FedRR: a federated resource reservation algorithm for multimedia services

The Internet is rapidly evolving towards a multimedia service delivery platform. However, existing Internet-based content delivery approaches have several disadvantages, such as the lack of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. Future Internet research has presented several promising ideas to solve the issues related to the current Internet, such as federations across network domains and end-to-end QoS reservations. This paper presents an architecture for the delivery of multimedia content across the Internet, based on these novel principles. It facilitates the collaboration between the stakeholders involved in the content delivery process, allowing them to set up loosely-coupled federations. More specifically, the Federated Resource Reservation (FedRR) algorithm is proposed. It identifies suitable federation partners, selects end-to-end paths between content providers and their customers, and optimally configures intermediary network and infrastructure resources in order to satisfy the requested QoS requirements and minimize delivery costs

Towards trusted volunteer grid environments

Intensive experiences show and confirm that grid environments can be considered as the most promising way to solve several kinds of problems relating either to cooperative work especially where involved collaborators are dispersed geographically or to some very greedy applications which require enough power of computing or/and storage. Such environments can be classified into two categories; first, dedicated grids where the federated computers are solely devoted to a specific work through its end. Second, Volunteer grids where federated computers are not completely devoted to a specific work but instead they can be randomly and intermittently used, at the same time, for any other purpose or they can be connected or disconnected at will by their owners without any prior notification. Each category of grids includes surely several advantages and disadvantages; nevertheless, we think that volunteer grids are very promising and more convenient especially to build a general multipurpose distributed scalable environment. Unfortunately, the big challenge of such environments is, however, security and trust. Indeed, owing to the fact that every federated computer in such an environment can randomly be used at the same time by several users or can be disconnected suddenly, several security problems will automatically arise. In this paper, we propose a novel solution based on identity federation, agent technology and the dynamic enforcement of access control policies that lead to the design and implementation of trusted volunteer grid environments.Comment: 9 Pages, IJCNC Journal 201

TINA as a virtual market place for telecommunication and information services: the VITAL experiment

The VITAL (Validation of Integrated Telecommunication Architectures for the Long-Term) project has defined, implemented and demonstrated an open distributed telecommunication architecture (ODTA) for deploying, managing and using a set of heterogeneous multimedia, multi-party, and mobility services. The architecture was based on the latest specifications released by TINA-C. The architecture was challenged in a set of trials by means of a heterogeneous set of applications. Some of the applications were developed within the project from scratch, while some others focused on integrating commercially available applications. The applications were selected in such a way as to assure full coverage of the architecture implementation and reflect a realistic use of it. The VITAL experience of refining and implementing TINA specifications and challenging the resulting platform by a heterogeneous set of services has proven the openness, flexibility and reusability of TINA. This paper describes the VITAL approach when choosing the different services and how they challenge and interact with the architecture, focusing especially on the service architecture and the Ret reference point definitions. The VITAL adjustments and enhancements to the TINA architecture are described. This paper contributes to proving that the TINA-based VITAL ODTA allows for easy and cost-effective development and deployment of advanced end-user and operator services, and can indeed act as the basis for a virtual market place for telecommunications service

Adam Smith goes mobile : managing services beyond 3G with the digital marketplace

The next generation of mobile communications systems is expected to offer new business opportunities to existing and new market players. A market-based middleware framework has been recently proposed whereby service providers, independent of network operators, are able to tender online service contracts to network operators in a dynamic and competitive manner. This facilitates a seamless service provision over disparate networks in a consumer-centric manner. Service providers select network bearers according to the network operators' ability to meet the QoS target, which in turn is influenced, among other things, by user's price and quality requirements. The benefits of this proposal are the complementarity of numerous network resources, the decoupling of services and networks in a self-organising distributed environment, and increased competition to consumers’ advantag

Interworking Between SIP/SDP and H.323

There are currently two standards for signaling and control of Internet telephone calls, namely ITU-T Recommendation H.323 and the IETF Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). We describe how an interworking function (IWF) can allow SIP user agents to call H.323 terminals and vice versa. Our solution addresses user registration, call sequence mapping and session description. We also describe and compare various approaches for multi-party conferencing and call transfer

A Centralized Model for Establishing End-to-End Communication Services via Management Agents

This paper presents a centralized approach for establishing end-to-end communication services via management agents. The main proposal is the modular architecture of the third-party based Service Establishment Agent (SEA). The SEA manages inter-provider service negotiation process with per-domain management agents through an appropriate signaling agent. It also receives and interprets end-toend service requests, selects inter-domain paths, performs mapping of service classes among domains on the path, and evaluates conformance of the offered service level with the required one. It allows implementation of different algorithms for the aforementioned functions as well as their selection and combination according to the predefined management policies. Simulation results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the distributed model in terms of service negotiation times. In the prototype development process, a policy-based solution for mapping of service classes was implemented. The performance evaluation shows that processing requirements for handling multiple service requests are modest, while benefit of the SEA approach is the lack of need to build long-term consensus among providers about technical choices for achieving network interconnection. The SEA architecture is completely independent of the quality of service mechanisms available in particular domains.</p