A Framework for Evaluating Model-Driven Self-adaptive Software Systems

In the last few years, Model Driven Development (MDD), Component-based Software Development (CBSD), and context-oriented software have become interesting alternatives for the design and construction of self-adaptive software systems. In general, the ultimate goal of these technologies is to be able to reduce development costs and effort, while improving the modularity, flexibility, adaptability, and reliability of software systems. An analysis of these technologies shows them all to include the principle of the separation of concerns, and their further integration is a key factor to obtaining high-quality and self-adaptable software systems. Each technology identifies different concerns and deals with them separately in order to specify the design of the self-adaptive applications, and, at the same time, support software with adaptability and context-awareness. This research studies the development methodologies that employ the principles of model-driven development in building self-adaptive software systems. To this aim, this article proposes an evaluation framework for analysing and evaluating the features of model-driven approaches and their ability to support software with self-adaptability and dependability in highly dynamic contextual environment. Such evaluation framework can facilitate the software developers on selecting a development methodology that suits their software requirements and reduces the development effort of building self-adaptive software systems. This study highlights the major drawbacks of the propped model-driven approaches in the related works, and emphasise on considering the volatile aspects of self-adaptive software in the analysis, design and implementation phases of the development methodologies. In addition, we argue that the development methodologies should leave the selection of modelling languages and modelling tools to the software developers.Comment: model-driven architecture, COP, AOP, component composition, self-adaptive application, context oriented software developmen

City Data Fusion: Sensor Data Fusion in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has gained substantial attention recently and play a significant role in smart city application deployments. A number of such smart city applications depend on sensor fusion capabilities in the cloud from diverse data sources. We introduce the concept of IoT and present in detail ten different parameters that govern our sensor data fusion evaluation framework. We then evaluate the current state-of-the art in sensor data fusion against our sensor data fusion framework. Our main goal is to examine and survey different sensor data fusion research efforts based on our evaluation framework. The major open research issues related to sensor data fusion are also presented.Comment: Accepted to be published in International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies (IJDST), 201

HiTrust: building cross-organizational trust relationship based on a hybrid negotiation tree

Small-world phenomena have been observed in existing peer-to-peer (P2P) networks which has proved useful in the design of P2P file-sharing systems. Most studies of constructing small world behaviours on P2P are based on the concept of clustering peer nodes into groups, communities, or clusters. However, managing additional multilayer topology increases maintenance overhead, especially in highly dynamic environments. In this paper, we present Social-like P2P systems (Social-P2Ps) for object discovery by self-managing P2P topology with human tactics in social networks. In Social-P2Ps, queries are routed intelligently even with limited cached knowledge and node connections. Unlike community-based P2P file-sharing systems, we do not intend to create and maintain peer groups or communities consciously. In contrast, each node connects to other peer nodes with the same interests spontaneously by the result of daily searches

A Resource Intensive Traffic-Aware Scheme for Cluster-based Energy Conservation in Wireless Devices

Wireless traffic that is destined for a certain device in a network, can be exploited in order to minimize the availability and delay trade-offs, and mitigate the Energy consumption. The Energy Conservation (EC) mechanism can be node-centric by considering the traversed nodal traffic in order to prolong the network lifetime. This work describes a quantitative traffic-based approach where a clustered Sleep-Proxy mechanism takes place in order to enable each node to sleep according to the time duration of the active traffic that each node expects and experiences. Sleep-proxies within the clusters are created according to pairwise active-time comparison, where each node expects during the active periods, a requested traffic. For resource availability and recovery purposes, the caching mechanism takes place in case where the node for which the traffic is destined is not available. The proposed scheme uses Role-based nodes which are assigned to manipulate the traffic in a cluster, through the time-oriented backward difference traffic evaluation scheme. Simulation study is carried out for the proposed backward estimation scheme and the effectiveness of the end-to-end EC mechanism taking into account a number of metrics and measures for the effects while incrementing the sleep time duration under the proposed framework. Comparative simulation results show that the proposed scheme could be applied to infrastructure-less systems, providing energy-efficient resource exchange with significant minimization in the power consumption of each device.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, To appear in the proceedings of IEEE 14th International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC-2012) of the Third International Workshop on Wireless Networks and Multimedia (WNM-2012), 25-27 June 2012, Liverpool, U

Run-time Support to Manage Architectural Variability Speci ed with CVL

The execution context in which pervasive systems or mobile computing run changes continuously. Hence, applications for these systems should be adapted at run-time according to the current context. In order to implement a context-aware dynamic reconfiguration service, most approaches usually require to model at design-time both the list of all possible configurations and the plans to switch among them. In this paper we present an alternative approach for the automatic run-time generation of application configurations and the reconfiguration plans. The generated configurations are optimal regarding di erent criteria, such as functionality or resource consumption (e.g. battery or memory). This is achieved by: (1) modelling architectural variability at design-time using Common Variability Language (CVL), and (2) using a genetic algorithm that finds at run-time nearly-optimal configurations using the information provided by the variability model. We also specify a case study and we use it to evaluate our approach, showing that it is efficient and suitable for devices with scarce resources.Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucia Tech y proyectos de investigación TIN2008-01942, P09-TIC-5231 and INTER-TRUST FP7-317731

The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed

Garnet: a middleware architecture for distributing data streams originating in wireless sensor networks

We present an architectural framework, Garnet, which provides a data stream centric abstraction to encourage the manipulation and exploitation of data generated in sensor networks. By providing middleware services to allow mutually-unaware applications to manipulate sensor behaviour, a scalable, extensible platform is provided. We focus on sensor networks with transmit and receive capabilities as this combination poses greater challenges for managing and distributing sensed data. Our approach allows simple and sophisticated sensors to coexist, and allows data consumers to be mutually unaware of each other This also promotes the use of middleware services to mediate among consumers with potentially conflicting demands for shared data. Garnet has been implemented in Java, and we report on our progress to date and outline some likely scenarios where the use of our distributed architecture and accompanying middleware support enhances the task of sharing data in sensor network environments