An ontology-driven semantic bus for autonomic communication elements

Recently, autonomics have been proposed as a solution to tackle the ever-increasing management complexity of large-scale computing and communications infrastructures. Over time, the control loops used to orchestrate the intelligent behaviour of autonomic management architectures have evolved from fully static to highly-dynamic loops comprised of loosely coupled management components. Communication and other interactions between these components is facilitated by a communications substrate. Additionally, in order to achieve truly autonomic behaviour, the interacting components need to be able to understand each other, justifying the need for semantically enriched communications. In this paper, we present a novel semantic communications bus that orchestrates interactions between the components of an autonomic control loop. It employs ontology-based reasoning in order to establish communication contracts, validate message consistency and support semantic topic subscriptions. Additionally, a prototype was designed, implemented and its performance evaluated

Evaluation and analysis of realizing broker-based content routing protocols in SDN

Publish/subscribe provides a valuable communication model to the future Internet due to the decoupling of end-users from each other. One of the stubborn challenges that face recent content-based publish/subscribe systems is the trade-off between the usage of the network bandwidth and the end-to-end delay of published events. This trade-off is imposed by the fact that most implementations depend on software brokers to filter incoming messages towards received requests from subscribers. Although this approach for filtering may present the most bandwidth efficient solutions, the use of brokers adds to the network end-to-end delay. The installed brokers are implemented at the application layer and hence the original path between publishers and subscribers is extended which adds to the delay in which messages are forwarded from publishers to subscribers. Along with the delay imposed by the extended path, another processing delay is added to the system based on the time needed for filtering incoming messages at the brokers. As the time factor is crucial to the real-world applications that depend on the content-based publish/subscribe paradigm, recent implementations try to tackle this problem by exploiting the deployed hardware in the underlying infrastructure for filtering operations. In-network filtering is enabled with the help of Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology as it allows the installment of content filters directly to the network switches/routers. Even though this approach significantly reduces the end-to-end delay, it suffers when the bandwidth efficiency is evaluated. Caused by the inherited hardware limitations, installing content filters on hardware network elements limits their expressiveness. This increases the number of published messages from publishers to subscribers on different network links which requires more bandwidth. As an intermediate solution between the two filtering approaches, the work of this thesis is the realization of a hybrid content-based publish/subscribe middleware that allows filtering operations in both network and application layers

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

Supporting Publication and Subscription Confidentiality in Pub/Sub Networks

The publish/subscribe model offers a loosely-coupled communication paradigm where applications interact indirectly and asynchronously. Publisher applications generate events that are sent to interested applications through a network of brokers. Subscriber applications express their interest by specifying filters that brokers can use for routing the events. Supporting confidentiality of messages being exchanged is still challenging. First of all, it is desirable that any scheme used for protecting the confidentiality of both the events and filters should not require the publishers and subscribers to share secret keys. In fact, such a restriction is against the loose-coupling of the model. Moreover, such a scheme should not restrict the expressiveness of filters and should allow the broker to perform event filtering to route the events to the interested parties. Existing solutions do not fully address those issues. In this paper, we provide a novel scheme that supports (i) confidentiality for events and filters; (ii) filters can express very complex constraints on events even if brokers are not able to access any information on both events and filters; (iii) and finally it does not require publishers and subscribers to share keys

Offloading content routing cost from routers

The publish/subscribe paradigm has lately received much attention. In publish/subscribe systems, a specialized event-based middleware delivers notifications of events created by producers (publishers) to consumers (subscribers) interested in that particular event. It is considered a good approach for implementing Internet-wide distributed systems as it provides full decoupling of the communicating parties in time, space and synchronization. One flavor of the paradigm is content-based publish/subscribe which allows the subscribers to express their interests very accurately. In order to implement a content-based publish/subscribe middleware in way suitable for Internet scale, its underlying architecture must be organized as a peer-to-peer network of content-based routers that take care of forwarding the event notifications to all interested subscribers. A communication infrastructure that provides such service is called a content-based network. A content-based network is an application-level overlay network. Unfortunately, the expressiveness of the content-based interaction scheme comes with a price - compiling and maintaining the content-based forwarding and routing tables is very expensive when the amount of nodes in the network is large. The routing tables are usually partially-ordered set (poset) -based data structures. In this work, we present an algorithm that aims to improve scalability in content-based networks by reducing the workload of content-based routers by offloading some of their content routing cost to clients. We also provide experimental results of the performance of the algorithm. Additionally, we give an introduction to the publish/subscribe paradigm and content-based networking and discuss alternative ways of improving scalability in content-based networks. ACM Computing Classification System (CCS): C.2.4 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Distributed Systems - Distributed application

Modelling Event-Based Interactions in Component-Based Architectures for Quantitative System Evaluation

This dissertation thesis presents an approach enabling the modelling and quality-of-service prediction of event-based systems at the architecture-level. Applying a two-step model refinement transformation, the approach integrates platform-specific performance influences of the underlying middleware while enabling the use of different existing analytical and simulation-based prediction techniques