Hybrid Fixed-Mobile P2P Superdistribution

The Internet and the cellular telephony system are the two most influential communication systems of the last years. The arrival of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) promises to help service providers to deploy a complete array of real-time, customized business and consumer multimedia services over any access network. IMS is an integrated solution that defines a generic architecture for offering Voice over IP (VoIP) and advanced multimedia services. This project describes a hybrid fixed-mobile peer-to-peer superdistribution system deployed over an IMS platform. This superdistribution service is aligned with the current interests of telecommunication operators that desire to offer services with large user acceptance and that involve a massive access to the service without collapsing their network infrastructure. Operators can increase their revenues for connectivity and Digital Rights Management (DRM)-based license distribution of the multimedia content, depending on the content and on the desired business model

Developing a Modern Infrastructure for Open Distance Education in China: The Implementation of the NCEC Project

The NCEC project was a joint venture between China and Europe to deliver Internet-based distance education in China. The project was proposed in 1995, sponsored by the European Union since 1998, and finally completed in 2002. This paper shows how the NCEC project was planned and developed, and the importance of its role in the history of Internet application development in China

Toward a broadband service delivery model over wireless technologies to resource-constrained public high schools in South Africa

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are capable of expanding access to quality education, educational resources, and also provide teachers with new skills. Nevertheless, a majority of rural public schools have limited ICTs, mainly due to geographical landscape, lack of service delivery and poverty. As a result, they currently seem not to be adequately benefiting from current advancements in ICTs. The main objective of this research study was to investigate an appropriate broadband services delivery model using wireless access technologies, such as a Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) and Enhanced data rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) to deliver electronic-based educational information to resource-constrained public high schools. An exploratory case study approach was adopted to identify and understand the challenges faced by rural schools in the Greater Tubatse Municipality (GTM), including educational services and content considered by the schools as relevant and useful. The research results indicate that resource-constrained schools in the GTM are facing challenges of lack of access to electronic educational information and services, and as a result, teaching and learning becomes limiting and challenging. Based on the research findings, the results show that having access to learning material via electronic platforms could afford educators and learners the opportunity to interact with the outside world, improve learning and teaching and benefit the community as a whole. The broadband services delivery conceptual model (BSDCM) was proposed, developed and evaluated to address the lack of electronic educational information and services for resource-constrained public high schools. The BSDCM is composed of both technical and non-technical components that consider requirements of all role players, ICT challenges, policy makers and Information Communication Technology for Education (ICT4ED) interventions. The proposed model addressed some of the challenges regarding lack of access to educational content. However, it is recommended that the ICT4ED policies governing the use of mobile devices in the classrooms be introduced by the relevant authorities. In addition, a comparative analysis of other network technologies should be conducted to establish if the TCP/IP header compression on Point to Point Protocol (PPP) improves the performance of the network in resource-constrained environments. Furthermore, it is recommended that further research and experiments be conducted to determine if other various third party content providers could create and deploy various educational services and content for different computing platforms using the proposed BSDCM.School of ComputingM. Tech (Information Technology

Towards Modular and Flexible Access Control on Smart Mobile Devices

Smart mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have become an integral part of our daily personal and professional lives. These devices are connected to a wide variety of Internet services and host a vast amount of applications, which access, store and process security- and privacy-sensitive data. A rich set of sensors, ranging from microphones and cameras to location and acceleration sensors, allows these applications and their back end services to reason about user behavior. Further, enterprise administrators integrate smart mobile devices into their IT infrastructures to enable comfortable work on the go. Unsurprisingly, this abundance of available high-quality information has made smart mobile devices an interesting target for attackers, and the number of malicious and privacy-intrusive applications has steadily been rising. Detection and mitigation of such malicious behavior are in focus of mobile security research today. In particular, the Android operating system has received special attention by both academia and industry due to its popularity and open-source character. Related work has scrutinized its security architecture, analyzed attack vectors and vulnerabilities and proposed a wide variety of security extensions. While these extensions have diverse goals, many of them constitute modifications of the Android operating system and extend its default permission-based access control model. However, they are not generic and only address specific security and privacy concerns. The goal of this dissertation is to provide generic and extensible system-centric access control architectures, which can serve as a solid foundation for the instantiation of use-case specific security extensions. In doing so, we enable security researchers, enterprise administrators and end users to design, deploy and distribute security extensions without further modification of the underlying operating system. To achieve this goal, we first analyze the mobile device ecosystem and discuss how Android's security architecture aims to address its inherent threats. We proceed to survey related work on Android security, focusing on system-centric security extensions, and derive a set of generic requirements for extensible access control architectures targeting smart mobile devices. We then present two extensible access control architectures, which address these requirements by providing policy-based and programmable interfaces for the instantiation of use-case specific security solutions. By implementing a set of practical use-cases, ranging from context-aware access control, dynamic application behavior analysis to isolation of security domains we demonstrate the advantages of system-centric access control architectures over application-layer approaches. Finally, we conclude this dissertation by discussing an alternative approach, which is based on application-layer deputies and can be deployed whenever practical limitations prohibit the deployment of system-centric solutions

International conference "Information technologies in education in the 21st century": Conference proceedings.

Proceedings of a conference which concluded TEMPUS project JEP 25008_200