Agoric computation: trust and cyber-physical systems

In the past two decades advances in miniaturisation and economies of scale have led to the emergence of billions of connected components that have provided both a spur and a blueprint for the development of smart products acting in specialised environments which are uniquely identifiable, localisable, and capable of autonomy. Adopting the computational perspective of multi-agent systems (MAS) as a technological abstraction married with the engineering perspective of cyber-physical systems (CPS) has provided fertile ground for designing, developing and deploying software applications in smart automated context such as manufacturing, power grids, avionics, healthcare and logistics, capable of being decentralised, intelligent, reconfigurable, modular, flexible, robust, adaptive and responsive. Current agent technologies are, however, ill suited for information-based environments, making it difficult to formalise and implement multiagent systems based on inherently dynamical functional concepts such as trust and reliability, which present special challenges when scaling from small to large systems of agents. To overcome such challenges, it is useful to adopt a unified approach which we term agoric computation, integrating logical, mathematical and programming concepts towards the development of agent-based solutions based on recursive, compositional principles, where smaller systems feed via directed information flows into larger hierarchical systems that define their global environment. Considering information as an integral part of the environment naturally defines a web of operations where components of a systems are wired in some way and each set of inputs and outputs are allowed to carry some value. These operations are stateless abstractions and procedures that act on some stateful cells that cumulate partial information, and it is possible to compose such abstractions into higher-level ones, using a publish-and-subscribe interaction model that keeps track of update messages between abstractions and values in the data. In this thesis we review the logical and mathematical basis of such abstractions and take steps towards the software implementation of agoric modelling as a framework for simulation and verification of the reliability of increasingly complex systems, and report on experimental results related to a few select applications, such as stigmergic interaction in mobile robotics, integrating raw data into agent perceptions, trust and trustworthiness in orchestrated open systems, computing the epistemic cost of trust when reasoning in networks of agents seeded with contradictory information, and trust models for distributed ledgers in the Internet of Things (IoT); and provide a roadmap for future developments of our research

Lightweight wireless network authentication scheme for constrained oracle sensors

x, 212 leaves : ill. (some col.) ; 29 cmIncludes abstract and appendices.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-147).With the significant increase in the dependence of contextual data from constrained IoT, the blockchain has been proposed as a possible solution to address growing concerns from organizations. To address this, the Lightweight Blockchain Authentication for Constrained Sensors (LBACS) scheme was proposed and evaluated using quantitative and qualitative methods. LBACS was designed with constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in mind and independent of a blockchain implementation. It asserts the authentication and provenance of constrained IoT on the blockchain utilizing a multi-signature approach facilitated by symmetric and asymmetric methods and sufficient considerations for key and certificate registry management. The metrics, threat assessment and comparison to existing WSN authentication schemes conducted asserted the pragmatic use of LBACS to provide authentication, blockchain provenance, integrity, auditable, revocation, weak backward and forward secrecy and universal forgeability. The research has several implications for the ubiquitous use of IoT and growing interest in the blockchain

Final CHOReOS Architectural Style and its Relation with the CHOReOS Development Process and IDRE

This is Part b of Deliverable D1.4, which specifies the final CHOReOS architectural style, that is, the types of components, connectors, and configurations that are composed within the Future Internet of services, as enabled by the CHOReOS technologies developed in WP2 to WP4 and integrated in the WP5 IDRE. The definition of the CHOReOS architectural style is especially guided by the objective of meeting the challenges posed by the Future Internet, i.e.: (i) the ultra large base of services and of consumers, (ii) the high heterogeneity of the services that get composed, from the ones offered by tiny things to the ones hosted on powerful cloud computing infrastructures, (iii) the increasing predominance of mobile consumers and services, which take over the original fixed Inter- net, and (iv) the required awareness of, and related adaptation to, the continuous environmental changes. Another critical challenge posed by the Future Internet is that of security, trust and privacy. However, the study of technologies dedicated to enforcing security, privacy and trust is beyond the scope of the CHOReOS project; instead, state of the art technologies and possibly latest results from projects focused on security solutions are built upon for the development of CHOReOS use cases -if and when needed-. The CHOReOS architectural style that is presented in this deliverable refines the definition of the early style introduced in Deliverable D1.3. Key features of the CHOReOS architectural elements are as follows: (1) The CHOReOS service-based components are technology agnostic and allow for the abstraction of the large diversity of Future Internet services, and particularly traditional Business services as well as Thing-based services; a key contribution of the component formalization lies in the inference of service abstractions that allows grouping services that are functionally similar in a systematic way, and thereby contributes to facing the ULS of the Future Internet together with dealing with system adaptation through service substitution. (2) The CHOReOS middleware-layer connectors span the variety of interaction paradigms, both discrete and continuous, which are used in today's increasingly complex distributed systems, as opposed to enforcing a single interaction paradigm that is commonly undertaken in traditional SOA; a central contribution of the connector formalization is the introduction of a multi-paradigm connector type, which not solely allows having highly heterogeneous services composed in the Future Internet but also having those heterogeneous services interoperating even if based on distinct interaction paradigms. (3) The CHOReOS coordination protocols introduce the third and last type of architectural elements char- acterizing the CHOReOS style. They specifically define the structure and behavior of service-oriented systems within the Future Internet as the fully distributed composition of services, i.e., choreographies; the key contribution of the work lies in a systematic model-based solution to choreography realizability, which synthesizes dedicated coordination delegates that govern the coordination of services

Pervasive computing reference architecture from a software engineering perspective (PervCompRA-SE)

Pervasive computing (PervComp) is one of the most challenging research topics nowadays. Its complexity exceeds the outdated main frame and client-server computation models. Its systems are highly volatile, mobile, and resource-limited ones that stream a lot of data from different sensors. In spite of these challenges, it entails, by default, a lengthy list of desired quality features like context sensitivity, adaptable behavior, concurrency, service omnipresence, and invisibility. Fortunately, the device manufacturers improved the enabling technology, such as sensors, network bandwidth, and batteries to pave the road for pervasive systems with high capabilities. On the other hand, this domain area has gained an enormous amount of attention from researchers ever since it was first introduced in the early 90s of the last century. Yet, they are still classified as visionary systems that are expected to be woven into people’s daily lives. At present, PervComp systems still have no unified architecture, have limited scope of context-sensitivity and adaptability, and many essential quality features are insufficiently addressed in PervComp architectures. The reference architecture (RA) that we called (PervCompRA-SE) in this research, provides solutions for these problems by providing a comprehensive and innovative pair of business and technical architectural reference models. Both models were based on deep analytical activities and were evaluated using different qualitative and quantitative methods. In this thesis we surveyed a wide range of research projects in PervComp in various subdomain areas to specify our methodological approach and identify the quality features in the PervComp domain that are most commonly found in these areas. It presented a novice approach that utilizes theories from sociology, psychology, and process engineering. The thesis analyzed the business and architectural problems in two separate chapters covering the business reference architecture (BRA) and the technical reference architecture (TRA). The solutions for these problems were introduced also in the BRA and TRA chapters. We devised an associated comprehensive ontology with semantic meanings and measurement scales. Both the BRA and TRA were validated throughout the course of research work and evaluated as whole using traceability, benchmark, survey, and simulation methods. The thesis introduces a new reference architecture in the PervComp domain which was developed using a novel requirements engineering method. It also introduces a novel statistical method for tradeoff analysis and conflict resolution between the requirements. The adaptation of the activity theory, human perception theory and process re-engineering methods to develop the BRA and the TRA proved to be very successful. Our approach to reuse the ontological dictionary to monitor the system performance was also innovative. Finally, the thesis evaluation methods represent a role model for researchers on how to use both qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate a reference architecture. Our results show that the requirements engineering process along with the trade-off analysis were very important to deliver the PervCompRA-SE. We discovered that the invisibility feature, which was one of the envisioned quality features for the PervComp, is demolished and that the qualitative evaluation methods were just as important as the quantitative evaluation methods in order to recognize the overall quality of the RA by machines as well as by human beings

Wireless sensor network as a distribute database

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have played a role in various fields. In-network data processing is one of the most important and challenging techniques as it affects the key features of WSNs, which are energy consumption, nodes life circles and network performance. In the form of in-network processing, an intermediate node or aggregator will fuse or aggregate sensor data, which are collected from a group of sensors before transferring to the base station. The advantage of this approach is to minimize the amount of information transferred due to lack of computational resources. This thesis introduces the development of a hybrid in-network data processing for WSNs to fulfil the WSNs constraints. An architecture for in-network data processing were proposed in clustering level, data compression level and data mining level. The Neighbour-aware Multipath Cluster Aggregation (NMCA) is designed in the clustering level, which combines cluster-based and multipath approaches to process different packet loss rates. The data compression schemes and Optimal Dynamic Huffman (ODH) algorithm compressed data in the cluster head for the compressed level. A semantic data mining for fire detection was designed for extracting information from the raw data by the semantic data-mining model is developed to improve data accuracy and extract the fire event in the simulation. A demo in-door location system with in-network data processing approach is built to test the performance of the energy reduction of our designed strategy. In conclusion, the added benefits that the technical work can provide for in-network data processing is discussed and specific contributions and future work are highlighted