Presents corrections to author affiliation information in the above named paper.

Presents the 2020 subject/author index for this publication.

Most online service providers deploy their own data stream processing systems in the cloud to conduct large-scale and real-time data analytics. However, such systems, e.g., Apache Heron, often adopt naive scheduling schemes to distribute data streams (in the units of tuples) among processing instances, which may result in workload imbalance and system disruption. Hence, there still exists a mismatch

The articles in this special section focus on advancements of utility and cloud computing technologies and services. Computing is rapidly moving towards a model where it is provided as services that are delivered in a manner similar to traditional utilities such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. In such a model, users access services according to their requirements, without regard to where

Many schemes have been recently advanced for storing data on multiple clouds. Distributing data over different cloud storage providers (CSPs) automatically provides users with a certain degree of information leakage control, for no single point of attack can leak all the information. However, unplanned distribution of data chunks can lead to high information disclosure even while using multiple clouds

Data center benefits cloud applications in providing high scalability and ensuring service availability. However, virtual machine (VM) placement in data center poses new challenges for service provisioning. For many cloud services such as storage and video streaming, present placement approaches are unable to support network-demanding services due to overwhelming communication traffic and time. Therefore

With the rapid development of the Internet, cloud storage has penetrated into every aspect of human society. However, cloud data disclosure happens more and more frequently, which makes cloud data security and privacy protection impact wide adoption of cloud storage. Control cloud data access based on reputation by introducing a Reputation Center (RC) was proposed and demonstrated to secure cloud data

Motivated by complementing the ubiquitous wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and powerful cloud computing (CC), a lot of attention from both industry and academia has been drawn to Sensor-Cloud (SC). However, SC pricing is barely investigated. Towards pricing for SC, this paper 1) introduces five SC Pricing Models (SCPMs) first. Specifically, to charge a SC user, each SCPM considers one of the following

Job scheduling is a necessary prerequisite for performance optimization and resource management in the cloud computing system. Focusing on accurate scaled cloud computing environment and efficient job scheduling under Virtual Machine (VM) resource and Server Level Agreement (SLA) constraints, we introduce the architecture of cloud computing platform and optimization job scheduling scheme in this study

Cloud computing has recently emerged as an important service to manage applications efficiently over the Internet. Various cloud providers offer pay per use cloud services that requires Quality of Service (QoS) management to efficiently monitor and measure the delivered services through Internet of Things (IoT) and thus needs to follow Service Level Agreements (SLAs). However, providing dedicated cloud

Service migration between datacenters can reduce the network overhead within a cloud infrastructure; thereby, also improving the quality of service for the clients. Most of the algorithms in the literature assume that the client access pattern remains stable for a sufficiently long period so as to amortize such migrations. However, if such an assumption does not hold, these algorithms can take arbitrarily

As an efficient development for industrial and scientific applications, workflow technologies have received substantial attention in recent decades. To address the issue of workflow scheduling in a state-of-the-art cloud environment, based on analysis of a decentralized architecture for workflow scheduling, a dependable scheduling strategy with active replica placement (DS-ARP) is proposed in this

New pricing policies are emerging where cloud providers charge resource provisioning based on the allocated CPU frequencies. As a result, resources are offered to users as combinations of different performance levels and prices which can be configured at runtime. With such new pricing schemes and the increasing energy costs in data centres, balancing energy savings with performance and revenue losses

Several real-world problems in domain of healthcare, large scale scientific simulations, and manufacturing are organised as workflow applications. Efficiently managing workflow applications on the Cloud computing data-centres is challenging due to the following problems: (i) they need to perform computation over sensitive data (e.g., Healthcare workflows) hence leading to additional security and legal

Aiming to improve Internet content accessing capacity of the system, cloud proxy platforms are used to improve the visiting performance in network export environment. Limited by complexity of cloud proxy system, trustworthy guarantee of cloud system becomes a difficult problem. Considering the self-government of autonomic computing, it could enhance cloud system trustworthy and avoids system management

Composing several API-defined services into one composite service per user requirements has become an important service creation approach in the cloud-enabled API economy. Various service selection approaches in support of service composition on demand have been proposed. They usually assume that networking resources are over-provisioned and their usage needs not be considered when making quality-aware

Elasticity is a fundamental feature of cloud computing and can be considered as a great advantage and a key benefit of cloud computing. One key challenge in cloud elasticity is lack of consensus on a quantifiable, measurable, observable, and calculable definition of elasticity and systematic approaches to modeling, quantifying, analyzing, and predicting elasticity. Another key challenge in cloud computing

For frequent disk I/O and large data transmissions among different racks and physical nodes, intermediate data communication has become the most important performance bottle-neck in most running Hadoop systems. This paper proposes a reduce placement algorithm called CORP to schedule related map and reduce tasks on the near nodes of clusters or racks for data locality. Because the number of keys cannot

A clear trend in the evolution of network-based services is the ever-increasing amount of multimedia data involved. This trend towards big-data multimedia processing finds its natural placement together with the adoption of the cloud computing paradigm, that seems the best solution to cope with the demands of a highly fluctuating workload that characterizes this type of services. However, as cloud

Enormous energy consumption of data centers has a major impact on power systems by significantly increasing the electrical load. Due to the increase in electrical load, power systems are facing demand and supply miss-management problems. Therefore, power systems require efficient and intelligent ancillary services to maintain robustness, reliability, and stability. Data centers can provide the computational

Multimedia content is massively generated from various applications and devices, and processed in cloud data centers. Multimedia service providers prefer that their data are processed in data centers close to users in order to offer them high performance and reliable multimedia services that meet the requirements specified in the Service Level of Agreement (SLA). This requires transferring huge data

As data progressively grows within data centers, the cloud storage systems continuously facechallenges in saving storage capacity and providing capabilities necessary to move big data within an acceptable time frame. In this paper, we present the Boafft, a cloud storage system with distributed deduplication. The Boafft achieves scalable throughput and capacity usingmultiple data servers to deduplicate

Recent expansions of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applying cloud computing have been growing at a phenomenal rate. As one of the developments, heterogeneous cloud computing has enabled a variety of cloud-based infrastructure solutions, such as multimedia big data. Numerous prior researches have explored the optimizations of on-premise heterogeneous memories. However, the heterogeneous cloud memories are

Reliability requirement is one of the most important quality of services (QoS) and should be satisfied for a reliable workflow in cloud computing. Primary-backup replication is an important software fault-tolerant technique used to satisfy reliability requirement. Recent works studied quantitative fault-tolerant scheduling to reduce execution cost by minimizing the number of replicas while satisfying

Traditional firewalls employ listed rules in both configuration and process phases to regulate network traffic. However, configuring a firewall with listed rules may create rule conflicts, and slows down the firewall. To overcome this problem, we have proposed a Tree-rule firewall in our previous study. Although the Tree-rule firewall guarantees no conflicts within its rule set and operates faster

Mobile displays have been recognized as the major contributors to the energy consumption of contemporary mobile video services. Existing display energy reduction (DER) algorithms focus on local video/image processing by utilizing the computation resources on the mobile devices. As such, a per-device DER strategy is highly inefficient from the systematic perspective since the same computation is repeated

Graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerated processing performs significant efficiency in many multimedia applications. With the development of GPU cloud computing, more and more cloud providers focus on GPU-accelerated services. Since the high maintenance cost and different speedups for various applications, GPU-accelerated services still need a different pricing strategy. Thus, in this paper, we propose

With the popularity of wearable devices, along with the development of clouds and cloudlet technology, there has been increasing need to provide better medical care. The processing chain of medical data mainly includes data collection, data storage and data sharing, etc. Traditional healthcare system often requires the delivery of medical data to the cloud, which involves users’ sensitive information

Cloud computing is now a well-adopted computing paradigm. With unprecedented scalability and flexibility, the computational cloud is able to carry out large scale computing tasks in parallel. The datacenter cloud is a new cloud computing model that uses multi-datacenter architectures for large scale massive data processing or computing. In datacenter cloud computing, the overall efficiency of the cloud

Privacy-preserving verifiable (outsourced) computation (PPVC) is a useful technique for a resource-constrained client to outsource computationally heavy but sensitive tasks to a computationally powerful but untrusted worker and to obtain expected correct results from the worker. In this paper, we analyze the privacy property of three matrix masking-based PPVC protocols, which have recently been published

Cloud computing can provide a flexible way to effectively share data among multiple users since it can overcome the time and location constraints of computing resource usage. However, the users of cloud computing are still reluctant to share sensitive data to a cloud server since the cloud server should be treated as an untrusted entity. In order to support secure and efficient data sharing in a cloud

Temporary keyword search on confidential data in a cloud environment is the main focus of this research. The cloud providers are not fully trusted. So, it is necessary to outsource data in the encrypted form. In the attribute-based keyword search (ABKS) schemes, the authorized users can generate some search tokens and send them to the cloud for running the search operation. These search tokens can

The fog computing paradigm brings together storage, communication, and computation resources closer to users’ end-devices. Therefore, fog servers are deployed at the edge of the network, offering low latency access to users. With the expansion of such fog computing services, different providers will be able to deploy multiple resources within a restricted geographical proximity. In this paper, we investigate

We present Roots, a full-stack monitoring and analysis system for performance anomaly detection and bottleneck identification in cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) systems. Roots facilitates application performance monitoring as a core capability of PaaS clouds, and relieves the developers from having to instrument application code. Roots tracks HTTP/S requests to hosted cloud applications and their

The severe challenges of the fast aging population and the prevalence of cardiovascular diseases highlight the needs for effective solutions supporting more accurate and affordable medical diagnosis and treatment. Recent advances in cloud computing have inspired numerous designs of cloud-based health care services. In this paper, we developed a cloud-computing platform monitored by physicians, which

An agent-less technique to understand virtual machines (VMs) behavior and their changes during the VM life-cycle is essential for many performance analysis and debugging tasks in the cloud environment. Because of privacy and security issues, ease of deployment and execution overhead, the method preferably limits its data collection to the physical host level, without internal access to the VMs. We

Presents the farewell editorial from the editor for this issue of the publication.

Presents the 2019 subject/author index for this publication.

With the increasing demands of end-users to the visual perception in three-dimension (3D) image, quality assessment for 3D imageis dominantly required as the feedback information for multimedia transmission systems. In this paper, a novel full-reference quality assessment method by considering the depth and integral color information of 3D image under cloud computing environment is proposed. Based

Cloud computing has promoted the success of big data applications such as medical data analyses. With the abundant resources provisioned by cloud platforms, the quality of service (QoS) of services that process big data could be boosted significantly. However, due to unstable network or fake advertisement, the QoS published by service providers is not always trusted. Therefore, it becomes a necessity

Cloud computing has emerged as a promising computational infrastructure for cost-efficient workflow execution by provisioning on-demand resources in a pay-as-you-go manner. While scientific workflows require accessing community-wide resources, they usually need to be performed in collaborative cloud environments composed of multiple datacenters. Although such environments facilitate scientific collaboration

A tremendous challenge in the development of Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS) is to integrate the growing volume and wide variety of data generated from multiple sources. To address the challenge, this paper presents an integration framework on cloud consisting of five functionally complementary processes, namely data representation, dimensionality reduction, relation establishment, data rank and

MapReduce plays a critical role as a leading framework for big data analytics. In this paper, we consider a geo-distributed cloud architecture that provides MapReduce services based on the big data collected from end users all over the world. Existing work handles MapReduce jobs by a traditional computation-centric approach that all input data distributed in multiple clouds are aggregated to a virtual

Crowdsourcing is a process of acquisition, integration, and analysis of big and heterogeneous data generated by a diversity of sources in urban spaces, such as sensors, devices, vehicles, buildings, and human. Especially, nowadays, no countries, no communities, and no person are immune to urban emergency events. Detection about urban emergency events, e.g., fires, storms, traffic jams is of great importance

One of the major challenges for safeguarding the security of big data in the cloud is how to detect and prevent malicious software (malware). Despite of the fact that security and privacy are critical issues in big data, more research needs to be done in this area. As malware can affect the reliability of the data and subsequently the reputation of the system, it is critical to detect and remove malware

In cloud computing, there have led to an increase in the capability to store and record personal data (microdata) in the cloud. In most cases, data providers have no/little control that has led to concern that the personal data may be beached. Microaggregation techniques seek to protect microdata in such a way that data can be published and mined without providing any private information that can be

Scientific discovery usually involves data generation, data preprocessing, data storage and data analysis. As the data volume exceeds a few terabytes (TB) in a single simulation run, the data movement, which happens during each cycle of the scientific discovery, continues to be the bottleneck in most scientific big data applications. A lot of research works have been conducted on reducing the data

Due to the existence of resource variations, it is very challenging for Cloud workflow resource allocation strategies to guarantee a reliable Quality of Service (QoS). Although dozens of resource allocation heuristics have been developed to improve the QoS of Cloud workflow, it is hard to predict their performance under variations because of the lack of accurate modeling and evaluation methods. So

Cloud computing offers a cost-effective and elastic computing paradigm that facilitates large scale data storage and analytics. By deploying virtualization technologies in the datacenter, cloud enables efficient resource management and isolation for various big data applications. Since the hotspots (i.e., overloaded machines) can degrade the performance of these applications, virtual machine migration

This paper investigates the problem of minimizing data transfer between different data centers of the cloud during the neurological diagnostics of cardiac autonomic neuropathy (CAN). This problem has never been considered in the literature before. All classifiers considered for the diagnostics of CAN previously assume complete access to all data, which would lead to enormous burden of data transfer

In medical cloud computing, a patient can remotely outsource her medical data to the cloud server. In this case, only authorized doctors are allowed to access the data since the medical data is highly sensitive. Before outsourcing, the data is commonly encrypted, where the corresponding secret key is sent to authorized doctors. However, performing searches on encrypted medical data is difficult without

Cloud Colonography is proposed in this paper, using different types of cloud computing environments. Databases from the Computed Tomographic Colonography (CTC) screening tests among several hospitals are explored. These networked databases are going to be available in the near future via cloud computing technologies. Associated Multiple Databases (AMD) was developed in this study to handle multiple

MapReduce is a widely-used programming model in cloud environment for parallel processing large-scale data sets. The combination of the high-level language with a SQL-to-MapReduce translator allows programmers to code using SQL-like declarative language, so that each program can afterwards be complied into a MapReduce jobflow automatically. This way is helpful to narrow the gap between non-professional

The surge of medical and e-commerce applications has generated tremendous amount of data, which brings people to a so-called “Big Data” era. Different from traditional large data sets, the term “Big Data” not only means the large size of data volume but also indicates the high velocity of data generation. However, current data mining and analytical techniques are facing the challenge of dealing with

To make better use of the cloud computing technology, and to overcome the computing and storage requirements which increase rapidly with the number of training samples, in this paper, a new parallel algorithm is proposed—Parallel Regularized Multiple-Criteria Linear Programming (PRMCLP) algorithm—The RMCLP model is converted into a unconstrained optimization problem, and then, in the parallel version

Brain informatics adopts a systematic methodology to study clinical diagnosis and pathology of mental disorders from macro, meso and micro points of view. Systematic studies produce multi-level and multi-aspect health big data of mental disorders. Effectively integrating multi-level mental health big data and providing multi-level and content-oriented data services for different types of users by an

Hadoop has become a popular framework for processing data-intensive applications in cloud environments. A core constituent of Hadoop is the scheduler, which is responsible for scheduling and monitoring the jobs and tasks, and rescheduling them in case of failures. Although fault-tolerance mechanisms have been proposed for Hadoop, the performance of Hadoop can be significantly impacted by unforeseen

Mobile cloud offloading migrates heavy computation from mobile devices to remote cloud resources or nearby cloudlets. It is a promising method to alleviate the struggle between resource-constrained mobile devices and resource-hungry mobile applications. Caused by frequently changing location mobile users often see dynamically changing network conditions which have a great impact on the perceived application

A modern Network Function Virtualization (NFV) service is usually expressed in a service chain that contains a list of ordered network functions, each can run in one or multiple virtual machines. Although lots of efforts have been devoted to service chain deployment, the researchers normally consider a simple model of network functions where different service chains have their own network functions

Cloud storage services enable individuals and organizations to outsource data storage to remote servers. Cloud storage providers generally adopt data deduplication, a technique for eliminating redundant data by keeping only a single copy of a file, thus saving a considerable amount of storage and bandwidth. However, an attacker can abuse deduplication protocols to steal information. For example, an