Content Sharing in Mobile Networks with Infrastructure: Planning and Management

This thesis focuses on mobile ad-hoc networks (with pedestrian or vehicular mobility) having infrastructure support. We deal with the problems of design, deployment and management of such networks. A first issue to address concerns infrastructure itself: how pervasive should it be in order for the network to operate at the same time efficiently and in a cost-effective manner? How should the units composing it (e.g., access points) be placed? There are several approaches to such questions in literature, and this thesis studies and compares them. Furthermore, in order to effectively design the infrastructure, we need to understand how and how much it will be used. As an example, what is the relationship between infrastructure-to-node and node-to-node communication? How far away, in time and space, do data travel before its destination is reached? A common assumption made when dealing with such problems is that perfect knowledge about the current and future node mobility is available. In this thesis, we also deal with the problem of assessing the impact that an imperfect, limited knowledge has on network performance. As far as the management of the network is concerned, this thesis presents a variant of the paradigm known as publish-and-subscribe. With respect to the original paradigm, our goal was to ensure a high probability of finding the requested content, even in presence of selfish, uncooperative nodes, or even nodes whose precise goal is harming the system. Each node is allowed to get from the network an amount of content which corresponds to the amount of content provided to other nodes. Nodes with caching capabilities are assisted in using their cache in order to improve the amount of offered conten

SNAP : A Software-Defined & Named-Data Oriented Publish-Subscribe Framework for Emerging Wireless Application Systems

The evolution of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) has given rise to an emergent class of CPSs defined by ad-hoc wireless connectivity, mobility, and resource constraints in computation, memory, communications, and battery power. These systems are expected to fulfill essential roles in critical infrastructure sectors. Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) and a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV swarm) are examples of such systems. The significant utility of these systems, coupled with their economic viability, is a crucial indicator of their anticipated growth in the future. Typically, the tasks assigned to these systems have strict Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements and require sensing, perception, and analysis of a substantial amount of data. To fulfill these QoS requirements, the system requires network connectivity, data dissemination, and data analysis methods that can operate well within a system\u27s limitations. Traditional Internet protocols and methods for network connectivity and data dissemination are typically designed for well-engineering cyber systems and do not comprehensively support this new breed of emerging systems. The imminent growth of these CPSs presents an opportunity to develop broadly applicable methods that can meet the stated system requirements for a diverse range of systems and integrate these systems with the Internet. These methods could potentially be standardized to achieve interoperability among various systems of the future. This work presents a solution that can fulfill the communication and data dissemination requirements of a broad class of emergent CPSs. The two main contributions of this work are the Application System (APPSYS) system abstraction, and a complementary communications framework called the Software-Defined NAmed-data enabled Publish-Subscribe (SNAP) communication framework. An APPSYS is a new breed of Internet application representing the mobile and resource-constrained CPSs supporting data-intensive and QoS-sensitive safety-critical tasks, referred to as the APPSYS\u27s mission. The functioning of the APPSYS is closely aligned with the needs of the mission. The standard APPSYS architecture is distributed and partitions the system into multiple clusters where each cluster is a hierarchical sub-network. The SNAP communication framework within the APPSYS utilized principles of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) through the publish-subscribe communication paradigm. It further extends the role of brokers within the publish-subscribe paradigm to create a distributed software-defined control plane. The SNAP framework leverages the APPSYS design characteristics to provide flexible and robust communication and dynamic and distributed control-plane decision-making that successfully allows the APPSYS to meet the communication requirements of data-oriented and QoS-sensitive missions. In this work, we present the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of an APPSYS through an exemplar UAV swarm APPSYS. We evaluate the benefits offered by the APPSYS design and the SNAP communication framework in meeting the dynamically changed requirements of a data-intensive and QoS-sensitive Coordinated Search and Tracking (CSAT) mission operating in a UAV swarm APPSYS on the battlefield. Results from the performance evaluation demonstrate that the UAV swarm APPSYS successfully monitors and mitigates network impairment impacting a mission\u27s QoS to support the mission\u27s QoS requirements

In Broker We Trust: A Double-auction Approach for Resource Allocation in NFV Markets

Network function virtualization (NFV) is an emerging scheme to provide virtualized network function services for next-generation networks. However, finding an efficient way to distribute different resources to customers is difficult. In this paper, we develop a new double-auction approach named DARA that is used for both service function chain routing and NFV price adjustment to maximize the profits of all participants. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to adopt a double-auction strategy in this area. The objective of the proposed approach is to maximize the profits of three types of participants: 1) NFV broker; 2) customers; and 3) service providers. Moreover, we prove that the approach is a weakly dominant strategy in a given NFV market by finding the Bayesian Nash equilibrium in the double-auction game. Finally, according to the results of the performance evaluation, our approach outperforms the single-auction mechanism with higher profits for the three types of participants in the given NFV market

Access Control Mechanisms in Named Data Networks:A Comprehensive Survey

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has recently emerged as a prominent candidate for the Future Internet Architecture (FIA) that addresses existing issues with the host-centric communication model of the current TCP/IP-based Internet. Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the most recent and active ICN architectures that provides a clean slate approach for Internet communication. NDN provides intrinsic content security where security is directly provided to the content instead of communication channel. Among other security aspects, Access Control (AC) rules specify the privileges for the entities that can access the content. In TCP/IP-based AC systems, due to the client-server communication model, the servers control which client can access a particular content. In contrast, ICN-based networks use content names to drive communication and decouple the content from its original location. This phenomenon leads to the loss of control over the content causing different challenges for the realization of efficient AC mechanisms. To date, considerable efforts have been made to develop various AC mechanisms in NDN. In this paper, we provide a detailed and comprehensive survey of the AC mechanisms in NDN. We follow a holistic approach towards AC in NDN where we first summarize the ICN paradigm, describe the changes from channel-based security to content-based security and highlight different cryptographic algorithms and security protocols in NDN. We then classify the existing AC mechanisms into two main categories: Encryption-based AC and Encryption-independent AC. Each category has different classes based on the working principle of AC (e.g., Attribute-based AC, Name-based AC, Identity-based AC, etc). Finally, we present the lessons learned from the existing AC mechanisms and identify the challenges of NDN-based AC at large, highlighting future research directions for the community.Comment: This paper has been accepted for publication by the ACM Computing Surveys. The final version will be published by the AC

Scheduling Advertisement Delivery in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular users are emerging as a prime market for targeted advertisement, where advertisements (ads) are sent from network points of access to vehicles, and displayed to passengers only if they are relevant to them. In this study, we take the viewpoint of a broker managing the advertisement system, and getting paid every time a relevant ad is displayed to an interested user. The broker selects the ads to broadcast at each point of access so as to maximize its revenue. In this context, we observe that choosing the ads that best fit the users’ interest could actually hurt the broker’s revenue. In light of this conflict, we present Volfied, an algorithm allowing for conflict-free, near-optimal ad selection with very low computational complexity. Our performance evaluation, carried out through real-world vehicular traces, shows that Volfied increases the broker revenue by up to 70% with provably low computational complexity, compared to state-of-the-art alternatives.This work is supported by the European Commission through the H2020 5G-TRANSFORMER project (Project ID 761536).En prens