Unicast UDP Usage Guidelines for Application Designers

Publisher PD

Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte

Centralized and Cooperative Transmission of Secure Multiple Unicasts using Network Coding

We introduce a method for securely delivering a set of messages to a group of clients over a broadcast erasure channel where each client is interested in a distinct message. Each client is able to obtain its own message but not the others'. In the proposed method the messages are combined together using a special variant of random linear network coding. Each client is provided with a private set of decoding coefficients to decode its own message. Our method provides security for the transmission sessions against computational brute-force attacks and also weakly security in information theoretic sense. As the broadcast channel is assumed to be erroneous, the missing coded packets should be recovered in some way. We consider two different scenarios. In the first scenario the missing packets are retransmitted by the base station (centralized). In the second scenario the clients cooperate with each other by exchanging packets (decentralized). In both scenarios, network coding techniques are exploited to increase the total throughput. For the case of centralized retransmissions we provide an analytical approximation for the throughput performance of instantly decodable network coded (IDNC) retransmissions as well as numerical experiments. For the decentralized scenario, we propose a new IDNC based retransmission method where its performance is evaluated via simulations and analytical approximation. Application of this method is not limited to our special problem and can be generalized to a new class of problems introduced in this paper as the cooperative index coding problem

Secure Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to the service providers. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi networks, with each access point (AP) connected to the wired network, in WMNs only a subset of the APs are required to be connected to the wired network. The APs that are connected to the wired network are called the Internet gateways (IGWs), while the APs that do not have wired connections are called the mesh routers (MRs). The MRs are connected to the IGWs using multi-hop communication. The IGWs provide access to conventional clients and interconnect ad hoc, sensor, cellular, and other networks to the Internet. However, most of the existing routing protocols for WMNs are extensions of protocols originally designed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and thus they perform sub-optimally. Moreover, most routing protocols for WMNs are designed without security issues in mind, where the nodes are all assumed to be honest. In practical deployment scenarios, this assumption does not hold. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of security issues in WMNs and then particularly focuses on secure routing in these networks. First, it identifies security vulnerabilities in the medium access control (MAC) and the network layers. Various possibilities of compromising data confidentiality, data integrity, replay attacks and offline cryptanalysis are also discussed. Then various types of attacks in the MAC and the network layers are discussed. After enumerating the various types of attacks on the MAC and the network layer, the chapter briefly discusses on some of the preventive mechanisms for these attacks.Comment: 44 pages, 17 figures, 5 table

Reflections on security options for the real-time transport protocol framework

The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) supports a range of video conferencing, telephony, and streaming video ap- plications, but offers few native security features. We discuss the problem of securing RTP, considering the range of applications. We outline why this makes RTP a difficult protocol to secure, and describe the approach we have recently proposed in the IETF to provide security for RTP applications. This approach treats RTP as a framework with a set of extensible security building blocks, and prescribes mandatory-to-implement security at the level of different application classes, rather than at the level of the media transport protocol

Multimedia congestion control: circuit breakers for unicast RTP sessions

The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) is widely used in telephony, video conferencing, and telepresence applications. Such applications are often run on best-effort UDP/IP networks. If congestion control is not implemented in these applications, then network congestion can lead to uncontrolled packet loss and a resulting deterioration of the user's multimedia experience. The congestion control algorithm acts as a safety measure by stopping RTP flows from using excessive resources and protecting the network from overload. At the time of this writing, however, while there are several proprietary solutions, there is no standard algorithm for congestion control of interactive RTP flows. This document does not propose a congestion control algorithm. It instead defines a minimal set of RTP circuit breakers: conditions under which an RTP sender needs to stop transmitting media data to protect the network from excessive congestion. It is expected that, in the absence of long-lived excessive congestion, RTP applications running on best-effort IP networks will be able to operate without triggering these circuit breakers. To avoid triggering the RTP circuit breaker, any Standards Track congestion control algorithms defined for RTP will need to operate within the envelope set by these RTP circuit breaker algorithms