Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Fast Authentication in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The growing diffusion of wireless devices is leading to an increasing demand for mobility and security. At the same time, most applications can only tolerate short breaks in the data flow, so that it is a challenge to find out mobility and authentication methods able to cope with these constraints. This paper aims to propose an authentication scheme which significantly shortens the authentication latency and that can be deployed in a variety of wireless environments ranging from common Wireless LANs (WLANs) to satellite-based access networks

Security in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs)

Major research domains in the WLAN security include: access control & data frame protection, lightweight authentication and secure handoff. Access control standard like IEEE 802.11i provides flexibility in user authentication but on the other hand fell prey to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. For Protecting the data communication between two communicating devices—three standard protocols i.e., WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) and AES-CCMP (Advanced Encryption Standard—Counter mode with CBC-MAC protocol) are used. Out of these, AES-CCMP protocol is secure enough and mostly used in enterprises. In WLAN environment lightweight authentication is an asset, provided it also satisfies other security properties like protecting the authentication stream or token along with securing the transmitted message. CAPWAP (Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points), HOKEY (Hand Over Keying) and IEEE 802.11r are major protocols for executing the secure handoff. In WLANs, handoff should not only be performed within time limits as required by the real time applications but should also be used to transfer safely the keying material for further communication. In this chapter, a comparative study of the security mechanisms under the above-mentioned research domains is provided

Attention to Wi-Fi Diversity: Resource Management in WLANs with Heterogeneous APs

Many home networks integrate a small number (typically 2-4) of Wi-Fi Access Points (APs), with heterogeneous characteristics: different 802.11 variants, capabilities and security schemes. This paper proposes the consideration of these specific characteristics in order to improve the management of network resources. Three use cases are presented in order to showcase the potential benefits. By the use of a user-space AP, which works in coordination with a controller, the network is able to assign each connected station to the AP that best fits with its characteristics. The system also manages security, avoiding the need of adding specific elements for authentication, encryption or decryption. Extensions are proposed to an existing protocol that defines the communication between the AP and the controller, in order to communicate and store the specific characteristics of each AP and end device. This includes new association and handoff schemes that do not introduce any additional delay. The system has been implemented in a real environment, and a battery of tests has been run using three hardware platforms of different characteristics. The results show that handoffs between bands are possible, and estimate the processing delays, the Round-Trip Time and the handoff delay, which is small enough in order not to produce any significant disruption to the user (10-50 ms). Finally, the scenarios of interest have been replicated in a simulation environment, showing that significant benefits can be achieved if the specific characteristics of each AP and station are considered

Why It Takes So Long to Connect to a WiFi Access Point

Today's WiFi networks deliver a large fraction of traffic. However, the performance and quality of WiFi networks are still far from satisfactory. Among many popular quality metrics (throughput, latency), the probability of successfully connecting to WiFi APs and the time cost of the WiFi connection set-up process are the two of the most critical metrics that affect WiFi users' experience. To understand the WiFi connection set-up process in real-world settings, we carry out measurement studies on $5$ million mobile users from $4$ representative cities associating with $7$ million APs in $0.4$ billion WiFi sessions, collected from a mobile "WiFi Manager" App that tops the Android/iOS App market. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to do such large scale study on: how large the WiFi connection set-up time cost is, what factors affect the WiFi connection set-up process, and what can be done to reduce the WiFi connection set-up time cost. Based on the measurement analysis, we develop a machine learning based AP selection strategy that can significantly improve WiFi connection set-up performance, against the conventional strategy purely based on signal strength, by reducing the connection set-up failures from $33\%$ to $3.6\%$ and reducing $80\%$ time costs of the connection set-up processes by more than $10$ times.Comment: 11pages, conferenc

Security and mobility in 802.11 structured networks

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrónica e TelecomunicaçõesNesta tese é apresentado um protocolo que permite handovers rápidos e seguros em redes estruturadas 802.11. Este protocolo recupera o paradigma original do 802.11: autenticar primeiro, reassociar depois. Partindo deste paradigma, apresentamos duas novas operações 802.11 de autenticação e (re)associacão, que permitem que uma estacão móvel realize reautenticacões e reassociações com as mesmas funcionalidades do 802.1X. Esta nova aproxiamação requer pouca mudança na arquitectura da rede, nomeadamente só necessita de um novo Servidor de Reautenticação, para armazenar os dados usados pelas estações móveis durante as reautenticações. Nesta tese é também apresentada uma extensão do nosso protocolo, de maneira a permitir uma migração rápida e segura entre ESS usando Mobile IP. ABSTRACT: This thesis presents a fast, secure handover protocol that recovers the original 802.11 paradigm: authenticate first, reassociate next. Following this paradigm, we present two new 802.11 authentication and (re)association operations which allow a mobile station to perform network reauthentications and reassociations with the same functionality of a complete 802.1X authentication. This new approach requires very little from the environment, namely it only requires a new, central network Reauthentication Service, for storing data used in the reauthentication of stations. This thesis also presents a layer 3 extension of our protocol, to support fast, secure transitions between ESS using Mobile IP

Millimeter-wave Evolution for 5G Cellular Networks

Triggered by the explosion of mobile traffic, 5G (5th Generation) cellular network requires evolution to increase the system rate 1000 times higher than the current systems in 10 years. Motivated by this common problem, there are several studies to integrate mm-wave access into current cellular networks as multi-band heterogeneous networks to exploit the ultra-wideband aspect of the mm-wave band. The authors of this paper have proposed comprehensive architecture of cellular networks with mm-wave access, where mm-wave small cell basestations and a conventional macro basestation are connected to Centralized-RAN (C-RAN) to effectively operate the system by enabling power efficient seamless handover as well as centralized resource control including dynamic cell structuring to match the limited coverage of mm-wave access with high traffic user locations via user-plane/control-plane splitting. In this paper, to prove the effectiveness of the proposed 5G cellular networks with mm-wave access, system level simulation is conducted by introducing an expected future traffic model, a measurement based mm-wave propagation model, and a centralized cell association algorithm by exploiting the C-RAN architecture. The numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed network to realize 1000 times higher system rate than the current network in 10 years which is not achieved by the small cells using commonly considered 3.5 GHz band. Furthermore, the paper also gives latest status of mm-wave devices and regulations to show the feasibility of using mm-wave in the 5G systems.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, accepted to be published in IEICE Transactions on Communications. (Mar. 2015

How far can we go? Towards Realistic Software-Defined Wireless Networking Experiments

International audienceSoftware-Defined Wireless Networking (SDWN) is an emerging approach based on decoupling radio control functions from the radio data plane through programmatic interfaces. Despite diverse ongoing efforts to realize the vision of SDWN, many questions remain open from multiple perspectives such as means to rapid prototype and experiment candidate software solutions applicable to real world deployments. To this end, emulation of SDWN has the potential to boost research and development efforts by re-using existing protocol and application stacks while mimicking the behavior of real wireless networks. In this article, we provide an in-depth discussion on that matter focusing on the Mininet-WiFi emulator design to fill a gap in the experimental platform space. We showcase the applicability of our emulator in an SDN wireless context by illustrating the support of a number of use cases aiming to address the question on how far we can go in realistic SDWN experiments, including comparisons to the results obtained in a wireless testbed. Finally, we discuss the ability to replay packet-level and radio signal traces captured in the real testbed towards a virtual yet realistic emulation environment in support of SDWN research