Alexander Willner

The Open-Multinet Upper Ontology Towards the Semantic-based Management of Federated Infrastructures

The Internet remains an unfinished work. There are several approaches to enhancing it that have been experimentally validated within federated testbed environments. To best gain scientific knowledge from these studies, reproducibility and automation are needed in all areas of the experiment life cycle. Within the GENI and FIRE context, several architectures and protocols have been developed for this purpose. However, a major open research issue remains, namely the description and discovery of the heterogeneous resources involved. To remedy this, we propose a semantic information model that can be used to allow declarative interoperability, build dependency graphs, validate requests, infer knowledge and conduct complex queries. The requirements for such an information model have been extracted from current international Future Internet research projects and the practicality of the model is being evaluated through initial implementations. The main outcome of this work is the definition of the Open-Multinet Upper Ontology and related sub-ontologies, which can be used to describe and manage federated infrastructures and their resources.

FIRMA: A Future Internet resource management architecture

Internet is broken and there are several approaches to fix it. In order to validate the different attempts, they need to be evaluated within large-scale environments involving numerous heterogeneous resources. As a result, several testbeds have been established along with a number of competitive mechanisms to federate them. Since most of these protocols try to address similar issues, combining and unifying them is subject of current research. This leads to a complex environment for testbed owners and developers. Furthermore, it is foreseeable that even more federation approaches in different application domains will emerge in the future. Therefore, we propose an extensible architecture that allows to be federation protocol agnostic. The fundamental idea is to allow interoperability on the level of a semantic information model and to separate delivery mechanism specific implementations from a common core. The requirements for such an architecture have been extracted from latest European Future Internet research projects and its practicability is being evaluated by an initial implementation.

A service orchestration architecture for Fog-enabled infrastructures

The development of Fog Computing technology is crucial to address the challenges to come with the mass adoption of Internet Of Things technology, where the generation of data tends to grow at an unprecedented pace. The technology brings computing power to the surrounds of devices, to offer local processing, filtering, storage and analysis of data and control over actuators. Orchestration is a requirement of Fog Computing technology to deliver services, based on the composition of microservices. It must take into consideration the heterogeneity of the IoT environment and devices capabilities and constraints. This heterogeneity requires a different approach for orchestration, be it regarding infrastructure management, node selection and/or service placement. Orchestrations shall be manually or automatically started through event triggers. Also, the Orchestrator must be flexible enough to work in a centralized or distributed fashion. Orchestration is still a hot topic and can be seen in different areas, especially in the Service Oriented Architectures, hardware virtualization, in the Cloud, and in Network Virtualization Function. However, the architecture of these solutions is not enough to handle Fog Requirements, specially Fogs heterogeneity, and dynamics. In this paper, we propose an architecture for Orchestration for the Fog Computing environment. We developed a prototype to prof some concepts. We discuss in this paper the implementation, and the tools chose, and their roles. We end the paper with a discussion on performance indicators and future direction on the evaluation of non-functional aspects of the Architecture.

DBcloud: Semantic Dataset for the cloud

In cloud environments, the process of matching requests from users with the available computing resources is a challenging task. This is even more complex in federated environments, where multiple providers cooperate to offer enhanced services, suitable for distributed applications. In order to resolve these issues, a powerful modeling methodology can be adopted to facilitate expressing both the request and the available computing resources. This, in turn, leads to an effective matching between the request and the provisioned resources. For this purpose, the Open-Multinet ontologies were developed, which leverage the expressive power of Semantic Web technologies to describe infrastructure components and services. These ontologies have been adopted in a number of federated testbeds. In this article, DBcloud is presented, a system that provides access to Open-Multinet open data via endpoints. DBcloud can be used to simplify the process of discovery and provisioning of cloud resources and services.

FIDDLE: Federated Infrastructure Discovery and Description Language

Considerable efforts have been spent on designing architectures to manage heterogeneous resources across multiple administrative domains. Specific fields of application are federated cloud computing (Intercloud) approaches and distributed testbeds, among others. An important interoperability challenge that arises in this context is the exchange of information about the provided resources and their dependencies. Existing work usually rests upon schematic data models, which impede the discovery and management of heterogeneous resources between autonomous sites. One way of addressing this issue is to exchange semantic information models. In this paper, we exploit such approaches to formally define federations, including their infrastructures and the life-cycle of the offered resources and services. The requirements of this work have been derived from several research projects and the results are in process of being standardized by an international body. The main contribution of this work is a higher level (upper) ontology and initial integration concepts for it. These contributions form a basis for further work in the general context of distributed semantic resource management.

Towards Mobile Federated Network Operators

Mobile Network Operators provide wireless communication services to their customers using their own network infrastructures. For providers, in particular in low income countries, access to latest network functions to offer 4G/5G services can be a large burden as this is directly impacted by financial restrictions of operators. Although some network sharing solutions between operators to reduce the total cost of ownership exist in standards and literature, none address specific requirements of the operating environment of low income countries. In our approach, we are exploiting the raising interest in the cloudification of the related infrastructure, namely Network Function Virtualization (NFV) over Software Defined Networks (SDN), to allow each operator in these countries to offer specific network functions as a service in a federation in order to share them and to increase their revenue. Initial results are presented based on the development of a commercial toolkit (OpenSDNCore) and a federated testbed research project (TRESCIMO). As a result, we define the notion of a Mobile Federated Network Operator (MFNO) and provide an analysis of the underlying requirements for such a use case and potential approaches to address them.

FanTaaStic: Sustainable management of Future Internet testbed federations

The global trend of Future Internet related experimentally driven research has gained a strong momentum. In this context sustainability and the best use of developed infrastructures are highly critical. While many facilities have reached a level of maturity that allows them to be opened up to a wider use, mainly the academic sectors have been targeted. The Fanning out Testbeds-as-a-Service for the EIT ICT1 (FanTaaStic) project explores best practices, has performed a gap analysis, investigates applicable business models and works out a concept for the operation of a self-sustainable commercial testbed service offering. For defining the operational model, an analysis of available tools and frameworks from past and current Future Internet testbed projects is being carried out, based on a standard framework that defines the required processes and applications for the carrier grade operation of telecommunication infrastructures and provisioning of services. The business model is defined as a gradually growing service offering, based on categories of a framework for IT Service Management in federated e-infrastructures. The applicability of both, the developed business and operational model for such a sustainable federation will initially be implemented and evaluated in 2014.

Towards Container Orchestration in Fog Computing Infrastructures

The Cloud Computing paradigm promoted the outsourcing of IT infrastructure and enterprise applications paving the way to save costs of building and maintaining computing infrastructures on-premise. In this environment, scale up of applications to attend demands in high peaks become easier and highly automated. Virtualization was a key technology to enable these characteristics. Nowadays, Container technology became popular as an alternative to Virtual Machines, and is being widely applied, as a consequence, Orchestration tools are being extensively applied in the Cloud environment. Despite its success, when it comes to the Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing falls short to meet several requirements. Fog Computing appear as a complimentary technology to the Cloud to deliver the missing requirements in the IoT scene. Managing services deployed in a Fog Environment is a complex task and infrastructure management and orchestration tools can make it seamless. In this paper, we evaluate how Containers can affect the overall performance of applications in Fog Nodes. We analyze different Container Orchestration tools and how they meet Fog requirements to run applications. We also propose a Container Orchestration Framework for Fog Computing infrastructures.

An automated health monitoring solution for future Internet infrastructure marketplaces

Worldwide a large number of Future Internet and Smart City infrastructures exist. To provide a global view on these infrastructures in Europe, the Infinity Project has developed an on-line catalog called the XiPi portal. Its main objective is to facilitate the construction of a sustainable market for infrastructure providers to advertise their capabilities and capacities for end-users. In this context, the requirement to provide up-to-date availability status information of individual infrastructures was raised. We introduce an architecture to provide these high-level monitoring information about the health of the involved infrastructures and their services by adopting existing Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) technologies. The approach has been integrated as an extension into the portal and selected infrastructures advertise their availability.

Next generation internet research and experimentation

Editors: Martin Serrano, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland Nikolaos Isaris, European Commission, Belgium Hans Schaffers, Saxion University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands John Domingue, Open University, United Kingdom Michael Boniface, IT Innovation, United Kingdom Thanasis Korakis, Polytechnic Institute of NYU, USA ISBN: 9788793519121 e-ISBN: 9788793519114 Available From: June 2017 Price: € 90.00The demand for ways to explore and understand how applications and services behave in a shared software defined infrastructures is increasing. Completely new applications are emerging, alongside “Big Data” and the convergence of services with mobile networks and the Internet of Things (IoT) all exploiting Cloud scalability and flexibility along with integration with software defined networks. These innovative technologies are creating opportunities for industry that requires a new collaborative approach to product and services that combines, commercial and funded research, early-stage and close-to-market applications, but always at the cutting edge of ideas.New media applications and services are revolutionising social interaction and user experience in both society and in wide ranging industry sectors. The rapid emergence of pervasive human and environment sensing technologies, novel immersive presentation devices and high performance, globally connected network and cloud infrastructures is generating huge opportunities for application providers, service provider and content providers. These new applications are driving convergence across devices, clouds, networks and services, and the merging of industries, technology and society. Yet the developers of such systems face many challenges in understanding how to optimise their solutions (Quality of Service – QoS) to enhance user experience (Quality of Experience – QoE) and how their disruptive innovations can be introduced into the market with appropriate business models.