Adaptive middleware is essential for developing distributed systems in several applications domains. The design and implementation of this kind of middleware, however, it is still a challenge due to general adaptation issues, such as When to adapt? Where to include the adaptation code? What to adapt?, and How to guarantee safe adaptations?. Current solutions commonly face these challenges at the implementation

A key challenge posed by the Next Generation Internet landscape is that modern service-based applications need to cope with open and continuously evolving environments and to operate under dynamic circumstances (e.g., changes in the users requirements, changes in the availability of resources). Indeed, dynamically discover, select and compose the appropriate services in such environment is a challenging

Cloud computing is a general term that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. With the accelerated growth of the volume of data used by applications, many organizations have moved their data into cloud servers to provide scalable, reliable and highly available services. A particularly challenging issue that arises in the context of cloud storage systems with geographically-distributed

Online discussion forums are asynchronous communication tools that are widely used in Learning Management Systems. However, instructors and students face various difficulties, and instructors lack a guide on what strategies they can use to achieve a more participatory forum environment. This work aims to identify benefits and difficulties of using online discussion forums from the instructors’ point

The competitive dynamics of the globalized market demand information on the internal and external reality of corporations. Information is a precious asset and is responsible for establishing key advantages to enable companies to maintain their leadership. However, reliable, rich information is no longer the only goal. The time frame to extract information from data determines its usefulness. This work

The huge amount of content names available in Named-Data Networking (NDN) challenges both the required routing table size and the techniques for locating and forwarding information. Content copies and content mobility exacerbate the scalability challenge to reach content in the new locations. We present and analyze the performance of a proposed Controller-based Routing Scheme, named CRoS-NDN, which

High-performance computing (HPC) and massive data processing (Big Data) are two trends that are beginning to converge. In that process, aspects of hardware architectures, systems support and programming paradigms are being revisited from both perspectives. This paper presents our experience on this path of convergence with the proposal of a framework that addresses some of the programming issues derived

Vehicular traffic re-routing is the key to provide better traffic mobility. However, taking into account just traffic-related information to recommend better routes for each vehicle is far from achieving the desired requirements of proper transportation management. In this way, context-aware and multi-objective re-routing approaches will play an important role in traffic management. Yet, most procedures

As an integral component of the 5G communications, the massive Internet of Things (IoT) are vulnerable to various routing attacks due to their dynamic infrastructure, distinct computing resources, and heterogeneity of mobile objects. The sinkhole and selective forwarding attacks stand out among the most destructive ones for infrastructureless networks. Despite the countermeasures introduced by legacy

Web applications are popular targets for cyber-attacks because they are network-accessible and often contain vulnerabilities. An intrusion detection system monitors web applications and issues alerts when an attack attempt is detected. Existing implementations of intrusion detection systems usually extract features from network packets or string characteristics of input that are manually selected as

Services that aim to make the current transportation system more secure, sustainable, and efficient constitute the Traffic Management Systems (TMS). Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) exert a strong influence for TMS applications, due to TMS services require data, communication, and processing for operation. Besides, VANET allows direct communication between vehicles, and data are exchanged and processed

Social networks were first investigated in social, educational and business areas. Academic interest in this field though has been growing since the mid twentieth century, given the increasing interaction among people, data dissemination and exchange of information. As such, the development and evaluation of new techniques for social network analysis and mining (SNAM) is a current key research area

Participatory sensing networks rely on gathering personal data from mobile devices to infer global knowledge. Participatory sensing has been used for real-time traffic monitoring, where the global traffic conditions are based on information provided by individual devices. However, fewer initiatives address asphalt quality conditions, which is an essential aspect of the route decision process. This

In recent years, as a result of the proliferation of non-elastic services and the adoption of novel paradigms, monitoring networks with high level of detail is becoming crucial to correctly identify and characterize situations related to faults, performance, and security. In-band Network Telemetry (INT) emerges in this context as a promising approach to meet this demand, enabling production packets

The identification of strategic business partnerships can potentially provide competitive advantages for businesses; however, due to the dynamics and uncertainty present in business environments, this task could be challenging. To help businesses in this task, this study presents a similarity model between businesses that consider the opinions of users on content shared by businesses on social media

With the Internet of Things (IoT), applications should interact with a huge number of devices and retrieve context data produced by those objects, which have to be discovered and selected a priori. Due to the number, heterogeneity, and dynamicity of resources, discovery services are required to consider many selection criteria, e.g., device capabilities, location, context data type, contextual situations

The futuristic wireless networks expects to provide adequate support for distinct kind of applications, their diverse requirements, and scenarios for future Internet systems, such as Internet of Things based on multimedia and sensor data, while figuring out low cost solutions to offload the mobile communication core. In this context, Low-cost Wireless Backhauls (LWBs) can be useful, since they are

Spatial concentrations (or spatial clusters) of moving objects, such as vehicles and humans, is a mobility pattern that is relevant to many applications. Fast detection of this pattern and its evolution, e.g., if the cluster is shrinking or growing, is useful in numerous scenarios, such as detecting the formation of traffic jams or detecting a fast dispersion of people in a music concert. On-Line detection

The dictum of “Release early, release often.” by Eric Raymond as the Linux modus operandi highlights the importance of release management in open source software development. However, there are very few empirical studies addressing release management in this context. It is already known that most open source software communities adopt either a feature-based or time-based release strategy. Both have

The processing and power-consumption constraints of the Internet of Things devices hinder them to offer more complex network services than the simple data transmission in smart city scenarios. The lack of complex services, such as security and quality of service, can even foster disasters in urban centers. In this paper, we propose the integration of complex network services from the IoT devices till

Human activity recognition using embedded mobile and embedded sensors is becoming increasingly important. Scaling up from individuals to groups, that is, group activity recognition, has attracted significant attention recently. This paper proposes a model and specification language for group activities called GroupSense-L, and a novel architecture called GARSAaaS (GARSA-as-a-Service) to provide services

Microservices are a popular method to design scalable cloud-based applications. Microservice-based applications (μApps) rely on message passing for communication and to decouple each microservice, allowing the logic in each service to scale independently. Complex μApps can contain hundreds of microservices, complicating the ability of DevOps engineers to reason about and automatically optimize the

The design of flexible and efficient mechanisms for proper placement and chaining of virtual network functions (VNFs) is key for the success of Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Most state-of-the-art solutions, however, consider fixed (and immutable) flow processing and bandwidth requirements when placing VNFs in the Network Points of Presence (N-PoPs). This limitation becomes critical in NFV-enabled

A federated cloud storage setup which integrates and utilizes storage resources from multiple cloud storage providers has become an increasingly popular and attractive paradigm for the persistence tier in cloud-based applications (e.g., SaaS applications, IoT applications, etc). However, federated cloud storage setups are prone to run-time dynamicity: many dynamic properties impact the way such a setup

In an era of big data, online services are becoming increasingly data-centric; they collect, process, analyze and anonymously disclose growing amounts of personal data in the form of pseudonymized data sets. It is crucial that such systems are engineered to both protect individual user (data subject) privacy and give back control of personal data to the user. In terms of pseudonymized data this means

The smart city model is used by many organizations for large cities around the world to significantly enhance and improve the quality of life of the inhabitants, improve the utilization of city resources, and reduce operational costs. This model includes various heterogeneous technologies such as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Cloud Computing

Due to the omnipresence of the Internet and Social Media in current society, it has become easy to find groups or communities of people discussing the most varied subjects in discussion forums, social network interactions, or comments on web pages. In this paper, we try to answer the question about whether, even when nothing is explicitly known about the entity referred to in the discussion, it is

Decades went by since Mark Weiser published his influential work on the computer of the 21st century. Over the years, some of the UbiComp features presented in that paper have been gradually adopted by industry players in the technology market. While this technological evolution resulted in many benefits to our society, it has also posed, along the way, countless challenges that we have yet to surpass

The imbalance between the quantity of supply and demand in public transport systems causes a series of disruptions in large metropolises. While extremely crowded vehicles are uncomfortable for passengers, virtually empty vehicles generate economic losses for system managers, and this usually comes back to passengers in the form of fare increases. In this article a new data processing methodology will

Online social networks are major hubs of communications that are used to share information by societies worldwide. However, the ability to freely communicate on these platforms is increasingly restricted in countries across the globe and existing technological solutions do not fully address the needs of affected communities. In this paper we explore the design process of SecurePost, a novel tool that

The identification of power groups that act within the political structure is a tool for citizens and also a challenging research topic as an unstable and complex force of interests system. This paper presents metrics based on sociologist Manuel Castells’ Network Theory of Power that reflect key factors for evaluating power: the imbalance between relationships; the ability to program the rules and

Tie strength allows to classify social relationships and identify different types of them. For instance, social relationships can be classified as persistent and similar based respectively on the regularity with which they occur and the similarity among them. On the other hand, rare and somewhat similar relationships are random and cause noise in a social network, thus hiding the actual structure of

Although major advances have been made in protection of cloud platforms against malicious attacks, little has been done regarding the protection of these platforms against insider threats. This paper looks into this challenge by introducing self-adaptation as a mechanism to handle insider threats in cloud platforms, and this will be demonstrated in the context of OpenStack. OpenStack is a popular cloud

This paper proposes an analysis of political homophily among Twitter users during the 2016 American Presidential Election. We collected 4.9 million tweets of 18,450 users and their contact network from August 2016 to November 2016. We defined six user classes regarding their sentiment towards Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton: whatever, Trump supporter, Hillary supporter, positive, neutral, and negative

This article examines organization and governance of commercially influenced Open Source Software development communities by presenting a multiple-case study of six contemporary, hybrid OSS projects. The findings provide in-depth understanding on how to design the participatory nature of the software development process, while understanding the factors that influence the delicate balance of openness

Connected cars, freely configurable operating rooms, or autonomous harvesting fleets: dynamically emerging open systems of systems will shape a new generation of systems opening up a vast potential for new kinds of applications. In light of the hard-to-predict structure and behavior of such systems, assuring their safety will require some disruptive changes of established safety paradigms. Combining

Recent developments in telecommunications have allowed drawing new paradigms, including the Internet of Everything, to provide services by the interconnection of different physical devices enabling the exchange of data to enrich and automate people’s daily activities; and Fog computing, which is an extension of the well-known Cloud computing, bringing tasks to the edge of the network exploiting characteristics

The weaknesses of the Internet led to the creation of a new network paradigm – network virtualization. Virtualization is a very successful technique for sharing and reusing resources, which results in higher efficiency. Despite its advantages, including flexibility in network architecture, virtualization imposes many challenges, such as physical resource allocation to virtual devices. An efficient

Machine Learning (ML) has been enjoying an unprecedented surge in applications that solve problems and enable automation in diverse domains. Primarily, this is due to the explosion in the availability of data, significant improvements in ML techniques, and advancement in computing capabilities. Undoubtedly, ML has been applied to various mundane and complex problems arising in network operation and

Distributed firewall systems emerged with the proposal of protecting individual hosts against attacks originating from inside the network. In these systems, firewall rules are centrally created, then distributed and enforced on all servers that compose the firewall, restricting which services will be available. However, this approach lacks protection against software vulnerabilities that can make network

The Debian project is one of the largest free software undertakings worldwide. It is geographically distributed, and participation in the project is done on a voluntary basis, without a single formal employee or directly funded person. As we will explain, due to the nature of the project, its authentication needs are very strict - User/password schemes are way surpassed, and centralized trust management

In this paper, we study the “Session Reconstruction” problem which is the reconstruction of user interactions from recorded request/response logs of a session. The reconstruction is especially useful when the only available information about the session is its HTTP trace, as could be the case during a forensic analysis of an attack on a website. Solutions to the reconstruction problem do exist for

The Internet of Services and Things is characterized as a distributed computing environment that will be populated by a large number of software services and things. Within this context, software systems will increasingly be built by reusing and composing together software services and things distributed over the Internet. This calls for new integration paradigms and patterns, formal composition theories

The use of cloud computing has become common due to advantages such as low cost and sizing of computing resources according to demand. However, it also raises security and privacy concerns, because critical data – for example, in IoT applications – are stored and processed in the cloud. This paper proposes a software architecture that supports multiple approaches to secure data aggregation. For validation

This paper describes EZ-AG, a structure-free protocol for duplicate insensitive data aggregation in MANETs. The key idea in EZ-AG is to introduce a token that performs a self-repelling random walk in the network and aggregates information from nodes when they are visited for the first time. A self-repelling random walk of a token on a graph is one in which at each step, the token moves to a neighbor

There are several educational resources distributed in different repositories that address to a wide range of subjects and different educational goals. The proper choice of these educational resources is a challenge. Recommendation systems may help users in this task. In order to generate personalized recommendations, it is important to identify information that will help to define user profile and

Foundations function as a vital institutional support infrastructure for many of the most successful open-source projects, but the different roles played by these support entities are understudied in Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) research. Drawing on Open Hub (formerly known as Ohloh) data, this paper empirically investigates how these entities support projects and interact with other

IP lookup is a core operation in packet forwarding, which is implemented using a Longest Prefix Matching (LPM) algorithm to find the next hop for an input address. This work proposes and evaluates the use of parallel processors to deploy an optimized IP lookup algorithm based on Bloom filters. We target the implementation on the Intel Xeon Phi (Intel Phi) many-core coprocessor and on multi-core CPUs

The literature regarding attacks in Networked Control Systems (NCS) indicates that covert and accurate attacks must be designed based on an accurate knowledge about the model of the attacked system. In this context, the literature on NCS presents the Passive System Identification attack as a metaheuristic-based tool to provide the attacker with the required system models. However, the scientific literature

Connecting multiple and heterogeneous hardware devices to solve problems raises some challenges, especially in terms of interoperability and communications management. A distributed solution may offer many advantages, like easy use of dispersed resources in a network and potential increase in processing power and data transfer speed. However, integrating devices from different architectures might not