The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed

High-Throughput Computing on High-Performance Platforms: A Case Study

The computing systems used by LHC experiments has historically consisted of the federation of hundreds to thousands of distributed resources, ranging from small to mid-size resource. In spite of the impressive scale of the existing distributed computing solutions, the federation of small to mid-size resources will be insufficient to meet projected future demands. This paper is a case study of how the ATLAS experiment has embraced Titan---a DOE leadership facility in conjunction with traditional distributed high- throughput computing to reach sustained production scales of approximately 52M core-hours a years. The three main contributions of this paper are: (i) a critical evaluation of design and operational considerations to support the sustained, scalable and production usage of Titan; (ii) a preliminary characterization of a next generation executor for PanDA to support new workloads and advanced execution modes; and (iii) early lessons for how current and future experimental and observational systems can be integrated with production supercomputers and other platforms in a general and extensible manner

Interoperability of Information Systems and Heterogenous Databases Using XML

Interoperabilily of information systerrrs is the most critical issue facing businesse! that need to access information from multiple idormution systems on tlifferent environments ancl diverse platforms. Interoperability has been a basic requirement for the modern information systems in a competitive and volatile business environment, particularly with the advent of distributed network system and the growing relevance of inter-network communications. Our objective in tltis paper is to develop a comprehensiveframework tofacilitate interoperability smong distributed and heterogeneous information systems and to develop prototype software to validate tlte application of XML in interoperability of infurmation systems and databases

DISCO: Distributed Multi-domain SDN Controllers

Modern multi-domain networks now span over datacenter networks, enterprise networks, customer sites and mobile entities. Such networks are critical and, thus, must be resilient, scalable and easily extensible. The emergence of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) protocols, which enables to decouple the data plane from the control plane and dynamically program the network, opens up new ways to architect such networks. In this paper, we propose DISCO, an open and extensible DIstributed SDN COntrol plane able to cope with the distributed and heterogeneous nature of modern overlay networks and wide area networks. DISCO controllers manage their own network domain and communicate with each others to provide end-to-end network services. This communication is based on a unique lightweight and highly manageable control channel used by agents to self-adaptively share aggregated network-wide information. We implemented DISCO on top of the Floodlight OpenFlow controller and the AMQP protocol. We demonstrated how DISCO's control plane dynamically adapts to heterogeneous network topologies while being resilient enough to survive to disruptions and attacks and providing classic functionalities such as end-point migration and network-wide traffic engineering. The experimentation results we present are organized around three use cases: inter-domain topology disruption, end-to-end priority service request and virtual machine migration

A survey of communication protocols for internet of things and related challenges of fog and cloud computing integration

The fast increment in the number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices is accelerating the research on new solutions to make cloud services scalable. In this context, the novel concept of fog computing as well as the combined fog-to-cloud computing paradigm is becoming essential to decentralize the cloud, while bringing the services closer to the end-system. This article surveys e application layer communication protocols to fulfill the IoT communication requirements, and their potential for implementation in fog- and cloud-based IoT systems. To this end, the article first briefly presents potential protocol candidates, including request-reply and publish-subscribe protocols. After that, the article surveys these protocols based on their main characteristics, as well as the main performance issues, including latency, energy consumption, and network throughput. These findings are thereafter used to place the protocols in each segment of the system (IoT, fog, cloud), and thus opens up the discussion on their choice, interoperability, and wider system integration. The survey is expected to be useful to system architects and protocol designers when choosing the communication protocols in an integrated IoT-to-fog-to-cloud system architecture.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft