Increasing demands for low latency, cost efficiency, and digital sovereignty are driving organisations beyond centralised cloud models towards decentralised and hybrid computing environments. The Edge-to-Cloud computing continuum aims to unify edge and cloud infrastructures into a seamless execution environment, but achieving this remains complex in practice.ColonyOS is an open-source, ready-to-use meta-operating system that coordinates distributed workloads across diverse computing environments. ColonyOS separates coordination from execution using declarative, intent-based function specifications and a lightweight, broker-based architecture that provides OS-like abstractions. This paper outlines key properties of a meta-operating system and describes how these are realised in ColonyOS. The paper also presents practical experiences from two industrial deployments: real-time seismic monitoring at RockSigma AB and integration with EuroHPC supercomputers. These use cases demonstrate ColonyOS’s capabilities in enabling resilient workload management and hybrid orchestration across HPC and Kubernetes environments. A referenced study on carbon-aware scheduling further illustrates how ColonyOS supports time-shifting of non-urgent workloads to reduce environmental impact. The paper concludes with a discussion of ColonyOS’s architecture and future research directions.

Kubernetes clusters now underpin the bulk of modern production workloads, recent 2024 Cloud Native Computing Foundation surveys report >96% enterprise adoption, stretching from 5G edge nodes and AI/ML pipelines to heavily-regulated fintech and healthcare back-ends. Every action in those environments funnels through the API server, so a single access-control slip can jeopardise an entire fleet. Yet most deployments still rely on a patchwork of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) rules and policy-as-code admission controllers such as OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno. In practice these controls are brittle: minor syntactic oversights, wildcard privileges, or conflicting rules can silently create privilege-escalation paths that elude linters and manual review. This paper presents a framework that models both RBAC and admission policies as first-order logic and uses an SMT solver to exhaustively search for counter-examples to stated security invariants before policies reach the cluster. The approach detects policy conflicts, unreachable denies, and unintended permissions. Three real-world case studies are presented to illustrate how the framework reveals latent misconfigurations and validates the soundness of the corrected rules. These case studies include a supply-chain image bypass, an RBAC “shadow-admi” escalation, and a multi-tenant namespace breach. To aid replication and further study, we release a fully scripted GitHub testbed: a Minikube cluster, AuthzForce PDP, admission-webhook adapter, and Z3-backed CLI that recreates each scenario and verifies policies end-to-end. While the framework does not address runtime threats, it closes a critical verification gap and substantially raises the bar for attackers targeting the most widely deployed orchestration platform. 

This research paper presents CoMA, a Container Monitoring Agent, that oversees resource consumption of operating system level virtualization platforms, primarily targeting container-based platforms such as Docker. The core contribution is CoMA, together with a quantitative evaluation verifying the validity of the measurements reported by the agent for three metrics: CPU, memory and block I/O. The proof-of-concept is implemented for Docker-based systems and consists of CoMA, the Ganglia Monitoring System and the Host sFlow agent. This research is in line with the rising trend of container adoption which is due to the resource efficiency and ease of deployment. These characteristics have set containers in a position to topple virtual machines as the reigning virtualization technology in data centers.

A family relation is generally considered to be stronger than a relation between coworkers in our society, but the strength of the relation is intrinsic and have been cumbersome to measure. The fact that we increasingly communicate electronically, such as through email, mobile phone calls or social media, has made it possible to automatically measure and analyze the relation between persons. This paper presents an evaluation study of social strength, where the social strength is defined as a metric that represents the tie strength of the relation between persons, calculated based on the frequency, duration, context and media type of the electronic communication between the persons. The study found that the Utility Function performs better because it emphasize the communication frequency between persons. There is however a significant difference in results between the algorithms and the user-defined ranking. This indicates the inability of the algorithms to capture intrinsic knowledge (such as the importance of family bonds and nonelectronic interaction). This would mean that the participants' ranking was colored by their interaction in real-life. It is however evident from the study that the functions provide more accurate results when they utilize multiple sources of communication history over only a single source. Finally, capturing sufficient communication data from multiple data sources is very hard, as access to such data is restricted because of concerns regarding for instance business and privacy. A conclusion is that the algorithms requires a larger data set, preferably being captured continuously over a period longer than 2 weeks, to achieve a better accuracy that is closer to the ground truth. However, the study shows the feasibility of capturing social strength automatically and we believe that the results is an important step towards systems that reason about the relation between persons in order to make communications services more pervasive.

This paper investigates how the management of groups that communicate electronically, such as group formation, can be simplified based on users’ context and social relations. This work builds on a framework for Aggregated Social Graphs, where each node represents the relational strength to other users. The strength of a relation is calculated by utilizing information on how we communicate using mobile phone calls, emails, and social networks in combination with additional sources of information such as from calendars. A contextual group management schema is presented where contextual parameters such as tags, locations and objects are used to prune an aggregated social graph in order to automatically form a group.The schema is implemented in a runtime environment based on the Distributed Shared Memory service available at Ericsson Labs. The feasibility of the proposed schema is then studied through a prototype implementation both in a web-browser and as a mobile app. The study shows that a group can be formed automatically and that a lightweight communication session then can be initiated for that group.

Mobile semantic Web provides a new way of developing context-aware social networking applications. Social networking applications are changing the way of communication by using userpsilas context-information. For example, micro-blogging has become a smart way of conveying the current situation and activity by using user context. There is currently a significant difference between using social networking applications on a static computer compared to a mobile device, even if current mobile devices are powerful and have good connectivity. The difference is primarily related to the mobility aspect since the user contexts may change more frequently and the user may not be able to interact with the mobile device. In this paper we identify common characteristics of current social networking applications and how they attract users. Finally, we propose an agent-based system architecture that is based on a distributed platform for developing semantic and semi-automated mobile social networking applications.

This paper presents work in progress regarding utilization of social network information for mobile applications. Primarily a number of challenges are identified, such as how to mine data from multiple social networks, how to integrate and consolidate social networks, and how to manage semantic information for mobile applications. The challenges are discussed from a semantic Web perspective using a driving scenario as motivation.The main objective is to enable mobile applications to benefit from semantic information obtained from Web services, mobile devices, or the surrounding environment. The goal is therefore to create a framework that enables integration of semantic information (location, activity, interests, etc) with social network data (from Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, etc) to facilitate intelligent yet easy to use communication tools for individual persons as well as groups of persons. An ultimate goal is to make complex communication simple through utilization of semantic information and social network data for pervasive services in mobile devices.

Providing seamless IP mobility support is one of the most challenging problems towards a world of mobile and ubiquitous multimedia communication. This paper proposes an application-layer framework based on the Session Initiation Protocol and the Resilient Mobile Socket to provide mobility support for distributed multimedia applications. As a part of the framework the paper describes a new handover strategy called Competition-based Soft-Handover Management that uses simulcast to improve quality of service and to seamlessly hand over multimedia traffic to the network interface that currently offers better network characteristics. In short, during a handover packets are simulcasted through all available network interfaces, and when the packets are received by the remote end-point, they are merged back into one stream. As each network connection competes with other connections in contributing to the merged stream at the remote end-point, the handover process can be viewed as a competition where the connection that contributes most is selected after the handover. As a proof of concept, the framework has been integrated into Marratech, which is a commercially available audio/video group communication application. By using network emulators, the paper demonstrates how the framework can be used to improve QoS, compare end-to-end performance, and perform lossless handovers while reducing redundant packets.

The proliferation of multimedia and deployment of wireless networks over the last decade have made it possible for users to communicate and share information using e-meeting services from almost any location at anytime. While these new services offer new ways to communicate, they are not always easy to use because of the heterogeneity of networks and devices, which must be managed by the users to take full advantage of the possible benefits. Switching to another communication service running on another terminal requires even more configuration efforts. In addition, it is expected that the configuration efforts required by the users will become more time-consuming in the future as the need for richer communication grows and the diversity of services and networks increases. This doctoral thesis proposes and evaluates new methods to create a ubiquitous multimedia communication system, which makes it easier for users to participate in online e-meetings using the most suitable network or terminal. The thesis makes several contributions related to mobility and bandwidth management. One contribution is a new mobility protocol called the Resilient Mobile Socket and an algorithm called Competition-based Soft-Handovers Management designed to manage host mobility and seamlessly migrate media streams between different network connections. To deal with bandwidth variation, the thesis proposes a method based on microeconomic theory to adapt and share bandwidth efficiently between media within an application, thereby relieving the users from manually adjusting bandwidth utilization after switching network. In regards to switching terminals, the thesis proposes a concept called media resources, and a framework for managing media resources using context-awareness. The most beneficial media resource is automatically selected using an algorithm, which is also presented in the thesis. The proposed methods, frameworks, and algorithms have been evaluated through a combination of theoretical analysis, controlled laboratory experiments, user studies, and exploratory experiments using prototypes. The results from these investigations show that it is possible to create a ubiquitous multimedia communication system that enables richer communication in mobile settings by better utilizing available networks and combining multiple terminals. A final conclusion is that it is crucial to minimize configuration efforts, but the user should always have the final decision if a configuration procedure cannot be automated with complete accuracy.

This paper¹ presents a middleware that applies a micro-economic model to help multimedia applications utilize available bandwidth in a way that maximizes the user’s net benefit. The key components are a bandwidth broker that puts the supply of available bandwidth on a virtual market, and utility functions for each media, which are used to calculate the relative gain they can offer the user by using this bandwidth. Basic supply and demand principles are used where the broker raises the price if the total demand from all media exceeds the available supply, or lowers the price if the demand is lower than the available supply.