Presents the 2020 subject/author index for this publication.

Edge computing (EC) can overcome several limitations of cloud computing. In the EC environment, a service provider can deploy its application instances on edge servers to serve users with low latency. Given a limited budget K for deploying applications in a particular geographical area, some approaches have been proposed to achieves various optimization objectives, e.g., to maximize the servers' coverage

The e-healthcare cloud system has shown its potential to improve the quality of healthcare and individuals' quality of life. Unfortunately, security and privacy impede its widespread deployment and application. In this paper, we design an inference attack-resistant e-healthcare cloud system with fine-grained access control. We first propose a two-layer encryption scheme. To ensure an efficient and

Recently researchers use skyline techniques to optimize service selection procedure, where they can filter those low-quality web services from the large amount of candidates and return a much smaller high-quality service set. The skycube concept is adopted for quickly responding to the skyline queries with different combinations of Quality of Web Service (QoWS) parameters. As the skycube computation

With the rapidly increasing computing demand, data centers become more and more power-hungry, which incurs substantial electricity cost. Meanwhile, due to the time-dependent demand preference, power grid is suffering high load variations, which results in a large profit loss. In this paper, we consider a cost-efficient workload scheduling with a coordination between a cloud service provider operating

As cloud computing becomes prevalent, more and more data owners are likely to outsource their data to a cloud server. However, to ensure privacy, the data should be encrypted before outsourcing. Symmetric searchable encryption allows users to retrieve keyword over encrypted data without decrypting the data. Many existing schemes that are based on symmetric searchable encryption only support single

Motivated by privacy preservation requirements for outsourced data, keyword searches over encrypted cloud data have become a hot topic. Compared to single-keyword exact searches, multi-keyword fuzzy search schemes attract more attention because of their improvements in search accuracy, typo tolerance, and user experience in general. However, existing multi-keyword fuzzy search solutions are not sufficiently

Online stores are capable analyzing user preference from click logs and transaction records, while retailers of physical stores still lack effective methods to understand user preference. Traditional ways are predominantly field surveys, which are not effective as they need labor-intensive survey thus limit to small populations. As mobile devices and social media are becoming more and more pervasive

Large-scale datacenters are the key infrastructures of cloud computing. Inside a datacenter, a large number of servers are interconnected using a specific datacenter network to deliver the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for tenants. To realize novel cloud applications like the network virtualization and network isolation among tenants, the principle of software-defined network (SDN) has been applied

ABKS has drawn much attention from research and industry in recent years, an ABKS scheme is an encryption scheme that supports keyword search and access control. Attribute-Based Encryption is a public key encryption that enables users to encrypt and decrypt message based on attributes. In a typical implementation, the size of the ciphertext is proportional to the number of attributes associated with

Thanks to the capabilities of the built-in sensors of smart devices, mobile crowd-sensing (MCS) has become a promising technique for massive data collection. In this paradigm, the service provider recruits workers (i.e., common people with smart devices) to perform sensing tasks requested by the consumers. To efficiently handle workers’ recruitment and task allocation, several factors have to be considered

With increasing adoption and presence of Web services, service composition becomes an effective way to construct software applications. Composite services need to satisfy both the functional and the non-functional requirements. Traditional methods usually assume that the quality of service (QoS) and the behaviors of services are deterministic, and they execute the composite service after all the component

Modern cloud computing platforms based on virtual machine monitors (VMMs) host a variety of complex businesses which present many network security vulnerabilities. In order to protect network security for these businesses in cloud computing, nowadays, a number of middleboxes are deployed at front-end of cloud computing or parts of middleboxes are deployed in cloud computing. However, the former is

With the development of cloud computing and virtualization technologies, more and more soft real-time applications, such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) server and cloud gaming, are running in virtualized data centers. Though previous studies optimize CPU schedulers of hypervisors to support these applications in virtualized environments, there are some important challenges in designing an efficient

Workflow-based Service-oriented WSNs have recently received a lot of attention from both academia and industry. With well-defined service components, various flexible WSN applications can be developed. However, the key characteristic of WSNs is resource constraints. Sensor nodes in WSNs have limited storage, computation and especially limited energy. As service components in WSNs rely on the data gathered

It is imperative for public cloud providers to guarantee performance targets for tenants’ virtual machines (VMs) while respecting strict business confidentiality, e.g., having no information on applications nor their performance. A large body of related work addresses the challenges of detecting performance interferences by leveraging client's quality of service (QoS) metrics, e.g., latency, and additional

Cloud systems empower the big data management by providing virtual machines (VMs) to process data nodes (DNs) in a faster, cheaper and more effective way. The efficiency of a VM allocation is an important concern that is influenced by the communication latencies. In the literature, it has been proved that the VM assignment minimizing communication latency in the presence of the triangle inequality

Reliability is widely identified as an increasingly relevant issue in heterogeneous service-oriented systems because processor failure affects the quality of service to users. Replication-based fault-tolerance is a common approach to satisfy application's reliability requirement. This study solves the problem of minimizing redundancy to satisfy reliability requirement for a directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based

Online reputation systems serve as core building blocks in various Internet services such as E-commerce (e.g., eBay) and crowdsourcing (e.g., oDesk). The flaws and deficiencies of real-world online reputation systems have been reported extensively. Users who are frustrated about the system will eventually abandon such service. However, there is no systematic and formal studies which examine such deficiencies

Scientists are increasingly using the workflow technology as a means for modeling and execution of scientific experiments. Despite being a very powerful paradigm workflows still lack support for trial-and-error modeling, as well as flexibility mechanisms that enable the ad hoc repetition of experiment logic to enable, for example, the convergence of results or to handle errors. In this respect, in

While it is well understood that the Internet of things (IoT) offers the capability of integrating the physical world and the cyber world, it also presents many significant challenges with numerous heterogeneous things connected and interacted, such as how to efficiently annotate things with semantic labels (i.e., things categorization) for searching and recommendation. Traditional ways for things

In cloud computing, it is crucial to maintain service continuity, while power outage is one of the most common and serious threats. To improve the resilience of cloud against power outage, a service provider usually deploys emergency energy supply (e.g., UPSs and generators) in a data center. When a power outage at a data center happens, the cloud service provider needs to make the operation decision

Cloud computing has brought a new method of resource utilization and management. Nowadays some researchers are working on cloud-based instrumentation and measurement systems designated as Instrumentation and Measurement Clouds (IMCs). However, until now, no standard definition or detailed architecture with an implemented system for IMC has been presented. This paper adopts the philosophy of cloud computing

Understanding the statistical latency between two groups of hosts in a period of time is of great significance to a wide variety of Internet applications and services, such as Service-Level Agreement (SLA) compliance monitoring and Virtual Network Function (VNF) placement. However, direct latency measurement methods are not always applicable to large-scale situations while the existing indirect methods

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the latest Internet evolution that incorporates billions of sensors, actuators, and related software services that collectively distill high value information, perform actions that affect the physical world, and support a variety of applications controlled by different organizations and individuals. IoT's ability to observe and affect the physical world presents a unprecedented

Oblivious RAM (ORAM) is important for applications that require hiding of access patterns. However, most of existing implementations of ORAM are very expensive, which are infeasible to be deployed in lightweight devices, like the terminal equipment for Internet of Things (IoT). In this article, we focus on how to apply the expensive ORAM to protect access pattern in IoT devices and propose an ORAM

Smart grid (SG) is an emerging technology which provides many services to the end users and utilities, such as load management, frequency regulation, and grid stability. Although many solutions exist to provide these services in a secure manner, but these solutions are not adequate keeping in view of the heavy cryptographic primitives execution on these devices. Hence, in this article, GUARDIAN, a

Internet of Things (IoT) is a disruptive technology in many aspects of our society, ranging from communications to financial transactions to national security (e.g., Internet of Battlefield / Military Things), and so on. There are long-standing challenges in IoT, such as security, comparability, energy consumption, and heterogeneity of devices. Security and energy aspects play important roles in data

In modern information systems different information features, about the same individual, are often collected and managed by autonomous data collection services that may have different privacy policies. Answering many end-users’ legitimate queries requires the integration of data from multiple such services. However, data integration is often hindered by the lack of a trusted entity, often called a

Frequently occurred oil leaking accidents can induce significant damage to the ocean ecosystem and environment. Integrated buoy sensing, which functions as a tool for periodically monitoring oil existence, plays an essential role in oil leakage detection in an offshore petroleum Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber Physical System (CPS). Buoy sensor cyberattack can severely affect the ability to detect

Transferring and processing huge amounts of data in the cloud can violate the low latency requirements of modern IoT applications, considering underlying network infrastructure limitations. Edge data analytics is a promising solution. However, edge resources have usually less computational capabilities than cloud nodes, resulting in a higher failure rate of IoT systems. Consequently, near-real-time

With the development of GPS technology, a new Mobile Internet of Things (M-IoT) is emerging, which perceives the city's rhythm and pulse day and night to collect a large scale of city data. It is urgent to innovate M-IoT service system for these large-scale and heterogeneous data. To cope with the problem, this article proposes a Mobile-IoT based multi-modal reinforcement learning service framework

Recommendation technology is an important part of the Internet of Things (IoT) services, which can provide better service for users and help users get information anytime, anywhere. However, the traditional recommendation algorithms cannot meet user's fast and accurate recommended requirements in the IoT environment. In the face of a large-volume data, the method of finding neighborhood by comparing

Online electroencephalograph (EEG) classification is a core service of recently booming brain e-health, but its performance often becomes unstable because (1) conventional end-to-end models (e.g., deep neural network, $DNN$DNN) largely remain static, while brain states of diseases are highly dynamic and exhibits significant individuality; and (2) EEG analytics are too complicated and have to be sustained

With the increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the volume and variety of data being generated by these devices are increasing rapidly. Cloud computing cannot process this data due to its high latency and scalability. In order to process this data in less time, fog computing has evolved as an extension to Cloud computing. In a fog computing environment, a resource monitoring service

Existing works adopt the Edge-Oriented Resource Allocation (EORA) scheme, in which edge nodes cache services and schedule user requests to distribute workloads over cloud and edge nodes, so as to achieve high-quality services and low latency. Unfortunately, EORA does not fully take into account the fact that service providers are sometimes independent from the edge operators with their own objectives

There is a growing trend for service providers to migrate their services from local clusters to the cloud data center. When there is no single service can satisfy the functionality requirement of the end user, existing services are combined together to fulfill the requirements. The data communication between component service hosting servers imposes a heavy burden on the data center network. In this

Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as intelligent road side units and video-based detectors, are being deployed in emerging applications like sustainable and intelligent transportation systems. The primary obstacles against the development of these IoT devices are various security threats and huge energy consumption. In this article, we study the problem of scheduling tasks onto a heterogeneous

Internet of Things (IoT) has become a new paradigm of communication to reform traditional industries, in which distributed data automatically collected via IoT in a low cost enables many new IT services that were even impossible decades ago. This research reports on an IoT-enabled production management service for crude-oil industry. In practice, even if an optimal management decision is achieved,

Data-intensive applications need to address the problem of properly placing the set of data items in geo-distributed storage nodes. Traditional techniques use the hashing method to achieve the load balance among nodes such as those used in Hadoop and Cassandra, but are not efficient for the requests reading multiple data items in one transaction, especially when the source locations of requests are

With the prosperity of mobile application markets, mobile advertising is becoming an increasingly important economic force. In order to maximize revenue, ads are recommended to be delivered to potentially interested users, which requires user targeting, i.e., analyzing users’ profiles and exploring users’ interests. However, collecting user personal information for targeted mobile advertising services

As greater numbers of data-intensive applications are required to process big data in bandwidth-constrained datacenters with heterogeneous physical machines (PMs) and virtual machines (VMs), network core traffic is experiencing rapid growth. The VMs of a virtual cluster (VC) must be allocated as compactly as possible to avoid bandwidth-related bottlenecks. Since each PM/switch has a certain failure

Many production datacenters nowadays service multiple applications with dynamically allocated network bandwidth, and some applications are time-critical so their data transfers or flows are constrained by deadlines. To meet deadlines, several flow scheduling schemes for datacenter networks are proposed, but most of them are unaware of bandwidth variations, leading to suboptimal throughputs. In this

Cloud computing encourages users to outsource their data to cloud storage. Data outsourcing means that users lose physical autonomy on their own data, which makes remote data integrity verification become a critical challenge for potential cloud users. To free user from the burden incurred by frequent integrity verifications, Third Party Auditor (TPA) is introduced to perform verifications on behalf

Searchable encryption is an important technique for public cloud storage service to provide user data confidentiality protection and at the same time allow users performing keyword search over their encrypted data. Previous schemes only deal with exact or fuzzy keyword search to correct some spelling errors. In this paper, we propose a new wildcard searchable encryption system to support wildcard keyword

Attribute based encryption (ABE) is a popular cryptographic technology to protect the security of users’ data. However, the decryption cost and ciphertext size restrict the application of ABE in practice. For most existing ABE schemes, the decryption cost and ciphertext size grow linearly with the complexity of access structure. This is undesirable to the devices with limited computing capability and

With the rapid development of service-oriented computing, a large number of software applications have been developed based on the services computing framework. It is well known that software engineering is a knowledge-intensive activity, and thus the effective management of service-related knowledge facilitates service-oriented software development. Although many methodologies have been proposed for

Smartphones and a growing number of wearable devices are equipped with powerful sensors. This has led to increased interest in developing applications using sensor feeds from such devices to offer services across a wide variety of domains including healthcare, entertainment, environmental monitoring and transportation. However, most of these applications require continuous sensing, which places a heavy

Ensuring the preservation of security is a key requirement and challenge for Service-Based Systems (SBS) due to the use of third party software services not operating under different security perimeters. In this paper, we present an approach for verifying the security properties of SBS workflows and adapting them if such properties are not preserved. Our approach uses secure service composition patterns

Efficient service composition in real time, while satisfying desirable Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for the composite solution has been one of the topmost research challenges in the domain of services computing. On one hand, optimal QoS aware service composition algorithms, that come with the promise of solution optimality, are inherently compute intensive, and therefore, often fail to generate

The challenge of maintaining confidentiality of stored data in cloud is of utmost importance to realize the potential of cloud computing as an emerging storage solution service. Storing data in encrypted form may solve the problem, but exposes data to an adversary for each required computation. This repeated encryption decryption also diminishes the essence of cloud for storing encrypted database and

Because of severe network congestion experienced during peak hours in the urban area, dynamic time-dependent pricing has been proposed by some mobile operators to shift users’ data usage from peak hours to off-peak time slots. We look at the performance of time-dependent pricing on a large scale cellular network comprising ten thousand base stations. Our investigation reveals two important observations

Remote data access control is of crucial importance in public cloud. Based on its own inclinations, the data owner predefines the access policy. When the user satisfies the data owner's access policy, it has the right to access the data owner's remote data. In order to improve flexibility and efficiency of remote data access control, attribute-based encryption (for short, ABE) is used to realize the

The overwhelming amount of information continuously flowing through the Twitter environment makes topic derivation essential. It indeed plays a valuable role in a variety of Twitter-based applications, including content recommendations, news summarization, market analysis, etc. Topic derivation methods are typically based on semantic features of tweet contents. Because tweets are short by nature, such

The papers in this special section focus on blockchain-based computing services. Blockchain has become a hot research area in academia and industry. A blockchain is a continuously growing list of records of value-transferred transactions maintained by a peer-to-peer network through a distributed consensus mechanism. Blockchain technology has promising characteristics regarding decentralization, persistency

Powered by a number of smart devices distributed throughout the whole network, the Internet of Things (IoT) is supposed to provide services computing for massive data from devices. Fog computing, an extension of cloud-based IoT-oriented solutions, has emerged with requirements for distribution and decentralization. In this respect, the conjunction with Blockchain provides a natural solution for decentralization

Known as a distributed ledger, blockchain is becoming prevalent due to its decentralization, traceability and tamper resistance. Particularly, permissioned blockchain such as Hyperledger Fabric shows great application prospects as the infrastructure of IoT security, credit management, etc. Many cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, Oracle and IBM cloud currently provide blockchain as a service, in which

Process descriptions are used to create products and deliver services. To lead better processes and services, the first step is to learn a process model. Process discovery is such a technique which can automatically extract process models from event logs. Although various discovery techniques have been proposed, they focus on either constructing formal models which are very powerful but complex, or

Presents the introductory editorial for this issue of the publication.

Presents the 2019 subject/author index for this publication.