A centralised cloud services repository (CCSR) framework for optimal cloud service advertisement discovery from heterogenous web portals

© 2013 IEEE. A cloud service marketplace is the first point for a consumer to discovery, select and possible composition of different services. Although there are some private cloud service marketplaces, such as Microsoft Azure, that allow consumers to search service advertainment belonging to a given vendor. However, due to an increase in the number of cloud service advertisement, a consumer needs to find related services across the worldwide web (WWW). A consumer mostly uses a search engine such as Google, Bing, for the service advertisement discovery. However, these search engines are insufficient in retrieving related cloud services advertainments on time. There is a need for a framework that effectively and efficiently discovery of the related service advertisement for ordinary users. This paper addresses the issue by proposing a user-friendly harvester and a centralised cloud service repository framework. The proposed Centralised Cloud Service Repository (CCSR) framework has two modules - Harvesting as-a-Service (HaaS) and the service repository module. The HaaS module allows users to extract real-time data from the web and make it available to different file format without the need to write any code. The service repository module provides a centralised cloud service repository that enables a consumer for efficient and effective cloud service discovery. We validate and demonstrate the suitability of our framework by comparing its efficiency and feasibility with three widely used open-source harvesters. From the evaluative result, we observe that when we harvest a large number of services advertisements, the HaaS is more efficient compared with the traditional harvesting tools. Our cloud services advertisements dataset is publicly available for future research at: http://cloudmarketregistry.com/cloud-market-registry/home.html

Autonomic Cloud Computing: Open Challenges and Architectural Elements

As Clouds are complex, large-scale, and heterogeneous distributed systems, management of their resources is a challenging task. They need automated and integrated intelligent strategies for provisioning of resources to offer services that are secure, reliable, and cost-efficient. Hence, effective management of services becomes fundamental in software platforms that constitute the fabric of computing Clouds. In this direction, this paper identifies open issues in autonomic resource provisioning and presents innovative management techniques for supporting SaaS applications hosted on Clouds. We present a conceptual architecture and early results evidencing the benefits of autonomic management of Clouds.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conference keynote pape

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201

Security and Compliance Ontology for Cloud Service Agreements

Cloud computing is a business paradigm where two important roles must be defined: provider and consumer. Providers offer services (e.g. web application, web services, and databases) and consumers pay for using them. The goal of this research is to focus on security and compliance aspects of cloud service. An ontology is introduced, which is the conceptualization of cloud domain, for analyzing different compliance aspects of cloud agreements. The terms, properties and relations are shown in a diagram. The proposed ontology can help service consumers to extract relevant data from service level agreements, to interpret compliance regulations, and to compare different contractual terms. Finally, some recommendations are presented for cloud consumers to adopt services and evaluate security risks

Enhancing healthcare services through cloud service: a systematic review

Although cloud-based healthcare services are booming, in-depth research has not yet been conducted in this field. This study aims to address the shortcomings of previous research by analyzing all journal articles from the last five years using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) systematic literature review methodology. The findings of this study highlight the benefits of cloud-based healthcare services for healthcare providers and patients, including enhanced healthcare services, data security, privacy issues, and innovative information technology (IT) service delivery models. However, this study also identifies challenges associated with using cloud services in healthcare, such as security and privacy concerns, and proposes solutions to address these issues. This study concludes by discussing future research directions and the need for a complete solution that addresses the conflicting requirements of the security, privacy, efficiency, and scalability of cloud technologies in healthcare

A linked data compliant framework for dynamic and web-scale consumption of web services

The While Semantic Web Services (SWS) research aims at automating Web service tasks such as discovery, orchestration and execution, its take-up is very limited so far. This is due to several reasons, such as inherent complexity of existing SWS frameworks and the considerable costs involved in creating correct SWS descriptions. In addition, while semantics are in use to enable tasks such as discovery, interaction between service consumers, providers and brokering environments is still not supported by semantic message descriptions. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has produced a set of established principles for sharing and describing data, such as RDF as representation language and the integral use of dereferencable URIs. In this paper we propose to apply those principles to expose Web services and Web APIs and introduce a framework in which service registries as well as services contribute to the automation of service discovery, and hence, workload is distributed more efficiently. This is achieved by developing a Linked Data compliant Web services framework with that communicate with semi-centralised registries but compute their suitability for a given request themselves. All communications among different framework components are using RDF-based message protocols including service input and output. This framework aims at optimizing load balance and performance by dynamically assembling services at run time in a massively distributed Web environment