161,410 research outputs found
Mobile agent based distributed network management : modeling, methodologies and applications
The explosive growth of the Internet and the continued dramatic increase for all wireless services are fueling the demand for increased capacity, data rates, support of multimedia services, and support for different Quality of Services (QoS) requirements for different classes of services. Furthermore future communication networks will be strongly characterized by heterogeneity. In order to meet the objectives of instant adaptability to the users\u27 requirements and of interoperability and seamless operation within the heterogeneous networking environments, flexibility in terms of network and resource management will be a key design issue. The new emerging technology of mobile agent (MA) has arisen in the distributed programming field as a potential flexible way of managing resources of a distributed system, and is a challenging opportunity for delivering more flexible services and dealing with network programmability.
This dissertation mainly focuses on: a) the design of models that provide a generic framework for the evaluation and analysis of the performance and tradeoffs of the mobile agent management paradigm; b) the development of MA based resource and network management applications. First, in order to demonstrate the use and benefits of the mobile agent based management paradigm in the network and resource management process, a commercial application of a multioperator network is introduced, and the use of agents to provide the underlying framework and structure for its implementation and deployment is investigated. Then, a general analytical model and framework for the evaluation of various network management paradigms is introduced and discussed. It is also illustrated how the developed analytical framework can be used to quantitatively evaluate the performances and tradeoffs in the various computing paradigms. Furthermore, the design tradeoffs for choosing the MA based management paradigm to develop a flexible resource management scheme in wireless networks is discussed and evaluated. The integration of an advanced bandwidth reservation mechanism with a bandwidth reconfiguration based call admission control strategy is also proposed. A framework based on the technology of mobile agents, is introduced for the efficient implementation of the proposed integrated resource and QoS management, while the achievable performance of the overall proposed management scheme is evaluated via modeling and simulation. Finally the use of a distributed cooperative scheme among the mobile agents that can be applied in the future wireless networks is proposed and demonstrated, to improve the energy consumption for the routine management processes of mobile terminals, by adopting the peer-to-peer communication concept of wireless ad-hoc networks. The performance evaluation process and the corresponding numerical results demonstrate the significant system energy savings, while several design issues and tradeoffs of the proposed scheme, such as the fairness of the mobile agents involved in the management activity, are discussed and evaluated
Support for flexible and transparent distributed computing
Modern distributed computing developed from the traditional supercomputing community rooted firmly
in the culture of batch management. Therefore, the field has been dominated by queuing-based resource
managers and work flow based job submission environments where static resource demands needed be
determined and reserved prior to launching executions. This has made it difficult to support resource
environments (e.g. Grid, Cloud) where the available resources as well as the resource requirements
of applications may be both dynamic and unpredictable. This thesis introduces a flexible execution
model where the compute capacity can be adapted to fit the needs of applications as they change during
execution. Resource provision in this model is based on a fine-grained, self-service approach instead
of the traditional one-time, system-level model. The thesis introduces a middleware based Application
Agent (AA) that provides a platform for the applications to dynamically interact and negotiate resources
with the underlying resource infrastructure.
We also consider the issue of transparency, i.e., hiding the provision and management of the distributed
environment. This is the key to attracting public to use the technology. The AA not only replaces
user-controlled process of preparing and executing an application with a transparent software-controlled
process, it also hides the complexity of selecting right resources to ensure execution QoS. This service
is provided by an On-line Feedback-based Automatic Resource Configuration (OAC) mechanism cooperating
with the flexible execution model. The AA constantly monitors utility-based feedbacks from the
application during execution and thus is able to learn its behaviour and resource characteristics. This
allows it to automatically compose the most efficient execution environment on the fly and satisfy any
execution requirements defined by users. Two policies are introduced to supervise the information learning
and resource tuning in the OAC. The Utility Classification policy classifies hosts according to their
historical performance contributions to the application. According to this classification, the AA chooses
high utility hosts and withdraws low utility hosts to configure an optimum environment. The Desired
Processing Power Estimation (DPPE) policy dynamically configures the execution environment according
to the estimated desired total processing power needed to satisfy users’ execution requirements.
Through the introducing of flexibility and transparency, a user is able to run a dynamic/normal
distributed application anywhere with optimised execution performance, without managing distributed
resources. Based on the standalone model, the thesis further introduces a federated resource negotiation
framework as a step forward towards an autonomous multi-user distributed computing world
Virtual Interactions With Real-agents For Sustainable Natural Resource Management
Common pool resource management systems are complex to manage due to the absence of a clear understanding of the effects of users’ behavioral characteristics. Non-cooperative decision making based on individual rationality (as opposed to group rationality) and a tendency to free ride due to lack of trust and information about other users’ behavior creates externalities and can lead to tragedy of the commons without intervention by a regulator. Nevertheless, even regulatory institutions often fail to sustain natural common pool resources in the absence of clear understanding of the responses of multiple heterogeneous decision makers to different regulation schemes. While modeling can help with our understanding of complex coupled human-natural systems, past research has not been able to realistically simulate these systems for two major limitations: 1) lack of computational capacity and proper mathematical models for solving distributed systems with self-optimizing agents; and 2) lack of enough information about users’ characteristics in common pool resource systems due to absence of reliable monitoring information. Recently, different studies have tried to address the first limitation by developing agent-based models, which can be appropriately handled with today’s computational capacity. While these models are more realistic than the social planner’s models which have been traditionally used in the field, they normally rely on different heuristics for characterizing users’ behavior and incorporating heterogeneity. This work is a step-forward in addressing the second limitation, suggesting an efficient method for collecting information on diverse behavioral characteristics of real agents for incorporation in distributed agent-based models. Gaming in interactive virtual environments is suggested as a reliable method for understanding different variables that promote sustainable resource use through observation of decision making and iii behavior of the resource system beneficiaries under various institutional frameworks and policies. A review of educational or serious games for environmental management was undertaken to determine an appropriate game for collecting information on real-agents and also to investigate the state of environmental management games and their potential as an educational tool. A web-based groundwater sharing simulation game—Irrigania—was selected to analyze the behavior of real agents under different common pool resource management institutions. Participants included graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Central Florida and Lund University. Information was collected on participants’ resource use, behavior and mindset under different institutional settings through observation and discussion with participants. Preliminary use of water resources gaming suggests communication, cooperation, information disclosure, trust, credibility and social learning between beneficiaries as factors promoting a shift towards sustainable resource use. Additionally, Irrigania was determined to be an effective tool for complementing traditional lecture-based teaching of complex concepts related to sustainable natural resource management. The different behavioral groups identified in the study can be used for improved simulation of multi-agent groundwater management systems
Privacy in Cooperative Distributed Systems: Modeling and Protection Framework
A new form of computation is emerging rapidly with cloud computing, mobile computing, wearable computing and the Internet-of-Things. All can be characterized as a class of “Cooperative Distributed Systems” (CDS) in open environment. A major driver of the growth is the exponential adoption by people and organizations within all aspects of their day-to-day matters. In this context, users’ requirements for privacy protection are becoming essential and complex beyond the traditional approaches. This requires a formal treatment of “privacy” as a fundamental computation concept in CDS paradigm.
The objective is to develop a comprehensive formal model for “privacy” as base to build a CDS based framework and platform in which various applications allow users to enjoy the comprehensive services in open environments while protecting their privacy seamlessly. To this end, this thesis presents a novel way of understudying, modeling and analyzing privacy concerns in CDS. A formal foundations and model of privacy is developed within the context of information management. This served as a base for developing a privacy protection management framework for CDS. It includes a privacy-aware agent model for CDS platform with the ability to support interaction-based privacy protection.
The feasibility of the proposed models has been demonstrated by developing an agent-based CDS platform using JIAC framework and a privacy-based Contract Net Protocol. It also included the application scenarios for the framework for privacy protection is Internet-of-Tings, cloud-based resource scheduling and personal assistance
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
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