Maurizio Paone

CLEVER: A cloud-enabled virtual environment

A cloud-enabled virtual environment called CLEVER is proposed in this paper. CLEVER simplifies the access management of private/hybrid clouds and provides simple and easily accessible interfaces to interact with different “interconnected” clouds, deploy Virtual Machines and perform load balancing through migration. The concept of interface is also exploited for integrating security, contextualization, VM disk image management and federation functionalities made available from higher level software components. Due to its pluggable design, CLEVER is able to grant high scalability, modularity and flexibility in the middleware architecture, while fault tolerance requirements are also satisfied. A prototype version of CLEVER has been developed to implement and test its main features, as discussed in the final part the paper.

Heterogeneous Sensors Become Homogeneous Things in Smart Cities

Smart Cities offer a new approach for optimizing services, reducing costs, simplifying the management of Future Cities, enabling new services for citizens. In the Future Internet initiatives, Sensors Networks assume even more a crucial role, especially for making smarter cities. Sensors, becoming smart, will represent the peripheral elements of a complex future ICT world. However, due to the specific application field, smart sensors are very heterogeneous in terms of communication technologies, sensing features and elaboration capabilities. To overcome issues due to the high heterogeneity in this paper we present a new architecture able to make a dual abstraction of complex sensing infrastructures along with data they collect. An important key of this work is to provide a service at world wide level, that is scalable and flexible. The architecture implementation is based on Sensor Web Enablement standard specifications and makes use of the Contiki Operating System for accomplishing the Internet of Things.

A multi-sink swarm-based routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are a new emerging area where swarm intelligence can be applied with interesting implications. In fact, a strong analogy between unicellular organism colonies and wireless sensor networks can be emphasized: a sensor network can be viewed as a “colony” of simple, scarce resource nodes that, autonomously, are able only to perform simple tasks, but all together can accomplish very complex problems. In this paper we propose a routing protocol for multisink Wireless Sensor Networks with interesting properties: self organization, fault tolerance and environmental adaptation. The proposed protocol was inspired by the well known behavior (in artificial life studies) of “Slime Mold”. Such colony of unicellular organisms organizes itself in clusters by pheromone generation and evaporation mechanisms. In a similar manner our protocol manages the data traffic towards multiple sink nodes using the gradient concept and reaching high levels of autonomy and fault tolerance. We analyze the proposed protocol to examine the performances, the signalling overhead and the adaptation properties to environmental changes or nodes faults using simulation techniques.

Huge amount of heterogeneous sensed data needs the cloud

Cloud Technology might be used for processing and storing the huge amount of data generated from users and thousands of heterogeneous kind of sensors deployed all around. In the near future, the simple use of the cloud ”elasticity”, where computation and storage resources can be on-demand resized, might be not useful enough to support the increasing rate of data production. In this work we introduce a new cloud architecture able to virtualize different types of sensing infrastructures in ”virtual sensing elements”, adding new capabilities of data processing. This architecture named CLEVER is capable to analyze and filter data from sensor networks and provide them through advanced services, in order to avoid the rough flooding of data within the cloud. CLEVER has a peripheral decision-maker, able to interact with SNs, and a high level intelligence, able to meet the new requirements of sensed environments, and the manipulation of data. The efficient communication system at the base of CLEVER allows to efficiently manage resources and services, balancing data offerings and demands.

Self Organizing Maps for Distributed Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Providing an efficient localization system is one of the most important goals to be pursued if an efficient utilization of sensor networks has to be addressed. This paper proposes a novel localization system based on Kohonen s self organizing maps (SOMs), able to provide some Artificial Intelligence features to sensor nodes. A SOM is a particular neural network that learns to classify data without any supervision. In each sensor node, a SOM is implemented to evaluate the sensor node position, using a very little amount of storage and computing resources. In a scenario where thousands of sensor nodes are placed, this system evaluates the position of each sensor in a distributed manner, assuming a very little percentage of nodes knowing their actual position.

How CLEVER-based clouds conceive horizontal and vertical federations

Nowadays, the cloud computing ecosystem includes hundreds of independent and heterogeneous clouds. Most of such cloud platforms can be considered as “islands in the ocean of the cloud computing” and do not present any form of federation. At the same time several clouds are beginning to use the cloud-based services of other clouds, but there is still a long way to go toward the establishment of a worldwide ecosystem including thousands of cooperation federated clouds. This paper aims to investigate the existing cloud middleware solutions able to address all the potential issues involved in these new cloud scenarios. In particular, the CLEVER cloud middleware will be analyzed, highlighting its design and features, and explaining the motivations that allow us to consider it suitable to the different phases of the evolution of federated cloud computing.

Call admission control in hierarchical mobile networks

Mobile networks are requested to provide several added value services with different QoS levels. An efficient call admission control (CAC) is one of the strategic components that a network management policy requires, which defines how to allocate network resources to roaming and new users. We assume a hierarchical network architecture constituted of several cellular IP regions which may communicate each other accessing the Internet through a Mobile IP protocol. In such scenario, we demonstrate the importance of CAC not only in the ingress wireless points, but in the wired network too. An integrated approach to CAC is then proposed whose advantages are shown through simulation analysis.

Virtual business networks with Cloud Computing and virtual machines

To be competitive and to react faster to the market demands, Enterprises need new information processing techniques, able to analyse the increasing amount of produced data, and innovative solutions in order to manage the computational resources with better flexibility, scalability, efficiency and smaller costs. The traditional monolithic high performance computing paradigm is not suitable to achieve these requisites. The emerging Cloud Computing represents a valuable answer to these requirements. In fact, in this model the business buy computing time from commercial providers, allowing to dramatically decrease the investments in own data centers. Nevertheless, this paradigm often imposes constraints related to underlying infrastructure, forcing Enterprises to rethink their application architectures. Inspired by Amazons EC2 model, we propose a system which allows Enterprises to extend their business networks within any Cloud infrastructure, creating custom virtual environments able to run the applications without any change, but responding always to the business companies typical requirements: Quality of Service, High- Availability and Security.

A Bio-inspired Distributed Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks: Performance Evaluation

Sensor networks are wireless networks with peculiar properties that require specific attention to be properly managed if their performance and dependability have to be taken care of. In fact, both the usually hard environmental conditions where sensors are deployed and the scarcity of node resources determine overall critical working conditions that dramatically impact on parameters such as reliability, fault tolerance, power consumption and scalability. Currently available routing protocols hardly meet all these constraints, because they are not designed in a strong distributed fashion. Swarm intelligence is a science that studies the behavior of social insects characterized by distributed elaboration features, simple computational capacity, flexibility and robustness. In this paper, we propose a routing algorithm based on swarm intelligence, named pheromone protocol (PH-protocol), with some interesting features such as self organization, fault tolerance and environmental adaptation capabilities. To highlight these properties we compared our algorithm against the directed diffusion one, a well known sensor network routing protocol, and measured their performances in terms of reliability, fault tolerance, power consumption and scalability. The obtained results demonstrate that sensor networks greatly benefit from the distributed nature of our PH-protocol, which ensures interesting performance and reliability features.

How a structured testbed enables the rapid development and deployment of cloud services: The VISION Cloud use case

The right setup of a testbed is important for enabling the rapid development and deployment of cloud services, in particular all the times the testbed hosts more concurrent interactions. This work shows how to configure an environment where more developers insist on it. In particular what tools are indispensable for managing compelling distributed cloud environments. We looked at mature Open Source solutions, performing their smoothed integration. The paper describes all parts necessary for accomplishing complex scenarios, even in a bounded perimeter as the VISION Cloud EU project offering. VISION Cloud represents the reference architecture dealing with Cloud Storage, and our work attempts to provide solutions applied on VISION, but suitable for any type of framework.