Soheil Qanbari

Web-Scale Service Delivery for Smart Cities

Smart cities encompass services in diverse business and technological domains. Presently, most of these services are delivered through domain-specific, tightly coupled systems, which entail limited scalability and extensibility. The authors propose Web-scale service delivery that addresses these limitations and encourage the creation of novel services based on a domain-independent, cloud-based service-delivery platform.

Green software services: from requirements to business models

In recent years, green software research is gaining momentum because of the acute need for sustainable development. Most past research has been focused on the definitions, metrics and technical solutions for green software, but few has addressed green software from the business perspective. In this paper, we present the analysis on three key elements of Green Software Services (GSS)-stakeholders, their requirements, and business models. The stakeholders of GSS are detailed with the services each stakeholder can provide and consume, thus clarifying their interests to GSS. Based on this analysis, we present the domain-independent, high-level requirements to GSS that cover diverse needs of different stakeholders. Six business models are then proposed to promote collaborations of stakeholders on the delivery of GSS. In the end, the relationship between GSS and cloud is discussed and a GSS marketplace is envisioned.

IoT Design Patterns: Computational Constructs to Design, Build and Engineer Edge Applications

The objective of design patterns is to make design robust and to abstract reusable solutions behind expressive interfaces, independent of a concrete platform. They are abstracted away from the complexity of underlying and enabling technologies. The connected things in IoT tend to be diverse in terms of supported protocols, communication methods and capabilities, computational power and storage. This motivates us to look for more cost-effective and less resource-intensive IoT microservice models. We have identified a wide range of design disciplines involved in creating IoT systems, that act as a seamless interface for collaborating heterogeneous things, and suitable to be implemented on resource-constrained devices. The IoT patterns covered in this paper vary in their granularity and level of abstraction. They are inter-related, well-structured design artifacts, providing efficient and reliable solutions to recurring problems discovered by IoT system architects. The authors offer sound advice for designing, building, and scaling with cross-device interactions inherent in complex IoT ecosystems.

CloudMan: A platform for portable cloud manufacturing services

Cloud manufacturing refers to “as a Service” production model that exploits an on-demand access to a distributed pool of diversified manufacturing services and resources. It forms elastic and reconfigurable production lines, which enhance efficiency, by allowing optimal resource allocation in response to demand changes and market dynamics. This paper studies these challenges and proposes a portable cloud manufacturing platform, entitled “CloudMan”, aiming at achieving a portable deployment of cloud manufacturing services to any compliant distributed production line in the cloud. The stakeholders of CloudMan are detailed together with their API requirements, where each stakeholder has an interest in. Having this rigorous analysis in mind, we present a holistic architecture for CloudMan, as it considers the manufacturing data, material and event flow from sensors and shop floors, through services to end products. In architecting such platform, there is a lack of agreed standard for the portability and orchestration of manufacturing services, as well as their definition. The proposed platform incorporates OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for cloud Applications (TOSCA) policies, plans and templates as a mechanism for dynamic configuration, portability and deployment of manufacturing services across multiple collaborating manufacturers. Thereby, the architecture provides a set of abstraction levels for various types of manufacturing services in which encapsulates and addresses specific requirements to satisfy the needs of stakeholders.

Open Government Data as a Service (GoDaaS): Big Data Platform for Mobile App Developers

The next web of open and linked data leverages governmental data openness to improve the quality of social services. This data is a national asset. In this study, we elaborate on this emerging open government movement, together with the underlying data transparency to drive novel business models which utilize these assets under a functioning platform called Open Government Data as a Service (GoDaaS). These business models actively engage civic-minded programmers in developing sustainable applications, contextualizing and utilizing the government open data resources. This leads to an expansive government marketplace, with many civic-minded developers might be new to doing business with the federal or state government. By means of a consultation service prototype, we provide development advices for programmers on how to work out the specific details of their applications business model. Having the business models in focus, this study also proposes a novel abstraction unit called Gov. Data Compute Unit (DCU), so that governments are able to feed developers with formalized, structured and programmable data resource units rather than just data catalogs. Such DCUs enable developers to cope with an increasing heterogeneity of state government data sets, by providing a unified interface on top of diverse data schemata from various states.

Constructing Green Software Services: From Service Models to Cloud-Based Architecture

In recent years, green software research is gaining momentum from the acute need for sustainable development as well as the far-reaching effect of ICT to our society. ‘[Green and] Sustainable Software is software, whose direct and indirect negative impacts on economy, society, human beings, and environment that result from development, deployment, and usage of the software are minimal and/or which have a positive effect on sustainable development’ [4]. Based on this definition, the green software research is growing in two directions. The first direction looks into the runtime energy consumption of software [15] and its engineering pro-aspects of our society and investigates how software can be used to improve the sustainability of a broader range of business, social and individual activities [5]. This chapter is focused on the research and development in the second direction—to leverage software to solve sustainability problems in a wider scope.

Cloud Asset Pricing Tree (CAPT)

Providers are incorporating novel techniques to cope with prospective aspects of trading like resource allocation over future demands and its pricing elasticity that was not foreseen before. To leverage the pricing elasticity of upcoming demand and supply, we employ financial option theory (future contracts) as a mechanism to alleviate the risk in resource allocation over future demands. This study introduces a novel Cloud Asset Pricing Tree (CAPT) model that finds the optimal premium price of the Cloud federation options efficiently. Providers will benefit by this model to make decisions when to buy options in advance and when to exercise them to achieve more economies of scale. The CAPT model adapts its structure to address the price elasticity concerns and makes the demand and provisioning, price inelastic. Our empirical evidences suggest that using the CAPT model, exploits the Cloud market potential as an opportunity for more resource utilization and future capacity planning.

An Economic Model for Utilizing Cloud Computing Resources via Pricing Elasticity of Demand and Supply

In this study, we elaborate two economic variables which have direct impact on prospective aspects of trading like Cloud resource allocation over future demands. These variables are Pricing Elasticity of Demand (PEoD) and Pricing Elasticity of Provisioning (PEoP). To leverage the pricing elasticity of upcoming demand and supply, we employ financial option theory as a method to alleviate the risk in resource provisioning over future demands. Our approach finds the optimal option price of the federated resource in the Cloud to come to an equilibrium between PEoD and PEoP. The asset equilibrium price occurs when the supply resource pool matches the aggregate demand indicating an optimal resource utilization. This study proposes a novel Cloud Asset Pricing Tree (CAPT) model that finds the optimal premium price of the Cloud federation options efficiently. The CAPT enables cloud service providers to make proper decisions when to trade options in advance and when to exercise them to achieve more economies of scale. Our empirical evidences suggest that utilizing the CAPT model, exploits the Cloud federation market as an opportunity for more resource utilization and future capacity planning.

Diameter of Things (DoT): A Protocol for Real-time Telemetry of IoT Applications

The Diameter of Things (DoT) protocol is intended to provide a near real-time metering framework for IoT applications in resource-constraint gateways. Respecting resource capacity constraints on edge devices establishes a firm requirement for a lightweight protocol in support of fine-grained telemetry of IoT deployment units. Such metering capability is needed when lack of resources among competing applications dictates our schedule and credit allocation. In response to these findings, the authors offer the DoT protocol that can be incorporated to implement real-time metering of IoT services for prepaid subscribers as well as Pay-per-use economic models. The DoT employs mechanisms to handle the IoT composite application resource usage units consumed/charged against a single user balance. Such charging methods come in two models of time-based and event-based patterns. The former is used for scenarios where the charged units are continuously consumed while the latter is typically used when units are implicit invocation events. The DoT-enabled platform performs a chained metering transaction on a graph of dependent IoT microservices, collects the emitted usage data, then generates billable artifacts from the chain of metering tokens. Finally it permits micropayments to take place in parallel.

Cloud Resources-Events-Agents Model: Towards TOSCA-Based Applications

The dilemma for domain experts and developers during design time of a cloud application is ensuring the sufficient programming abstractions between them in mapping the business requirements to cloud specifications. Thus, a modeling language is needed to capture and express the business requirements. Resources-Events-Agents (REA) is a well-known business requirement modeling language that decomposes the information system into three constituents with the set of compliant binary collaborations called, Duality. This study is a preliminary attempt to employ REA for developing cloud applications. In this study, we define a conceptual mapping between REA model and OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for cloud Applications (TOSCA) policies, plans and templates. Based on that, we proceed with the process of building business-driven cloud applications. In support of our model, we implement a cloud REA Modeling tool referred to as CREAM, where business requirements are specified in REA, then corresponding cloud application is composed and built. We describe the underlying mapping strategy as well as the details of our tool in support of the proposed approach.