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Focusing on the leisure and entertainment sector, the experiment will build and assess a distributed application hosting environment that enables network-centric Application Service Providers (ASP) to deploy and manage their services in secure and accountable way. In particular internet-based multi-player gaming has been chosen as the targeted application area.

BE09 aims to provide distributed ”virtual hosting environment” (VHE) that allows securely exposing applications as a managed services and enforcing quality of service in dynamic federations of users, application service providers and application hosts:

From an application service provider’s perspective, this innovation allows businesses to provide, manage and control own application services, while outsourcing service deployment and management, security, and contact enforcement to the infrastructure services hosted by the network. In addition, they can take advantage of the distributed VHE in order to dynamically scale and load balance by distributing the hosting of their resource intensive or response time constrained application.
From an application host provider’s perspective, this innovation allows businesses to optimize the use of their resources by accommodating diverse application services from potentially different ASPs that are can be provided in distinct contexts and distinct federations that meet different security and quality of service requirements, as required.
From a converged IT and communication services provider’s perspective, this innovation has the potential to create a new market of network-hosted infrastructure services that are offered as “common capabilities” over the network, that enable the VHE operation and life-cycle management.

Fact Sheet

Context

Internet-based gaming offers challenging features such as interactivity with multi-players, low latency requirements, high-performance servers for game execution. Thus, a gaming platform will be a suitable driver for the technological and commercial impact evaluation of the BE. The experiment will selectively reuse SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) middleware components and R&D experience of FP5 and FP6 European projects including GRASP, TrustCoM and ELeGI. URJC acts as a Software Developer expert, and aims to adapt efficiently the application in the Grid Infrastructure. BT participates in the project as a web services and security design expert, and following the experiment it aims to offer elements of the VHE as common capabilities over a converged network. ATOS ORIGIN participates as a technological IT integrator and aims to analyse the applicability of VHE solution to other economical sectors. CRMPA acts as technology provider and Grid expert developer in .NET environments.

Challenges

The main technical challenges, to be addressed through use of standards-based Grid and Web Services technologies, are:

To architect scaleable solution, for efficient and reliable game execution over distribute Virtual Hosting Environments.
To implement a Virtual Hosting Environment supporting the operation and life-cycle management for federations of Common Capabilities, Game Servers, and Game Instances, and ensure the applicability of the result across vertical markets.
To provide a suitable model for securely aggregating: Groups of gaming servers hosting game instances in virtual hosts; Collections (converged network) services supporting the execution a game instance; Communities of gamers sharing the same game instance; while maintaining the separation of administrative authority and concerns between gamer communities, application service providers, service host providers and the enabling infrastructure.
Provision of internet games to the consumer via non-intrusive, secure, pervasive and scaleable technology.
The BE combines several technologies: .NET, Java, CORBA, Web Services, Grid.