Towards goal-based autonomic networking

The ability to quickly deploy and efficiently manage services is critical to the telecommunications industry. Currently, services are designed and managed by different teams with expertise over a wide range of concerns, from high-level business to low level network aspects. Not only is this approach expensive in terms of time and resources, but it also has problems to scale up to new outsourcing and/or multi-vendor models, where subsystems and teams belong to different organizations. We endorse the idea, upheld among others in the autonomic computing community, that the network and system components involved in the provision of a service must be crafted to facilitate their management. Furthermore, they should help bridge the gap between network and business concerns. In this paper, we sketch an approach based on early work on the hierarchical organization of autonomic entities that possibly belong to different organizations. An autonomic entity governs over other autonomic entities by defining their goals. Thus, it is up to each autonomic entity to decide its line of actions in order to fulfill its goals, and the governing entity needs not know about the internals of its subordinates. We illustrate the approach with a simple but still rich example of a telecom service

From Physics Model to Results: An Optimizing Framework for Cross-Architecture Code Generation

Starting from a high-level problem description in terms of partial differential equations using abstract tensor notation, the Chemora framework discretizes, optimizes, and generates complete high performance codes for a wide range of compute architectures. Chemora extends the capabilities of Cactus, facilitating the usage of large-scale CPU/GPU systems in an efficient manner for complex applications, without low-level code tuning. Chemora achieves parallelism through MPI and multi-threading, combining OpenMP and CUDA. Optimizations include high-level code transformations, efficient loop traversal strategies, dynamically selected data and instruction cache usage strategies, and JIT compilation of GPU code tailored to the problem characteristics. The discretization is based on higher-order finite differences on multi-block domains. Chemora's capabilities are demonstrated by simulations of black hole collisions. This problem provides an acid test of the framework, as the Einstein equations contain hundreds of variables and thousands of terms.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Scientific Programmin

iTETRIS: An Integrated Wireless and Traffic Platform for Real-Time Road Traffic Management Solutions

Wireless vehicular cooperative systems have been identified as an attractive solution to improve road traffic management, thereby contributing to the European goal of safer, cleaner, and more efficient and sustainable traffic solutions. V2V-V2I communication technologies can improve traffic management through real-time exchange of data among vehicles and with road infrastructure. It is also of great importance to investigate the adequate combination of V2V and V2I technologies to ensure the continuous and costefficient operation of traffic management solutions based on wireless vehicular cooperative solutions. However, to adequately design and optimize these communication protocols and analyze the potential of wireless vehicular cooperative systems to improve road traffic management, adequate testbeds and field operational tests need to be conducted. Despite the potential of Field Operational Tests to get the first insights into the benefits and problems faced in the development of wireless vehicular cooperative systems, there is yet the need to evaluate in the long term and large dimension the true potential benefits of wireless vehicular cooperative systems to improve traffic efficiency. To this aim, iTETRIS is devoted to the development of advanced tools coupling traffic and wireless communication simulators

Domain Objects and Microservices for Systems Development: a roadmap

This paper discusses a roadmap to investigate Domain Objects being an adequate formalism to capture the peculiarity of microservice architecture, and to support Software development since the early stages. It provides a survey of both Microservices and Domain Objects, and it discusses plans and reflections on how to investigate whether a modeling approach suited to adaptable service-based components can also be applied with success to the microservice scenario

Ontology-based collaborative framework for disaster recovery scenarios

This paper aims at designing of adaptive framework for supporting collaborative work of different actors in public safety and disaster recovery missions. In such scenarios, firemen and robots interact to each other to reach a common goal; firemen team is equipped with smart devices and robots team is supplied with communication technologies, and should carry on specific tasks. Here, reliable connection is mandatory to ensure the interaction between actors. But wireless access network and communication resources are vulnerable in the event of a sudden unexpected change in the environment. Also, the continuous change in the mission requirements such as inclusion/exclusion of new actor, changing the actor's priority and the limitations of smart devices need to be monitored. To perform dynamically in such case, the presented framework is based on a generic multi-level modeling approach that ensures adaptation handled by semantic modeling. Automated self-configuration is driven by rule-based reconfiguration policies through ontology

A Systematic Approach to Constructing Incremental Topology Control Algorithms Using Graph Transformation

Communication networks form the backbone of our society. Topology control algorithms optimize the topology of such communication networks. Due to the importance of communication networks, a topology control algorithm should guarantee certain required consistency properties (e.g., connectivity of the topology), while achieving desired optimization properties (e.g., a bounded number of neighbors). Real-world topologies are dynamic (e.g., because nodes join, leave, or move within the network), which requires topology control algorithms to operate in an incremental way, i.e., based on the recently introduced modifications of a topology. Visual programming and specification languages are a proven means for specifying the structure as well as consistency and optimization properties of topologies. In this paper, we present a novel methodology, based on a visual graph transformation and graph constraint language, for developing incremental topology control algorithms that are guaranteed to fulfill a set of specified consistency and optimization constraints. More specifically, we model the possible modifications of a topology control algorithm and the environment using graph transformation rules, and we describe consistency and optimization properties using graph constraints. On this basis, we apply and extend a well-known constructive approach to derive refined graph transformation rules that preserve these graph constraints. We apply our methodology to re-engineer an established topology control algorithm, kTC, and evaluate it in a network simulation study to show the practical applicability of our approachComment: This document corresponds to the accepted manuscript of the referenced journal articl