Ricardo Azevedo

User Provided Cloud Computing

Web 2.0 started a paradigm shift concerning content generation. Users spend hours browsing and producing contents to share, most of the times, freely. During these activities, their laptops and home PCs are considerably underused. By combining the amount of idle processing capacity with increasingly fast internet accesses, every computer can be considered as a computational “nearby” resource. The question is: what to do with them? This paper explores how these resources can be used to give something back to the user in a secure and private way.

The Building Blocks of a PaaS

Traditional cloud computing providers enable developers to program and deploy applications in the cloud by using platform as a service (PaaS) providers. Despite the benefits of such an approach, this service model usually comes with a high level of the lock in effect into the service provider. The lock in effect occurs when a software developer needs to change its cloud provider. When this happens, it usually means a major application rewrite, specific for the new PaaS. This paper details the initial results of a project whose goal is to build a PaaS where vendor lock in does not occur. With this PaaS, developers wishing to deploy their applications into the cloud may continue to program using their usual development environments. There are no necessary changes required to make the application PaaS compatible. As a proof of concept, we developed an open source PaaS management application as a regular web application and then deployed it on the cloud.

A Cloud Oriented Approach for People-Provided Services

Web 2.0 started a paradigm shift concerning content generation. Users spend hours browsing and producing contents to share, most of the times, freely. During these activities, their laptops and home PCs are considerably underused. By combining the amount of idle processing capacity with increasingly fast internet accesses, every computer can be considered as a computational “nearby” resource. The question is: what to do with them? This paper explores how these resources can be used to give something back to the user in a secure and private way.

Evaluation of policy-based admission control mechanisms in NGN

The 3GPP consortium proposed in the release 7 of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) a Diameter interface for the resource admission communication process replacing the previous COPS solution. Although both academic and industry communities have deeply debate the advantages and disadvantages of each protocol, its impact in NGN may have not been thoroughly quantified. This paper compares both protocols in terms of messages exchanged between network entities, and of bandwidth requirements during the admission control process. Based on general network operator environment characteristics, we present several exploitation scenarios where it is analyzed the scalability and adequacy of each protocol.

Managing QoS in a NGN Using a PBM Approach

Next Generation Network (NGN) management represents an enormous challenge due to the large number of managed elements, the variety of roles the managed entities play in the network and the difficulty of orchestrating management actions. Several NGN standardization bodies point toward Policy Based Management as the best approach for NGN network management. This paper describes a anagement solution for a NGN IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) QoS management scenario based on WBEM technology. The roposal is for a WBEM-based policy server, a graphical olicy editor application and instrumentation logic for the NGN QoS Management. The graphical policy editor reduces the learning curve imposed by the policy specification anguage, allowing the specification of policies through a rich and user-friendly visual interface, hiding the CIM syntax complexity but keeping CIM’s potential.

A graphical user interface for policy composition in CIM-SPL

CIM-SPL is a declarative policy specification language proposed inside DMTF. SPL policies allow the specification of rules to govern the behavior of a system using a PBM approach. However, SPL requires thorough knowledge of the language syntax as well as full understanding of the management scenario and its available management features. This paper describes a graphical CIM-SPL editor application and the supporting policy edition metaphor. A graphical composition process of SPL policies is proposed, based on the use of drag and drop operations of the policy component items in a graphical interface. The editor includes policy creation wizards that guide the user in the policy specification process, in order to alleviate network administrators from the difficulties associated with the intricacies of SPL language. Additionally, a text-based SPL edition tool is provided as a complement for experienced SPL language operators.