Resource provisioning and scheduling algorithms for hybrid workflows in edge cloud computing

In recent years, Internet of Things (IoT) technology has been involved in a wide range of application domains to provide real-time monitoring, tracking and analysis services. The worldwide number of IoT-connected devices is projected to increase to 43 billion by 2023, and IoT technologies are expected to engaged in 25% of business sector. Latency-sensitive applications in scope of intelligent video surveillance, smart home, autonomous vehicle, augmented reality, are all emergent research directions in industry and academia. These applications are required connecting large number of sensing devices to attain the desired level of service quality for decision accuracy in a sensitive timely manner. Moreover, continuous data stream imposes processing large amounts of data, which adds a huge overhead on computing and network resources. Thus, latency-sensitive and resource-intensive applications introduce new challenges for current computing models, i.e, batch and stream. In this thesis, we refer to the integrated application model of stream and batch applications as a hybrid work ow model. The main challenge of the hybrid model is achieving the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the two computation systems. This thesis provides a systemic and detailed modeling for hybrid workflows which describes the internal structure of each application type for purposes of resource estimation, model systems tuning, and cost modeling. For optimizing the execution of hybrid workflows, this thesis proposes algorithms, techniques and frameworks to serve resource provisioning and task scheduling on various computing systems including cloud, edge cloud and cooperative edge cloud. Overall, experimental results provided in this thesis demonstrated strong evidences on the responsibility of proposing different understanding and vision on the applications of integrating stream and batch applications, and how edge computing and other emergent technologies like 5G networks and IoT will contribute on more sophisticated and intelligent solutions in many life disciplines for more safe, secure, healthy, smart and sustainable society

An adaptive trust based service quality monitoring mechanism for cloud computing

Cloud computing is the newest paradigm in distributed computing that delivers computing resources over the Internet as services. Due to the attractiveness of cloud computing, the market is currently flooded with many service providers. This has necessitated the customers to identify the right one meeting their requirements in terms of service quality. The existing monitoring of service quality has been limited only to quantification in cloud computing. On the other hand, the continuous improvement and distribution of service quality scores have been implemented in other distributed computing paradigms but not specifically for cloud computing. This research investigates the methods and proposes mechanisms for quantifying and ranking the service quality of service providers. The solution proposed in this thesis consists of three mechanisms, namely service quality modeling mechanism, adaptive trust computing mechanism and trust distribution mechanism for cloud computing. The Design Research Methodology (DRM) has been modified by adding phases, means and methods, and probable outcomes. This modified DRM is used throughout this study. The mechanisms were developed and tested gradually until the expected outcome has been achieved. A comprehensive set of experiments were carried out in a simulated environment to validate their effectiveness. The evaluation has been carried out by comparing their performance against the combined trust model and QoS trust model for cloud computing along with the adapted fuzzy theory based trust computing mechanism and super-agent based trust distribution mechanism, which were developed for other distributed systems. The results show that the mechanisms are faster and more stable than the existing solutions in terms of reaching the final trust scores on all three parameters tested. The results presented in this thesis are significant in terms of making cloud computing acceptable to users in verifying the performance of the service providers before making the selection

Systematic survey on evolution of cloud architectures

Cloud architectures are becoming an active area of research. The quality and durability of a software system are defined by its architecture. The architecture approaches that are used to build cloud-based systems are not available in a blended fashion to achieve an effective universal architecture solution. The paper aims to contribute to the systematic literature review (SLR) to assist researchers who are striving to contribute in this area. The main objective of this review is to systematically identify and analyse the recently published research topics related to software architecture for cloud with regard to research activity, used tools and techniques, proposed approaches, domains. The applied method is SLR based on four selected electronic databases proposed by (Kitchenham and Charters, 2007). Out of 400 classified publications, we regard 121 as relevant for our research domain. We outline taxonomy of their topics and domains, provide lists of used methods and proposed approaches. At present, there is little research coverage on software architectures for cloud, while other disciplines have become more active. The future work is to develop a secure architecture to achieve quality of service and service level agreements

A framework for rapid problem assessment in healthcare delivery systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityProblems in healthcare are difficult to comprehend due to complexity, involvement of multiple stakeholders in decision making and fragmented structure of delivery systems. Major Problem Structuring Methods (PSMs) have been used to aid problem understanding which, in principle, can provide greater clarity to strategic problems and engage diverse decision makers using transparent representation that capture differing perceptions of problems. In reality, PSMs can be difficult in accurately representing problems, limited in highlighting improvement opportunities due to non-intuitive visual representations and requirements for facilitators and stakeholders to be experts in tools used. This research aims to address this gap by developing a framework, taking into account characteristics of healthcare delivery systems, advantages and limitations of PSMs with an aim of providing accurate and holistic representation of delivery workflow, so as to promote problem understanding in a rapid manner. The framework, termed CARE, first establishes nature of problem and a commonly agreed problem statement along with an understanding of stakeholder involvement and operating regulations. It then sets specific guidelines for data collection, representation, verification and validation from stakeholders and provides methodology for data analysis which allows facilitator insight into possible flaws in workflow. A case study approach is used to test effectiveness of CARE across two different healthcare settings, each involving a different nature of problem. Implementation of CARE leads to improved participation and ownership amongst stakeholders, ease of facilitation during individual or multidisciplinary meetings, intuitive and informative representation of workflow, minimized time and effort for implementation and minimized dependencies on learning new tools and terminologies. A post mortem indicates the positive impact of CARE on services rendered to the patients, leading to an increase in patient satisfaction and workflow efficiencies. The research concludes by noting the contributions and lessons learnt from this research for healthcare practitioners and possible future work

Capacity planning and stochastic scheduling in grid computing environments

Imperial Users onl

Service level agreement specification for IoT application workflow activity deployment, configuration and monitoring

PhD ThesisCurrently, we see the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) within various domains such as healthcare, smart homes, smart cars, smart-x applications, and smart cities. The number of applications based on IoT and cloud computing is projected to increase rapidly over the next few years. IoT-based services must meet the guaranteed levels of quality of service (QoS) to match users’ expectations. Ensuring QoS through specifying the QoS constraints using service level agreements (SLAs) is crucial. Also because of the potentially highly complex nature of multi-layered IoT applications, lifecycle management (deployment, dynamic reconfiguration, and monitoring) needs to be automated. To achieve this it is essential to be able to specify SLAs in a machine-readable format. currently available SLA specification languages are unable to accommodate the unique characteristics (interdependency of its multi-layers) of the IoT domain. Therefore, in this research, we propose a grammar for a syntactical structure of an SLA specification for IoT. The grammar is based on a proposed conceptual model that considers the main concepts that can be used to express the requirements for most common hardware and software components of an IoT application on an end-to-end basis. We follow the Goal Question Metric (GQM) approach to evaluate the generality and expressiveness of the proposed grammar by reviewing its concepts and their predefined lists of vocabularies against two use-cases with a number of participants whose research interests are mainly related to IoT. The results of the analysis show that the proposed grammar achieved 91.70% of its generality goal and 93.43% of its expressiveness goal. To enhance the process of specifying SLA terms, We then developed a toolkit for creating SLA specifications for IoT applications. The toolkit is used to simplify the process of capturing the requirements of IoT applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the toolkit using a remote health monitoring service (RHMS) use-case as well as applying a user experience measure to evaluate the tool by applying a questionnaire-oriented approach. We discussed the applicability of our tool by including it as a core component of two different applications: 1) a contextaware recommender system for IoT configuration across layers; and 2) a tool for automatically translating an SLA from JSON to a smart contract, deploying it on different peer nodes that represent the contractual parties. The smart contract is able to monitor the created SLA using Blockchain technology. These two applications are utilized within our proposed SLA management framework for IoT. Furthermore, we propose a greedy heuristic algorithm to decentralize workflow activities of an IoT application across Edge and Cloud resources to enhance response time, cost, energy consumption and network usage. We evaluated the efficiency of our proposed approach using iFogSim simulator. The performance analysis shows that the proposed algorithm minimized cost, execution time, networking, and Cloud energy consumption compared to Cloud-only and edge-ward placement approaches