Integrated Architecture for Configuration and Service Management in MANET Environments

Esta tesis nos ha permitido trasladar algunos conceptos teóricos de la computación ubicua a escenarios reales, identificando las necesidades específicas de diferentes tipos de aplicaciones. Con el fin de alcanzar este objetivo, proponemos dos prototipos que proporcionan servicios sensibles al contexto en diferentes entornos, tales como conferencias o salas de recuperación en hospitales. Estos prototipos experimentales explotan la tecnología Bluetooth para ofrecer información basada en las preferencias del usuario. En ambos casos, hemos llevado a cabo algunos experimentos con el fin de evaluar el comportamiento de los sistemas y su rendimento. También abordamos en esta tesis el problema de la autoconfiguración de redes MANET basadas en el estándar 802.11 a través de dos soluciones novedosas. La primera es una solución centralizada que se basa en la tecnología Bluetooth, mientras la segunda es una solución distribuida que no necesita recurrir a ninguna tecnología adicional, ya que se basa en el uso del parámetro SSID. Ambos métodos se han diseñado para permitir que usuarios no expertos puedan unirse a una red MANET de forma transparente, proporcionando una configuración automática, rápida, y fiable de los terminales. Los resultados experimentales en implementaciones reales nos han permitido evaluar el rendimiento de las soluciones propuestas y demostrar que las estaciones cercanas se pueden configurar en pocos segundos. Además, hemos comparado ambas soluciones entre sí para poner de manifiesto las diferentes ventajas y desventajas en cuanto a rendimento. La principal contribución de esta tesis es EasyMANET, una plataforma ampliable y configurable cuyo objetivo es automatizar lo máximo posible las tareas que afectan a la configuración y puesta en marcha de redes MANET, de modo que su uso sea más simple y accesible.Cano Reyes, J. (2012). Integrated Architecture for Configuration and Service Management in MANET Environments [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/14675Palanci

Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT

The recent development in wireless networks and devices has led to novel services that will utilize wireless communication on a new level. Much effort and resources have been dedicated to establishing new communication networks that will support machine-to-machine communication and the Internet of Things (IoT). In these systems, various smart and sensory devices are deployed and connected, enabling large amounts of data to be streamed. Smart services represent new trends in mobile services, i.e., a completely new spectrum of context-aware, personalized, and intelligent services and applications. A variety of existing services utilize information about the position of the user or mobile device. The position of mobile devices is often achieved using the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) chips that are integrated into all modern mobile devices (smartphones). However, GNSS is not always a reliable source of position estimates due to multipath propagation and signal blockage. Moreover, integrating GNSS chips into all devices might have a negative impact on the battery life of future IoT applications. Therefore, alternative solutions to position estimation should be investigated and implemented in IoT applications. This Special Issue, “Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT” aims to report on some of the recent research efforts on this increasingly important topic. The twelve accepted papers in this issue cover various aspects of Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT

Internet... the final frontier: an ethnographic account: exploring the cultural space of the Net from the inside

The research project The Internet as a space for interaction, which completed its mission in Autumn 1998, studied the constitutive features of network culture and network organisation. Special emphasis was given to the dynamic interplay of technical and social conventions regarding both the Net’s organisation as well as its change. The ethnographic perspective chosen studied the Internet from the inside. Research concentrated upon three fields of study: the hegemonial operating technology of net nodes (UNIX) the network’s basic transmission technology (the Internet Protocol IP) and a popular communication service (Usenet). The project’s final report includes the results of the three branches explored. Drawing upon the development in the three fields it is shown that changes that come about on the Net are neither anarchic nor arbitrary. Instead, the decentrally organised Internet is based upon technically and organisationally distributed forms of coordination within which individual preferences collectively attain the power of developing into definitive standards. --

Branch Prediction For Network Processors

Originally designed to favour flexibility over packet processing performance, the future of the programmable network processor is challenged by the need to meet both increasing line rate as well as providing additional processing capabilities. To meet these requirements, trends within networking research has tended to focus on techniques such as offloading computation intensive tasks to dedicated hardware logic or through increased parallelism. While parallelism retains flexibility, challenges such as load-balancing limit its scope. On the other hand, hardware offloading allows complex algorithms to be implemented at high speed but sacrifice flexibility. To this end, the work in this thesis is focused on a more fundamental aspect of a network processor, the data-plane processing engine. Performing both system modelling and analysis of packet processing functions; the goal of this thesis is to identify and extract salient information regarding the performance of multi-processor workloads. Following on from a traditional software based analysis of programme workloads, we develop a method of modelling and analysing hardware accelerators when applied to network processors. Using this quantitative information, this thesis proposes an architecture which allows deeply pipelined micro-architectures to be implemented on the data-plane while reducing the branch penalty associated with these architectures

A composable approach to design of newer techniques for large-scale denial-of-service attack attribution

Since its early days, the Internet has witnessed not only a phenomenal growth, but also a large number of security attacks, and in recent years, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks have emerged as one of the top threats. The stateless and destination-oriented Internet routing combined with the ability to harness a large number of compromised machines and the relative ease and low costs of launching such attacks has made this a hard problem to address. Additionally, the myriad requirements of scalability, incremental deployment, adequate user privacy protections, and appropriate economic incentives has further complicated the design of DDoS defense mechanisms. While the many research proposals to date have focussed differently on prevention, mitigation, or traceback of DDoS attacks, the lack of a comprehensive approach satisfying the different design criteria for successful attack attribution is indeed disturbing. Our first contribution here has been the design of a composable data model that has helped us represent the various dimensions of the attack attribution problem, particularly the performance attributes of accuracy, effectiveness, speed and overhead, as orthogonal and mutually independent design considerations. We have then designed custom optimizations along each of these dimensions, and have further integrated them into a single composite model, to provide strong performance guarantees. Thus, the proposed model has given us a single framework that can not only address the individual shortcomings of the various known attack attribution techniques, but also provide a more wholesome counter-measure against DDoS attacks. Our second contribution here has been a concrete implementation based on the proposed composable data model, having adopted a graph-theoretic approach to identify and subsequently stitch together individual edge fragments in the Internet graph to reveal the true routing path of any network data packet. The proposed approach has been analyzed through theoretical and experimental evaluation across multiple metrics, including scalability, incremental deployment, speed and efficiency of the distributed algorithm, and finally the total overhead associated with its deployment. We have thereby shown that it is realistically feasible to provide strong performance and scalability guarantees for Internet-wide attack attribution. Our third contribution here has further advanced the state of the art by directly identifying individual path fragments in the Internet graph, having adopted a distributed divide-and-conquer approach employing simple recurrence relations as individual building blocks. A detailed analysis of the proposed approach on real-life Internet topologies with respect to network storage and traffic overhead, has provided a more realistic characterization. Thus, not only does the proposed approach lend well for simplified operations at scale but can also provide robust network-wide performance and security guarantees for Internet-wide attack attribution. Our final contribution here has introduced the notion of anonymity in the overall attack attribution process to significantly broaden its scope. The highly invasive nature of wide-spread data gathering for network traceback continues to violate one of the key principles of Internet use today - the ability to stay anonymous and operate freely without retribution. In this regard, we have successfully reconciled these mutually divergent requirements to make it not only economically feasible and politically viable but also socially acceptable. This work opens up several directions for future research - analysis of existing attack attribution techniques to identify further scope for improvements, incorporation of newer attributes into the design framework of the composable data model abstraction, and finally design of newer attack attribution techniques that comprehensively integrate the various attack prevention, mitigation and traceback techniques in an efficient manner

Internet... the final frontier: an ethnographic account ; exploring the cultural space of the net from the inside

"The research project 'The Internet as a space for interaction', which completed its mission in Autumn 1998, studied the constitutive features of network culture and network organisation. Special emphasis was given to the dynamic interplay of technical and social conventions regarding both the net's organisation as well as its change. The ethnographic perspective chosen studied the Internet from the inside. Research concentrated upon three fields of study: the hegemonial operating technology of net nodes (UNIX) the network’s basic transmission technology (the Internet Protocol IP) and a popular communication service (Usenet). The project's final report includes the results of the three branches explored. Drawing upon the development in the three fields it is shown that changes that come about on the Net are neither anarchic nor arbitrary. Instead, the decentrally organised Internet is based upon technically and organisationally distributed forms of coordination within which individual preferences collectively attain the power of developing into definitive standards." (author's abstract)"Das im Herbst 1998 abgeschlossene Forschungsprojekt 'Interaktionsraum Internet' hat sich mit den konstitutiven Merkmalen der Netzkultur und Netzwerkorganisation beschäftigt. Im Vordergrund des Interesses stand das dynamische Zusammenspiel technischer und gesellschaftlicher Konventionen in der Organisation wie auch im Wandel des Netzes. Die ethnographisch angeleitete Binnenperspektive auf das Internet konzentrierte sich auf drei ausgewählte Bereiche, um Prozesse der Institutionenbildung und die Formen ihrer Transformation zu studieren: die hegemoniale Betriebstechnik der Netzknoten (UNIX), die grundlegende Übertragungstechnik im Netz (das Internet Protokoll IP) und einen populären Kommunikationsdienst (Usenet). Der Schlußbericht des Projekts enthält die Ergebnisse der drei Untersuchungsstränge. Gezeigt wird anhand der Entwicklung in den drei Feldern, daß sich der Wandel des Netzes weder beliebig noch anarchisch vollzieht. Das dezentral organisierte Internet beruht vielmehr auf technisch wie organisatorisch verteilten Formen der Koordination, in denen individuelle Handlungspräferenzen kollektiv definitionsmächtig werden." (Autorenreferat