Microsoft Cloud Compuring/Software+Services

Cloud Computing is a relatively new topic that has taken over the computing world by storm with promises of cost savings, increased flexibility and infinite scalability, while harnessing the full power of today’s very powerful devices. With advances by Microsoft, Amazon, and other leaders in computing, this field is slated as the fastest growing segment of the technology industry in terms of investment, development and recruitment. Join us in the Microsoft Cloud Computing / Software+Services workshop to learn about the Azure ecosystem and Windows Azure – our internet-scale cloud services platform, which provides an operating system and a rich set of developer services that allow you to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloudbased capabilities. We will also discuss our vision of the future – what we consider the natural evolution of cloud computing – the intersection of the cloud and software running on-premise and devices, which we call “Software-plus-Services”. We will share why the intersection of the cloud, the on-premise server and rich clients is the future of computing

Taming the interoperability challenges of complex IoT systems

of communication protocols and data formats; hence ensuring diverse devices can interoperate with one another remains a significant challenge. Model-driven development and testing solutions have been proposed as methods to aid software developers achieve interoperability compliance in the face of this increasing complexity. However, current approaches often involve complicated and domain specific models (e.g. web services described by WSDL). In this paper, we explore a lightweight, middleware independent, model-driven development framework to help developers tame the challenges of composing IoT services that interoperate with one another. The framework is based upon two key contributions: i) patterns of interoperability behaviour, and ii) a software framework to monitor and reason about interoperability success or failure. We show using a case-study from the FI-WARE Future Internet Service domain that this interoperability framework can support non-expert developers address interoperability challenges. We also deployed tools built atop the framework and made them available in the XIFI large-scale FI-PPP test environment

Mobile Communications Industry Scenarios and Strategic Implications for Network Equipment Vendors

Mobile infrastructure markets have changed dramatically during the past years. The industry is experiencing a shift from traditional large-scale, hardware-driven system roll-outs to software and services -driven business models. Also, the telecommunications and internet worlds are colliding in both mobile infrastructure and services domains requiring established network equipment vendors and mobile operators to transform and adapt to the new business environment. This paper utilizes Schoemaker's scenario planning process to reveal critical uncertain elements shaping the future of the industry. Four possible scenarios representing different value systems between industry's key stakeholders are created. After this, five strategic options with differing risk and cost factors for established network equipment vendors are discussed in order to aid firm's strategic planning process. --

A framework for network RTK data processing based on grid computing

Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) positioning is a technique used to provide precise positioning services at centimetre accuracy level in the context of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). While a Network-based RTK (N-RTK) system involves multiple continuously operating reference stations (CORS), the simplest form of a NRTK system is a single-base RTK. In Australia there are several NRTK services operating in different states and over 1000 single-base RTK systems to support precise positioning applications for surveying, mining, agriculture, and civil construction in regional areas. Additionally, future generation GNSS constellations, including modernised GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, and Compass, with multiple frequencies have been either developed or will become fully operational in the next decade. A trend of future development of RTK systems is to make use of various isolated operating network and single-base RTK systems and multiple GNSS constellations for extended service coverage and improved performance. Several computational challenges have been identified for future NRTK services including: • Multiple GNSS constellations and multiple frequencies • Large scale, wide area NRTK services with a network of networks • Complex computation algorithms and processes • Greater part of positioning processes shifting from user end to network centre with the ability to cope with hundreds of simultaneous users’ requests (reverse RTK) There are two major requirements for NRTK data processing based on the four challenges faced by future NRTK systems, expandable computing power and scalable data sharing/transferring capability. This research explores new approaches to address these future NRTK challenges and requirements using the Grid Computing facility, in particular for large data processing burdens and complex computation algorithms. A Grid Computing based NRTK framework is proposed in this research, which is a layered framework consisting of: 1) Client layer with the form of Grid portal; 2) Service layer; 3) Execution layer. The user’s request is passed through these layers, and scheduled to different Grid nodes in the network infrastructure. A proof-of-concept demonstration for the proposed framework is performed in a five-node Grid environment at QUT and also Grid Australia. The Networked Transport of RTCM via Internet Protocol (Ntrip) open source software is adopted to download real-time RTCM data from multiple reference stations through the Internet, followed by job scheduling and simplified RTK computing. The system performance has been analysed and the results have preliminarily demonstrated the concepts and functionality of the new NRTK framework based on Grid Computing, whilst some aspects of the performance of the system are yet to be improved in future work

The Use of Online Tools by Information Professionals in Medical Libraries in Oman

Rapid development of the Internet and the emergence of a new generation of the Internet within different social software offer advantages to medical libraries in terms of their services and marketing. Medical libraries need to change the ways they provide their services based on changes in users’ needs in the digital world. The main purpose of this study is to explore the perception/attitude of information professionals in Medical libraries in Oman towards use of various online tools or so-called Web2.0. The study also intends to highlight the main challenges that prevent libraries from using these tools and applications in providing services. An online survey was used as a data collection method. Survey Monkey software was used to design the questionnaire. The survey included all medical libraries (16) in Oman. The study found that the majority of information professionals in medical libraries in Oman are aware of Web 2.0 and the majority of them use its tools within library services. The majority of information professionals reported positively regarding the use of these tools in library services. However, several challenges were identified regarding using and adopting online tools within library services. This study tried to provide a clear understanding of the ways that online tools are used and adopted by information professionals in medical libraries. It is hoped that it will make a contribution to the future development of this subject area. Keywords: Oman, Online Tools, Information Professionals, Medical Libraries, Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Librarian 2.

Design and Implementation of an Economy Plane for the Internet

The Internet has been very successful in supporting many network applications. As the diversity of uses for the Internet has increased, many protocols and services have been developed by the industry and the research community. However, many of them failed to get deployed in the Internet. One challenge of deploying these novel ideas in operational network is that the network providers need to be involved in the process. Many novel network protocols and services, like multicast and end-to-end QoS, need the support from network providers. However, since network providers are typically driven by business reasons, if they can not get economic profit from supporting new protocols and services, they will not deploy them. Therefore, we conclude that the lack of explicit economic relationship in the current Internet hinders the innovation of itself, and it is critical that a network architecture intrinsically considers economic relationships. ChoiceNet is an NSF funded Future Internet Architecture (FIA) project that aims to address these challenges. ChoiceNet proposes an ``economy plane\u27\u27 of the Internet to explicitly represent economic relationship within the architecture. This economy plane enables entities in the network to dynamically set up fine-grained, short-term economic contracts for network services. A marketplace can be established for advertising and selling services. The services can be simple path services ( pathlets ) between end-points, or more complex processing and storage services (e.g., transcoding and caching). ChoiceNet is a comprehensive project, and its architecture is designed by researchers from several institutes. This work will not cover every aspect of it. Instead, this work will focus on five aspects of ChoiceNet: 1) service definition and protocol design, 2) marketplace design, 3) use plane design, 4) path finding algorithm design, and 5) access control for services. Service definition aims at a unified and extensible description of services, and the method to compose them. Marketplace design discusses the protocols used to advertise and request services. The use plane design describes how network providers and users will access the Marketplace while preserving the existing infrastructure and applications, it also discusses how to progressively deploy ChoiceNet in the current Internet. The path finding algorithm design proposes ParetoBFS, an algorithm finding all the Pareto-optimal paths in a multi-criteria network. The access control discusses how to prevent unauthorized usage of the services, we present OrthCredential, an algorithm for high-performance access control in ChoiceNet. To prove the feasibility of such an economy plane, this work presents a Software Defined Networking (SDN) based implementation of ChoiceNet. The implementation has been deployed and tested on GENI, a global test bed for network architectures. By designing and implementing ChoiceNet, this work tries to offer a network architecture that users can select from several different network services rather than being limited to a single choice. By enabling greater choice, ChoiceNet can promote competition among providers for price and quality. This competition will lead to lower prices and higher quality services, which are beneficial for consumers and eventually help bring sustained innovation into the Internet

Converging Future Internet, “Things”, and Big Data: An Specification Following NovaGenesis Model

The convergence of Internet of “things” (IoT) with big data platforms and cloud computing is already happening. However, the vast majority, if not all the proposals are based on the current Internet technologies. The convergence of IoT, big data and cloud in “clean slate” architectures is an unexplored topic. In this article, we discuss this convergence considering the viewpoint of a “clean slate” proposal called NovaGenesis. We specify a set of NovaGenesis services to publish sensor device’s data in distributed hash tables employing selfverifying addresses and contract-based trust network formation. IoT devices capabilities and configurations are exposed to software-controllers, which control their operational parameters. The specification covers how the “things” sensed information are subscribed by a big data service and injected in Spark big data platform, allowing NovaGenesis services to subscribe data analytics from Spark. Future work include implementation of the proposed specifications and further investigation of NovaGenesis services performance and scalability

Virtualization of set-top-box devices in next generation SDN-NFV networks: the INPUT project perspective

Due to the emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) paradigms, coupled with a hyper-connectivity communication paradigm, the \u201csoftwarisation\u201d of the Internet infrastructure and of its network management framework is gaining increasing popularity. This is the target of the INPUT platform, a novel infrastructure and paradigm supporting Future Internet personal cloud services in a more scalable and sustainable way, and with innovative addedvalue capabilities. The INPUT technologies enable next-generation cloud applications to go beyond classical service models, and even replace physical Smart Devices, usually placed in users\u2019 homes (e.g., set-top boxes), with their virtual images, providing them to users \u201cas a Service\u201d. In this paper we present the Virtual set-top box from both architectural and functional points of view, demonstrating the feasibility of the softwarized SDN/NFV paradigm joined with the fog-computing approach to support personal cloud services

On the investigation of cloud-based mobile media environments with service-populating and QoS-aware mechanisms

Recent advances in mobile devices and network technologies have set new trends in the way we use computers and access networks. Cloud Computing, where processing and storage resources are residing on the network is one of these trends. The other is Mobile Computing, where mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are believed to replace personal computers by combining network connectivity, mobility, and software functionality. In the future, these devices are expected to seamlessly switch between different network providers using vertical handover mechanisms in order to maintain network connectivity at all times. This will enable mobile devices to access Cloud Services without interruption as users move around. Using current service delivery models, mobile devices moving from one geographical location to another will keep accessing those services from the local Cloud of their previous network, which might lead to moving a large volume of data over the Internet backbone over long distances. This scenario highlights the fact that user mobility will result in more congestion on the Internet. This will degrade the Quality of Service and by extension, the Quality of Experience offered by the services in the Cloud and especially multimedia services that have very tight temporal constraints in terms of bandwidth and jitter. We believe that a different approach is required to manage resources more efficiently, while improving the Quality of Service and Media Service Delivery in which services run on localised public Clouds and are capable of populating other public Clouds in different geographical locations depending on service demands and network status. Using an analytical framework, this paper argues that as the demand for specific services increases in a location, it might be more efficient to move those services closer to that location. This will prevent the Internet backbone from experiencing high traffic loads due to multimedia streams and will offer service pr- viders an automated resource allocation and management mechanism for their services