Towards Adaptable and Adaptive Policy-Free Middleware

We believe that to fully support adaptive distributed applications, middleware must itself be adaptable, adaptive and policy-free. In this paper we present a new language-independent adaptable and adaptive policy framework suitable for integration in a wide variety of middleware systems. This framework facilitates the construction of adaptive distributed applications. The framework addresses adaptability through its ability to represent a wide range of specific middleware policies. Adaptiveness is supported by a rich contextual model, through which an application programmer may control precisely how policies should be selected for any particular interaction with the middleware. A contextual pattern mechanism facilitates the succinct expression of both coarse- and fine-grain policy contexts. Policies may be specified and altered dynamically, and may themselves take account of dynamic conditions. The framework contains no hard-wired policies; instead, all policies can be configured.Comment: Submitted to Dependable and Adaptive Distributed Systems Track, ACM SAC 200

Towards a service-oriented e-infrastructure for multidisciplinary environmental research

Research e-infrastructures are considered to have generic and thematic parts. The generic part provids high-speed networks, grid (large-scale distributed computing) and database systems (digital repositories and data transfer systems) applicable to all research commnities irrespective of discipline. Thematic parts are specific deployments of e-infrastructures to support diverse virtual research communities. The needs of a virtual community of multidisciplinary envronmental researchers are yet to be investigated. We envisage and argue for an e-infrastructure that will enable environmental researchers to develop environmental models and software entirely out of existing components through loose coupling of diverse digital resources based on the service-oriented achitecture. We discuss four specific aspects for consideration for a future e-infrastructure: 1) provision of digital resources (data, models & tools) as web services, 2) dealing with stateless and non-transactional nature of web services using workflow management systems, 3) enabling web servce discovery, composition and orchestration through semantic registries, and 4) creating synergy with existing grid infrastructures

Every Cloud Has a Push Data Lining: Incorporating Cloud Services in a Context-Aware Application

We investigated context-awareness by utilising multiple sources of context in a mobile device setting. In our experiment we developed a system consisting of a mobile client, running on the Android platform, integrated with a cloud-based service. These components were integrated using pushmessaging technology.One of the key featureswas the automatic adaptation of smartphones in accordance with implicit user needs. The novelty of our approach consists in the use of multiple sources of context input to the system, which included the use of calendar data and web based user configuration tool, as well as that of an external, cloud-based, configuration file storing user interface preferences which, pushed at log-on time irrespective of access device, frees the user from having to manually configure its interface.The systemwas evaluated via two rounds of user evaluations (n = 50 users), the feedback of which was generally positive and demonstrated the viability of using cloud-based services to provide an enhanced context-aware user experience

SAMI: Service-Based Arbitrated Multi-Tier Infrastructure for Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the state-ofthe- art mobile computing technology aims to alleviate resource poverty of mobile devices. Recently, several approaches and techniques have been proposed to augment mobile devices by leveraging cloud computing. However, long-WAN latency and trust are still two major issues in MCC that hinder its vision. In this paper, we analyze MCC and discuss its issues. We leverage Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to propose an arbitrated multi-tier infrastructure model named SAMI for MCC. Our architecture consists of three major layers, namely SOA, arbitrator, and infrastructure. The main strength of this architecture is in its multi-tier infrastructure layer which leverages infrastructures from three main sources of Clouds, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), and MNOs' authorized dealers. On top of the infrastructure layer, an arbitrator layer is designed to classify Services and allocate them the suitable resources based on several metrics such as resource requirement, latency and security. Utilizing SAMI facilitate development and deployment of service-based platform-neutral mobile applications.Comment: 6 full pages, accepted for publication in IEEE MobiCC'12 conference, MobiCC 2012:IEEE Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing, Beijing, Chin

Consuming Web Services on Mobile Platforms

Web services are an emerging technology that provides interoperability between applications running in different platforms. The Web services technology provide the best approach to Service Oriented Architecture envision of component collaboration for better business re-quirements fulfilment in large enterprise systems. The challenges in implementing Web services consuming clients for low-resources mobile devices connected through unreliable wireless connections are delimited. The paper also presents a communication architecture that moves the heavy load of XML-based messaging system from the mobile clients to an external middleware component. The middleware component will act like a gateway that lightly com-municates with the device in a client-server manner over a fast binary protocol and at the same time takes the responsibility of solving the request to the Web service.Web Services, SOA, Mobile Computing, Mobile Devices