Advisor(s)

Elias S. Manolakos

Contributor(s)

Dimitris Kalofonos, David R. Kaeli

Date of Award

2011

Date Accepted

12-2011

Degree Grantor

Northeastern University

Degree Level

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department or Academic Unit

College of Engineering. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Keywords

computer engineering, peer-to-peer service-oriented architectures, service composition middleware, service discovery and the cloud, web services on mobile devices

Subject Categories

Peer-to-peer architecture (Computer networks), Service-oriented architecture (Computer science), Middleware

Disciplines

Computer and Systems Architecture | Digital Communications and Networking

Abstract

Digital personal devices, such as Personal Computers and mobile phones, have become pervasive in our times. We more and more depend on their services for our daily tasks from sharing information to managing activities among groups of friends, family, or business peers. With the recent advances in "smart phone" hardware and software technologies it is also now possible to access social networking sites or share content through the Cloud from anywhere at anytime. Moreover, web servers can now be deployed on mobile devices and provide software services to remote users. These new capabilities have far reaching implications since they allow mobile devices to execute services and participate as "equal citizens" in service compositions that can offer enhanced user experience and functionality not only to their owners but also to whole groups (communities) of collaborating mobile peers. Personalized web servers also have the advantage of preserving user content privacy by keeping user data only local on private devices and offering it only to trusted peers.

We have designed, implemented and validated a novel middleware, called Peer-to-Peer Service Oriented Architecture (p2pSOA) which can run on both personal computers and mobile phones and enable the sharing, distributed discovery and execution of composite services among trusted peers. Specifically, p2pSOA offers naming and P2P addressing of private services in devices which reside in NATed networks directly i.e. without the need for using any service-level proxies or intermediaries. Users of PCs and mobile phones are authenticated into trusted peer groups (communities) that may collaborate by volunteering their services for service composition. The p2pSOA middleware supports the true Peer-to-Peer execution of distributed SOA applications which implement use scenarios combining private services running on such devices with services executing in the public open Web. By keeping the user's sensitive content on personal devices within the trusted group, it becomes possible using p2pSOA middleware to preserve user privacy.

P2pSOA also enables the seamless integration of the P2P service model with Cloud service provision, thus enabling service providers to offer services not only to individual users but also to communities of trusted peer. Furthermore, this is possible without the need for service providers to adopt an Application Programming Interface (API) specific to p2pSOA. Composite Service descriptions (applications) remain agnostic of the underlying p2pSOA middleware which handles all the service "plumbing" tasks.

We have implemented and tested a working p2pSOA prototype which adopts the Web Services execution model and utilizes scripting on mobile devices to allow the automatic generation of client stubs at runtime without the need for code compilation. P2pSOA supports REST-style services hosted on mobile devices and both SOAP-based and REST-style services on personal computers, regardless of their location, and it combines them with Internet services into composite services. The prototype utilizes Oracle's JXTA as a secure P2P overlay network without modifying the software in any way. It achieves this by using adapters that can be substituted to create different p2pSOA middleware instances. Different types of transport and distributed service layers can be accommodated making p2pSOA agnostic to their runtime.

Finally we demonstrate and evaluate the capabilities of the middleware through several interesting collaborative computing use case scenarios.

Document Type

Dissertation

Rights Information

Copyright 2011

Rights Holder

Demetris Georgios Galatopoullos


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