Explicitly Context-Aware Publish/Subscribe with Context-Invariant Subscriptions

Although context could be exploited to improve the performance, elasticity and adaptation in most distributed systems that adopt the publish/subscribe (P/S) model of communication, only very few works have explored domains with highly dynamic context, whereas most adopted models are context agnostic. In this paper, we present the key design principles underlying a novel context-aware content-based P/S (CA-CBPS) model of communication, where the context is explicitly managed, focusing on the minimization of network overhead in domains with recurrent context changes thanks to contextual scoping. We highlight how we dealt with the main shortcomings of most of the current approaches. Our research is some of the first to study the problem of explicitly introducing context-awareness into the P/S model to capitalize on contextual information. The envisioned CA-CBPS middleware enables the cloud ecosystem of services to communicate very efficiently, in a decoupled, but contextually scoped fashion

Explicit context matching in content-based publish/subscribe systems

Although context could be exploited to improve performance, elasticity and adaptation in most distributed systems that adopt the publish/subscribe (P/S) communication model, only a few researchers have focused on the area of context-aware matching in P/S systems and have explored its implications in domains with highly dynamic context like wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and IoT-enabled applications. Most adopted P/S models are context agnostic or do not differentiate context from the other application data. In this article, we present a novel context-aware P/S model. SilboPS manages context explicitly, focusing on the minimization of network overhead in domains with recurrent context changes related, for example, to mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Our approach represents a solution that helps to efficiently share and use sensor data coming from ubiquitous WSNs across a plethora of applications intent on using these data to build context awareness. Specifically, we empirically demonstrate that decoupling a subscription from the changing context in which it is produced and leveraging contextual scoping in the filtering process notably reduces (un)subscription cost per node, while improving the global performance/throughput of the network of brokers without fltering the cost of SIENA-like topology changes

A flight software development and simulation framework for advanced space systems

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 293-302).Distributed terrestrial computer systems employ middleware software to provide communications abstractions and reduce software interface complexity. Embedded applications are adopting the same approaches, but must make provisions to ensure that hard real-time temporal performance can be maintained. This thesis presents the development and validation of a middleware system tailored to spacecraft flight software development. Our middleware runs on the Generalized Flight Operations Processing Simulator (GFLOPS) and is called the GFLOPS Rapid Real-time Development Environment (GRRDE). GRRDE provides publish-subscribe communication services between software components. These services help to reduce the complexity of managing software interfaces. The hard real-time performance of these services has been verified with General Timed Automata modelling and extensive run-time testing. Several example applications illustrate the use of GRRDE to support advanced flight software development. Two technology-focused studies examine automatic code generation and autonomous fault protection within the GRRDE framework. A complex simulation of the TechSat 21 distributed spacebased radar mission highlights the utility of the approach for large-scale applications.by John Patrick Enright.Ph.D

Principles of building scalable and robust event-based systems

Event-based systems are of tremendous importance for a wide range of distributed applications interacting with physical processes, e.g., traffic management, financial services, manufacturing processes, or health services. Event-based systems support to monitor, analyze events of interest efficiently. Therefore, they enable distributed applications to respond to detected events in the form of appropriate actions. Event-based systems provide as part of the publish/subscribe paradigm, mechanisms for the scalable integration of a variety of information sources, e.g., dedicated sensor networks, mobile devices, or cameras. In addition, event-based systems allow as part of the event processing paradigm to detect correlations between events from distinct information sources. Event-based systems ensure two important forms of decoupling of importance building scalable distributed applications. Decoupling producers of information and consumers of information by ensuring that neither producers need to keep state on the interested consumers nor consumers need to know the producers of information, is a key principle for scalable communications. Furthermore, a step-wise correlation from primary events to events of importance for distributed applications is an enabler to specify distributed applications independent from the underlying sensor infrastructure at hand. In this thesis, we present and discuss principles of building scalable and robust event-based systems. On the one hand, this requires distributed mechanisms to fulfill a wide spectrum of distinct application requirements, e.g., being bandwidth efficient and providing events with low end-to-end latency. On the other hand, the underlying mechanisms for event-based systems need to deal with many levels of dynamics, e. g., dynamics in the rate at which events are produced, dynamics in the interest of producers and consumers, mobility of consumer and producer, failures and changing security privileges to access events. In the context of mechanisms for event distribution, operator execution, operator migration, operator recovery and secure access to events, we highlight problems in the scalable and robust design of those mechanisms. We give an overview on related work in the field and present in a tutorial manner the ideas of six own contributions for realizing distributed event-based systems

Efficient Content-based Routing, Mobility-aware Topologies, and Temporal Subspace Matching

Event-based systems are seen as good candidates for supporting distributed applications in dynamic and ubiquitous environments because they support decoupled and asynchronous many-to-many information dissemination. Event systems are widely used, because asynchronous messaging provides a flexible alternative to RPC (Remote Procedure Call). They are typically implemented using an overlay network of routers. A content-based router forwards event messages based on filters that are installed by subscribers and other routers. The filters are organized into a routing table in order to forward incoming events to proper subscribers and neighbouring routers. This thesis addresses the optimization of content-based routing tables organized using the covering relation and presents novel data structures and configurations for improving local and distributed operation. Data structures are needed for organizing filters into a routing table that supports efficient matching and runtime operation. We present novel results on dynamic filter merging and the integration of filter merging with content-based routing tables. In addition, the thesis examines the cost of client mobility using different protocols and routing topologies. We also present a new matching technique called temporal subspace matching. The technique combines two new features. The first feature, temporal operation, supports notifications, or content profiles, that persist in time. The second feature, subspace matching, allows more expressive semantics, because notifications may contain intervals and be defined as subspaces of the content space. We also present an application of temporal subspace matching pertaining to metadata-based continuous collection and object tracking.Tapahtumapohjaiset järjestelmät nähdään hyvänä tapana tukea ja kehittää hajautettuja sovelluksia dynaamisissa ympäristöissä. Nämä järjestelmät tukevat asynkronista viestien välitystä. Tapahtumapohjaisia järjestelmiä käytetään, koska asynkroninen viestintä mahdollistaa etäproseduurikutsuja vapaammat sidokset sovellusten välille. Tapahtumapohjaiset järjestelmät toteutetaan tyypillisesti ns. "overlay" verkkoina sovelluskerroksella. Sisältöpohjainen reititin välittää tapahtumaviestejä tilaajien asettamien suotimien (eng. filter) perusteella. Tiedon tilaajat ja tuottajat kytketään suotimien avulla niin että tuottajien tuottamat tapahtumat välittyvät aktiivisille tilaajille. Suodin valikoi viestivirrasta halutut viestit erityisten sääntöjen avulla. Suotimet järjestetään reititystauluksi, jonka perusteella päätetään kenelle reititin ohjaa viestejä. Väitöskirja käsittelee suodinpohjaisten reititystaulujen optimointia ja esittää uusia tietorakenteita ja konfiguraatioita paikalliseen sekä hajautettuun toimintaan. Työssä esitetään yleinen formaali suotimien yhdistämismalli, joka integroidaan esitettyjen tietorakenteiden kanssa. Lisäksi työssä tutkitaan liikkuvien tilaajien ja tuottajien aiheuttamia kustannuksia. Työssä esitetään myös uusi tekniikka aikaan kytketyn tiedon välitykseen. Tekniikka yhdistää kaksi uutta piirrettä. Ensimmäinen piirre on temporaalinen toiminta, jossa välitettävä tieto on määritetty olemaan voimassa tietyn ajanjakson. Toinen ominaisuus mahdollistaa sekä kyselyiden että datan, johon kyselyt kohdistuvat, määrittelyn moniulotteisten suotimien avulla. Työssä esitetään tekniikasta esimerkkisovellus, joka käsittelee joukkojen ja olioiden seurantaa

Parallelization of Littlewood-Richardson Coefficients Computation and its Integration into the BonjourGrid Meta-Desktop Grid Middleware

International audienceThe aim of this paper is to show how to parallelize a compute intensive application in mathematics (Group Theory) for an institutional Desktop Grid platform coordinated by a meta-grid middleware named BonjourGrid. The paper is twofold: first of all, it shows how to parallelize a sequential program for a multicore CPU which participates in the computation and second it demonstrates the effort for launching multiple instances of the solutions for the mathematical problem with the BonjourGrid middleware. BonjourGrid is a fully decentralized Desktop Grid middleware. The main results of the paper are: a) an efficient multi-threaded version of a sequential program to compute Littlewood- Richardson coefficients, namely the Multi-LR program and b) a proof of concept, centered around the user needs, for the BonjourGrid middleware dedicated to coordinate multiple instances of programsfor Desktop Grids and with the help of Multi-LR. In this paper, the scientific work consists in starting from a model for the solution of a compute intensive problem in mathematics, to incorporate the concrete model into a middleware and running it on commodity PCs platform managed by an innovative meta Desktop Grid middleware

Study and analysis of innovative network protocols and architectures

In the last years, some new paradigms are emerging in the networking area as inspiring models for the definition of future communications networks. A key example is certainly the Content Centric Networking (CCN) protocol suite, namely a novel network architecture that aims to supersede the current TCP/IP stack in favor of a name based routing algorithm, also introducing in-network caching capabilities. On the other hand, much interest has been placed on Software Defined Networking (SDN), namely the set of protocols and architectures designed to make network devices more dynamic and programmable. Given this complex arena, the thesis focuses on the analysis of these innovative network protocols, with the aim of exploring possible design flaws and hence guaranteeing their proper operation when actually deployed in the network. Particular emphasis is given to the security of these protocols, for its essential role in every wide scale application. Some work has been done in this direction, but all these solutions are far to be considered fully investigated. In the CCN case, a closer investigation on problems related to possible DDoS attacks due to the stateful nature of the protocol, is presented along with a full-fledged proposal to support scalable PUSH application on top of CCN. Concerning SDN, instead, we present a tool for the verification of network policies in complex graphs containing dynamic network functions. In order to obtain significant results, we leverage different tools and methodologies: on the one hand, we assess simulation software as very useful tools for representing the most common use cases for the various technologies. On the other hand, we exploit more sophisticated formal methods to ensure a higher level of confidence for the obtained results

Designing peer-to-peer overlays:a small-world perspective

The Small-World phenomenon, well known under the phrase "six degrees of separation", has been for a long time under the spotlight of investigation. The fact that our social network is closely-knitted and that any two people are linked by a short chain of acquaintances was confirmed by the experimental psychologist Stanley Milgram in the sixties. However, it was only after the seminal work of Jon Kleinberg in 2000 that it was understood not only why such networks exist, but also why it is possible to efficiently navigate in these networks. This proved to be a highly relevant discovery for peer-to-peer systems, since they share many fundamental similarities with the social networks; in particular the fact that the peer-to-peer routing solely relies on local decisions, without the possibility to invoke global knowledge. In this thesis we show how peer-to-peer system designs that are inspired by Small-World principles can address and solve many important problems, such as balancing the peer load, reducing high maintenance cost, or efficiently disseminating data in large-scale systems. We present three peer-to-peer approaches, namely Oscar, Gravity, and Fuzzynet, whose concepts stem from the design of navigable Small-World networks. Firstly, we introduce a novel theoretical model for building peer-to-peer systems which supports skewed node distributions and still preserves all desired properties of Kleinberg's Small-World networks. With such a model we set a reference base for the design of data-oriented peer-to-peer systems which are characterized by non-uniform distribution of keys as well as skewed query or access patterns. Based on this theoretical model we introduce Oscar, an overlay which uses a novel scalable network sampling technique for network construction, for which we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis. The simulations of our system validate the developed theory and evaluate Oscar's performance under typical conditions encountered in real-life large-scale networked systems, including participant heterogeneity, faults, as well as skewed and dynamic load-distributions. Furthermore, we show how by utilizing Small-World properties it is possible to reduce the maintenance cost of most structured overlays by discarding a core network connectivity element – the ring invariant. We argue that reliance on the ring structure is a serious impediment for real life deployment and scalability of structured overlays. We propose an overlay called Fuzzynet, which does not rely on the ring invariant, yet has all the functionalities of structured overlays. Fuzzynet takes the idea of lazy overlay maintenance further by eliminating the need for any explicit connectivity and data maintenance operations, relying merely on the actions performed when new Fuzzynet peers join the network. We show that with a sufficient amount of neighbors, even under high churn, data can be retrieved in Fuzzynet with high probability. Finally, we show how peer-to-peer systems based on the Small-World design and with the capability of supporting non-uniform key distributions can be successfully employed for large-scale data dissemination tasks. We introduce Gravity, a publish/subscribe system capable of building efficient dissemination structures, inducing only minimal dissemination relay overhead. This is achieved through Gravity's property to permit non-uniform peer key distributions which allows the subscribers to be clustered close to each other in the key space where data dissemination is cheap. An extensive experimental study confirms the effectiveness of our system under realistic subscription patterns and shows that Gravity surpasses existing approaches in efficiency by a large margin. With the peer-to-peer systems presented in this thesis we fill an important gap in the family of structured overlays, bringing into life practical systems, which can play a crucial role in enabling data-oriented applications distributed over wide-area networks

SAVCBS 2003: Specification and Verification of Component-Based Systems

These are the proceedings for the SAVCBS 2003 workshop. This workshop was held at ESEC/FSE 2003 in Helsinki Finland in September 2003