Model Based Development of Quality-Aware Software Services

Modelling languages and development frameworks give support for functional and structural description of software architectures. But quality-aware applications require languages which allow expressing QoS as a first-class concept during architecture design and service composition, and to extend existing tools and infrastructures adding support for modelling, evaluating, managing and monitoring QoS aspects. In addition to its functional behaviour and internal structure, the developer of each service must consider the fulfilment of its quality requirements. If the service is flexible, the output quality depends both on input quality and available resources (e.g., amounts of CPU execution time and memory). From the software engineering point of view, modelling of quality-aware requirements and architectures require modelling support for the description of quality concepts, support for the analysis of quality properties (e.g. model checking and consistencies of quality constraints, assembly of quality), tool support for the transition from quality requirements to quality-aware architectures, and from quality-aware architecture to service run-time infrastructures. Quality management in run-time service infrastructures must give support for handling quality concepts dynamically. QoS-aware modeling frameworks and QoS-aware runtime management infrastructures require a common evolution to get their integration

Distributed multimedia systems

Multimedia systems will allow professionals worldwide to collaborate more effectively and to travel substantially less. But for multimedia systems to be effective, a good systems infrastructure is essential. In particular, support is needed for global and consistent sharing of information, for long-distance, high-bandwidth multimedia interpersonal communication, greatly enhanced reliability and availability, and security. These systems will also need to be easily usable by lay computer users. \ud In this paper we explore the operating system support that these multimedia systems must have in order to do the job properly

Smart PIN: utility-based replication and delivery of multimedia content to mobile users in wireless networks

Next generation wireless networks rely on heterogeneous connectivity technologies to support various rich media services such as personal information storage, file sharing and multimedia streaming. Due to users’ mobility and dynamic characteristics of wireless networks, data availability in collaborating devices is a critical issue. In this context Smart PIN was proposed as a personal information network which focuses on performance of delivery and cost efficiency. Smart PIN uses a novel data replication scheme based on individual and overall system utility to best balance the requirements for static data and multimedia content delivery with variable device availability due to user mobility. Simulations show improved results in comparison with other general purpose data replication schemes in terms of data availability

Towards a Framework for Developing Mobile Agents for Managing Distributed Information Resources

Distributed information management tools allow users to author, disseminate, discover and manage information within large-scale networked environments, such as the Internet. Agent technology provides the flexibility and scalability necessary to develop such distributed information management applications. We present a layered organisation that is shared by the specific applications that we build. Within this organisation we describe an architecture where mobile agents can move across distributed environments, integrate with local resources and other mobile agents, and communicate their results back to the user

An Efficient Transport Protocol for delivery of Multimedia An Efficient Transport Protocol for delivery of Multimedia Content in Wireless Grids

A grid computing system is designed for solving complicated scientific and commercial problems effectively,whereas mobile computing is a traditional distributed system having computing capability with mobility and adopting wireless communications. Media and Entertainment fields can take advantage from both paradigms by applying its usage in gaming applications and multimedia data management. Multimedia data has to be stored and retrieved in an efficient and effective manner to put it in use. In this paper, we proposed an application layer protocol for delivery of multimedia data in wireless girds i.e. multimedia grid protocol (MMGP). To make streaming efficient a new video compression algorithm called dWave is designed and embedded in the proposed protocol. This protocol will provide faster, reliable access and render an imperceptible QoS in delivering multimedia in wireless grid environment and tackles the challenging issues such as i) intermittent connectivity, ii) device heterogeneity, iii) weak security and iv) device mobility.Comment: 20 pages, 15 figures, Peer Reviewed Journa

Transport of video over partial order connections

A Partial Order and partial reliable Connection (POC) is an end-to-end transport connection authorized to deliver objects in an order that can differ from the transmitted one. Such a connection is also authorized to lose some objects. The POC concept is motivated by the fact that heterogeneous best-effort networks such as Internet are plagued by unordered delivery of packets and losses, which tax the performances of current applications and protocols. It has been shown, in several research works, that out of order delivery is able to alleviate (with respect to CO service) the use of end systems’ communication resources. In this paper, the efficiency of out-of-sequence delivery on MPEG video streams processing is studied. Firstly, the transport constraints (in terms of order and reliability) that can be relaxed by MPEG video decoders, for improving video transport, are detailed. Then, we analyze the performance gain induced by this approach in terms of blocking times and recovered errors. We demonstrate that POC connections fill not only the conceptual gap between TCP and UDP but also provide real performance improvements for the transport of multimedia streams such MPEG video

Mobile Online Gaming via Resource Sharing

Mobile gaming presents a number of main issues which remain open. These are concerned mainly with connectivity, computational capacities, memory and battery constraints. In this paper, we discuss the design of a fully distributed approach for the support of mobile Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs). In mobile environments, several features might be exploited to enable resource sharing among multiple devices / game consoles owned by different mobile users. We show the advantages of trading computing / networking facilities among mobile players. This operation mode opens a wide number of interesting sharing scenarios, thus promoting the deployment of novel mobile online games. In particular, once mobile nodes make their resource available for the community, it becomes possible to distribute the software modules that compose the game engine. This allows to distribute the workload for the game advancement management. We claim that resource sharing is in unison with the idea of ludic activity that is behind MOGs. Hence, such schemes can be profitably employed in these contexts.Comment: Proceedings of 3nd ICST/CREATE-NET Workshop on DIstributed SImulation and Online gaming (DISIO 2012). In conjunction with SIMUTools 2012. Desenzano, Italy, March 2012. ISBN: 978-1-936968-47-