The members of DEIS - Ingegneria, University of Bologna, involved in GL-1 intend to give their contribution on the topics of Quality of Service offered during service provisioning over best-effort networks and of policy-based models for networks, systems, and service management. The quality control and management of Web-based services require an extension of the traditional Internet infrastructure with monitoring functions to achieve full visibility of network resource state and to propagate this visibility up to the application level. It is crucial to realize Java mechanisms for the on-line monitoring of heterogeneous Internet resources. Those mechanisms should provide indicators at different abstraction levels, from the application level, e.g., the object instantiation and the method invocation, to the kernel level, e.g., the CPU usage and the number of received network packets. We will investigate emerging Java technologies such as JVMPI and JMX, and standard management systems for integration solutions (SNMP and RTCP).
Monitoring mechanism supply a base for the deployment of an open and portable framework for monitoring and management of distributed resources, by using also new technologies based on mobile agents for local resource management, in order to reduce traffic overhead and response time.
System and network management can be facilitated by the integration with policy-based systems, to enable the control, adaptation, and management of both the infrastructure and the provided services according to the quality and security requirements. Policies allow a high level abstraction in the definition of system requirements, independently of the actual implementation mechanisms. Separating policy level from mechanism level makes possible the dynamic adaptation of component behaviour without any change in the component design and implementation. The group is also collaborating with Prof. Morris Sloman and Dr. Emil Lupu of the Software Engineering group at the Imperial College, London.

The integration of the traditional fixed Internet infrastructure with wireless networks requires new software architectures, fully aware of both location and context and capable of propagating this awareness up to the application level. A primary interest is in middleware-based solutions that support resource sharing to simplify the realization of collaborative services in highly dynamic environments. Another fundamental direction of solution is based on middlewares that exploit the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) model of interaction also in contexts of mobility.
The members of DEIS - Ingegneria, University of Bologna, involved in GL-3 are willing to design and implement a middleware infrastructure that, starting from a P2P model, supports the rapid realization of collaborative services in deployment scenarios with mobility of users, terminals and resources.

The members of DEIS - Ingegneria, University of Bologna, involved in GL-4 intend to address the challenging issue of the management of mobile wireless devices and to provide them with context and location aware services.
In the first year, the Unit plans to investigate off-theshelf technologies for wireless connectivity (IEEE 802.11b, Bluetooth, and UMTS), Java virtual machines and software suites (mainly MIDP/CLDC/KVM) for limited devices with strict constraints on computational power, client/server protocols at the application level for limited mobile devices (Jini Surrogate, Ksoap, ...), and specific security solutions. The goal is to realize a support architecture for location and context aware services, by integrating also GL-5 decisions, developments and prototypes. A primary issue will be the dynamic adaptation of services driven from metadata describing device characteristics and user preferences (W3C CC/PP — Composite Capabilities/ Preferences Profile). Metadata contribute to dynamically realize the context of a user's session. The Unit will investigate novel methodologies for software design, implementation, and deployment to facilitate dynamic composition and reusability of middleware/service components.

Finally, the members of DEIS - Ingegneria, University of Bologna, involved in GL-5 aim at extending Internet accessibility (originally designed and thought for wired networks) to mobile devices. This will be the basis to develop location and context aware services. The goals are to realize a middleware capable of providing specific support facilities for mobile and wireless devices, and to seamlessly integrate those devices with the wired network. The middleware intends to exploit active components (proxies) that act on the behalf of the clients even in absence of continuous client connectivity, that can follow mobile devices, and that can adapt services to the characteristics of the served devices. The Unit will use the mobile agent technology to exploit the autonomy and asynchrony properties of mobile agents.
In addition, the Unit plans to integrate the mobile agent-based middleware with a service management infrastructure based on policies. Policies make possible to describe actions that mobile agents must perform for adapting services to the current environment state and for controlling user-resource interaction in order to prevent from improper/illegal use of resources. The adoption of policies should simplify service adaptability to both the runtime environment and to the mobile device characteristics, thus increasing service flexibility and component reusability.