Network layer access control for context-aware IPv6 applications

As part of the Lancaster GUIDE II project, we have developed a novel wireless access point protocol designed to support the development of next generation mobile context-aware applications in our local environs. Once deployed, this architecture will allow ordinary citizens secure, accountable and convenient access to a set of tailored applications including location, multimedia and context based services, and the public Internet. Our architecture utilises packet marking and network level packet filtering techniques within a modified Mobile IPv6 protocol stack to perform access control over a range of wireless network technologies. In this paper, we describe the rationale for, and components of, our architecture and contrast our approach with other state-of-the- art systems. The paper also contains details of our current implementation work, including preliminary performance measurements

Seamless mobility with personal servers

We describe the concept and the taxonomy of personal servers, and their implications in seamless mobility. Personal servers could offer electronic services independently of network availability or quality, provide a greater flexibility in the choice of user access device, and support the key concept of continuous user experience. We describe the organization of mobile and remote personal servers, define three relevant communication modes, and discuss means for users to exploit seamless services on the personal server

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

Adaption of the Creative Commons approach and the roaming concept to spatial data infrastructures (SDI)

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesThe Spatial data infrastructure (SDI) has been developed for nearly 17 years. However, it still fails to support professional and cross-provider seamless usage. In year 2000, after the introduction of the OGC Web Mapping Service Specification, OGC/ISO TC 211 publishes more than 40 drafts or final standards, which provide basic rules for the geospatial implementation industry. Besides these, the release of the INSPIRE law in 2007 is also a major milestone in the development of SDI. While, the coverage of the SDI providers is still very limited due to the national or natural boundaries which make the SDI can not be largely used in some professional areas. Therefore, a legally-protected business environment is necessary. To pursue an effective and innovative operational model, the roaming concept of GSM was mitigated to SDI named Roaming Enabled SDI(r-SDI) (Roland M. Wagner, 2006). In order to make this innovative idea into reality, the first and must step was to find specific issue – Geospatial information licensing which was also an urgent problem to the normal SDI as well as rSDI. In this paper, firstly, a Creative Commons licensing approach was adapt in the Catalogue Service (CSW) which enabled the clients to get the advanced query results according to the license types. The rights management was successfully enhanced. Secondly, a suitable structure for the operation model in rSDI was conducted, moreover, 5 business use cases were proposed to CSW in different specifications sets. The contractship concepts were applied to the metadata level. Finally a demonstration designed on “deegree” – a free SDI software and web service theory was conducted, by which users can query metadata documents by title, product type, service type, license type, even in a roaming environment. Meanwhile, with the comparison between OGC and INSPIRE documents, some limitations of those standards were exposed. The pilot experiment of the demos proved it provided an effective solution to combine the right management and roaming concept demo with present CSW. The logic and concepts are well implemented in this research work

Flexible consistency for wide area peer replication

technical reportThe lack of a flexible consistency management solution hinders P2P implementation of applications involving updates, such as read-write file sharing, directory services, online auctions and wide area collaboration. Managing mutable shared data in a P2P setting requires a consistency solution that can operate efficiently over variable-quality failure-prone networks, support pervasive replication for scaling, and give peers autonomy to tune consistency to their sharing needs and resource constraints. Existing solutions lack one or more of these features. In this paper, we describe a new consistency model for P2P sharing of mutable data called composable consistency, and outline its implementation in a wide area middleware file service called Swarm1. Composable consistency lets applications compose consistency semantics appropriate for their sharing needs by combining a small set of primitive options. Swarm implements these options efficiently to support scalable, pervasive, failure-resilient, wide-area replication behind a simple yet flexible interface. We present two applications to demonstrate the expressive power and effectiveness of composable consistency: a wide area file system that outperforms Coda in providing close-to-open consistency overWANs, and a replicated BerkeleyDB database that reaps order-of-magnitude performance gains by relaxing consistency for queries and updates