InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services

Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions. The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database) for handling sudden variations in service demands. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape

Combinatorial Auction-based Mechanisms for Composite Web Service Selection

Composite service selection presents the opportunity for the rapid development of complex applications using existing web services. It refers to the problem of selecting a set of web services from a large pool of available candidates to logically compose them to achieve value-added composite services. The aim of service selection is to choose the best set of services based on the functional and non-functional (quality related) requirements of a composite service requester. The current service selection approaches mostly assume that web services are offered as single independent entities; there is no possibility for bundling. Moreover, the current research has mainly focused on solving the problem for a single composite service. There is a limited research to date on how the presence of multiple requests for composite services affects the performance of service selection approaches. Addressing these two aspects can significantly enhance the application of composite service selection approaches in the real-world. We develop new approaches for the composite web service selection problem by addressing both the bundling and multiple requests issues. In particular, we propose two mechanisms based on combinatorial auction models, where the provisioning of multiple services are auctioned simultaneously and service providers can bid to offer combinations of web services. We mapped these mechanisms to Integer Linear Programing models and conducted extensive simulations to evaluate them. The results of our experimentation show that bundling can lead to cost reductions compared to when services are offered independently. Moreover, the simultaneous consideration of a set of requests enhances the success rate of the mechanism in allocating services to requests. By considering all composite service requests at the same time, the mechanism achieves more homogenous prices which can be a determining factor for the service requester in choosing the best composite service selection mechanism to deploy

Ties That Bind: Employment Protection and Labor Market Outcomes in Latin America

This paper reviews the regulations governing hiring, firing, overtime work, social security contributions, minimum wages, and collective bargaining in the region, examining their impact on labor market outcomes.

Wage-setting Behavior in France: Additional Evidence from an Ad-hoc Survey

We investigate the wage-setting behavior of French companies using an ad-hoc survey conducted specifically for this study. Our main results are the following. i) Wages are changed infrequently. The mean duration of wage contracts is one year. Wage changes occur at regular intervals during the year and are concentrated in January and July. ii) We find a lower degree of downward real wage rigidity and nominal wage rigidity in France compared to the European average. iii) About one third of companies have an internal policy to grant wage increases according to inflation. iv) When companies are faced with adverse shocks, only a partial response is transmitted into prices. Companies also adopt cost-cutting strategies. The wage of newly hired employees plays an important role in this adjustment.Wage Rigidity, Wage-setting Behavior, Survey Data.

A taxonomy of multi-industry labour force skills

This paper proposes an empirical study of the skill repertoires of 290 sectors in the United States over the period 2002–2011. We use information on employment structures and job content of occupations to flesh out structural characteristics of industry-specific know-how. The exercise of mapping the skills structures embedded in the workforce yields a taxonomy that discloses novel nuances on the organization of industry. In so doing we also take an initial step towards the integration of labour and employment in the area of innovation studies

Multi-agent automated negotiation for management of services in smart cities

The objective of this PhD thesis is the study, the design and the prototype implementation of an agent-based automated negotiation mechanism to support the development of smart Service Based Applications having as a reference scenario the smart cities of the future intended as a realistic market of services. this research shows that the use of the multi-agent paradigm and of automated negotiation for Service Based Applications in the context of Smart Cities is a approach that: allows to model a "smart" behaviour for the providers of SBAs; makes it possible the automate the composition of services based on specific user requirements of QoS, taking into account the variability of a market of services; allows the management of conflicting interests among providers and users of services in applications of Smart Mobility

Wage-setting behavior in France: additional evidence from an ad-hoc survey

We investigate the wage-setting behavior of French companies using an ad-hoc survey conducted specifically for this study. Our main results are the following. i) Wages are changed infrequently. The mean duration of wage contracts is one year. Wage changes occur at regular intervals during the year and are concentrated in January and July. ii) We find a lower degree of down-ward real wage rigidity and nominal wage rigidity in France compared to the European average. iii) About one third of companies have an internal policy to grant wage increases according to inflation. iv) When companies are faced adverse shocks, only a partial response is transmitted into prices. Companies also adopt cost-cutting strategies. The wage of newly hired employees plays an important role in this adjustment. JEL Classification: E3, D4, L11survey data, wage rigidity, wage-setting behavior

UNIVERSAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF M2M ENABLED INTER-CLOUD SERVICES FOR INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM

 The objective of this study is to develop the design of a generic infrastructure for on-demand applications for intelligent transport systems (ITS) in an urban area. The main idea of the study is to allow seamless service composition and consumption, but also to allow rapid deployment of new services through the pooling of different devices and access networks that may be owned and operated by different actors such as telecom operators, transportation service operators, governmental organizations, etc. This research serves the solution for the problem of interoperability between different devices, on the fly device reconfiguration and service discovery. Â