Georgios Bouloukakis

Service-oriented Distributed Applications in the Future Internet: The Case for Interaction Paradigm Interoperability

The essential issue of interoperability in distributed systems is becoming even more pressing in the Future Internet, where complex applications will be composed from extremely heterogeneous systems. Open system integration paradigms, such as service oriented architecture (SOA) and enterprise service bus (ESB), have provided answers to the interoperability requirement. However, when it comes to integrating systems featuring heterogeneous interaction paradigms, such as client-service, publish-subscribe and tuple space, existing solutions are typically ad hoc and partial, applying to specific interaction protocol technologies. In this paper, we introduce an interoperability solution based on abstraction and merging of the common high-level semantics of interaction paradigms, which is sufficiently general and extensible to accommodate many different protocol technologies. We apply this solution to revisit the SOA- and ESB-based integration of heterogeneous distributed systems.

Revisiting Service-Oriented Architecture for the IoT: A Middleware Perspective

By bridging the physical and the virtual worlds, the Internet of Things (IoT) impacts a multitude of application domains, among which smart cities, smart factories, resource management, intelligent transportation, health and well-being to name a few. However, leveraging the IoT within software applications raises tremendous challenges from the networking up to the application layers, in particular due to the ultra-large scale, the extreme heterogeneity and the dynamics of the IoT. This paper more specifically explores how the service-oriented architecture paradigm may be revisited to address challenges posed by the IoT for the development of distributed applications. Drawing from our past and ongoing work within the MiMove team at Inria Paris, the paper discusses the evolution of the supporting middleware solutions spanning the introduction of: probabilistic protocols to face scale, cross-paradigm interactions to face heterogeneity, and streaming-based interactions to support the inherent sensing functionality brought in by the IoT.

Integration of Heterogeneous Services and Things into Choreographies

Internet-of-Things (IoT) protocols are constantly increasing in the research and industrial landscape. However, the current standardization efforts limit the incorporation of Things as first-class entities into choreographies. To tackle this interoperability barrier, we propose and demonstrate the eVolution Service Bus (VSB), a middleware solution targeted to enable the interaction between Things-based and business-oriented services. Particularly, we demonstrate the incorporation of a service/Thing into the following choreographies: (i) temperature sensors interacting with a business-oriented service, and (ii) business-oriented services interacting with a route planner service.

Analysis of Timing Constraints in Heterogeneous Middleware Interactions

With the emergence of Future Internet applications that connect web services, sensor-actuator networks and service feeds, scalability and heterogeneity support of interaction paradigms are of critical importance. Heterogeneous interactions can be abstractly represented by client-service, publish-subscribe and tuple space middleware connectors that are interconnected via bridging mechanisms providing interoperability among the services. In this paper, we make use of the eXtensible Service Bus (XSB), proposed in the CHOReOS project as the connector enabling interoperability among heterogeneous choreography participants. XSB models transactions among peers through generic post and get operations that represent peer behavior with varying time/space coupling. Nevertheless, the heterogeneous lease and timeout constraints of these operations severely affect latency and success rates of transactions. By precisely studying the related timing thresholds using timed automata models, we verify conditions for successful transactions with XSB connectors. Furthermore, we statistically analyze through simulations, the effect of varying lease and timeout periods to ensure higher probabilities of successful transactions. Simulation experiments are compared with experiments run on the XSB implementation testbed to evaluate the accuracy of results. This work can provide application developers with precise design time information when setting these timing thresholds in order to ensure accurate runtime behavior.

Towards building real-time, convenient route recommendation system for public transit

Public transportation is essential for sustainable and economical development of cities. Several transport organizations aim to provide service information to commuters through web and mobile apps. This information includes possible routes between two stations, estimated travel and arrival times, and real-time updates about traffic conditions. However, this information is currently not personalized according to commuter preferences. In this work, we emphasize the need for personalized transit service information to commuters and present a vision of our work in this direction. Our final goal is to develop a fully-functional personalized route recommendation system for public transit commuters. This involves identifying commuter preferences and suitable recommendation techniques, and developing a platform to communicate this information to the commuters. We identify the requirements for the development of this platform, and propose an architecture for our system. As a proof of concept, we present an Android participatory sensing application - MetroCognition, which acquires feedback on convenience experienced by commuters in public transit.

QoS-Aware Resource Allocation for Mobile IoT Pub/Sub Systems

IoT applications are usually characterized by large-scale demand and the widespread use of mobile devices. Similarly, performing interaction among application and system components in a decoupled and elastic way, and enforcing Quality of Service (QoS) usually also become issues. Hence, paradigms such as pub/sub on top of cloud resources represent a suitable strategy for application development. However, management of QoS-aware resource allocation for pub/sub systems remains challenging, especially when system peers connect in an intermittent way. In this paper, we propose a new approach for resource allocation focusing on end-to-end performance in face of peers’ disconnections. We evaluate and demonstrate the benefits of our approach using simulations. QoS enforcement was achieved in almost all scenarios, and we have shown that our approach can help reasoning about efficient resource allocation.

Interconnecting and Monitoring Heterogeneous Things in IoT Applications.

Internet of Things (IoT) applications incorporate heterogeneous devices that employ different middleware protocols (MQTT, CoAP, WebSocket, etc). In this paper we present an extension of our cross-integration platform which supports the interoperability of IoT devices. In particular, we introduce the VSB Web Console which enables the development and monitoring of applications with heterogeneous IoT devices. We showcase our approach using the Fire Detection scenario.

Timeliness Evaluation of Intermittent Mobile Connectivity over Pub/Sub Systems

Systems deployed in mobile environments are typically characterized by intermittent connectivity and asynchronous sending/reception of data. To create effective mobile systems for such environments, it is essential to guarantee acceptable levels of timeliness between sending and receiving mobile users. In order to provide QoS guarantees in different application scenarios and contexts, it is necessary to model the system performance by incorporating the intermittent connectivity. Queueing Network Models (QNMs) offer a simple modeling environment, which can be used to represent various application scenarios, and provide accurate analytical solutions for performance metrics, such as system response time. In this paper, we provide an analytical solution regarding the end-to-end response time between users sending and receiving data by modeling the intermittent connectivity of mobile users with QNMs. We utilize the publish/subscribe (pub/sub) middleware as the underlying communication infrastructure for mobile users. To represent the users connections/disconnections, we model and solve analytically an ON/OFF queueing system by applying a mean value approach. Finally, we validate our model using simulations with real-world workload traces. The deviations between the performance results foreseen by the analytical model and the ones provided by the simulator are shown to be less than 5% for a variety of scenarios.