A Case for Cooperative and Incentive-Based Coupling of Distributed Clusters

Research interest in Grid computing has grown significantly over the past five years. Management of distributed resources is one of the key issues in Grid computing. Central to management of resources is the effectiveness of resource allocation as it determines the overall utility of the system. The current approaches to superscheduling in a grid environment are non-coordinated since application level schedulers or brokers make scheduling decisions independently of the others in the system. Clearly, this can exacerbate the load sharing and utilization problems of distributed resources due to suboptimal schedules that are likely to occur. To overcome these limitations, we propose a mechanism for coordinated sharing of distributed clusters based on computational economy. The resulting environment, called \emph{Grid-Federation}, allows the transparent use of resources from the federation when local resources are insufficient to meet its users' requirements. The use of computational economy methodology in coordinating resource allocation not only facilitates the QoS based scheduling, but also enhances utility delivered by resources.Comment: 22 pages, extended version of the conference paper published at IEEE Cluster'05, Boston, M

IPv6 Network Mobility

Network Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting has been used since before the days of the Internet as we know it today. Authentication asks the question, “Who or what are you?” Authorization asks, “What are you allowed to do?” And fi nally, accounting wants to know, “What did you do?” These fundamental security building blocks are being used in expanded ways today. The fi rst part of this two-part series focused on the overall concepts of AAA, the elements involved in AAA communications, and highlevel approaches to achieving specifi c AAA goals. It was published in IPJ Volume 10, No. 1[0]. This second part of the series discusses the protocols involved, specifi c applications of AAA, and considerations for the future of AAA

Using Open Stack for an Open Cloud Exchange(OCX)

We are developing a new public cloud, the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) based on the model of an Open Cloud eXchange (OCX). We discuss in this paper the vision of an OCX and how we intend to realize it using the OpenStack open-source cloud platform in the MOC. A limited form of an OCX can be achieved today by layering new services on top of OpenStack. We have performed an analysis of OpenStack to determine the changes needed in order to fully realize the OCX model. We describe these proposed changes, which although significant and requiring broad community involvement will provide functionality of value to both existing single-provider clouds as well as future multi-provider ones

A Broad Evaluation of the Tor English Content Ecosystem

Tor is among most well-known dark net in the world. It has noble uses, including as a platform for free speech and information dissemination under the guise of true anonymity, but may be culturally better known as a conduit for criminal activity and as a platform to market illicit goods and data. Past studies on the content of Tor support this notion, but were carried out by targeting popular domains likely to contain illicit content. A survey of past studies may thus not yield a complete evaluation of the content and use of Tor. This work addresses this gap by presenting a broad evaluation of the content of the English Tor ecosystem. We perform a comprehensive crawl of the Tor dark web and, through topic and network analysis, characterize the types of information and services hosted across a broad swath of Tor domains and their hyperlink relational structure. We recover nine domain types defined by the information or service they host and, among other findings, unveil how some types of domains intentionally silo themselves from the rest of Tor. We also present measurements that (regrettably) suggest how marketplaces of illegal drugs and services do emerge as the dominant type of Tor domain. Our study is the product of crawling over 1 million pages from 20,000 Tor seed addresses, yielding a collection of over 150,000 Tor pages. We make a dataset of the intend to make the domain structure publicly available as a dataset at https://github.com/wsu-wacs/TorEnglishContent.Comment: 11 page

The ODO project: a Case Study in Integration of Multimedia Services

Recent years have witnessed a steady growth in the availability of wide-area multi-service networks. These support a variety of traffic types including data, control messages, audio and video. Consequently they are often thought of as integrated media carriers. To date, however, use of these networks has been limited to isolated applications which exhibit very little or no integration amongst themselves. This paper describes a project which investigated organisational, user interfacing and programming techniques to exploit this integration of services at the application level

A personal distributed environment for future mobile systems

A Personal Distributed Environment (PDE) embraces a user-centric view of communications that take place against a backdrop of multiple user devices, each with its distinct capabilities, in physically separate locations. This paper provides an overview of a Personal Distributed Environment and some of the research issues related to the implementation of the PDE concept that are being considered in the current Mobile VCE work programme

Exploiting multi-agent system technology within an autonomous regional active network management system

This paper describes the proposed application of multi-agent system (MAS) technology within AuRA-NMS, an autonomous regional network management system currently being developed in the UK through a partnership between several UK universities, distribution network operators (DNO) and a major equipment manufacturer. The paper begins by describing the challenges facing utilities and why those challenges have led the utilities, a major manufacturer and the UK government to invest in the development of a flexible and extensible active network management system. The requirements the utilities have for a network automation system they wish to deploy on their distribution networks are discussed in detail. With those requirements in mind the rationale behind the use of multi-agent systems (MAS) within AuRA-NMS is presented and the inherent research and design challenges highlighted including: the issues associated with robustness of distributed MAS platforms; the arbitration of different control functions; and the relationship between the ontological requirements of Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agent (FIPA) compliant multi-agent systems, legacy protocols and standards such as IEC 61850 and the common information model (CIM)

Delivering Live Multimedia Streams to Mobile Hosts in a Wireless Internet with Multiple Content Aggregators

We consider the distribution of channels of live multimedia content (e.g., radio or TV broadcasts) via multiple content aggregators. In our work, an aggregator receives channels from content sources and redistributes them to a potentially large number of mobile hosts. Each aggregator can offer a channel in various configurations to cater for different wireless links, mobile hosts, and user preferences. As a result, a mobile host can generally choose from different configurations of the same channel offered by multiple alternative aggregators, which may be available through different interfaces (e.g., in a hotspot). A mobile host may need to handoff to another aggregator once it receives a channel. To prevent service disruption, a mobile host may for instance need to handoff to another aggregator when it leaves the subnets that make up its current aggregator�s service area (e.g., a hotspot or a cellular network).\ud In this paper, we present the design of a system that enables (multi-homed) mobile hosts to seamlessly handoff from one aggregator to another so that they can continue to receive a channel wherever they go. We concentrate on handoffs between aggregators as a result of a mobile host crossing a subnet boundary. As part of the system, we discuss a lightweight application-level protocol that enables mobile hosts to select the aggregator that provides the �best� configuration of a channel. The protocol comes into play when a mobile host begins to receive a channel and when it crosses a subnet boundary while receiving the channel. We show how our protocol can be implemented using the standard IETF session control and description protocols SIP and SDP. The implementation combines SIP and SDP�s offer-answer model in a novel way

Supporting service discovery, querying and interaction in ubiquitous computing environments.

In this paper, we contend that ubiquitous computing environments will be highly heterogeneous, service rich domains. Moreover, future applications will consequently be required to interact with multiple, specialised service location and interaction protocols simultaneously. We argue that existing service discovery techniques do not provide sufficient support to address the challenges of building applications targeted to these emerging environments. This paper makes a number of contributions. Firstly, using a set of short ubiquitous computing scenarios we identify several key limitations of existing service discovery approaches that reduce their ability to support ubiquitous computing applications. Secondly, we present a detailed analysis of requirements for providing effective support in this domain. Thirdly, we provide the design of a simple extensible meta-service discovery architecture that uses database techniques to unify service discovery protocols and addresses several of our key requirements. Lastly, we examine the lessons learnt through the development of a prototype implementation of our architecture

Peer - Mediated Distributed Knowledge Management

Distributed Knowledge Management is an approach to knowledge management based on the principle that the multiplicity (and heterogeneity) of perspectives within complex organizations is not be viewed as an obstacle to knowledge exploitation, but rather as an opportunity that can foster innovation and creativity. Despite a wide agreement on this principle, most current KM systems are based on the idea that all perspectival aspects of knowledge should be eliminated in favor of an objective and general representation of knowledge. In this paper we propose a peer-to-peer architecture (called KEx), which embodies the principle above in a quite straightforward way: (i) each peer (called a K-peer) provides all the services needed to create and organize "local" knowledge from an individual's or a group's perspective, and (ii) social structures and protocols of meaning negotiation are introduced to achieve semantic coordination among autonomous peers (e.g., when searching documents from other K-peers). A first version of the system, called KEx, is imple-mented as a knowledge exchange level on top of JXTA