Cross-framework Service Composition in OSGi-enabled Cloud Environments

Abstract

The Internet has been growing with heterogeneous services considering the new trend of IoT (Internet of Things), Smartphones and smart devices. That situation has kept making the distributed computing the mainstream in building and provisioning services. Henceforth, it urges for the advancement of related middleware technologies in order to catch up the increasing Internet application users along with the market growth. Modularity referred as “a clean software development” model was proposed as one of the approaches to handling the aforesaid growth. The latter has been well accepted from the industry, as well as the academia since it promotes the development and usage of modular software instead of monolithic software which are less flexible and expensive to maintain. Another solution to cope with such growth is to compose services for instance in Cloud environments, which requires support from an adequate middleware for optimized execution of composition plans. Cloud offerings as well, can be leveraged for provisioning composite services. At this point, it will be beneficial for increasing users’ satisfaction and reduce application developers’ effort. Prior to achieving such goal, a PaaS Cloud (Platform as a Service) environment seems to be a mandatory platform. However, adaptive middleware solutions which can ease and speed up application developers’ duty are still missing. This research proposes a middleware architecture on top of OSGi (Open Service Gateway initiative) framework to achieve service composition in a Cloud infrastructure leveraging the dynamic deployment capabilities offered by a provisioning server. It also extends the functionality of the Remote Service Admin to ensure service availability in distributed environments. We verify our proposal throughout a prototype implementation on top of which we performed a use case scenario to determine the system performance.