by Strassner, John; O’Sullivan, Declan; Lewis, David

In this article we examine the current trend to employ ontologies in the modelling of management systems and examine the barrier facing the integration of such modelling into the practical engineering of management systems.

DOI: 10.1007/s10922-006-9058-1
Online Date: 1/26/2007
Print publication date: 3/1/2007
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by Roussaki, Ioanna; Strimpakou, Maria; Pils, Carsten

The challenge of saturating all phases of pervasive service provision with context-aware functionality lies in coping with the complexity of maintaining, retrieving and distributing context information. To efficiently represent and query context information a sophisticated modelling scheme should exist. To distribute and synchronise context knowledge in various context repositories across a multitude of administrative domains, streamlined mechanisms are needed. This paper elaborates on an innovative context management framework that has been designed to cope with free-text and location based context retrieval and efficient context consistency control. The proposed framework has been incorporated in a multi-functional pervasive services platform, while most of the mechanisms it employs have been empirically evaluated.

DOI: 10.1007/s10922-006-9053-6
Online Date: 1/26/2007
Print publication date: 3/1/2007
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by Lewis, David; Dobson, Simon

DOI: 10.1007/s10922-006-9055-4
Online Date: 1/19/2007
Print publication date: 3/1/2007
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by Keeney, John; Lewis, David; O’Sullivan, Declan

Much recent research has focused on applying Autonomic Computing principles to achieve constrained self-management in adaptive systems, through self-monitoring and analysis, strategy planning, and self adjustment. However, in a highly distributed system, just monitoring current operation and context is a complex and largely unsolved problem domain. This difficulty is particularly evident in the areas of network management, pervasive computing, and autonomic communications. This paper presents a model for the filtered dissemination of semantically enriched knowledge over a large loosely coupled network of distributed heterogeneous autonomic agents, removing the need to bind explicitly to all of the potential sources of that knowledge. This paper presents an implementation of such a knowledge delivery service, which enables the efficient routing of distributed heterogeneous knowledge to, and only to, nodes that have expressed an interest in that knowledge. This gathered knowledge can then be used as the operational or context information needed to analyze to the system’s behavior as part of an autonomic control loop. As a case study this paper focuses on contextual knowledge distribution for autonomic network management. A comparative evaluation of the performance of the knowledge delivery service is also provided.

DOI: 10.1007/s10922-006-9054-5
Online Date: 1/19/2007
Print publication date: 3/1/2007
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by Malatras, Apostolos; Hadjiantonis, Antonios M.; Pavlou, George

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are characterized by a degree of dynamicity that can result in significant drawbacks regarding their useful deployment. The fact they are formed spontaneously, comprising possibly heterogeneous devices, hinders further their wide adoption. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a system that exploits context-awareness and couples it with policy-based management in order to enable the self-management of MANETs. The key idea is to support self-configuration by being adaptive to varying conditions modeled as context, with high-level management policies driving self-configuration towards particular goals. We propose the management of the MANET in a hierarchical but also distributed manner through a dynamically constructed set of manager nodes. We present and evaluate our work on context-awareness and context dissemination in MANETs through simulation and also by deploying the prototype system in our experimental MANET testbed for a proof-of-concept application scenario.

DOI: 10.1007/s10922-006-9052-7
Online Date: 1/9/2007
Print publication date: 3/1/2007
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by Razzaque, Mohammad Abdur; Dobson, Simon; Nixon, Paddy

Layered architectures are not flexible enough to cope with the dynamics of wireless dominated next generation communications. Cross-layer architectures may provide a more flexible solution: breaks the traditional structure by allowing interactions between two or more non-adjacent layers. This paper review the cross–layer approach to network architecture and compare the different cross-layering architectures, observing that most current approaches depend purely on local information and provide only poor and inaccurate information gathering at the global scale. This paper also explores the possible use of cross-layering architectures in autonomic communications and the potential importance of new cross-layer architectures with a hybrid local and global view for autonomic communications.

DOI: 10.1007/s10922-006-9051-8
Online Date: 1/3/2007
Print publication date: 3/1/2007
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