SLAs for Industrial IoT: Mind the Gap

Currently, from the customer's opinion, the establishment and monitoring of Service Level Agreements (SLA) between cloud service consumers (CSC) and cloud service providers (CSP) is far to be ideal. This contacts require crucial importance for consumers having companies whose success is conditioned by the announced Quality of Service (QoS) that the service provider delivers. Inflexible term and price conditions, nontransparent verification of advertised service quality, and inflexible expression of SLAs represent today the most gap in terms of SLAs on the cloud market. This paper presents an approach of an autonomous framework based Agreement-Broker as a third party in the cloud market that provides a way to source out tasks regarding the management of SLAs. Thus the Agreement-Broker adds an additional transitive connection between consumers and providers without affecting any existing one. The Agreement-Broker's main purposes are: –Registering declarations in the form of established SLAs; –Giving customers the opportunity to discover provided SLAs and to easily compare them; –Notifying participating parties about agreementrelated events like creation, violation or termination Thus, the overhead for managing SLAs which causes congestion between consumers and providers is minimized for both and a higher trust is established by broker of an external entity.

A service level agreement (SLA) is a service contract that includes the evaluation criteria for agreed service quality standards. Since agreeable specifications on the evaluation criteria cannot be limited in practice, competitive SLA management products must be extensible in terms of their support for contract-specific SLA compliance evaluations. While the need of running and managing those software products as services increases, we have found that developing a good solution for configuring them as per contractual terms is a challenging task. This paper presents the Fresco framework, which facilitates configuring extensible SLA management systems using Web services. An XML-based specification of SLA management related data called SCOL will also be presented to show how the framework supports contract-specific SLA terms and contract-specific extensions of the deployed SLA management software. The paper furthermore shows how the Fresco system uses a template-based approach to communicate with other Web services applications with support for various input and output formats. Our experience with implementing the Fresco framework for a leading commercial SLA management software product demonstrates that the framework facilitates the creation of effective and efficient solutions for configuring extensible SLA management systems.

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) establishes the trustworthiness of service providers and consumers in several domains; including the Internet of Things (IoT). Given the proliferation of Blockchain technology, we find it compelling to reconsider the assumption of trust and centralised governance typically practised in SLA management including monitoring, compliance assessment, and penalty enforcement. Therefore, we argue that, such critical tasks should be operated by blockchain-based smart contracts in a non-repudiable manner beyond the influence of any SLA party. This paper envisions an IoT scenario wherein a firefighting station outsources end-to-end IoT operations to a specialised service provider. The contractual relationship between them is governed by an SLA which stipulates a set of quality requirements and violation consequences. The main contribution of this paper lies in designing, deploying and empirically experimenting a novel blockchain-based SLA monitoring and compliance assessment framework in the context of IoT. This is done by utilising Hyperledger Fabric (HLF), an enterprise-grade blockchain technology. Our work highlights a set of considerations and best practice at two sides, the IoT application monitoring-side and the blockchain-side. Moreover, it experimentally validates the reliability of the proposed monitoring approach, which collects relevant metrics from each IoT component and examines them against the quality requirements stated in the SLA. Finally, we propose a novel design for smart contracts at the blockchain-side, analyse and benchmark the performance, and demonstrate that the new design proves to successfully handle Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC) conflicts typically encountered in blockchain applications, while maintaining sound throughput and latency.

This work presents a novel scheme for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). An SLA is a contract that guarantees quality of service (QoS) between service providers and consumers. An SLA can be split into several parts for an SOA system which is consisting of different services. A split SLA is used to guarantee quality of services for one of services in an SOA system. However, these contract rules do not regulate follow-up process in services. SLA violations may occur consequently. For instance, interactions between services are not encrypted because the encryption parameter isn't included in the split SLA contract. Confidential data would be transmitted through unsafe channels. There would be a security issue of SLA Management for follow-up processes in an SOA system. The novel scheme in this work addresses these problems. Using SLAs management proposed in this work can identify the services that consumer needs and split the contracts for follow-up services. SLAs are not only guaranteed between service providers and consumers but also assured in follow-up processes. The proposed method improves the security and completeness of SLA using in an SOA system.

Cloud computing allows individuals and organizations outsource their applications to cloud due to the flexibility and cost savings. However, cloud service providers (CSPs) may offer reduced resources to tenant by virtualization technology for illegal economic benefit. Most cloud tenants don't have specialized knowledge to detect the CSPs' service level agreement (SLA) disruption. To address this issue, we propose a worst-case performance prediction scheme to audit the SLA disruption of cloud by comparison between actual performance cost and the predicted worst-case performance cost. Firstly, we insert labels into application, and collect the running time information on cloud on a small input dataset. The historical information is used to identify the frequent block. Then, we construct the performance cost function for each hotspot block, and resort to curve fitting method to obtain the performance cost function of each frequent block. Finally, we get the worst-case performance prediction by performance estimation model and performance cost function of each one on large input dataset. The experiments show that our proposed scheme can achieve high sensitiveness on cloud SLA and fulfill cloud SLA auditing.

Nowadays, Cloud providers revise the terms of their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to include security provisions due to their criticality for their customers. In order to speed up their adoption by service providers and consumers and to make them more actionable, security SLAs monitoring should be described in a machine-processable, agile and extensible way. Several tools for SLA management are available on the market but most deal with performance metrics and do not refer to security properties. There are other tools for monitoring cloud security, in a non-SLA way. However, they are not associated with SLA management systems. We propose an extension to an SLA language (i.e., rSLA) to enable the description of security requirements in an SLA document. We also extend the rSLA framework by a security methodology that makes use of known tools and that enables continuously checking that the security requirements are respected during runtime according to the SLA document.

The Internet of Things (IoT), which seamlessly interconnects heterogeneous devices with diverse functionalities, is an attractive choice for the large-scale petrochemical industry to develop an integrated system. With the industrial revolution, efforts have mainly been focused on factory automation, transportation security, and surveillance. The IoT plays a major role in factories with its new methods of data management and data collection. However, the IoT is still at an early stage in large-scale petrochemical plants due to the multiple coexisting heterogeneous networks in harsh and complex large-scale industrial networks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the IoT in large-scale petrochemical plants as well as recent activities in communication standards for the IoT in industries. This paper addresses the key enabling middleware approaches, e.g., an industrial intelligent sensing ecosystem (IISE), which allows rapid deployment and integration of heterogeneous wireless sensor networks with advancements in crowdsensing based services. In addition, this survey highlights the research issues of data management in the IoT for large-scale petrochemical plants.

Online service is used to be as Pay-Per-Use in Cloud computing. Service user need not be in a long time contract with cloud service providers. Service level agreements (SLAs) are understandings marked between a cloud service providers and others, for example, a service user, intermediary operator, or observing operators. Since cloud computing is an ongoing technology giving numerous services to basic business applications and adaptable systems to manage online agreements are significant. SLA maintains the quality-of-service to the cloud user. If service provider fails to maintain the required service SLA is considered to be SLA violated. The main aim is to minimize the SLA violations for maintain the QoS of their cloud users. In this research article, a toolbox is proposed to help the procedure of exchanging of a SLA with the service providers that will enable the cloud client in indicating service quality demands and an algorithm as well as Negotiation model is also proposed to negotiate the request with the service providers to produce a better agreement between service provider and cloud service consumer. Subsequently, the discussed framework can reduce SLA violations as well as negotiation disappointments and have expanded cost-adequacy. Moreover, the suggested SLA toolkit is additionally productive to clients so clients can secure a sensible value repayment for diminished QoS or conceding time. This research shows the assurance level in the cloud service providers can be kept up by as yet conveying the services with no interruption from the client's perspective

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a legal contract between parties to ensure the Quality of Service (QoS). It specifies one or more service level objectives (SLO), to ensure that the QoS delivered has met customer expectations. However, It becomes hard to guarantee QoS levels and detect SLA violations. Therefore, we propose to use MDE (Model Driven Engineering) to express the SLA contract requirements. This latter, created with a specific modeling language (DSML), will be used harmonically with a Multi-agent systems (MASs) in order to monitor SLA violations in real-time. Indeed, MASs are suitable tools for self-detection of failures and self-monitoring of cloud operations and services, QoS negotiation and SLA management. They are designed to operate in a dynamically changing environment. Our main motivation is firstly to use MDE technology for the creation of the SLA contract and then to integrate MASs in order to control the quality of service contract and guarantee transparency and symmetry with respect to the SLA contract between prospective signatories.

The rapid development of the supply chain of the Internet of Things (IoT) industry may trigger financial risk contagion among IoT manufacturers. This article collects data on listed IoT companies in the Chinese market from 2010 to 2019 and explores the development of the environment for the IoT industry. Two dynamic time wrapping (DTW) networks are created to analyze the topological structures of the IoT industry environment. Both the standard DTW and strongly connected DTW networks are revolutionary in terms of their interconnectedness in the IoT industry. We found that the level of clustering and transitivity of the network continued to decline between 2010 and 2019; i.e., the efficiency of financial risk contagion on IoT networks was significantly reduced. This article contributes to the literature in two aspects. First, it reveals that China's IoT industry is increasingly competitive; financial risks have become more difficult to transfer. The IoT industry has become more robust and exhibits a lower likelihood of financial risk contagion. Second, the article provides empirical evidence for the theory of coevolution, showing that risk contagion ability in an industry setting is decreasing with the development of individual firms.

Internet of Things and cloud services are one of main enablers in fourth industrial revolution. Real-time industrial systems have high availability requirements of 99.9% to 99.999% whereas architectures built on regional cloud services and IoT do not provide similar guarantees or Service Level Agreement. These differences of QoS and SLA availability between Operational Technology and Information Technology has become a main challenge in adoption of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) for real-time applications.This work presents an approach to find end-to-end QoS and availability for an IIoT architecture. Device-to-cloud, cloud-to-cloud and inside-cloud experiments have been performed over eight weeks where each experiment have more then four million QoS measurements. Our availability analysis shows that a remote IoT connected to a less busy cloud region gives higher availability as compared to an IoT device inside a busy cloud region. IIoT and regional cloud services provide good QoS with 99% to 99.9% availability for 1sec soft real-time requirements. In 100ms applications, more efforts are required to achieve higher then 95% availability and design industrial SLA. IIoT applications with 10sec latency like machine learning models can get 99.9% availability with cloud. Availability loss due to communication is almost 1% for 100ms applications. These results also provide requirements and future work of industrial edge computing for IIoT on real-time cloud.

The services landscape is changing with the growing adoption by businesses of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the migration of business solutions to the cloud, and the proliferation of smartphones and Internet-enabled handheld devices to consume services. To meet their business goals, organizations increasingly demand services, which can satisfy their functional and non-functional requirements. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are seen as the means to guarantee the continuity in service provisioning and required levels of service. In this paper, we propose a framework for service provisioning, which aims at providing support for automated SLA negotiation and management. The Service Broker component carries out SLA negotiation with selected service-providers on behalf of service-consumers. Multi-rounds of negotiations are very often required to reach an agreement. In each round, the negotiating parties bargain on multiple SLA parameters by trying to maximize their global utility functions. The monitoring infrastructure is in charge of observing SLA compliance monitoring using measurements obtained from independent third party monitoring services.

PurposeThe Internet of Things (IoT) provides exciting opportunities for the construction industry to solve its time and resource constraints and frequent defaults. This study seeks to identify and rank the perceived importance level of principal research areas associated with the IoT and the construction industry by utilising a scientific mapping tool (i.e. VOSviewer). Such knowledge would enable key drivers for successful adoption of the IoT and digitisation technologies to be outlined. An analysis of key drivers and research trends that facilitates the development of a roadmap for applying the IoT and digital technologies in the construction sector is therefore much needed.Design/methodology/approachAn interpretivist philosophical lens was adopted to analyse published work as secondary data, where each publication represented a unit of analysis. A total of 417 peer-reviewed journal review articles covering the IoT within the construction domain were systematically reviewed using a mixed-methods approach, utilising qualitative-scientometric analyses techniques.FindingsThe results revealed a field of study in a fledgling stage, with a limited number of experts operating somewhat in isolation and offering single-point solutions instead of taking an integrated “holistic” approach. Key publication outlets were identified and the main focus of research undertaken being in the technical areas of smart buildings, smart construction objects and environmental sustainability. The major effects of adopting the IoT within the construction industry were identified as high-speed reporting, complete process control, data explosion leading to deep data analytics, strict ethical and legal expectations. Key drivers of the IoT adoption were outlined: interoperability; data privacy and security; flexible governance structures; proper business planning and models.Practical implicationsThe study benefits researchers and industry practitioners alike. For researchers, the identified gaps reveal areas of high priority in future research. For construction companies, particularly small to medium-sized businesses, the study raises awareness of the latest developments and potential applicability of the IoT in the industry. For government agencies and policymakers, this study offers a point of reference in directing the adoption of the IoT smoothly in the construction sector and provides guidelines and standards for maximising the potential benefits.Originality/valueThe study is the first scientometric review of the existing body of knowledge in the context of application of the IoT in the construction industry. Findings expose knowledge gaps in contemporary research, specifically, a broader consideration of organisational adjustments needed to accommodate the IoT usage, economic analyses and impediments to wider acceptance.

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.

C-SLA-MLO: Enhancing SLA Compliance in Industrial Wi-Fi through Cooperative Multilink Operation