Lisaks kirjeldatakse CroudSTag rakenduse realisatsiooni - CroudSTag on mobiilirakendus, mille eesmärgiks on sotsiaalsete gruppide moodustamine kasutades näotuvastustehnoloogiat. CroudSTag-i realisatsioon kasutab mobiilseid pilveteenuseid ja Mobile Host'i, et pakkuda oma funktsionaalsust kasutajale.In the last lustrum the mobile devices such as laptops, PDAs, smart phones, tablets, etc. have pervaded almost all the environments where people perform their day-to-day activities. Further, the extensive Research and Development in mobile technologies has led to significant improvements in hardware, software and transmission. Similarly, there are significant developments and standardization efforts in web services domain and basic web services have been widely accessed from smart phones. This has lead to the logical next step of providing web services from the smart phones. The concept of the web service provisioning from smart phones is not new and has been extensively explored by Srirama who proposed the concept of Mobile Host. However, the original implementation considered aged technologies such as JMEE, PersonalJava, SOAP architecture among others. This work updates the Mobile Host to the latest technologies like Android OS and REST architecture and proposes a service engine based on Apache Felix, and OSGI implementation for resource constraint devices. Moreover, the astonishing speed in developments in mobile computing enable the new generation of applications from domains such as context-awareness, social network, collaborative tools, location based services, etc., which benefit from the Mobile Host service provisioning capabilities. As a result the clients have access to a huge number of services available; therefore, an efficient and effective service discovery mechanism is required. The thesis proposes a directory-based with network overlay support discovery mechanism for large networks with high mobility. The proposed discovery mechanism relies in OWL-S, an ontology for service discovery, invocation, composition, and monitoring of web resources. The work also considers the original service discovery mechanism proposed by Srirama relying in peer-to-peer networks and Apache Lucene, a keyword search engine. The study updates the service search to Apache Solr, the latest development for Apache Lucene. The service discovery was extensively tested and the results are summarized in this work. Mobile technologies are looking into the clouds for extending their capabilities in storage and processing by offloading data and process intensive tasks. This fosters the development of more complex and rich mobile applications. However, due to the time-consuming nature of the tasks delegated to the clouds, an asynchronous mechanism is necessary for notifying the user when the intensive tasks are completed. Mobile cloud service providers and Middleware solutions might benefit from Mobile Host and its asynchronous notification capabilities. The study presents four push notification mechanisms being AC2DM, APNS, IBM MQTT and Mobile Host based push notification. The work summarizes the results of a quantitative analysis and highlights the strengths and weakness of the four notifications approaches. In addition, it explains CroudSTag realization, a mobile application that aims the social group formation by means of facial recognition that relies in mobile cloud services and Mobile Host to provide its functionality to the user

Supporting Collaboration in Mobile Environments

Continued rapid improvements in the hardware capabilities of mobile computing devices is driving a parallel need for a paradigm shift in software design for such devices with the aim of ushering in new classes of software applications for devices of the future. One such class of software application is collaborative applications that seem to reduce the burden and overhead of collaborations on human users by providing automated computational support for the more mundane and mechanical aspects of a cooperative effort. This dissertation addresses the research and software engineering questions associated with building a workflow-based collaboration system that can operate across mobile ad hoc networks, the most dynamic type of mobile networks that can function without dependence on any fixed external resources. While workflow management systems have been implemented for stable wired networks, the transition to a mobile network required the development of a knowledge management system for improving the predictability of the network topology, a mobility-aware specification language to specify workflows, and its accompanying algorithms that help automate key pieces of the software. In addition to details of the formulation, design, and implementation of the various algorithms and software components. this dissertation also describes the construction of a custom mobile workflow simulator that can be used to conduct simulation experiments that verify the effectiveness of the approaches presented in this document and beyond. Also presented are empirical results obtained using this simulator that show the effectiveness of the described approaches

Cross-layer Peer-to-Peer Computing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The future information society is expected to rely heavily on wireless technology. Mobile access to the Internet is steadily gaining ground, and could easily end up exceeding the number of connections from the fixed infrastructure. Picking just one example, ad hoc networking is a new paradigm of wireless communication for mobile devices. Initially, ad hoc networking targeted at military applications as well as stretching the access to the Internet beyond one wireless hop. As a matter of fact, it is now expected to be employed in a variety of civilian applications. For this reason, the issue of how to make these systems working efficiently keeps the ad hoc research community active on topics ranging from wireless technologies to networking and application systems. In contrast to traditional wire-line and wireless networks, ad hoc networks are expected to operate in an environment in which some or all the nodes are mobile, and might suddenly disappear from, or show up in, the network. The lack of any centralized point, leads to the necessity of distributing application services and responsibilities to all available nodes in the network, making the task of developing and deploying application a hard task, and highlighting the necessity of suitable middleware platforms. This thesis studies the properties and performance of peer-to-peer overlay management algorithms, employing them as communication layers in data sharing oriented middleware platforms. The work primarily develops from the observation that efficient overlays have to be aware of the physical network topology, in order to reduce (or avoid) negative impacts of application layer traffic on the network functioning. We argue that cross-layer cooperation between overlay management algorithms and the underlying layer-3 status and protocols, represents a viable alternative to engineer effective decentralized communication layers, or eventually re-engineer existing ones to foster the interconnection of ad hoc networks with Internet infrastructures. The presented approach is twofold. Firstly, we present an innovative network stack component that supports, at an OS level, the realization of cross-layer protocol interactions. Secondly, we exploit cross-layering to optimize overlay management algorithms in unstructured, structured, and publish/subscribe platforms

SIP servlets-based service provisioning in MANETs

Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) are a part of the fourth generation networks vision. They are new wireless networks having transient mobile nodes with no need for a pre-installed infrastructure. They are of utmost interest for the future networks owing to their flexibility, effortlessness of deployment and related low cost. They come in two flavours: standalone MANETs and integrated with the conventional 3G network. Providing value-added services is the core concept of several paradigms and has been extensively studied in legacy network. However, providing such services in MANETs is a challenging process. Indeed, MANETs are known for their heterogeneous devices, limited resources, dynamic topology and frequent disconnections/connections. New SIP based solutions for signalling and media handling in these networks are emerging. Furthermore, SIP is the primary protocol for 3G networks. Therefore, SIP servlets become a promising paradigm for service provisioning in MANETs. This thesis addresses the service provisioning aspects in both standalone MANETs and integrated 3G/MANETs. The SIP servlets framework is considered as the starting point while Multihop Cellular Networks (MCNs), the widely studied networks, are used as an example of integrated 3G/MANETs. Background information is provided, architectures requirements are derived and related work is reviewed. A novel business model is proposed for service provision in standalone MANETs. The business model defines the business roles and the relationship and interfaces between them. We also propose a service invocation and execution architecture implementing the business model. The solution is based on overlay network and a distribution scheme of the SIP servlets engine. The overlay network enables self-organization and self-recovery to take into account MANETs characteristics. As for the integrated 3G/MANETs we propose high level architectural alternatives for service provisioning in MCNs. We identify the most interesting alternatives from the network operator point of view and proposed a detailed and concrete architecture for the promising alternative. Overall architecture, functional entities and procedures are presented. During this work, we built prototypes as proof-of-concept and made preliminary performance measurements, used SPIN as protocol validation tool and adopted OPNET for simulation. The results show that we can provide services in MANETs as we do in conventional networks with reasonable performance