Experimental design for a next generation residential gateway

Puolella eurooppalaisista kotitalouksista on laajakaistaliittymä. Yleensä käyttäjä kytkeytyy ulkoiseen verkkoon kotireitittimen avulla (residential gateway). Internet-yhteyden ja IP-perustaisten palveluiden kuten VoIP- ja IPTV-palveluiden lisäksi kotireititin muodostaa kotiverkon ytimen kodin verkkolaitteiden liittyessä siihen. Kotiverkkojen lukumäärän ja koon kasvun seurauksena kotiverkoissa voidaan tunnistaa kolme ongelmaa. Ensinnäkin kotiverkkojen hallinta on haastavaa kotiverkossa tuettavien verkkotekniikoiden ja laitteiden määrän kasvaessa. Toiseksi sisällönhallinta. on monimutkaistunut käyttäjien luodessa ja kuluttaessa yhä enemmän sisältöä. Kolmanneksi uudet verkkoperustaiset tekniikat kuten sähköisen terveydenhuollon ratkaisut (e-health) integroituvat usein heikosti olemassa olevien kotiverkkolaitteiden kanssa. Tässä diplomityössä edellä mainittuihin ongelmiin pyritään löytämään yhtenäinen ratkaisu kotireititintä apuna käyttäen. Työssä analysoidaan uudentyyppisen kotireitittimen vaatimuksia käyttämällä hyväksi joukkoa käyttötapauksia. Vaativuusanalyysin perusteella luodaan malli, joka sisältää seuraavat pääkomponentit. (i) Virtuaalisointitekniikkaan pohjautuva kotireititinarkkitehtuuri. (ii) Kotireititinperustainen mekanismi yhteisöverkostoiden pystyttämiseen kotiverkkojen välillä. (iii) Hajautettu tiedostojärjestelmä yhteisöverkkojen pystyttämiseksi ja parannetun sisällönhallinnan ja sisällön jakamisen mahdollistamiseksi. (iv) Mekanismeja joiden avulla vierailevat käyttäjät voivat hyödyntää muiden käyttäjien kotireitittimien resursseja. Työssä. toteutetaan em. ydintoimintoja laaditun mallin perusteella ja toteutuksen toimivuus verifioidaan käyttötapauksiin perustuvalla testauksellaToday over half of the European homes have a broadband Internet connection. Typically, this connection is enabled through a residential gateway device at the users' premises. In addition to facilitating triple play services, this gateway also forms the core of users' home networks by connecting their network-enabled devices. While the number and the size of such home networks keep on increasing, three major problems can be identified in current systems. First, home network management is getting increasingly complex, and a growing number of networking technologies and connected devices must be supported and managed. Second, content management has become difficult. Users are generating an increasing amount of content and this content is stored (and sometimes shared) in an almost anarchical manner across different home network devices as well as online. Third, new network-enabled services, such as e-health systems, are emerging, but are typically poorly integrated into existing home networks. There is a clear need for home networking solutions that address these problems. In this thesis, we adopt a gateway-centric approach to address these problems in a unified manner. We concretise the requirements for a next generation residential gateway by analysing a set of future home networking use cases. These requirements serve as input to our gateway system design. In summary, our design includes the following main components. (i) A residential gateway architecture based on virtualization. This enables new features and new ways to implement the other components of our design. (ii) A gateway-based mechanism to set up community networks between different home networks. (iii) A distributed file system to establish community networks and to enable improved content management and sharing. (iv) Mechanisms for visiting gateway users to utilize other users' gateway resources. We implement these core functionalities and develop a proof-of concept prototype. We successfully validate our prototype through use case driven testbed experiments. Finally, we believe that the insights gained from this study and the prototype implementations are important overall contributions that can be used in the future research to further explore the limitations and opportunities of this gateway-centric approach

Network and service monitoring in heterogeneous home networks

Home networks are becoming dynamic and technologically heterogeneous. They consist of an increasing number of devices which offer several functionalities and can be used for many different services. In the home, these devices are interconnected using a mixture of networking technologies (for example, Ethernet, Wifi, coaxial cable, or power-line). However, interconnecting these devices is often not easy. The increasing heterogeneity has led to significant device- and service-management complexity. In addition, home networks provide a critical "last meters" access to the public telecom and Internet infrastructure and have a dramatic impact on to the end-to-end reliability and performance of services from these networks. This challenges service providers not only to maintain a satisfactory quality of service level in such heterogeneous home networks, but also to remotely monitor and troubleshoot them. The present thesis work contributes research and several solutions in the field of network and service monitoring in home networks, mainly in three areas: (1) providing automatic device- and service-discovery and configuration, (2) remote management, and (3) providing quality of service (QoS). With regard to the first area, current service discovery technology is designed to relieve the increasing human role in network and service administration. However, the relevant Service Discovery Protocols (SDPs) are lacking crucial features namely: (1) they are not platform- and network-independent, and (2) they do not provide sufficient mechanisms for (device) resource reservation. Consequently, devices implementing different SDPs cannot communicate with each other and share their functionalities and resources in a managed way, especially when they use different network technologies. As a solution to the first problem, we propose a new proxy server architecture that enables IP-based devices and services to be discovered on non-IP based network and vice versa. We implemented the proxy architecture using UPnP respectively Bluetooth SDP as IP- and non-IP-based SDPs. The proxy allows Bluetooth devices and UPnP control points to discover, access, and utilize services located on the other network. Validation experiments with the proxy prototype showed that seamless inter-working can be achieved keeping all proxy functionalities on a single device, thus not requiring modification of currently existing UPnP and Bluetooth end devices. Although the proxy itself taxes the end-to-end performance of the service, it is shown to be still acceptable for an end user. For mitigating resource conflicts in SDPs, we propose a generic resource reservation scheme with properties derived from common SDP operation. Performance studies with a prototype showed that this reservation scheme significantly improves the scalability and sustainability of service access in SDPs, at a minor computational cost. With regard to the second area, it is known that the end-to-end quality of Internet services depends crucially on the performance of the home network. Consequently, service providers require the ability to monitor and configure devices in the home network, behind the home gateway (HG). However, they can only put limited requirements to these off-the-shelf devices, as the consumer electronics market is largely outside their span of control. Therefore they have to make intelligent use of the given device control and management protocols. In this work, we propose an architecture for remote discovery and management of devices in a highly heterogeneous home network. A proof-of-concept is developed for the remote management of UPnP devices in the home with a TR-069/UPnP proxy on the HG. Although this architecture is protocol specific, it can be easily adapted to other web-services based protocols. Service providers are also asking for diagnostic tools with which they can remotely troubleshoot the home networks. One of these tools should be able to gather information about the topology of the home network. Although topology discovery protocols already exist, nothing is known yet about their performance. In this work we propose a set of key performance indicators for home network topology discovery architectures, and how they should be measured. We applied them to the Link-Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) protocol and the Link-Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP). Our performance measurement results show that these protocols do not fulfill all the requirements as formulated by the service providers. With regard to the third area, current QoS solutions are mostly based on traffic classification. Because they need to be supported by all devices in the network, they are relatively expensive for home networks. Furthermore, they are not interoperable between different networking technologies. Alternative QoS provision techniques have been proposed in the literature. These techniques require end-user services to pragmatically adapt their properties to the actual condition of the network. For this, the condition of the home network in terms of its available bandwidth, delay, jitter, etc., needs to be known in real time. Appropriate tools for determining the available home network resources do not yet exist. In this work we propose a new method to probe the path capacity and available bandwidth between a server and a client in a home network. The main features of this method are: (a) it does not require adaptation of existing end devices, (b) it does not require pre-knowledge of the link-layer network topology, and (c) it is accurate enough to make reliable QoS predictions for the most relevant home applications. To use these predictions for effective service- or content-adaptation or admission control, one should also know how the state of the home network is expected to change immediately after the current state has been probed. However, not much is known about the stochastic properties of traffic in home networks. Based on a relatively small set of traffic observations in several home networks in the Netherlands, we were able to build a preliminary model for home network traffic dynamics

Plataforma de serviços residenciais

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrónica e TelecomunicaçõesO serviço de acesso à Internet tem sido, até agora, o principal catalisador para a difusão das chamadas ligações de banda larga junto do mercado residencial. O desejo de partilhar este serviço entre vários terminais da mesma residência, aliado a factores como a maturidade do protocolo IP, o aparecimento de tecnologias de rede que permitem a comunicação entre dispositivos em espaços reduzidos, a generalização de conteúdos multimédia em formato digital, entre outros, tem impulsionado o aparecimento das chamadas redes residenciais. Para além de interligarem entre si os mais variados tipos de dispositivos domésticos, estas redes asseguram ainda a comunicação destes mesmos dispositivos com entidades externas à residência. Existe, portanto agora a oportunidade para operadores de telecomunicações e provedores de serviços utilizarem a largura de banda disponível para disponibilizarem, através de uma única plataforma, toda uma nova geração de serviços a clientes residenciais. No entanto, garantir o correcto comportamento de todos estes novos serviços, lidar com as particularidades do ambiente residencial e do próprio utilizador residencial, impõe a operadores e provedores de serviços novos desafios. Um dos principais desafios prende-se com a capacidade das actuais redes de acesso e domésticas para o transporte de vários tipos de serviços. Desta forma, na presente dissertação, são analisados cenários típicos de prestação de serviços residenciais, com ênfase nas infra estruturas de rede que suportam essa mesma prestação de serviços. Nesta, são também caracterizadas infra-estruturas de rede capazes de suportar a distribuição de um leque alargado de serviços residenciais, garantindo o correcto comportamento dos mesmos. A distribuição de vários tipos de serviços sobre infra-estruturas de rede partilhadas, requer também soluções que contemplem a configuração/gestão remota dos vários tipos de serviços e de mecanismos que possibilitem a auto configuração de dispositivos que residem na rede doméstica. Neste contexto a plataforma de serviços OSGi é apresentada. Por forma a concluir-se acerca da sua validade e aplicabilidade em cenários futuros de prestação de serviços residenciais, foi implementado um serviço de monitorização médica remota sobre a mesma. Esta, permitiu principalmente avaliar vantagens e desvantagens da plataforma OSGi, bem como indicar possíveis soluções que colmatam as desvantagens encontradas. Esta dissertação apresenta portanto possíveis soluções para desafios com que operadores e prestadores de serviços se deparam em cenários de prestação de múltiplos tipos de serviços residenciais. ABSTRACT: Internet access service has been, until now, the main reason to the current generalization of the so called broadband connections in the residential market. The will of sharing this same service between different terminals in the same house, together with other factors like the maturity of the IP protocol, the eruption of network technologies that allow the communication between devices in restricted environments, the generalization of multimedia contents distributed in a digital format, among others, has driven to the appearance of the so called residential networks. Besides providing the interconnection between the several types of residential devices, these networks also assure the communication of those same devices with entities outside the home. So this is the opportunity for telecommunications operators and service providers to use the available bandwidth to provide, using a single service platform, new kinds of services to residential costumers. Although, to assure the correct behaviour of that multitude of services, to deal with the uniqueness of the residential environment and of the residential user himself, challenges must be solved by operators and service providers. One of the main challenges as to do with the ability of today's access and residential networks to transport different kinds of services. This way, in the present thesis, typical residential service providing scenarios are analyzed, with special detail on the network infra structures used on that same scenarios. Moreover, network infra structures that support the distribution of different kinds of residential services are also characterized, always considering that the expected behaviour of those same services is assured. The distribution of different types of services over shared networks, also requires solutions regarding the configuration/remote management of those same services, as well mechanisms that allow the auto configuration of domestic devices. In this context, the OSGi service platform is presented. In order to conclude about it's validity and applicability in future service providing scenarios, a remote medical monitoring service was implemented over OSGi. This implementation allowed mainly to judge the advantages and disadvantages of the OSGi platform, as well pointing some possible solutions that somehow minimize the disadvantages. Therefore, this thesis presents possible solutions for challenges that operators and service providers will face in scenarios where is intended to provide to residential costumers a multitude of kinds of services

Μέθοδοι Λήψης Αποφάσεων και Μελέτη Αβεβαιότητας για τη Δημιουργία Οδικού Χάρτη με εφαρμογή στα Οικιακά Δίκτυα Επόμενης Γενιάς

Τα τελευταία χρόνια είναι επιτακτική η ανάγκη για υποστήριξη ευρυζωνικών υπηρεσιών στον οικιακό και εργασιακό χώρο. Δεδομένου ότι έχει σημειωθεί μεγάλη πρόοδος σε τεχνολογίες με υψηλό εύρος ζώνης τίθεται το θέμα διερεύνησης των τεχνολογικών λύσεων καθώς και του τρόπου με τον οποίο θα διασυνδεθούν, ώστε να επιτευχθούν υψηλές ταχύτητες. Η παρούσα διδακτορική διατριβή διερευνά τη δημιουργία ενός οδικού χάρτη που θα αποτελέσει το κλειδί για τη διασφάλιση της ομαλής ανάπτυξης των μελλοντικών οικιακών δικτύων, προδιαγράφει την πορεία τους και καθορίζει τις καταλληλότερες τεχνολογικές λύσεις για την ανάπτυξη των αντίστοιχων συστημάτων, λαμβάνοντας υπόψη τεχνολογικούς αλλά και κοινωνικο- οικονομικούς παράγοντες. Η εν λόγω διδακτορική διατριβή έχει ως απώτερο σκοπό αφενός τη δημιουργία ενός οδικού χάρτη με εφαρμογή στα οικιακά δίκτυα επόμενης γενιάς, με τη βοήθεια των πολυκριτηριακών μεθόδων λήψης απόφασης και αφετέρου την μελέτη κρίσιμων θεμάτων αβεβαιότητας που ελλοχεύουν στις διαδικασίες λήψης απόφασης και ενδέχεται να επηρεάζουν το τελικό αποτέλεσμα. Άλλωστε στη σύγχρονή εποχή που διανύουμε, η λήψη ορθών αποφάσεων με τη χρήση αποτελεσματικών μεθόδων κρίνεται εξαιρετικά σημαντική. Η μελέτη και ανάπτυξη των ανωτέρω βασίζεται στην Αναλυτική Ιεραρχική Διαδικασία (AHP), σε κάποιες παραλλαγές της και ιδιαίτερα στη μέθοδο συγκρίσεων ανά ζεύγη, αναπόσπαστο κομμάτι πολλών διαδικασιών λήψης απόφασης.In recent years there is a need for supporting broadband services in both home and office networks. Given the increasing technological development, it would be interesting to investigate the technical solutions and the possibility to achieve high bit rate connectivity. Towards this end, this thesis aims to investigate the development of a roadmap which will be the key for ensuring the smooth development of future home networks and determine the most appropriate technological solutions for the development of such systems. This thesis aims both to contribute to a roadmap implementation in next-generation home networks, based on multi-criteria decision making methods and also study critical issues of uncertainty lurking in decision making processes and may affect the final result. The study and the development of the above lies on the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), and especially in pairwise comparison method, integral part of many decision making processes

Home Area Networking With Universal Plug And Play Technology

Tez (Yüksek Lisans) -- İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2007Thesis (M.Sc.) -- İstanbul Technical University, Institute of Science and Technology, 2007Bu çalışma, ev içerisindeki kablolu ya da kablosuz akıllı cihazların, farklı özellikteki bilgisayarların birbirlerine otomatik olarak bağlanması ve birlikte çalışması, ev yerel ağının işletim sisteminden, programlama dilinden, iletişim mekanizmalarından ve fiziksel ortamdan bağımsız olabilmesi için uçtan uca dağınık ağ mimari yapısına ve TCP/IP, HTTP, XML gibi farklı internet standartları ve protokollerine imkan tanıyan evrensel tak ve çalıştır teknolojisini inceler. Bu teknoloji, sıfır konfigürasyonlu ağ oluşturma ve otomatik cihaz keşfini sağlayarak ağ oluşturmayı kullanıcıların yapabilecekleri basit yapıya dönüştürür. Ayrıca, bu çalışma isteğe bağlı transfer protokollerini ve içerik formatlarını destekleyen, ses ve görüntü içeriğinin kontrol noktası tarafından herhangi bir müdaheleye gerek olmadan cihazlar arası akmasını, kontrol noktalarının herhangi bir cihaz tipinden, içerik formatından, transfer protokolünden bağımsız olmasını sağlayan, ortam çeviricisinin yakınındaki ortam sunucusunun servislerini keşfedip gerekli ayarlamaları otomatik olarak yaparak kullanıcının ev eğlence kullanımı senaryosuna uygun olarak favori parçasını seçmesine olanak sağlayıp kullanıcıdan herhangi bir yardım gerektirmeyen geniş kapsamlı evrensel tak ve çalıştır ses ve görüntü mimarisini tanımlar. Uygulama safhası, kullanıcı müdahelesi olmadan ortam içeriğini depolayan ve akışı başlatan ortam sunucusu ile içeriği ortam formatından tamamen bağımsız olarak çalınmaya uygun hale getiren ortam çeviricisi arasında, sıradan bir televizyona evrensel tak ve çalıştır kabiliyeti kazandırabilmek için donanımsal arabirimi ortam çeviricisi olarak oluşturarak ve dizüstü bilgisayarı kontrol noktası ve ortam sunumcusu olarak programlayarak, ses ve görüntü akışını sağlar.This study provides an overview of Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) technology, which allows an architecture for pervasive peer-to-peer network connectivity of intelligent devices, PCs of all form factors, and wireless devices within the home, and builds on Internet standards and technologies, such as TCP/IP, HTTP, and XML, to enable these devices to automatically connect with one another and work together to build home networking independent of any particular operating system, programming language, transport mechanisms, or physical medium. UPnP technology is all about making home networking simple and affordable for users, supporting zero-configuration networking and automatic discovery. The study also defines overall UPnP Audio/Video (A/V) Architecture which supports arbitrary transfer protocols and content formats, enables the A/V content to flow directly between devices without any intervention from Control Point (CP), makes CPs to remain independent of any particular device type, content format and transfer protocol and requires no assistance at all from the user since Media Renderer, can discover available services from Media Server in its neighborhood, perform the necessary setup automatically, and finally enable the user to select and play their favorite song in home entertainment usage scenario. Implementation phase provides A/V transport and streaming without any user intervention between server and renderer by building and programming an hardware interface as Media Renderer, in order to make an ordinary A/V device UPnP enabled and programming a laptop as CP and Media Server.Yüksek LisansM.Sc

Standards Battles for Complex Systems: Empirical Research on the Home Network

Home networks combine components and technologies from the consumer electronics industry, the information technology industry, the telecommunications industry, and the home automation industry. Irrespective of the fact that the home network has been technically possible for many years, it has not become a practical reality. A major reason is the lack of generally accepted common standards. In this dissertation we develop a framework with which we can explain and predict which standard will have the highest chance of achieving dominance. We applied the framework to several standards battles and it appeared that it can be used to explain these standards battles better, when compared to existing frameworks in the literature. We applied a multi-attribute utility approach to standard selection and provide a first indication of weights for factors. Also, we have studied two factors in depth: the diversity in the network of actors that support a standard; and the flexibility of the standard. We provide a first indication that these variables influence standard dominance positively and reinforce each other

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications

Information Security in Smart Grid Demonstration Environment

The ever growing population and need for energy has culminated in an energy crisis. Old, traditional energy sources are running low and the transition to renewable ones has begun. The electric grid, however, is very old, being inefficient and incapable of meeting the needs of today. One solution for these problems is to utilize a two-way flow of electricity and information, also known as Smart Grid. As Smart Grid utilizes information and communications technology, it will be exposed to information security threats. Smart Grid comprises of many systems, creating a complex automation environment. Thus, even if making Smart Grid secure is troublesome, it is essential to ensure its security since the consequences of successful attacks can be disastrous. This thesis is part of CLEEN SHOK Smart Grids and Energy Markets project and studies the information security of the Smart Grid demonstration environment. The main goals are to analyze and test the information security of the Smart Grid implementation, and to generate a best practice information security checklist for different players in the Smart Grid environment. The thesis is divided into four phases. In the literature study the focus is on information security landscape and features, as well as Smart Grid on general level. This phase includes a presentation of the conceptual model of Smart Grid and the demonstration environment on a general level. In the analysis demonstration environment is analyzed through threat modelling and closer examination of the demonstration equipment. The threat model works from the customer´s point of view, concentrating on home energy management system, and providing high abstract level analysis, whereas the examination of the equipment provides more specific analysis. In the testing, the demonstration environment is tested, and the results are presented. This phase also includes the testing layout and introduces the software used for the testing. The final section focuses on generating a best practice security list. This checklist provides the top 10 critical controls of information security for the Smart Grid environment, especially for a home automation environment. In the course of the study, it is indicated that the information security of the demonstration environment has shortages. The most common vulnerabilities are due to wrong software configurations, and using vulnerable versions of software. The most critical part of the demonstration environment is the end user's device, which in this study was ThereGate. This equipment has many security issues that need to be taken care of. Se-curing ThereGate is essential in regard to the entire system's dependability and security. To secure dependable Smart Grid, stronger methods like strong client authentication are required. As long as standards only recommend and do not require information security methods, like encryption, they will not be used, and thus, they will make the system more vulnerable. As a result, it can be said that more security research is required in order to secure a dependable Smart Grid