BGP-inspired autonomic service routing for the cloud

Cloud computing has emerged as a new computing paradigm, with provisioning model generally consisting of cloud service providers (CSPs), network service providers (NSPs), and end users. The associated economics has opened up a new research area; and with the expansion of the cloud computing market, the relationship between CSPs and NSPs, is changing profoundly. In addition to providing the default network services, traditional NSPs, in attempt to compete with CSPs, have started offering cloud services to end users. Though much progress has been made toward addressing competitions among CSPs themselves or among NSPs themselves, few studies have focused on the competition between CSPs and NSPs. In this paper, we investigate the problem of insufficient studies on the competition between CSPs and NSPs by presenting a new economic model to characterize the competition between CSPs and NSPs, and by conducting thorough theoretical analysis as well as numeric experiments to validate the proposed model. We believe, based on results, that the proposed economic model is general and feasible, and thus is applicable to modeling the competition among service providers in cloud computing market.

Cloud computing is a promising technology, where the infrastructure, developing platform, software and storage are delivered as a service. With the development of cloud computing, more and more cloud service providers emerge. However, there are no metrics can be referred to compare these providers, so it is difficult for cloud consumers to select the most reliable providers or resources. Thus we present a platform of Services Level Agreement (SLA) in cloud computing. In the platform, we propose a Reputation System to evaluate the reliability of providers or resources to address this challenge, and we also propose a SLA template pool in order to make the SLA negotiation between cloud providers and cloud consumers become more equitable, transparent and convenient.

Despite the promising application of cloud computing within government organisations, determining the barriers to the successful implementation of cloud computing remains a major challenge. Often, government organisations face formidable barriers to fully adopting cloud computing functions. These barriers include organisational culture issues, a weak application of service-level agreements (SLAs), compliance issues, interoperability and integration issues, the lack of an organisational strategy, cost calculation methods, cloud service availability, and cloud data security and privacy, as well as insufficient trust in providers. Tackling these barriers while meeting the specifications of government cloud computing involves architectural requirements and mechanisms. In addition, the nature of cloud ecosystem operation and its alignment with appropriate strategies are known to be complex, also considering the growing desire for governance solutions. Although researchers and organisations have recognised cloud computing obstacles prior to the cloud implementation stage, fewer efforts have been made to investigate cloud barriers in-depth during and after cloud implementation projects or when introducing governance solutions. This might partly be attributable to inadequate enterprise requirements for addressing cloud barriers, the complexity of government cloud specifications, and the lack of involvement by cloud stakeholders, such as providers and consumers. Thus, the aim of this dissertation is to develop a governance method consisting of the generation and testing of architectural requirements to overcome dominant cloud barriers and improve cloud computing functionalities in the implementation stage. To achieve this, the roles of related cloud providers and consumers have been investigated. The study was guided by activities of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) Architecture Development Method (ADM) to design related architectural requirements that would provide best practices for the development of the governance method. Using a sequential, exploratory mixed method, multiple qualitative case studies on the role of cloud providers were conducted to explore which and how architectural requirements are suitable and applicable for addressing the identified cloud barriers. Afterwards, a quantitative survey study was performed to examine and validate the findings from the qualitative phase and to discover the role of cloud consumers in tackling cloud barriers. The utilisation of dual perspectives, from cloud providers and consumers, to design and measure the suitability and applicability of the architectural requirements is a substantial theoretical contribution in the field of enterprise information systems and cloud governance. Both cloud providers and consumers in the selected research context balanced their roles in the composition of cloud ecosystem projects, reducing complexity and enabling cooperative solutions for handling cloud barriers with different levels of emphasis and prioritisation. The results of this thesis provide significant guidance in eliciting architectural requirements as well as in their successful contribution to addressing the 10 identified cloud barriers in the selected context. Seeking a cloud provider’s perspective through multiple case studies resulted in 24 confirmed, newly emerged architectural requirements and 48 sub-requirements for best practices to support Information Technology (IT) managers and practitioners during the implementation of government cloud projects. From the point of view of the cloud service consumer, statistical evidence showed that the architectural requirements proved to be relevant and applicable and resulted in the validation of only eight important cloud constructs with a scale of 36 architectural requirements. The results at the governance level also produced a clear method that can enhance the realisation of value when business/IT strategies and EA governance practices both take place in cloud projects. The governance method also consists of a set of architectural requirements to support managing and controlling cloud computing implementation projects with related stakeholders and change management initiatives. The architectural requirements have been modelled via the ArchiMate 3.0 modelling language as unique and beneficial contributions for the enhancement of enterprise architecture practices. This thesis thereby introduces a novel cloud governance method with clear mechanisms and practices to serve as crucial resources for related organisations, decision-makers, business practitioners and researchers.

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of G-Route (Green Route), an autonomic service routing protocol for constructing energy-efficient service provider paths in collaborative cloud computing architectures. The chief contribution of this work resides in autonomously selecting the optimal set of composite service components sustaining the most efficient energy consumption characteristics among a set of providers for executing a particular consumer service request. The routing protocol processes accountable service energy measurements extracted securely from within the provider sites or data centers using trusted computing technologies and cryptographic mechanisms. By pushing green computing constraints into the service routing protocol decision engine, we can leverage the collaborative cloud computing service model to maximize the energy savings achieved by focusing on a path of providers that executes the service requests instead of directing the green computing efforts towards a single provider site. The major goal of G-Route is to enhance the energy savings in the overall cloud computing infrastructure. The protocol design is deployed in a real cloud computing environment using the Amazon EC2 cloud platform. The analyses of the protocol convergence characteristics, traffic overhead, and resilience demonstrate the capability of the proposed system to significantly reduce the overall energy requirements of collaborative cloud services.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are the means through which the provision of infrastructure, platform, and software services in Cloud Computing is regulated, along with functional and non-functional specifications of services. SLAs are intended to set a framework for the provision of services and for the cooperation between service providers and service consumers. Currently, Cloud SLAs are usually drafted by Cloud providers and do not allow much negotiation. Therefore, it becomes critical to analyze and assess if, and to what extent, the rights and the expectations of Cloud users (in particular private consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises) are respected by these SLAs and by existing legal mechanisms. With this perspective, in this chapter, we analyze whether the current Cloud SLAs are sufficiently in accordance with rights (if any) and business expectations of users in protecting their data concerns and whether they are able to establish trust between Cloud consumers and Cloud providers.

Accessing data from social networks using cloud computing has been adopted by many IT enthusiasts. It allows easy access to data and easy sending of data for communication purposes. For many social network users, cloud computing can simplify processes and save time and money. This article defines cloud computing and shows how one can quickly, safely and easily access data. It also discusses how cloud computing solutions could be beneficial to libraries in these basic areas: technology and acquisition.Today’s more libraries and social networks are joining the cloud. But despite the numerous social networks and data acquisition sites demand for data are still escalating—as they always will. To be able to access data conveniently today’s data competitiveness users of search engines must carefully scrutinize various libraries as well as social media to ensure that they match key data and communication needs and deliver intended results in the most efficient and cost-effective way. To meet these challenges, IT organizations are increasingly moving away from a device-centric view of IT, to a view that is application-, information- and people-centric. Cloud computing aligns with this new world view. Cloud computing technology is enabling IT to do more with the infrastructure that already exists, as well as adding new ways to expand capacity quickly and economically by using external cloud computing resources. This technology is enabling IT managers to treat infrastructure as a common substrate on which they can provision services to users faster in a much more flexible and cost-effective way –without having to re-design or add to the underlying infrastructure. Given the benefits of cloud computing, its broad appeal is not surprising. However, this new approach does raise some concerns. Chief among them is securing data in the cloud. This white paper will briefly review the basic fundamentals of cloud computing and describe how virtualization are enabling enterprises to move toward a flexible, federated computing model with a cohesive mix of private external and internal cloud environments. It then discusses the security implications of cloud computing and provides insights into addressing them, and offers a view of security best practices to adopt when considering cloud services.Cloud computing has become an increasingly popular means of delivering valuable, IT-enabled business services. Adopting cloud technology can be an affordable way to get access to a dynamically scalable, virtualized computing environment. Optimal IT hardware, software, expertise and infrastructure management resources that may not otherwise be available from a cost perspective can be rapidly deployed and easily scaled. Processes, applications and services can be available on demand, regard-less of the user location or device. The cloud provider is responsible for the environment, so organizations can make use of resources for short periods of time without having to maintain the environment when it is not being used. While cloud computing models are attractive because of their flexibility and cost effectiveness, certain challenges must be addressed in order to provide a viable option to traditional data services. First and foremost is the issue of security. The externalized aspect of outsourcing can make it harder to maintain data integrity and privacy, support data and service availability, demonstrate compliance, and secure highly available access to applications and information. In short, cloud computing can present an added level of risk. Organizations must therefore establish trust relationships with their cloud computing providers and understand risk in terms of how these providers implement, deploy, and manage security on their behalf. Whether delivered as part of the service or as specific components added in, your cloud provider should address the fundamentals of security and risk management through a comprehensive approach.

Cloud Computing provides higher level services and shared pools of configurable resources with minimal management effort over the internet. Cloud Computing achieves coherence and economic of scale by means of shared resources. The growth of cloud computing depends on the high availability of low cost computers, storage devices and networks as well as hardware virtualization and utility computing. Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a service commitment tool between a cloud service provider and a cloud customer. Using SLA in cloud computing, reduce the chances of disappointing the cloud customer and manage the expectation between the service provider and the customer. The challenge is, it is very difficult to handle all request by the cloud providers at a time during peak hours and to keep up SLA. So when there is an uneven request arrival pattern, the cloud resources may either be underutilized or over-utilized. In order to balance the load, the load balancer plays the major role in cloud computing. The load balancing algorithm equalizes the workload and computing resources in a cloud computing environment. It allows an organization to manage their workload demands by allocating resources among multiple servers and thus it minimizes the response time, minimize the waiting time, maximize the throughput time, maximize the resource utilization and minimize the communication delays of the server by meeting the SLA. The major goal of this study is to review both the existing static and dynamic load balancing algorithms proposed till now and to design and implement a Load balancer that uses a Meta Heuristics approach – Ant Colony Optimization technique to perform balancing the load so that the SLA is met evenly without any issues. Each of the load balancing algorithms is compared with other algorithms theoretically and experimentally one of it is tested with the proposed system using AWS Cloud PaaS (Platform as a Service).

The selection of routing protocols is playing a major role in the device and proper utilization of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that can help to provide better interconnection networks. On preserving the role of key performance, metric related to routing protocols is also an important and challenging task in the WSNs. Therefore, the sensor nodes life can be improved in efficient manner by using routing protocols that preserve the energy consumption and quality of service (QoS). Three different kinds of categories are used in the design of routing protocols which are data centric, hierarchical, and location-based approaches. Energy consumption can be improved by reducing the effect of redundancy level and transferring the passive motes sleep mode. The data transmission time also impacts on the energy conservation and QoS in WSNs. The surveillance and monitoring-related applications are the demanding research field in the WSNs that has to resolve the issue QoS routing in the manner of reliable data delivery. Energy consumption and QoS constraints are two complementary factors in the routing protocol, but the time delay factor can be involved in such a manner to satisfy both the performance metrics in routing protocol in WSNs.

SummaryEach cloud service provider provides only an interface of its own cloud infrastructure for enabling clients to use its cloud resources. However, there is a number of difficulties for cloud providers to ensure proper functioning. One of the main problems of a cloud provider is the lack of resources to support a huge number of on‐demand resources provisioning. Thus, resources cannot be distributed among different cloud providers since the federation is not the basic operation of the cloud provider. The most efficient way to overcome this problem is to extend the interface's cloud provider with an automatic negotiation to dynamically form the best agreement between the different cloud providers based on the service level agreement. In this article, we propose an extension for the Open Cloud Computing Interface which is the standardized interface for the cloud computing to support the automatic negotiation between the different cloud providers. To prove the efficiency and the effectiveness of our approach, we implement a prototype to evaluate the key presented in this article.

To understand the importance of secure anonymous system technologies, this chapter introduces communication, electronic payment, cloud computing, and electronic governance systems as their applications, and discusses roles of secure anonymous system technologies in these systems. To preserve privacies of individuals and to protect secrets of organizations, communication systems must enable users to send or receive messages without disclosing their identities even to managers of communication networks and receivers or senders of their messages, and credit card systems must enable cardholders to make their purchases without disclosing their identities while ensuring card companies to collect their exact expenditure amounts. Also, service providers in cloud computing must be able to calculate various functions of data owned by their clients without knowing values of individual data. Moreover, to protect voters from coercers who are forcing the voters to choose their supporting candidates, computerized voting systems must conceal correspondences between voters and their votes even from voters themselves. Secure anonymous system technologies enable developments of systems that satisfy these requirements.

In Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN); the sensor node is responsible to extract the valuable application based information from underwater environment. The application based information covers the applications like: tactical surveillance, assisted navigation, disaster prevention, offshore exploration, pollution monitoring and oceanographic data collection. The design of routing protocol in underwater environment is one of the challenging issues for researchers. This research article focuses the designing issues of the data forwarding routing protocols based on single path. In this article the designing of 2D and 3D architecture of routing protocols are discussed with their different issues. This article also focuses the analytical approach of proposed routing protocols with different parameters, the simulation scenarios of the single path routing protocols with critical analysis; and the open research issues; will help the researchers to further research in the field of routing protocols for UWSN.

In this paper, a new cross layer design of MAC and Routing protocol for OFDMA-based Multi-hop Ad-hoc Networks is proposed. In wireless network, when a route is established, the radio resource allocation problems at MAC layer may decrease the end to end performance proportionally with the length of each route. The contention at MAC layer may causes routing protocol to respond by finding new routes and routing table updates. The cross layer design allows layers to exchange state information in order to solve the problem and obtain higher performance. The proposed cross layer design of MAC and Routing protocol based the dynamic Sub-channel Assignment Algorithm in [4] to ensure the performance of ad-hoc and multi-hop networks is significantly improved.

The availability and advancements of cloud computing service models such as IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS; introducing on-demand self-service, auto scaling, easy maintenance, and pay as you go, has dramatically transformed the way organizations design and operate their datacenters. However, some organizations still have many concerns like: security, governance, lack of expertise, and migration. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the cloud computing customers’ opinions, feedbacks, attitudes, and emotions towards cloud computing services using sentiment analysis. The associated aim, is to help people and organizations to understand the benefits and challenges of cloud services from the general public’s perspective view as well as opinions about existing cloud providers, focusing on three main cloud providers: Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud. The methodology used in this paper is based on sentiment analysis applied to the tweets that were extracted from social media platform (Twitter) via its search API. We have extracted a sample of 11,000 tweets and each cloud provider has almost similar proportion of the tweets based on relevant hashtags and keywords. Analysis starts by combining the tweets in order to find the overall polarity about cloud computing, then breaking the tweets to find the specific polarity for each cloud provider. Bing and NRC Lexicons are employed to measure the polarity and emotion of the terms in the tweets. The overall polarity classification of the tweets across all cloud providers shows 68.5% positive and 31.5% negative percentages. More specifically, Azure shows 63.8% positive and 36.2% negative tweets, Google Cloud shows 72.6% positive and 27.4% negative tweets and AWS shows 69.1% positive and 30.9% negative tweets.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are gaining momentum among researchers. ITS encompasses several technologies, including wireless communications, sensor networks, data and voice communication, real-time driving assistant systems, etc. These states of the art technologies are expected to pave the way for a plethora of vehicular network applications. In fact, recently we have witnessed a growing interest in Vehicular Networks from both the research community and industry. Several potential applications of Vehicular Networks are envisioned such as road safety and security, traffic monitoring and driving comfort, just to mention a few. It is critical that the existence of convenience or driving comfort services do not negatively affect the performance of safety services. In essence, the dissemination of safety services or the discovery of convenience applications requires the communication among service providers and service requesters through constrained bandwidth resources. Therefore, service discovery techniques for vehicular networks must efficiently use the available common resources. In this thesis, we focus on the design of bandwidth-efficient and scalable service discovery protocols for Vehicular Networks. Three types of service discovery architectures are introduced: infrastructure-less, infrastructure-based, and hybrid architectures. Our proposed algorithms are network layer based where service discovery messages are integrated into the routing messages for a lightweight discovery. Moreover, our protocols use the channel diversity for efficient service discovery. We describe our algorithms and discuss their implementation. Finally, we present the main results of the extensive set of simulation experiments that have been used in order to evaluate their performance.

Cloud computing has evolved to emerge the most topical IT paradigm in recent times. Cloud computing is rapidly transforming the IT landscape. On a pay-as-you-use basis, cloud consumers can access resources, applications and infrastructure provided by cloud providers. Such access could be in form of applications already deployed by cloud providers for use by the cloud users. It could be in form of the capability to develop and deploy user applications using services of a cloud provider. In addition, massive storage infrastructure is available for database and data supplied by the user. The cloud has several unique architectures and many more are still evolving. The primary ones are the SaaS, PaaS and the IaaS that can be deployed on private, public, community and hybrid clouds. This paper examines present developments in the cloud computing architecture and presents guidance for additional research. Papers published in journals, conferences, white papers were analyzed. The objective of this present work is to identify, examine and explain the current trends and development in cloud computing architecture. However, only 13% of the papers examined discussed Others-as-a-Service, while only 26% of the papers reviewed considered issues relating to the major actors involved in cloud computing. This will beneficial to cloud providers, users, and researchers alike