Quality of service assurance for the next generation Internet

The provisioning for multimedia applications has been of increasing interest among researchers and Internet Service Providers. Through the migration from resource-based to service-driven networks, it has become evident that the Internet model should be enhanced to provide support for a variety of differentiated services that match applications and customer requirements, and not stay limited under the flat best-effort service that is currently provided. In this paper, we describe and critically appraise the major achievements of the efforts to introduce Quality of Service (QoS) assurance and provisioning within the Internet model. We then propose a research path for the creation of a network services management architecture, through which we can move towards a QoS-enabled network environment, offering support for a variety of different services, based on traffic characteristics and user expectations

A Service Component-based Accounting and Charging Architecture to Support Interim Mechanisms across Multiple Domains

Today, telematics services are often compositions of different chargeable service components offered by different service providers. To enhance component-based accounting and charging, the service composition information is used to match with the corresponding charging structure of a service session. This enables the sharing of revenues among the service providers, and calculation of the total cost for the end-user. When multiple independent service providers are involved, it is a great challenge to apply interim accounting and charging during a service session in order to minimize financial risks between business partners. Another interesting development is the trend towards outsourcing accounting and charging processes to specialized business partners. This requires a decoupling between provisioning and accounting and charging processes. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive component-based accounting and charging architecture to support service session provisioning across multiple domains. The architecture, modeled in UML, incorporates an interim accounting and charging mechanism to enable the processing and exchange of accounting information needed to update intermediate charges for separate service components and the user's credit, even during the service provisioning phase

Notes on Cloud computing principles

This letter provides a review of fundamental distributed systems and economic Cloud computing principles. These principles are frequently deployed in their respective fields, but their inter-dependencies are often neglected. Given that Cloud Computing first and foremost is a new business model, a new model to sell computational resources, the understanding of these concepts is facilitated by treating them in unison. Here, we review some of the most important concepts and how they relate to each other

A Micro Financing Framework for Rural Water and Sanitation Provisioning in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper investigates potential issues with regard to water and sanitation. It argues that technological fixes alone are not enough and need to be complemented by other forms of innovation such as local community organization and financial innovation. It provides a micro financing framework that is founded on the Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (RoSCA) arrangements at the village level

Towards a Swiss National Research Infrastructure

In this position paper we describe the current status and plans for a Swiss National Research Infrastructure. Swiss academic and research institutions are very autonomous. While being loosely coupled, they do not rely on any centralized management entities. Therefore, a coordinated national research infrastructure can only be established by federating the various resources available locally at the individual institutions. The Swiss Multi-Science Computing Grid and the Swiss Academic Compute Cloud projects serve already a large number of diverse user communities. These projects also allow us to test the operational setup of such a heterogeneous federated infrastructure

Dynamic virtual private network provisioning from multiple cloud infrastructure service providers

The Cloud infrastructure service providers currently provision basic virtualized computing resources as on demand and dynamic services but there is no common framework in existence that allows the seamless provisioning of even these basic services across multiple cloud service providers, although this is not due to any inherent incompatibility or proprietary nature of the foundation technologies on which these cloud platforms are built. We present a solution idea which aims to provide a dynamic and service oriented provisioning of secure virtual private networks on top of multiple cloud infrastructure service providers. This solution leverages the benefits of peer to peer overlay networks, i.e., the flexibility and scalability to handle the churn of nodes joining and leaving the VPNs and can adapt the topology of the VPN as per the requirements of the applications utilizing its intercloud secure communication framework

CAMMD: Context Aware Mobile Medical Devices

Telemedicine applications on a medical practitioners mobile device should be context-aware. This can vastly improve the effectiveness of mobile applications and is a step towards realising the vision of a ubiquitous telemedicine environment. The nomadic nature of a medical practitioner emphasises location, activity and time as key context-aware elements. An intelligent middleware is needed to effectively interpret and exploit these contextual elements. This paper proposes an agent-based architectural solution called Context-Aware Mobile Medical Devices (CAMMD). This framework can proactively communicate patient records to a portable device based upon the active context of its medical practitioner. An expert system is utilised to cross-reference the context-aware data of location and time against a practitioners work schedule. This proactive distribution of medical data enhances the usability and portability of mobile medical devices. The proposed methodology alleviates constraints on memory storage and enhances user interaction with the handheld device. The framework also improves utilisation of network bandwidth resources. An experimental prototype is presented highlighting the potential of this approach