QoS Contract Negotiation in Distributed Component-Based Software

Currently, several mature and commercial component models (for e.g. EJB, .NET, COM+) exist on the market. These technologies were designed largely for applications with business-oriented non-functional requirements such as data persistence, confidentiality, and transactional support. They provide only limited support for the development of components and applications with non-functional properties (NFPs) like QoS (e.g. throughput, response time). The integration of QoS into component infrastructure requires among other things the support of components’ QoS contract specification, negotiation, adaptation, etc. This thesis focuses on contract negotiation. For applications in which the consideration of non-functional properties (NFPs) is essential (e.g. Video-on-Demand, eCommerce), a component-based solution demands the appropriate composition of the QoS contracts specified at the different ports of the collaborating components. The ports must be properly connected so that the QoS level required by one is matched by the QoS level provided by the other. Generally, QoS contracts of components depend on run-time resources (e.g. network bandwidth, CPU time) or quality attributes to be established dynamically and are usually specified in multiple QoS-Profiles. QoS contract negotiation enables the selection of appropriate concrete QoS contracts between collaborating components. In our approach, the component containers perform the contract negotiation at run-time. This thesis addresses the QoS contract negotiation problem by first modelling it as a constraint satisfaction optimization problem (CSOP). As a basis for this modelling, the provided and required QoS as well as resource demand are specified at the component level. The notion of utility is applied to select a good solution according to some negotiation goal (e.g. user’s satisfaction). We argue that performing QoS contract negotiation in multiple phases simplifies the negotiation process and makes it more efficient. Based on such classification, the thesis presents heuristic algorithms that comprise coarse-grained and fine-grained negotiations for collaborating components deployed in distributed nodes in the following scenarios: (i) single-client - single-server, (ii) multiple-clients, and (iii) multi-tier scenarios. To motivate the problem as well as to validate the proposed approach, we have examined three componentized distributed applications. These are: (i) video streaming, (ii) stock quote, and (iii) billing (to evaluate certain security properties). An experiment has been conducted to specify the QoS contracts of the collaborating components in one of the applications we studied. In a run-time system that implements our algorithm, we simulated different behaviors concerning: (i) user’s QoS requirements and preferences, (ii) resource availability conditions concerning the client, server, and network bandwidth, and (iii) the specified QoS-Profiles of the collaborating components. Under various conditions, the outcome of the negotiation confirms the claim we made with regard to obtaining a good solution

QoS Contract Negotiation in Distributed Component-Based Software

Currently, several mature and commercial component models (for e.g. EJB, .NET, COM+) exist on the market. These technologies were designed largely for applications with business-oriented non-functional requirements such as data persistence, confidentiality, and transactional support. They provide only limited support for the development of components and applications with non-functional properties (NFPs) like QoS (e.g. throughput, response time). The integration of QoS into component infrastructure requires among other things the support of components’ QoS contract specification, negotiation, adaptation, etc. This thesis focuses on contract negotiation. For applications in which the consideration of non-functional properties (NFPs) is essential (e.g. Video-on-Demand, eCommerce), a component-based solution demands the appropriate composition of the QoS contracts specified at the different ports of the collaborating components. The ports must be properly connected so that the QoS level required by one is matched by the QoS level provided by the other. Generally, QoS contracts of components depend on run-time resources (e.g. network bandwidth, CPU time) or quality attributes to be established dynamically and are usually specified in multiple QoS-Profiles. QoS contract negotiation enables the selection of appropriate concrete QoS contracts between collaborating components. In our approach, the component containers perform the contract negotiation at run-time. This thesis addresses the QoS contract negotiation problem by first modelling it as a constraint satisfaction optimization problem (CSOP). As a basis for this modelling, the provided and required QoS as well as resource demand are specified at the component level. The notion of utility is applied to select a good solution according to some negotiation goal (e.g. user’s satisfaction). We argue that performing QoS contract negotiation in multiple phases simplifies the negotiation process and makes it more efficient. Based on such classification, the thesis presents heuristic algorithms that comprise coarse-grained and fine-grained negotiations for collaborating components deployed in distributed nodes in the following scenarios: (i) single-client - single-server, (ii) multiple-clients, and (iii) multi-tier scenarios. To motivate the problem as well as to validate the proposed approach, we have examined three componentized distributed applications. These are: (i) video streaming, (ii) stock quote, and (iii) billing (to evaluate certain security properties). An experiment has been conducted to specify the QoS contracts of the collaborating components in one of the applications we studied. In a run-time system that implements our algorithm, we simulated different behaviors concerning: (i) user’s QoS requirements and preferences, (ii) resource availability conditions concerning the client, server, and network bandwidth, and (iii) the specified QoS-Profiles of the collaborating components. Under various conditions, the outcome of the negotiation confirms the claim we made with regard to obtaining a good solution

Hardware-based smart camera for recovering high dynamic range video from multiple exposures

International audienceIn many applications such as video surveillance or defect detection, the perception of information related to a scene is limited in areas with strong contrasts. The high dynamic range (HDR) capture technique can deal with these limitations. The proposed method has the advantage of automatically selecting multiple exposure times to make outputs more visible than fixed exposure ones. A real-time hardware implementation of the HDR technique that shows more details both in dark and bright areas of a scene is an important line of research. For this purpose, we built a dedicated smart camera that performs both capturing and HDR video processing from three exposures. What is new in our work is shown through the following points: HDR video capture through multiple exposure control, HDR memory management, HDR frame generation, and rep- resentation under a hardware context. Our camera achieves a real-time HDR video output at 60 fps at 1.3 mega- pixels and demonstrates the efficiency of our technique through an experimental result. Applications of this HDR smart camera include the movie industry, the mass-consumer market, military, automotive industry, and sur- veillanc

Video Quality Assessment in Underwater Acoustic Networks

Fecha de Lectura de Tesis Doctoral: 23 de mayo de 2018.Las imágenes subacuáticas reciben una atención cada vez mayor por parte de la comunidad científica dado que las fotografías y los vídeos son herramientas de gran valor en el estudio del entorno oceánico que cubre el 90% de la biosfera de nuestro planeta. Sin embargo, las Redes de Sensores Submarinas deben enfrentarse al canal hostil que el agua de mar constituye. Las comunicaciones de medio rango son sólo posibles con modems acústicos de capacidades muy limitadas con tasas binarias de pico de unas decenas de kbps. En transmisión de vídeo, estas reducidas tasas binarias fuerzan una compresión elevada que produce niveles de distorsión mucho mayores que en otros entornos. Además, los usuarios de vídeo submarino son oceanógrafos u otros especialistas con una percepción de la calidad diferente a la de un grupo genérico de usuarios. Las peculiaridades descritas exigen un estudio dedicado de la evaluación de calidad de vídeo para redes submarinas. Esta tesis doctoral aborda el problema de la evaluación de calidad de vídeo y presenta contribuciones en las dos áreas principales de esta disciplina: evaluación subjetiva y evaluación objetiva. La referencia para la percepción de calidad en cualquier servicio es la opinión de los usuarios y, por tanto, un análisis de la calidad subjetiva es el primer paso en este trabajo. Se presentan el diseño experimental y los resultados de un test de acuerdo a métodos psicométricos estándares. Los participantes del test fueron científicos del océano y las secuencias de vídeo utilizadas fueron grabadas en campañas de exploración y procesadas para simular las condiciones de las comunicaciones submarinas. Los resultados experimentales muestran como los vídeos son útiles para tareas científicas incluso en condiciones de muy baja tasa binaria. Los métodos de evaluación de la calidad objetiva son algoritmos diseñados para calcular puntuaciones de calidad