A prototype and demonstrator of Akogrimo’s architecture: An approach of merging grids, SOA, and the mobile Internet

The trend of merging telecommunication infrastructures with traditional Information Technology (IT) infrastructures is ongoing and important for commercial service providers. The driver behind this development is, on one hand, the strong need for enhanced services and on the other hand, the need of telecommunication operators aiming at value-added service provisioning to a wide variety of customers. In the telecommunications sector, the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a promising service platform, which may become a ''standard'' for supporting added-value services on top of the next generation network infrastructure. However, since its range of applicability is bound to SIP- enabled services, IMS extensions are being proposed by ''SIPifying'' applications. In parallel to these developments within the traditional IT sector, the notion of Virtual Organizations (VO) enabling collaborative businesses across organizational boundaries is addressed in the framework of Web Services (WS) standards implementing a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). Here, concepts for controlled resource and service sharing based on WS and Semantic Technologies have been consolidated. Since the telecommunications sector has become, in the meantime ''mobile'', all concepts brought into this infrastructure must cope with the dynamics mobility brings in. Therefore, within the Akogrimo project the VO concept has been extended towards a Mobile Dynamic Virtual Organization (MDVO) concept, additionally considering key requirements of mobile users and resources. Especial attention is given to ensure the duality of the merge of both, SOA and IMS approaches to holistically support SOA-enabled mobile added-value services and their users. This work describes major results of the Akogrimo project, paying special attention to the overall Akogrimo architecture, the prototype implemented, and the key scenario in which the instantiated Akogrimo architecture shows a very clear picture of applicability, use, and an additional functional evaluation

The MobyDick Project: A Mobile Heterogeneous All-IP Architecture

Proceedings of Advanced Technologies, Applications and Market Strategies for 3G (ATAMS 2001). Cracow, Poland: 17-20 June, 2001.This paper presents the current stage of an IP-based architecture for heterogeneous environments, covering UMTS-like W-CDMA wireless access technology, wireless and wired LANs, that is being developed under the aegis of the IST Moby Dick project. This architecture treats all transmission capabilities as basic physical and data-link layers, and attempts to replace all higher-level tasks by IP-based strategies. The proposed architecture incorporates aspects of mobile-IPv6, fast handover, AAA-control, and Quality of Service. The architecture allows for an optimised control on the radio link layer resources. The Moby dick architecture is currently under refinement for implementation on field trials. The services planned for trials are data transfer and voice-over-IP.Publicad

Meta-analysis of genome-wide DNA methylation and integrative omics of age in human skeletal muscle

International audienceBackground: Knowledge of age-related DNA methylation changes in skeletal muscle is limited, yet this tissue is severely affected by ageing in humans.Methods: We conducted a large-scale epigenome-wide association study meta-analysis of age in human skeletal muscle from 10 studies (total n = 908 muscle methylomes from men and women aged 18-89 years old). We explored the genomic context of age-related DNA methylation changes in chromatin states, CpG islands, and transcription factor binding sites and performed gene set enrichment analysis. We then integrated the DNA methylation data with known transcriptomic and proteomic age-related changes in skeletal muscle. Finally, we updated our recently developed muscle epigenetic clock (https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/MEAT.html).Results: We identified 6710 differentially methylated regions at a stringent false discovery rate <0.005, spanning 6367 unique genes, many of which related to skeletal muscle structure and development. We found a strong increase in DNA methylation at Polycomb target genes and bivalent chromatin domains and a concomitant decrease in DNA methylation at enhancers. Most differentially methylated genes were not altered at the mRNA or protein level, but they were nonetheless strongly enriched for genes showing age-related differential mRNA and protein expression. After adding a substantial number of samples from five datasets (+371), the updated version of the muscle clock (MEAT 2.0, total n = 1053 samples) performed similarly to the original version of the muscle clock (median of 4.4 vs. 4.6 years in age prediction error), suggesting that the original version of the muscle clock was very accurate.Conclusions: We provide here the most comprehensive picture of DNA methylation ageing in human skeletal muscle and reveal widespread alterations of genes involved in skeletal muscle structure, development, and differentiation. We have made our results available as an open-access, user-friendly, web-based tool called MetaMeth (https://sarah-voisin.shinyapps.io/MetaMeth/)

Experimental evidence of the ferroelectric phase transition near the λ−\lambda-point in liquid water

We studied dielectric properties of nano-sized liquid water samples confined in polymerized silicates MCM-41 characterized by the porous sizes \sim 3-10nm. We report the direct measurements of the dielectric constant by the dielectric spectroscopy method at frequencies 25Hz-1MHz and demonstrate clear signatures of the second-order phase transition of ferroelectric nature at temperatures next to the \lambda- point in the bulk supercooled water. The presented results support the previously developed polar liquid phenomenology and hence establish its applicability to model actual phenomena in liquid water.Comment: 4 pages, single figur

Authentication, authorization, accounting and charging for the mobile internet

Mobile data services across the Internet pave the path for a society of tomorrow. Users will be able to access data, information, and services independent of their location. This will ease the way of business and private life, such as for the travelling field engineer repairing electronic devices at the customers’ premises by downloading a new control software or the family on vacation accessing on their Personal Digital Assistant local maps and information on tourist attractions. Having these applications in mind, the Internet technology as it exists today has to be enhanced by a number of different features. An important one is the infrastructure for Authentication, Authorization, Accounting, and Charging (AAAC) those mobile services. These functions will ensure that mobility will not happen into places where not authorized and will enable a commercial operation of a network, which offers services to be sold, such as services with varying Quality-of-Service (QoS) or different security degrees. Therefore, existing approaches, such as the traditional AAA (Authorization, Authentication, and Accounting) Architecture of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) have to be enhanced and equipped with performing and suitable functionalities

Extensions of AAA for future IP networks

The design of an extended and generic authentication, authorization, accounting, and charging architecture (AAAC Arch.) has been performed within the IST project MobyDick. In addition, this architecture has been implemented to address MobyDick's main objective: to facilitate the deployment of a ubiquitous mobile IPv6-based, quality-of-service (QoS)-aware infrastructure through a flexible and evolutionary AAAC Architecture. While the AAAC Arch. is based on the DIAMETER protocol, basic concepts developed cover session and services models, user profiles to allow for user mobility and QoS-aware authorization. Based on those basic building blocks for the extended AAAC Arch., the implementation of user registration, service authorization, metering, accounting, charging, and auditing is discussed. The paper closes with the presentation of the two trial sites used and their testbeds

Mobility Support for a Future Communication Architecture

3rd Generation networks as proposed by 3GPP claim to follow the path towards fixed-mobile convergence and full support of Internet services. Although the providers have obviously recognised the dynamics of the Internet, their attempt to provide IP-services over the system has led to a circuit switched architecture. This forthcoming infrastructure will be a sophisticated, complicated, and quite expensive network, with some IP-equipment in the middle (core-network). From an IETF-biased engineers view, some parts of this network and protocols could be dropped, except that they are probably needed for backward compatibility. But since backward compatibility and saving of investment is a major concern of the standardising bodies, the evolving architectures carry a big burden

Evaluation of an accounting model for dynamic virtual organizations

Accounting of Grid resource and service usage determines the central support activity for Grid systems to be adopted as a means for service-oriented computing in Dynamic Virtual Organizations (DVO). An all-embracing study of existing Grid accounting systems has revealed that these approaches focus primarily on technical precision, while they lack a foundation of appropriate economic accounting principles and the support for multi-provider scenarios or virtualization concepts. Consequently, a new, flexible, resource-based accounting model for DVOs was developed, combining technical and economic accounting by means of Activity-based Costing. Driven by a functional evaluation, this paper pursues a full-fledged evaluation of the new, generically applicable Grid accounting model. This is done for the specific environment of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany. Thus, a detailed evaluation methodology and evaluation environment is outlined, leading to actual model-based cost calculations for a defined set of considered Grid services. The results gained are analyzed and respective conclusions on model applicability, optimizations, and further extensions are drawn

Stiller: Grids in a Mobile World: Akogrimo’s Network and Business Views; IFI

Abstract — The use of wireless networking technologies has emerged over recent years in many application domains. The area of grids determines a potentially huge application domain, since the typical centralized computing centers require access from anywhere, e.g., from field engineers who are situated in a wireless network domain. Thus, the integration of suitable business views on mobile grids, of grid views on available technologies, and network views in a fully IP-based network domain determines the key challenge. The Akogrimo project’s architecture developed, is outlined and discussed in this paper and provides the major details required to offer a fully integrated and interoperable solution for those three views of concern