Guest Editorial: Services Composition and Virtualization Technologies

SERVICES and Cloud Computing (SCC) is emerging rapidly as an exciting new paradigm that includes grid computing, utility computing, web computing, servicecentric computing, ubiquitous computing, and ambient intelligence to provide computing and communication services any time and anywhere. Among which, services composition and virtualization are two of the most important technologies. The goal of services computing is to enable IT services and computing technology to perform business services more efficiently and effectively, while virtualization technology is a decoupling technique that separates system software from hardware platforms, making applications run pervasively. SCC usually refers to the creation and deployment of computing technology in such a way that it becomes an invisible part of the fabric of everyday life and commerce. As pervasive computing presents a new trend of information and communication technologies for connecting cyber and physical domains, computers in the traditional sense gradually fade from view. Namely, information and communication mediated by computers is available anywhere and any time through devices that are embedded in our environment, completely interconnected, intuitive, effortlessly portable, and constantly available. This special issue includes four extended versions of selected papers originally presented at the IEEE Asia Pacific Services Computing Conference held in Yilan, Taiwan. The papers selected for this issue not only contribute valuable insights and results, but also have particular relevance to services composition, services management, services query, and scheduling for cloud, grid, and pervasive systems. They all present high quality results for tackling problems arising from the ever-growing fields of services and cloud computing. The paper by Chun-Feng Liao, Ya-Wen Jong, and Li-Chen Fu, entitled “Toward Reliable Service Management in Message-Oriented Pervasive Systems,” proposes a reliable service management framework by formally defining a message-oriented service application model and protocols that facilitate autonomous composition, failure detection, and recovery of services. The proposed approaches are realized by constructing a developer’s toolkit that enables rapid-prototyping of services. The proposed approach was evaluated by proving the reliability property as well as conducting experiments on recovery rate and performance. In addition, services developed by the proposed approach are capable of integrating heterogeneous software/hardware and can be deployed in dissimilar sites with little effort. Dang Minh Quan and Laurence T. Yang, in the paper entitled “Parallel Mapping with Time Optimization for SLA-Aware Compositional Services in the Business Grid,” present a parallel mapping algorithm to optimize the execution time of the workflow, which can reduce the runtime of the mapping algorithm without reducing the quality of the mapping solutions. As Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are currently one of the major research topics in Grid computing. The SLA mapping module holds an important position and the capability of the mapping module depends on the runtime performance of the mapping algorithm. The performance measurements show the quality of the method. The speedup of the algorithms and the quality of the solutions are significantly improved. The paper by Blaise Omer Yenke, Jean-Francois Mehaut, and Maurice Tchuente, entitled ”Scheduling of Computing Services on Intranet Networks” treats the scheduling problem of computing services as a sequence of knapsack problems with nonlinear constraints. Based on such an approach, enterprises can provide computing services through their intranet networks by letting their available resources be used as virtual clusters for scientific computation during idle periods such as nights, weekends, and holidays. Generally, idle periods do not permit carrying out the computations completely. It is therefore necessary to save the context of uncompleted applications for possible restart. Such a check-pointing mechanism is subject to resource constraints: the network bandwidth, the disk bandwidth, and the delay T imposed for releasing the workstations. The paper by Kaijun Ren, Nong Xiao, and Jinjun Chen, entitled “Building Quick Service Query List Using WordNet and Multiple Heterogeneous Ontologies toward More Realistic Service Composition,” presents an innovative composition technique by building an Extended Quick Service Query List (EQSQL) for supporting more efficient and more realistic service composition. In EQSQL, data structures are specially designed to record service information and their associated semantic concepts by processing semantic-related computing during the service publication period in advance. WordNet and semantic similarities among multiple heterogeneous ontologies can be exploited in the developed algorithms for forming EQSQL. Such IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SERVICES COMPUTING, VOL. 4, NO. 3, JULY-SEPTEMBER 2011 181