Component-ware Autonomic, Situation-aware Communications And Dynamically Adaptable Services

CASCADAS DIT-PRJ-05-090

Homepage http://netmob.unitn.it/cascadas/
Status NOT active project
DISI role Partner
Project type Research Project
Dimension International
Acquisition date 2006-01-01
Start date 2006-01-01
End date 2008-12-31

Project details

Project astract We are witnessing an age of computing ubiquity where our work and home environments are increasingly enveloped by computing and communication resources. However, exploiting such distributed resources to provide meaningful, useful, and usable communication services actually comes at high development and maintenance costs. In addition, while the full potential of such resources is far to be fully exploited, the services provided within them are not flexible and far to be fully satisfying to users.<br/><br/>CASCADAS is a three-year integrated project aimed at providing the technology and the mechanisms that can address these complex problems. The central objective is to identify, develop, and evaluate, a general-purpose abstraction and the associated tools for the development of autonomic and situation-aware communication services. The key idea is to identify and rely on a new model of distributed components (called ACEs, Autonomic Communication Elements), able to autonomously self-organize with each other towards the provisioning of specific user communication services, and able to self-adapt such provisioning to social and network contexts. These features are likely to dramatically reduce the costs associated to the development and configuration of complex communication services, to leverage the exploitation of distributed computing and communication resources, and to make services more usable and more fitted to user needs. <br/><br/>From the scientific viewpoint, CASCADAS will be inspired by four key scientific principles that should characterize any complex network systems: situation-awareness, semantic self-organization, self-similarity, and autonomic component-ware. From the technological viewpoint, CASCADAS will approach the problem by conceiving ACEs as sorts of application-level overlay networks of service components, supported in the execution by ACE-based middle-level tools able to enforce in an autonomic way features such as security, self-supervision, self-survivability, knowledge-based self-adaptation. <br/><br/>The most important result of the project will be an Open Source toolkit with a set of well-integrated abstractions, algorithms, tools, and application demonstrations. <br/><br/>CASCADAS is highly relevant to the two main objectives of this call: it precisely aims at defining a self-organising communication network concept yet at higher-levels than the networking ones); and it will also study how strategic needs impact on future communication paradigms. lso, CASCADAS is proactive in seeking to carry out research encompassing security, resilience, and the interaction with new paradigms on society, which are all key focuses of the call.<br/>
Keywords autonomic communication, Autonomic Communication Element
Fundings 4948560 €
Partners
  • Telecom Italia S.p.A., Telecom Italia Lab
  • British Telecommunications plc
  • Budapest University of Technology and Economics
  • Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication System
  • Imperial Collage London, Dept of electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Institut EURECOM
  • Politecnico di Milano-Dipartimento di Ingegneria Gestionale
  • National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
  • Universitat Kassel
  • Universite Libre de Bruxelles
  • Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia-Dip. di Scienze e MEtodi dell'Ingegneria
  • Universita degli Studi di Trento-Dipartimento di Informatica e Telecomunicazioni
  • Univerity of Ulster, Nikel, Faculty of Engineering
  • Telecom Italia S.p.A.
  • Imperial Collage London
  • Univerity of Ulster

DISI Sub-project details

Project astract UNITN brings to the project a notable experience in security and trust, which will put to service of WP4 (Security, Survivability and Self-Preservation in Autonomic Communication Systems), for which UNITN will assume the lead. Experiences in complex web-based systems will be of support to WP6 (Applications Areas).<br/><br/>WP4 examines the security and self-preservation problems resulting from the new service-centric paradigm being proposed by CASCADAS. We lay out an initial security architecture based on off-the-shelf technologies available at this time such as public key cryptography, certificate authorities and digital signatures. We then extend this architecture by taking into consideration the challenges provided by the distributed nature of the CASCADAS network.<br/><br/>Furthermore, we propose an interactive trust negotiation model for establishing trust relationships and managing access rights in an open and dynamic autonomic communications system. To ensure that the system continues to function as desired after node entry, we will use digital reputation methods. These schemes will allow us to monitor the behaviour of nodes already in the network and achieve better self-preservation for the network as a whole. <br/>Reputation mechanisms will allow us not only to monitor faulty nodes, but also malicious nodes that behave in an adversarial fashion.<br/>
Keywords security, survivability, autonomic communication system
Fundings 361406 €
Manager Roberto Battiti