Semantic-based policy engineering for autonomic systems

This paper presents some important directions in the use of ontology-based semantics in achieving the vision of Autonomic Communications. We examine the requirements of Autonomic Communication with a focus on the demanding needs of ubiquitous computing environments, with an emphasis on the requirements shared with Autonomic Computing. We observe that ontologies provide a strong mechanism for addressing the heterogeneity in user task requirements, managed resources, services and context. We then present two complimentary approaches that exploit ontology-based knowledge in support of autonomic communications: service-oriented models for policy engineering and dynamic semantic queries using content-based networks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the major research challenges such approaches raise

Application collaboration in ubiquitous computing environments

With the emergence of mobile and ubiquitous computing environments, there is a requirement to enable collaborative applications between components of these environments. As many of these applications (e.g. MP3 players) have been designed to operate in isolation, making them work together is often complicated by two, different aspects: firstly, a lack of protocols to enable the systems to bind to each other for interaction and, secondly, semantic and ontological differences in the meta-data describing the data to be shared. An abstraction termed a Self-Managed Cell has previously been proposed as an architectural pattern for building autonomous systems, that can represent entities ranging from individual devices to entire environments, and have described mechanisms that enable such cells to establish peer-to-peer bindings facilitating interaction at the system and management level. Semantic and ontological differences in the meta-data describing information to be shared between peers and application level aspects of interaction still exist, and prevent successful, autonomous application collaboration. Typical approaches to application collaboration, particularly in the database world, require the presence of a third-party administrator to manage ontological differences; such an approach is incompatible with interactive, autonomous systems. This dissertation presents a novel approach to automatic collection mapping suitable for deployment in autonomous, interacting systems. The approach facilitates the collaboration of SMC application-level data collections by identifying areas of conflict and using meta-data values associated with those collections to establish commonality. Music sharing and traditional “book” library catalogue matching applications, exploiting this mapping mechanism, have been developed to facilitate the sharing of data between peers. Protocols and abstractions are used to establish commonality and collaboration between the systems, and the mapping mechanism is used to enhance interoperability at the application level

Enterprise Composition Architecture for Micro-Granular Digital Services and Products

The digitization of our society changes the way we live, work, learn, communicate, and collaborate. This defines the strategical context for composing resilient enterprise architectures for micro-granular digital services and products. The change from a closed-world modeling perspective to more flexible open-world composition and evolution of system architectures defines the moving context for adaptable systems, which are essential to enable the digital transformation. Enterprises are presently transforming their strategy and culture together with their processes and information systems to become more digital. The digital transformation deeply disrupts existing enterprises and economies. Since years a lot of new business opportunities appeared using the potential of the Internet and related digital technologies, like Internet of Things, services computing, cloud computing, big data with analytics, mobile systems, collaboration networks, and cyber physical systems. Digitization fosters the development of IT systems with many rather small and distributed structures, like Internet of Things or mobile systems. In this paper, we are focusing on the continuous bottom-up integration of micro-granular architectures for a huge amount of dynamically growing systems and services, like Internet of Things and Microservices, as part of a new digital enterprise architecture. To integrate micro-granular architecture models to living architectural model versions we are extending more traditional enterprise architecture reference models with state of art elements for agile architectural engineering to support the digitalization of services with related products, and their processes

Adaptive Process Distribution at the Edge of IoT using the Integration of BPMS and Containerization

Täna levivad pilvepõhised värkvõrgu (asjade interneti) süsteemid tuginevad protsesside halduseks kaugel asuvatel andmekeskustel, mis toob endaga kaasa latentsusprobleeme. Vastusena sellele probleemile on varem välja pakutud servaarvutuse lähenemine, kus arvutused viiakse läbi asjade interneti süsteemi võrgule füüsiliselt lähemal. Mitmete servaarvutuse metoodikate seas on uduarvutus lähenemine, kus rõhk on arvutuste liigutamisel värkvõrgu seadmetele endile. Ehkki uduarvutusel põhinev arhitektuur on paljutõotav, tõstatab see küsimuse – kuidas värkvõrgu protsessihaldussüsteemid (BPMS4IoT-süsteemid) äriprotsesse heterogeensetele värkvõrgu seadmetele jaotama peaksid? Levinud on lähenemine, kus protsesside töövooülesannete käituseks tuginetakse ühisele platvormile. Näiteks, kui haldusserver defineerib teatud töövoo ülesandena Pythoni skripti ja määrab selle seadmele, siis peab seadme töövookäitusmootor toetama vastavat mehhanismi skriptide jooksutamiseks. Selline nõue ei ole paindlik, arvestades värkvõrgu seadmete heterogeensust. Käesolevas magistritöös pakub autor välja raamistiku, mis eraldab töövoo ülesannete käitusmeetodi käitusmootorist kasutades selleks konteinertehnoloogiat. Töö käigus arendati välja raamistiku prototüüp ning viidi läbi katseid mikroarvutitel põhinevail seadmetel. Lisaks võrreldi väljapakutud uduarvutuse raamistiku jõudlust pilvearvutusel põhineva süsteemiga.Emerging cloud-centric Internet of Things (IoT) system relies on distant data centers to manage the entire processes, which raises the issue of latency. To address the issue, researchers have introduced the Edge computing methodologies that carry out computation closer to the edge network of IoT system. Among the numerous Edge computing approaches, Mist computing paradigm emphasises the mechanism that moves the computation further to the front-end IoT devices. Although the architecture of Mist computing is promising, it raises a new challenge in how the Business Process Management System for IoT (BPMS4IoT) distributes the business process workflow to the heterogeneous IoT devices? In general, executing business process workflows relies on the common platform for executing customized tasks. For example, if the management server defines a Python script task in a workflow, which has been allocated to an IoT device, the workflow engine of the IoT device must have the compatible execution method. Such a requirement is less flexible when one considers the heterogeneity of the IoT devices. Therefore, in this thesis, the author proposes a framework to decouple the workflow task execution method from the workflow engines using the containerization technology. A proof-of-concept prototype has been developed and has been tested on several single-board computers-based IoT devices. Further, a case study has been performed to demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework comparing to the cloud-centric system

Internet of Drones (IoD): Threats, Vulnerability, and Security Perspectives

The development of the Internet of Drones (IoD) becomes vital because of a proliferation of drone-based civilian or military applications. The IoD based technological revolution upgrades the current Internet environment into a more pervasive and ubiquitous world. IoD is capable of enhancing the state-of-the-art for drones while leveraging services from the existing cellular networks. Irrespective to a vast domain and range of applications, IoD is vulnerable to malicious attacks over open-air radio space. Due to increasing threats and attacks, there has been a lot of attention on deploying security measures for IoD networks. In this paper, critical threats and vulnerabilities of IoD are presented. Moreover, taxonomy is created to classify attacks based on the threats and vulnerabilities associated with the networking of drone and their incorporation in the existing cellular setups. In addition, this article summarizes the challenges and research directions to be followed for the security of IoD.Comment: 13 pages, 3 Figures, 1 Table, The 3rd International Symposium on Mobile Internet Security (MobiSec'18), Auguest 29-September 1, 2018, Cebu, Philippines, Article No. 37, pp. 1-1

UBIDEV: a homogeneous service framework for pervasive computing environments

This dissertation studies the heterogeneity problem of pervasive computing system from the viewpoint of an infrastructure aiming to provide a service-oriented application model. From Distributed System passing through mobile computing, pervasive computing is presented as a step forward in ubiquitous availability of services and proliferation of interacting autonomous entities. To better understand the problems related to the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of pervasive computing environments, we need to analyze the structure of a pervasive computing system from its physical and service dimension. The physical dimension describes the physical environment together wit the technology infrastructure that characterizes the interactions and the relations within the environment; the service dimension represents the services (being them software or not) the environment is able to provide [Nor99]. To better separate the constrains and the functionalities of a pervasive computing system, this dissertation classifies it in terms of resources, context, classification, services, coordination and application. UBIDEV, as the key result of this dissertation, introduces a unified model helping the design and the implementation of applications for heterogeneous and dynamic environments. This model is composed of the following concepts: • Resource: all elements of the environment that are manipulated by the application, they are the atomic abstraction unit of the model. • Context: all information coming from the environment that is used by the application to adapts its behavior. Context contains resources and services and defines their role in the application. • Classification: the environment is classified according to the application ontology in order to ground the generic conceptual model of the application to the specific environment. It defines the basic semantic level of interoperability. • Service: the functionalities supported by the system; each service manipulates one or more resources. Applications are defined as a coordination and adaptation of services. • Coordination: all aspects related to service composition and execution as well as the use of the contextual information are captured by the coordination concept. • Application Ontology: represents the viewpoint of the application on the specific context; it defines the high level semantic of resources, services and context. Applying the design paradigm proposed by UBIDEV, allows to describe applications according to a Service Oriented Architecture[Bie02], and to focus on application functionalities rather than their relations with the physical devices. Keywords: pervasive computing, homogenous environment, service-oriented, heterogeneity problem, coordination model, context model, resource management, service management, application interfaces, ontology, semantic services, interaction logic, description logic.Questa dissertazione studia il problema della eterogeneit`a nei sistemi pervasivi proponendo una infrastruttura basata su un modello orientato ai servizi. I sistemi pervasivi sono presentati come un’evoluzione naturale dei sistemi distribuiti, passando attraverso mobile computing, grazie ad una disponibilit`a ubiqua di servizi (sempre, ovunque ed in qualunque modo) e ad loro e con l’ambiente stesso. Al fine di meglio comprendere i problemi legati allintrinseca eterogeneit`a dei sistemi pervasivi, dobbiamo prima descrivere la struttura fondamentale di questi sistemi classificandoli attraverso la loro dimensione fisica e quella dei loro servizi. La dimensione fisica descrive l’ambiente fisico e tutti i dispositivi che fanno parte del contesto della applicazione. La dimensione dei servizi descrive le funzionalit`a (siano esse software o no) che l’ambiente `e in grado di fornire [Nor99]. I sistemi pervasivi vengono cos`ı classificati attraverso una metrica pi `u formale del tipo risorse, contesto, servizi, coordinazione ed applicazione. UBIDEV, come risultato di questa dissertazione, introduce un modello uniforme per la descrizione e lo sviluppo di applicazioni in ambienti dinamici ed eterogenei. Il modello `e composto dai seguenti concetti di base: • Risorse: gli elementi dell’ambiente fisico che fanno parte del modello dellapplicazione. Questi rappresentano l’unit`a di astrazione atomica di tutto il modello UBIDEV. • Contesto: le informazioni sullo stato dell’ambiente che il sistema utilizza per adattare il comportamento dell’applicazione. Il contesto include informazioni legate alle risorse, ai servizi ed alle relazioni che li legano. • Classificazione: l’ambiente viene classificato sulla base di una ontologia che rappresenta il punto di accordo a cui tutti i moduli di sistema fanno riferimento. Questa classificazione rappresenta il modello concettuale dell’applicazione che si riflette sull’intero ambiente. Si definisce cos`ı la semantica di base per tutto il sistema. • Servizi: le funzionalit`a che il sistema `e in grado di fornire; ogni servizio `e descritto in termini di trasformazione di una o pi `u risorse. Le applicazioni sono cos`ı definite in termini di cooperazione tra servizi autonomi. • Coordinazione: tutti gli aspetti legati alla composizione ed alla esecuzione di servizi cos`ı come l’elaborazione dell’informazione contestuale. • Ontologia dell’Applicazione: rappresenta il punto di vista dell’applicazione; definisce la semantica delle risorse, dei servizi e dell’informazione contestuale. Applicando il paradigma proposto da UBIDEV, si possono descrivere applicazioni in accordo con un modello Service-oriented [Bie02] ed, al tempo stesso, ridurre l’applicazione stessa alle sue funzionalit`a di alto livello senza intervenire troppo su come queste funzionalit` a devono essere realizzate dalle singole componenti fisiche

Facing Big Data System Architecture Deployments: Towards an Automated Approach Using Container Technologies for Rapid Prototyping

Within the last decade, big data became a promising trend for many application areas, offering immense potential and a competitive edge for various organizations. As the technical foundation for most of today´s data-intensive projects, not only corresponding infrastructures and facilities but also the appropriate knowledge is required. Currently, several projects and services exist that not only allow enterprises to utilize but also to deploy related technologies and systems. However, at the same time, the use of these is accompanied by various challenges that may result in huge monetary expenditures, a lack of modifiability, or a risk of vendor lock-ins. To overcome these shortcomings, in the contribution at hand, modern container and task automation technologies are used to wrap complex big data technologies into re-usable and portable resources. Those are subsequently incorporated in a framework to automate the deployment of big data architectures in private and limited resources