Programming routing policies for video traffic

Making the network programmable simplifies network management and enables network innovations. The Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) is our solution to enable network programmability. ProtoRINA is a user-space prototype of RINA and provides users with a framework with common mechanisms so a user can program recursive-networking policies without implementing mechanisms from scratch. In this paper, we focus on how routing policies, which is an important aspect of network management, can be programmed using ProtoRINA, and demonstrate how ProtoRINA can be used to achieve better performance for a video streaming application by instantiating different routing policies over the GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) testbed, which provides a large-scale experimental facility for networking research.National Science Foundation (NSF grant CNS-0963974

Multi-layer virtual transport network design and management

Nowadays there is an increasing need for a general paradigm that can simplify network management and further enable network innovations. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an efficient way to make the network programmable and reduce management complexity, however it is plagued with limitations inherited from the legacy Internet (TCP/IP) architecture. On the other hand, service overlay networks and virtual networks are widely used to overcome deficiencies of the Internet. However, most overlay/virtual networks are single-layered and lack dynamic scope management. Furthermore, how to solve the joint problem of designing and mapping the overlay/virtual network requests for better application and network performance remains an understudied area. In this thesis, in response to limitations of current SDN management solutions and of the traditional single-layer overlay/virtual network design, we propose a recursive approach to enterprise network management, where network management is done through managing various Virtual Transport Networks (VTNs) over different scopes (i.e., regions of operation). Different from the traditional overlay/virtual network model which mainly focuses on routing/tunneling, our VTN approach provides communication service with explicit Quality-of-Service (QoS) support for applications via transport flows, i.e., it involves all mechanisms (e.g., addressing, routing, error and flow control, resource allocation) needed to meet application requirements. Our approach inherently provides a multi-layer solution for overlay/virtual network design. The contributions of this thesis are threefold: (1) we propose a novel VTN-based management approach to enterprise network management; (2) we develop a framework for multi-layer VTN design and instantiate it to meet specific application and network goals; and (3) we design and prototype a VTN-based management architecture. Our simulation and experimental results demonstrate the flexibility of our VTN-based management approach and its performance advantages

Cyber physical approach and framework for micro devices assembly

The emergence of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) based principles and technologies holds the potential to facilitate global collaboration in various fields of engineering. Micro Devices Assembly (MDA) is an emerging domain involving the assembly of micron sized objects and devices. In this dissertation, the focus of the research is the design of a Cyber Physical approach for the assembly of micro devices. A collaborative framework comprising of cyber and physical components linked using the Internet has been developed to accomplish a targeted set of MDA life cycle activities which include assembly planning, path planning, Virtual Reality (VR) based assembly analysis, command generation and physical assembly. Genetic algorithm and modified insertion algorithm based methods have been proposed to support assembly planning activities. Advanced VR based environments have been designed to support assembly analysis where plans can be proposed, compared and validated. The potential of next generation Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) networking technologies has also been explored to support distributed collaborations involving VR-based environments. The feasibility of the cyber physical approach has been demonstrated by implementing the cyber physical components which collaborate to assemble micro designs. The case studies conducted underscore the ability of the developed Cyber Physical approach and framework to support distributed collaborative activities for MDA process contexts

Data-driven design of intelligent wireless networks: an overview and tutorial

Data science or "data-driven research" is a research approach that uses real-life data to gain insight about the behavior of systems. It enables the analysis of small, simple as well as large and more complex systems in order to assess whether they function according to the intended design and as seen in simulation. Data science approaches have been successfully applied to analyze networked interactions in several research areas such as large-scale social networks, advanced business and healthcare processes. Wireless networks can exhibit unpredictable interactions between algorithms from multiple protocol layers, interactions between multiple devices, and hardware specific influences. These interactions can lead to a difference between real-world functioning and design time functioning. Data science methods can help to detect the actual behavior and possibly help to correct it. Data science is increasingly used in wireless research. To support data-driven research in wireless networks, this paper illustrates the step-by-step methodology that has to be applied to extract knowledge from raw data traces. To this end, the paper (i) clarifies when, why and how to use data science in wireless network research; (ii) provides a generic framework for applying data science in wireless networks; (iii) gives an overview of existing research papers that utilized data science approaches in wireless networks; (iv) illustrates the overall knowledge discovery process through an extensive example in which device types are identified based on their traffic patterns; (v) provides the reader the necessary datasets and scripts to go through the tutorial steps themselves

Multi-layered virtual transport network design and management (PhD Thesis)

Nowadays there is an increasing need for a general paradigm that can simplify network management and further enable network innovations. Softwa re Defined Networking (SDN) is an efficient way to make the network programmable and reduce management complexity, however it is plagued with limitations inherited from the legacy Internet (TCP/IP) architecture. On the other hand, service overlay networks and virtual networks are widely usedto overcome deficiencies of the Internet. However, most over lay/virtual networks are single- layered and lack dynamic scope management. Furthermore, how to solve the joint problem of designing and mapping the overlay/virtual network requests for better application and network performance remains an understudied area. In this thesis, in response to limitations of current SDN management solutions and of the traditional single-layer overlay/virtual network design, we propose a recursive approach to enterprise network management, where network management is done through managing various Virtual Transport Networks (VTNs) over different scopes (i.e., regions of opera-tion). Different from the traditional overlay/virtual network model which mainly focuses on routing/tunneling, our VTN approach provides communication service with explicit Quality-of-Service (QoS) support for applications via transport flows, i.e., it involves all mechanisms (e.g., addressing, routing, error and flow control, resource allocation) needed to meet application requirements. Our approach inherently provides a multi-layer solution for overlay/virtual network design. The contributions of this thesis are threefold: (1) we propose a novel VTN-based management approach to enterprise network management; (2) we develop a framework for multi-layer VTN design and instantiate it to meet specific application and network goals; and (3) we design and prototype a VTN-based management architecture. Our simulation and experimental results demonstrate the flexibility of our VTN-based management approach and its performance advantages

Annual Research Report, 2010-2011

Annual report of collaborative research projects of Old Dominion University faculty and students in partnership with business, industry and government.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/or_researchreports/1000/thumbnail.jp

Remote fidelity of Container-Based Network Emulators

This thesis examines if Container-Based Network Emulators (CBNEs) are able to instantiate emulated nodes that provide sufficient realism to be used in information security experiments. The realism measure used is based on the information available from the point of view of a remote attacker. During the evaluation of a Container-Based Network Emulator (CBNE) as a platform to replicate production networks for information security experiments, it was observed that nmap fingerprinting returned Operating System (OS) family and version results inconsistent with that of the host Operating System (OS). CBNEs utilise Linux namespaces, the technology used for containerisation, to instantiate \emulated" hosts for experimental networks. Linux containers partition resources of the host OS to create lightweight virtual machines that share a single OS kernel. As all emulated hosts share the same kernel in a CBNE network, there is a reasonable expectation that the fingerprints of the host OS and emulated hosts should be the same. Based on how CBNEs instantiate emulated networks and that fingerprinting returned inconsistent results, it was hypothesised that the technologies used to construct CBNEs are capable of influencing fingerprints generated by utilities such as nmap. It was predicted that hosts emulated using different CBNEs would show deviations in remotely generated fingerprints when compared to fingerprints generated for the host OS. An experimental network consisting of two emulated hosts and a Layer 2 switch was instantiated on multiple CBNEs using the same host OS. Active and passive fingerprinting was conducted between the emulated hosts to generate fingerprints and OS family and version matches. Passive fingerprinting failed to produce OS family and version matches as the fingerprint databases for these utilities are no longer maintained. For active fingerprinting the OS family results were consistent between tested systems and the host OS, though OS version results reported was inconsistent. A comparison of the generated fingerprints revealed that for certain CBNEs fingerprint features related to network stack optimisations of the host OS deviated from other CBNEs and the host OS. The hypothesis that CBNEs can influence remotely generated fingerprints was partially confirmed. One CBNE system modified Linux kernel networking options, causing a deviation from fingerprints generated for other tested systems and the host OS. The hypothesis was also partially rejected as the technologies used by CBNEs do not influence the remote fidelity of emulated hosts.Thesis (MSc) -- Faculty of Science, Computer Science, 202

Source-code Summarization of Java Methods Using Control-Flow Graphs

Source-code summarization aims to generate natural-language summaries for software artifacts (e.g., method and class). % Researchers have been exploring source-code summarization as one research area in software engineering. Various research works showed the use of text-retrieval-based techniques, heuristic-based techniques, and data-driven techniques for source-code summarization. In data-driven techniques, researchers used a sequence of source-code tokens and other representations of source code (e.g., application programming interface (API) sequences and abstract syntax tree (AST)) as an input to source-code summarization models. According to the current published literature in source-code summarization, researchers have not explored the use of a sequence extracted from control-flow graph that shows a contextual relationship between program instructions based on control-flow relationships for source-code summarization models. In this work, we employ control-flow graph representations to increase the prediction accuracy of a bi-directional long-short term memory (LSTM) source-code summarization model in terms of describing the functionality of Java methods. We use an attention-based bi-directional LSTM sequence-to-sequence model to show the use of linearized control-flow graph sequences alongside a sequence of source-code tokens. We compared our model with the current state-of-the-art and with or without a linearized control-flow graph. We created a source-code summarization dataset to train and evaluate our approach and conducted expert and automatic evaluations. In the expert evaluation, the participants gave rating for summaries generated by each model in terms of correctly describing the functionality of a Java method. Our models outperformed the state-of-the-art in terms of the mean average-rating. Also, the expert evaluation showed us the model benefit from the structural information. In the automatic evaluation, we found that the use of control-flow graphs does not increase the prediction accuracy of a bi-directional LSTM model in terms of BLEU score compared to a bi-directional LSTM model that does not use control-flow graphs. However, we found our source-code summarization approach that uses a control-flow graph as an additional representation better than encoding AST in graph neural networks. Overall, we improved the state-of-the-art for method summarization with our models that take sequence of method tokens with and without a control-flow graph

VALICO-UD: annotating an Italian learner corpus

Previous work on learner language has highlighted the importance of having annotated resources to describe the development of interlanguage. Despite this, few learner resources, mainly for English L2, feature error and syntactic annotation. This thesis describes the development of a novel parallel learner Italian treebank, VALICO-UD. Its name suggests two main points: where the data comes from—i.e. the corpus VALICO, a collection of non-native Italian texts elicited by comic strips—and what formalism is used for linguistic annotation—i.e. Universal Dependencies (UD) formalism. It is a parallel treebank because the resource provides for each learner sentence (LS) a target hypothesis (TH) (i.e., parallel corrected version written by an Italian native speaker) which is in turn annotated in UD. We developed this treebank to be exploitable for interlanguage research and comparable with the resources employed in Natural Language Processing tasks such as Native Language Identification or Grammatical Error Identification and Correction. VALICO-UD is composed of 237 texts written by English, French, German and Spanish native speakers, which correspond to 2,234 LSs, each associated with a single TH. While all LSs and THs were automatically annotated using UDPipe, only a portion of the treebank made of 398 LSs plus correspondent THs has been manually corrected and released in May 2021 in the UD repository. This core section features also an explicit XML-based annotation of the errors occurring in each sentence. Thus, the treebank is currently organized in two sections: the core gold standard—comprising 398 LSs and their correspondent THs—and the silver standard—consisting of 1,836 LSs and their correspondent THs. In order to contribute to the computational investigation about the peculiar type of texts included in VALICO-UD, this thesis describes the annotation schema of the resource, provides some preliminary tests about the performance of UDPipe models on this treebank, reports on inter-annotator agreement results for both error and linguistic annotation, and suggests some possible applications

Entertainment-Education Behind the Scenes

This Open Access book tracks the latest trends in the theory, research, and practice of entertainment-education, the field of communication that incorporates social change messaging into entertaining media. Sometimes called edutainment, social impact television, narrative persuasion, or cultural strategy, this approach to social and behavior change communication offers new opportunities including transmedia and digital formats. However, making media can be a chaotic process. The realities of working in the field and the rigid structures of scholarly evaluation often act as barriers to honest accounts of entertainment-education practice. In this collection of essays, experienced practitioners offer unique insight into how entertainment-education works and present a balanced view of its potential pitfalls. This book gives readers an opportunity to learn from the successes and mistakes of the experts, taking a behind-the-scenes look at the business of making entertainment-education media