Towards a Scalable Dynamic Spatial Database System

With the rise of GPS-enabled smartphones and other similar mobile devices, massive amounts of location data are available. However, no scalable solutions for soft real-time spatial queries on large sets of moving objects have yet emerged. In this paper we explore and measure the limits of actual algorithms and implementations regarding different application scenarios. And finally we propose a novel distributed architecture to solve the scalability issues.Comment: (2012

ElfStore: A Resilient Data Storage Service for Federated Edge and Fog Resources

Edge and fog computing have grown popular as IoT deployments become wide-spread. While application composition and scheduling on such resources are being explored, there exists a gap in a distributed data storage service on the edge and fog layer, instead depending solely on the cloud for data persistence. Such a service should reliably store and manage data on fog and edge devices, even in the presence of failures, and offer transparent discovery and access to data for use by edge computing applications. Here, we present Elfstore, a first-of-its-kind edge-local federated store for streams of data blocks. It uses reliable fog devices as a super-peer overlay to monitor the edge resources, offers federated metadata indexing using Bloom filters, locates data within 2-hops, and maintains approximate global statistics about the reliability and storage capacity of edges. Edges host the actual data blocks, and we use a unique differential replication scheme to select edges on which to replicate blocks, to guarantee a minimum reliability and to balance storage utilization. Our experiments on two IoT virtual deployments with 20 and 272 devices show that ElfStore has low overheads, is bound only by the network bandwidth, has scalable performance, and offers tunable resilience.Comment: 24 pages, 14 figures, To appear in IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), Milan, Italy, 201

PicShark: mitigating metadata scarcity through large-scale P2P collaboration

With the commoditization of digital devices, personal information and media sharing is becoming a key application on the pervasive Web. In such a context, data annotation rather than data production is the main bottleneck. Metadata scarcity represents a major obstacle preventing efficient information processing in large and heterogeneous communities. However, social communities also open the door to new possibilities for addressing local metadata scarcity by taking advantage of global collections of resources. We propose to tackle the lack of metadata in large-scale distributed systems through a collaborative process leveraging on both content and metadata. We develop a community-based and self-organizing system called PicShark in which information entropy—in terms of missing metadata—is gradually alleviated through decentralized instance and schema matching. Our approach focuses on semi-structured metadata and confines computationally expensive operations to the edge of the network, while keeping distributed operations as simple as possible to ensure scalability. PicShark builds on structured Peer-to-Peer networks for distributed look-up operations, but extends the application of self-organization principles to the propagation of metadata and the creation of schema mappings. We demonstrate the practical applicability of our method in an image sharing scenario and provide experimental evidences illustrating the validity of our approac

M-Grid : A distributed framework for multidimensional indexing and querying of location based big data

The widespread use of mobile devices and the real time availability of user-location information is facilitating the development of new personalized, location-based applications and services (LBSs). Such applications require multi-attribute query processing, handling of high access scalability, support for millions of users, real time querying capability and analysis of large volumes of data. Cloud computing aided a new generation of distributed databases commonly known as key-value stores. Key-value stores were designed to extract value from very large volumes of data while being highly available, fault-tolerant and scalable, hence providing much needed features to support LBSs. However complex queries on multidimensional data cannot be processed efficiently as they do not provide means to access multiple attributes. In this thesis we present MGrid, a unifying indexing framework which enables key-value stores to support multidimensional queries. We organize a set of nodes in a P-Grid overlay network which provides fault-tolerance and efficient query processing. We use Hilbert Space Filling Curve based linearization technique which preserves the data locality to efficiently manage multi-dimensional data in a key-value store. We propose algorithms to dynamically process range and k nearest neighbor (kNN) queries on linearized values. This removes the overhead of maintaining a separate index table. Our approach is completely independent from the underlying storage layer and can be implemented on any cloud infrastructure. Experiments on Amazon EC2 show that MGrid achieves a performance improvement of three orders of magnitude in comparison to MapReduce and four times to that of MDHBase scheme --Abstract, pages iii-iv

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges