Opportunistic Collaborative Service Networks: The Facilitator for Efficient Data and Services Exchange

Abstract

The dynamic rapidly changing and technology-rich digital environment and the market economic constraints shift service provisioning from a pre- and strictly-defined to an on-demand and ad-hoc orientation, where applications depend on dynamic, scarce, distributed resources, which operate at different temporal and spatial scales, have different (potentially conflicting) objectives and are governed under different domains of control. The framework described in this paper aims at enabling the exploitation of all available highly heterogeneous resources (i.e. clouds, communicating objects, sensors and smart devices) by providing a service-based environment that allows for harvesting, dynamically creating and managing these diverse, discrete and distributed resources. Swarms refer to opportunistic service networks, which as new constructs can rapidly emerge in relation either to users and applications requirements or to events and information of great potential for the wider community, coordinated by an open and distributed runtime model.