Personalised service discovery in mobile environments

In recent years, some trends have emerged that pertain both to mobile devices and the Web. On one side, mobile devices have transitioned from being simple wireless phones to become ubiquitous Web-enabled users' companions. On the other side, the Web has evolved from an online one-size-fits-all collection of interlinked documents to become an open platform of personalised services and content. It will not be long before these trends will converge and create a Seamless Web: an integrated environment where, besides traditional services delivered by powerful server machines accessible via wide area networks, new services and content will be offered by users to users via their portable devices. As a result, mobile users will soon be exposed - in addition to traditional "on-line" Web services/content - to a parallel universe of pervasive "off-line" services provided by devices in their surroundings. Such circumstances will raise new challenges when it comes to selecting the services to rely on, that will require solutions grounded on the characteristics of mobile environments. Two aspects will require particular attention: first, users will have access to a countless multitude of services impossible to explore; they will need assistance to identify, among this multitude, those services they are most likely to enjoy. Secondly, if today's services (and their providers) are always-on, `static' and aiming at Five 9s availability, tomorrow's pervasive services will be mobile (as devices move), fine-grained, increasingly composite (to provide richer functionalities) and so more unreliable by nature. Our research tackles the problem of service discovery in pervasive environments in two ways: on one hand, we support personalised discovery by means of a mobile recommender system, easing the discovery of pervasive services appealing to end-users. On the other hand, we enable reliable discovery, by reasoning on the composite nature of pervasive services and the physical availability of their component providers. Overall, we provide a discovery method that enables 'better' pervasive services, where by 'better' we mean both `more interesting' to the user and 'more reliable'

Un meta-modèle de composants pour la réalisation d'applications temps-réel flexibles et modulaires

The increase of software complexity along the years has led researchers in the software engineering field to look for approaches for conceiving and designing new systems. For instance, the service-oriented architectures approach is considered nowadays as the most advanced way to develop and integrate fastly modular and flexible applications. One of the software engineering solutions principles is re-usability, and consequently generality, which complicates its appilication in systems where optimizations are often used, like real-time systems. Thus, create real-time systems is expensive, because they must be conceived from scratch. In addition, most real-time systems do not beneficiate of the advantages which comes with software engineering approches, such as modularity and flexibility. This thesis aim to take real time aspects into account on popular and standard SOA solutions, in order to ease the design and development of modular and flexible applications. This will be done by means of a component-based real-time application model, which allows the dynamic reconfiguration of the application architecture. The component model will be an extension to the SCA standard, which integrates quality of service attributs onto the service consumer and provider in order to stablish a real-time specific service level agreement. This model will be executed on the top of a OSGi service platform, the standard de facto for development of modular applications in Java.La croissante complexité du logiciel a mené les chercheurs en génie logiciel à chercher des approcher pour concevoir et projéter des nouveaux systèmes. Par exemple, l'approche des architectures orientées services (SOA) est considérée actuellement comme le moyen le plus avancé pour réaliser et intégrer rapidement des applications modulaires et flexibles. Une des principales préocuppations des solutions en génie logiciel et la réutilisation, et par conséquent, la généralité de la solution, ce qui peut empêcher son application dans des systèmes où des optimisation sont souvent utilisées, tels que les systèmes temps réels. Ainsi, créer un système temps réel est devenu très couteux. De plus, la plupart des systèmes temps réel ne beneficient pas des facilités apportées par le genie logiciel, tels que la modularité et la flexibilité. Le but de cette thèse c'est de prendre en compte ces aspects temps réel dans des solutions populaires et standards SOA pour faciliter la conception et le développement d'applications temps réel flexibles et modulaires. Cela sera fait à l'aide d'un modèle d'applications temps réel orienté composant autorisant des modifications dynamiques dans l'architecture de l'application. Le modèle de composant sera une extension au standard SCA qui intègre des attributs de qualité de service sur le consomateur et le fournisseur de services pour l'établissement d'un accord de niveau de service spécifique au temps réel. Ce modèle sera executé sur une plateforme de services OSGi, le standard de facto pour le developpement d'applications modulaires en Java

Proyecto Docente e Investigador, Trabajo Original de Investigación y Presentación de la Defensa, preparado por Germán Moltó para concursar a la plaza de Catedrático de Universidad, concurso 082/22, plaza 6708, área de Ciencia de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial

Este documento contiene el proyecto docente e investigador del candidato Germán Moltó Martínez presentado como requisito para el concurso de acceso a plazas de Cuerpos Docentes Universitarios. Concretamente, el documento se centra en el concurso para la plaza 6708 de Catedrático de Universidad en el área de Ciencia de la Computación en el Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación de la Universitat Politécnica de València. La plaza está adscrita a la Escola Técnica Superior d'Enginyeria Informàtica y tiene como perfil las asignaturas "Infraestructuras de Cloud Público" y "Estructuras de Datos y Algoritmos".También se incluye el Historial Académico, Docente e Investigador, así como la presentación usada durante la defensa.Germán Moltó Martínez (2022). Proyecto Docente e Investigador, Trabajo Original de Investigación y Presentación de la Defensa, preparado por Germán Moltó para concursar a la plaza de Catedrático de Universidad, concurso 082/22, plaza 6708, área de Ciencia de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/18903

Private and censorship-resistant communication over public networks

Society’s increasing reliance on digital communication networks is creating unprecedented opportunities for wholesale surveillance and censorship. This thesis investigates the use of public networks such as the Internet to build robust, private communication systems that can resist monitoring and attacks by powerful adversaries such as national governments. We sketch the design of a censorship-resistant communication system based on peer-to-peer Internet overlays in which the participants only communicate directly with people they know and trust. This ‘friend-to-friend’ approach protects the participants’ privacy, but it also presents two significant challenges. The first is that, as with any peer-to-peer overlay, the users of the system must collectively provide the resources necessary for its operation; some users might prefer to use the system without contributing resources equal to those they consume, and if many users do so, the system may not be able to survive. To address this challenge we present a new game theoretic model of the problem of encouraging cooperation between selfish actors under conditions of scarcity, and develop a strategy for the game that provides rational incentives for cooperation under a wide range of conditions. The second challenge is that the structure of a friend-to-friend overlay may reveal the users’ social relationships to an adversary monitoring the underlying network. To conceal their sensitive relationships from the adversary, the users must be able to communicate indirectly across the overlay in a way that resists monitoring and attacks by other participants. We address this second challenge by developing two new routing protocols that robustly deliver messages across networks with unknown topologies, without revealing the identities of the communication endpoints to intermediate nodes or vice versa. The protocols make use of a novel unforgeable acknowledgement mechanism that proves that a message has been delivered without identifying the source or destination of the message or the path by which it was delivered. One of the routing protocols is shown to be robust to attacks by malicious participants, while the other provides rational incentives for selfish participants to cooperate in forwarding messages

Service Quality and Profit Control in Utility Computing Service Life Cycles

Utility Computing is one of the most discussed business models in the context of Cloud Computing. Service providers are more and more pushed into the role of utilities by their customer's expectations. Subsequently, the demand for predictable service availability and pay-per-use pricing models increases. Furthermore, for providers, a new opportunity to optimise resource usage offers arises, resulting from new virtualisation techniques. In this context, the control of service quality and profit depends on a deep understanding of the representation of the relationship between business and technique. This research analyses the relationship between the business model of Utility Computing and Service-oriented Computing architectures hosted in Cloud environments. The relations are clarified in detail for the entire service life cycle and throughout all architectural layers. Based on the elaborated relations, an approach to a delivery framework is evolved, in order to enable the optimisation of the relation attributes, while the service implementation passes through business planning, development, and operations. Related work from academic literature does not cover the collected requirements on service offers in this context. This finding is revealed by a critical review of approaches in the fields of Cloud Computing, Grid Computing, and Application Clusters. The related work is analysed regarding appropriate provision architectures and quality assurance approaches. The main concepts of the delivery framework are evaluated based on a simulation model. To demonstrate the ability of the framework to model complex pay-per-use service cascades in Cloud environments, several experiments have been conducted. First outcomes proof that the contributions of this research undoubtedly enable the optimisation of service quality and profit in Cloud-based Service-oriented Computing architectures

Process Models for Distributed Event-Based Systems

Distributed Event-Based Systems (DEBSs) are middleware supporting the interaction of publisher and subscriber components via events. In DEBSs, the subscribers to be notified when an event is announced are decided at run-time without requiring publisher components to know the name or locations of the subscribers, nor the subscribers to know the name or locations of the publishers. This low coupling between components makes DEBSs suitable for applications with a large or unpredictable number of autonomous components. The development of applications in DEBSs is an ad hoc process poorly supported by current software engineering methodologies. Moreover, the behaviours exhibited by these systems and their applications are not well understood, and no suitable models exist where these behaviours can be described and analyzed. The main concern of this thesis is the development of such models. Specifically, we develop formalisms and models supporting the specification, prediction, and validation of the behaviour exhibited by the middleware and the applications executing on it. Our main contributions to the area are: new formalisms for the representation of DEBSs and their applications, and for the specification of both, system and application properties; a categorization of the features related to the definition, announcement, and notification of events in DEBSs and, in general, event-based systems; models representing the categorized DEBS features; case studies detailing models and properties for specific systems; a prototype tool for the verification of DEBSs and applications. The formalisms developed expose the location of the actions in the modelled systems and support the specification of several forms of location-awareness and adaptive behaviour

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate