Provenance-based trust for grid computing: Position Paper

Current evolutions of Internet technology such as Web Services, ebXML, peer-to-peer and Grid computing all point to the development of large-scale open networks of diverse computing systems interacting with one another to perform tasks. Grid systems (and Web Services) are exemplary in this respect and are perhaps some of the first large-scale open computing systems to see widespread use - making them an important testing ground for problems in trust management which are likely to arise. From this perspective, today's grid architectures suffer from limitations, such as lack of a mechanism to trace results and lack of infrastructure to build up trust networks. These are important concerns in open grids, in which "community resources" are owned and managed by multiple stakeholders, and are dynamically organised in virtual organisations. Provenance enables users to trace how a particular result has been arrived at by identifying the individual services and the aggregation of services that produced such a particular output. Against this background, we present a research agenda to design, conceive and implement an industrial-strength open provenance architecture for grid systems. We motivate its use with three complex grid applications, namely aerospace engineering, organ transplant management and bioinformatics. Industrial-strength provenance support includes a scalable and secure architecture, an open proposal for standardising the protocols and data structures, a set of tools for configuring and using the provenance architecture, an open source reference implementation, and a deployment and validation in industrial context. The provision of such facilities will enrich grid capabilities by including new functionalities required for solving complex problems such as provenance data to provide complete audit trails of process execution and third-party analysis and auditing. As a result, we anticipate that a larger uptake of grid technology is likely to occur, since unprecedented possibilities will be offered to users and will give them a competitive edge

QoS monitoring in real-time streaming overlays based on lock-free data structures

AbstractPeer-to-peer streaming is a well-known technology for the large-scale distribution of real-time audio/video contents. Delay requirements are very strict in interactive real-time scenarios (such as synchronous distance learning), where playback lag should be of the order of seconds. Playback continuity is another key aspect in these cases: in presence of peer churning and network congestion, a peer-to-peer overlay should quickly rearrange connections among receiving nodes to avoid freezing phenomena that may compromise audio/video understanding. For this reason, we designed a QoS monitoring algorithm that quickly detects broken or congested links: each receiving node is able to independently decide whether it should switch to a secondary sending node, called "fallback node". The architecture takes advantage of a multithreaded design based on lock-free data structures, which improve the performance by avoiding synchronization among threads. We will show the good responsiveness of the proposed approach on machines with different computational capabilities: measured times prove both departures of nodes and QoS degradations are promptly detected and clients can quickly restore a stream reception. According to PSNR and SSIM, two well-known full-reference video quality metrics, QoE remains acceptable on receiving nodes of our resilient overlay also in presence of swap procedures

Streaming video using cooperative networking

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on September 10, 2010).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Dissertation advisor: Dr. Wenjun Zeng.Vita.Ph. D. University of Missouri--Columbia 2009.The main objective of this dissertation is to improve the overall video streaming performance in various networking environments, such as IP-multicast in wired network and wireless mesh networks (WMNs), using cooperation among participants including clients and routers. We investigate a number of key challenging issues associated with video streaming, and we explore solutions to those issues using a cooperative networking approach, which includes constructing overlay Peer-to-Peer (P2P) retransmission networks and exploring hybrid architecture of content distribution networks (CDN) and P2P networks. To solve the reliability issue in IP-multicast, we propose a novel overlay P2P retransmission architecture to exploit path diversity. An approach that leverages both disjoint path finding and periodic selective probing to take into account peer's recent packet loss probability, retransmission delay and recent retransmission performance is proposed to effectively construct an efficient and dynamic overlay peer retransmission network. To improve the video streaming quality over WMNs, we design a Unified Peer-to-Peer and Cache (UPAC) framework for high quality video on demand services over infrastructure multi-hop WMNs. In this framework, mesh routers work cooperatively with mesh clients to construct a CDN and P2P hybrid structure to improve the QoS of video streaming. We present a series of solutions to address the key challenges in video streaming over WMNs, i.e., the design of a new high throughput routing metric, a new enhanced routing algorithm, a cross-layer server and path selection strategy, a novel admission control algorithm with per-flow routing and a new P2P structure for video streaming. Simulation results show that the proposed UPAC framework can utilize the capacity of WMNs better than existing approaches and improve the video streaming quality over WMNs significantly.Includes bibliographical reference

Trust in a multi-tenant, logistics, data sharing infrastructure:Opportunities for blockchain technology

In support of the trend towards ever more complex supply chain collaboration for the physical Internet, a trusted, multi-tenant (and interoperable) data sharing infrastructure has to be enabled. Trust is a condition sine qua non organizations may not be prepared to share potentially competitive sensitive information. As such, trust has to be an essential design aspect for any multi-tenant data sharing infrastructure for the data sharing stakeholders To overcome the challenges for trusted data sharing, various reference architectures for a trusted, multi-tenant, data sharing infrastructure are being developed. As such, the Industrial Data Space (IDS) initiative is currently gaining attention. It’s based on the architectural principles of keeping the data owner in control over his data and keeping data, data processing and data distribution at the source. Its reference architecture is strongly grounded on a role / stakeholder model for the intermediary trusted roles to enable peer-to-peer data sharing over a controlled and trusted connector infrastructure. The intermediary trusted roles may contain and process meta-data on the data sources, the data transactions and/or on the identities of the parties involved in the data sharing. This paper focuses on the role of blockchain technology for improving trust levels for such intermediary trusted roles

The essence of P2P: A reference architecture for overlay networks

The success of the P2P idea has created a huge diversity of approaches, among which overlay networks, for example, Gnutella, Kazaa, Chord, Pastry, Tapestry, P-Grid, or DKS, have received specific attention from both developers and researchers. A wide variety of algorithms, data structures, and architectures have been proposed. The terminologies and abstractions used, however, have become quite inconsistent since the P2P paradigm has attracted people from many different communities, e.g., networking, databases, distributed systems, graph theory, complexity theory, biology, etc. In this paper we propose a reference model for overlay networks which is capable of modeling different approaches in this domain in a generic manner. It is intended to allow researchers and users to assess the properties of concrete systems, to establish a common vocabulary for scientific discussion, to facilitate the qualitative comparison of the systems, and to serve as the basis for defining a standardized API to make overlay networks interoperable

Service-oriented architecture for device lifecycle support in industrial automation

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores Especialidade: Robótica e Manufactura IntegradaThis thesis addresses the device lifecycle support thematic in the scope of service oriented industrial automation domain. This domain is known for its plethora of heterogeneous equipment encompassing distinct functions, form factors, network interfaces, or I/O specifications supported by dissimilar software and hardware platforms. There is then an evident and crescent need to take every device into account and improve the agility performance during setup, control, management, monitoring and diagnosis phases. Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is currently a widely endorsed approach for both business and enterprise systems integration. SOA concepts and technology are continuously spreading along the layers of the enterprise organization envisioning a unified interoperability solution. SOA promotes discoverability, loose coupling, abstraction, autonomy and composition of services relying on open web standards – features that can provide an important contribution to the industrial automation domain. The present work seized industrial automation device level requirements, constraints and needs to determine how and where can SOA be employed to solve some of the existent difficulties. Supported by these outcomes, a reference architecture shaped by distributed, adaptive and composable modules is proposed. This architecture will assist and ease the role of systems integrators during reengineering-related interventions throughout system lifecycle. In a converging direction, the present work also proposes a serviceoriented device model to support previous architecture vision and goals by including embedded added-value in terms of service-oriented peer-to-peer discovery and identification, configuration, management, as well as agile customization of device resources. In this context, the implementation and validation work proved not simply the feasibility and fitness of the proposed solution to two distinct test-benches but also its relevance to the expanding domain of SOA applications to support device lifecycle in the industrial automation domain