An investigation on sun microsystems Jini technology

Sun Microsystems introduced the JiniTM Technology as its vision of the future in networking, where services can be registered dynamically and he used easily regardless of their location in the network. This is an investigation of feasibility on such claims made by Sun regarding JiniTM and comparisons with the directly similar Universal Plug and Play from Microsoft. The aim is to implement a simple application of the JiniTM Technology in order to demonstrate its capabilities as a contribution to the distributed computing research

Support for Ad-Hoc applications in ubiquitous computing

This thesis presents work within the area of ubiquitous computing, an area based on a vision of computers blending into the background. The work has been done within the EU project PalCom that introduces palpable computing. Palpable computing puts a new perspective on ubiquitous computing, by focusing on human understandability. The thesis goals are to allow for ad-hoc combinations of services and nonpreplanned interaction in ubiquitous computing networks. This is not possible with traditional technologies for network services, which are based on standardization of service interfaces at the domain level. In contrast to those, our approach is based on standardization at a generic level, and on self-describing services. We propose techniques for ad-hoc applications that allow users to inspect and combine services, and to specify their cooperation in assemblies. A key point is that the assembly is external to the services. That makes it possible to adapt to changes in one service, without rewriting the other coordinated services. A framework has been implemented for building services that can be combined into ad-hoc applications, and example scenarios have been tested on top of the framework. A browser tool has been built for discovering services, for interacting with them, and for combining them. Finally, discovery and communication protocols for palpable computing have been developed, that support ad-hoc applications

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

MonALISA : A Distributed Monitoring Service Architecture

The MonALISA (Monitoring Agents in A Large Integrated Services Architecture) system provides a distributed monitoring service. MonALISA is based on a scalable Dynamic Distributed Services Architecture which is designed to meet the needs of physics collaborations for monitoring global Grid systems, and is implemented using JINI/JAVA and WSDL/SOAP technologies. The scalability of the system derives from the use of multithreaded Station Servers to host a variety of loosely coupled self-describing dynamic services, the ability of each service to register itself and then to be discovered and used by any other services, or clients that require such information, and the ability of all services and clients subscribing to a set of events (state changes) in the system to be notified automatically. The framework integrates several existing monitoring tools and procedures to collect parameters describing computational nodes, applications and network performance. It has built-in SNMP support and network-performance monitoring algorithms that enable it to monitor end-to-end network performance as well as the performance and state of site facilities in a Grid. MonALISA is currently running around the clock on the US CMS test Grid as well as an increasing number of other sites. It is also being used to monitor the performance and optimize the interconnections among the reflectors in the VRVS system.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 8 pages, pdf. PSN MOET00

CSP channels for CAN-bus connected embedded control systems

Closed loop control system typically contains multitude of sensors and actuators operated simultaneously. So they are parallel and distributed in its essence. But when mapping this parallelism to software, lot of obstacles concerning multithreading communication and synchronization issues arise. To overcome this problem, the CT kernel/library based on CSP algebra has been developed. This project (TES.5410) is about developing communication extension to the CT library to make it applicable in distributed systems. Since the library is tailored for control systems, properties and requirements of control systems are taken into special consideration. Applicability of existing middleware solutions is examined. A comparison of applicable fieldbus protocols is done in order to determine most suitable ones and CAN fieldbus is chosen to be first fieldbus used. Brief overview of CSP and existing CSP based libraries is given. Middleware architecture is proposed along with few novel ideas

SOPA - a self organizing processing and streaming architecture

This paper describes SOPA, a component framework that is an essential part of the lecture recording system E-Chalk. It envisiones a general processing and streaming architecture featuring autonomous assembly of stream processing components. The goal is to provide an easy to use framework where dynamically organized processing graphs are build out of components from various distributed sources. Based on state-of-the-art solutions for component based software development the system simplifies the implementation and the configuration of multimedia streaming applications and associated tools. It supports stream synchronization transparently while extending components are installed on the fly according to the existing requirements that may change at any time

Plug-and-Participate for Limited Devices in the Field of Industrial Automation

Ausgangspunkt und gleichzeitig Motivation dieser Arbeit ist die heutige Marktsituation: Starke Kundenbedürfnisse nach individuellen Gütern stehen oftmals eher auf Massenproduktion ausgerichteten Planungs- und Automatisierungssystemen gegenüber - die Befriedigung individueller Kundenbedürfnisse setzt aber Flexibilität und Anpassungsfähigkeit voraus. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es daher, einen Beitrag zu leisten, der es Unternehmen ermöglichen soll, auf diese individuellen Bedürfnisse flexibel reagieren zu können. Hierbei kann es im Rahmen der Dissertation natürlich nicht um eine Revolutionierung der gesamten Automatisierungs- und Planungslandschaft gehen; vielmehr ist die Lösung, die der Autor der Arbeit präsentiert, ein integraler Bestandteil eines Automatisierungskonzeptes, das im Rahmen des PABADIS Projektes entwickelt wurde: Während PABADIS das gesamte Spektrum von Planung und Maschineninfrastruktur zum Inhalt hat, bezieht sich der Kern dieser Arbeit weitestgehend auf den letztgenannten Punkt - Maschineninfrastruktur. Ziel war es, generische Maschinenfunktionalität in einem Netzwerk anzubieten, durch das Fertigungsaufträge selbstständig navigieren. Als Lösung präsentiert diese Dissertation ein Plug-and-Participate basiertes Konzept, welches beliebige Automatisierungsfunktionen in einer spontanen Gemeinschaft bereitstellt. Basis ist ein generisches Interface, in dem die generellen Anforderungen solcher ad-hoc Infrastrukturen aggregiert sind. Die Implementierung dieses Interfaces in der PABADIS Referenzimplementierung sowie die Gegenüberstellung der Systemanforderungen und Systemvoraussetzungen zeigte, das klassische Plug-and-Participate Technologien wie Jini und UPnP aufgrund ihrer Anforderungen nicht geeignet sind - Automatisierungsgeräte stellen oftmals nur eingeschränkte Ressourcen bereit. Daher wurde als zweites Ergebnis neben dem Plug-and-Participate basierten Automatisierungskonzept eine Plug-and-Participate Technologie entwickelt - Pini - die den Gegebenheiten der Automatisierungswelt gerecht wird und schließlich eine Anwendung von PABADIS auf heutigen Automatisierungsanlagen erlaubt. Grundlegende Konzepte von Pini, die dies ermöglichen, sind die gesamte Grundarchitektur auf Basis eines verteilten Lookup Service, die Art und Weise der Dienstrepräsentation sowie die effiziente Nutzung der angebotenen Dienste. Mit Pini und darauf aufbauenden Konzepten wie PLAP ist es nun insbesondere möglich, Automatisierungssysteme wie PABADIS auf heutigen Anlagen zu realisieren. Das wiederum ist ein Schritt in Richtung Kundenorientierung - solche Systeme sind mit Hinblick auf Flexibilität und Anpassungsfähigkeit gestaltet worden, um Kundenbedürfnissen effizient gerecht zu werden

Development of a Proactive Fault Diagnosis for Critical System

Large-scale network environments, such as the Internet, are characterized by the presence of various devices connected at various remote locations. There is a scenario of main office connected to different branch offices in another town and cities, with the presence of central administrative system at the main office. Any problem at branches is reported to the main office, due to availability of enough resources there. However, few support tools have been developed to allow the administrators at the central office to remotely control and monitor the computers at the branches. Even, in local area network environment, diagnosing the computers on the network is always a big problem for the administrator, as he/she moves from one computer to another, running the diagnostic program and collecting report for each machine tested. This is strenuous and time consuming. To help address these problems, I have employed the concept of mobile agent to design an architecture that can remotely perform various checks and tests on computers on network, and report its findings to the server administrator as central location. This architecture was implemented with Java, using Jini lookup service to establish communication between the computers. The agent tasks were implemented in C programming language. The result of this research work shows that the use of mobile agent for remote maintenance of computers on network was found to provide an improved, efficient, and dynamic diagnostic management system. All the same, it has proven to be a substantive contributor to efficient network management