Application Layer Multicast Extensions to RELOAD

Native multicast deployment is relatively slow and linked with a number of issues. However, there are a number of native multicast regions. Application Layer Multicast (ALM) can be used in areas of the network where there is no native multicast available. The SAM (Scalable Adaptive Multicast) Research group within the IRTF is investigating hybrid approaches to multicast, involving native deployments were available and ALM in other regions. SAM is using a P2P overlay to connect the nodes. Here we describe a protocol and API extensions to RELOAD for constructing Scalable Adaptive Multicast (SAM) sessions using hybrid combinations of ALM, native multicast, and multicast tunnels. The Automatic Multicast Tunneling (AMT) relay and gateway elements are employed for interoperation between native regions and ALM regions

A Common API for Transparent Hybrid Multicast

Group communication services exist in a large variety of flavors and technical implementations at different protocol layers. Multicast data distribution is most efficiently performed on the lowest available layer, but a heterogeneous deployment status of multicast technologies throughout the Internet requires an adaptive service binding at runtime. Today, it is difficult to write an application that runs everywhere and at the same time makes use of the most efficient multicast service available in the network. Facing robustness requirements, developers are frequently forced to use a stable upper-layer protocol provided by the application itself. This document describes a common multicast API that is suitable for transparent communication in underlay and overlay and that grants access to the different flavors of multicast. It proposes an abstract naming scheme that uses multicast URIs, and it discusses mapping mechanisms between different namespaces and distribution technologies. Additionally, this document describes the application of this API for building gateways that interconnect current Multicast Domains throughout the Internet. It reports on an implementation of the programming Interface, including service middleware. This document is a product of the Scalable Adaptive Multicast (SAM) Research Group

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities

An Evaluation of Opportunistic Native Multicast

Hybrid multicast opportunistically combines Application Layer Multicast and native multicast protocols. This paper presents an evaluation of Opportunistic Native Multicast which uses the AMT multicast tunnelling protocol. We describe our opportunistic multicasting approach that tries to solve the islands phenomenon by building unicast tunnels to connect these islands while attempting to utilise the native multicast capability of the islands. It is expected that this hybrid approach will improve both efficiency and availability of multicast. We compare our approach to the ALM protocol SCRIBE. The comparison here was done using five metrics: Stress, Stretch, intra-island traffic, interisland traffic and Delivery rate. In all of them, our proposed model has shown improved results over ALM. Moreover, we investigated what effect the number of islands that the receivers are distributed into, has on performance

Hybrid CoAP-based resource discovery for the Internet of Things

Enabling automatic, efficient and scalable discovery of the resources provided by constrained low-power sensor and actuator networks is an important element to empower the transformation towards the Internet of Things (IoT). To this end, many centralized and distributed resource discovery approaches have been investigated. Clearly, each approach has its own motivations, advantages and drawbacks. In this article, we present a hybrid centralized/distributed resource discovery solution aiming to get the most out of both approaches. The proposed architecture employs the well-known Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and features a number of interesting discovery characteristics including scalability, time and cost efficiency, and adaptability. Using such a solution, network nodes can automatically and rapidly detect the presence of Resource Directories (RDs), via a proactive RD discovery mechanism, and perform discovery tasks through them. Nodes may, alternatively, fall back automatically to efficient fully-distributed discovery operations achieved through Trickle-enabled, CoAP-based technics. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture has been demonstrated by formal analysis and experimental evaluations on dedicated IoT platforms

Network coding for reliable wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are used in many applications and are now a key element in the increasingly growing Internet of Things. These networks are composed of small nodes including wireless communication modules, and in most of the cases are able to autonomously con gure themselves into networks, to ensure sensed data delivery. As more and more sensor nodes and networks join the Internet of Things, collaboration between geographically distributed systems are expected. Peer to peer overlay networks can assist in the federation of these systems, for them to collaborate. Since participating peers/proxies contribute to storage and processing, there is no burden on speci c servers and bandwidth bottlenecks are avoided. Network coding can be used to improve the performance of wireless sensor networks. The idea is for data from multiple links to be combined at intermediate encoding nodes, before further transmission. This technique proved to have a lot of potential in a wide range of applications. In the particular case of sensor networks, network coding based protocols and algorithms try to achieve a balance between low packet error rate and energy consumption. For network coding based constrained networks to be federated using peer to peer overlays, it is necessary to enable the storage of encoding vectors and coded data by such distributed storage systems. Packets can arrive to the overlay through any gateway/proxy (peers in the overlay), and lost packets can be recovered by the overlay (or client) using original and coded data that has been stored. The decoding process requires a decoding service at the overlay network. Such architecture, which is the focus of this thesis, will allow constrained networks to reduce packet error rate in an energy e cient way, while bene ting from an e ective distributed storage solution for their federation. This will serve as a basis for the proposal of mathematical models and algorithms that determine the most e ective routing trees, for packet forwarding toward sink/gateway nodes, and best amount and placement of encoding nodes.As redes de sensores sem fios são usadas em muitas aplicações e são hoje consideradas um elemento-chave para o desenvolvimento da Internet das Coisas. Compostas por nós de pequena dimensão que incorporam módulos de comunicação sem fios, grande parte destas redes possuem a capacidade de se configurarem de forma autónoma, formando sistemas em rede para garantir a entrega dos dados recolhidos. (…

A simulation model for hybrid multicast

In order to achieve one-to-many data delivery on the internet, native multicast is used and implemented in some parts of the Internet. On the other hand, application layer multicast (ALM), which uses P2P overlays (overlay multicast, OM), can be used to create multicast trees and deliver the data at the application layer. Despite Native Multicast being more efficient than Application Layer Multicast, it is not deployed widely. A hybrid multicast protocol has been proposed that opportunistically combines overlay multicast protocols and native multicast protocols to create and maintain hybrid multicast trees. The design for hybrid multicast trees leverages the AMT multicast tunneling protocol. It is expected that this hybrid approach will improve both efficiency and availability of multicast. This paper presents a simulation model for the Oversim/Omnet++ simulation framework to evaluate the performance of the hybrid multicast approach. Our model combines both a scalable overlay and a detailed network layer model that includes routers with native multicast support

IETF standardization in the field of the internet of things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no 258885 (SPITFIRE project), from the iMinds ICON projects GreenWeCan and O’CareCloudS, a FWO postdoc grant for Eli De Poorter and a VLIR PhD scholarship to Isam Ishaq

Architectural and mobility management designs in internet-based infrastructure wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have recently emerged to be a cost-effective solution to support large-scale wireless Internet access. They have numerous ap- plications, such as broadband Internet access, building automation, and intelligent transportation systems. One research challenge for Internet-based WMNs is to design efficient mobility management techniques for mobile users to achieve seamless roam- ing. Mobility management includes handoff management and location management. The objective of this research is to design new handoff and location management techniques for Internet-based infrastructure WMNs. Handoff management enables a wireless network to maintain active connections as mobile users move into new service areas. Previous solutions on handoff manage- ment in infrastructure WMNs mainly focus on intra-gateway mobility. New handoff issues involved in inter-gateway mobility in WMNs have not been properly addressed. Hence, a new architectural design is proposed to facilitate inter-gateway handoff man- agement in infrastructure WMNs. The proposed architecture is designed to specifi- cally address the special handoff design challenges in Internet-based WMNs. It can facilitate parallel executions of handoffs from multiple layers, in conjunction with a data caching mechanism which guarantees minimum packet loss during handoffs. Based on the proposed architecture, a Quality of Service (QoS) handoff mechanism is also proposed to achieve QoS requirements for both handoff and existing traffic before and after handoffs in the inter-gateway WMN environment. Location management in wireless networks serves the purpose of tracking mobile users and locating them prior to establishing new communications. Existing location management solutions proposed for single-hop wireless networks cannot be directly applied to Internet-based WMNs. Hence, a dynamic location management framework in Internet-based WMNs is proposed that can guarantee the location management performance and also minimize the protocol overhead. In addition, a novel resilient location area design in Internet-based WMNs is also proposed. The formation of the location areas can adapt to the changes of both paging load and service load so that the tradeoff between paging overhead and mobile device power consumption can be balanced, and at the same time, the required QoS performance of existing traffic is maintained. Therefore, together with the proposed handoff management design, efficient mobility management can be realized in Internet-based infrastructure WMNs