Service level assurance of Smart Infrastructures

物联网已经成为一种新的模式，能够提高现有城市基础设施的效率，减少满足增长需求所需的新投资规模。通过在城市环境中安装传感器，当局可以获得近乎实时的情况，并采取适当的行动来改善公民的生活质量。BT的数据中心方法通过提供一个平台来将传感器数据馈送到一起，同时还支持一个合作伙伴和工具的生态系统来交易数据，从而提供额外的好处;也就是说，数据中心将数据提供商和数据消费者聚集在一起，数据提供商通过自己的许可证、隐私条款和SLA保证提供传感器数据源（公民，应用程序开发人员甚至中小企业）订阅使用某些感兴趣的数据源。在这个数字生态系统中，关键的挑战是如何保证和维护SLA，当端到端服务交付涉及多个机构时，每个机构都对他们负责的服务部分拥有单独的控制域。博士应该专注于物联网/数据中心生态系统环境中端到端SLA管理的技术和方法，考虑以下领域：（i）预测性分析，可以预测趋势，并可以确定中断SLA的高可能性（ii）我们如何能够最好地检测提要问题以及SLA影响事项的位置，如何在集线器上处理报告这些问题而无需大量搜索等，以及如何发布否认，例如服务信用（iii）优化物联网设备部署、网络连接参数、应用程序逻辑部署等的编排技术，以保证端到端客户SLA。

The Internet of Things has emerged as a new paradigm able to drive extra efficiencies out of existing city infrastructures, decreasing the size of new investment necessary to meet growth requirements. By installing sensors in a city environment, authorities could get a near real-time view of situations and take appropriate actions to improve citizens quality of life. BT's Data Hub approach provides additional benefits through the delivery of a platform to pull sensor data feeds together but also supporting an ecosystem of partners and tools to trade the data; that is the Data Hub brings together Data Providers who make sensor data feeds available with own licences, privacy terms and SLA guarantees and Data Consumers (citizens, app developers or even SMEs) who subscribe to use certain data feeds of interest. In this digital ecosystem, the key challenge is how to guarantee and maintain SLAs, when end-to-end service delivery engages multiple authorities, each authority owing a separate domain of control over the part of the service they are responsible for. The PhD should focus on techniques and approaches for End-to-end SLA management in an IoT/Data hub ecosystem environment considering areas like: (i) predictive analytics that can foretell trends and could determine a high possibility of disrupting SLAs (ii) how we can best detect problems with feeds and where there have been SLA affecting matters, how to handle reporting these without a large strain of searches etc. on the hub, and how to issue repudiation e.g. service credits (iii) orchestration techniques that optimise deployment of IoT devices, network connectivity parameters, app logic deployment etc, to guarantee end-to-end customer SLAs.