Journal of Network and Computer Applications 34 (2011) 10331034

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Network and Computer Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jnca

Editorial

Advanced topics in cloud computing

Cloud computing is proving itself as the next wave of technology infrastructure. The goal of cloud computing is to share resources among the cloud service consumers, cloud partners, and cloud vendors in the cloud value chain. Cloud computing helps IT cut infrastructure costs while adding new features and services to grow core businesses. Cloud computing makes data highly available and a user can simply access a chosen cloud with any Internet accessible device. IT-related capabilities are provided as services, accessible without requiring detailed knowledge of the underlying technology. Therefore, many mature technologies are used as components in cloud computing, but still there are many unresolved and open problems. The Call for Papers attracted 32 submissions worldwide. After a rigorous review process, 9 papers have been selected for publication in this special issue. An outline of the papers follows. In the rst paper, Optimization of Sub-query Processing in Distributed Data Integration Systems, Chen et al., consider Data Integration System in Cloud/Grid applications. In their proposed method, DIS uses a data ow style query execution model. Each query plan is mapped to a group of engines, each of which is a program corresponding to a particular operator. As a result, overall communication overhead can be reduced. Experimental results show that, when DIS runs a group of parameterized queries, the proposed algorithm can reduce the average query completion time by 32 In the second paper, Verifying Mediated Service Interactions Considering Expected Behaviors, Zhou et al. propose a technique to verify whether or not, as well as under which conditions, an expected interaction is adaptable. Therefore, a requestor can select a suitable providing service from functionally equivalent candidates according to her requirements. The technique proposed in this paper complements the effort of adapter synthesization for achieving an expected interaction. In the third paper, Ripple: a publish/subscribe service for multidata item updates propagation in the cloud, Zhu et al. address the problem of how to provide a convenient functionality that applies updates to a large number of data items. To effectively utilizing computing resources of all nodes in a cloud, they devise a publish/subscribe service called Ripple. Extensive experiments based upon data collected from real Web applications demonstrate that Ripple satisfying the service requirement has good scalability and performs well even under conditions of data redistribution and node membership dynamicity. The service maintenance cost does not cause over stress on the underlying system. In the fourth paper, Efcient Dynamic Task Scheduling in Virtualized Data Centers with Fuzzy Prediction, Kong et al. propose an efcient dynamic task scheduling scheme for
1084-8045/$ - see front matter & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2010.07.012

virtualized data centers. By considering the availability and responsiveness performance, the general model of the task scheduling for virtual data centers is built and formulated as a two-objective optimization. A graceful fuzzy prediction method is given to model the uncertain workload and the vague availability of virtualized server nodes, by using the type-I and type-II fuzzy logic systems. An on-line dynamic task scheduling algorithm named SALAF is proposed and evaluated. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the total availability of the virtualized data center while providing good responsiveness performance. In the fth paper, SHARC: A Scalable 3D Graphics Virtual Appliance Delivery Framework in Cloud, Shi et al. present SHARC, a solution for enabling scalable support of real-time 3D virtual appliances in a cloud computing environment. The solution uses a scalable pipelined processing infrastructure which consists of three processing networks according to the principle of divisionof-labor, a virtualization server network for running 3D virtual appliances, a graphics rendering network for processing graphics rendering workload with load balancing, and a media streaming network for transcoding rendered frames into H.264/MPEG-4 media streams and streaming the media streams to a cloud user. In the sixth paper, Optimizing the Live Migration of Virtual Machine by CPU Scheduling, Jin et al. design an optimization scheme for live migration, under which according to precopy speed, the VCPU working frequency may be reduced so that at a certain phase of the precopy the remained dirty memory can reach a desired small amount. The method improves migration liveness at the cost of application performance, and works for those applications for which interruption causes much more serious problems than quality deterioration. Comparing to the original live migration, the experiments show that the optimized scheme can reduce up to 88. In the seventh paper, Cloud Security Defence to Protect Cloud Computing against HTTP-DoS and XML-DoS Attacks, Chonka et al. present a solution to traceback through their Cloud TraceBack (CTB) to nd the source of the HTTP and XML attacks, and introduce the use of a back propagation neutral network, called Cloud Protector, which was trained to detect and lter such attack trafc. The results show that most of the attack messages can be detected and ltered, and the source of the attack can be identied within a short period of time. In the eighth paper, Layered Video Multicast with a P2P Cooperation Approach, Shen et al. propose to use layered video and a P2P approach to improve video multicast service. In their solution, a video is encoded into multiple layers and broadcast to the multicast group users. Then users form a P2P network to recover the loss of multicast video packets, which will improve

1034

Editorial / Journal of Network and Computer Applications 34 (2011) 10331034

the overall received video quality. Furthermore, the proposed solution can provide incentives for users to help each other. In the last paper, Secure Virtualization for Cloud Computing, Pietro et al. show how virtualization can increase the security of cloud computing, by protecting both the integrity of guest virtual machines and the cloud infrastructure components. They propose the Advanced Cloud Protection System (ACPS) architecture. ACPS can be deployed on several cloud solutions and can effectively monitor the integrity of guest and infrastructure components while remaining fully transparent to virtual machines and to cloud users. ACPS can locally react to security breaches as well as notify a further security management layer of such events. A prototype test results show that the proposed architecture is resilient against attacks and that the introduced overhead is small when compared to the provided features.

his diligent support that this issue has come to fruition. This work is supported in part by NSFC under Grant no. 60973117, and also in part by NSFC under Grant no. 60903154.

Keqiu Li School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, China E-mail address: keqiu@dlut.edu.cn

Laurence T. Yang Department of Computer Science, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the Journal of Network and Computer Applications Editor-in-Chief for his effort and time. It is because of

Xuemin Lin School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Australia