Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud

With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes, i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions supporting them. In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00

Dynamic Choreographies: Theory And Implementation

Programming distributed applications free from communication deadlocks and race conditions is complex. Preserving these properties when applications are updated at runtime is even harder. We present a choreographic approach for programming updatable, distributed applications. We define a choreography language, called Dynamic Interaction-Oriented Choreography (AIOC), that allows the programmer to specify, from a global viewpoint, which parts of the application can be updated. At runtime, these parts may be replaced by new AIOC fragments from outside the application. AIOC programs are compiled, generating code for each participant in a process-level language called Dynamic Process-Oriented Choreographies (APOC). We prove that APOC distributed applications generated from AIOC specifications are deadlock free and race free and that these properties hold also after any runtime update. We instantiate the theoretical model above into a programming framework called Adaptable Interaction-Oriented Choreographies in Jolie (AIOCJ) that comprises an integrated development environment, a compiler from an extension of AIOCs to distributed Jolie programs, and a runtime environment to support their execution.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1407.097

Representation of virtual choreographies in learning dashboards of interoperable LMS analytics

Learning management systems (LMS) collect a large amount of data from user interaction, and it isn't easy to analyze this data in a reliable and context-independent manner. This research seeks to comprehend how virtual choreographies can be represented in interoperable LMS analytics dashboards. In order to gain a better understanding of the problem, this objective has been divided into three sub-goals: determining which interactions can be gathered from LMS contexts, identifying virtual choreographies from LMS logs, and representing virtual choreographies in learning dashboards. To achieve these objectives, we first conducted a Systematic Literature Review to comprehend the behaviors and interactions other authors have investigated in LMS contexts. Then, by applying these findings to this dissertation's case study, a methodical procedure for extracting valuable choreographies from the logs was outlined. The Design Science Research methodology was then applied to transforming logs into virtual choreographies and their representation in learning dashboards. It was implemented two services: one responsible for identifying virtual choreographies from data logs and transforming the logs into statements, recipes, and choreographies, following xAPI specification elements; and the other translates the information from the backend service into dashboard visualizations, allowing the user to view representations for statements, recipes, choreographies, and various visualizations. These artifacts provide a new flexible and cost-efficient solution for the identification of virtual choreographies, thereby facilitating the widespread adoption of their use

INFRASTRUCTURE FOR INTEROPERABILITY OF THE E-GOVERNMENT APPLICATIONS BASED ON SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES

The e-Government interoperability is the ability of ICT components/applications to work together, in other words it is the ability of two or more diverse government (ICT) systems or components to sharing and re-use of information-services, inter-linking of administrative tasks, within and between sectors are essential factors for the delivery of high quality, innovative, seamless and customer-centric e-services. The organizational interoperability refers to the cooperation way of the public administrations processes, by defining the communication interfaces between processes. This approach addresses the interoperability of e-government applications at organizational and semantic level, adopting Web services (WS) and Semantic Web Services (SWS) as technological solutions. The e-Government interoperability is becoming an increasingly crucial issue, especially for developing countries that have committed to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 . Enhanced government efficiency and effectiveness coupled with the delivery of basic public services to all citizens are essential components required to achieve such goals. In this context, most governments have finalized the design of national e-government strategies and are busy implementing priority programmes. Today the data needed by policy makers to make better decisions is available but inaccessible. Policy makers are faced not only with overlapping and uncoordinated data sources, but also with the absence of common terms of reference and means of representing these data. This results in the time consuming and complex cost of comparing data that is represented differently. Interoperability will allow data compiled by different agencies to be used together to make faster and better decisions. An important goal of governance is to enable the citizenry to have easier and faster access to government information and services. The seamless flow of data from one government office to another provides the policy maker with the information needed to draft sound policy and deliver better services. In this paper we present an approach, which addresses the interoperability of e-government applications at organizational and semantic level, adopting Web services (WS) and Semantic Web Services (SWS) as technological solutions. The main objective of this work consists in designing and developing a distributed network of semantic registries in order to publish, find and execute the Web services. The publishing in registries of the Web services consists in the execution of syntactic and semantic matching algorithms between the attributes of the registries and the attributes of Web services.e-government application, interoperability, semantic registries, WSDL standard