Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Metrics for BPEL process context-independency analysis

BPEL processes are workflow-oriented composite services for service-oriented solutions. Rapidly changing environment and turbulent market conditions require flexible BPEL processes to adapt with several modifications during their lifecycles. Such adaptability and flexibility requires the low degree of dependency or coupling between a BPEL process and its surrounding environment. In fact, heavy coupling and context-dependency with partners provoke several undesirable drawbacks such as poor understandability, inflexibility, inadaptability, and defects. This paper is to propose metrics at the design phase to measure BPEL process context-independency. With the aid of these metrics the architect could analyse and control the context-independency of a BPEL process quantitatively. To validate the metrics, authors collected a data set consisting 70 BPEL processes and also gathered the expert’s rating of context-independency through conducting a controlled experiment. The obtained results reveal that there exists a high statistical correlation between the proposed metrics and the expert’s judgment of context-independency

Process patterns for service-oriented software development

Software systems development nowadays has moved towards dynamic composition of services that run on distributed infrastructures aligned with continuous changes in the system requirements. Consequently, software developers need to tailor project specific methodologies to fit their methodology requirements. Process patterns present a suitable solution by providing reusable method chunks of software development methodologies for constructing methodologies to fit specific requirements. In this paper, we propose a set of high-level service-oriented process patterns that can be used for constructing and enhancing situational service-oriented methodologies. We show how these patterns are used to construct a specific service-oriented methodology for the development of a sample system

An information retrieval based approach for measuring service conceptual cohesion

High cohesion as a desirable principle in software design has an incredible impact on software reuse, maintenance and support. In service-oriented architecture (SOA), the focus of services on single business functionality is defined as conceptual cohesion. Current metrics for measuring service cohesion reflect mostly the structural aspect of cohesion and therefore cannot be utilized to measure conceptual cohesion of services. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), on the other hand, is an information retrieval technique and is widely used to measure the degree of similarity between a set of text based documents. In this paper, a metric namely SCD is proposed that measure the conceptual cohesion of services based on LSI technique. This metric consider both service functionality and operation sequence to measure the conceptual cohesion. An evaluation of the metric based on a set of cohesion principles and comparison with the previously proposed metrics are also provided