Analysis of wireless network usage at Universiti Utara Malaysia: a preliminary study towards Bandwidth Management

The emergent of mobile device technology has increased the need for wireless network coverage in organizations. Users with mobile devices such as smartphones, computer tablets, and laptops require a wireless network to access the Internet services. Network administrators face challenges in managing access to the Internet and data usage by these devices. The challenge can be alleviated by implementing efficient bandwidth management strategies. Before identifying the proper strategies and implement them, network administrators must understand the usage pattern of the wireless network. Hence, this study presents an analysis of traffic pattern of wireless network usage by students at Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) as a preliminary input towards identifying the best strategies for managing wireless network bandwidth. The students' wireless network usage on a selected student residential area in UUM was analyzed for seven days using network management software. The data on the usage of protocols, service set identifiers, and types of applications were monitored and captured. The analysis of the data suggested valuable information towards managing bandwidth at the university

A practical approach to network-based processing

The usage of general-purpose processors externally attached to routers to play virtually the role of active coprocessors seems a safe and cost-effective approach to add active network capabilities to existing routers. This paper reviews this router-assistant way of making active nodes, addresses the benefits and limitations of this technique, and describes a new platform based on it using an enhanced commercial router. The features new to this type of architecture are transparency, IPv4 and IPv6 support, and full control over layer 3 and above. A practical experience with two applications for path characterization and a transport gateway managing multi-QoS is described.Most of this work has been funded by the IST project GCAP (Global Communication Architecture and Protocols for new QoS services over IPv6 networks) IST-1999-10 504. Further development and application to practical scenarios is being supported by IST project Opium (Open Platform for Integration of UMTS Middleware) IST-2001-36063 and the Spanish MCYT under projects TEL99-0988-C02-01 and AURAS TIC2001-1650-C02-01.Publicad

Software defined networking challenges and future direction: A case study of implementing SDN features on OpenStack private cloud

Cloud computing provides services on demand instantly, such as access to network infrastructure consisting of computing hardware, operating systems, network storage, database and applications. Network usage and demands are growing at a very fast rate and to meet the current requirements, there is a need for automatic infrastructure scaling. Traditional networks are difficult to automate because of the distributed nature of their decision making process for switching or routing which are collocated on the same device. Managing complex environments using traditional networks is time-consuming and expensive, especially in the case of generating virtual machines, migration and network configuration. To mitigate the challenges, network operations require efficient, flexible, agile and scalable software defined networks (SDN). This paper discuss various issues in SDN and suggests how to mitigate the network management related issues. A private cloud prototype test bed was setup to implement the SDN on the OpenStack platform to test and evaluate the various network performances provided by the various configurations

NETWORK SANDBOX FOR CLOSED-SOURCE COMPONENTS WITH ACCESS TO SENSITIVE DATA

A computing device (e.g., a smartphone, a laptop computer, a tablet computer, a smartwatch, etc.) may include a system application for managing both the ability of software (e.g., an application, a program, a widget, etc.) to access a network and the type of information that can be transmitted to a computing system via the network. Rather than use a permission-based model (e.g., a model in which a user manually permits an application to access the network), which may grant the application unconstrained network access, the system application may use a dataflow model (e.g., a model in which a framework defines a policy for how an application may access the network) that results in more granular network access. In some examples, the system application may comprise a first component (e.g., an application package (APK)) that delegates all requests for network access to a second component (e.g., an application programming interface (API)) to ensure policy enforcement (e.g., limiting data exfiltration from the first component). Source code for the second component may be made available for inspection or review by anyone (e.g., open sourced) to provide a means for auditing the operation of the system application. In addition, the system application may provide a ledger to enable a user of the computing device to monitor dataflows and network usage. In this way, the system application may increase trust in applications executing at the computing device (e.g., by enabling researchers to ensure that no party is receiving preferential treatment with regards to data retention policies) and may increase transparency in how applications are using and sharing data (e.g., by allowing interested parties to verify network usage)

End-user traffic policing for QoS assurance in polyservice RINA networks

Looking at the ever-increasing amount of heterogeneous distributed applications supported on current data transport networks, it seems evident that best-effort packet delivery falls short to supply their actual needs. Multiple approaches to Quality of Service (QoS) differentiation have been proposed over the years, but their usage has always been hindered by the rigidness of the TCP/IP-based Internet model, which does not even allow for applications to express their QoS needs to the underlying network. In this context, the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) has appeared as a clean-slate network architecture aiming to replace the current Internet based on TCP/IP. RINA provides a well-defined QoS support across layers, with standard means for layers to inform of the different QoS guarantees that they can support. Besides, applications and other processes can express their flow requirements, including different QoS-related measures, like delay and jitter, drop probability or average traffic usage. Greedy end-users, however, tend to request the highest quality for their flows, forcing providers to apply intelligent data rate limitation procedures at the edge of their networks. In this work, we propose a new rate limiting policy that, instead of enforcing limits on a per QoS class basis, imposes limits on several independent QoS dimensions. This offers a flexible traffic control to RINA network providers, while enabling end-users freely managing their leased resources. The performance of the proposed policy is assessed in an experimental RINA network test-bed and its performance compared against other policies, either RINA-specific or adopted from TCP/IP. Results show that the proposed policy achieves an effective traffic control for high QoS traffic classes, while also letting lower QoS classes to take profit of the capacity initially reserved for the former ones when available.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Balancing Interactive Performance and Budgeted Resources in Mobile Computing.

In this dissertation, we explore the various limited resources involved in mobile applications --- battery energy, cellular data usage, and, critically, user attention --- and we devise principled methods for managing the tradeoffs involved in creating a good user experience. Building quality mobile applications requires developers to understand complex interactions between network usage, performance, and resource consumption. Because of this difficulty, developers commonly choose simple but suboptimal approaches that strictly prioritize performance or resource conservation. These extremes are symptoms of a lack of system-provided abstractions for managing the complexity inherent in managing performance/resource tradeoffs. By providing abstractions that help applications manage these tradeoffs, mobile systems can significantly improve user-visible performance without exhausting resource budgets. This dissertation explores three such abstractions in detail. We first present Intentional Networking, a system that provides synchronization primitives and intelligent scheduling for multi-network traffic. Next, we present Informed Mobile Prefetching, a system that helps applications decide when to prefetch data and how aggressively to spend limited battery energy and cellular data resources toward that end. Finally, we present Meatballs, a library that helps applications consider the cloudy nature of predictions when making decisions, selectively employing redundancy to mitigate uncertainty and provide more reliable performance. Overall, experiments show that these abstractions can significantly reduce interactive delay without overspending the available energy and data resources.PHDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108956/1/brettdh_1.pd

On Usage Control for GRID Systems

This paper introduces a formal model, an architecture and a prototype implementation for usage control on GRID systems. The usage control model (UCON) is a new access control paradigm proposed by Park and Sandhu that encompasses and extends several existing models (e.g. MAC, DAC, Bell-Lapadula, RBAC, etc). Its main novelty is based on continuity of the access monitoring and mutability of attributes of subjects and objects. We identified this model as a perfect candidate for managing access/usage control in GRID systems due to their peculiarities, where continuity of control is a central issue. Here we adapt the original UCON model to develop a full model for usage control in GRID systems. We use as policy specification language a process description language and show how this is suitable to model the usage policy models of the original UCON model. We also describe a possible architecture to implement the usage control model. Moreover, we describe a prototype implementation for usage control of GRID computational services, and we show how our language can be used to define a security policy that regulates the usage of network communications to protect the local computational service from the applications that are executed on behalf of remote GRID users

Distributed Approach to the Holistic Resource Management of a Mobile Cloud Network

The Mobile Cloud Network is an emerging cost and capacity heterogeneous distributed cloud topological paradigm that aims to remedy the application performance constraints imposed by centralised cloud infrastructures. A centralised cloud infrastructure and the adjoining Telecom network will struggle to accommodate the exploding amount of traffic generated by forthcoming highly interactive applications. Cost effectively managing a Mobile Cloud Network computing infrastructure while meeting individual application’s performance goals is non- trivial and is at the core of our contribution. Due to the scale of a Mobile Cloud Network, a centralised approach is infeasible. Therefore, in this paper a distributed algorithm that addresses these challenges is presented. The presented approach works towards meeting individual application’s performance objectives, constricting system-wide operational cost, and mitigating re- source usage skewness. The presented distributed algorithm does so by iteratively and independently acting on the objectives of each component with a common heuristic objective function. Sys- tematic evaluations reveal that the presented algorithm quickly converges and performs near optimal in terms of system-wide operational cost and application performance, and significantly outperforms similar na ̈ıve and random methods