Non-functional Property based service selection: A survey and classification of approaches

In recent years there has been much effort dedicated to developing approaches for service selection based on non-functional properties. It is clear that much progress has been made, and by considering the individual approaches there is some overlap in functionality, but obviously also some divergence. In this paper we contribute a classification of approaches, that is, we define a number of criteria which allow to differentiate approaches. We use this classification to provide a comparison of existing approaches and in that sense provide a survey of the state of the art of the field. Finally we make some suggestions as to where the research in this area might be heading and which new challenges need to be addressed

A Hybrid Approach for Data Analytics for Internet of Things

The vision of the Internet of Things is to allow currently unconnected physical objects to be connected to the internet. There will be an extremely large number of internet connected devices that will be much more than the number of human being in the world all producing data. These data will be collected and delivered to the cloud for processing, especially with a view of finding meaningful information to then take action. However, ideally the data needs to be analysed locally to increase privacy, give quick responses to people and to reduce use of network and storage resources. To tackle these problems, distributed data analytics can be proposed to collect and analyse the data either in the edge or fog devices. In this paper, we explore a hybrid approach which means that both innetwork level and cloud level processing should work together to build effective IoT data analytics in order to overcome their respective weaknesses and use their specific strengths. Specifically, we collected raw data locally and extracted features by applying data fusion techniques on the data on resource constrained devices to reduce the data and then send the extracted features to the cloud for processing. We evaluated the accuracy and data consumption over network and thus show that it is feasible to increase privacy and maintain accuracy while reducing data communication demands.Comment: Accepted to be published in the Proceedings of the 7th ACM International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT 2017

Runtime Resolution of Feature Interactions in Evolving Telecommunications Systems

Feature interactions in telecommunications is an active research area. Many approaches to solve the so-called feature interaction problem have been proposed. However, all these approaches consider feature interaction as a somewhat isolated problem, in particular it is not seen in the context of evolving legacy systems and third party features in a deregulated market environment. An exception is the approach by Marples and Magill [MM98, Mar00], which presents an interaction detection mechanism and an essentially manual resolution approach. We develop an automatic resolution approach that can be integrated with Marples and Magill's detection mechanism. We distinguish two key concepts, namely solutions and resolutions. The former are essentially possible behaviours of the system, they are not qualified as desirable or undesirable, the latter are the desirable solutions. Our approach allows for automatic removal of undesired behaviour and selection of the "best" desired behaviour. The correctness, complexity and suitability of our approach are analysed. Two case studies support these more theoretical considerations. Our approach is transferable to other areas, such as quality of service management, and is not restricted to network architectures with a single point of control

A Policy Architecture for Enhancing and Controlling Features

Abstract. Features provide extensions to a basic service, but in new systems users require much greater flexibility oriented towards their needs. Traditional features do not easily allow for this.We propose policies as the features of the future. Policies can be defined by the end-user, and allow for the use of rich context information when controlling calls. This paper introduces an architecture for policy definition and call control by policies. We discuss the operation of systems based on such an architecture. An important aspect of the architecture is integral feature interaction handling

The ACCENT Policy Server

The designs expressed in this report are copyright of the University of Stirling. Certain aspects may also be protected by patents held by Mitel Networks Corporation. Publication of this report does not confer the right to use or adapt these designs in whole or in part. The ACCENT project was concerned with developing a practical and comprehensive policy language for call control. The project therefore studied a number of distinct tasks: the definition of the language, and also a threelayer architecture for deploying and enforcing policies defined in the language. This document focuses on the policy system layer of the three-layer architecture. The policy system layer is concerned with storing, deploying and enforcing policies. It represents the core functionality of the three-layer architecture. This report discusses the prototype implementation at a technical level. It is intended as supporting documentation for developers continuing to enhance the prototype, as well as those wishing to gain an insight into the technical details of the policy server layer

Service Selection Based on Non-functional Properties

Service-oriented Architecture supports software to be composed from services dynamically. Selecting and composing appropriate services according to business process, policies and non-functional constraints is an essential challenge. This paper proposes a method for automatic selection of the most relevant service for composition based on non-functional properties and the user’s context. In doing this we also propose a method of obtaining and evaluating non-functional aspects

Use of Logic to describe Enhanced Communications Services

New functionality is added to telecommunications systems in the form of features or services. However, this is a very provider-centric approach, not giving much control to the user. We consider a logic that allows the user to express preferences as to how they wish calls to be handled. This logic is encapsulated in a user-friendly policy description language. The transferability of a policy description language (Ponder) developed for system management and access control is discussed

Structure and Behaviour of Virtual Organisation Breeding Environments

This paper provides an outline of a formal approach that we are developing for modelling Virtual Organisations (VOs) and their Breeding Environments (VBEs). We propose different levels of representation for the functional structures and processes that VBEs and VOs involve, which are independent of the specificities of the infrastructures (organisational and technical) that support the functioning of VBEs. This allows us to reason about properties of tasks performed within VBEs and services provided through VOs without committing to the way in which they are implemented

Fog computing for sustainable smart cities: a survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to connect billions of smart objects to the Internet, which can bring a promising future to smart cities. These objects are expected to generate large amounts of data and send the data to the cloud for further processing, specially for knowledge discovery, in order that appropriate actions can be taken. However, in reality sensing all possible data items captured by a smart object and then sending the complete captured data to the cloud is less useful. Further, such an approach would also lead to resource wastage (e.g. network, storage, etc.). The Fog (Edge) computing paradigm has been proposed to counterpart the weakness by pushing processes of knowledge discovery using data analytics to the edges. However, edge devices have limited computational capabilities. Due to inherited strengths and weaknesses, neither Cloud computing nor Fog computing paradigm addresses these challenges alone. Therefore, both paradigms need to work together in order to build an sustainable IoT infrastructure for smart cities. In this paper, we review existing approaches that have been proposed to tackle the challenges in the Fog computing domain. Specifically, we describe several inspiring use case scenarios of Fog computing, identify ten key characteristics and common features of Fog computing, and compare more than 30 existing research efforts in this domain. Based on our review, we further identify several major functionalities that ideal Fog computing platforms should support and a number of open challenges towards implementing them, so as to shed light on future research directions on realizing Fog computing for building sustainable smart cities