UCLP in flow state router platforms

Actualment, els serveis òptics són essencialment estàtics, en els que els usuaris sol•liciten als proveïdors o ISPs l’ample de banda que necessiten durant un cert període de temps. Aquest serveis s’aprovisionen de forma manual, la qual cosa pot suposar un treball llarg i costós. Els usuaris o les mateixes aplicacions necessiten flexibilitat per controlar els seus serveis al llarg de diferents dominis independents, ja que estan en millor posició que els proveïdors per escollir i gestionar camins òptics adaptats a les seves necessitats. Aquesta idea ha donat lloc a un nou paradigma en el mon de les xarxes anomenat “xarxes controlades per usuaris”. Amb el patrocini de Canarie, s’està duent a terme una investigació per tal d’aconseguir les xarxes controlades pels usuaris. D’aquesta investigació ha sorgit un sistema anomenat "User-Controlled Lightpath Provisioning" (UCLP) (Provisió de camins òptics controlats per usuaris) que permet als usuaris establir canals òptics d’extrem a extrem a través de diferents Sistemes Autònoms. Aquest software s’està desenvolupant al CRC (Communications Research Centre, Canada) amb la col•laboració de la Fundació i2Cat. UCLP es un sistema de gestió distribuït que utilitza la idea de OON (Objecte Orientat a Xarxa) i que es pot explicar com una eina de partició i configuració que representa cada recurs d’una xarxa física (fibres, targetes) com un servei o objecte. Aquest servei/objecte es pot posar sota el control de diversos usuaris de la xarxa per tal que puguin crear les seves pròpies topologies de xarxa IP. Fins ara, UCLP treballava amb equips de capa 1 i 2. El principal objectiu d’aquest projecte és trobar una solució per integrar equips de capa 3 al sistema. Concretament, es vol introduir un router basat en una nova tecnologia anomenada “estat de flux” (flow-state). Aquesta tecnologia, que permet reconèixer fluxos basats en determinades funcions de hash, realitza un extens procés al primer paquet d’un flux, associa aquest flux amb un estat i aplica el resultat d’aquest procés als següents paquets del flux, amb els quals, enlloc de realitzar enrutament, simplement els reenviarà sense mirar les taules d’enrutament

Telecommunication Economics

This book constitutes a collaborative and selected documentation of the scientific outcome of the European COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel "A Telecommunications Economics COST Network" which run from October 2007 to October 2011. Involving experts from around 20 European countries, the goal of Econ@Tel was to develop a strategic research and training network among key people and organizations in order to enhance Europe's competence in the field of telecommunications economics. Reflecting the organization of the COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel in working groups the following four major research areas are addressed: - evolution and regulation of communication ecosystems; - social and policy implications of communication technologies; - economics and governance of future networks; - future networks management architectures and mechanisms

Telecommunication Economics

This book constitutes a collaborative and selected documentation of the scientific outcome of the European COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel "A Telecommunications Economics COST Network" which run from October 2007 to October 2011. Involving experts from around 20 European countries, the goal of Econ@Tel was to develop a strategic research and training network among key people and organizations in order to enhance Europe's competence in the field of telecommunications economics. Reflecting the organization of the COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel in working groups the following four major research areas are addressed: - evolution and regulation of communication ecosystems; - social and policy implications of communication technologies; - economics and governance of future networks; - future networks management architectures and mechanisms

Telecommunications Networks

This book guides readers through the basics of rapidly emerging networks to more advanced concepts and future expectations of Telecommunications Networks. It identifies and examines the most pressing research issues in Telecommunications and it contains chapters written by leading researchers, academics and industry professionals. Telecommunications Networks - Current Status and Future Trends covers surveys of recent publications that investigate key areas of interest such as: IMS, eTOM, 3G/4G, optimization problems, modeling, simulation, quality of service, etc. This book, that is suitable for both PhD and master students, is organized into six sections: New Generation Networks, Quality of Services, Sensor Networks, Telecommunications, Traffic Engineering and Routing

Security for Decentralised Service Location - Exemplified with Real-Time Communication Session Establishment

Decentralised Service Location, i.e. finding an application communication endpoint based on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT), is a fairly new concept. The precise security implications of this approach have not been studied in detail. More importantly, a detailed analysis regarding the applicability of existing security solutions to this concept has not been conducted. In many cases existing client-server approaches to security may not be feasible. In addition, to understand the necessity for such an analysis, it is key to acknowledge that Decentralised Service Location has some unique security requirements compared to other P2P applications such as filesharing or live streaming. This thesis concerns the security challenges for Decentralised Service Location. The goals of our work are on the one hand to precisely understand the security requirements and research challenges for Decentralised Service Location, and on the other hand to develop and evaluate corresponding security mechanisms. The thesis is organised as follows. First, fundamentals are explained and the scope of the thesis is defined. Decentralised Service Location is defined and P2PSIP is explained technically as a prototypical example. Then, a security analysis for P2PSIP is presented. Based on this security analysis, security requirements for Decentralised Service Location and the corresponding research challenges -- i.e. security concerns not suitably mitigated by existing solutions -- are derived. Second, several decentralised solutions are presented and evaluated to tackle the security challenges for Decentralised Service Location. We present decentralised algorithms to enable availability of the DHTs lookup service in the presence of adversary nodes. These algorithms are evaluated via simulation and compared to analytical bounds. Further, a cryptographic approach based on self-certifying identities is illustrated and discussed. This approach enables decentralised integrity protection of location-bindings. Finally, a decentralised approach to assess unknown identities is introduced. The approach is based on a Web-of-Trust model. It is evaluated via prototypical implementation. Finally, the thesis closes with a summary of the main contributions and a discussion of open issues

Towards a cloud enabler : from an optical network resource provisioning system to a generalized architecture for dynamic infrastructure services provisioning

This work was developed during a period where most of the optical management and provisioning system where manual and proprietary. This work contributed to the evolution of the state of the art of optical networks with new architectures and advanced virtual infrastructure services. The evolution of optical networks, and internet globally, have been very promising during the last decade. The impact of mobile technology, grid, cloud computing, HDTV, augmented reality and big data, among many others, have driven the evolution of optical networks towards current service technologies, mostly based on SDN (Software Defined Networking) architectures and NFV(Network Functions Virtualisation). Moreover, the convergence of IP/Optical networks and IT services, and the evolution of the internet and optical infrastructures, have generated novel service orchestrators and open source frameworks. In fact, technology has evolved that fast that none could foresee how important Internet is for our current lives. Said in other words, technology was forced to evolve in a way that network architectures became much more transparent, dynamic and flexible to the end users (applications, user interfaces or simple APIs). This Thesis exposes the work done on defining new architectures for Service Oriented Networks and the contribution to the state of the art. The research work is divided into three topics. It describes the evolution from a Network Resource Provisioning System to an advanced Service Plane, and ends with a new architecture that virtualized the optical infrastructure in order to provide coordinated, on-demand and dynamic services between the application and the network infrastructure layer, becoming an enabler for the new generation of cloud network infrastructures. The work done on defining a Network Resource Provisioning System established the first bases for future work on network infrastructure virtualization. The UCLP (User Light Path Provisioning) technology was the first attempt for Customer Empowered Networks and Articulated Private Networks. It empowered the users and brought virtualization and partitioning functionalities into the optical data plane, with new interfaces for dynamic service provisioning. The work done within the development of a new Service Plane allowed the provisioning of on-demand connectivity services from the application, and in a multi-domain and multi-technology scenario based on a virtual network infrastructure composed of resources from different infrastructure providers. This Service Plane facilitated the deployment of applications consuming large amounts of data under deterministic conditions, so allowing the networks behave as a Grid-class resource. It became the first on-demand provisioning system that at lower levels allowed the creation of one virtual domain composed from resources of different providers. The last research topic presents an architecture that consolidated the work done in virtualisation while enhancing the capabilities to upper layers, so fully integrating the optical network infrastructure into the cloud environment, and so providing an architecture that enabled cloud services by integrating the request of optical network and IT infrastructure services together at the same level. It set up a new trend into the research community and evolved towards the technology we use today based on SDN and NFV. Summing up, the work presented is focused on the provisioning of virtual infrastructures from the architectural point of view of optical networks and IT infrastructures, together with the design and definition of novel service layers. It means, architectures that enabled the creation of virtual infrastructures composed of optical networks and IT resources, isolated and provisioned on-demand and in advance with infrastructure re-planning functionalities, and a new set of interfaces to open up those services to applications or third parties.Aquesta tesi es va desenvolupar durant un període on la majoria de sistemes de gestió de xarxa òptica eren manuals i basats en sistemes propietaris. En aquest sentit, la feina presentada va contribuir a l'evolució de l'estat de l'art de les xarxes òptiques tant a nivell d’arquitectures com de provisió d’infraestructures virtuals. L'evolució de les xarxes òptiques, i d'Internet a nivell mundial, han estat molt prometedores durant l'última dècada. L'impacte de la tecnologia mòbil, la computació al núvol, la televisió d'alta definició, la realitat augmentada i el big data, entre molts altres, han impulsat l'evolució cap a xarxes d’altes prestacions amb nous serveis basats en SDN (Software Defined Networking) i NFV (Funcions de xarxa La virtualització). D'altra banda, la convergència de xarxes òptiques i els serveis IT, junt amb l'evolució d'Internet i de les infraestructures òptiques, han generat nous orquestradors de serveis i frameworks basats en codi obert. La tecnologia ha evolucionat a una velocitat on ningú podria haver predit la importància que Internet està tenint en el nostre dia a dia. Dit en altres paraules, la tecnologia es va veure obligada a evolucionar d'una manera on les arquitectures de xarxa es fessin més transparent, dinàmiques i flexibles vers als usuaris finals (aplicacions, interfícies d'usuari o APIs simples). Aquesta Tesi presenta noves arquitectures de xarxa òptica orientades a serveis. El treball de recerca es divideix en tres temes. Es presenta un sistema de virtualització i aprovisionament de recursos de xarxa i la seva evolució a un pla de servei avançat, per acabar presentant el disseny d’una nova arquitectura capaç de virtualitzar la infraestructura òptica i IT i proporcionar serveis de forma coordinada, i sota demanda, entre l'aplicació i la capa d'infraestructura de xarxa òptica. Tot esdevenint un facilitador per a la nova generació d'infraestructures de xarxa en el núvol. El treball realitzat en la definició del sistema de virtualització de recursos va establir les primeres bases sobre la virtualització de la infraestructura de xarxa òptica en el marc de les “Customer Empowered Networks” i “Articulated Private Networks”. Amb l’objectiu de virtualitzar el pla de dades òptic, i oferir noves interfícies per a la provisió de serveis dinàmics de xarxa. En quant al pla de serveis presentat, aquest va facilitat la provisió de serveis de connectivitat sota demanda per part de l'aplicació, tant en entorns multi-domini, com en entorns amb múltiples tecnologies. Aquest pla de servei, anomenat Harmony, va facilitar el desplegament de noves aplicacions que consumien grans quantitats de dades en condicions deterministes. En aquest sentit, va permetre que les xarxes es comportessin com un recurs Grid, i per tant, va esdevenir el primer sistema d'aprovisionament sota demanda que permetia la creació de dominis virtuals de xarxa composts a partir de recursos de diferents proveïdors. Finalment, es presenta l’evolució d’un pla de servei cap una arquitectura global que consolida el treball realitzat a nivell de convergència d’infraestructures (òptica + IT) i millora les capacitats de les capes superiors. Aquesta arquitectura va facilitar la plena integració de la infraestructura de xarxa òptica a l'entorn del núvol. En aquest sentit, aquest resultats van evolucionar cap a les tendències actuals de SDN i NFV. En resum, el treball presentat es centra en la provisió d'infraestructures virtuals des del punt de vista d’arquitectures de xarxa òptiques i les infraestructures IT, juntament amb el disseny i definició de nous serveis de xarxa avançats, tal i com ho va ser el servei de re-planificació dinàmicaPostprint (published version

Change is inevitable but compliance is optional : coworker social influence and behavioral work-arounds in the EHR implementation of healthcare organizations

textThe implementation of planned organizational change is ultimately a communication-related phenomenon, and as such, it is imperative that organizational communication scholars examine the interactions surrounding EHR implementation and understand how users (e.g. healthcare practitioners) utilize, evaluate, and deliberate this new technological innovation. Previous research on planned organizational change has called for researchers to adopt a more dynamic perspective that emphasizes the active agency of organizational members throughout implementation processes and focuses on informal implementers and change reinvention (work-arounds) as individuals actively reinterpret and personalize their work roles during implementation socialization. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap in research by demonstrating how communication between doctors, nurses, and other health professionals affects the adoption, maintenance, alternation, modification, or rejection of EHR systems within health care organizations. To delve into these inquiries and examine the intersecting domains of medical informatics and organizational communication research, this dissertation proceeds in the following manner: First, a literature review, capitalizing on Laurie Lewis’s work in planned organizational change and social constructionist views of technology use in organizations, outlines the assumptions that undergird this research. Next, this dissertation builds a model that predicts the communicative and structural antecedents of the study outcome variables, which include 1) organizational resistance to EHR implementation, 2) employees’ perception of EHR implementation success, 3) levels of change reinvention—or work-arounds—due to change initiatives and activities, and 4) employees’ perceptions of the quality of the organizational communication surrounding the change. Hypotheses guiding the model specification are provided and are followed by a description of the empirical methods and procedures that were utilized to explore the variable relationships. Results of the SEM model suggest that work-arounds could play a mediating role governing the relationship between informal social influence and the outcome variables in the study. In addition, one-way ANOVAs and multiple regression analyses reveal that physicians are the most resistant to EHR implementation and perceived change communication quality positively predicts perceived EHR implementation success and perceived relative advantage of EHR and negatively predicts employee resistance. A discussion of the expected and unexpected results is offered in addition to study limitation and future directions.Communication Studie

IP Mobility in Wireless Operator Networks

Wireless network access is gaining increased heterogeneity in terms of the types of IP capable access technologies. The access network heterogeneity is an outcome of incremental and evolutionary approach of building new infrastructure. The recent success of multi-radio terminals drives both building a new infrastructure and implicit deployment of heterogeneous access networks. Typically there is no economical reason to replace the existing infrastructure when building a new one. The gradual migration phase usually takes several years. IP-based mobility across different access networks may involve both horizontal and vertical handovers. Depending on the networking environment, the mobile terminal may be attached to the network through multiple access technologies. Consequently, the terminal may send and receive packets through multiple networks simultaneously. This dissertation addresses the introduction of IP Mobility paradigm into the existing mobile operator network infrastructure that have not originally been designed for multi-access and IP Mobility. We propose a model for the future wireless networking and roaming architecture that does not require revolutionary technology changes and can be deployed without unnecessary complexity. The model proposes a clear separation of operator roles: (i) access operator, (ii) service operator, and (iii) inter-connection and roaming provider. The separation allows each type of an operator to have their own development path and business models without artificial bindings with each other. We also propose minimum requirements for the new model. We present the state of the art of IP Mobility. We also present results of standardization efforts in IP-based wireless architectures. Finally, we present experimentation results of IP-level mobility in various wireless operator deployments.Erilaiset langattomat verkkoyhteydet lisääntyvät Internet-kykyisten teknologioiden muodossa. Lukuisten eri teknologioiden päällekkäinen käyttö johtuu vähitellen ja tarpeen mukaan rakennetusta verkkoinfrastruktuurista. Useita radioteknologioita (kuten WLAN, GSM ja UMTS) sisältävien päätelaitteiden (kuten älypuhelimet ja kannettavat tietokoneet) viimeaikainen kaupallinen menestys edesauttaa uuden verkkoinfrastruktuurin rakentamista, sekä mahdollisesti johtaa verkkoteknologioiden kirjon lisääntymiseen. Olemassa olevaa verkkoinfrastruktuuria ei kaupallisista syistä kannata korvata uudella teknologialla yhdellä kertaa, vaan vaiheittainen siirtymävaihe kestää tyypillisesti useita vuosia. Internet-kykyiset päätelaitteet voivat liikkua joko saman verkkoteknologian sisällä tai eri verkkoteknologioiden välillä. Verkkoympäristöstä riippuen liikkuvat päätelaitteet voivat liittyä verkkoon useiden verkkoyhteyksien kautta. Näin ollen päätelaite voi lähettää ja vastaanottaa tietoliikennepaketteja yhtäaikaisesti lukuisia verkkoja pitkin. Tämä väitöskirja käsittelee Internet-teknologioiden liikkuvuutta ja näiden teknologioiden tuomista olemassa oleviin langattomien verkko-operaattorien verkkoinfrastruktuureihin. Käsiteltäviä verkkoinfrastruktuureita ei alun perin ole suunniteltu Internet-teknologian liikkuvuuden ja monien yhtäaikaisten yhteyksien ehdoilla. Tässä työssä ehdotetaan tulevaisuuden langattomien verkkojen arkkitehtuurimallia ja ratkaisuja verkkovierailujen toteuttamiseksi. Ehdotettu arkkitehtuuri voidaan toteuttaa ilman mittavia teknologisia mullistuksia. Mallin mukaisessa ehdotuksessa verkko-operaattorin roolit jaetaan selkeästi (i) verkko-operaattoriin, (ii) palveluoperaattoriin ja (iii) yhteys- sekä verkkovierailuoperaattoriin. Roolijako mahdollistaa sen, että kukin operaattorityyppi voi kehittyä itsenäisesti, ja että teennäiset verkkoteknologiasidonnaisuudet poistuvat palveluiden tuottamisessa. Työssä esitetään myös alustava vaatimuslista ehdotetulle mallille, esimerkiksi yhteysoperaattorien laatuvaatimukset. Väitöskirja esittelee myös liikkuvien Internet-teknologioiden viimeisimmän kehityksen. Työssä näytetään lisäksi standardointituloksia Internet-kykyisissä langattomissa arkkitehtuureissa

Authenticity framing and market creation for meta organisations: The case of the Swartland Independent Producers in the South African wine field

This PhD thesis studies the Swartland Independent Producers (SIP) meta-organisation, located in the Western Cape wine region of South Africa, and asks: how and why the collective rendering of authenticity creates markets? Seventy-one interviews were realised with producers making “authentic wine” and other market participants active in the South African wine industry between 2010 and 2016. How and why businesses create markets by rendering authenticity through collective action organised within meta-organisations has not been fully explored in the organisational authenticity literature. The framework developed through a qualitative analysis of the SIP case, contributes to filling this gap by showing that authenticity can be constructed, and new markets created for meta-organisations, via the interplay of two sets of intersecting meta-framings: authenticity work and authentication work, and hot and cool authenticity framing. This thesis demonstrates that authenticity work may comprise three meso-framings: claiming purity, performing charisma and meta-organisational tethering. Simultaneously, this study conceptualises how market participants purposively engage in authentication work through meso-framings of polarising evaluation, valorising status, and reframing meaning. The theoretical framework refines the current scholarly explanation of why rendered authenticity creates markets. By bridging the sociology and organisational literatures dedicated to authenticity, this PhD developed four novel authenticity meta-framing constructs: hot and cool authenticity work and hot and cool authentication work. Through further theorising their interactions, this study advances current academic knowledge on how and why rendering authenticity is a central concern for businesses intending to create markets through meta-organisational collective action