TCP in the Internet of Things: from ostracism to prominence

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.TCP has traditionally been neglected as a transport-layer protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, recent trends and industry needs are favoring TCP presence in IoT environments. In this article, we describe the main IoT scenarios where TCP will be used. We then analyze the historically claimed issues of TCP in the IoT context. We argue that, in contrast to generally accepted wisdom, most of those possible issues fall in one of the following categories: i) are also found in well-accepted IoT end-to-end reliability mechanisms, ii) can be solved, or iii) are not actual issues. Considering the future prominent role of TCP in the IoT, we provide recommendations for lightweight TCP implementation and suitable operation in such scenarios, based on our IETF standardization work on the topic.Postprint (author's final draft

Preventing Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks on the IMS Emergency Services Support through Adaptive Firewall Pinholing

Emergency services are vital services that Next Generation Networks (NGNs) have to provide. As the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is in the heart of NGNs, 3GPP has carried the burden of specifying a standardized IMS-based emergency services framework. Unfortunately, like any other IP-based standards, the IMS-based emergency service framework is prone to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. We propose in this work, a simple but efficient solution that can prevent certain types of such attacks by creating firewall pinholes that regular clients will surely be able to pass in contrast to the attackers clients. Our solution was implemented, tested in an appropriate testbed, and its efficiency was proven.Comment: 17 Pages, IJNGN Journa

The NASA SBIR product catalog

The purpose of this catalog is to assist small business firms in making the community aware of products emerging from their efforts in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. It contains descriptions of some products that have advanced into Phase 3 and others that are identified as prospective products. Both lists of products in this catalog are based on information supplied by NASA SBIR contractors in responding to an invitation to be represented in this document. Generally, all products suggested by the small firms were included in order to meet the goals of information exchange for SBIR results. Of the 444 SBIR contractors NASA queried, 137 provided information on 219 products. The catalog presents the product information in the technology areas listed in the table of contents. Within each area, the products are listed in alphabetical order by product name and are given identifying numbers. Also included is an alphabetical listing of the companies that have products described. This listing cross-references the product list and provides information on the business activity of each firm. In addition, there are three indexes: one a list of firms by states, one that lists the products according to NASA Centers that managed the SBIR projects, and one that lists the products by the relevant Technical Topics utilized in NASA's annual program solicitation under which each SBIR project was selected