IPv6 Network Mobility

Network Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting has been used since before the days of the Internet as we know it today. Authentication asks the question, “Who or what are you?” Authorization asks, “What are you allowed to do?” And fi nally, accounting wants to know, “What did you do?” These fundamental security building blocks are being used in expanded ways today. The fi rst part of this two-part series focused on the overall concepts of AAA, the elements involved in AAA communications, and highlevel approaches to achieving specifi c AAA goals. It was published in IPJ Volume 10, No. 1[0]. This second part of the series discusses the protocols involved, specifi c applications of AAA, and considerations for the future of AAA

Real-life performance of protocol combinations for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks today are used for many and diverse applications like nature monitoring, or process and wireless building automation. However, due to the limited access to large testbeds and the lack of benchmarking standards, the real-life evaluation of network protocols and their combinations remains mostly unaddressed in current literature. To shed further light upon this matter, this paper presents a thorough experimental performance analysis of six protocol combinations for TinyOS. During these protocol assessments, our research showed that the real-life performance often differs substantially from the expectations. Moreover, we found that combining protocols is far from trivial, as individual network protocols may perform very different in combination with other protocols. The results of our research emphasize the necessity of a flexible generic benchmarking framework, powerful enough to evaluate and compare network protocols and their combinations in different use cases

Smart Signs: Showing the way in Smart Surroundings

This paper presents a context-aware guidance and messaging system for large buildings and surrounding venues. Smart Signs are a new type of electronic door- and way-sign based on wireless sensor networks. Smart Signs present in-situ personalized guidance and messages, are ubiquitous, and easy to understand. They combine the easiness of use of traditional static signs with the flexibility and reactiveness of navigation systems. The Smart Signs system uses context information such as user’s mobility limitations, the weather, and possible emergency situations to improve guidance and messaging. Minimal infrastructure requirements and a simple deployment tool make it feasible to easily deploy a Smart Signs system on demand. An important design issue of the Smart Signs system is privacy: the system secures communication links, does not track users, allow almost complete anonymous use, and prevent the system to be used as a tool for spying on users

Supporting protocol-independent adaptive QoS in wireless sensor networks

Next-generation wireless sensor networks will be used for many diverse applications in time-varying network/environment conditions and on heterogeneous sensor nodes. Although Quality of Service (QoS) has been ignored for a long time in the research on wireless sensor networks, it becomes inevitably important when we want to deliver an adequate service with minimal efforts under challenging network conditions. Until now, there exist no general-purpose QoS architectures for wireless sensor networks and the main QoS efforts were done in terms of individual protocol optimizations. In this paper we present a novel layerless QoS architecture that supports protocol-independent QoS and that can adapt itself to time-varying application, network and node conditions. We have implemented this QoS architecture in TinyOS on TmoteSky sensor nodes and we have shown that the system is able to support protocol-independent QoS in a real life office environment

The Quest for a Killer App for Opportunistic and Delay Tolerant Networks (Invited Paper)

Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) has attracted a lot of attention from the research community in recent years. Much work have been done regarding network architectures and algorithms for routing and forwarding in such networks. At the same time as many show enthusiasm for this exciting new research area there are also many sceptics, who question the usefulness of research in this area. In the past, we have seen other research areas become over-hyped and later die out as there was no killer app for them that made them useful in real scenarios. Real deployments of DTN systems have so far mostly been limited to a few niche scenarios, where they have been done as proof-of-concept field tests in research projects. In this paper, we embark upon a quest to find out what characterizes a potential killer applications for DTNs. Are there applications and situations where DTNs provide services that could not be achieved otherwise, or have potential to do it in a better way than other techniques? Further, we highlight some of the main challenges that needs to be solved to realize these applications and make DTNs a part of the mainstream network landscape

Integrating big data into a sustainable mobility policy 2.0 planning support system

It is estimated that each of us, on a daily basis, produces a bit more than 1 GB of digital content through our mobile phone and social networks activities, bank card payments, location-based positioning information, online activities, etc. However, the implementation of these large data amounts in city assets planning systems still remains a rather abstract idea for several reasons, including the fact that practical examples are still very strongly services-oriented, and are a largely unexplored and interdisciplinary field; hence, missing the cross-cutting dimension. In this paper, we describe the Policy 2.0 concept and integrate user generated content into Policy 2.0 platform for sustainable mobility planning. By means of a real-life example, we demonstrate the applicability of such a big data integration approach to smart cities planning process. Observed benefits range from improved timeliness of the data and reduced duration of the planning cycle to more informed and agile decision making, on both the citizens and the city planners end. The integration of big data into the planning process, at this stage, does not have uniform impact across all levels of decision making and planning process, therefore it should be performed gradually and with full awareness of existing limitations