Martin Waldburger

Toward the Mobile Grid:Service Provisioning in a Mobile Dynamic Virtual Organization

When considering mobile or nomadic users of commercial grid services, todays grids have to be reflected with regard to potential functional extensions needed, as well as emerging consequences on business modeling. In-line with a formalized investigation of such mobile grids, the concept of a mobile dynamic virtual organization (MDVO) is introduced, and relevant potentials are illustrated by means of a business scenario in e-health and tourism.

An Accounting Model for Dynamic Virtual Organizations

The provisioning of remote and composed services in support of various application areas has dramatically increased over recent times. Thus, the concept of Grids has evolved, in the sense of a common platform for electronic service provisioning in multi-domain environments. While, traditionally, Grids have seen a quite static existence, many new service compositions have to take place on-demand and for certain periods of time only. To tackle those issues the concept of Virtual Organizations (VO) delivers a highly suitable representation of such dynamic Grids. However, one important open problem at this stage is the lack of applicable, distributed, and efficient accounting schemes for commercial resource and service consumptions. Even for simple management purposes, e.g., sampling or archiving, this functionality is essential. Therefore, a comprehensive model for Grid accounting has been developed and suitable accountable units have been defined, in which an underlying activity- and resource-based accounting model covers economic cost theory. Furthermore, this work is based on a service model proposed for service provisioning in dynamic VOs, overcoming the typically static nature of traditional Grids.

An Integrated Accounting and Charging Architecture for Mobile Grids

The adoption of the Internet Protocol (IP) by a number of non-IP network operators, such as telecom or cable TV operators, opens the path toward new business models. IP will allow operators to provide a unified wired as well as wireless access to a wide range of services to their users. Additionally, using the same communication protocols and standard interfaces, enables different providers to coordinate any type of resources in virtual organizations (VO) and supports the composition of services aggregated across multiple domains. On one hand, such an open environment requires new business models to be adopted by the involved parties. On the other hand, grid middleware infrastructure supporting integrated accounting, charging, pricing, and billing across multiple domains has to be in place to facilitate service provisioning in multiple VOs. Based on the relevant set of requirements derived, a new and extended A4C Architecture (Authentication, Authorization, Accounting, Auditing, Charging) has been developed, implemented, and evaluated for mobile grids providing pervasive access to knowledge.

Dependable Networks and Services

The threat landscape is continuously evolving. Large, widespread worm infections are leaving more and more space to more stealthy attacks targeting highly valuable targets. Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are rapidly becoming a new major target of cyber-criminals: ICS are evolving, bringing powerful capabilities into the critical infrastructure environment along with new and yet undiscovered threats. This was pointed out in multiple occasions by security experts and was confirmed by a recent survey carried out by Symantec: according to the survey (http://bit.ly/bka8UF), 53% of a total of 1580 critical infrastructure industries have admitted to being targeted by cyber attacks. The survey implies that the incidents reported by the press over the last several years are nothing but the tip of a considerably larger problem: the vast majority of these incidents has never been disclosed. Moreover, when looking at the few publicly disclosed incidents such as Stuxnet, we see a completely different level of sophistication, compared to traditional malware witnessed in the wild in previous years. This talk will dive into the challenges and the opportunities associated to ICS security research, and on the tools at our disposal to improve our ability to protect such critical environments. Ontology-Driven Dynamic Discovery and Distributed Coordination of a Robot Swarm Niels Bouten, Anna Hristoskova, Femke Ongenae, Jelle Nelis, and Filip De Turck Ghent University Department of Information Technology IBBT Gaston Crommenlaan 8/201, B-9050 Ghent, Belgium {niels.bouten,anna.hristoskova,femke.ongenae, jelle.nelis,filip.deturck}@intec.ugent.be http://ibcn.intec.ugent.be Abstract. Swarm robotic systems rely heavily on dynamic interactions to provide interoperability between the different autonomous robots. In Swarm robotic systems rely heavily on dynamic interactions to provide interoperability between the different autonomous robots. In current systems, interactions between robots are programmed into the applications controlling them. Incorporating service discovery into these applications allows the robots to dynamically discover other devices. However, since most of these mechanisms use syntax-based matching, the robots cannot reason about the offered functionality. Moreover, as contextual information is often not included in the matching process, it is impossible for robots to select the most suitable device under the current context. This paper aims to tackle these issues by proposing a framework for semantic service discovery in a dynamically changing environment. A semantic layer was added to an existing discovery protocol, offering a semantic interface. Using this framework, services can be searched based on what they offer, with services best suiting the current context yielding the highest matching scores.

An approach to investigating socio-economic tussles arising from building the future internet

With the evolution of the Internet from a controlled research network to a worldwide social and economic platform, the initial assumptions regarding stakeholder cooperative behavior are no longer valid. Conflicts have emerged in situations where there are opposing interests. Previous work in the literature has termed these conflicts tussles. This article presents the research of the SESERV project, which develops a methodology to investigate such tussles and is carrying out a survey of tussles identified within the research projects funded under the Future Networks topic of the FP7. Selected tussles covering both social and economic aspects are analyzed also in this article.

Grids in a Mobile World: Akogrimo's Network and Business Views

ABSTRACT The use of wireless networking technologies has emerged over recent years in many application domains. The area of grids determines a potentially huge application domain, since the typical centralized computing centers require access from anywhere, e.g., from field engineers who are situated in a wireless network domain. Thus, the integration of suitable business views on mobile grids, of grid views on available technologies, and network views in a fully IP-based network domain determines the key challenge. The Akogrimo projects architecture developed, is outlined and discussed in this paper and provides the major details required to offer a fully integrated and interoperable solution for those three views of concern.

Evaluation of an Accounting Model for Dynamic Virtual Organizations

Accounting of Grid resource and service usage determines the central support activity for Grid systems to be adopted as a means for service-oriented computing in Dynamic Virtual Organizations (DVO). An all-embracing study of existing Grid accounting systems has revealed that these approaches focus primarily on technical precision, while they lack a foundation of appropriate economic accounting principles and the support for multi-provider scenarios or virtualization concepts. Consequently, a new, flexible, resource-based accounting model for DVOs was developed, combining technical and economic accounting by means of Activity-based Costing. Driven by a functional evaluation, this paper pursues a full-fledged evaluation of the new, generically applicable Grid accounting model. This is done for the specific environment of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany. Thus, a detailed evaluation methodology and evaluation environment is outlined, leading to actual model-based cost calculations for a defined set of considered Grid services. The results gained are analyzed and respective conclusions on model applicability, optimizations, and further extensions are drawn.

Emerging Management Mechanisms for the Future Internet: 7th IFIP WG 6.6 International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management, and Security, AIMS 2013, Barcelona, Spain, June 25-28, 2013. Proceedings

The current Internet paradigm and its core technologies have been designed to support connections between endpoints (hosts). It is widely deployed and IP (Internet Protocol) management tools are largely used by network operators. Yet, nowadays user needs are not host-centric; users care about accessing content. Recent research activities for the Future Internet point to information-centric networking (ICN), centered on the production, consumption, and transformation of information matching user interest, moving away from the current endpoint-oriented approach. Several ICN solutions are proposed and amongst them, Content-centric Networking (CCN) is one of the most promising ones. However, CCN networks will not be deployed by a network operator, if a management solution will not be available. Having an efficient management system is a strong requirement to rapidly react to problems in the network. Furthermore, a network operator needs to be aware of the traffic transiting in its network and, thus, needs to be able to monitor, classify, and qualify it. Research on ICN started 5-6 years ago, but there is not yet any significant effort on the management of such networks. It just started few months ago and a first proposal was presented in the 86 IRTF ICNRG meeting in March 2013. Since this is a critical issue, this talk will focus on it from a network operator’s point of view. This talk will also introduce the ICN paradigm, with a special focus on the CCN solution. Additionally, requirements and challenges for managing and monitoring the CCN network will be presented.

Data Transfer Using a Camera and a Three-Dimensional Code

Oneand two-dimensional barcodes have become very popular in the last years and decades and are widely used to identify products and services. Recently, two-dimensional barcodes like QR code are also used to transfer a hyperlink from a magazine or poster to a smartphone. To overcome the low storage capacity of two-dimensional barcodes, the time can be introduced as a third dimension. Instead of one, a sequence of barcodes can be used to transfer an amount of data therefore. This would create a new application area. One could transfer for example files from a personal computer to a smartphone in cases where a wired or wireless connection is not available. The goal of this thesis is to design and implement the whole workflow on the receiver side. This contains capturing the 3D barcode, recognizing and reading the sequence of 2D matrices, and retrieving the original content. An important criterion though is the maximization of the transfer rate respecting the reliability. Furthermore, adversarial conditions have to be identified, tested and documented. The implemented prototype achieves a theoretical throughput of 12’288 bytes per 30 seconds, which means about 430 bytes/s. Interfering factors like distortion, rotation and light reflectance have been evaluated and considered in the implementation. Future extensions of the prototype could for example compensate the occurrent fish-eye effect and aim for larger barcodes, which could help increasing the throughput. Auspicious in this regard are the announced API changes and improvements in Android 4.0, e.g. taking pictures faster due to a shorter burst delay.

Legal compliance in commercial service provisioning across administrative domains

Internet design principles do not focus on commercial service provisioning. Hence, support mechanisms need to be implemented in order to ensure that value added services can be offered in a competitive context. Commercial product offerings base on contractual agreements concluded between service providers and service customers. Contracts need to reflect business-driven requirements originating from involved contract parties, while they are invariably required to respect those regulations imposed by commerce law. Legal compliance, thus, determines the available range of applicable contractual terms-- irrespective of whether such a contract governs commercial value added services in the Internet or not. Legal determinations are valid in a limited geographical area. The Internet, however, lacks a distinct notion of location. Consequently, technical means to overcome this fundamental design gap are investigated, in order to ensure that legally compliant contracts can be concluded.