156,593 research outputs found
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
A Survey on Service Composition Middleware in Pervasive Environments
The development of pervasive computing has put the light on a challenging problem: how to dynamically compose services in heterogeneous and highly changing environments? We propose a survey that defines the service composition as a sequence of four steps: the translation, the generation, the evaluation, and finally the execution. With this powerful and simple model we describe the major service composition middleware. Then, a classification of these service composition middleware according to pervasive requirements - interoperability, discoverability, adaptability, context awareness, QoS management, security, spontaneous management, and autonomous management - is given. The classification highlights what has been done and what remains to do to develop the service composition in pervasive environments
Virtual Communication Stack: Towards Building Integrated Simulator of Mobile Ad Hoc Network-based Infrastructure for Disaster Response Scenarios
Responses to disastrous events are a challenging problem, because of possible
damages on communication infrastructures. For instance, after a natural
disaster, infrastructures might be entirely destroyed. Different network
paradigms were proposed in the literature in order to deploy adhoc network, and
allow dealing with the lack of communications. However, all these solutions
focus only on the performance of the network itself, without taking into
account the specificities and heterogeneity of the components which use it.
This comes from the difficulty to integrate models with different levels of
abstraction. Consequently, verification and validation of adhoc protocols
cannot guarantee that the different systems will work as expected in
operational conditions. However, the DEVS theory provides some mechanisms to
allow integration of models with different natures. This paper proposes an
integrated simulation architecture based on DEVS which improves the accuracy of
ad hoc infrastructure simulators in the case of disaster response scenarios.Comment: Preprint. Unpublishe
Applying formal methods to standard development: the open distributed processing experience
Since their introduction, formal methods have been applied in various ways to different standards. This paper gives an account of these applications, focusing on one application in particular: the development of a framework for creating standards for Open Distributed Processing (ODP). Following an introduction to ODP, the paper gives an insight into the current work on formalising the architecture of the
Reference Model of ODP (RM-ODP), highlighting the advantages to be gained. The different approaches currently being taken are shown, together with their associated advantages and disadvantages. The paper concludes that there is no one all-purpose approach which can be used
in preference to all others, but that a combination of approaches is desirable to best fulfil the potential of formal methods in developing an architectural semantics for OD
Tools for producing formal specifications : a view of current architectures and future directions
During the last decade, one important contribution towards requirements engineering has been the advent of formal specification languages. They offer a well-defined notation that can improve consistency and avoid ambiguity in specifications.
However, the process of obtaining formal specifications that are consistent with the requirements is itself a difficult activity. Hence various researchers are developing systems that aid the transition from informal to formal specifications.
The kind of problems tackled and the contributions made by these proposed systems are very diverse. This paper brings these studies together to provide a vision for future architectures that aim to aid the transition from informal to formal specifications. The new architecture, which is based on the strengths of existing studies, tackles a
number of key issues in requirements engineering such as identifying ambiguities, incompleteness, and reusability.
The paper concludes with a discussion of the research problems that need to be addressed in order to realise the proposed architecture
Walking Through the Method Zoo: Does Higher Education Really Meet Software Industry Demands?
Software engineering educators are continually challenged by rapidly evolving concepts, technologies, and industry demands. Due to the omnipresence of software in a digitalized society, higher education institutions (HEIs) have to educate the students such that they learn how to learn, and that they are equipped with a profound basic knowledge and with latest knowledge about modern software and system development. Since industry demands change constantly, HEIs are challenged in meeting such current and future demands in a timely manner. This paper analyzes the current state of practice in software engineering education. Specifically, we want to compare contemporary education with industrial practice to understand if frameworks, methods and practices for software and system development taught at HEIs reflect industrial practice. For this, we conducted an online survey and collected information about 67 software engineering courses. Our findings show that development approaches taught at HEIs quite closely reflect industrial practice. We also found that the choice of what process to teach is sometimes driven by the wish to make a course successful. Especially when this happens for project courses, it could be beneficial to put more emphasis on building learning sequences with other courses
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