A First Step Towards Automatically Building Network Representations

To fully harness Grids, users or middlewares must have some knowledge on the topology of the platform interconnection network. As such knowledge is usually not available, one must uses tools which automatically build a topological network model through some measurements. In this article, we define a methodology to assess the quality of these network model building tools, and we apply this methodology to representatives of the main classes of model builders and to two new algorithms. We show that none of the main existing techniques build models that enable to accurately predict the running time of simple application kernels for actual platforms. However some of the new algorithms we propose give excellent results in a wide range of situations

Mobile Service Clouds: A self-managing infrastructure for autonomic mobile computing services

Abstract. We recently introduced Service Clouds, a distributed infrastructure designed to facilitate rapid prototyping and deployment of autonomic communication services. In this paper, we propose a model that extends Service Clouds to the wireless edge of the Internet. This model, called Mobile Service Clouds, enables dynamic instantiation, composition, configuration, and reconfiguration of services on an overlay network to support mobile computing. We have implemented a prototype of this model and applied it to the problem of dynamically instantiating and migrating proxy services for mobile hosts. We conducted a case study involving data streaming across a combination of PlanetLab nodes, local proxies, and wireless hosts. Results are presented demonstrating the effectiveness of the prototype in establishing new proxies and migrating their functionality in response to node failures.