- Dynamic and Robust Tree Overlays
- Hierarchical structures support a wide range of network management
applications. However, trees suffer from the effect of failures, as a
node disconnection results in the disconnection of a branch from the
main body of the tree. Minimizing the effect of failures means
decreasing the number of nodes in the disconnected branch. This can be
achieved by building reliability-driven trees in which more reliable
nodes are placed closer to the root leaving the unreliable ones
underneath. Moreover, in the case of failures, the system must be
able to react and reconnect the disconnected nodes in the tree on the
fly (dynamically).
- Research proposal:
This project focuses on the dynamic building and maintenance of tree
overlays. The candidate must be able to explore the feasibility of
existing mechanisms and potentially propose and implement other
effective ones. The evaluation of the system will be based on
simulations, thus good programming skills are required.
- Smart Sockets for AgentScape
- Smart Sockets are designed to reduce the problems communicating through firewalls. Adding Smart Socket support
to AgentScape will ease the configuration issues when setting up an AgentScape location and allow easier use when
attempting to use for machines located behind more restrictive firewalls. Smart Sockets are also being developed in
the IBIS project in the VU. The SmartSockets communication library lifts this burden by automatically discovering
the connectivity problems and solving them with as little support from the user as possible.
- Research project:
Implement a robust implementation of Smart Sockets in AgentScape. This implementation should provide a secure means to communicate
between AgentScape locations without requiring extensive configuration.
- AgentScape Mobile
- Mobile devices are traditionally unable to perform complex tasks or execute complex applications.
Recently, with the advent of such devices as Apple's iPhone, Google's Android technology and
the widespread adoption of Windows mobile, the abilty to execute complex applications is more readily available.
- Research project:
Investigate and develop an implementation of AgentScape for mobile devices. Initially it is proposed to develop a
version of AgentScape for a simulator, but the goal is to have a running version on existing mobile hardware.
- Security for AgentScape
- Securing hosts from malicious agents entails monitoring every action that
the agent attempts on the host. Whenever an agent
makes a call to the middleware API, it is first mediated upon by a
security manager. The security manager checks the system policy to determine
if an action, such as migration and resource access, should be allowed or denied.
For example, a host could decide that it is not willing to allow an agent to
migrate anywhere except directly back to the owner's host, or, perhaps, to another
host that has been properly authenticated to the current host.
- Research project:
The goal of this project is to implement a robust security manager in AgentScape.
This security manager should monitor all the security relevant actions that Agents
perform on a secured host.
- Support Service Level Agreements in AgentScape
- A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is an electronic contract between a
service user and a provider, and specifies the service to be
provided, Quality of Service (QoS) properties that must be
maintained by a provider during service provision (generally defined
as a set of Service Level Objectives (SLOs)), and a set of penalty
clauses specifying what happens when service providers fail to
deliver the QoS agreed. Although significant work exists on how
SLOs may be specified and monitored, not much work has focused on
actually identifying how SLOs may be impacted by the choice of
specific penalty clauses. A trusted mediator may be used to resolve
conflicts between the parties involved.
- Research Proposal:
The objectives of this work is to extend the AgentScape environment with an
extension of WS-Agreement to support monitoring of violations and
to enforce penalty clauses based on this monitoring of SLAs.
- Support multiple and new languages for AgentScape agents
- AgentScape currently supports Java and C agents. Support for
Python agents is underway. In future, other languages can be
supported, such as, lisp, ruby or C#. Determining the consequences
of multiple binary agents and managing multiple programming
languages form the main research questions in this project
- Research project:
Develop support for agents written in a new language and analyze the consequences thereof
- BEEP AgentScape RPC
- BEEP is a framework for building application protocols. It's not a replacement
for any existing protocol. Instead, it's kind of a "best hits" album of the
tricks used by experienced application protocol designers since the early 80's.
- AgentScape RPC is a remote procedure call protocol used for middleware service and
middleware kernel IPC.
- Current AgentScape RPC is implemented using XML-RPC or SunRPC, but both implementations
have drawbacks, e.g., performance penalty for XML-RPC and lack of multithreading in open
source SunRPC implementations.
- Research project:
Develop an efficient and multithreaded RPC library for AgentScape using the BEEP
framework.
- AgentScape FIPA Compliancy
- Extend the AgentScape platform with FIPA specifications for
interoperability with other platforms, e.g. JADE or SeMoA. FIPA
specifications represent a collection of standards which are
intended to promote the interoperation of heterogeneous agents and
the services that they can represent.
For now, this project will focus on implementing (part of) the
Agent Communication Language
(ACL). Notice that a common language
is not enough for agents to understand each other. Agents should
also share an ontology that describes an agent's capabilities so that
it can interact with the world.
- Research project:
Extend the AgentScape platform with FIPA specification for interoperability with other platforms
- Autonomic AgentScape Deployment on Distributed Networks
- AgentScape should support automatic installation. Suppose that an agent could
migrate to a host that has not yet installed AgentScape? An agent
could first transfer all the necessary components of the
AgentScape environment to the remote host and start the
environment and finally migrate to it. Such a scheme would allow for
easy and rapid deployment of AgentScape in a network.
- Research project:
Develop a rapid and user-friendly deployment program for AgentScape
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