Improving the Scalability of DPWS-Based Networked Infrastructures

The Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) specification enables seamless discovery, configuration, and interoperability of networked devices in various settings, ranging from home automation and multimedia to manufacturing equipment and data centers. Unfortunately, the sheer simplicity of event notification mechanisms that makes it fit for resource-constrained devices, makes it hard to scale to large infrastructures with more stringent dependability requirements, ironically, where self-configuration would be most useful. In this report, we address this challenge with a proposal to integrate gossip-based dissemination in DPWS, thus maintaining compatibility with original assumptions of the specification, and avoiding a centralized configuration server or custom black-box middleware components. In detail, we show how our approach provides an evolutionary and non-intrusive solution to the scalability limitations of DPWS and experimentally evaluate it with an implementation based on the the Web Services for Devices (WS4D) Java Multi Edition DPWS Stack (JMEDS).Comment: 28 pages, Technical Repor

The Hunt for Science Diplomacy: Practice and Perceptions in the Horizon 2020 Scientific Community. EL-CSID Working Paper Issue 2018/18 • June 2018

There are many illustrations from recent history of what we now call science diplomacy; for example, where nations have advanced scientific collaboration to build relationships and smooth hostilities in the period post World War II. However, compared to other fields such as cultural diplomacy, academics and policy makers have only recently begun to investigate and develop frameworks and tools for ‘science diplomacy’. We are still in the process of testing the limits of the concept, which can most readily be explained as actions that exist at the interface of scientific practice and foreign policy. Science is often considered alongside culture as a tool of soft power (Nye, 1990) but there are several critical differences between the two fields and they should not be given a false equivalence as a diplomatic tool. Cultural practice and knowledge are by their very nature fundamentally linked to a particular nation or group; it can be shared without diminution in value and is very difficult to lose. Science knowledge and practices on the other hand, can be transferred, sold or stolen, and used for the economic benefit or advancement of others. Intellectual property has independent economic value and must be protected; its loss can diminish competitiveness, influence and lead to conflict between states (as we see in contemporary US, China relations). Its application leads to tradeable technology and goods and hard economic advantage. Taking liberties with Nye’s (1990) classic terminology, if cultural diplomacy is the runny egg of soft power, then scientific diplomacy is much harder boiled

Federated and autonomic management of multimedia services

Over the years, the Internet has significantly evolved in size and complexity. Additionally, the modern multimedia services it offers have considerably more stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements than traditional static services. These factors contribute to the ever-increasing complexity and cost to manage the Internet and its services. In the dissertation, a novel network management architecture is proposed to overcome these problems. It supports QoS-guarantees of multimedia services across the Internet, by setting up end-to-end network federations. A network federation is defined as a persistent cross-organizational agreement that enables the cooperating networks to share capabilities. Additionally, the architecture incorporates aspects from autonomic network management to tackle the ever-growing management complexity of modern communications networks. Specifically, a hierarchical approach is presented, which guarantees scalable collaboration of huge amounts of self-governing autonomic management components