The combination of cloud computing, ad hoc networking and proliferation of wireless devices and sensors will be the most significant disruptive technology to transform the way next generation services are supplied and consumed in the communications industry since the introduction of Internet. In this next generation service marketplace, service brokering is emerging as a promising low-risk business model for offering new and value-added services through cross provider service delivery and partnership. The paper presents a service brokering architecture possessing the capabilities necessary to support a service delivery infrastructure for integration, delivery and management of composite services in a multi-provider heterogeneous networks environment.

This paper reexamines deadlock prevention in the context of multiprocessor or distributed systems. The essential idea is to have a deadlock prevention process that executes “on-the-fly”, i.e. in parallel with processes that use resources. The prevention process determines in advance those requests that could be satisfied. The effect of this approach is to reduce greatly the overhead imposed by deadlock prevention. The contributions of the paper are an efficient algorithm for predicting which requests could be granted and efficient process interaction protocols for on-the-fly prevention. The predictor algorithm is also used for efficient determination of delayed requests that can be granted after a release.

The multiple assignment statement is defined in full generality—including assignment to subscripted variables and record fields—using the “axiomatic” approach of Hoare. Proof rules are developed for calls of procedures using global variables, var parameters, result parameters, and value parameters, using the idea of multiple assignment to provide understanding. An attempt is made to clarify some issues that have arisen concerning the use of rules of inference to aid in generating “verification conditions” in mechanical verifiers and the use of logical variables to denote initial values of program variables.