Evaluation of efficient XML interchange (EXI) for large datasets and as an alternative to binary JSON encodings

Current and emerging Navy information concepts, including network-centric warfare and Navy Tactical Cloud, presume high network throughput and interoperability. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) addresses the latter requirement, but its verbosity is problematic for afloat networks. JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is an alternative to XML common in web applications and some non-relational databases. Compact, binary encodings exist for both formats. Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) is a standardized, binary encoding of XML. Binary JSON (BSON) and Compact Binary Object Representation (CBOR) are JSON-compatible encodings. This work evaluates EXI compaction against both encodings, and extends evaluations of EXI for datasets up to 4 gigabytes. Generally, a configuration of EXI exists that produces a more compact encoding than BSON or CBOR. Tests show EXI compacts structured, non-multimedia data in Microsoft Office files better than the default format. The Navy needs to immediately consider EXI for use in web, sensor, and office document applications to improve throughput over constrained networks. To maximize EXI benefits, future work needs to evaluate EXI’s parameters, as well as tune XML schema documents, on a case-by-case basis prior to EXI deployment. A suite of test examples and an evaluation framework also need to be developed to support this process.http://archive.org/details/evaluationofeffi1094545196Outstanding ThesisLieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Measurements based performance analysis of Web services

Web services are increasingly used to enable interoperability and flexible integration of software systems. In this thesis we focus on measurement-based performance analysis of an e-commerce application which uses Web services components to execute business operations. In our experiments we use a session-oriented workload generated by a tool developed accordingly to TPC-W specification. The empirical results are obtained for two different user profiles, Browsing and Ordering, under different workload intensities. In addition to variation in workloads we also study the applications performance when Web services are implemented using .NET and J2EE. Unlike the previous work which was focused on the overall server response time and throughput, we present Web interaction, software architecture, and hardware resource level analysis of the system performance. In particular, we propose a method for extracting component level response times from the application server logs and study the impact of Web services and other components on the server performance. The results show that the response times of Web services components increase significantly under higher workload intensities when compared to other components. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

NVIDIA Bug Services: Synchronization & Statistics

The NVIDIA ChromeOS team works with NVIDIA’s internal bug database and Google’s partner bugs database. Project Managers currently manually copy-paste bugs from the Google database to the NVIDIA database so that NVIDIA engineers can work on those bugs. To track the progress of projects, NVIDIA’s Project Managers manually tabulate data and generate bug trend visualizations. Both these manual operations are time-intensive and prone to human error. We developed a service to automate the synchronization of Google bugs, guaranteeing timely and automatic Google partner bug updates. We also developed a tool to automate the generation of bug statistics, providing an easy manner of periodically visualizing bug trends

A distributed solution to software reuse

Reuse can be applied to all stages of the software lifecycle to enhance quality and to shorten time of completion for a project. During the phases of design and implementation are some examples of where reuse can be applied, but one frequent obstruction to development is the building of and the identifying of desirable components. This can be costly in the short term but an organisation can gain the profits of applying this scheme if they are seeking long-term goals. Web services are a recent development in distributed computing. This thesis combines the two research areas to produce a distributed solution to software reuse that displays the advantages of distributed computing within a reuse system. This resulted in a web application with access to web services that allowed two different formats of component to be inserted into a reuse repository. These components were searchable by keywords and the results are adjustable by the popularity of a component’s extraction from the system and by user ratings of it; this improved the accuracy of the search. This work displays the accuracy, usability, and speed of this system when tested with five undergraduate and five postgraduate students

Web Service Reliability for Deactivation and Decommissioning Knowledge Management Information Tool (D&D KM-IT) Vendor Management with Mobile Applications

This thesis presents the Knowledge Management Information Tool (KM-IT) Vendor Management Web Service and its reliability features. KM-IT is a web-based knowledge management information tool for the deactivation and decommissioning (D&D) user community. The Vendor Management (VM) module provides a directory service for searching D&D vendors. Clients have an increasing need to integrate and display the vendor information in their own applications. As such, this study proposes Web Services technology to provide VM access to clients. Moreover, when clients access information, particularly via mobile applications, they can encounter different failures that may occur on the network or the server. Such problems require fault tolerance in the VM Service. This study examines various reliability standards and selects the WS-ReliableMessaging standard as the best-suited approach to implement the reliability features for the VM Service. Implementation evaluation confirms that the KM-IT VM Service can effectively tolerate different types of failures

An XML Messaging Service for Mobile Devices

In recent years, XML has been accepted as the format of messages for several applications. Prominent examples include SOAP for Web services, XMPP for instant messaging, and RSS and Atom for content syndication. This XML usage is understandable, as the format itself is a well-accepted standard for structured data, and it has excellent support for many popular programming languages, so inventing an application-specific format no longer seems worth the effort. Simultaneously with this XML's rise to prominence there has been an upsurge in the number and capabilities of various mobile devices. These devices are connected through various wireless technologies to larger networks, and a goal of current research is to integrate them seamlessly into these networks. These two developments seem to be at odds with each other. XML as a fully text-based format takes up more processing power and network bandwidth than binary formats would, whereas the battery-powered nature of mobile devices dictates that energy, both in processing and transmitting, be utilized efficiently. This thesis presents the work we have performed to reconcile these two worlds. We present a message transfer service that we have developed to address what we have identified as the three key issues: XML processing at the application level, a more efficient XML serialization format, and the protocol used to transfer messages. Our presentation includes both a high-level architectural view of the whole message transfer service, as well as detailed descriptions of the three new components. These components consist of an API, and an associated data model, for XML processing designed for messaging applications, a binary serialization format for the data model of the API, and a message transfer protocol providing two-way messaging capability with support for client mobility. We also present relevant performance measurements for the service and its components. As a result of this work, we do not consider XML to be inherently incompatible with mobile devices. As the fixed networking world moves toward XML for interoperable data representation, so should the wireless world also do to provide a better-integrated networking infrastructure. However, the problems that XML adoption has touch all of the higher layers of application programming, so instead of concentrating simply on the serialization format we conclude that improvements need to be made in an integrated fashion in all of these layers

Web services approach for ambient assisted living in mobile environments

Web services appeared as a promising technology for Web environments independent of technologies, services, and applications. First, a performance comparison study between the two most used Web service architectures, SOAP and REST, is presented, considering messages exchange between clients and a server. Based on this study, the REST architecture was chosen to deploy the system because it gets better results compared to SOAP architecture. Currently, there are some issues related with this approach that should be studied. For instance, if massive quantities of data are sent to databases it can influence significantly the performance of the whole system. The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMPQ) appears as a promising solution to address this problem. Then, in order to evaluate the performance of this approach, this work presents a performance evaluation and a comparison study of RESTful Web services and the AMQP Protocol considering exchanging messages between clients and a server. The study is based on the averaged exchanged messages for a certain period of time. It was observed and concluded that, for large quantities of messages exchange, the best results comes from the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) was addressed in this work because it is a similar protocol to AMQP but it can be used by mobile devices with a processing capacity smallest unlike the AMQP that needs greater processing capacity. These studies are performed in the context of Ambient Assisted Living environments, since the work was applied to this topic in order to experiment the effectiveness and evaluate the performance of these protocols in this scenario

Performance of constrained wireless devices in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is an emerging concept where every device, regardless of size, have their own connection to the Internet. This thesis examines what possible limitations are imposed on the functionality of resource constrained, wireless devices. Several different technologies are evaluated and compared, before a set of them is chosen for inclusion in an implementation, for example: IEEE 802.15.4, 6LoWPAN and CoAP. The implementation uses the Contiki operating system, and runs on a Texas Instruments CC2530 SoC. We then examine several different performance aspects of our implementation: the amount of data sent, memory usage and energy consumption. The results are discussed together with security aspects applicable to the Internet of things. The memory usage and power consumption were found to be severe issues. Due to the small amount of memory on the chip, all features could not be used at the same time. In addition, the power consumption was found to be too high for battery-powered usage, giving a lifetime of only 27 hours using a button cell battery. The conclusion is that hardware with more memory, and lower power consumption is required. New protocols for radio power-saving should also be developed and implemented in software.Internet of Things – sakernas internet – är ett framväxande koncept där varje enhet, oavsett storlek, har en anslutning till Internet. Detta examensarbete undersöker vilka möjliga begränsningar i funktionalitet detta får på trådlösa enheter med begränsade resurser. Flera olika teknologier undersöks och jämförs, innan ett antal väljs ut för att ingå i en implementation, till exempel: IEEE 802.15.4, 6LoWPAN och CoAP. Implementationen använder operativsystemet Contiki och körs på ett Texas Instruments CC2530 SoC. Flera prestandaaspekter undersöks: mängden skickad data, minnesanvändning och energiförbrukning. Resultaten diskuteras tillsammans med säkerhetsaspekter att ta hänsyn till i Internet of Things. Minnesanvändningen och energiförbrukningen är de mest problematiska områdena. På grund av chippets begränsade mängd minne kan inte all funktionalitet användas samtidigt. Dessutom är energiförbrukningen för hög för längre tids strömförsörjning med batteri, vilket ger en livslängd på enbart 27 timmar med ett knappcellsbatteri. Slutsatsen är att hårdvara med mer minne och lägre energiförbrukning behövs. Nya protokoll för energibesparande radioanvändning behöver också utvecklas och implementeras i mjukvara

Smart Sensor Webs For Environmental Monitoring Integrating Ogc Standards

Sensor webs are the most recent generation of data acquisition systems. The research presented looks at the concept of sensor webs from three perspectives: node, user, and data. These perspectives are different but are nicely complementary, and all extend an enhanced, usually wireless, sensor network. From the node perspective, sensor nodes collaborate in response to environmental phenomena in intelligent ways; this is referred to as the collaborative aspect. From the user perspective, a sensor web makes its sensor nodes and resources accessible via the WWW (World Wide Web); this is referred to as the accessible aspect. From the data perspective, sensor data is annotated with metadata to produce contextual information; this is referred to as the semantic aspect. A prototype that is a sensor web in all three senses has been developed. The prototype demonstrates theability of managing information in different knowledge domains. From the low-level weather data, information about higher-level weather concepts can be inferred and transferred to other knowledge domains, such as specific human activities. This produces an interesting viewpoint of situation awareness in the scope of traditional weather data

Interoperability enhancement of IoT devices using open web standards in a smart farming use case

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesSince its rst appearance the Internet of Things has been subject to constant evolution, development and change. Now it has stepped out of its infancy with billions of devices embedded in the world wide web. However, IoT providers mostly de ne their own data formats and protocols and there is still a lack of a common standard that connects these devices in an interoperable manner. There are several organisations dedicated to developing common standards for IoT devices and research is focusing on de ning an e ective standard to be used by embedded devices. Unsurprisingly, IoT has also found its way into the spatial web and into environmental monitoring and sensing platforms connected over the web by wireless sensor networks are now a common way to monitor natural phenomena. This study compares three open Web Standards in the use case of SEnviro for Agriculture, a full stack IoT for monitoring vineyards. The interoperability potential of the OGC's Sensor Observation Service and SensorThings API are evaluated by integrating Web Standard implementations for each standard and contrasting their qualitative and quantitative traits. In a further step the Mozilla Corporation's Web Thing API was implemented and evaluated in an environmental monitoring and Smart Farming context. The results of the study show that the SensorThings API proves to be the most adequate Web Standard for SEnviro and IoT applications for environmental monitoring and Smart Farming in terms of interoperability. It outperforms the contesting Web Standards in terms of exibility and scalability, which strongly impacts on developer and user experience