The Virginia Tech Center for Wireless Telecommunications' (CWT) Public Safety Cognitive Radio (PSCR) addresses the radio interoperability issues that plague many of the existing public safety radios — disparate frequency bands, incompatible modulation schemes and lack of active channel detection features. The PSCR allows the operator to scan for active channels, classify the detected channels, connect to any of the recognized waveforms and begin analog audio communication as well as bridge two incompatible waveforms together. The PSCR, although very useful, unfortunately is not portable enough to be used by public safety officials. The power requirement, processing requirement and equipment is respectively large, hungry and bulky. In this thesis, a possible solution to the portability problem is addressed by installing the PSCR in a public safety vehicle and using a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) for remote access. The PDA allows the user to remotely scan, classify, talk, and bridge waveforms similar in operation to the PSCR. An ergonomically designed interface masks the channel and modulation selection procedure. This architecture can be extended to offer service to any remotely connected device. In the second part of this thesis, the concept of remote access is extended to a wide-area wireless public safety network. A public safety network consisting of heterogeneous devices is proposed utilizing a small number of backbone nodes. The major research focus of this section is the algorithm for distributing services across the network. Service discovery is optimized to reduce the overhead of service messages and multiple service distribution techniques are utilized depending on the location of the services. Simulation is performed to evaluate the performance of the service discovery protocol in terms of overhead, dissemination time and scalability. The proposed protocol is determined to be superior to the competition in the overhead and scalability tests. / Master of Science

<p>Polazeći od prostog aukcijskog algoritma (SAP) za izbor izvršioca u<br />bežičnim senzorskim i aktuatorskim mrežama u ovoj disertaciji su<br />uvedena dva poboljšanja tog algoritma (multi-hop komunikacija i<br />lokalizacija). Predloženo je i pet novih aukcijskih agregacionih<br />algoritama koji koriste tehniku agregacije da bi smanjili<br />komunikacione troškove. Treća grupa doprinosa ove disertacije se<br />odnosi na primenu aukcija za poboljšanje postojećeg iMesh algoritma<br />za pronalaženje izvršioca. Eksperimentalni rezultati pokazuju<br />svojstva algoritama i njihove prednosti u odnosu na postojeće.</p> / <p>Two improvements of the simple auction protocol (SAP) for the task<br />assignment in wireless sensor and actuator networks is proposed in this<br />dissertation (multi-hop communications and localization). Five new auction<br />aggregation algorithms for the task assignment are proposed with the goal to<br />minimize the communication costs. One of the auction aggregation algorithms<br />is also used to improve existing iMesh service discovery algorithm.<br />Experimental results show the characteristics of the proposed algorithms and<br />advantages over the existing ones.</p>

La croissance de l’Internet en tant que plateforme d’approvisionnement à grande échelled’approvisionnement de contenus multimédia a été une grande success story du 21e siécle.Toutefois, les applications multimédia, avec les charactéristiques spécifiques de leur trafic ainsique les les exigences des nouveaux services, posent un défi intéressant en termes de découverte,de mobilité et de gestion. En outre, le récent élan de l’Internet des objets a rendu très nécessairela revitalisation de la recherche pour intégrer des sources hétérogènes d’information à travers desréseaux divers. Dans cet objectif, les contributions de cette thèse essayent de trouver un équilibreentre l’hétérogénéité et l’interopérabilité, pour découvrir et intégrer les sources hétérogènesd’information dans le contexte de l’Internet du Futur.La découverte de sources d’information sur différents réseaux requiert une compréhensionapprofondie de la façon dont l’information est structurée et quelles méthodes spécifiques sontutilisés pour communiquer. Ce processus a été régulé à l’aide de protocoles de découverte.Cependant, les protocoles s’appuient sur différentes techniques et sont conçues en prenant encompte l’infrastructure réseau sous-jacente, limitant ainsi leur capacité à franchir la limite d’unréseau donné. Pour résoudre ce problème, le première contribution dans cette thèse tente detrouver une solution équilibrée permettant aux protocoles de découverte d’interagir les uns avecles autres, tout en fournissant les moyens nécessaires pour franchir les frontières entre réseaux.Dans cet objectif, nous proposons ZigZag, un middleware pour réutiliser et étendre les protocolesde découverte courants, conçus pour des réseaux locaux, afin de découvrir des servicesdisponibles dans le large. Notre approche est basée sur la conversion de protocole permettant ladécouverte de service indépendamment de leur protocole de découverte sous-jacent. Toutefois,dans les réaux de grande échelle orientée consommateur, la quantité des messages de découvertepourrait rendre le réseau inutilisable. Pour parer à cette éventualité, ZigZag utilise le conceptd’agrégation au cours du processus de découverte. Grâce à l’agrégation, ZigZag est capabled’intégrer plusieurs réponses de différentes sources supportant différents protocoles de découverte.En outre, la personnalisation du processus d’agrégation afin de s’aligner sur ses besoins,requiert une compréhension approfondie des fondamentaux de ZigZag. À cette fin, nous proposonsune seconde contribution: un langage flexible pour aider à définir les politiques d’unemanière propre et efficace. / The growth of the Internet as a large scale media provisioning platform has been a great successstory of the 21st century. However, multimedia applications, with their specific traffic characteristicsand novel service requirements, pose an interesting challenge in terms of discovery,mobility and management. Furthermore, the recent impetus to Internet of things has made it verynecessary, to revitalize research in order to integrate heterogeneous information sources acrossnetworks. Towards this objective, the contributions in this thesis, try to find a balance betweenheterogeneity and interoperability, to discovery and integrate heterogeneous information sourcesin the context of Future Internet.Discovering information sources across networks need a through understanding of how theinformation is structured and what specific methods they follow to communicate. This processhas been regulated with the help of discovery protocols. However, protocols rely on differenttechniques and are designed taking the underlying network infrastructure into account. Thus,limiting the capability of some protocols to cross network boundary. To address this issue, thefirst contribution in this thesis tries to find a balanced solution to enable discovery protocols tointeroperate with each other as well as provide the necessary means to cross network boundaries.Towards this objective, we propose ZigZag, a middleware to reuse and extend current discoveryprotocols, designed for local networks, to discover available services in the large. Our approachis based on protocol translation to enable service discovery irrespectively of their underlyingdiscovery protocol. Although, our approach provides a step forward towards interoperability inthe large. We needed to make sure that discovery messages do not create a bottleneck for thenetwork.In large scale consumer oriented network, service discovery messages could render the networkunusable. To counter this, ZigZag uses the concept of aggregation during the discoveryprocess. Using aggregation ZigZag is able to integrate several replies from different servicesources supporting different discovery protocols. However, to customize the aggregation processto suit once needs, requires a through understanding of ZigZag fundamentals. To this end, wepropose our second contribution, a flexible policy language that can help define policies in aclean and effective way. In addition, the policy language has some added advantages in terms ofdynamic management. It provides features like delegation, runtime time policy management andlogging. We tested our approach with the help of simulations, the results showed that ZigZag canboth reduce the number of messages that flow through the network, and provide value sensitiveinformation to the requesting entity.Although, ZigZag is designed to discover media services in the large. It can very well be usedin other domains like home automation and smart spaces. While, the flexible pluggable modulardesign of the policy language enables it to be used in other applications like for instance, e-mail.

Depuis quelques années, des évolutions importantes ont lieu en matière d’infrastructures technologiques. En particulier, la démocratisation des dispositifs mobiles (comme les PCs, Smartphones, Tablettes, etc.) a rendu l’information accessible par le grand public partout et à tout moment, ce qui est l’origine du concept d’informatique ubiquitaire. L’approche classique des systèmes de l’informatique ubiquitaire, qui répondent aux besoins des utilisateurs indépendants les uns des autres, a été bouleversée par l’introduction de la dimension sociale. Ce rapprochement est à l’origine d’une discipline naissante « le pervasive social computing » ou l’informatique socio-pervasive. Les applications socio-pervasives connaissent une véritable expansion. Ces dernières intègrent de plus en plus la notion de communauté. Le succès des applications communautaires se justifie par le but poursuivi par ces dernières qui est de répondre aux besoins des communautés et d’offrir un ‘chez soi’ virtuel, spécifique à la communauté, dans lequel elle va construire sa propre identité et réaliser ses objectifs. Par ailleurs, la notion de communauté représente une source d’informations contextuelles sociales. Elle est, aujourd’hui, au cœur des problématiques de personnalisation et d’adaptation des applications informatiques. Dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous étudions sous différents aspects les applications informatiques centrées communautés existantes et soulignons un certain nombre de carences au niveau même de la notion de communauté, des modèles de communautés, ou encore des architectures dédiées à ces applications communautaires, etc. Pour remédier à ces défauts, nous proposons trois principales contributions : Un nouveau type de communauté adapté aux exigences des environnements pervasifs qui vient rompre avec les traditionnelles communautés pérennes thématiques : des communautés éphémères, géolocalisées et spontanées (sans contrainte thématique). 
 Un modèle de communauté basé sur les standards du web sémantique pour répondre aux problèmes liés à l’hétérogénéité de conception des communautés. Une architecture dynamiquement reconfigurable pour promouvoir les communautés spontanées en aidant les utilisateurs nomades à intégrer des communautés environnantes et à découvrir les services dédiés. 
Nous montrons la faisabilité de nos propositions pour la conception et le développement d’applications communautaires spontanées grâce au prototype Taldea. Enfin, nous testons les approches proposées de découverte de communauté et de services à travers plusieurs scénarios caractérisés par la mobilité et l’ubiquité. / Advances in technology, in particular the democratization of mobile devices (PCs, smartphones and tablets), has made information accessible to anyone at any time and from anywhere while facilitating the capture of physical contextual data, thereby justifying the growing interest for pervasive computing. The classical approach of pervasive computing has been affected by the introduction of the social dimension. Ubiquitous systems do not meet the needs of users independently from each other but do take into account their social context. Fostering the social dimension has given rise to a fast growing research field called Pervasive Social Computing. Applications in this area are increasingly concerned by communities. The contextual information associated with a community can be harnessed for personalization, adaptability and dynamic deployment of services, which are important factors for Pervasive Computing. A community is considered in our approach as a set of distinct social entities that should be supported with services as a single user is. In this thesis, we look into different aspects of existing centered communities applications and we identify several weaknesses and shortcomings in the notion of community, the community models, and the architecture of communities’ applications. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose three main contributions: A new type of communities that fits better with the requirements of pervasive environments: short- lived, geolocated and spontaneous (without thematic constraint) community. Intuitively, it is the type of community that best matches with circumstantial, accidental, incidental or fortuitous situations. This kind of community has to meet specific needs, which are not taken into account by perennial thematic communities. 
 A model for communities based on semantic web standards to overcome the problem of heterogeneity across definitions and models. The ontological representation allows us to organize and represent social data, to make information searches easier for users and to infer new knowledge. 
 A dynamically reconfigurable architecture for fostering spontaneous communities in order to facilitate the user access to communities, information exchange between community members and service discovery. 
The proposed architecture for community and service discovery have been validated through a prototype called Taldea and have been tested through several scenarios characterized by mobility and ubiquity.

Les travaux de recherche menés autour de la description de services Web utilisent de plus en plus des modèles sémantiques pour fournir une représentation interprétable automatiquement. Toutefois, nous avons décelé des lacunes dans les approches sémantiques actuelles qui engendrent ambiguïté et non pertinence au niveau de l’appariement et de la découverte de services Web. Pour remédier à ces lacunes nous proposons des contributions à la description et à la découverte de services Web sémantiques. En ce qui concerne la description de services, nous avons défini un langage basé sur une recommandation W3C. En plus d’une annotation métier sémantique des éléments d’un service, notre principale contribution à la description sémantique consiste à spécifier la nature de ces annotations en utilisant une ontologie technique que nous avons définie. Cette ontologie met en relation plusieurs concepts sémantiques de services Web que nous avons identifiés dans des approches existantes et intègrera d’autres concepts qu’on définira ultérieurement sans pour autant modifier notre langage de description ou nos techniques d’appariement associées. Nous avons également défini un algorithme d’appariement entre une requête de service et les descriptions des services publiés. Cet algorithme se base sur un appariement entre éléments d’une requête et un service publié et trois techniques d’agrégation des résultats d’appariements élémentaires. L’algorithme tire avantage de la description sémantique que nous avons définie. Il a été mis en œuvre dans un annuaire de services Web sémantiques et a été également comparé aux algorithmes de référence. Les expérimentations montrent clairement l’efficacité de notre approche en termes de temps de réponse et de précision / Researches conducted around Web service description use more and more of semantic models to provide an automatically interpretable representation. However, we identified gaps in current approaches that generate semantic ambiguity and impertinence at Web service matching and discovery. To address these shortcomings we propose contributions about semantic Web service description and discovery. As for the Web services description, we have defined a language based on a W3C Recommendation. In addition to a semantic business annotation of service components, our main contribution about the semantic description is to specify the nature of these annotations using a technical ontology that we have defined. This ontology merges several semantic concepts of web services that we identified in existing approaches and may include other concepts that can be defined later without changing our description language or our matching techniques. We also defined a matching algorithm between a service request and published service descriptions. This algorithm is based on matching between elements of a service request and descriptions of published services. This matching is may be computed by three aggregation techniques of the results of those elements’ matching. The algorithm takes advantage of the semantic description we have defined. It was implemented in a semantic web services registry and was also compared to referenced algorithms. The experiments clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of response time and precision

Verlässliche Dienstbereitstellung ist eines der wichtigsten Ziele in modernen Netzwerken. Da Anbieter und Nutzer Teil einer Informations und Kommunikationstechnologie (IKT) Infrastruktur sind, wird die Verlässlichkeit der Dienste je nach Position der Aktoren variieren, so wie sich die für die Bereitstellung nötigen IKT Geräte ändern. Wir stellen zwei Ansätze zur Quantifizierung nutzerspezifischer Dienstverlässlichkeit vor. Der erste, modellgetriebene Ansatz berechnet momentane Dienstverfügbarkeit. Aus Modellen des Dienstes, der Infrastruktur und einer Abbildung zwischen den beiden, welche die Aktoren der Dienstkommunikation beschreibt, werden durch eine Serie von Modelltransformationen automatisiert Verfügbarkeitsmodelle generiert. Die Realisierbarkeit des Ansatzes wird anhand von Diensten im Netzwerk der Universität Lugano, Schweiz, gezeigt. Der zweite Ansatz behandelt die Responsivität der Dienstfindung, die Wahrscheinlichkeit innerhalb einer Frist Dienstinstanzen zu finden, unter der Annahme von Fehlern. Dies stellt den Hauptteil dieser Arbeit dar. Eine Hierarchie stochastischer Modelle wird vorgestellt, die nutzerspezifische Responsivität auf Basis von Messdaten der Routingebene berechnet. Umfangreiche Experimente wurden im Distributed Embedded Systems (DES) Funktestbett der Freien Universität Berlin durchgefürt. Diese zeigen Probleme aktueller Dienstfindungsprotokolle in modernen, dynamischen Netzwerken. Gleichzeitig dienen sie der Validierung der vorgestellten Modelle. Beide Ansätze zeigen, daß die Verlässlichkeit der Dienstbereitstellung in der Tat deutlich mit der Position von Nutzern und Anbietern variiert, sogar in hochverfügbaren Kabelnetzwerken. Die Ansätze ermöglichen die Optimierung von Dienstnetzwerken anhand bekannter oder erwarteter Nutzungsmuster. Zudem antizipieren sie neuartige Verlässlichkeitsmodelle, welche Dienstfindung, zeitige Bereitstellung, Platzierung und Nutzung kombinieren; Gebiete, die bisher im Allgemeinen getrennt behandelt wurden. / Dependability of service provision is one of the primary goals in modern networks. Since providers and clients are part of a connecting Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure, service dependability varies with the position of actors as the ICT devices needed for service provision change. We present two approaches to quantify user-perceived service dependability. The first is a model-driven approach to calculate instantaneous service availability. Using input models of the service, the infrastructure and a mapping between the two to describe actors of service communication, availability models are automatically created by a series of model to model transformations. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated using exemplary services in the network of University of Lugano, Switzerland. The second approach aims at the responsiveness of the service discovery layer, the probability to find service instances within a deadline even in the presence of faults, and is the main part of this thesis. We present a hierarchy of stochastic models to calculate user-perceived responsiveness based on monitoring data from the routing layer. Extensive series of experiments have been run on the Distributed Embedded Systems (DES) wireless testbed at Freie Universität Berlin. They serve both to demonstrate the shortcomings of current discovery protocols in modern dynamic networks and to validate the presented stochastic models. Both approaches demonstrate that the dependability of service provision indeed differs considerably depending on the position of service clients and providers, even in highly reliable wired networks. The two approaches enable optimization of service networks with respect to known or predicted usage patterns. Furthermore, they anticipate novel service dependability models which combine service discovery, timeliness, placement and usage, areas that until now have been treated to a large extent separately.

Recently much research effort has been devoted to the discovery of relevant Web services. It is widely recognized that adding semantics to service description is the solution to this challenge. Web services with explicit semantic annotation are called Semantic Web Services (SWS). This research proposes an indexation and discovery architecture for SWS, together with a prototype application in the area of bioinformatics. In this approach, a SWS repository is created and maintained by crawling both ontology-oriented UDDI registries and Web sites that hosting SWS. For a given service request, the proposed system invokes the matching algorithm and a candidate set is returned with different degree of matching considered. This approach can add more flexibility to the current industry standards by offering more choices to both the service requesters and publishers. Also, the prototype developed in this research shows the value can be added by using SWS in application areas such as bioinformatics.

The reliability of web services is important for both users and other service providers, with which they are in interaction. Thus, to guarantee reliability of the web services that are invoked and integrated at runtime, automatic testing of web services is needed. In web service testing, different test cases for web services are generated. The most important issue is to generate the most appropriate value for input parameters of web services at runtime. In this thesis, we developed a method for automatic web service testing that uses semantics dependency-based and data mutation-based techniques to analyze web services and generate different test cases. Thus, we both check whether the services function correctly by generating appropriate input values from different data sources and check robustness of web services by generating random and error-prone data inputs. With respect to the behaviors of web services, the test values are calculated and saved to the database for each web service.

The goal of this thesis is to provide enhanced mechanisms to deploy competitive services in a rapid and cost-effective manner. To achieve this goal, we first propose an automatic service composition model relying on an IMS/Web converged environment. This service composition model is intended to be one in which even non-professional users can easily reuse existing services to create new services. To further improve the automatic service composition feature, three strategies including passive update, active update and hybrid update are proposed and analyzed. We then propose a centralized service exposure framework for a variey of services, including Telecom / Web / Device / user-generated services. This framework aims at enhancing the user-centric and convergence features, and providing the unified access to diverse services.Subsequently, two P2P based service information sharing models are designed to complement the centralized service exposure model : i) A hierarchical P2P based model, which reuses Chord for guaranteeing the service discovery efficiency, meanwhile adopts the concept of abstract service publication and discovery for enabling the ambiguous services searching. ii) A triplex P2P overlay based model, which mainly targets the devices offered services. In this model, we use the gateways to delegate the devices residing in them for the global service exposure, and use a triplex overlay based architecture, which includes an underlying unstructured P2P layer, a Semantic Overlay Network (SON) based overlay and a service dependency overlay, for the service information sharing and discovery

Semantic Web Services domain has gained special attention in academia and industry. It has been adopted as a promise to enable automation of all aspects of Web services provision and use, such as service creation, selection, discovery, composition, invocation. For that, the Semantic Web Services community has been devoted to creating tools and techniques that explore the semantic information of these services. However, the state of the art shows that the aplications based on Semantic Services have their own characteristics, interests and priorities. This diversity directly influences the choice of techniques and technologies for handling services, ie, a single tool can have satisfactory results in a particular application and is not appropriate for others. Moreover, these applications can evolve, which implies the need of changing these tools. Aiming to solve this problem, this work proposes an adaptive middleware for managing discovery and invocation of services capable of integrating different tools and techniques according to application needs. In order to validate the work, a case study with Semantic Web Services of education domain is presented, with this, it was noted that the proposed Middleware is efficient for performing the processes of discovery, composition and invocation of services in an adaptable manner. / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Os Serviços Web Semânticos têm ganhado uma atenção especial pela academia e indústria. Eles têm sido utilizados como uma promessa para possibilitar a automação de todos os aspectos da provisão e uso de Serviços Web, tais como criação, seleção, descoberta, composição e invocação de serviços. Para isso, a comunidade tem se dedicado a criação de ferramentas e técnicas para explorar as informações semânticas destes serviços. Entretanto, como apontado pela comunidade especializada no tema, aplicações baseadas em Serviços Semânticos possuem suas próprias características, interesses e prioridades. Esta diversidade influencia diretamente na escolha das técnicas e tecnologias utilizadas para manipulação de serviços, ou seja, uma mesma ferramenta pode ter resultados satisfatórios em uma determinada aplicação e não ser adequada para outras. Além disso, essas aplicações podem evoluir, o que implica na necessidade de mudança nestas ferramentas. Com o objetivo de contribuir na solução deste problema, propõe-se na pesquisa em pauta um Middleware adaptável para gerenciamento de descoberta e invocação de serviços capaz de integrar diferentes técnicas e ferramentas de acordo com as necessidades da aplicação. Como forma de avaliar o trabalho, realizou-se um estudo de caso envolvendo o uso de Serviços Web Semânticos no domínio de educação, com isso, verificou-se que o Middleware proposto se mostrou eficiente na realização dos processos de descoberta, composição e invocação de serviços de maneira adaptável.