A Secure Key Management Model for Wireless Mesh Networks

As Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are newly emerging wireless technologies, they are designed to have huge potential for strengthening Internet deployment and access. However, they are far from muture for large-scale deployment in some applications due to the lack of the satisfactory guarantees on security. The main challenges exposed to the security of WMNs come from the facts of the shared nature of the wireless architecture and the lack of globally trusted central authorities. A well-performed security framework for WMNs will contribute to network survivability and strongly support the network growth. A low-computational and scalable key management model for WMNs is proposed in this paper which aims to guarantee well-performed key management services and protection from potential attacks

Quantum Navigation and Ranking in Complex Networks

Complex networks are formal frameworks capturing the interdependencies between the elements of large systems and databases. This formalism allows to use network navigation methods to rank the importance that each constituent has on the global organization of the system. A key example is Pagerank navigation which is at the core of the most used search engine of the World Wide Web. Inspired in this classical algorithm, we define a quantum navigation method providing a unique ranking of the elements of a network. We analyze the convergence of quantum navigation to the stationary rank of networks and show that quantumness decreases the number of navigation steps before convergence. In addition, we show that quantum navigation allows to solve degeneracies found in classical ranks. By implementing the quantum algorithm in real networks, we confirm these improvements and show that quantum coherence unveils new hierarchical features about the global organization of complex systems.Comment: title changed, more real networks analyzed, version published in scientific report

Entropy and Graph Based Modelling of Document Coherence using Discourse Entities: An Application

We present two novel models of document coherence and their application to information retrieval (IR). Both models approximate document coherence using discourse entities, e.g. the subject or object of a sentence. Our first model views text as a Markov process generating sequences of discourse entities (entity n-grams); we use the entropy of these entity n-grams to approximate the rate at which new information appears in text, reasoning that as more new words appear, the topic increasingly drifts and text coherence decreases. Our second model extends the work of Guinaudeau & Strube [28] that represents text as a graph of discourse entities, linked by different relations, such as their distance or adjacency in text. We use several graph topology metrics to approximate different aspects of the discourse flow that can indicate coherence, such as the average clustering or betweenness of discourse entities in text. Experiments with several instantiations of these models show that: (i) our models perform on a par with two other well-known models of text coherence even without any parameter tuning, and (ii) reranking retrieval results according to their coherence scores gives notable performance gains, confirming a relation between document coherence and relevance. This work contributes two novel models of document coherence, the application of which to IR complements recent work in the integration of document cohesiveness or comprehensibility to ranking [5, 56]

The troubled journey of QoS: From ATM to content networking, edge-computing and distributed internet governance

Network Quality of Service (QoS) and the associated user Quality of Experience (QoE) have always been the networking “holy grail” and have been sought after through various different approaches and networking technologies over the last decades. Despite substantial amounts of effort invested in the area, there has been very little actual deployment of mechanisms to guarantee QoS in the Internet. As a result, the Internet is largely operating on a “best effort” basis in terms of QoS. Here, we attempt a historical overview in order to better understand how we got to the point where we are today and consider the evolution of QoS/QoE in the future. As we move towards more demanding networking environments where enormous amounts of data is produced at the edge of the network (e.g., from IoT devices), computation will also need to migrate to the edge in order to guarantee QoS. In turn, we argue that distributed computing at the edge of the network will inevitably require infrastructure decentralisation. That said, trust to the infrastructure provider is more difficult to guarantee and new components need to be incorporated into the Internet landscape in order to be able to support emerging applications, but also achieve acceptable service quality. We start from the first steps of ATM and related IP-based technologies, we consider recent proposals for content-oriented and Information-Centric Networking, mobile edge and fog computing, and finally we see how distributed Internet governance through Distributed Ledger Technology and blockchains can influence QoS in future networks

Authentication Issues in Multi-Service Residential Access Networks

Multi-service residential access networks allow residential customers to choose amongst a variety of service offerings, over a range of Core Networks and subject to user requirements such as QoS, mobility, cost and availability. These issues place requirements on authentication for network access, with a need for mutual authentication of the residential gateway (RG) to the local access point (LAP). The EU-IST project TORRENT is building a testbed providing for multi-service residential access networks in order to demonstrate the benefit of intelligent control, both for the customer and for the network operators and service providers. Adequate security measures are essential in order to secure access to the TORRENT system and services and for QoS provisioning to authorised users. This paper examines the authentication issues for the TORRENT system and presents a public key based authentication protocol for mutually authenticating the RG and the LAP

Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The lack of interoperability between Pay‐TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay‐TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay‐TV systems. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria