Pay as You Go: A Generic Crypto Tolling Architecture

The imminent pervasive adoption of vehicular communication, based on dedicated short-range technology (ETSI ITS G5 or IEEE WAVE), 5G, or both, will foster a richer service ecosystem for vehicular applications. The appearance of new cryptography based solutions envisaging digital identity and currency exchange are set to stem new approaches for existing and future challenges. This paper presents a novel tolling architecture that harnesses the availability of 5G C-V2X connectivity for open road tolling using smartphones, IOTA as the digital currency and Hyperledger Indy for identity validation. An experimental feasibility analysis is used to validate the proposed architecture for secure, private and convenient electronic toll payment

Cross-Layer Platform for Dynamic, Energy-Efficient Optical Networks

The design of the next-generation Internet infrastructure is driven by the need to sustain the massive growth in bandwidth demands. Novel, energy-efficient, optical networking technologies and architectures are required to effectively meet the stringent performance requirements with low cost and ultrahigh energy efficiencies. In this thesis, a cross-layer communications platform is proposed to enable greater intelligence and functionality on the physical layer. Providing the optical layer with advanced networking capabilities will facilitate the dynamic management and optimization of optical switching based on performance monitoring measurements and higher-layer attributes. The cross-layer platform aims to create a new framework for networks to incorporate packet-scale measurement subsystems and techniques for monitoring the health of the optical channel. This will allow for quality-of-service- and energy-aware routing schemes, as well as an enhanced awareness of the optical data signals. This thesis first presents the design and development of an optical packet switching fabric. Leveraging a networking test-bed environment to validate networking hypotheses, advanced switching functionalities are demonstrated, including the support for quality-of-service based routing and packet multicasting. The investigated cross-layering is based on emerging optical technologies, enabling packet protection techniques and packet-rate switching fabric reconfiguration. Coupled with fast performance monitoring, the platform will achieve significant performance gains within the endeavor of all-optical switching. Allowing for a more intelligent, programmable optical layer aims to support greater flexibility with respect to bandwidth allocation and potentially a significant reduction in the network's energy consumption. The ultimate deliverable of this work is a high-performance, cross-layer enabled optical network node. The experimental demonstration of an initial prototype creates a dynamic network element with distributed control plane management, featuring fast packet-rate optical switching capabilities and embedded physical-layer performance monitoring modules. The cross-layer box enables an intelligent traffic delivery system that can dynamically manipulate optical switching on a packet-granular scale. With the goal of achieving advanced multi-layer routing and control algorithms, the network node requires an intelligent co-optimization across all the layers. The proposed cross-layer design should drive optical technologies and architectures in an innovative way, in order to fulfill the void between the design of basic photonic devices and the networking protocols that use them. The performance of the entire network -- from the optical components, to the routing algorithms and user applications -- should be optimized in concert. This contribution to the area of cross-layer network design creates an adaptable optical pipe that is extremely flexible and intelligent aware of both the physical optical signals and higher-layer requirements. The impact of this work will be seen in the realization of dynamic, energy-efficient optical communication links in future networking infrastructures

Adaptive conflict-free optimization of rule sets for network security packet filtering devices

Packet filtering and processing rules management in firewalls and security gateways has become commonplace in increasingly complex networks. On one side there is a need to maintain the logic of high level policies, which requires administrators to implement and update a large amount of filtering rules while keeping them conflict-free, that is, avoiding security inconsistencies. On the other side, traffic adaptive optimization of large rule lists is useful for general purpose computers used as filtering devices, without specific designed hardware, to face growing link speeds and to harden filtering devices against DoS and DDoS attacks. Our work joins the two issues in an innovative way and defines a traffic adaptive algorithm to find conflict-free optimized rule sets, by relying on information gathered with traffic logs. The proposed approach suits current technology architectures and exploits available features, like traffic log databases, to minimize the impact of ACO development on the packet filtering devices. We demonstrate the benefit entailed by the proposed algorithm through measurements on a test bed made up of real-life, commercial packet filtering devices

Characterizing, managing and monitoring the networks for the ATLAS data acquisition system

Particle physics studies the constituents of matter and the interactions between them. Many of the elementary particles do not exist under normal circumstances in nature. However, they can be created and detected during energetic collisions of other particles, as is done in particle accelerators. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) being built at CERN will be the world's largest circular particle accelerator, colliding protons at energies of 14 TeV. Only a very small fraction of the interactions will give raise to interesting phenomena. The collisions produced inside the accelerator are studied using particle detectors. ATLAS is one of the detectors built around the LHC accelerator ring. During its operation, it will generate a data stream of 64 Terabytes/s. A Trigger and Data Acquisition System (TDAQ) is connected to ATLAS -- its function is to acquire digitized data from the detector and apply trigger algorithms to identify the interesting events. Achieving this requires the power of over 2000 computers plus an interconnecting network capable of sustaining a throughput of over 150 Gbit/s with minimal loss and delay. The implementation of this network required a detailed study of the available switching technologies to a high degree of precision in order to choose the appropriate components. We developed an FPGA-based platform (the GETB) for testing network devices. The GETB system proved to be flexible enough to be used as the ba sis of three different network-related projects. An analysis of the traffic pattern that is generated by the ATLAS data-taking applications was also possible thanks to the GETB. Then, while the network was being assembled, parts of the ATLAS detector started commissioning -- this task relied on a functional network. Thus it was imperative to be able to continuously identify existing and usable infrastructure and manage its operations. In addition, monitoring was required to detect any overload conditions with an indication where the excess demand was being generated. We developed tools to ease the maintenance of the network and to automatically produce inventory reports. We created a system that discovers the network topology and this permitted us to verify the installation and to track its progress. A real-time traffic visualization system has been built, allowing us to see at a glance which network segments are heavily utilized. Later, as the network achieves production status, it will be necessary to extend the monitoring to identify individual applications' use of the available bandwidth. We studied a traffic monitoring technology that will allow us to have a better understanding on how the network is used. This technology, based on packet sampling, gives the possibility of having a complete view of the network: not only its total capacity utilization, but also how this capacity is divided among users and software applicati ons. This thesis describes the establishment of a set of tools designed to characterize, monitor and manage complex, large-scale, high-performance networks. We describe in detail how these tools were designed, calibrated, deployed and exploited. The work that led to the development of this thesis spans over more than four years and closely follows the development phases of the ATLAS network: its design, its installation and finally, its current and future operation

Advanced photonic and electronic systems - WILGA 2017

WILGA annual symposium on advanced photonic and electronic systems has been organized by young scientist for young scientists since two decades. It traditionally gathers more than 350 young researchers and their tutors. Ph.D students and graduates present their recent achievements during well attended oral sessions. Wilga is a very good digest of Ph.D. works carried out at technical universities in electronics and photonics, as well as information sciences throughout Poland and some neighboring countries. Publishing patronage over Wilga keep Elektronika technical journal by SEP, IJET by PAN and Proceedings of SPIE. The latter world editorial series publishes annually more than 200 papers from Wilga. Wilga 2017 was the XL edition of this meeting. The following topical tracks were distinguished: photonics, electronics, information technologies and system research. The article is a digest of some chosen works presented during Wilga 2017 symposium. WILGA 2017 works were published in Proc. SPIE vol.10445