Ramide Dantas

XACML-Based Composition Policies for Ambient Networks

Ambient Networks (AN) pose new challenges to the management discipline, and policies are considered to be an adequate solution for providing flexibility, distributed control, and self-management features. However, the current state-of the art IETF policy framework was not designed for the challenges of new 3G/4G environments such as AN. This paper presents PBMAN, a policy-based architecture and a composition framework that extends the AN architecture, where policies are intrinsically at the underlying layer by design and not as a later ad-on. The use of policies and their interaction with network composition is the main research challenge of PBMAN. The current architecture has been designed based on previous experience, on a design-implement-test development cycle. The framework was used to model a video on demand scenario, whereto composition policies based on an extended version of the XACML policy language have been written.

Service creation and execution with the Service Refinement Cycle

Service composition is today mostly a manual process and automated service creation techniques are not ready for prime time in IT and network system development. This paper presents the Service Refinement Cycle as an integrated framework for dealing with the service lifecycle composed of stages like service creation, deployment, execution and management. The main realization of the cycle is the Service Code, which contains executable specifications (code) that may run at any compatible engine.

Workflow specification and scheduling with security constraints in hybrid clouds

Hybrid cloud management must deal with resources from both public and private clouds, as well as their interaction. When workflows are executed in a hybrid cloud, dependencies among their components bring new factors to be considered during specification, scheduling, and virtual machine provisioning. In this paper, we describe three components, namely workflow code, scheduler, and resource allocator, which enable the specification and execution of workflows in hybrid clouds in the context of the AltoStratus middleware. We present a case study that shows the interaction among these components, and their applicability in practice.

KVM virtualization impact on active round-trip time measurements

Active measurements tools transmit probe packets between a sender and a receiver to estimate performance metrics such as round-trip time, jitter and loss. In this paper we evaluate how KVM virtualization affects measurements of performance metrics, specifically the round-trip time (RTT). To understand the impact we investigate the interplay of various environment and measurement parameters with virtualization. A number of experiments are performed in order to investigate which parameters had major impact on the RTT. The paper shows that the measurements are affected by CPU load in the host as well as network load while I/O load seemed to have limited impact.

Design and implementation of a policy-based management framework for Ambient Networks: Choices and lessons learned

The management of large-scale 3G and 4G wireless systems, such as ambient networks (AN), in the Internet is a challenge, due to their inherent heterogeneous and distributed nature. In this paper we present our experience with the design and implementation of PBMAN, a Policy-based Management framework for AN, which gives special attention to network composition. We discuss the main choices as well as the lessons we learned during this process and the next steps.

A path to automated service creation via semi-automation levels

The manual creation of new Internet- and IT-based applications is currently a limiting factor in enabling new and innovative services to be quickly available. We advocate that semi-automated service creation techniques are feasible, whereas fully automated ones are not a reality yet. Consistently increasing the level of automation may lead to a better comprehension of the problem that will pave the way for the introduction of higher levels of automation in the future. We have developed two versions of a service creation tool, with different levels of automation, which have so far confirmed our expectations that the experience with semi-automation is a promising approach for continually speeding up the service creation process.

Facilitating Service Creation via Partial Specification and Automated Composition

Service composition is an important feature enabled by Service Oriented Computing but it remains mainly a manual process. Proposals for complete or partial automation of composition exist, the majority relying on artificial intelligence-based planning, automated proof techniques, or graph-based solutions. Although sound, these approaches present practical issues that prevent their use in production scenarios. This paper presents a composition tool that allows for partial service specification along with a composition algorithm based on the semantic matching of services inputs and outputs. Early performance numbers are also presented.

Goal-Based Service Creation Using Autonomic Entities

This paper presents an approach for facilitating the setting-up and management of new multi-organizational telecom services. We are addressing factors that currently impede the development of new complex telecom services. One factor is the gap between high-level business goals and low-level network management policies making it hard for business managers to quickly implement new business ideas. A second factor, due to the trends towards outsourcing and multi-organizational structures, is the increasing complexity of the services which leads to high demands on the management environments. These factors translate into high costs and long time-to-market for the introduction of new complex telecom services. As a suggestion for a solution to these issues, we propose a goal-based approach towards self-management of complex telecom services. In our suggestion lies a new breed of network devices called Autonomic Entities which should be able both to orchestrate services fulfilling given goals, and to refine and combine goals for the purpose of self-management. This paper focuses on how Autonomic Entities can be combined via a goal combining method for the creation of new services. Our approach is illustrated with examples and an application to a scenario.

Toward Goal-Based Autonomic Networking

The ability to quickly deploy and efficiently manage services is critical to the telecommunications industry. Currently, services are designed and managed by different teams with expertise over a wide range of concerns, from high-level business to low-level network aspects. Not only is this approach expensive in terms of time and resources, but it also has problems to scale up to new outsourcing and/or multi-vendor models, where subsystems and teams belong to different organizations. We endorse the idea, upheld among others in the autonomic computing community, that the network and system components involved in the provision of a service must be crafted to facilitate their management. Furthermore, they should help bridge the gap between network and business concerns. In this paper, we sketch an approach based on early work on the hierarchical organization of autonomic entities that possibly belong to different organizations. An autonomic entity governs over other autonomic entities by defining their goals. Thus, it is up to each autonomic entity to decide its line of actions in order to fulfill its goals, and the governing entity needs not know about the internals of its subordinates. We illustrate the approach with a simple but still rich example of a telecom service.

E2ECloud: Composition and execution of end-to-end services in the cloud

The Internet has rapidly evolved, becoming a virtual place where it is simple to handle tasks that were known to be cumbersome or complex beforehand. However the development of new services remains a time consuming activity. This paper presents E2ECloud, a computing environment that allows the development of solutions for creation and provision of composite services in the cloud. Users create a new service through a SaaS tool, which generates a Service Code and deploys it onto an IaaS to be executed. A prototype of E2ECloud was developed and qualitative and quantitative evaluations were conducted, highlighting the potential of our approach to the creation of a new market for cloud service development.