Personal mobile grids with a honeybee inspired resource scheduler

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The overall aim of the thesis has been to introduce Personal Mobile Grids (PMGrids) as a novel paradigm in grid computing that scales grid infrastructures to mobile devices and extends grid entities to individual personal users. In this thesis, architectural designs as well as simulation models for PM-Grids are developed. The core of any grid system is its resource scheduler. However, virtually all current conventional grid schedulers do not address the non-clairvoyant scheduling problem, where job information is not available before the end of execution. Therefore, this thesis proposes a honeybee inspired resource scheduling heuristic for PM-Grids (HoPe) incorporating a radical approach to grid resource scheduling to tackle this problem. A detailed design and implementation of HoPe with a decentralised self-management and adaptive policy are initiated. Among the other main contributions are a comprehensive taxonomy of grid systems as well as a detailed analysis of the honeybee colony and its nectar acquisition process (NAP), from the resource scheduling perspective, which have not been presented in any previous work, to the best of our knowledge. PM-Grid designs and HoPe implementation were evaluated thoroughly through a strictly controlled empirical evaluation framework with a well-established heuristic in high throughput computing, the opportunistic scheduling heuristic (OSH), as a benchmark algorithm. Comparisons with optimal values and worst bounds are conducted to gain a clear insight into HoPe behaviour, in terms of stability, throughput, turnaround time and speedup, under different running conditions of number of jobs and grid scales. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of HoPe performance where it has successfully maintained optimum stability and throughput in more than 95% of the experiments, with HoPe achieving three times better than the OSH under extremely heavy loads. Regarding the turnaround time and speedup, HoPe has effectively achieved less than 50% of the turnaround time incurred by the OSH, while doubling its speedup in more than 60% of the experiments. These results indicate the potential of both PM-Grids and HoPe in realising futuristic grid visions. Therefore considering the deployment of PM-Grids in real life scenarios and the utilisation of HoPe in other parallel processing and high throughput computing systems are recommended

Towards Internet QoS Provisioning Based on Generic Distributed QoS Adaptive Routing Engine

Increasing efficiency and quality demands of modern Internet technologies drive today’s network engineers to seek to provide quality of service (QoS). Internet QoS provisioning gives rise to several challenging issues. This paper introduces a generic distributed QoS adaptive routing engine (DQARE) architecture based on OSPFxQoS. The innovation of the proposed work in this paper is its undependability on the used QoS architectures and, moreover, splitting of the control strategy from data forwarding mechanisms, so we guarantee a set of absolute stable mechanisms on top of which Internet QoS can be built. DQARE architecture is furnished with three relevant traffic control schemes, namely, service differentiation, QoS routing, and traffic engineering. The main objective of this paper is to (i) provide a general configuration guideline for service differentiation, (ii) formalize the theoretical properties of different QoS routing algorithms and then introduce a QoS routing algorithm (QOPRA) based on dynamic programming technique, and (iii) propose QoS multipath forwarding (QMPF) model for paths diversity exploitation. NS2-based simulations proved the DQARE superiority in terms of delay, packet delivery ratio, throughput, and control overhead. Moreover, extensive simulations are used to compare the proposed QOPRA algorithm and QMPF model with their counterparts in the literature

A systematic literature review on Energy Efficiency in Cloud Software Architectures

Cloud-based software architectures introduce more complexity and require new competences for migration, maintenance, and evolution. Although cloud computing is often considered as an energy-efficient technology, the implications of cloud-based software on energy efficiency lack scientific evidence. At the same time, energy efficiency is becoming a crucial requirement for cloud service provisioning, as energy costs significantly contribute to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a data center. In this paper, we present the results of a systematic literature review that investigates cloud software architectures addressing energy efficiency as a primary concern. The aim is to provide an analysis of the state-of-the-art in the field of energy-efficient software architectures

Auto-scaling techniques for cloud-based Complex Event Processing

One key topic in cloud computing is elasticity, which is the ability of the cloud environment to timely adapt the resource assignment along with the workload demand. According to cloud on-demand model, the infrastructure should be able to scale up and down to unpredictable workloads, in order to achieve both a guaranteed service level and cost efficiency. This work addresses the cloud elasticity problem, with particular reference to the Complex Event Processing (CEP) systems. CEP systems are designed to process large volumes of event-driven data streams and continuously provide results with a low latency and in real-time. CEP systems need to adapt to changing query and events loads. Because of the high computational requirements and varying loads, CEP are distributed system and running on cloud infrastructures. In this work we review the cloud computing auto-scaling solutions, and study their suit- ability in the CEP model. We implement some solutions in a CEP prototype and evaluate the experimental results

Utilising stream reasoning techniques to underpin an autonomous framework for cloud application platforms

As cloud application platforms (CAPs) are reaching the stage where the human effort required to maintain them at an operational level is unsupportable, one of the major challenges faced by the cloud providers is to develop appropriate mechanisms for run-time monitoring and adaptation, to prevent cloud application platforms from quickly dissolving into a non-reliable environment. In this context, the application of intelligent approaches to Autonomic Clouds may offer promising opportunities. In this paper we present an approach to providing cloud platforms with autonomic capabilities, utilising techniques from the Semantic Web and Stream Reasoning research fields. The main idea of this approach is to encode values, monitored within cloud application platforms, using Semantic Web languages, which then allows us to integrate semantically-enriched observation streams with static ontological knowledge and apply intelligent reasoning. Using such run-time reasoning capabilities, we have developed a conceptual architecture for an autonomous framework and describe a prototype solution we have constructed which implements this architecture. Our prototype is able to perform analysis and failure diagnosis, and suggest further adaptation actions. We report our experience in utilising the Stream Reasoning technique in this context as well as further challenges that arise out of our work