Silvano Mignanti

Context-aware Semantic Service Discovery

In the last few years telecommunications and Internet have spread all over the world, in a pervasive way, connecting millions of devices, people, sensors and services without a planned strategy. In such scenario the discovery of services represent still an open challenging research field. To address that problem this paper proposes a context-aware semantic service discovery architecture designed to perform distributed service discovery in heterogeneous networks. This novel architecture is technology independent and compatible with most of the existent service discovery protocols; it inherits and extends the results of the last research groups in the field of context-aware service discovery based on the use of semantic languages. The present work presents the first results of the service discovery design activity which has been carried out within DAIDALOS II (Designing Advanced network Interfaces for the Delivery and Administration of Location independent, Optimised personal Services), a project granted in the European 6th Framework Research Programme, within the IST (Information Society and Technology) thematic area.

An Architecture for Distributing Scalable Content over Peer-to-Peer Networks

Peer-to-Peer systems are nowadays a very popular solution for multimedia distribution, as they provide significant cost benefits compared with traditional server-client distribution. Additionally, the distribution of scalable content enables the consumption of the content in a quality suited for the available bandwidth and the capabilities of the end-user devices. Thus, the distribution of scalable content over P2P networks is a very actual research topic. This paper presents an architecture for the distribution of scalable content in a fully distributed Peer-to-Peer network. The architectural description includes how the scalable layers of the content are mapped to the pieces distributed in the Peer-to-Peer system and detailed descriptions of the producer- and consumer-site architecture of the system. The presented system is to our knowledge the first open-source Peer-to-Peer network with full Scalable Video Coding support.

A Model Based RL Admission Control Algorithm for Next Generation Networks

In this paper we study the call admission control problem to optimize the network operators revenue guaranteeing quality of service to the end users. We consider a network scenario where each class of service is characterized by a different constant bit rate and an associated revenue. We formulate the problem as a Semi-Markov Decision Process,and we use a model based Reinforcement Learning approach.Other traditional algorithms require an explicit knowledge of the state transition models while our solution learn it on-line.We will show how our policy provides better solution than a classic greedy algorithm.

An Ontology-Based Multi-Protocol Service Discovery Framework

In a pervasive computing scenario, a fundamental functionality is the discovery of available services: in fact, the first step in the long chain bringing an user to access a service is to find it. In the literature there are a number of service discovery protocols, each of them excelling in its particular field of application, and also a number of extensions to usual discovery architectures, especially to empower their descriptive capabilities. In any case it is missing an architecture able to solve the problem of the inter-working among different service discovery approaches -typically, each service discovery protocol has its own rules, and limitations -instead to have a common architecture able to use all actual protocols in the same way. In this paper we propose a service discovery framework which addresses this problem, introducing the concept of ontology -based multi-protocol service discovery: the proposed architecture, apart to use OWL to enhance, in the same common way, all descriptive capabilities of discovery protocols, is tailored to be compatible with all discovery protocols, due to the use of an opportune interface. This architecture has been deployed and tested using the SLP and UPnP service discovery protocols, integrated with the powerful descriptive functionalities offered by OWL. This work describes the results of the design activity which is being carried out within DAIDALOS II (designing advanced network interfaces for the delivery and administration of location independent, optimised personal services), a project granted in the European 6th Framework Research Programme, within the IST (Information Society and Technology) thematic area.