2016
Journal article
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Making puzzles green and useful for adaptive identity management in large-scale distributed systems
Cordeiro Wldc, Santos Fr, Barcelos Mp, Gaspary Lp, Kavalionak H, Guerrieri A, Montresor AVarious online systems offer a lightweight process for creating accounts (e.g., confirming an e-mail address), so that users can easily join them. With minimum effort, however, an attacker can subvert this process, obtain a multitude of fake accounts, and use them for malicious purposes. Puzzle-based solutions have been proposed to limit the spread of fake accounts, by establishing a price (in terms of computing resources) per identity requested. Although effective, they do not distinguish between requests coming from presumably legitimate users and potential attackers, and also lead to a significant waste of energy and computing power. In this paper, we build on adaptive puzzles and complement them with waiting time to introduce a green design for lightweight, long-term identity management; it balances the complexity of assigned puzzles based on the reputation of the origin (source) of identity requests, and reduces energy consumption caused by puzzle-solving. We also take advantage of lessons learned from massive distributed computing to come up with a design that makes puzzle-processing useful. Based on a set of experiments, we show that our solution provides significant energy savings and makes puzzle-solving a useful task, while not compromising effectiveness in limiting the spread of fake accounts.Source: COMPUTER NETWORKS (1999), vol. 95, pp. 97-114
DOI: 10.1016/j.comnet.2015.12.005Metrics:
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Computer Networks
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2016
Conference article
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NATCloud: Cloud-assisted NAT-traversal service
Kavalionak H, Payberah Ah, Dowling J, Montresor AAlthough over the last decade large efforts have been done to design efficient peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols, very few of them have taken into account the problem of firewalls and network address translators (NAT). Most of the existing P2P systems do not work properly when a high percentage of nodes are behind NAT. While a few P2P systems tackled the NAT problem, all of them employ third party nodes to establish a connection towards nodes behind NAT, and these may become bottlenecks, menacing the health of the entire system. A possible solution to this problem is to rent ex- tra resources from the cloud. This paper presents NATCLOUD, a cloud-assisted NAT-traversal service, where rented cloud resources are added on demand to the overlay, as third party nodes, to help other nodes to make connections to nodes behind NAT. We show the feasibility of integrating our approach with existing gossip-based peer sampling services and evaluate our solution by simulations, conducting extensive experiments under different network conditions.DOI: 10.1145/2851613.2851640Metrics:
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dl.acm.org
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2021
Other
Open Access
ACCORDION D3.1 - Edge infrastructure pool framework report (I)
Psomakelis E, Blasi L, Vailati A, Kavalionak H, Korontanis I, Huici F, Dazzi PThis deliverable provides the first report summarizing the scientific advancements achieved during the project, by the WP3 tasks. The achievements, risks and challenges are presented both at a high level, presenting the outcome of the WP3 tasks (called ACCORDION Minicloud VIM) as a unified component, and at a lower level, presenting the components that comprise the ACCORDION Minicloud VIM. For each component we can clearly identify the progress through the first year of the project, the challenges and problems encountered and the plans for the second year of the project.Project(s): ACCORDION 
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2021
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ACCORDION D3.2 - Edge infrastructure pool framework implementation (I)
Korontanis I, Psomakelis V, Kavalionak H, Di Girolamo M, Vailati A, Huici F, Dazzi PThis document is the accompanying report documenting the software components that are released as part of ACCORDION Deliverable D3.2 and explains how to install and use them. The report includes the description of the first implementation provided by ACCORDION for the Edge infrastructure pool framework (or Edge minicloud), developed by the tasks inside WP3. The implemented minicloud model can include only resources located in a single site and typically owned by a single provider. The developed framework, representing one of the key innovations realized by ACCORDION, puts together the different components that altogether implement the functionalities requested to deploy and operate federated miniclouds inside the ACCORDION environment. It allows to locate and assign edge resources to the client applications of ACCORDION, ensuring they are duly registered, tracked, monitored and that the system is able to react whenever needed to ensure the quality of service to users of client applications. The framework implements the architectural guidelines and requirements set by WP2, will be further integrated with the higher (orchestration) layer components developed by WP4 and, once integrated, will run the Pilot use case applications proposed by WP6.Project(s): ACCORDION 
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2013
Journal article
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Integrating peer-to-peer and cloud computing for massively multiuser online games
Kavalionak H, Carlini E, Ricci L, Montresor A, Coppola MCloud computing has recently become an attractive solution for massively multiplayer online games, also known as MMOGs, as it lifts operators from the burden of buying and maintaining large amount of computational, storage and communication resources, while offering the illusion of infinite scalability. Yet, cloud resources do not come for free: a careful orchestration is needed to minimize the economical cost. This paper proposes a novel architecture for MMOGs that combines an elastic cloud infrastructure with user-provided resources, to boost both the scalability and the economical sustainability provided by cloud computing. Our system dynamically reconfigures the platform while managing the trade-off between economical cost and quality of service, exploiting user-provided resources whenever possible. Simulation results show that a negligible reduction in the quality of service can reduce the cost of the platform up to 60% percent.Source: PEER-TO-PEER NETWORKING AND APPLICATIONS
DOI: 10.1007/s12083-013-0232-4Metrics:
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Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications
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2018
Conference article
Open Access
Toward Decentralised Consensus and Offloading for Area Coverage in a Fleet of Drones
Kavalionak H., Carlini E., CassarĂ P., Meghini C.A precise and dynamic visual coverage of a given area is an essential task in many smart contexts, ranging from civil communities to military applications. Due to the last years advancement in hardware miniaturization and efficiency, area coverage is often performed with a combination of static and moving devices, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (drones). Drones are useful to cope with the highly unpredictability and dynamicity of environments, but require specific and efficient solutions toward and efficient area coverage. In this paper we proposes an initial work toward a drone-based approach for the task of area coverage. In particular, we focus our analysis on the following points: (i) decentralized consensus for movement planning, and (ii) the integration of cloud computing infrastructures and technologies for computation offloading, both for image analysis and movement planning.Source: LECTURE NOTES OF THE INSTITUTE FOR COMPUTER SCIENCES, SOCIAL INFORMATICS AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS ENGINEERING, vol. 231, pp. 96-105. Oxford, United Kingdom, 14-15/09/2017
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-76571-6_10Metrics:
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2020
Other
Open Access
ACCORDION - D2.2 State of the art report (I)
Korontanis I, Carlini E, Kavalionak H, Dazzi P, Psomakelis V, Blasi L, Nadir Z, Violos J, Toro A, Russo M, Fabregas Em, Vasios G, Tserpes K, Zadtootaghaj S, Lipa B, Pateraki M, Di Girolamo MThe present document is the result of the collaborative effort of all ACCORDION partners participating to Task 2.2. The document offers a review of the state of the art for a series of topics strictly related to the work performed in the ACCORDION project. There is actually a strict correlation between the topics analyzed in this document and the Tasks that are part of the three research Work Packages of ACCORDION (WP3, WP4, and WP5).
The main part of this document is section 2, in which all the state of the art analysis results have been reported. Section 2 has a subsection for each of the topics researched in the project, which includes: a description of the objectives, a list of outcomes expected from the research work, and an analysis of the state of the art.
Section 2.1 (Resource monitoring & characterization) reports on monitoring, characterization and classification of Edge resources, identifying Prometheus, TOSCA and the automatic creation of taxonomies, respectively, as the best solutions for each of the three fields.
Section 2.2 (Resource indexing & discovery) focuses on discussing solutions and data structures for organizing data in Resource Discovery Services.
Section 2.3 (Edge storage, availability, reliability and performance) presents the advantages and disadvantages of both block and object storage, and then discusses some solutions, identifying OpenStack and MinIO as the most promising ones, even if not completely suitable. Some open research issues are also summarized.
Section 2.4 (Pooling Edge resources), after listing some orchestration challenges typical of Edge computing and the techniques to cope with them, reports on several solutions to be considered as possible baselines for the ACCORDION Minicloud.
Section 2.5 (??-based network orchestration) first lists the main machine learning techniques, then explores both Federated Learning techniques and further evolutions such as Meta-Learning Framework and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning.
Section 2.6 (Resilience policies & mechanisms over heterogeneous edge resources) starts by discriminating between reactive and proactive protection strategies and describing some of them. Then other Fault Tolerance approaches are explored both reported in the literature and adopted in common distributed computing frameworks (Openstack, Cloudstack, Kubernetes, Openshift, and Mesos). Finally techniques for movement behaviour and resource utilization prediction are analysed, with a particular focus on the the LSTM model for Neural Networks. The conclusion is that the most promising solution to efficiently adapt the deep learning topologies for the fault tolerance needs is the hyper parameter optimization approach.
Section 2.7 (Techniques for secure Edge application development & deployment) offers an analysis of the most common types of security attacks (Distributed Denial-of-Service, Malware Injection, and Authentication-based attacks) and their related countermeasures, along with some threat modelling methods, while DevSecOps methods and tools are also described.
Section 2.8 (Privacy preserving mechanisms) starts by analysing Machine Learning techniques with a focus on privacy preserving ones, and then lists a number of works analysing how cookie synchronization techniques adopted for web advertising can expose users to privacy leaks.
Section 2.9 (Application model for automatic deployment / migration of components) looks for application description models suitable for ACCORDION, i.e. with a machine-processable syntax, able to represent resource capacity requirements, containerization, and recovery policies. Three available solutions, TOSCA, Juju charms and CAMP, are compared along with the projects that are using them. Furthermore, tools supporting the three above solutions are described, and works researching the interoperability among the solutions are also analysed.
Section 2.10 (Modelling and assessing QoE for NextGen applications) reports on different types of objective models that can be used to estimate the Quality of Experience (QoE) perceived by users of multimedia applications, and about the latest ITU-T Recommendations on QoE models and methodologies that can be applied to Next Generation Applications. For the ACCORDION project it has been decided to follow the standardized approach to build models for QoE assessment of ACCORDION applications.
Section 2.11 (DevOps tools to automate Edge applications' deployment) sets the context and reports the starting points for the evaluation of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment tools. The identified state-of-the art solutions are Jenkins for the CI/CD pipeline and Kubernetes as the runtime deployment environment.
Section 2.12 (Collaborative VR), starting from the general requirements for Virtual Reality applications, reports considerations about the still limited power of the available HMDs and discusses the trade-offs conditioning the possibility to offload computation from the end devices to the Edge.
Finally Section 2.13 (Resource federation models) describes the main features of the federation model proposed by the H2020 5GeX project and lists the additional constraints and issues raised by an Edge providers' federation, which have to be further investigated.
Not all project's research Tasks have a related section in this document about their main topics, yet. Monitoring the State of the Art is an ongoing activity in ACCORDION, and the next version of this document foreseen in M22 will improve the State of the Art analysis by adding further details, covering more topics and reporting on possible new approaches that appeared in the meantime.Project(s): ACCORDION 
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2020
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Open Access
ACCORDION D2.3 - Architecture design (I)
Tserpes K, Kousiouris G, Xydis S, Korodanis I, Kafatari T, Dazzi P, Carlini E, Kavalionak H, Ferrucci L, Huici F, Fabregas Em, Kourtellis N, Diego Af, Violos I, Psomakelis E, Kamiski M, Lipa B, Loven T, Gonzalez Rozad Y, Toro A, Russo M, Blasi L, Vailati A, Di Girolamo M, Zinelaabidine N, Ledwo Z, Zadtootaghaj S, Pateraki M, Fotis S, Kallipolitis L, Vantolas SThis deliverable provides an account of the work done for the specification of the ACCORDION ecosystem architecture, which is mainly comprised of two artefacts: the infrastructure to support the cloud-edge continuum and the platform to manage the resources and the applications hosted in that infrastructure. The main outcomes of the work described in this deliverable are: a) the definition of components that comprise the architecture as well as their interactions, and; b) the assignment of the implementation of those components to specific project Tasks and partners.
The deliverable describes the process for reaching to those outcomes, starting with the delineation of the scope of the described artefacts and working down to their specifics. The main approach used is the analysis of the platform use case scenarios. In practice, we analyze the scenarios and extract the required functionality. Then we cluster and map this functionality to components. Finally, we schematically present the interactions of those components using block and sequence diagrams. These outcomes are then validated against the use case requirements, especially those linked to the applications operation itself. This is meant to provide a proof-of-concept that the ACCORDION architecture is able to support the ACCORDION applications.Project(s): ACCORDION 
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2023
Conference article
Open Access
A proposal for a continuum-aware programming model: from workflows to services autonomously interacting in the compute continuum
Aldinucci M, Birke R, Brogi A, Carlini E, Coppola M, Danelutto M, Dazzi P, Ferrucci L, Forti S, Kavalionak H, Mencagli G, Mordacchini M, Pasin M, Paganelli F, Torquati MThis paper proposes a continuum-aware programming model enabling the execution of application workflows across the compute continuum: cloud, fog and edge resources. It simplifies the management of heterogeneous nodes while alleviating the burden of programmers and unleashing innovation. This model optimizes the continuum through advanced development experiences by transforming workflows into autonomous service collaborations. It reduces complexity in positioning/interconnecting services across the continuum. A metamodel introduces high-level workflow descriptions as service networks with defined contracts and quality of service, thus enabling the deployment/management of workflows as first-class entities. It also provides automation based on policies, monitoring and heuristics. Tailored mechanisms orchestrate/manage services across the continuum, optimizing performance, cost, data protection and sustainability while managing risks. This model facilitates incremental development with visibility of design impacts and seamless evolution of applications and infrastructures. In this work, we explore this new computing paradigm showing how it can trigger the development of a new generation of tools to support the compute continuum progress.DOI: 10.1109/compsac57700.2023.00287Metrics:
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2017
Conference article
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A prediction-based distributed tracking protocol for video surveillance
Kavalionak H, Carlini E, Lulli A, Gennaro C, Amato G, Meghini C, Ricci LVideo surveillance is an important security enforcement operation in many contexts, from large public areas to private smart homes and smart buildings. Today's video surveillance systems are much more than mere recording storages, as the advancement in classification and recognition allow for an immediate target recognition without the intervention of human operators. These smart video surveillance systems usually rely on a central server as the main coordination of recognition and tracking, which can represent a performance or economical bottleneck. In this paper, our contribution focuses on a decentralized protocol with the aim of eliminating such bottleneck. Our protocol organizes the distribution of a classification library among the cameras involved, which also participate actively to the target recognition phase. The protocol minimizes the network overhead towards the centralized server while keeping high the speed of recognition making use of a system to predict the movements of the targets. We tested the protocol by means of simulations, exploiting a realistic indoor human mobility model.DOI: 10.1109/icnsc.2017.8000081Metrics:
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doi.org
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2022
Conference article
Open Access
Network measurements with function-as-a-service for distributed low-latency edge applications
Carlini E, Kavalionak H, Dazzi P, Ferrucci L, Coppola M, Mordacchini MEdge computing promises to bring computation and storage close to end-users, opening exciting new areas of improvement for applications with a high level of interactivity and requiring low latency. However, these improvements require careful scheduling of applications in the correct Edge resource. This decision is generally taken by considering multiple parameters, including the network capabilities. In this paper, we discuss an approach that measures latency and bandwidth between multiple clients and Edge servers. The approach is based on recent Serverless computing technologies, and it is meant as a support to take timely and correct scheduling decisions in the Edge. We also provide the description of a proof of concept implementation of the said approach.DOI: 10.1145/3526059.3533622Project(s): ACCORDION
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dl.acm.org
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2022
Conference article
Open Access
Energy and QoE aware placement of applications and data at the edge
Mordacchini M, Ferrucci L, Carlini E, Kavalionak H, Coppola M, Dazzi PRecent years are witnessing extensions of cyber-infrastructures towards distributed environments. The Edge of the network is gaining a central role in the agenda of both infrastructure and application providers. Following the actual distributed structure of such a computational environment, nowadays, many solutions face resource and application management needs in Cloud/Edge continua. One of the most challenging aspects is ensuring highly available computing and data infrastructures while optimizing the system's energy consumption. In this paper, we describe a decentralized solution that limits the energy consumption by the system without failing to match the users' expectations, defined as the services' Quality of Experience (QoE) when accessing data and leveraging applications at the Edge. Experimental evaluations through simulation conducted with PureEdgeSim demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.Source: CEUR WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS, pp. 109-116. Tirrenia, Pisa, Italy, 19-22/06/2022
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ISTI Repository
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2022
Conference article
Open Access
Decentralized federated learning and network topologies: an empirical study on convergence
Kavalionak H, Carlini E, Dazzi P, Ferrucci L, Mordacchini M, Coppola MFederated Learning is a well-known learning paradigm that allows the distributed training of machine learning models. Federated Learning keeps data in the source devices and communicates only the model's coefficients to a centralized server. This paper studies the decentralized flavor of Federated Learning. A peer-to-peer network replaces the centralized server, and nodes exchange model's coefficients directly. In particular, we look for empirical evidence on the effect of different network topologies and communication parameters on the convergence in the training of distributed models. Our observations suggest that small-world networks converge faster for small amounts of nodes, while xx are more suitable for larger setups.Source: CEUR WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS, pp. 317-324. Tirrenia, Pisa, Italy, 19-22/06/2022
Project(s): TEACHING 
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ceur-ws.org
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2020
Conference article
Open Access
Edge-Based Video Surveillance with Embedded Devices
Kavalionak H, Gennaro C, Amato G, Vairo C, Perciante C, Meghini C, Falchi F, Rabitti FVideo surveillance systems have become indispensable tools for the security and organization of public and private areas. In this work, we propose a novel distributed protocol for an edge-based face recogni-tion system that takes advantage of the computational capabilities of the surveillance devices (i.e., cameras) to perform person recognition. The cameras fall back to a centralized server if their hardware capabili-ties are not enough to perform the recognition. We evaluate the proposed algorithm via extensive experiments on a freely available dataset. As a prototype of surveillance embedded devices, we have considered a Rasp-berry PI with the camera module. Using simulations, we show that our algorithm can reduce up to 50% of the load of the server with no negative impact on the quality of the surveillance service.Source: CEUR WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS, pp. 278-285. Villasimius, Sardinia, Italy, 21-24/06/2020
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ceur-ws.org
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2019
Journal article
Open Access
Distributed video surveillance using smart cameras
Kavalionak H, Gennaro C, Amato G, Vairo C, Perciante C, Meghini C, Falchi FVideo surveillance systems have become an indispensable tool for the security and organization of public and private areas. Most of the current commercial video surveillance systems rely on a classical client/server architecture to perform face and object recognition. In order to support the more complex and advanced video surveillance systems proposed in the last years, companies are required to invest resources in order to maintain the servers dedicated to the recognition tasks. In this work, we propose a novel distributed protocol for a face recognition system that exploits the computational capabilities of the surveillance devices (i.e. cameras) to perform the recognition of the person. The cameras fall back to a centralized server if their hardware capabilities are not enough to perform the recognition. In order to evaluate the proposed algorithm we simulate and test the 1NN and weighted kNN classification algorithms via extensive experiments on a freely available dataset. As a prototype of surveillance devices we have considered Raspberry PI entities. By means of simulations, we show that our algorithm is able to reduce up to 50% of the load from the server with no negative impact on the quality of the surveillance service.Source: JOURNAL OF GRID COMPUTING, vol. 17 (issue 1), pp. 59-77
DOI: 10.1007/s10723-018-9467-xMetrics:
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| Journal of Grid Computing
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