Towards epistemic autonomy in adaptive biomimetic middleware for cooperative sensornets

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.The importance of studying biomimetic models of software infrastructure for sensornet systems lies in the fact that they are not entirely formal models and thus have to cover a range of issues of epistemic autonomy as well as linguistic and mental adaptation. This adaptation considers the context of software ability to reflect upon the verifiability and validity of its actions and measurements. This research elucidates and explores epistemological consequences of embodying biological autonomic patterns in software architectural models. Autonomy in software systems is a complex issue that raises many fundamental inquiries. The proposal is to initially concentrate on transformations of biological paradigms into epistemological queries and then adapt suitable biomimetic mechanisms into the development of software structure and ethology. Such methodology has proven to be very successful in the design of many engineering systems. The approach leads to a better understanding of the ontology of biomimetic patterns in software as well as a confirmation of requirements validity and design verifiability of autonomous software systems. In a dynamic, cooperative but often hostile environment, a software system infrastructure requires autonomic abilities to execute its normal operations, detect faults and perform necessary recovery actions without the need for external intervention. We approach this problem from the point of view of cognitive and mimetic systems research. The simplest way to make an autonomous and adaptive sensornet system is to include a hierarchy of layers in its middleware, not only to monitor activities of its components but to learn and adapt new behavioural patterns of these components in a changing environment. There are situations, however, where the components will not be able to adapt, learn new behaviour and evolve by themselves. For instance, these may not have yet encountered the new situation while others already have. A solution to this problem is to distribute the new behaviour to neighbouring elements via direct and indirect stigmergy mechanisms so that collaborating components can mutually improve their individual and team performance. The main objective is to disallow distribution of multiple versions of the software components and rather allow each software component to acquire and share with others, new “skills”. The components have to compare/verify these new behavioural patterns against their own set of beliefs, desires and intentions. In this thesis we intend to present simulations to test the learning capability of biomimetic algorithms, build a proof-of-concept middleware solution and demonstrate that such systems can not only adapt and evolve but they are robust and highly interoperable (co-operative). The thesis also assesses the suitability of various biomimetic design patterns and algorithms for building autonomic software infrastructure systems for cooperative networked agents

Context and resource awareness in opportunistic network data dissemination

Opportunistic networks are challenging mobile ad hoc networks characterised by frequent disconnections and partitioning. In this paper we focus on data-dissemination services, i.e. cases in which data should be disseminated in the network without a priori knowledge about the set of intended destinations. We propose a general autonomic datadissemination framework that exploits information about the users\u27 context and social behaviour, to decide how to replicate and replace data on nodes\u27 buffers. Furthermore, our data-dissemination scheme explicitly takes into account resource constraints, by jointly considering the expected utility of data replication and the associated costs. The results we present show that our solution is able to improve data availability, provide fairness among nodes, and reduce the network load with respect to reference proposals available in the literature

Opportunistic Key Management in Delay Tolerant Networks

Key Management is considered to be a challenging task in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) operating in environments with adverse communication conditions such as space, due to the practical limitations and constraints prohibiting effective closed loop communications. In this paper we propose opportunistic key management as a more suitable solution for key management in networks requiring opportunistic behaviour. We show that opportunistic key management is better exploited and utilized when used in conjunction with routing decisions by security aware DTN nodes

Autonomic Management of Networked Small-Medium Factories

The Chapter reports the achievements of a research project that is developing a software platform with a suite of autonomic services enabling every company in the network to move from a situation where it wastes valuable resources in struggling with its customers and suppliers, towards a rational business environment where communication becomes faster, and operation and collaboration more efficient. The ultimate objective of the project is to set-up, develop, experiment and promote the adoption of a new collaboration practice within networked factories taking advantage of the autonomic model applied to a suite of support software services

Cryptographic Key Management in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs): A survey

Since their appearance at the dawn of the second millennium, Delay or Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have gradually evolved, spurring the development of a variety of methods and protocols for making them more secure and resilient. In this context, perhaps, the most challenging problem to deal with is that of cryptographic key management. To the best of our knowledge, the work at hand is the first to survey the relevant literature and classify the various so far proposed key management approaches in such a restricted and harsh environment. Towards this goal, we have grouped the surveyed key management methods into three major categories depending on whether the particular method copes with a) security initialization, b) key establishment, and c) key revocation. We have attempted to provide a concise but fairly complete evaluation of the proposed up-to-date methods in a generalized way with the aim of offering a central reference point for future research

A collaborative trust management scheme for emergency communication using delay tolerant networks

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) comprises of nodes with small and limited resources including power and memory capacity. We propose the use of DTN as an alternate means of communication for the dissemination of emergency information in a post-disaster evacuation operation. We investigate the performance of DTN in providing emergency communication support services under packet dropping attacks. We consider internally motivated attacks where the nodes that are part of the emergency rescue team are compromised with malicious behaviours thereby dropping packets to disrupt the message dissemination during the evacuation operation. A way to mitigating malicious behaviour and improve network performance of DTN is to use incentives in exchanging information between nodes. Unlike existing schemes, we consider the Basic Watchdog Detection System which detects and acts against misbehaving nodes to reduce their overall impact on the network performance. We design a Collaborative Trust Management Scheme (CTMS) which is based on the Bayesian detection watchdog approach to detect selfish and malicious behaviour in DTN nodes. We have evaluated our proposed CTMS through extensive simulations and compared our results with the other existing schemes. Our evaluations show that the use of adequate collaborative strategies between well behaved nodes could improve the performance of Watchdog schemes taking into account the delivery ratio, routing cost and the message delay from the source node to the destination node