Autonomic Systems

An autonomic system is defined as self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-healing, and self-protecting. We implemented the Autonomic Cluster Management System (ACMS), a low overhead Java application designed to manage and load balance a cluster, while working at NASA GSFC. The ACMS is a mobile multi-agent system in which each agent is designed to fulfill a specific role. The agents collaborate and coordinate their activities in order to achieve system management goals. The ACMS is scalable and extensible to facilitate future development

04411 Abtracts Collection -- Service Management and Self-Organization in IP-based Networks

From 03.10.04 to 06.10.04, the Dagstuhl Seminar 04411 ``Service Management and Self-Organization in IP-based Networks\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Towards formal models and languages for verifiable Multi-Robot Systems

Incorrect operations of a Multi-Robot System (MRS) may not only lead to unsatisfactory results, but can also cause economic losses and threats to safety. These threats may not always be apparent, since they may arise as unforeseen consequences of the interactions between elements of the system. This call for tools and techniques that can help in providing guarantees about MRSs behaviour. We think that, whenever possible, these guarantees should be backed up by formal proofs to complement traditional approaches based on testing and simulation. We believe that tailored linguistic support to specify MRSs is a major step towards this goal. In particular, reducing the gap between typical features of an MRS and the level of abstraction of the linguistic primitives would simplify both the specification of these systems and the verification of their properties. In this work, we review different agent-oriented languages and their features; we then consider a selection of case studies of interest and implement them useing the surveyed languages. We also evaluate and compare effectiveness of the proposed solution, considering, in particular, easiness of expressing non-trivial behaviour.Comment: Changed formattin

Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte

A survey of self organisation in future cellular networks

This article surveys the literature over the period of the last decade on the emerging field of self organisation as applied to wireless cellular communication networks. Self organisation has been extensively studied and applied in adhoc networks, wireless sensor networks and autonomic computer networks; however in the context of wireless cellular networks, this is the first attempt to put in perspective the various efforts in form of a tutorial/survey. We provide a comprehensive survey of the existing literature, projects and standards in self organising cellular networks. Additionally, we also aim to present a clear understanding of this active research area, identifying a clear taxonomy and guidelines for design of self organising mechanisms. We compare strength and weakness of existing solutions and highlight the key research areas for further development. This paper serves as a guide and a starting point for anyone willing to delve into research on self organisation in wireless cellular communication networks

Design and Implementation of a Byzantine Fault Tolerance Framework for Web Services

Many Web services are expected to run with high degree of security and dependability. To achieve this goal, it is essential to use a Web services compatible framework that tolerates not only crash faults, but Byzantine faults as well, due to the untrusted communication environment in which the Web services operate. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of such a framework, called BFT-WS. BFT-WS is designed to operate on top of the standard SOAP messaging framework for maximum interoperability. It is implemented as a pluggable module within the Axis2 architecture, as such, it requires minimum changes to the Web applications. The core fault tolerance mechanisms used in BFT-WS are based on the well-known Castro and Liskov’s BFT algorithm for optimal efficiency. Our performance measurements confirm that BFT-WS incurs only moderate runtime overhead considering the complexity of the mechanisms