No abstract

NoSQL storage systems are used extensively by web applications and provide an attractive alternative to conventional databases due to their high security and availability with a low cost. High data availability is achieved by replicating data in different servers in order to reduce access time lag, network bandwidth consumption and system unreliability. Hence, the data consistency is a major challenge in distributed systems. In this context, strong consistency guarantees data freshness but affects directly the performance and availability of the system. In contrast, weaker consistency enhances availability and performance but increases data staleness. Therefore, an adaptive consistency strategy is needed to tune, during runtime, the consistency level depending on the criticality of the requests or data items. Although there is a rich literature on adaptive consistency approaches in cloud storage, there is a need to classify as well as regroup the approaches based on their strategies. This paper will establish a set of comparative criteria and then make a comparative analysis of existing adaptive consistency approaches. A survey of this kind not only provides the user/researcher with a comparative performance analysis of the approaches but also clarifies the suitability of these for candidate cloud systems.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address the Internet of Things (IoT) service discovery problem and investigate the existing solutions to tackle this problem in many aspects. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents an overview of IoT services aiming at providing a clear understanding about their features because this term is still ambiguous for the IoT service discovery approaches. Besides, a full comparison study of the most representative service discovery approaches in the literature is presented over four perspectives: the IoT information model, the mechanism of IoT service discovery, the adopted architecture and the context awareness. These perspectives allow classifying, comparing and giving a deeper understanding of the existing IoT service discovery solutions. Findings This paper presents a new definition and a new classification of IoT services and citation of their features comparing with the traditional Web services. This paper discusses the existing solutions, as well as the main challenges, that face the service discovery issue in the IoT domain. Besides, two classifications of the approaches are adopted on the basis of their service description model and their mechanism of discovery, and a set of requirements that need to be considered when defining an IoT service are proposed. Originality/value There are few number works that survey the service discovery approaches in the IoT domain, but none of these surveys discuss the service description models in the IoT or the impact of the context awareness aspect in the service discovery solution. There are also few works that give a comprehensive overview of IoT services to understand their nature to facilitate their description and discovery. This paper fills this gap by performing a full comparison study of multi-category and recent approaches for service discovery in the IoT over many aspects and also by performing a comprehensive study of the IoT service features.