Open Service Gateway Initiative Research Articles

Design for Spatiotemporal Information Cloud Platform of Smart City Based on OSGi

In 2009, IBM put forward the development policy of building “smart city” before building “smart earth”. In response to this policy, the National Bureau of Surveying and Mapping issued “The Notification on the Development of Smart City Spatiotemporal Information Cloud Platform”, which formally took the construction spatiotemporal information cloud platform of smart city as a pilot project. In this paper, the OSGi (Open Service Gateway Initiative) technology is used as the framework. Developing component on demand is realized by the SOA architecture and OSGi technology, which improves the efficiency of developing software, shortens the cycle of developing software and saves labor costs. Resource access is achieved through RESTful services, and distributed coordination services are implemented through Zookeeper.

Cyber-physical manufacturing systems: An architecture for sensor integration, production line simulation and cloud services

The pillars of Industry 4.0 require the integration of a modern smart factory, data storage in the Cloud, access to the Cloud for data analytics, and information sharing at the software level for simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) capabilities. The resulting cyber-physical system (CPS) is often termed the cyber-physical manufacturing system, and it has become crucial to cope with this increased system complexity and to attain the desired performances. However, since a great number of old production systems are based on monolithic architectures with limited external communication ports and reduced local computational capabilities, it is difficult to ensure such production lines are compliant with the Industry 4.0 pillars. A wireless sensor network is one solution for the smart connection of a production line to a CPS elaborating data through cloud computing. The scope of this research work lies in developing a modular software architecture based on the open service gateway initiative framework, which is able to seamlessly integrate both hardware and software wireless sensors, send data into the Cloud for further data analysis and enable both HIL and cloud computing capabilities. The CPS architecture was initially tested using HIL tools before it was deployed within a real manufacturing line for data collection and analysis over a period of two months.

Implementing a system for the real-time risk assessment of patients considered for intensive care

BackgroundDelay in identifying deterioration in hospitalised patients is associated with delayed admission to an intensive care unit (ICU) and poor outcomes. For the HAVEN project (HICF ref.: HICF-R9–524), we have developed a mathematical model that identifies deterioration in hospitalised patients in real time and facilitates the intervention of an ICU outreach team. This paper describes the system that has been designed to implement the model. We have used innovative technologies such as Portable Format for Analytics (PFA) and Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) to define the predictive statistical model and implement the system respectively for greater configurability, reliability, and availability.ResultsThe HAVEN system has been deployed as part of a research project in the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. The system has so far processed > 164,000 vital signs observations and > 68,000 laboratory results for > 12,500 patients and the algorithm generated score is being evaluated to review patients who are under consideration for transfer to ICU. No clinical decisions are being made based on output from the system. The HAVEN score has been computed using a PFA model for all these patients. The intent is that this score will be displayed on a graphical user interface for clinician review and response.ConclusionsThe system uses a configurable PFA model to compute the HAVEN score which makes the system easily upgradable in terms of enhancing systems’ predictive capability. Further system enhancements are planned to handle new data sources and additional management screens.

Business Platform Model for Smart Home for Technology Planning Task Force

In this study we used an architectural research method based on the Open Services Gateway Initiative and Mobile Agent Technology, which is a model for analyzing smart home business platforms for technology governance planning tasks that include the recommended decision flow process and as recommendations from established business models and expanded to include a series of additional parameters needed to produce a business platform so that it can analyze the business model offered by the developer and detailed analysis of proposed governance in the service sector. And finally this research produces a Framework that presents a technology governance model for updating strategic plans and governance models for technology and frameworks designed to meet the needs of the elderly population and as recommendations for smart home management that aim to measurably improve the welfare of people in Indonesia. The proposed model and strategy recognizes the diversity of the community with existing providers of household tools and developers to optimize resources to achieve the goals and objectives of elderly smart home residents

An IP Multimedia Subsystem Services Proxy Gateway Based on a JAVA Dynamic Module System

By virtue of the rapid development of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT), people have owned various devices connected to the Internet to enjoy various emerging application services, such as multimedia related services. IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is the integration platform for multimedia application services and provides a rich feature set of converged services in the Next Generation Network (NGN). IMS services are accessed by a user anytime and anywhere through his/her personal self IMS device, e.g., mobile device, equipped with a Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM) card. People have owned various devices connected to the Internet at homes or offices. However, some devices can not access IMS services without USIM cards embedded, which is called non-IMS devices. People wish that more devices without USIM cards embedded should be connected to the Internet on which IMS services are accessed in addition to the mobile devices equipped with USIM cards. Accordingly, we propose an Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi)-based IMS service gateway, in which OSGi technology is the dynamic module system for JAVA. The proposed gateway is authorized by a personal self IMS device such that IMS services are accessed by non-IMS devices, in this paper. Moreover, these non-IMS devices rely on different networks to access technologies and network protocols and the IMS service gateway proposed here adopts the OSGi framework for no problem of integration.

Automatic generation of predictive monitors from scenario-based specifications

ContextUnpredictability and uncertainty about future evolutions of both the system and its environment may easily compromise the behavior of the system. The subsequent software failures can have serious consequences. When dealing with open environments, run-time monitoring is one of the most promising techniques to detect software failures. Several monitoring approaches have been proposed in the last years; however, they suffer from two main limitations. First, they provide limited information to be exploited at run-time for early detecting and managing situations that most probably will lead to failures. Second, they mainly rely on logic-based specifications, whose intrinsic complexity may hamper the use of these monitoring approaches in industrial contexts. ObjectiveIn order to address these two limitations, this paper proposes a novel approach, called PREDIMO (PREDIctive MOnitoring). The approach starts from scenario-based specifications, automatically generates predictive monitors called MAs (Multi-valued Automata), which take into account the actual status and also the possible evolution of both system and environment in the near future, and enables the definition of precise strategies to prevent failures. More specifically, the generated monitors evaluate the specified properties and return one of the seven different values representing the degree of controllability of the system and the distance of the potential incoming failure. The translation from scenario-based specifications to MAs preserves the semantics of the starting specification. MethodWe use the design and creation research methodology to design an innovative approach that fills highlighted gaps of state-of-the-art approaches. The validation of the approach is performed through a large experimentation with OSGi (Open Service Gateway Initiative) applications. ResultsWe present a novel language to specify the properties to be monitored. Then, we present a novel approach to automatically generate predictive monitors from the specified properties. ConclusionThe overall approach is tool supported and a large experimentation demonstrates its feasibility and usability.

Systematic Security Checking on Open Service Gateway Initiative Bundles for Remote Healthcare System

Systematic Security Checking on Open Service Gateway Initiative Bundles for Remote Healthcare System

Lightweight Mashup Middleware for Coal Mine Safety Monitoring and Control Automation

Recently, the frequent coal mine safety accidents have caused serious casualties and huge economic losses. It is urgent for the global mining industry to increase operational efficiency and improve overall mining safety. This paper proposes a lightweight mashup middleware to achieve remote monitoring and control automation of underground physical sensor devices. First, the cluster tree based on ZigBee Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is deployed in an underground coal mine, and propose an Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi)-based uniform devices access framework. Then, propose a uniform message space and data distribution model, and also, a lightweight services mashup approach is implemented. With the help of visualization technology, the graphical user interface of different underground physical sensor devices could be created, which allows the sensors to combine with other resources easily. Besides, four types of coal mine safety monitoring and control automation scenarios are illustrated, and the performance has also been measured and analyzed. It has been proved that our lightweight mashup middleware can reduce the costs efficiently to create coal mine safety monitoring and control automation applications.

Blueprint Flow: A Declarative Service Composition Framework for Cloud Applications

Cloud applications provides users with services that can be accessed on demand through the Internet. Fertile service frameworks are considered one of the most critical ingredients for the envisaged benefits so as to further interactions among cloud computing resources and application components. Such foundations should lead to the proliferation of new innovative services and applications. The research community has been exploring the Open Service Gateway initiative’s (OSGi) potential as a top candidate for cloud application platforms. Although the current OSGi specification provides some level of support for dynamic service discovery, tracking, and composition, more should be done to be able to adequately address the need for diverse interaction patterns for cloud applications. This paper introduces a novel service framework built upon OSGi platforms that supports a directed-acyclic-graph style composition of constituent services. Given a declarative blueprint of service interconnections and interactions, the framework can find and assemble corresponding component services to form a real application. Our proposal can enable a realistic topology of service component interlinkings beyond linear chaining interactions as supported by the status quo. The design, implementation details, and validation results of our workflow-based service composition framework architecture are discussed in the paper.

Safe and efficient runtime testing framework applied in dynamic and distributed systems

This paper provides a standard-based and resource aware Runtime Testing Framework For Adaptable and Distributed Systems (RTF4ADS). Based on the runtime testing approach, RTF4ADS performs safely and efficiently tests on the final operational environment of such dynamic systems. Indeed, our proposal (1) looks for a minimal set of tests to re-execute written in a standardized notation, (2) assigns the involved test components in execution nodes while respecting resources and connectivity constraints and finally (3) performs distributed testing at runtime while it prevents test processes from interfering with business processes. Implementation details of the proposed research prototype are presented. To demonstrate the validity and the usefulness of RTF4ADS, a case study in the healthcare domain implemented using the Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) platform is illustrated. The experiments that we conducted show a reasonable overhead introduced by RTF4ADS. They also demonstrate the efficiency of this framework in testing dynamic and distributed systems while reducing side effects of this validation technique.

Introducing Triquetrum, A Possible Future for Kepler and Ptolemy II

Triquetrum is an open platform for managing and executing scientific workflows that is under development as an Eclipse project. Both Triquetrum and Kepler use Ptolemy II as their execution engine. Triquetrum presents opportunities and risks for the Kepler community. The opportunities include a possibly larger community for interaction and a path for Kepler to move from Kepler's one-off ant-based build environment towards a more common Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi)-based environment and a way to maintain a stable Ptolemy II core. The risks include the fact that Triquetrum is a fork of Ptolemy II that would result in package name changes and other possible changes. In addition, Triquetrum is licensed under the Eclipse Public License v1.0, which includes a patent clause that could conflict with the University of California patent clause. This paper describes these opportunities and risks.

ClusterViz: A Cytoscape APP for Cluster Analysis of Biological Network

Cluster analysis of biological networks is one of the most important approaches for identifying functional modules and predicting protein functions. Furthermore, visualization of clustering results is crucial to uncover the structure of biological networks. In this paper, ClusterViz, an APP of Cytoscape 3 for cluster analysis and visualization, has been developed. In order to reduce complexity and enable extendibility for ClusterViz, we designed the architecture of ClusterViz based on the framework of Open Services Gateway Initiative. According to the architecture, the implementation of ClusterViz is partitioned into three modules including interface of ClusterViz, clustering algorithms and visualization and export. ClusterViz fascinates the comparison of the results of different algorithms to do further related analysis. Three commonly used clustering algorithms, FAG-EC, EAGLE and MCODE, are included in the current version. Due to adopting the abstract interface of algorithms in module of the clustering algorithms, more clustering algorithms can be included for the future use. To illustrate usability of ClusterViz, we provided three examples with detailed steps from the important scientific articles, which show that our tool has helped several research teams do their research work on the mechanism of the biological networks.

Seamless integration of heterogeneous devices and access control in smart homes and its evaluation

ABSTRACTThe recent trend of ubiquitous access to embedded physical devices over the Internet as well as increasing penetration of wireless protocols such as ZigBee has raised attention to smart homes. These systems consist of sensors, devices and smart appliances that can be monitored and controlled remotely by human users and cloud services. However, the lack of a de facto communication standard for smart homes creates a barrier against the interoperability of devices from different vendors. We address this challenge by proposing a holistic and extensible software architecture that seamlessly integrates heterogeneous protocol- and vendor-specific devices and services, while making these services securely available over the Internet. Our architecture is developed on top of the Open Services Gateway initiative framework and incorporates a semantic model of a smart home system. As a result, we come closer to semantic interoperability – the ability to integrate new applications and drivers into the deployed system during runtime. Furthermore, we integrate a new access control model for specific smart home scenarios. As a proof of our concept, we demonstrate the seamless semantic discovery of home devices at runtime by integrating several protocols including X10, Insteon, ZigBee and Universal Plug-and-Play into a real test. Using smart phones and cloud services together with our home gateway implementation, we further demonstrate the ease of integration of new applications and drivers. We show the scalability of our solution by evaluating the execution time for different numbers of devices and configurations of the semantic device discovery.

RESTful M2M Gateway for Remote Wireless Monitoring for District Central Heating Networks

In recent years, the increased interest in energy conservation and environmental protection, combined with the development of modern communication and computer technology, has resulted in the replacement of distributed heating by central heating in urban areas. This paper proposes a Representational State Transfer (REST) Machine-to-Machine (M2M) gateway for wireless remote monitoring for a district central heating network. In particular, we focus on the resource-oriented RESTful M2M gateway architecture, and present an uniform devices abstraction approach based on Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi) technology, and implement the resource mapping mechanism between resource address mapping mechanism between RESTful resources and the physical sensor devices, and present the buffer queue combined with polling method to implement the data scheduling and Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee, and also give the RESTful M2M gateway open service Application Programming Interface (API) set. The performance has been measured and analyzed. Finally, the conclusions and future work are presented.

Research on Service Update Dynamically Based on OSGi Frame

It is a key problem for a 7*24 running system to update and maintain online. According to the feature of OSGi (Open Service Gateway Initiative) framework, current service dynamic update policies for OSGi framework are analyzed. In order to solve the problem of service mutual consistency and service state consistency during service update, the service dynamic update policy based on publish & subscribe model is presented. This policy is based on quiescent state theory to ensure mutual consistency when services are updated online. The process of the dynamic service update policy is described by Petri net. We realize the policy using Event Admin Service in the experiment with well-defined program model. The result shows that the policy is validate and feasibility.

An OSGi-based flexible and adaptive pervasive cloud infrastructure

There is a trend that different computing paradigms such as cloud computing, pervasive, and mobile computing are converging with each other. Due to this convergence, there arise unprecedented complexities, such as huge number of computing devices, flexibilities and adaptation of service infrastructure (infrastructure elasticity) for fitting dynamics of large smart city applications, expectations of powerful computing and storage capabilities on handhold devices, and so on. Therefore, a supporting infrastructure is needed, which can flexibly switch services at run time and can be used to enhance capabilities for small devices through component/service migrations. In this paper, we propose an elastic open service gateway initiative (OSGi)-based pervasive cloud (OSGi-PC) infrastructure which can make use of both the cloud computing capabilities and the component flexibilities from OSGi. OSGi-PC provides flexible management of component migrations between small devices themselves and powerful nodes in between, which is remaining a critical challenge for enabling mobile clouds. We have evaluated the OSGi-PC in terms of performance for adaptive service provision, and power consumption during service adaptation, performance and power consumption for component migrations in different scenarios, which show the usability of OSGi-PC.

A Smart Kitchen for Ambient Assisted Living

The kitchen environment is one of the scenarios in the home where users can benefit from Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications. Moreover, it is the place where old people suffer from most domestic injuries. This paper presents a novel design, implementation and assessment of a Smart Kitchen which provides Ambient Assisted Living services; a smart environment that increases elderly and disabled people's autonomy in their kitchen-related activities through context and user awareness, appropriate user interaction and artificial intelligence. It is based on a modular architecture which integrates a wide variety of home technology (household appliances, sensors, user interfaces, etc.) and associated communication standards and media (power line, radio frequency, infrared and cabled). Its software architecture is based on the Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi), which allows building a complex system composed of small modules, each one providing the specific functionalities required, and can be easily scaled to meet our needs. The system has been evaluated by a large number of real users (63) and carers (31) in two living labs in Spain and UK. Results show a large potential of system functionalities combined with good usability and physical, sensory and cognitive accessibility.

Smart Door: A Ubiquitous Collaboration System for Home Activities in the Smart Home

This paper describes a smart home system consisting of Smart Door Porch and a home portal. Smart Door Porch uses cameras, an RFID (radio-frequency identification) reader, and a touch panel for home security as well as the at-home awareness of each family member. The home portal uses Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) framework and Java EE as the middleware to provide services including home activity, home calendar, and home collaboration map. The home collaboration map, based on the Google map, shows the locations of family members on the map with the aid of the GPS-enabled mobile devices carried by them. With the mobile devices, the proposed system supports ubiquitous collaboration among family members. Experimental results based on scenario simulations confirm that the proposed system is able to provide better services for family members in home collaboration.

Itinerary-Based Mobile Agent as a Basis for Distributed OSGi Services

Recently, as more and more mobile devices embedded with intelligent software become part of our daily lives, Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) has gained increasing attention in the development of services for such devices. However, services residing in OSGi platforms are devised specifically for the platforms' local bundles. Although several works have enhanced OSGi with various communication mechanisms that enable remote service invocations, two crucial issues pertaining to mobile computing remain to be addressed: One is limited resources of mobile devices, and the other is unstable links experienced with mobile devices. To address these two issues, we propose an itinerary-based mobile agent approach with four major features: To implement mobile agents as OSGi bundles to deliver distributed OSGi services with lower resource consumption; to extend WSDL and WS-BPEL to help developers design mobile agent itineraries; to provide an opportunistic service matchmaking mechanism allowing mobile agents to adapt to context changes at runtime; and to devise asynchronous communication mechanism to enable reliable mobile agent transmissions among mobile devices with dynamic IP addresses and intermittent connection to the Internet. Through experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that both network traffic and turnaround time of our approach are better than those of client-server ones.

Comprehensive Vehicular Networking Platform for V2I and V2V Communications within the Walkie-Talkie Project

Communication architectures integrating vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications will be the key of success for the next generation of cars. Nevertheless, the integration of these communication partners in the same platform is a challenging issue because most of the literature is focused on individual parts, such as V2V routing protocols or specific safety services. The Walkie-Talkie project was proposed to fill this gap, focusing on the integration of V2V and V2I systems to equip vehicles with a set of intelligent services addressing safer, smarter, and sustainable driving. This paper describes the developed communications platform. The network design is based on IPv6 to support middleware and applications executed on both the vehicle and infrastructure sides. Whereas V2I is focused on the usage of IPv6 network mobility, V2V is provided by means of a hybrid solution based on intelligent delivery and delay tolerant networks. On top of the networking protocols, a service access middleware exploiting concepts from next generation networks is proposed, together with a proper on-board application management based on the open service gateway initiative. A prototype of the network and real evaluations are also presented as a proof of concept of our platform.