Showing papers on "Differentiated service published in 2011"

Multilevel Service Design: From Customer Value Constellation to Service Experience Blueprinting:

Abstract: The proliferation of complex service systems raises new challenges for service design and requires new methods. Multilevel Service Design (MSD) is presented as a new interdisciplinary method for designing complex service systems. MSD synthesizes contributions from new service development, interaction design, and the emerging field of service design. MSD enables integrated development of service offerings at three hierarchical levels: (a) Designing the firm’s service concept with the customer value constellation of service offerings for the value constellation experience; (b) Designing the firm’s service system, comprising its architecture and navigation, for the service experience; and (c) Designing each service encounter with the Service Experience Blueprint for the service encounter experience. Applications of the MSD method are described for designing a new retail grocery service and for redesigning a bank service. MSD contributes an interdisciplinary service design method that accommodates the cocreat...

WSPred: A Time-Aware Personalized QoS Prediction Framework for Web Services

Abstract: The exponential growth of Web service makes building high-quality service-oriented applications an urgent and crucial research problem. User-side QoS evaluations of Web services are critical for selecting the optimal Web service from a set of functionally equivalent service candidates. Since QoS performance of Web services is highly related to the service status and network environments which are variable against time, service invocations are required at different instances during a long time interval for making accurate Web service QoS evaluation. However, invoking a huge number of Web services from user-side for quality evaluation purpose is time-consuming, resource-consuming, and sometimes even impractical (e.g., service invocations are charged by service providers). To address this critical challenge, this paper proposes a Web service QoS prediction framework, called WSPred, to provide time-aware personalized QoS value prediction service for different service users. WSPred requires no additional invocation of Web services. Based on the past Web service usage experience from different service users, WSPred builds feature models and employs these models to make personalized QoS prediction for different users. The extensive experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of WSPred. Moreover, we publicly release our real-world time-aware Web service QoS dataset for future research, which makes our experiments verifiable and reproducible.

Framework for modularity and customization: service perspective

Abstract: Purpose – Modularity has been identified as one of the most important methods for achieving mass customization. However, service models that apply varying levels of modularity and customization also exist and are appropriate for various business situations. The objective of this paper is to introduce a framework with which different customer service offerings, service production processes, and service production networks can be analyzed in terms of both modularity and customization.Design/methodology/approach – The paper builds theory and offers a systematic approach for analyzing service modularity and customization. To illustrate the dimensions of the framework, the authors also provide service examples of the various aspects.Findings – In the previous literature, the concepts of modularity and customization have often been discussed in an intertwined manner. The authors find that when modularity and customization are regarded as two separate dimensions, and different perspectives– such as the service o...

Method and system for realizing an avatar in a management operations center implemented in a global ecosystem of interrelated services

Abstract: A data processing system may be implemented as a program product embodied on a processing system readable medium for implementing a method for using mobile code for implementing a service in a global ecosystem of interrelated services in an enterprise. The enterprise may include a group of network domains, where each of the network domains further includes a group of servers; at least one service container running on each of the servers; and a group of interrelated services, where each of the interrelated services may run on any of the at least one service container. The program product may include instructions for loading mobile service code for implementing a service on a code server, where the code server is accessible to at least some of the servers in the enterprise; instructions for determining information related to the service, where the information related to the service includes configuration information and a proxy reference for the service, the proxy reference including a codebase containing an address for a code server holding the mobile service code of a proxy for the service; and instructions for launching the service in a network domain.

Horizontal and vertical combination of multi-tenancy patterns in service-oriented applications

Abstract: Software as a service (SaaS) providers exploit economies of scale by offering the same instance of an application to multiple customers typically in a single-instance multi-tenant architecture model. Therefore the applications must be scalable, multi-tenant aware and configurable. In this article, we show how the services in a service-oriented SaaS application can be deployed using different multi-tenancy patterns. We describe how services in different multi-tenancy patterns can be composed on the application level. In addition to that, we also describe how these multi-tenancy patterns can be applied to middleware and hardware components. We then show with some real world examples how the different multi-tenancy patterns can be combined.

Provisioning multiple network resources

Abstract: A resource provisioning service allows users to provision multiple, different network resources in an atomic manner and with a single call to a resource provisioning service. In some instances, the multiple, different network resources comprise individual types of resources that form a portion of one or more cloud-computing platforms. For instance, one or more entities may host and operate a cloud-computing platform that includes different types of network resources, such a storage service, a load balancing service, a compute service, a security service, or any other similar or different type of network-accessible service.

Method and apparatus for providing bundled services

Abstract: Techniques for supporting bundled services of network operators and service providers comprise determining data that indicates a service provided by a vendor over a network. It is determined whether the service is associated with a service feature of a network operator of at least a portion of the network. If the service is associated with the service feature of the network operator, then data that indicates the service feature of the network operator is provided. A view may also be provided, to be presented on a display, the view comprising indications of services, service features and related data such as bundling data.

Web Service Selection for Resolving Conflicting Service Requests

Abstract: Web service selection based on quality of service (QoS) has been a research focus in an environment where many similar web services exist. Current methods of service selection usually focus on a single service request at a time and the selection of a service with the best QoS at the user's own discretion. The selection does not consider multiple requests for the same functional web services. Usually, there are multiple service requests for the same functional web service in practice. In such situations, conflicts occur when too many requesters select the same best web service. This paper aims at solving these conflicts and developing a global optimal service selection method for multiple related service requesters, thereby optimizing service resources and improving performance of the system. It uses Euclidean distance with weights to measure degree of matching of services based on QoS. A 0-1 integral programming model for maximizing the sum of matching degree is created and consequently, a global optimal service selection algorithm is developed. The model, together with a universal and feasible optimal service selection algorithm, is implemented for global optimal service selection for multiple requesters (GOSSMR). Furthermore, to enhance its efficiency, Skyline GOSSMR is proposed. Time complexity of the algorithms is analyzed. We evaluate performance of the algorithms and the system through simulations. The simulation results demonstrate that they are more effective than existing ones.

A Reference Architecture for Multi-Level SLA Management

Abstract: Service-orientation is the core paradigm for organising business interactions and modern IT architectures. At the business level, service industries are becoming the dominating sector in which solutions are flexibly composed out of networked services. At the IT level, the paradigms of Service-Oriented Architecture and cloud computing realise service-orientation for both software and infrastructure services. Service composition across different layers is a major advantage of this paradigm. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a common approach to specifying the exact conditions under which services are to be delivered, and thus are a prerequisite for supporting the flexible trading of services. However, typical SLAs are only specified at a single layer and do not provide insight into metrics or parameters at the various lower layers of the service stack. Thus they do not allow service providers to manage their service stack optimally. In this chapter, we present a reference architecture for a multi-level SLA management framework. We discuss fundamental concepts of the framework and detail its main architectural components and interactions.

Network based provisioning

Abstract: The subject disclosure generally relates to provisioning devices via a network service, such as a cloud service. A profile component can authenticate a user of a device with a cloud service, and determine services maintained by the network service that are associated with the user. A reception component can receive a request for a set of services from the device, and a services component can obtain the set of services from the network service, and provision the device based on the set of services. Provisioning the device can include downloading the services to the device, or including the services in a virtual machine executing in the network service.

Service Mediation Framework

Abstract: A service mediation framework may allow each component within a computer network to perform common service processing tasks driven by standardized service policies stored within a centralized repository. In particular, an enhanced service domain name system (DNS) server, an enhanced service router, and/or an enhanced service gateway within the network may each access relevant service policies stored within an enhanced service repository to implement tasks such as security, content-based routing, logging, message format translation, and protocol bridging for each service request processed by the network. In addition, each network component may communicate through standardized formats, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), to realize the end-to-end network solution.

Dynamic Cluster-based Service Bundling: A Value-oriented Framework

Abstract: In this paper we present a framework for dynamic service bundling, which focuses on the exchange of valuable outcomes between customers and service suppliers. The approach is based on three components: A customer, a broker and a pool of suppliers. The broker is in charge of matching the customer and supplier perspectives and performing a cluster-based bundling process. The applicability of our approach is proven by means of a case study in the educational service industry.

A QoS-Aware Service Evaluation Method for Co-selecting a Shared Service

Abstract: In service selection, an end user often has his or her personal preferences imposing on a candidate service's non-functional properties. For a service selection process promoted by a group of users, candidate services are often evaluated by a group of end users who may have different preferences or priorities. In this situation, it is often a challenging effort to make a tradeoff among various preferences or priorities of the users. In view of this challenge, a multi-criteria decision-making method, named AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), is introduced to transform both qualitative personal preferences and users' priorities into numeric weights. Furthermore, a QoS-aware service evaluation method is presented for a shared service's co-selection taking advantage of AHP theory. At last, a case study is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the method.

A History Record-Based Service Optimization Method for QoS-Aware Service Composition

Abstract: The performance of a service's QoS may evolve relatively frequently with its internal changes or the changes of dynamic Internet environment, especially when some"intentional" deceptions are taken into consideration. Therefore, the service providers could not always deliver their services according to their "promised" quality. In view of this challenge, a history record-based service optimization method, named Hire Some, is investigated in this paper. This method aims at enhancing the credibility of service composition plan, taking advantage of a web service's QoShistory records, rather than using the tentative QoS values advertised by the service provider. At last, a case study and an experiment is presented for validating the method.

A user centric service-oriented modeling approach

Abstract: With rapid development of service-oriented architecture and cloud computing, web services have been widely employed on the Internet. Quality of Service (QoS) is a very important criterion for service consumers to measure and select services. The selection of web services with respect to non-functional QoS criteria can be considered as a Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem when multiple consumers need to share a number of services. This paper describes a new user centric service-oriented modeling approach which is featured by integrating fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Service Component Architecture (SCA) to facilitate web service selection and composition and to effectively satisfy a group of service consumers' subjective requirements and preferences in the dynamic environment. The main contribution of this method is able to translate a group of users' fuzzy requirements to services as well as model different levels of hardware and software as services to meet the requirements. We also design a simulated environment that includes 8*8 LED matrix on a circuit board that corresponds to an office with different appliances to demonstrate the dynamic service selection and binding. The simulation is used to assess the computational efficiency of the fuzzy TOPSIS method and the effectiveness of the proposed system.

Metamodel for service design and service innovation : integrating service activities , service systems , and value constellations

Abstract: This paper presents a metamodel that addresses service system design and innovation by traversing and integrating three essential layers, service activities, service systems, and value constellations. The metamodel's approach to service systems as service-in-operation is an alternative to another currently used approach that views service systems as systems of economic exchange. The metamodel addresses service science topics including basic concepts of service science, design thinking for service systems, decomposition within service systems, and integration of IT service architecture with customer services. This paper's contributions to service science include clarifications concerning concepts such as service, service system, customer, product/service, coproduction and cocreation of value, actor roles, resources, symmetrical treatment of automated and non-automated service systems, and the relationship between service-dominant logic and service systems. Many articles have discussed these topics individually. Few, if any, have tied them together using an integrated metamodel.

Rule-Based Run-Time Information Flow Control in Service Cloud

Abstract: Service cloud provides added value to customers by allowing them to compose services from multiple providers. Most existing web service security models focus on the protection of individual web services. When multiple services from different domains are composed together, it is critical to ensure the proper information flow on the chain of services. In a service chain, each service needs to determine whether the sensitive information can be directly or indirectly disseminated to the subsequent services. Also, each service in the chain needs to decide whether to accept the data passed to it directly or indirectly from prior services. Moreover, the input data that service si receives from si-1, si. InF, may cause certain side effects inside si, such as updating si's backend database using data computed from si. InF. Service si may wish to allow such side effects in one situation while reject some side effects in another situation. All these decisions should be made based on the service's information flow control policies. To achieve fine-grained information flow control, it is also necessary to analyze the flow and processing of the data and derive the dependencies between the data dynamically generated or used in a service chain. In this paper, we develop a run-time information flow control model for service cloud. First, we develop a run-time dependency analysis mechanism which enables each service in the service chain to determine the correlation between the locally accessed data and the data dynamically generated by the services in the service chain. Then, we develop a model to enable each service in a service chain to specify policies on how its sensitive information can be released to its subsequent services and what types of input data from prior services can be accepted and how they can flow within the services. Finally, we design a run-time protocol to enforce these policies in a service chain.

Radio access network load and condition aware traffic shaping control

Abstract: Fine grained RAN aware traffic prioritization in spectrum constrained modern wireless networks which support differentiated service plans uses cell load metrics supplied to a Fine grained Traffic flow Prioritization Engine (FTPE) with and without the assistance from a client side collection module, Peer Agent (PA), at the mobile. Knowledge about a mobile's subscription plan is derived from a Subscription Profiles Repository (SPR). Dynamic control on traffic prioritization is applied through operator policy control engines, Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) module. The FTPE works with flexible flow aggregation rules to simplify and scale prioritizing, blocking, and deferring decisions. The FPTE may apply Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) techniques to identify application flows, and uses hierarchical queue disciplines to achieve the necessary flow control. The FPTE may also instead use an adjunct DPI to perform the flow identifications.

Towards a Framework for developing Product/Service Systems

Abstract: Increasingly, manufacturers become service providers rather than product providers. In this work, a framework based on industrial studies is suggested for developing product service system. The framework is represented by six life cycle phases where three actor categories views are represented. The framework is described using examples from different industries/businesses. The intention is that the framework can be used for both B2C and B2B type of relations. One significant characteristic is that the “traditional” sales phase is replaced by a sales occasion that occur within different life cycle phases depending on which business context/model is used.

Routing service requests based on lowest actual cost within a federated virtual service cloud

Abstract: A method for providing a virtual cloud service at the lowest actual cost can begin with an optimal transaction handler of a federated virtual service cloud maintaining a virtual resource pool of transactional units. Each transactional unit can represent a service application deployed to a cloud service provided by a cloud service provider having a usage-based service cost model that allows transactional units to be placed in an inactive state to suspend its operating expense. Operational metrics data for the cloud service providers can be continuously captured. In response to a service request, the transactional unit that meets fulfillment requirements of the service request and incurs a lowest actual cost can be determined based upon cost factors derived from the operational metrics data, the usage-based service cost model, and a current usage state of the virtual resource pool. The received service request can be routed to the determined transactional unit.

FeatherWeight: low-cost optical arbitration with QoS support

Abstract: The nanophotonic signaling technology enables efficient global communication and low-diameter networks such as crossbars that are often optically arbitrated. However, existing optical arbitration schemes incur costly overheads (e.g., waveguides, laser power, etc.) to avoid starvation caused by their inherent fixed priority, which limits their applicability in power-bounded future many-core processors. On the other hand, quality-of-service (QoS) support in the on-chip network is becoming necessary due to an increase in the number of components in the network. Most prior work on QoS in on-chip networks has focused on conventional multi-hop electrical networks, where the efficiency of QoS is hindered by the limited capabilities of electrical global communication. In this work, we exploit the benefits of nanophotonics to build a lightweight optical arbitration scheme, FeatherWeight, with QoS support. Leveraging the efficient global communication, we devise a feedback-controlled, adaptive source throttling scheme to asymptotically approach weighted max-min fairness among all the nodes on the chip. By re-using existing datapath components to exchange minimal global information, FeatherWeight provides freedom from starvation while resulting in negligible (< 1%) throughput loss compared to the best-effort baseline optical arbitration. In addition, FeatherWeight provides strong fairness, performance isolation, and differentiated service for a wide range of traffic patterns. Compared to state-of-art optical arbitration schemes, FeatherWeight reduces power consumption by up to 87% while reducing execution time by 7.5%, on average, across SPLASH-2 and MineBench traces, and improving throughput on synthetic traffic patterns by up to 17%.

Essentials Of Service Design

Abstract: This paper is a conspectus of service design for service scientists.Historically, science has been concerned with the discovery and study of natural and socially developed phenomena, and the role of design has been to create new artifacts and processes and to improve existing ones.Service has been an important part of the fabric of societal culture from ancient times, so the notion of service as the co-creation of value by provider and client is well established.It necessarily follows that the objective of service design is to add value by enhancing the efficiency, effectiveness, and efficacy of older service systems and to create newer ones with requisite attributes.This is a topic that has not been covered in traditional service science research.Thus, service design, as a discipline, seeks to facilitate the operation of the modern global economy that is now based on service.The necessary elements of service design are introduced and important concepts are identified.

A Quality of Service Broker Based Process Model for Dynamic Web Service Composition

Abstract: Problem statement: With fast spreading of web services technology ove r the Internet, the quality aspects of a web service has received signi ficant attention to the practitioners. The quality of web service includes both functional and nonfunctio nal details. In order to provide the correct and meaningful information to web service consumer, sometimes there is a need to compose existing web services in order to create new web service. Approach: We have proposed a Quality of Service (QoS) broker based process model for Dynamic Web Service Composition (DWSC). The QoS broker in the proposed model is responsible for web servic e collection, selection, optimization and composition based on the service consumer's require ments. It also verifies and certifies the functiona l and QoS specifications provided by service provider at the time of web service registration before publishing it in Universal Description, Discovery a nd Integration (UDDI) registry. The detailed working of QoS broker is also presented in the stud y with functionality of each component. We will also discuss the process flowchart for new web serv ice registration and web service composition at runtime. Results: The proposed QoS broker based model for dynamic web service composition solves the problems associated with quality of web service. It also prevents the central repository from malicious service provider to publish wrong in formation. Conclusion: The QoS broker-based process model for dynamic web service composition guarantees the quality of delivered service to web service consumers and improve the efficiency of composition.

Relationship between consumer's preference and service attributes in mobile telecommunication service

Abstract: The mobile telecommunication sector is increasing, thus becoming a key area for economic development in global and local markets. One of potential ways to promote competition among service providers is to introduce a mobile number portability (MNP) service. Consumer preferences are estimated using conjoint analysis. Results indicate that subscribers do not consider the MNP service an import attribute, while price and service quality are the most valuable attributes. The results of this study provide important information to implement the first service launch in mobile telecommunication and other similar information and communication technology (ICT) services.

Modeling a complex global service delivery system

Abstract: Enterprises and IT service providers are increasingly challenged with improving the quality of service while reducing the cost of service delivery. Effectively balancing dynamic customer workload, strict service level constraints, and diverse service personnel skills challenges the most experienced management teams. In this paper we describe a modeling framework for analyzing complex service delivery systems. The interaction among various key factors are included in the model to allow decision-making around staffing skill levels, scheduling, and service level constraints in system design. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach in a large IT services delivery environment.

A Privacy-Preserving Approach for Web Service Selection and Provisioning

Abstract: The growing success of WS-related technologies has resulted in a large number of providers, which implement services of varying degree of sophistication and complexity. While on the one hand the availability of a wide array of services has created a competitive and flexible market that suits well the needs of different type of users, on the other hand, it requires them to select among possibly hundreds of similar services. As such, Web service selection plays a crucial role in Web service life-cycle. Here, several application-dependent requirements might constrain the selection of the best service. In this paper, we study the privacy implications caused by the exchange of large amount of potentially sensitive data required by optimized strategies for service-selection. In particular, we propose a comprehensive framework to uniformly protect users' and service providers' privacy needs, at the time of service selection. We define a solution that allows matching of the search criteria against the Web services attributes in a private fashion such that both criteria and service attributes are kept private during the matching. Further, we propose an approach to protect service provisioning rules from unwanted disclosure, both from the user and the service provider's perspective. Our experimental evaluation and complexity analysis demonstrate that our algorithms are efficient.

Describing and selecting communication services in a service oriented network architecture

Abstract: Today networks offer communication services ranging from a rather simple and unsecure one to secure and reliable data transmission for communicating on the network In the future, it is expected that networks will offer a large number of different communication services With so many services available, determining which service to select and use becomes much more difficult Here we propose a description schema including an ontology for describing communication services For service selection a decision making process called Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is utilized which is specially adapted and extended for automatic processing

Alternative representations for end user composition of service-based systems

Abstract: Service composition is a process of developing service-based applications that combine the functionality and features from multiple service providers in a unified solution In this paper we report on a study aimed to gauge users' views and perceptions about traditional service composition approaches (such as control flow and data flow-based composition approaches) versus a system assisted composition approach User preferences and opinions are obtained from a set of focus groups that aimed at exploring the mental model of end-users about the way they would prefer to develop service-based applications The results of user studies are being used in the design of an easy to use service-based application development tool in the EC funded SOA4All project