The Fog Makes Sense: Enabling Social Sensing Services With Limited Internet Connectivity

Social sensing services use humans as sensor carriers, sensor operators and sensors themselves in order to provide situation-awareness to applications. This promises to provide a multitude of benefits to the users, for example in the management of natural disasters or in community empowerment. However, current social sensing services depend on Internet connectivity since the services are deployed on central Cloud platforms. In many circumstances, Internet connectivity is constrained, for instance when a natural disaster causes Internet outages or when people do not have Internet access due to economical reasons. In this paper, we propose the emerging Fog Computing infrastructure to become a key-enabler of social sensing services in situations of constrained Internet connectivity. To this end, we develop a generic architecture and API of Fog-enabled social sensing services. We exemplify the usage of the proposed social sensing architecture on a number of concrete use cases from two different scenarios.Comment: Ruben Mayer, Harshit Gupta, Enrique Saurez, and Umakishore Ramachandran. 2017. The Fog Makes Sense: Enabling Social Sensing Services With Limited Internet Connectivity. In Proceedings of The 2nd International Workshop on Social Sensing, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, April 21 2017 (SocialSens'17), 6 page

Investigating Decision Support Techniques for Automating Cloud Service Selection

The compass of Cloud infrastructure services advances steadily leaving users in the agony of choice. To be able to select the best mix of service offering from an abundance of possibilities, users must consider complex dependencies and heterogeneous sets of criteria. Therefore, we present a PhD thesis proposal on investigating an intelligent decision support system for selecting Cloud based infrastructure services (e.g. storage, network, CPU).Comment: Accepted by IEEE Cloudcom 2012 - PhD consortium trac

Cost-based Optimization of Multistore Query Plans

Multistores are data management systems that enable query processing across different and heterogeneous databases; besides the distribution of data, complexity factors like schema heterogeneity and data replication must be resolved through integration and data fusion activities. Our multistore solution relies on a dataspace to provide the user with an integrated view of the available data and enables the formulation and execution of GPSJ queries. In this paper, we propose a technique to optimize the execution of GPSJ queries by formulating and evaluating different execution plans on the multistore. In particular, we outline different strategies to carry out joins and data fusion by relying on different schema representations; then, a self-learning black-box cost model is used to estimate execution times and select the most efficient plan. The experiments assess the effectiveness of the cost model in choosing the best execution plan for the given queries and exploit multiple multistore benchmarks to investigate the factors that influence the performance of different plans