Showing papers on "Service (systems architecture) published in 2015"

Service Function Chaining (SFC) Architecture

Abstract: This document describes an architecture for the specification, creation, and ongoing maintenance of Service Function Chains (SFCs) in a network. It includes architectural concepts, principles, and components used in the construction of composite services through deployment of SFCs, with a focus on those to be standardized in the IETF. This document does not propose solutions, protocols, or extensions to existing protocols.

Software-Defined Network Function Virtualization: A Survey

Abstract: Diverse proprietary network appliances increase both the capital and operational expense of service providers, meanwhile causing problems of network ossification. Network function virtualization (NFV) is proposed to address these issues by implementing network functions as pure software on commodity and general hardware. NFV allows flexible provisioning, deployment, and centralized management of virtual network functions. Integrated with SDN, the software-defined NFV architecture further offers agile traffic steering and joint optimization of network functions and resources. This architecture benefits a wide range of applications (e.g., service chaining) and is becoming the dominant form of NFV. In this survey, we present a thorough investigation of the development of NFV under the software-defined NFV architecture, with an emphasis on service chaining as its application. We first introduce the software-defined NFV architecture as the state of the art of NFV and present relationships between NFV and SDN. Then, we provide a historic view of the involvement from middlebox to NFV. Finally, we introduce significant challenges and relevant solutions of NFV, and discuss its future research directions by different application domains.

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN): a primer

Abstract: In the era of mobile Internet, mobile operators are facing pressure on ever-increasing capital expenditures and operating expenses with much less growth of income. Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) is expected to be a candidate of next generation access network techniques that can solve operators' puzzle. In this article, on the basis of a general survey of C-RAN, we present a novel logical structure of C-RAN that consists of a physical plane, a control plane, and a service plane. Compared to traditional architecture, the proposed C-RAN architecture emphasizes the notion of service cloud, service-oriented resource scheduling and management, thus it facilitates the utilization of new communication and computer techniques. With the extensive computation resource offered by the cloud platform, a coordinated user scheduling algorithm and parallel optimum precoding scheme are proposed, which can achieve better performance. The proposed scheme opens another door to design new algorithms matching well with C-RAN architecture, instead of only migrating existing algorithms from traditional architecture to C-RAN.

ChEMBL web services: streamlining access to drug discovery data and utilities.

Abstract: ChEMBL is now a well-established resource in the fields of drug discovery and medicinal chemistry research. The ChEMBL database curates and stores standardized bioactivity, molecule, target and drug data extracted from multiple sources, including the primary medicinal chemistry literature. Programmatic access to ChEMBL data has been improved by a recent update to the ChEMBL web services (version 2.0.x, https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chembl/api/data/docs), which exposes significantly more data from the underlying database and introduces new functionality. To complement the data-focused services, a utility service (version 1.0.x, https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chembl/api/utils/docs), which provides RESTful access to commonly used cheminformatics methods, has also been concurrently developed. The ChEMBL web services can be used together or independently to build applications and data processing workflows relevant to drug discovery and chemical biology.

The 4th International Workshop on Body Area Sensor Networks (BASNet-2015) Stream processing of healthcare sensor data: studying user traces to identify challenges from a big data perspective

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) generates massive streams of data which call for ever more effireal time processing. Designingcientand implementing a big data service for the real time processing of such data requires an extensive knowledge of both input loadand data distribution in order to provide a service which can cope with the workload. In this context, we study in this paper thechallengesinherenttotherealtimeprocessingofmassivedataflowsfromtheIoT.Weprovideadetailedanalysisoftracesgatheredfrom a well-known healthcare sport-oriented application in order to illustrate our conclusions from a big data perspective.c 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Program Chairs. Keywords: Internet of Things; Healthcare Sport Services ; Big Data. 1. IntroductionOne of the most important challenges in the big data era is to be able to collect and process massive and hetero-geneous data flows. In this context, the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem

Real-time information capturing and integration framework of the internet of manufacturing things

Abstract: Currently, the typical challenges that manufacturing enterprises faced are the lack of timely, accurate and consistent information of manufacturing things resources during manufacturing execution. Real-time information visibility and traceability allows decision makers to make better-informed shop-floor decisions. In this article, a real-time information capturing and integration architecture of the internet of manufacturing things IoMT is presented to provide a new paradigm by extending the techniques of IoT to manufacturing field. Under this architecture and its key components, the manufacturing things such as operators, machines, pallets, materials etc. can be embedded with sensors, they can interact with each other. Considering the challenges of processing a huge amount of real-time data into useful information and exchange it among the heterogeneous application systems, a Real-time Manufacturing Information Integration Service RTMIIS has been designed to achieve seamless dual-way connectivity and interoperability among enterprise layer, workshop floor layer and machine layer. Finally, a near-life scenario has been used to illustrate the proof-of-concept application of the proposed IoMT.

A state-of-the-art survey of cloud manufacturing

Abstract: Rapid development in cloud computing has made an impact on the manufacturing industry. Consequently, cloud manufacturing has been proposed and has become a hot topic in the past 3 years. Many technologies such as service-oriented architecture, resource virtualisation, service ontology and modelling, service composition and management, and product data integration have been used to build the architecture of cloud manufacturing platforms. In this article, the authors survey the state of the art in the area of cloud manufacturing, identify recent research directions, and discuss potential research opportunities.

From the Internet of Things to the Internet of People

Abstract: There's growing interest in developing applications for the Internet of Things. Such applications' main objective is to integrate technology into people's everyday lives, to be of service to them en masse. The form in which this integration is implemented, however, still leaves much room for improvement. Usually, the user must set parameters within the application. When the person's context changes, they have to manually reconfigure the parameters. What was meant to be a commodity in an unforeseen situation then becomes extra noise. This article describes a reference architecture that improves how people are integrated with the IoT, with smartphones doing the connecting. The resulting integration opens the way to new IoT scenarios supporting evolution towards the Internet of People.

Towards cloud based big data analytics for smart future cities

Abstract: A large amount of land-use, environment, socio-economic, energy and transport data is generated in cities. An integrated perspective of managing and analysing such big data can answer a number of science, policy, planning, governance and business questions and support decision making in enabling a smarter environment. This paper presents a theoretical and experimental perspective on the smart cities focused big data management and analysis by proposing a cloud-based analytics service. A prototype has been designed and developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the analytics service for big data analysis. The prototype has been implemented using Hadoop and Spark and the results are compared. The service analyses the Bristol Open data by identifying correlations between selected urban environment indicators. Experiments are performed using Hadoop and Spark and results are presented in this paper. The data pertaining to quality of life mainly crime and safety & economy and employment was analysed from the data catalogue to measure the indicators spread over years to assess positive and negative trends.

Key techniques for 5G wireless communications:network architecture, physical layer, and MAC layer perspectives

Abstract: The fourth generation (4G) mobile communication systems are offering service worldwide steadily. Although 4G systems could be loaded with much more services and data than previous systems, there is still a dramatic gap between the peoples practical requirements and what can be offered by the 4G technologies. Consequently, the research and development for the fifth generation (5G) systems have already been started. This article presents an overview of potential network architecture and highlights several promising techniques which could be employed in the future 5G systems. These techniques include non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), massive multiple input and multiple output (MIMO), cooperative communications and network coding, full duplex (FD), device-to-device (D2D) communications, millimeter wave communications, automated network organization, cognitive radio (CR), and green communications. The state-of-art and implementation issue of these techniques are also addressed.

Manufacturing Service Management in Cloud Manufacturing: Overview and Future Research Directions

Abstract: As a new service-oriented manufacturing paradigm, cloud manufacturing (CMfg) has experienced rapid development in the past five years. The research on its theories, key technologies, developments, and applications still keeps attracting attentions from more and more researchers. One of the most important issues to its improvements and quality of service (QoS) is the manufacturing service management (MSM). CMfg aims to realize the full-scale sharing, free circulation and transaction, and on-demand use of various manufacturing resource and capabilities in the form of manufacturing service. Without the effective operation and technical support of MSM, the implementation of CMfg and its aim cannot be achieved. It is therefore necessary to summarize the existing works and technologies on MSM in CMfg. This paper first provides a brief overview of CMfg and then focuses on the problem of MSM in CMfg from the service lifecycle perspective. The advances on MSM technology from eleven aspects are investigated and summarized. Finally, future research directions are identified and discussed. It is evident that the future MSM in CMfg is closely related to Internet of things (IoT), big data, and cloud computing.

Friendship Selection in the Social Internet of Things: Challenges and Possible Strategies

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to be overpopulated by a very large number of objects, with intensive interactions, heterogeneous communications, and millions of services. Consequently, scalability issues will arise from the search of the right object that can provide the desired service. A new paradigm known as Social Internet of Things (SIoT) has been introduced and proposes the integration of social networking concepts into the Internet of Things. The underneath idea is that every object can look for the desired service using its friendships, in a distributed manner, with only local information. In the SIoT it is very important to set appropriate rules in the objects to select the right friends as these impact the performance of services developed on top of this social network. In this work, we addressed this issue by analyzing possible strategies for the benefit of overall network navigability. We first propose five heuristics, which are based on local network properties and that are expected to have an impact on the overall network structure. We then perform extensive experiments, which are intended to analyze the performance in terms of giant components, average degree of connections, local clustering, and average path length. Unexpectedly, we discovered that minimizing the local clustering in the network allowed for achieving the best results in terms of average path length. We have conducted further analysis to understand the potential causes, which have been found to be linked to the number of hubs in the network.

Voice application architecture

Abstract: A voice-based system may comprise a local speech interface device and a remote control service. A user may interact with the system using speech to obtain services and perform functions. The system may allow a user to install applications to provide enhanced or customized functionality. Such applications may be installed on either the speech interface device or the control service. The control service receives user speech and determines user intent based on the speech. If an application installed on the control service can respond to the intent, that application is called. Otherwise, the intent is provided to the speech interface device which responds by invoking one of its applications to respond to the intent.

Spectrum access system for the citizen broadband radio service

Abstract: As a part of the global effort to address the overwhelming demand for wireless broadband capacity, the wireless communities in the United States have undertaken innovative initiatives such as tiered-access to shared spectrum. The Federal Communications Commission has proposed a dynamic spectrum management framework for a Citizen Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) governed by a spectrum access system (SAS). The implementation of a SAS capable of dynamic frequency assignment and interference management is critical for the success of the proposed framework. In this paper we present the efforts toward a spectrum sharing system in the U.S. context by summarizing different interest groups’ standpoint on the FCC proposed framework. We also present an example SAS architecture that accommodates the tiered access to shared spectrum and example approaches to achieve important SAS capabilities.

DIAT: A Scalable Distributed Architecture for IoT

Abstract: The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) has boosted the growth in number of devices around us and kindled the possibility of umpteen number of applications. One of the major challenges in the realization of IoT applications is interoperability among various IoT devices and deployments. Thus, the need for a new architecture—comprising smart control and actuation—has been identified by many researchers. In this paper, we propose a Distributed Internet-like Architecture for Things (DIAT), which will overcome most of the obstacles in the process of large-scale expansion of IoT. It specifically addresses heterogeneity of IoT devices, and enables seamless addition of new devices across applications. In addition, we propose an usage control policy model to support security and privacy in a distributed environment. We propose a layered architecture that provides various levels of abstraction to tackle the issues such as scalability, heterogeneity, security, and interoperability. The proposed architecture is coupled with cognitive capabilities that helps in intelligent decision-making and enables automated service creation. Using a comprehensive use-case, comprising elements from multiple-application domains, we illustrate the usability of the proposed architecture.

Internet of Things for Industrial Automation -- Challenges and Technical Solutions

Abstract: Using internet of things (IoT) to connect things, service, and people for intelligent operations has been discussed and deployed in many industry domains such as smart city, smart energy, healthcare, food and water tracking, logistics and retail, and transportation. However, scarce information is available for IoT usage in industrial automation domain for reliable and collaborative automation with respect to e.g., enabling scalable collaboration between heterogeneous devices and systems, offering predictable and fault-tolerant real-time closed-loop control, and inclusion of intelligent service features from edge devices to the cloud. In this paper, we will clarify the specific quality attribute constraints within industrial automation, present specific industrial IoT challenges due to these constraints, and discuss the potentials of utilizing some technical solutions to cope with these challenges.

SDN-based 5G mobile networks: architecture, functions, procedures and backward compatibility

Abstract: In this paper, we describe an SDN-based plastic architecture for 5G networks, designed to fulfill functional and performance requirements of new generation services and devices. The 5G logical architecture is presented in detail, and key procedures for dynamic control plane instantiation, device attachment, and service request and mobility management are specified. Key feature of the proposed architecture is flexibility, needed to support efficiently a heterogeneous set of services, including Machine Type Communication, Vehicle to X and Internet of Things traffic. These applications are imposing challenging targets, in terms of end-to-end latency, dependability, reliability and scalability. Additionally, backward compatibility with legacy systems is guaranteed by the proposed solution, and Control Plane and Data Plane are fully decoupled. The three levels of unified signaling unify Access, Non-access and Management strata, and a clean-slate forwarding layer, designed according to the software defined networking principle, replaces tunneling protocols for carrier grade mobility. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

E- Learning Using Cloud Computing

Abstract: E-learning refers to the virtualized distance learning by means of electronic media in education. Cloud computing is the computing in which large group of remote servers are networked to allow centralized data storage and online access to computer resources. E- learning usually requires many resources like hardware and software and many educational institutions cannot afford large investments. And so Cloud computing is the best solution as it delivers the resources as a service over a network (internet). It provides resources via services offered by CSP (cloud service provider). This paper present the benefits of using cloud computing technology in E-Learning, i.e., build an elearning cloud.

The MyOcean IBI Ocean Forecast and Reanalysis Systems: operational products and roadmap to the future Copernicus Service

Abstract: The MyOcean IBI-MFC (Monitoring & Forecasting Centre) has been providing continuous daily ocean model estimates and forecasts for the Iberia–Biscay–Ireland (IBI) regional seas since 2011 The operational IBI Ocean Forecast Service is based on a NEMO model application that includes high-frequency processes required to characterize regional scale marine processes Since June 2014, a new IBI reanalysis, comprising both physical and biogeochemical components, covering the time period 2002–2012 has also been available This paper provides an end-to-end description of these IBI model systems and presents a summary of the scientific validation assessments carried out with the derived operational products The validation statistics suggest that the systems capture major synoptic and mesoscale ocean circulation features observed in the IBI region Finally, an IBI roadmap towards the future EU Copernicus Service is outlined, providing a look ahead to future IBI model and data-assimilation developments and operation

Automatic scaling of resource instance groups within compute clusters

Abstract: A service provider may apply customer-selected or customer-defined auto-scaling policies to a cluster of resources (e.g., virtualized computing resource instances or storage resource instances in a MapReduce cluster). Different policies may be applied to different subsets of cluster resources (e.g., different instance groups containing nodes of different types or having different roles). Each policy may define an expression to be evaluated during execution of a distributed application, a scaling action to take if the expression evaluates true, and an amount by which capacity should be increased or decreased. The expression may be dependent on metrics emitted by the application, cluster, or resource instances by default, metrics defined by the client and emitted by the application, or metrics created through aggregation. Metric collection, aggregation and rules evaluation may be performed by a separate service or by cluster components. An API may support auto-scaling policy definition.

Using gamification to incentivize sustainable urban mobility

Abstract: Sustainable urban mobility is an important dimension in a Smart City, and one of the key issues for city sustainability. However, innovative and often costly mobility policies and solutions introduced by cities are liable to fail, if not combined with initiatives aimed at increasing the awareness of citizens, and promoting their behavioural change. This paper explores the potential of gamification mechanisms to incentivize voluntary behavioural changes towards sustainable mobility solutions. We present a service-based gamification framework, developed within the STREETLIFE EU Project, which can be used to develop games on top of existing services and systems within a Smart City, and discuss the empirical findings of an experiment conducted in the city of Rovereto on the effectiveness of gamification to promote sustainable urban mobility.

MonPaaS: An Adaptive Monitoring Platformas a Service for Cloud Computing Infrastructures and Services

Abstract: This paper presents a novel monitoring architecture addressed to the cloud provider and the cloud consumers. This architecture offers a monitoring platform-as-a-Service to each cloud consumer that allows to customize the monitoring metrics. The cloud provider sees a complete overview of the infrastructure whereas the cloud consumer sees automatically her cloud resources and can define other resources or services to be monitored. This is accomplished by means of an adaptive distributed monitoring architecture automatically deployed in the cloud infrastructure. This architecture has been implemented and released under GPL license to the community as “MonPaaS”, open source software for integrating Nagios and OpenStack. An intensive empirical evaluation of performance and scalability have been done using a real deployment of a cloud computing infrastructure in which more than 3,700 VMs have been executed.

Exploring factors influencing the use of enterprise social networks in multinational professional service firms

Abstract: Organizations are increasingly implementing enterprise social networks (ESNs) for improved communication and collaboration, as well as enhanced knowledge sharing and innovation among employees. However, the paradoxical relationship between ESN implementation and the promised benefits has been attributed to employees’ underutilization. Our research focuses on factors influencing employees’ decision to use ESN in their work role and draws on case studies of two multinational professional service firms (PSFs) based in Australia. Qualitative data were collected during ten semi-structured interviews with employees from both organizations, to determine their perceptions of ESN usage and capture the factors that influence their use behavior. The findings illustrate that the likelihood of ESN use is significantly influenced by technological, organizational, social and individual factors. A successful ESN use within an organization involves the nexus between these four factors and recommendations are made,...