Inter-Domain Integration of Services and Service Management

The evolution of the global telecommunications industry into an open services market presents developers of telecommunication service and management systems with many new challenges. Increased competition, complex service provision chains and integrated service offerings require effective techniques for the rapid integration of service and management systems over multiple organisational domains. These integration issues have been examined in the ACTS project Prospect by developing a working set of integrated, managed telecommunications services for a user trial. This paper presents the initial results of this work detailing the technologies and standards used, the architectural approach taken and the application of this approach to specific services

Querying Large Physics Data Sets Over an Information Grid

Optimising use of the Web (WWW) for LHC data analysis is a complex problem and illustrates the challenges arising from the integration of and computation across massive amounts of information distributed worldwide. Finding the right piece of information can, at times, be extremely time-consuming, if not impossible. So-called Grids have been proposed to facilitate LHC computing and many groups have embarked on studies of data replication, data migration and networking philosophies. Other aspects such as the role of 'middleware' for Grids are emerging as requiring research. This paper positions the need for appropriate middleware that enables users to resolve physics queries across massive data sets. It identifies the role of meta-data for query resolution and the importance of Information Grids for high-energy physics analysis rather than just Computational or Data Grids. This paper identifies software that is being implemented at CERN to enable the querying of very large collaborating HEP data-sets, initially being employed for the construction of CMS detectors.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Constructing a Virtual Training Laboratory Using Intelligent Agents

This paper reports on the results and experiences of the Trilogy project; a collaborative project concerned with the development of a virtual research laboratory using intelligence agents. This laboratory is designed to support the training of research students in telecommunications traffic engineering. Training research students involves a number of basic activities. They may seek guidance from, or exchange ideas with, more experienced colleagues. High quality academic papers, books and research reports provide a sound basis for developing and maintaining a good understanding of an area of research. Experimental tools enable new ideas to be evaluated, and hypotheses tested. These three components-collaboration, information and experimentation- are central to any research activity, and a good training environment for research should integrate them in a seamless fashion. To this end, we describe the design and implementation of an agent-based virtual laboratory

Performance Testing of Distributed Component Architectures

Performance characteristics, such as response time, throughput andscalability, are key quality attributes of distributed applications. Current practice,however, rarely applies systematic techniques to evaluate performance characteristics.We argue that evaluation of performance is particularly crucial in early developmentstages, when important architectural choices are made. At first glance, thiscontradicts the use of testing techniques, which are usually applied towards the endof a project. In this chapter, we assume that many distributed systems are builtwith middleware technologies, such as the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) or theCommon Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). These provide servicesand facilities whose implementations are available when architectures are defined.We also note that it is the middleware functionality, such as transaction and persistenceservices, remote communication primitives and threading policy primitives,that dominates distributed system performance. Drawing on these observations, thischapter presents a novel approach to performance testing of distributed applications.We propose to derive application-specific test cases from architecture designs so thatthe performance of a distributed application can be tested based on the middlewaresoftware at early stages of a development process. We report empirical results thatsupport the viability of the approach

Simulation of a distributed CORBA-based SCP

This paper examines load balancing issues relating to a distributed CORBA-based Service Control Point. Two types of load balancing strategies are explored through simulation studies: (i) a novel ant-based load balancing algorithm, which has been devised specically for this type of system. This algorithm is compared to more traditional algorithms, (ii) a method for optimal distribution of the computational objects composing the service programs. This is based on mathematically minimising the expected communication ows between network nodes and message-level processing costs. The simulation model has been based on the recently adopted OMG IN/CORBA Interworking specication and the TINA Service Session computational object model

The Impact of the Internet on Telecommunication Architectures

The ever-growing popularity of the Internet is dramatically changing the landscape of the communications market place. The two separate worlds of the Internet and Telecommunications are converging. The respective advantages of the two environments are being integrated to fulfill the promise of the information super-highways. In this paper, we examine the impact of the Internet on the main telecommunication architectures, namely the IN, the TMN and TINA. There are two new tendencies for implementing telephony services in combination with the Internet: running part of the control sys tem over the Internet, or conveying both the user data and the control information over the Internet. We examine these two trends, and elaborate on possible ways of salvaging the best parts of the work achieved by the TINA-Consortium in the Internet context

Performance of distributed information systems

There is an increasing use of distributed computer systems to provide services in both traditional telephony as well as in the Internet. Two main technologies are Distributed Object Computing (DOC) and Web based services. One common DOC architecture investigated in this thesis is the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), specified by the Object Management Group. CORBA applications consist of interacting software components called objects. Two other DOC architectures investigated are the Telecommunications Information Net- working Architecture (TINA) and a CORBA based Intelligent Network (IN/CORBA) system. In a DOC environment, the objects of an application are distributed on mul- tiple nodes. A middleware layer makes the distribution transparent to the application. However, the distributed nature creates a number of potential performance problems. Three problems in DOC systems are examined in this thesis: object distribution, load balancing and overload protection. An object distribution describes how objects are distributed in the network. The objective is to distribute the objects on the physical nodes in such a way that intern-node communication overhead is as small as possible. One way to solve the object distribution problem is to use linear programming. The constraints for the problem are then given by both ease of management of the system and performance concerns. Load balancing is used when there are multiple objects that can be used at a particular time. The objective of load balancing is to distribute the load e±ciently on the available nodes. This thesis investigates a number of de- centralized load balancing mechanisms, including one based on the use of intelligent agents. Finally, overload protection mechanisms for DOC systems are investigated. While overload protection is well-researched for telecom networks, only little work has been performed previously concerning DOC and overload protection. Also, this thesis examines the use of overload protection in e-commerce web servers. Two schemes are compared, one which handles admission to the e-commerce site on request basis, and another which handles admission on session basis. The session based mechanism is shown to be better in terms of user-experienced performance

Network-based business process management: embedding business logic in communications networks

Advanced Business Process Management (BPM) tools enable the decomposition of previously integrated and often ill-defined processes into re-usable process modules. These process modules can subsequently be distributed on the Internet over a variety of many different actors, each with their own specialization and economies-of-scale. The economic benefits of process specialization can be huge. However, how should such actors in a business network find, select, and control, the best partner for what part of the business process, in such a way that the best result is achieved? This particular management challenge requires more advanced techniques and tools in the enabling communications networks. An approach has been developed to embed business logic into the communications networks in order to optimize the allocation of business resources from a network point of view. Initial experimental results have been encouraging while at the same time demonstrating the need for more robust techniques in a future of massively distributed business processes.active networks;business process management;business protocols;embedded business logic;genetic algorithms;internet distributed process management;payment systems;programmable networks;resource optimization