Flexible programmable networking: A reflective, component-based approach

The need for programmability and adaptability in networking systems is becoming increasingly important. More specifically, the challenge is in the ability to add services rapidly, and be able to deploy, configure and reconfigure them as easily as possible. Such demand is creating a considerable shift in the way networks are expected to operate in the future. This is the main aim of programmable networking research community, and in our project we are investigating a component-based approach to the structuring of programmable networking software. Our intention is to apply the notion of components, component frameworks and reflection ubiquitously, thus accommodating all the different elements that comprise a programmable networking system

The OCarePlatform : a context-aware system to support independent living

Background: Currently, healthcare services, such as institutional care facilities, are burdened with an increasing number of elderly people and individuals with chronic illnesses and a decreasing number of competent caregivers. Objectives: To relieve the burden on healthcare services, independent living at home could be facilitated, by offering individuals and their (in)formal caregivers support in their daily care and needs. With the rise of pervasive healthcare, new information technology solutions can assist elderly people ("residents") and their caregivers to allow residents to live independently for as long as possible. Methods: To this end, the OCarePlatform system was designed. This semantic, data-driven and cloud based back-end system facilitates independent living by offering information and knowledge-based services to the resident and his/her (in)formal caregivers. Data and context information are gathered to realize context-aware and personalized services and to support residents in meeting their daily needs. This body of data, originating from heterogeneous data and information sources, is sent to personalized services, where is fused, thus creating an overview of the resident's current situation. Results: The architecture of the OCarePlatform is proposed, which is based on a service-oriented approach, together with its different components and their interactions. The implementation details are presented, together with a running example. A scalability and performance study of the OCarePlatform was performed. The results indicate that the OCarePlatform is able to support a realistic working environment and respond to a trigger in less than 5 seconds. The system is highly dependent on the allocated memory. Conclusion: The data-driven character of the OCarePlatform facilitates easy plug-in of new functionality, enabling the design of personalized, context-aware services. The OCarePlatform leads to better support for elderly people and individuals with chronic illnesses, who live independently. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved

Interoperability and Standards: The Way for Innovative Design in Networked Working Environments

Organised by: Cranfield UniversityIn today’s networked economy, strategic business partnerships and outsourcing has become the dominant paradigm where companies focus on core competencies and skills, as creative design, manufacturing, or selling. However, achieving seamless interoperability is an ongoing challenge these networks are facing, due to their distributed and heterogeneous nature. Part of the solution relies on adoption of standards for design and product data representation, but for sectors predominantly characterized by SMEs, such as the furniture sector, implementations need to be tailored to reduce costs. This paper recommends a set of best practices for the fast adoption of the ISO funStep standard modules and presents a framework that enables the usage of visualization data as a way to reduce costs in manufacturing and electronic catalogue design.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Compan

Secure Integration of Desktop Grids and Compute Clusters Based on Virtualization and Meta-Scheduling

Reducing the cost for business or scientific computations, is a commonly expressed goal in today’s companies. Using the available computers of local employees or the outsourcing of such computations are two obvious solutions to save money for additional hardware. Both possibilities exhibit security related disadvantages, since the deployed software and data can be copied or tampered if appropriate countermeasures are not taken. In this paper, an approach is presented to let a local desktop machines and remote cluster resources be securely combined into a singel Grid environment. Solutions to several problems in the areas of secure virtual networks, meta-scheduling and accessing cluster schedulers from desktop Grids are proposed

LightBox: Full-stack Protected Stateful Middlebox at Lightning Speed

Running off-site software middleboxes at third-party service providers has been a popular practice. However, routing large volumes of raw traffic, which may carry sensitive information, to a remote site for processing raises severe security concerns. Prior solutions often abstract away important factors pertinent to real-world deployment. In particular, they overlook the significance of metadata protection and stateful processing. Unprotected traffic metadata like low-level headers, size and count, can be exploited to learn supposedly encrypted application contents. Meanwhile, tracking the states of 100,000s of flows concurrently is often indispensable in production-level middleboxes deployed at real networks. We present LightBox, the first system that can drive off-site middleboxes at near-native speed with stateful processing and the most comprehensive protection to date. Built upon commodity trusted hardware, Intel SGX, LightBox is the product of our systematic investigation of how to overcome the inherent limitations of secure enclaves using domain knowledge and customization. First, we introduce an elegant virtual network interface that allows convenient access to fully protected packets at line rate without leaving the enclave, as if from the trusted source network. Second, we provide complete flow state management for efficient stateful processing, by tailoring a set of data structures and algorithms optimized for the highly constrained enclave space. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that LightBox, with all security benefits, can achieve 10Gbps packet I/O, and that with case studies on three stateful middleboxes, it can operate at near-native speed.Comment: Accepted at ACM CCS 201

Supporting UK-wide e-clinical trials and studies

As clinical trials and epidemiological studies become increasingly large, covering wider (national) geographical areas and involving ever broader populations, the need to provide an information management infrastructure that can support such endeavours is essential. A wealth of clinical data now exists at varying levels of care (primary care, secondary care, etc.). Simple, secure access to such data would greatly benefit the key processes involved in clinical trials and epidemiological studies: patient recruitment, data collection and study management. The Grid paradigm provides one model for seamless access to such data and support of these processes. The VOTES project (Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies) is a collaboration between several UK institutions to implement a generic framework that effectively leverages the available health-care information across the UK to support more efficient gathering and processing of trial information. The structure of the information available in the health-care domain in the UK itself varies broadly in-line with the national boundaries of the constituent states (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). Technologies must address these political boundaries and the impact these boundaries have in terms of for example, information governance, policies, and of course large-scale heterogeneous distribution of the data sets themselves. This paper outlines the methodology in implementing the framework between three specific data sources that serve as useful case studies: Scottish data from the Scottish Care Information (SCI) Store data repository, data on the General Practice Research Database (GPRD) diabetes trial at Imperial College London, and benign prostate hypoplasia (BPH) data from the University of Nottingham. The design, implementation and wider research issues are discussed along with the technological challenges encountered in the project in the application of Grid technologies

Advanced eGovernment Information Service Bus (eGov-Bus)

The eGov-Bus project provides citizens and businesses with improved access to virtual public services, which are based on existing national eGovernment Web services and which support cross-border life events. Requirements and specific rules of these life events are considered, and personalization of user preferences is supported. eGov-Bus is based on adaptable process management technologies, allowing for virtual services which are dynamically combined from existing national eGovernment services. In this way, a comprehensive workflow process is set up, allowing for service-level agreements, an audit trail and explanation of the process to the end user. The eGov-Bus process engine operates on top of a virtual repository, providing a high-level semantic view of information retrieved from heterogeneous information sources, such as eGovernment Web services. Further, eGov-Bus relies on a security framework to ensure all high-level security requirements are met. The eGov-Bus architecture is business oriented, it focuses on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts, asynchronously combining Web services and providing a Service Bus.Frameworks and Guidelines, eGovernment Ontologies, Admininistrative Process Design, Life Events, Web Services, Service Bus Integration