Proceedings of International Workshop "Global Computing: Programming Environments, Languages, Security and Analysis of Systems"

According to the IST/ FET proactive initiative on GLOBAL COMPUTING, the goal is to obtain techniques (models, frameworks, methods, algorithms) for constructing systems that are flexible, dependable, secure, robust and efficient. The dominant concerns are not those of representing and manipulating data efficiently but rather those of handling the co-ordination and interaction, security, reliability, robustness, failure modes, and control of risk of the entities in the system and the overall design, description and performance of the system itself. Completely different paradigms of computer science may have to be developed to tackle these issues effectively. The research should concentrate on systems having the following characteristics: • The systems are composed of autonomous computational entities where activity is not centrally controlled, either because global control is impossible or impractical, or because the entities are created or controlled by different owners. • The computational entities are mobile, due to the movement of the physical platforms or by movement of the entity from one platform to another. • The configuration varies over time. For instance, the system is open to the introduction of new computational entities and likewise their deletion. The behaviour of the entities may vary over time. • The systems operate with incomplete information about the environment. For instance, information becomes rapidly out of date and mobility requires information about the environment to be discovered. The ultimate goal of the research action is to provide a solid scientific foundation for the design of such systems, and to lay the groundwork for achieving effective principles for building and analysing such systems. This workshop covers the aspects related to languages and programming environments as well as analysis of systems and resources involving 9 projects (AGILE , DART, DEGAS , MIKADO, MRG, MYTHS, PEPITO, PROFUNDIS, SECURE) out of the 13 founded under the initiative. After an year from the start of the projects, the goal of the workshop is to fix the state of the art on the topics covered by the two clusters related to programming environments and analysis of systems as well as to devise strategies and new ideas to profitably continue the research effort towards the overall objective of the initiative. We acknowledge the Dipartimento di Informatica and Tlc of the University of Trento, the Comune di Rovereto, the project DEGAS for partially funding the event and the Events and Meetings Office of the University of Trento for the valuable collaboration

Cost-aware Defense for Parallel Server Systems against Reliability and Security Failures

Parallel server systems in transportation, manufacturing, and computing heavily rely on dynamic routing using connected cyber components for computation and communication. Yet, these components remain vulnerable to random malfunctions and malicious attacks, motivating the need for fault-tolerant dynamic routing that are both traffic-stabilizing and cost-efficient. In this paper, we consider a parallel server system with dynamic routing subject to reliability and stability failures. For the reliability setting, we consider an infinite-horizon Markov decision process where the system operator strategically activates protection mechanism upon each job arrival based on traffic state observations. We prove an optimal deterministic threshold protecting policy exists based on dynamic programming recursion of the HJB equation. For the security setting, we extend the model to an infinite-horizon stochastic game where the attacker strategically manipulates routing assignment. We show that both players follow a threshold strategy at every Markov perfect equilibrium. For both failure settings, we also analyze the stability of the traffic queues under control. Finally, we develop approximate dynamic programming algorithms to compute the optimal/equilibrium policies, supplemented with numerical examples and experiments for validation and illustration.Comment: Major Revision in Automatic

QoS-Aware Energy Management and Node Scheduling Schemes for Sensor Network-Based Surveillance Applications

Recent advances in wireless technologies have led to an increased deployment of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for a plethora of diverse surveillance applications such as health, military, and environmental. However, sensor nodes in WSNs usually suffer from short device lifetime due to severe energy constraints and therefore, cannot guarantee to meet the Quality of Service (QoS) needs of various applications. This is proving to be a major hindrance to the widespread adoption of WSNs for such applications. Therefore, to extend the lifetime of WSNs, it is critical to optimize the energy usage in sensor nodes that are often deployed in remote and hostile terrains. To this effect, several energy management schemes have been proposed recently. Node scheduling is one such strategy that can prolong the lifetime of WSNs and also helps to balance the workload among the sensor nodes. In this article, we discuss on the energy management techniques of WSN with a particular emphasis on node scheduling and propose an energy management life-cycle model and an energy conservation pyramid to extend the network lifetime of WSNs. We have provided a detailed classification and evaluation of various node scheduling schemes in terms of their ability to fulfill essential QoS requirements, namely coverage, connectivity, fault tolerance, and security. We considered essential design issues such as network type, deployment pattern, sensing model in the classification process. Furthermore, we have discussed the operational characteristics of schemes with their related merits and demerits. We have compared the efficacy of a few well known graph-based scheduling schemes with suitable performance analysis graph. Finally, we study challenges in designing and implementing node scheduling schemes from a QoS perspective and outline open research problems